Your Story Sells Better Than Fear

marketing really shapes the dialogue of what's going on in society. And we have power as marketers to shift that rhetoric. Yeah.

I've always said I can make with marketing and my skillset being in the room, I could make Jews Muslims, Muslims Christians, Christians Jews.

Exactly. And all of it is communication.

You didn't build your clinic to feel like an employee in your own business. I'm Matthew Cologli, and on Out of the System hosted by Dr. Talks, we challenge the broken rules holding healthcare entrepreneurs back. Hear from clinic owners, Rebels and builders who are creating bold, profitable, patient-centered practices and doing it their way. I'm so glad you're here. Tell everybody who you are and what do you do?

Yeah.

Because aside from the fact that you are a vision of pink, I've been with you 3 times. This is the 3rd time we've been together face to face, and you always are dressed beautifully. So why the pink? And probably tell everybody who you are, and then let's talk about the pink.

Yes. Listen, if you were to see me 7 times, you would see me in pink 7 times. But my name is Alicia Munyan, and I'm so grateful to be here. Um, I've been on this incredible journey in life and where I found myself now is a marketing expert who also is a spiritual individual. And it's so interesting cuz when I first started my journey, I saw it as 2 very separate things.

Uh-huh.

But the more I kind of stepped into myself, I was able to embody this overlap and this kind of multidimensional expression of myself, which now I'm able to serve clients in the marketing sphere. but also having a spiritual angle, which is different and interesting because a lot of people think these are 2 different things, but actually there's so much that overlaps, and I'm excited to talk about that. But I'm actually a first-generation Guyanese American.

Guyanese American? What is that?

Guyanese.

Guyanese. Okay, where, where is that?

So Guyana is in South America, and it's actually Indian descent, so it's actually—

That's why. Okay.

Yes.

Yeah, obviously you Keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's—

that threw me for the loop.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm West Indian. That's the technical name for it. But essentially, it's a country that has been comprised of slaves from both India and Africa. And of course, there's the Amerindians who were initially there. But when the British colonized India, they were taking people over from India to work in different sugar plantations throughout the world. So Guyana was one of the largest sugar plantations. So it was basically a country where a lot of people were forced to go there as indentured servants. And they were also promised, you know, better lives, not knowing what they were walking into there. So that's my ancestors. They worked on, you know, farming, sugar plantations, things like that from India.

That's impressive. Down around the—

I know.

Down around below Argentina and the connection of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. And oh my God, that trip must have just been— Wow.

I can only imagine, especially back then, like, the resources that were available and how far that journey is. A lot of people died during the journey. There's a lot of records that were lost from India. Some people don't even know what particular part in India they're from. It's a very deep and rich history. And part of my own spiritual journey was owning my roots and reconnecting back to my Indian roots.

Yeah.

Because, for example, like, a lot of my family, they converted to Christianity and even like Catholicism. But, um, the core of my family roots is Hinduism when you really go deep down. Mm-hmm. So, um, you know, I was raised Christian going to church and everything, but then life kind of took me on the spiritual journey where I began to get more interested in spirituality in general. Mm-hmm. Not only just Hinduism, but the concept of past lives and all of this stuff. And it, it took me back to my roots and to kind of reclaiming what that is for myself. So,

very cool.

Yeah.

And this plays out in, in your marketing and the work that you do with your clients.

Yes.

And for you, for the record, to those of you that are wondering, like, yes, you are working with one of our clients right now, Dr. Lister, I should say.

Yes.

Um, who's in, uh, in Reno. That's how we met. We met at one of our masterminds.

Yes.

Um, and the thing that really struck me about you, and then as we've connected on social media and all of that, is the, the joy and the light that you bring into a room and into your work, which, you know, marketing as a longtime marketer, it's, you really are trained to, um, make people feel bad.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And then, you know, as a friend of mine, Kevin Nations, once said, you can't sell heaven unless you have a hell.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So you, in order for people to say, I want heaven, you actually demonize, no pun intended, you demonize the, and you really accentuate how horrible hell is going to be. And then you say the path is this to heaven. Don't get the sense that you do that

anymore. No, I don't.

So what's kind of your marketing philosophy and look at it from the context of the work that you do in the medical space.

Yeah. So it's interesting because a lot of people are like, focus on the pain points, focus on the pain points. But I don't necessarily agree that that's the only way that you could sell people into your program. And I think that a lot of people tend to focus on the negative, and that's how the traditional marketing is. It's like, oh, you're terrible, you're depressed, you're this, you're too fat, you're this, you're this. And it kind of puts people into this box.

Mm-hmm.

But the approach that I tend to kind of maneuver towards when it comes to marketing is called attraction marketing. And this is kind of a new terminology that a lot of people in the more spiritual sphere are into. But essentially what this is about, it's about you really focusing on the story of your client, on the story of who they are, and also showing your clients like what is potential for them, how they can step into the future that they wanna create for themselves without necessarily, you know, making them feel bad about a certain aspect about themselves. Mm-hmm. It's about helping them see like, okay, are you ready to live your greatest life where you feel good, you look good, where you're embodying yourself? And you can do that without kind of like all of this negative messaging and even body shaming that's out there. There's so much negativity, especially in the mainstream media, where they're showing you like, oh, this is bad and this is bad. And, you know, it's instead about framing it in a way where you're helping other people to see their potential and showing them direct results, showing them, for example, even in Dr. Liz's case, it's like she is a testament to her work.

Mm-hmm.

She is a woman who has embodied her worthiness. She's a woman who has, you know, learned how to balance her hormones. And the change and transformation that that has had in her life speaks volumes to the work that she does. So in that sense, the marketing is her expressing herself to the world. Yeah. It's her showing like, hey, this is me. I just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at 62 years old. I just did this. And On top of that, I feel good in my body and I want you to feel good too.

Yeah. It's, um, it's interesting because, and I know we won't talk about it, but I know you've done some work in the political space.

Yes.

So I don't want to, but I want to use this as an example because, you know, I think one of the hardest things for Americans is that all political campaigns, they go naked, right? Because it flat out pulls. Now, You'll probably, I don't know if you remember this movie. It was when I was younger, when I was your age. Um, it was called Primary Colors and it was John Travolta was playing a prototype of Bill Clinton. Like they didn't say it was Bill Clinton, but they made it like everything around it. And Clinton, the persona, the persona. And I forget who was played his version of his wife and Hillary anyway. And he's running and he's coming from a southern state and he is a governor and he is like, I don't wanna go negative. I, I don't wanna go negative.

Yeah.

And his numbers are tanking and his numbers are tanking. And his team is like, you gotta go negative. You gotta go negative.

Yeah.

And finally he goes, fine, we'll go negative. And his numbers go through the roof. He starts attacking.

Hmm.

That's kind of the hard reality about marketing and advertising is the reality is going negative works. How, how do you reconcile that? Because if I look at this purely from a data standpoint, and I have 25+ years of marketing, right? I've been a copywriter. I've worked in 30 industries on 5 continents. Like, There's an industry I've probably written copy and I've written copy in the political space. Yes. How do you, how do you not go negative? How do you, because it, it, it generally works so well in retail.

Yeah. I think that there's a line and I think that there's things that are shifting in the marketing sphere now too.

Okay.

If you look at, for example, social media, I feel has changed the game entirely when it comes to marketing. Oh,

absolutely. Totally. This is new

stuff that there's no comparative data, even within the last 5 years. Every single person that you know has a platform, and what they do with that platform is up to them. So I— when it comes to going negative in a certain way, there's this terminology called punching down, right?

Okay.

Where you might attack someone or do something, and maybe it'll get you a few talking points and things like that, but in the age of social media, it's shifting. People don't connect as deeply to the negative sphere.

Really? I would've believed that it was different. It was the opposite.

I would say that now that people have an open conversation, because before marketing was very one-channeled, like you see something on TV.

Everyone was telling you what to believe.

Yes, exactly. Like you see something on TV, this is what this person's about and that's it. that's the end of the story. You can maybe have a conversation with your family or your friends about it, and that's it. But now marketing has become a network, right? So you post something on social media and all of a sudden there's a comment section and you could see thousands of comments from people all around the world and how they respond.

Mm-hmm.

Without giving you direct examples, I can tell you that I've seen my candidate get attacked. And then with that being said, all of the comments were in support of him because of that attack. And actually, it actually helped him to gain more support. And I can't go into like, oh, this is a— I understand.

So is it like sympathetic support or people, is it, does that kind of—

No, it was a little bit more like, why are you even like going there kind of thing? You know, so I would say that it's shifting in terms of the dialogue that people are now allowed to have with marketing. Instead of it being a one-way channel, it's a two-way channel. And now deeper conversations are have— are being had, especially on social media. And I feel like because of that, a lot more people have empathy when it comes to marketing.

Mm-hmm. I remember watching Mad Men, 'cause of course I'm in marketing and you had to watch Mad Men.

It was great.

This is also when I started drinking bourbon.

Um,

like, that looks like fun. Um, and Don Draper's character said, his character said in one of them, I don't care what people think. We tell them what to think. And that really was in 1960s, '70s, even early '80s, throughout the '80s mentality. When I was coming up and cutting my chops in the late '80s, really in the early '90s in marketing, it was like, no, you tell them, you research and you tell them what to believe. And you are, it is, it is really fascinating because. There, when I owned the, when I owned the erectile dysfunction clinics, we got our best copy. The reason why I went in and met with so many of the patients is because I would get copy. So one of the copy points—

That's a fun thing to write copy about.

Oh, it's great. You wanna talk about a great market? Yeah. Let's give men erections for a living. That's exactly what I did for 4 or 5 years. Um, a lot of really funny stories about it.

Yeah.

But I remember walked in and, um, This, one of the headlines that we wrote, and it was a theme is, and, and I won't remember it exactly, but the guy said, my doctor just told me this is what happens when you get older. And I turned that into like a headline and that ad ran for like 6 months. 'Cause it really resonated. And so when you hear you talk about this 2-way communication,

yes,

this was 2014. So there wasn't as much of that 2-way communication on social. That exists today. But that was our way of communicating. Like if I wanted to become a really good copywriter, one of the tricks that we developed over at the beginning was we would go look up topics on Amazon, find the books, and we'd read the comments.

Oh, in Amazon.

And we'd print 'em out and we'd highlight 'em like, ooh, that's a good one.

Yes.

Because that's the more I can write my marketing in the way that the, that my prospect communicates.

Yes.

The more successful it is.

Mm-hmm.

And it sounds like what you're telling me is this gives us a faster track. Yes. What you're experiencing is, would you say that's true? What are your thoughts?

Yeah. So I basically think, you know, right, marketing is actually stepping into the foot of the person who is your ideal client. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, how can we achieve that connection? There's multiple ways that we could go. Like, and I think that also with us talking about different niches, it can also slightly differ depending on the niche. 'Cause you know, something like what you discussed, you know, that's kind of a more fun, interesting, almost sensational thing, right? Sex sells. Like, you know, it's—

Everybody wants more money, more sex, more power, more—

Exactly. And there's different ways to go about that, right?

So— Wait, what do you mean by that? There's different ways to go about that? You mean in the marketing messages?

Yeah, exactly. There's different ways to go about that.

So tell me about it. Give me an example.

So with that being said, um, you know, you can, for example, uh, uh, like in the top of my head, just like weight management is coming up because this is something that is like so much deeply out there, right?

Oh yeah. It's been, and by the way, it's been that way for forever. This isn't something new with Ozempic, with the ideal BMI. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's been there for as long as I can remember.

But there's different ways to go about this, right? Like, are we gonna go on TV and show women like the different fat in their body and be like, you're terrible and you need to, you know, do this and this and this? Exactly. And that's the thing. It's that marketing really shapes the dialogue of what's going on in society. And we have power as marketers to shift that rhetoric. Yeah.

I've always said I can, I can make with marketing and my skillset of being in the room, I could make Jews Muslims, Muslims Christians, Christians Jews.

Exactly. Yeah. And all of it is communications. Mm-hmm. So with that being said, I think that a lot of marketers don't necessarily recognize their power and also the detriment of what can happen with that. When I was in high school, I was part of this, um, it was like a teen kind of advisory group and we covered different topics and one of them including eating disorders. Right? And with that, we were looking at actually what is the result of this? And you're looking at the magazines, you're looking at all of this stuff and you're seeing that, you know, coming out with this messaging, like you need to look like this and kind of making people feel psychologically bad about themselves.

Yep.

You know, that has psychological detriment. And with that power, it's like, would you rather sell someone something because they're feeling in that bad negative energy about themselves, or would you rather empower them? Would you rather empower them into making better choices for themselves?

Yeah. But, uh, so I struggle with this because my 25-year marketing brain, people don't wanna be empowered.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like it's an illusion.

Yeah.

I don't think most, I think most people don't wanna be empowered. I don't think most people want power. I think most people want the illusion of power. Mm-hmm. They want the, they want the myth of power. Yeah. I think the average consumer wants to believe that they have power, but they really wanna be told What to

do? I would say that once again, like I'm more of like a new age kind of marketer, right?

And I understand that. I don't know, but I'm, but I'm just, I love this discussion.

So thank you for it. Yeah, no, 100%. I think that this is shifting.

Really?

Maybe I don't have qualitative data and I wish that we could pull it up and like, you know, I'm a little biased.

There's a lot of instinctual stuff that always goes on.

But I do feel like this is shifting. And even if you look at the wellness coaching Sphere, like this is a billion-dollar industry now. People are ready to be empowered. People are ready to change genuinely for themselves. There's a whole sphere in the wellness industry with all these wellness festivals that are going on, all these people who are ready to actually become better in their lives. I think that this is a huge movement that needs to be taken into consideration.

So is that empowerment really that they want to have? Control, jurisdiction, voice over their health?

I think that it's, they want to make better conscious decisions.

Hmm. Better conscious decisions. I might think that they want— I think there's a lot of unconscious decisions that go on for the consumer. Because they can't put a finger on where they hurt someone. I think there's a lot of subconscious decisions that go on. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I do this, right? Like, this is a, we know this about the human mind, right? So we know that the human mind takes so many times to hear a message for them to be able to come to it. It's why they pound the radio waves and the airwaves and the TV waves during elections, right? It's why, and by the way, if you really want to, I've always felt like if you really want to understand marketing, pay real close attention to politics. Because there is no more money at risk. There is no more power at risk than to be the party in majority.

Yeah.

I mean, people don't understand the money behind politics, the pacts and the alignments, which again, I know you're getting a front row seat to. Yeah. And we won't go into it, but, but if you, I think people just want, but on the flip side, I know that people turn off the messaging because they get tired of the negativity. So dive into that.

There actually is something I really want to commentate on this. There are, because of the age of social media, the political sphere is changing. If you look—

People certainly, the polls are certainly wrong all the time because people are bullshit and lying. Exactly.

Because, and also people are showing up in numbers that are unprecedented. If you look at, for example, Mom Donnie's campaign, I'm just using him as an example. Like we could not like his policies, whatever.

Whatever. But this isn't about policy. This is about understanding how, what, what, what works.

He's a genius marketer. Okay. So tell me about it. Okay, millions of followers that connected with him in New York City that were able to see his messaging by Instagram, by Facebook, pulling out young people in massive amounts of number where you have clear, concise, two-way communication. There's literally been videos that he's done where he's like, oh, like someone says, oh, Mom Donnie, can you fill in this pothole? The next day he's out there with his cameras filling in that pothole. There is such a difference now that people are able to access this information themselves. They're able to fact-check. They're able to have their own commentary on their platform.

Fact-checking is, is, is a loose word. What's facts, right?

Yeah.

If you're using TikTok or Instagram to get your facts.

Well, here's the thing. There are legitimate organizations and people who, for example, when someone is making a speech, they'll literally go and research and break down and then, you know, put this video on TikTok where they're talking about—

Who's funding those? Is the opposition funding them?

No, that's the thing.

That's what you see. That's my— so, okay, so this is great because I'm obviously significantly older than you are.

Exactly.

So there's a high level of cynicism in my view.

Yes, of course.

We've been fucked, excuse my language. We've been screwed so many times. We've been lied to by so many politicians. We don't trust any of them.

Well, here's the difference about what's happening today. is that individual people are having greater power than they've ever been able to have in terms of having a voice.

Mm-hmm.

Before, we would have to rely on mass media, on the media giants to commentate and say, this is what's happening, this is the messaging, this is what we're talking about, right? But now everyone, like I said before, has an Instagram, has a TikTok, has a platform, has the potential to go viral. These are some people who are not being funded by anyone with no special interests. They're just genuinely people who want to see a difference being made, and they're making their own videos for fun. They're— they might even be monetized by TikTok, and TikTok doesn't take into account whether you're from the left or from the right. It counts for how many people you're able to garner on your page, right? And the point that I was gonna make is that these people are now able to have their platform, commentate on what's going on and creating a deeper conversation than ever before with giving the individual person power.

Okay. I hear all that. Now let's translate that to a doctor.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. And as you know, you were at our mastermind, about half of the room we working with, I don't know, you know, working with medical professionals.

Yeah.

Most of them Really are happy in their own little bubble, introverted bubble. They don't— I have some doctors like, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to be making content. That sounds horrible. I can't imagine a worse existence. Why does it work so well? Why in the medical space? Why does it work so well in weight loss or regenerative therapy? Why?

So going into this, and it's the same reason why it's working in the political sphere is because it's more relatable than ever. People feel connected before, like even for myself, remembering like 20 years ago, a doctor was always behind an office. Mm-hmm. And a doctor was always, you know, behind a wall.

Mm-hmm.

Where there's only a certain level you can connect with them.

Mm-hmm.

But now with social media, it's very different where you have the opportunity to actually connect with them as a person. And depending on what that doctor's selling and what their services are, That genuine connection will lead to a sale.

So walk me through what, how would you coach? Let's say I'm a doctor.

Yes.

Let's say I'm a regenerative therapist, orthopedic surgeon, type A personality, or pain management. How would you coach me?

So I would first start by asking you what your story is. And I think that is key that a lot of people are missing. Why is your own story

so

Because depending on if you're able to actually connect the storyline to what that person is doing, and usually you can. I found that doctors are some of the most passionate people, and typically they've had their own stories in their lives that have led them down that path. It's not easy to become a doctor.

No.

It takes years and years of work, and you have to have some sort of passion and drive. Most of the time, I would say 90% of the time, people are driven by their desire to make a difference and make a change in something that they're passionate about. And tapping into that passion is what makes the difference in marketing.

Okay. So origin story is, is, is key. What else, what else are some key components to making this stuff work?

I would say with going on top of the origin story, what is The, how can it relate back to your niche? How can it relate back to the service that you're providing? And then kind of looping them back into that rhythm, because once you understand like, okay, this is my story. And like, you know, I've been on a personal journey of healing myself and this is what I want to do for other people. That's what steps people in where then you're able to actually look at the flip side and say, okay. Mm-hmm. Stepping into the shoes of my client, what do I share with them to help them step into that sale?

Mm-hmm. I find this topic incredibly fascinating because the— I pay very close attention to the world. Like, I don't pay attention to, I don't pay attention to like political campaigns, or I don't really pay attention to You know, like we've got a big election in Los Angeles where I live of Karen Bass, the incumbent who screwed up during Al-Sayed's fire. And now we've got our version of Mondame.

I can't

remember her name anyway. And she's like leading by 10 points. Like the social democrat is like leading, like it's pretty much a foregone conclusion she's going to win. Right. So, but what intrigues me is what intrigues me most about people is how on one hand they can vote for socialism, communism, but on the other hand want so much

freedom.

I find that incredibly interesting because if you look at, like, if you look at the history of say socialism, communism, I'm gonna lump all those together cuz the tenets are essentially the same. There's very little personal freedom that are involved in those. Mm-hmm. And yet In those things, there's a, there's an interesting dichotomy to me. Like it doesn't, it doesn't compute. And I guess my question to you is how, how is it that people don't recognize in marketing, whether it's that or healing and doing it outside of the insurance base, when people are saying, I want everything covered by insurance, why is it that people will be able to toss aside one thing in order to have the other when it comes to their, their buying decision. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah, it does.

It does. You understand what I'm asking? I'm having a hard time kind of wrapping this up.

No, I, no, I understand what you're saying. And I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking before. People crave relatability. And I think that if you have the right person who is gearing them towards a certain thing and showing people like, okay, this is good for us. Like they're willing—

Is it like good for the community? Is that what you're— community, you're saying a good person's a community?

If they believe, if they believe, yeah. Yes, exactly. If they believe that this person is a good community leader or a good person to connect to, they will throw away the conventional belief that, you know, certain limitations, uh, how do I, how do I frame this?

I get what you're— keep going, keep unpacking it.

Yeah, yeah, I'm unpacking this. So basically, when someone is so relatable, they're able to convince someone that this is the best thing for them. And, you know, old conventional thought sort of put certain concepts into a box where people are now willing to move past that to have a good genuine leader. And I would say in this, um, it's interesting because like when it comes to marketing, like the most interesting man in the world comes up to my, my, my head, you know, the guy who sells the beer, right? Yeah, right. Like he's such a personable character, right? And people, Don't necessarily care. Like, does this beer taste good? Like, is this good? Like, they just see him.

Yeah.

And they're like, oh, he's a cool guy. Like, I relate to that. Like, let me buy and support his beer.

Well, you know, in politics, the one thing that they really look at is likability.

Yeah. Exactly.

And what most people, what didn't get a whole lot of airtime on this is when people are always like, I can't believe Trump beat Hillary.

Yeah.

One, people underestimate Trump all the time. This is not an endorsement of him. You always have to put this out there. Trump's number one. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just You don't really watch, you're not going to learn.

Well, there's a reason why he won.

Because, well, Hillary was not very likable. Didn't matter that she had the pedigree. Didn't matter that she had the resume. People just didn't like

her. Yeah.

And the people that liked Trump liked him more than the people that liked Hillary.

The thing that, that is like, that you can almost parallel Trump and Mom Donnie is that they both are such strong,

okay.

Personable characters. Oh, okay.

Let's do this. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. 'Cause they hang out, they're like, they have, so, okay. Back that up a second.

Yeah.

What is it? What do you, what is it that Mondani's doing that, is that how I pronounce it? Mondani?

Yeah.

What is it that he's doing that Trump was doing that people aren't seeing the crossover?

They're actually very personable characters. If you look at Trump's history—

Oh, listen, have you ever met Trump?

And he wasn't a political, I actually, I've met him a number of times.

I've met Trump a number of times when I was in the golf business and I was in Atlantic City.

Okay.

We ran the Trump, um, golf tournament. I've met him probably 10 times. He's unbelievably care— and I've met Clinton.

Okay. So it's about shifting minds, right? Mm-hmm. And connecting and showing yourself, like displaying yourself in a certain way. This also, by the way, relates back to the doctor marketing, right? It's like the personable characters, the personable people who are able to present themselves, like people kind of look at things and then they don't look as much into the details sometimes, you know?

Right. Right.

Like they wanna see a strong leader, a strong person. That's telling them this is the right direction, right?

And whether the direction is right or not, they want somebody saying this is the direction that we're going to go. Exactly.

And when we're speaking in general, large numbers of people, right?

It doesn't matter. I don't care what you, if you have to have a belief, you've got to double down on it.

Yeah.

Which is important for the doctors to hear and understand. But yeah. Okay. So keep going.

So the similarity between them both is that they have such deep conviction.

Mm-hmm.

They have such deep belief in what they stand for, and they are both masters of the art of showing up. With that being said, Trump was a TV personality.

Mm-hmm.

Trump was a character. Like, this was a little bit before social media became such a big thing.

I remember when he first came up.

But it was, it was like right around then, right? But he was on TV. He, like, a lot of people knew him.

He had a ring of everyone.

And a lot of people say this now, like in the political sphere, not a career politician. It's like, we want the person who's not doing the thing.

Right.

You know? And then it's interesting cuz relating this back to the doctors—

I was just gonna say, so relate this back to the doctors.

People, people want doctors who are able to feel like they're talking to their friend. Yeah. Like they're talking to someone that they know their story, which is going back to what I was saying about the storytelling actually being a huge part of marketing. And if you look at Instagram videos and what's trending, like when people share their stories and people share like in depth about what they've been through, those transformations, that's really what captures people in and their attention. And on top of that, having like a strong character where they're like, oh, what is this doctor going to say today? I've seen like different, you know, doctors that even do those talking head videos where they commentate on what's happening and like, and it's because it's like Like almost like unconventional. It's something that's unconventional and stands out to them. And they're like, oh wow, my doctor's talking to me like on TikTok and they're doing like a little thing. Like, you know, that makes them so much more approachable. And that's what people want to feel. And that's what Trump and Mamatzani have done is making them feel more approachable.

Yeah, you have to. And I tell them all, I tell the doctors all the time, like, well, I'm not an extrovert. The reality is, is I'm a hermit. Like, if you look at my Human Design body graph, I'm a 2/4. I don't know if you've done work in—

Oh, manifesting generator? Like, I don't know.

I'm a generator, Human Design generator, emotional authority. But I'm a 2, which is a hermit. So I prefer, I like, when I'm, this is, you're my second interview today. I'm going to go back to the hotel room and boom, I'm going to be like hermiting for 4 hours. I'm done. Okay. But I love this. Okay. So I'm not necessarily I'm a traditional extrovert. What people don't realize is there is, there is a front-facing Matt and there is a not, there is a part of me that never leaves the cave that I don't share. I'm very protective. And I learned this from my mentor, Kennedy, before we even, then we were just sending emails and fax messages out. But you, you, I have learned to curate, carefully curate The part that I release to the public versus part of me that, and it's not hidden, it's just, you know, it's the one that goes with Christine to see Wicked last.

Yeah, right.

Exactly. I don't post pictures of her going, we went and saw Wicked last. Yeah. Phenomenal.

Cute.

Great. Loved it. Love the theater. Love being here in New York Broadway. Um, like I'm not posting pictures of where we go.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I don't post pictures of our vacations that we take and the places that we go. I talk about it to my core clients. I don't post that out of, hey, look at us in this beach.

I think the social media discernment is really important because I think that some people, and this is like something I had written down that I wanted to talk about, is that a lot of doctors have resistance towards social media.

Absolutely.

Because they're afraid of what they can post and what they can't post. They're afraid of being judged.

Okay. So how do you deal with that? How do you coach them through that?

I would say moving past the fear of being judged is often what leads them to the greatest abundance.

Yeah, but how do you— that's easier said than done.

No, 100%. And that's part of the journey. That's why they hire us, right?

I mean, that's— how do you— okay, so aside from telling them that they have to make this shift, like, what kind of work do you do with them to get past

that?

That's a huge freaking hurdle.

This is where I actually incorporate the spirituality into this. Like, I tend to do meditations with my client to help them step into their power because actually what it is—

Future self? Like, what are you doing?

Yeah. Future self is a huge one that I do.

Love

that one. So, so there's actually sometimes even deeper things that have happened that create those blockages. So I might even do some regression work because I'm actually a licensed hypnotherapist where maybe a doctor has a preconceived notion from when they were a child that, oh, I can't have fun and I can't go out and I can't do this thing. And that's reflecting in how they show up in their marketing. And they're not even realizing that, that actually, oh, mom told me that I need to go study. And be in the books all the time, and then I can't show people who I truly am.

Mm-hmm. We, um, you've been to one of our masterminds.

Yes.

And, um, I do a lot of like these one, the Dominion Path days where they come in and we reinvent their business in a day.

Mm-hmm.

And invariably we wind up spending time talking about this. Mm-hmm. And I had a client in, obviously I won't use, I'll change some of it. I'll get kind of the gist of it.

Yeah.

But I won't, Because I want to reveal, but basically, um, she was having a hard time keeping staff.

Okay.

Well, when that conversation continued during lunch, realizing that as a kid growing up, dad wasn't around, not sure who dad was, all of these things.

Mm-hmm.

And what we recognized is we took, we came back from lunch and we did some meditation. And that was actually driving it. She was actually hiring people on her team that weren't qualified. So therefore she would have to jump in and do the work, which gave her a sense of power

and

control, and that she was proving her worth because she could never feel like she was proving

her worth.

So when we, like, literally in the meditation that she got done, she went, how the—

I did that.

She goes, how the bleep did that just happen? How did you get me there? And I'm with you because the spiritual, the gentleman we just had in, we were talking, uh, Dr. Rafai, he was talking about this. He's a psychiatrist and we are constantly running this epigenetic coding. We don't even know. Like, we don't even know what, you know, we don't even remember. I didn't even remember. I haven't even, I didn't remember for 56 years, 57 years. of my life, some of the things that were going on in my house and I'm like, oh, that explains

why.

Are you getting into that kind of depth and level with people?

Yeah.

Why?

So my background actually is that, um, when I was about 20 years old, I went on a really deep journey of healing myself. And I was at the point where I was actually suicidal in my life and I had been through a lot of childhood traumas and I was at a place where I was very blocked in everything. And that led me on a very deep spiritual path where I connected with a mentor who actually taught me about somatic energy healing and going into my past and learning about things that were blocking my own life. And I saw the instantaneous shifts that happened with this work.

Okay. So tell me, tell the listeners, what is somatic

So

what is it? Where did it— like, let's dive into this. And if you have any science, because, you know, doctors.

Yeah, exactly. Well, here's the thing. Okay. So somatic energy healing, right? And especially in the context of like hypnotherapy and things like that, it's about going in mentally to the spaces where you might have a mental blockage. So this is kind of interesting to like talk about this like in a medical sense, right? Because there's different spheres of reality, right? There's like the physical sphere, like we could feel our body, but the most tangible kind of connection I can make is, you know, when you've experienced a deep heartbreak and immediately it physically hurts. So this is a somatic pain. This is something that is intangible. It's something inside of yourself. So when you're able to actually, through meditation, go into that pain, you're giving it a shape. You're giving it an object.

Is that what you mean by going in? I'm giving it a color. I'm giving it a shape. So when we do a meditation, we say, where does it live in your body? What color is it?

It's red.

What shape of it is jagged?

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay. Okay.

So once you're able to kind of create this tangible object from it, you then recognize like, oh, this isn't an isolated pain. This is actually something that I can physically almost feel that I can come to terms with. And I can actually dive deeper into this space and I can recognize Once you're in meditation, where this actually resulted from and what are the different components of that.

Mm-hmm.

So when you're doing these sort of healings with people, it's a very mental process, but it's interesting because a lot of people who even think like, there's no way I could do that, that's too woo-woo, that's too this, this is actually a really deep psychological process that is much easier than people think because if you've experienced a heartbreak, like, you know that pain, you know where that is. So it's just about tapping into almost like another layer of reality, which is the mental layer, which is also tied to the spiritual layer as well.

Well, I mean, Jesus said, you know, um, have the faith of a mustard seed, right? You can move mountains. Um, he, I mean, I can go through all kinds of scriptures from lots of different disciplines that talk about the, in a way, the power.

Exactly.

So when people say, does it feel a little woo-woo? I almost, I don't even want to put that language out there because to me it's not woo-woo. It's actually, it's, it's actually kind of like this stripped down, cleaned version of really, let's just focus on the teachings of Jesus. Now, whether or not you're, and I'm not saying you have to be a Christian or being religious, because I'm certainly not religious, which means return to bondage.

Yeah.

The Greek of that. Yeah. means return to neutral. Um, and I certainly don't classify some— myself as a Christian. Now, I like to follow the teachings of Jesus. Sounds like a pretty cool dude. I would've loved hanging

out with him. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Um, and plus we'd always have wine to drink. Um,

so, so he'd be like, here's this water. Just kidding, it's wine.

He'd be a great guy to go to college with. I'm broke this week. Uh, no problem, man. Order water. I got you all night. Um, but we, it's not woo-woo to me. Yeah. To me, it's really what the purity of the teachings, like if you think about it. God forbid you have a family member who gets cancer. What are you going to do? You're going to pray. You're going to manifest. Manifesting in prayer to me is the same thing.

Same thing.

It's just different language. It's just different words.

Exactly.

I would bet, and I don't have the Greek in front of me, I would bet the Greek and the Latin mean pretty close to the same damn thing. I'm asking for somebody to intercede on my behalf.

Exactly.

Right. I'm asking for a different result than what everybody else is telling me is possible. Okay. So yeah, I don't think of it as woo woo. I think of it as what's happened is We've created a language around something because we don't want people to— people, powers don't want people to use it because it's so powerful.

Yes.

Does that make sense?

No, 100%. I completely agree with that. And even when you talk to psychologists, psychiatrists, there's similar aspects of these sort of teachings that they do as well.

Mm-hmm. Can you give me an example? Do you know any right off the top of your head?

Um, I like, for example, dialectic behavior therapy. I'm pretty sure—

What is that? What is dialectic Behavior therapy.

So this is like kind of talking people through reframing the ways that they speak. So for example, um, people with borderline personality disorder, people who have sort of like, um, different fragmented ways of thinking where their emotions are displayed in however they're coming across and it's actually emotionally hurting them. There's this book called Buddha and the Borderline.

Buddha and the Borderline.

Yeah.

All right.

I believe that's what it's called.

There's, there's more. You know what, Alicia, you've just given me more books to put on the stack because I don't have enough to read and I'm never home.

But it's interesting.

There's only about 27 on the stack.

Yeah, because I had a friend who actually had borderline personality disorder, and I was learning about this with her because she was one of my best friends. And in this, like, it's a lot of mindfulness therapy that goes into this. So it's interesting because this is something like, you know, when you're talking to psychologists, psychiatrists, you expect them to be in the medical field and that's that. But there's so many different layers that there's overlap that comes in.

Okay.

So in this context, they're actually teaching people about mindfulness, about stopping their thoughts, and then, um, reprogramming themselves to speak in a particular way, reprogramming their thought patterns, when this is going into the concept of neuroplasticity. It's interesting because in mindfulness, there's literally studies that have been done, and I wish I could just pull them up.

I do too. I'm trying to think of them.

I had to pull them up.

I took Instagram off my phone so I can't pull them

up. Exactly. But there's studies that have been done that show that, you know, when you start to think in different ways and more positive pathways, it literally reframes your brain. It reframes your mind. And there's different neural connections that are formed, and that's what neuroplasticity is. So it's the way that we think that you think is something that's just in the mental sphere that actually goes in to alternate your brain physically in the way that the neural pathways are being fired.

So I had this situation come up for me about 2 and a half, 3 weeks ago. And what happened was something happened in the company and I missed it. Okay. Now I didn't fully miss it. Like I started seeing it, but I didn't act on it. You know, anybody listening has a company, you know, like there's things that you, you start to notice something with an employee or kind of like a trend happening or something like that or whatever it is. And, you know, I'm very intuitive and I spend a lot of, like, I'm very tapped in. Right. And I was just like, I just, this is, this isn't going There's something not right and I couldn't put my finger on it. And sure enough, came back from vacation and it was kind of, uh, revealed to me, our trip down the West Coast, what it was. And then I spent about 10 days relitigating and re-prosecuting it in my head.

Mm-hmm.

Against myself.

Mm-hmm.

Which made me angry. Now, anger is a much thicker environment or residue. and joy and peace.

Mm-hmm.

Right? I mean, think about it. When you're angry, it's like you're moving through like cold glasses. Yeah. Right? You know, like it's hard to move. Like everything just seems like a lot more effort when you're angry. But when you're in a place of joy and enlightenment or happiness or whatever it is, things are a lot freer, right?

Yeah.

We dance, we spin faster. We, we don't care what people think. We're at a festival and we're spinning around and everything is fantastic.

Yeah. Right?

And what it did is it made me realize most people are spending a huge amount of time relitigating and re-prosecuting the past over and over again after the judge has ruled. Okay. And they keep going back.

And they might not even recognize it.

And they don't recognize it, which creates a thickness, a viscosity, if you will, to your present-day reality. Now, I'm sure somebody's listening to this. This sounds like woo-woo. It's not woo-woo. It's science. Like, think about yourself.

Exactly.

If you just think about this stuff in terms of like, like your experience of yourself. And you think, oh, when I'm angry, what does that feel like? And you're like, oh yeah, it does. It feels like things are— yeah, I'm trying to move through and lessen.

Exactly.

And the goal that everybody, everyone, I don't know anybody, I've yet to meet anybody who's not looking for a better life. They're looking for more happiness. They're looking for their own version of heaven or nirvana or enlightenment or whatever. Everybody here has something that they're doing that they do in order for them, in their belief, to make their life a better place.

Right? Exactly.

It's just a function of whether or not those things are actually proven tools. And one of these things, and I know there's plenty of studies about how you frame things, how you look at

things. Yeah.

What do you say to people that are like, well, that sounds to me like you're not confronting the harsh realities. It sounds like you're just looking at unicorns and pixies.

I would say that it's actually the deepest work you can do.

Okay. Okay. You got me, you got me intrigued. So let's unpack that. What does that mean?

So it's interesting cuz like a lot of people see me and they're like, oh, you're so fun. You're so light. You're so bubbly. Right? But this, when I said to you that I was actually suicidal at one point, like I saw your face like change, you know? And I'm like, a lot of people do.

But it doesn't surprise, it doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't—

Because you were like exposed to that as well.

Right. I'm not surprised and I am surprised. They can be both in the same sentence.

Exactly. Okay.

Keep going.

And here's the thing, because also you're in this conscious space in a way, like, so you understand the depth of that, right? But on the lay level of the average person, right? They don't understand that, you know, some of this work, like we're like, oh, we're manifesting, we're doing somatic healing and this, like it sounds all light and fuzzy and bubbly until you sit in on one of those sessions and you literally see All of the deepest aspects, the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul, right?

This— Dark years.

Yeah, exactly.

Dark decades.

So, you know, in order to emerge as your lightest being, as your most embodied self, you must go through that journey of letting go of all of those layers. And naturally being a human being, we're faced with suffering. We're faced with depression. We're faced with some of the hardest things that, you know, reality can give us.

Isn't it interesting that we're all trying to create some form of better lightness? Meaning we spend so much time trying to get our physical bodies lighter.

Yeah.

Right? But yet we don't spend any time making our energetic minds lighter.

That's the thing is that people don't realize that it's tied together because, and I think the number one reason is that our bodies are tangible, right? People see, ooh, like they look good. They look this, right? But then when you do this inner work, like no one really physically sees that, right? Like you could have gone on the deepest, most emotional forgiveness journey and then show up looking physically the same the next day. But, but I would say there's a difference, but not everyone knows that, but not everyone knows that.

My clients have noticed the work I've done over the last 2 years. My clients have noticed. My clients that have been with me for like 3, 4 years, they're like, you're a vastly different person. Like, we like this version of you more. Yeah, I do too.

But here's the thing, like they don't Well, you know, they might, you know, the people who know it, but like, for example, if you lose 100 pounds walking down the street, someone will, will notice like, okay, they looked like that before and they look like this now.

Mm-hmm.

And the energetic difference sometimes is very subtle where only like your friends or family can like really recognize that. And I think that's the difference of appeal. And with that being said, I would say that the energetic Um, work that you do is actually more important in some ways than the physical, but the physical gets more attention because you're able to see, oh, that person lost 100 pounds, or that person looks like this now.

So how does the energetic relate to getting clients?

That's so funny. Cause I was, I was literally gonna— Energetic,

you know,

oh, look, 111.

Cause we're connected energetically. Right. Okay. So I'm doing this energetic work. This is, this is soft, squishy work.

Yes.

It's difficult for people like, I don't want that, Matt. I want the tangible things.

Yeah.

And I tell them all the time, give you all the tangible things you want. You might get 10% out of it. You might get 20% out of it. But 99% of my clients need to do some kind of—

This is what I would say. It's, you won't see it until you try it, but the moment you try it, you won't want to stop.

You'll see it the second you try

it. So here's the thing. I remember when I did my first energetic session with someone. When was that? It was, I wanna say I was like 21, 22 years old. Okay. And, um, when I stepped out of that session, one of the number one things was that I was dealing with like a lot of family trauma.

Mm-hmm.

And—

Was it ancestral or current or both?

It was current.

Okay.

It was things that happened in this, you know,

in this time.

In that, in that timeframe. Exactly. So the moment that I stepped out of it, I literally saw the person I did the healing for right after, and they literally said to me out of nowhere, you look different.

Yeah.

And like, I didn't do anything different. I actually had tears streaming down my face, and then I had to clean up and then go in. And then literally they said to me, you look different. And then I was actually trying to like get an apartment somewhere. And no matter what I did, like every time I got a deal and offer, it would fall through. Right after I did that session, the next week I got an apartment offer for the exact budget that I set for myself.

And it was the perfect apartment.

And it was the perfect apartment. Looked out on the water, like exactly what I wanted, like literally to the T what I described and within my budget and everything. And it was very spacious.

It's really interesting. I've had doctors in sessions, in meetings with me, and we'll do one of these meditations. And my my, uh, then director of coaching would be there as well. And we would, they would come out of it and we'd both look at each other and like, they changed.

Yeah.

And they're like, I feel so much different. I'm like, I wish you could see. And we, you know, when we'll do the medicine work, we'll see that like people will change it before our very eyes. It's really fascinating. It's like the layers, it's like the exoskeleton of their hard self, their hard protective self falls off.

I feel like especially as a doctor, right? Like they have to put this armor on. And there's all of this stuff like they, they're not allowed to be vulnerable because they're the healer. And that's the thing—

Vulnerable's risky.

With that sphere.

Yeah.

Is that you're getting a lot of people who've studied for years and years and they had to shape themselves and create this discipline, but it's like to take that shell off, right? And to actually do that inner work, they don't realize that that could actually be the thing that makes their business. And I've even seen Um, in certain cases, I've done a session with a client before and then literally right at the end of it, they'll get a text. Oh, I just made 2 sales or something like that. And

it happens like all the time. All the time. Happens all the time. We've, I, I could go on. I've got a couple of stories on this, right? Um, the one that I would probably use the most is, so, um, Christine and I started seeing each other. I moved from Charlotte and she didn't want me living in LA. I'm like, it's a big city. It's like 13 million people. She's like, too close. I don't want you in Alty. So I thought about living in San Diego. I'm like, okay, San Diego is more expensive than Alty. And I was going through sticker shock of what it costs to live in Charlotte and what it costs to live in Southern California. So I wound up in Scottsdale renting a house furnished, right? So I was there probably 8 days a month, probably 8 days in LA. And so we're going for the next 15 months, we're going through this process and I'm like, where are we going to live? We're realizing we want to be. And so she's like, I'm not leaving LA because she's an actress. She's like, or we can move to Manhattan. I'm like, No. So like, I like the West Coast. I like, no offense to your hometown.

Oh, listen, I travel for 80% of my life. So especially when the cold wind comes over.

And so we were looking at all these places in California and I had had a couple of sessions where it came out saying move to Southern California, like in meditation and in somatic work and all of that. And I wasn't paying attention to it. And finally what happens, we thought maybe Ojai. Ojai, the Ojai Valley, which is about an hour and a half to 2 hours from LA. Like, oh, that'd be, that might be a compromise. It's a little bit quieter. We said, we haven't looked. Nope. Too small. We're driving out of Ojai. We're like, I guess we're just going to find a place in LA. Driving out of Ojai, her landlord's texted and said, hey, the unit next door to you, because it's duplex, is opening up and it's bigger and has an ADU and has parking on the side. Oh, we used to live in it. It's the owner's side. So it's much nicer. Right. And we went and looked at it the next This is it.

That's it. It was right there, right under your nose the whole time.

And so when I got clear about like what I wanted, right? And I started to visualize, okay, what would this mean for me in my life to be in LA? Which to a lot of people makes no sense in my late 50s to be moving to

LA, which I did.

Um, and the taxes and the cost of living and all of that. But when you start to follow There's a lot of, do you find like a lot of things that people do to the outside world don't make a whole lot of sense?

Yeah.

What do you say to people like that of like, that doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any logic. Why would you do that? And you're following your heart.

I feel like

you're following your soul.

Part of that spiritual journey is taking complete ownership of your path, whatever that is.

What is ownership of your

path? So I would say it's when you're fully able to trust your intuition and trust your heart where you're being led to. That's a really hard thing.

to do. How do you get to that? Because it's a lot of people's hearts are closed off.

Yeah. Like, especially

doctors, like they don't, they don't even know they have intuition, but like,

well, something had to lead them first of all, to begin with on that medical path.

Right. Yeah.

So it's like trusting that same nudge, trusting that nudge that inherently, right, because we're animals at the end of the day and Instinct and intuition are almost like 2 sides of the same coin. It's like, where is your instinct leading you? Even if there's no evidence at that point, but you know that something is waiting for you.

Isn't that the greatest?

Yeah.

When you make those moves and it makes no sense to anybody. My college buddies are like, what are you doing, Galo?

Yeah.

Why are you—

You're like, I don't know, but, but that's where the most successful people come from.

Right. I get the voice.

It's the people who can trust that voice because the people who can't tend to live, you know, sort of like the average life. They're like, oh, I'm just gonna get, you know, a 9 to 5. I'm gonna do this, play things by the book, and that'll be that. You know, but the people who think outside of the box, the people who are able to trust their intuition, who are able to go on that journey, the risks are greater, but the rewards are also greater. So.

I think the risk is greater to stay where you are and not Listen, voice. Mm-hmm. I don't think the risk is great to make these decisions. Mm-hmm. I didn't view the risk as great for me to move to LA. I mean, it's a two-way door. Like,

yeah,

I can go there for a year or 6 months. I could be there for 3 months. I go, I hate it. I can move somewhere else.

Exactly.

There's nothing that ties me to the place.

That's the thing though. People don't, people lean too far into the fear of consequence.

I think they think that, so I heard this said at my mastermind last week, and I'm gonna attribute this quote to Jeff Bezos. I, that's what the guy in the room equated. Marcus did. So I don't know if this is, Jeff said this or not. He goes, there's 2 types of doorways. He said, there's 2-way doors. You walk through, you make a decision, you walk through. If you don't like the decision, you can always walk back through.

Yeah.

He said, then there's one-way doors and one-way door decisions. You go through and you don't like it. You have to go outside, walk down the steps, go all the way down before you can go to another door and make a decision.

Yeah.

And that really crystallized it. Most of the decisions that we make in our life are 2-way doors, but we think that they're Okay. Like, okay. So let's say I decide to move to Manhattan. Let's say Kristen's like, let's move to Manhattan. Okay. Let's move to Manhattan.

Could always try it out. Let's see if it works.

So, okay. So let's say we sign a year lease. It doesn't work out. We don't like it. So we move.

Yeah.

People are like, oh, it's a big giant pain in the ass. I'm like, not really. It's not really that big of a deal.

Exactly.

It's not, it's not a giant pain in the ass to move. It's a pain in the ass. A giant pain. There's a lot of other things that are bigger, giant paint the house, right? You hire somebody to come in and pack. They, you know, they pack up the house. You can pay people to unpack.

Yeah.

You can pay people to come in and clean. You can make it as streamlined and as clear as you want.

Exactly.

And in our world, because we own the business and because we're entrepreneurs, so let's say it's gonna cost $15,000 or $20,000. So we just go sell something for $20,000.

Exactly.

To pay for it. Like, it's not—

there's always ways.

There's not a big, it's not a big deal about

it. But here's the thing, you're resourceful and I feel like

unbelievably so.

And I feel like a lot, like in the general sphere, people who aren't in the self-development industry or who aren't interested in self-development don't really see that. Like they think that when something happens to them, that's just the end-all be-all.

Yeah.

You know, they give up.

You, it's, um, I, you know, in our pyramid of what, of our values, in the bottom we have valor, which is courage, the center we have love. On the top we have dominion. On the left-hand side of bottom, we have transformation. The reason why we have valor and transformation on the same level is you can't have transformation unless you have courage.

Mm-hmm.

And you can't have courage unless you have transformation. They go hand in hand. Mm-hmm. Trans— for you to transform, there's a great book. It's called The Comfort Crisis. My daughter gave it to me at Thanksgiving in 2024. And, uh, just right after Thanksgiving, because we did Thanksgiving in Christmas together because she's got a mom she has to go see and then she's got her in-laws. And she gave me that book and I read it over that December and I was like, oh my God, I've created a comfortable life and I can make this decision. I can continue to be comfortable, probably wind up in Florida, which I hate Florida. Um, and I was like, no, I got to go do the uncomfortable thing. And that was moving out west. And it just, there's, I think people mistake comfort for Mm-hmm. There's every person I know that has unbelievable success or passion or whatever, an athlete, they're making themselves uncomfortable every single

day. Yeah.

When you do energy work, how do you view comfort and being uncomfortable? Do you think about it at all? Do you think about courage? Like, what do you, when you do that kind of What kind of comes to you?

It's interesting because the deepest transformation comes from when the client is uncomfortable at one point in the session. And then when they lean into that dark place that they don't want to see, that's where the transformation is waiting for them. And I've hosted these sessions to a point where, you know, me personally holding that space, I always know that the results are waiting on the other side. Like, I never personally feel like, oh, okay, this person can't get to the end of it, because you always can. You always can.

Mm-hmm.

And I've seen it in so many circumstances with the most devastating things. And it's like, when you're able, as a space holder, to be able to give that belief in that person of, regardless of how dark that space is for them in their life, that there's something waiting for them on the end of that, That assurance that you have in yourself will bleed into them.

So when you were in your twen— early 20s, when you were 20 and you were going through this depression, is it safe to say depression and trauma? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. Were you going in with this philosophy or was this philosophy revealed to you during that process?

There was no option. I, I went in and it was either, for me it was like, I either do this or that's it. You know?

What does that sound like?

Yeah, I was really suicidal, you know. And I—

Did you try?

I actually wrote a 9-page suicide letter.

Well, you gotta condense that down

like a page

and a half.

What? That's so funny. No, I literally—

Suicide notes can only be a page. That's facts. Double face.

That's the thing, right? Like, I was just internally going through so much, and I— it was like handwritten, of course. But, um—

Is that therapeutic for you to write that 9-page suicide letter?

I think it was at the time, but it was also like a very big reality for me. It was like, okay, this is either it or I have to choose to fully commit myself and jump into my healing journey, which ultimately—

That's a pretty broad spectrum. Like most people wouldn't be that either or.

Yeah.

Most people would want to do it incrementally. Why the— are you always that kind of extreme with everything in your life?

Um,

are you that extreme with your relationships?

Uh, well, here's the thing. I feel like I live in the wide spectrum of life. Like I, you know, actually one of my goals in life was to travel to over 30 countries before the age of 30, which I did. And like, I was always ignited to like, um, you know, do something with my life. But at the same time, like when I was going through that depression, it felt so stuck and I was like, that's it. You know, I couldn't do it. And there was so much piled up in me that I literally couldn't see past the hill. Mm-hmm. And what had happened was when I was walking out of a psychologist's office, they had given me all of these prescriptions for different medications. It was like Lexapro, it was all of these antidepressants, and it was like a whole list.

Don't do shit.

And they were like, all right, this is it. Like, you're gonna, this is gonna be, you know, you're just gonna take that medication. As I was walking out, I bumped into my philosophy professor and she was holding in this hand, this book in her hand called Peace Is in Every Step by Thích Nhất Hạnh.

Peace is in every step.

Yes.

Okay.

And this is a book about mindfulness. Um, and she had said to me, oh, um, I don't know why, but I feel like I should give you this book.

Okay.

And she gave me the book, and I remembered, like, taking it, and I was like, no, this is the answer. 'Cause I was literally, like, almost like a TV show, holding— Almost. I was in college at that point. Okay. So I wanna say I was like 20.

Okay.

I wanna say I was 20. That's a tough time. Yeah, yeah.

20's a rough time.

Because here's the thing, you're at such, um, so many different pathways that you could take. And if you're not solid in a foundation in yourself with your own self-care and your own self-love, like you could just get lost in it.

I can't imagine being 20 with social media.

Yeah. Social media— I can't, but

right now, right now, I mean, it would be Because

when I was 20, it had just like, it was like, yeah, it was just like getting like a little bit more up, you know? But I remember I was actually bullied online too. Yeah. And like people, like, especially in our college, there was like this thing where you could like write anonymous comments and then it would be like almost like Twitter and like pop up on the feed. And like, there were certain things that had come up, like, just, just about me because I was actually one of the only Um, people of color that went to my college. Like, it was actually 90%, um, a white college. And, um, people just, you know, for the most part, I had a very pleasant experience, but there were people who were actually, you know, not nice. So that also added on to like whatever I was going through emotionally. But when I received that book, I took it and I had the book in my left hand and the prescription in the other hand. And I remembered feeling into it and I was like, this book is the answer.

Is the prescription.

So I actually never ended up filling the prescription and I ended up reading this book and it was all about mindfulness. It was about neuroplasticity. It was about meditation. And it was about tuning into the moment where you might have, uh, like an inherent dislike for something, but reframing your mindset to actually enjoy that experience and become more present in your life. And they use the example of washing the dishes.

Okay.

So we have this preconceived notion that we hate washing the dishes. Like, you'll go up to me and you'll be like, oh, I don't wanna do this. I don't wanna do this.

I enjoy washing them.

Yeah. But I'm—

I'd rather do that than laundry.

So I do like washing the dishes. I was gonna give a similar example.

So Christine does the laundry. I'm like, I'll take care of the dishes.

So like in this book, right, it talks about how at some point in your life you actually had to decide for yourself that you hate washing the dishes. And ever since that moment, your brain is programmed to say, I hate washing the dishes.

Kind of like a doctor would be about posting about social media.

Exactly. So what it does is it encourages you to reframe your mind, to pause when you have that thought of negativity, to pause it and clear the thought and be like, okay, this is a neutral experience. I'm just going to go in and I'm going to see what this is So then when you're washing the dishes this time, you pause your thought and you notice how the warm water feels on your hands. You notice, you think about the amazing meal that you had. Do you think about, um, you know, the next meal you're gonna have? You think about the fact that you actually have running water.

Mm-hmm.

You start to reframe the way that your mind is speaking rather than, I hate this experience, to let's stop and like actually see what we could appreciate in this moment. And by consistently doing this, and that's the thing, it has to be consistent. It's not just an overnight thing. You'll soon realize that going into that experience, you have less negativity associated with that experience, which can be bled into different experiences, including posting to social media, including having difficult conversations with your client, including, you know, wherever else it flows. Right.

Hey, while you were saying this, so I, I grew up in

Chicago. Deep dish.

Yeah.

Deep dish pizza.

A lot of, a lot of things about Chicago. And in Chicago, it's like you're trained to hate New York, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's just part of it.

Ah, it's a very New York thing. Yeah, exactly.

And I lived out in central Jersey and southern New Jersey for like 5 years. I spent a lot of time up here in my 20s. We come up here quite a bit. Um, then I lived, I've lived all over the eastern part of the United States and I lived 23 years in Charlotte. And for me, I would be like, oh, I'm going to New York. I can handle it for 4 days, but people are rude. It's not really— it's turning to a city, right? And I don't, I don't like it. Right. And so Christine, about 4 months ago, goes, let's go to New York for a week. So we fly in on Saturday. I'd already been on the road and we get in on Saturday and, you know, travel for me is not that rough. It's a lot of first class. I mean, we, you know, we're, that's how I travel. I do 250 days a year. So then we get to the hotel and she's kind of sad and she's like, you're not happy here, are you? I'm like, no, I don't, I don't like New York. I don't, I don't like it. People are rude. Just place is loud. It's compressed. I don't, I don't understand the appeal. Okay. And I made a decision. Decision I made was What if this was my first experience in New York? And instead of rushing around to get to places like Christina, I'll be walking. We've been walking a lot. We're staying down by the East River. And so we're walking a lot and I'm like, she wants to walk really fast. I'm like, let's just walk really slow. I go, baby, I'm gonna be 59 in 6 weeks. You realize as you get older, you don't know how much time you have left. Yeah. So instead of rushing through and to everything, Why don't we just enjoy every step? So we've been doing that. My experience, first time ever in New York, it's been phenomenal. I'm like, I would come back here. I would, you know, like, I'm not saying I move here, right? But like you, so I hear you saying this is what if I just like washing the dishes?

Exactly.

What if I just enjoyed the honking? What if I just enjoyed But here's the thing,

you're shifting your perspective. Yes. Because it, you might not even call in that energy around you. In general, people, people can say people in New York are rude and that's gonna be what you attract.

Right.

But if you shift your mindset, maybe you might attract a really nice New Yorker who's like, maybe I'm attracting the rude people. Yes.

Right. No. And I've noticed this. I'm like, wow, I'm really running into some really nice New Yorkers.

Like, exactly.

It's been really awesome. I'm a New Yorker. You're a New Yorker. You're very nice. Very nice. You're not, you're not the prototypical New Yorker.

That's true.

Um, but you, but what I want people to take away from this is our, we actually have dominion over our environment. Our environment doesn't have dominion over us. And what I'm hearing you say is I can, and I think that washing dishes is a beautiful example. You do dishes just about every night. Sometimes I'm like, let's get this done as quick as we possibly can. But I take immense joy in taking something that was messy and cleaning it up.

Yeah.

Like, and the joy of that, right? It takes me 5 minutes. There's 2 of us. I mean, how dirty can the dishes be? I think it'd make me 10 if I made cheeseburgers or something

like that.

Or I grilled some steaks. But because I do the cooking as well, it's really amazing for people to realize that we can even in I'm 58 years old. I can completely reframe. I don't, I talk to my friends who, you know, my college buddies who are, one just turned 60 and they're so stuck in how they believe and how they think. Yeah. And, you know, Gunnar, if you're listening to this, you know, I love you, brother. Like, you know, I mean, that's, and he's like, he'll tell you, he goes, I just want things this way. And I appreciate that. But to me, there's so much more joy of like looking at Something for the first time is like a little child.

Wow.

Let's look at the excitement of that.

Yes. That's the difference between a limited mindset and a growth mindset, right? So a limited mindset is when you just, you know, settle for what you're used to. You settle for, you know, the average of, you know, your flow. But when you're in a growth mindset, you're like, okay, what can I learn today? How can I keep expanding? How can I keep growing? And having that approach to life can change the entire way that you experience this reality.

Do you think that you are, is it safe to say that you are an all or nothing person? That you're an all, that you're an all in kind of gal?

Yeah.

Okay. So you're probably a lot like me. You have a, there's a, there's first gear and there's fifth gear. Yes.

There's like no, there's no like, let's see what 2.5 feels like. Exactly. Exactly.

Do you think that that mentality and the way that you're wired Contributed to your season of depression because it was an all-in?

I would say it was an interesting mix of things. And I would say that because my soul/spirit wanted to do so much more and I was being held back, it almost felt like constricted in a way. That's the best way I could describe it. It's like I almost knew that I was destined to do all these things and I had all of these visions, but like the way that, you know, I was even self-sabotaging myself, the way that I treated myself, the traumas that I experienced were so deep that it, it felt like I was trapped.

Yeah.

And even growing up, I always used to watch the Travel Channel. I, I was like the president of like 3 different clubs in school. Like I was doing all of this stuff, but then I, I didn't feel like it was leading me anywhere. And I think And I think that also was the source of the depression where I still felt stuck in this like old reality and I wanted to be somewhere else, but my mind wasn't yet there. But the moment that I was able to open myself up and, you know, kind of make movement, that's when things like really unfolded for me. And then I was like, oh, this is great.

So was that Costa Rica? You said something about, uh, so tell us about Costa Rica at 23. How did that impact—

Yeah.

At the age of 23, you go to Costa Rica. How did that impact your Yes.

So I actually, um, I bought a house in Costa Rica at the age of 27 years old, but the way that I— Do you still have it?

Let's go.

Yes, I do.

All right. I'm renting it right now. Party.

Damn.

Okay.

But the way that that started actually was I began working for, um, a nonprofit organization that did work internationally in different countries around the world. This was actually— so when I graduated from college, I studied political science and then I immediately stepped into the political sphere and I was working for these different elected officials. I worked for Hillary Clinton a little bit. Look,

I have respect for her.

I learned a lot, you know, and also to the point where, um, I sort of went in with these like, you know, rose-colored glasses where I was like, oh, everything's gonna be like this. Everything is, you know, is gonna be great. It's easy to do this stuff. And then you see the reality.

The rose-colored glasses become like a—

Yeah, exactly. And then, um, going through that, I actually, you know, in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost the election, that was a huge point for me because I realized like I put in all of this work to help with this thing. And then all of a sudden, like your job, everything is lost, you know? And that's the nature of political work is that you could put in all this work.

One day, one day you're looking at real estate in Washington, DC.

Yeah.

You're convinced you're gonna win. And by midnight, You're like, fuck, we just lost.

Exactly. And you're in this room with all of these, you know, political consultants and everyone is crying. Yeah. And everyone is like, you know, everyone's lives have also been altered. And then also what it, what it meant for the country. So I went back to my roots, which was like my desire to travel, my desire to make an impact. And I started working for this organization called Cross Cultural Solutions that actually did health projects internationally and, um, you know, taught children English. So my first assignment was Costa Rica. And then going there, it really opened my eyes. I was like working in these impoverished countries and getting the opportunity to connect. And I was like, wow, these people are happy. These people who have nothing still find joy in every day. And it was like a big reality, um, contrast for me, you know?

Because we spend so much time marketing here telling us you're not happy unless you have X, Y, and Z.

Yeah.

They don't have marketing to them that says you're not, you should be, you should have Exactly. And, uh, you know, it's really fun this stage of my life in the late 50s. Um, hard to believe I'll be 60 in like 13 months. Um, but you really do have a very different perspective. You just realize that like the things that you thought were unbelievably important, they're not important.

Exactly.

And you're just like, you almost, I joke a lot. I'm like, it's once you realize it's a video game, Yes.

No, 100%.

And you chose your avatar, like from a,

uh,

that's the same analogy I use as well. Yeah. From like a, you know, if you wanna debate that, you can debate that. But like, yeah, if just from a coping mechanism, like, you know, really like for the most part, most of our, or as a friend of mine said, we're all just extras in somebody else's main feature movie.

Yes.

Right? Like we think our stuff is so important. So here's my, here's my, here's, here's where I wanna end this today. So let's say you have a functional medicine doctor comes to you tomorrow. They have no online presence. What do you do with them over the next— how do you get them to a place that—

Step 1, I would start with like the meditation session with them.

Really?

And I would get really deep with them to begin with, to really see the direction that we want to take. 1, capturing their story. 2, identifying if they have any existing blocks. That is gonna—

I hear their story and identify if they have any existing blocks.

Existing blocks.

Like, you do that through the meditation?

Yes, exactly. It's a mix of meditation and somatic healing.

Okay.

We'll do one together one day. Okay, cool. Do it on the, do it on the podcast for all I care.

I'm a fricking open book.

It's a longer session.

Okay.

All right.

Next time you're in LA, you can come by the house. We'll hang out. Yeah.

Yes. So essentially, you know, I step them in because first, you know, when it comes to marketing, you want to get people down to the roots, right? You want to start with what is their core. So through that, usually what I do is then go into, um, creating the strategy where I'm like, okay, this is where that person's at and this is where we want them to be. So basically packaging out their story, how can I relate their story to what they're selling, have them step into the shoes of their ideal client. How can we use that story to connect to who that client is? Putting themselves in that shoe, saying like, okay, if I was Jane Doe and Dr. Bob is selling,

right,

you know, XYZ, what are the steps? What is the messaging that I need to use? Getting clarity on the Then from there, we kind of like, you know, hash it all out in a Google document. I'm actually mentally doing this right now, you know, hashing it all out.

I understand.

Yeah, hashing it all out. And then, um, kind of looking at cross-channel strategy. What is your website gonna look like? What is your social media gonna look like? And what is your email marketing gonna look like? And how do these all connect in a network together?

So are you doing in your services, Are you running, are you just doing the social and the email? Are you doing running ads for people? Like, um,

I personally don't run ads, but I've worked with ads teams before where I've even advised them. Like my role is communications director and marketing director. So I come up with the strategy and then like, um, especially for ads because it requires more oversight. Like I tend to splice that out to different people, but I've done it before, but it's not my favorite thing.

Yeah, no, it's, uh, running those, running the ads is kind of like—

Because you need people on it to actually look and see like what's It's not performing well, you know, renegotiate. Exactly. And I have a life, so, you know, but—

And I have a life.

Yeah. But on top of that, like, having the strategy is the central point of all of that stuff, right? Because you could be running ads, but if it doesn't connect to your social media or it doesn't connect to your email, it's not gonna serve you.

Yeah.

You know, all of it needs to be a cohesive sort of like umbrella.

You know, marketing has changed so much. I think about my first time really marketing was probably 1992 or '93.

I remember back then.

Were you even born then?

'93. '93. Good

to know. Let's see, I was outta college, uh, so I was probably 23, 24 years old.

I was, I was just outta the womb. Yeah.

And it's, I didn't know, like there weren't the resources that exist today. Now you can swing a dead cat and you can learn anything about anything.

Yes.

The thing that I always tell everybody with regards to marketing and generating leads, the purpose of marketing is to make selling and advertising is to make selling superfluous. What that means is there shouldn't be any hardcore selling by the time they're sitting.

Hmm.

They should be making, they should be ready to make the Because most people, when they think of selling, they think of like, you want floor mats with that? Yeah. Come on, I'll give you the Z-Bud. Right? And that's not what selling is at all. Selling is actually about eliminating the people who are not the perfect fit.

Mm-hmm.

So you have all this marketing and social media, you're running ads, content, podcasts, books, whatever. By the time somebody gets in front of us and they meet with Christine, it's really a process of, are you really a fit? And then when they sit down with, with our person who's an enrollment person, it's really like, here's how it works. Is this a fit for you? If it's not, great. If it's not, great. Right? Like, there's no high-pressure sales.

I think that that boundary also of, of saying no to the people who aren't your right kind is the most important thing.

It's the most powerful thing in the world. Um, and this is really hard for people to think, 'cause we'll get new people like, how do I get 'em to buy?

Yeah.

It's not about how you get 'em to It's about how you make your process so beautiful that when they walk in the door, they feel like they're meeting Elvis.

Exactly.

That's what it should feel like to them. Yeah. Okay. And when they can finally grasp that, it's how do I squeeze every dime out? Or, oh, I lost that sale. How do I get 'em back? Yeah. How do we reengage them? That's like saying after the fish has jumped off the hook and you can't see the fish when you go fishing, how am I gonna get that fish back in the hook?

Exactly.

No, you gotta put more bait back in the water.

There's more fish in the sea.

You gotta put more bait in the water.

And it's about It's about calling in the aligned clients, magnetizing in the aligned clients. Yeah.

Anything else you wanna say? Like any, I know we've talked about that a lot, but like, is it visualization? Is it meditation? Is it all of it?

It's a little bit of all of it. And I would say like, when you really know the core of your business in the same way that you said, like, these are my core values, you don't want a person who doesn't align with those values. You have a certain, based on your story, based on what you've been through, based on, you You know, the, the sort of strategy that your company has along with your core vis— um, values.

Mm-hmm.

This adds up to who your ideal client is. And knowing that is the most important and empowering thing that anyone can do for the business.

When I first started, I had a rule. We'd get on the phone and I would do this thing with the doctor and be like, uh, you know, Dr. Smith, nice to meet you. I'm Matthew Glogli. Um, do you want me to call you Dan? Or are we going to call you Dr. Smith? What are we going to call you? And if they would say, you have to call me Dr. Smith, I would literally say, this phone calls

over. And

they'd be like, why? Because if you're going to pull the hierarchy thing on me, it ain't going to

work.

I'm just as good at my day job as you are at

yours. Yes.

And they would be like, oh, oh, oh, oh. Sometimes, most of the time you'd be like, well, okay, that's it, right? Which saved me. 45 minutes on a phone call.

Exactly.

So yeah, really powerful. So how do people find out more? How do they get in touch with you if they wanna inquire about working with you? I know this'll drop probably in about 2 weeks from when we're recording, so you're gonna be knee deep in the middle of political season, but that'll end. It'll end the second Tuesday of November.

Yes, exactly. And then I'll be available.

Then you'll be available.

Who knows? Who knows? Um, but you could still get in touch with me anyways.

Yeah. Yeah.

So my Instagram is @aliciamunyan.

And that's spelled A-L-I-C-I-A? Yes.

Yes. M-U-N-I-A-N is the last name. And then I'm also on Facebook. Um, yeah. And I have a website, intuitivemarketingmind.com.

Intuitivemarketingmind.com.

Yes.

You are working with one of our clients. Yes. And

I know,

uh, when you're at the mastermind, people enjoy talking with you. Yes. And you're always dressed in a beautiful vision of pink. Why the pink? Why always pink?

I feel like that's my aura color.

That's your aura color?

Yes.

What is that? That's not one of the chakras.

I guess it is.

It is now. It's a combination of all 7 or 9 of them.

Exactly.

Whatever one you want to subscribe to.

But you know what's interesting? Like, I actually took a class called, um, colorism in like, uh, like about like, you know, what colors you wear and things like that. And, um, it's really about how you can express yourself and who you are. And there's so many different ways that you can do that. And for me, like when I wear pink, like it's like a, it's like like a color that gives warmth, gives magnetism, you know? And there's so many ways that you could present yourself, like including being a doctor. It's like, you know, do you wanna show up with a little stethoscope? Stethoscope. That's on social media.

It's a beautiful color on you and it's memorable.

Thank you.

Yeah. So it looks great.

Keep it up. Yes.

Alicia, thank you for coming in. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on Out of the System and thank you for sharing your insights. All right.

Yes.

All right everyone, check her out. Um, thanks for coming on Out of the System. And, uh, we'll be with you next week. We'll have another guest. Who knows who it's gonna be?

Someone amazing as always.

And by the way, you can get our book by going to mavericksprofitsystem.com/thebook. That's Out of the System. And, uh, check us out. Like us, love us. Like and love her as well. Thanks everybody. Take care.

Bye.

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