Your Nervous System Is Sabotaging Your Success! with @dr_espen

What your mindset rests upon is actually your nervous system. And so we actually have to go in, and I call my process now neuro rewiring, because I have to go in and help people rewire your whole nervous system.

Welcome to the Dr. Espen Podcast. I am Espen. Today I'm joined by Mike Zeller, who has founded and partnered over 16 ventures in over 7 countries. His business, uh, businesses collectively have done over $100 million in revenue. And today we're going to talk not just about the strategic aspect of how to be successful in money and business and in life, we're going to talk about how to rewire our brain, how to rewire our nervous system, rewire our energy for success. It's not an outside job, it's an inside job. It's going to be a very, very powerful, um, conversation, and also necessary conversation if you have the intention to have more impact in the world to maybe grow or scale businesses or maybe even rewire your brain for success. Interesting thing about Mike is that he survived losing over $1 million in 18 months. His wife was going through 2.5 years of battling with mental health issues and now coming out of that, he's guiding and helping leaders from around the world, entrepreneurs and investors, etc., through his powerful Rewired program. So we're going to talk about today and how we can tap into the flow state, how we can achieve peak performance in life and in business, and anything from the tools needed to be able to do that. And Mike now has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs in 6 continents, and it's an exciting conversation to have. His book, The Genius Within, we'll talk a little bit about today as well in regards to how we can truly find our genius within. So I want to say special welcome to the Dr. Espen Podcast. How are you, Mike?

Dr. Espen, honored to be here again. Always great to connect with you, man. I love your energy. And you have such brilliance in how you show up. I was just listening to Bruce Lipton episode earlier, which is so good. So excited to be here.

Yeah, that was cool, man. I interviewed Bruce a little while ago and I asked him, you know, what do people need to do to rewire our programs? We talked about that before to change our programs. And he said, just go to Dr. Esmond's programs. That's where that happens. I was just like, well, did Bruce just say that? I was like, thanks Bruce, I might use that, you know? So what a legend. But I wanna talk about you, man, because I know you've done some pretty extraordinary things and I wanna start right off the bat with the first question. You know, to get to your level of business acumen and success and financial achievements, I want to ask, how do— how does a person— how do you rewire your nervous system for success?

Amazing question. And, you know, I used to think it was so much about mindset and it was about your state and it was about your habits, which it is partially about that. That plays a huge part. But one of the biggest things that I ran into is in my wife's depression battle. So, my wife is a 3-time suicide survivor. And, in October 2020 when she got pregnant, I was shocked to realize like my peak performance stuff, my NLP, my stuff that I'd trained for years and worked for the majority of my clients was not working. And, I was like, "Oh, there's something deeper here. This is a much deeper, harder, more complex challenge." And, I started realizing trauma Trauma is really about your nervous system. And then even I started realizing, well, why had I achieved, you know, a certain level of success but I hadn't gotten to another level, a much higher level that I knew I was capable of? So, and then I started noticing why do people break through certain levels at certain points? And it's ultimately their nervous system feels safe with that next level. And the bedrock Beyond what your mindset rests upon is actually your nervous system. And so, we actually have to go in and I call my process now neuro rewiring because I have to go in and help people rewire your whole nervous system. And especially when you— a lot of my clients now have CEOs, top YouTubers in the world, et cetera, that are absolutely stuck. It could be emotionally stuck and they can be financially stuck. They just can't bust through the next level. Well, usually in a handful of sessions, I can get them to a significant breakthrough. Sometimes the biggest breakthrough in the last decade for them. But it all comes down to your nervous system.

I love the distinction and the differentiation between mindset and nervous system because we know so much of it is in the unconscious or the subconscious parts of the mind. Just to quickly tell you my story, and then I'd love your feedback or your opinion on this. I was born and raised in a family where it was always scarcity when it came to money. Both my grandparents are, you know, were living in fear around money. Both my parents were saying something like money, you know, you got to be careful, etc., etc. So I grew up with this. I was not aware of it. I had this money program. As I say in my programs, I don't— I didn't have a money problem, I had a money program. So I started my first business in 2010. I was deeply passionate, highly skilled, worked really hard, and was really good at it. And then ended up being $147,000 in debt. And I remember looking at myself in the mirror after I had gone through, you know, months of, you know, let's call it despair and guilt and shame, and, you know, I'm not good enough and how could I fail and all these, you know, painful experiences. And I really— and I look at myself in the mirror and I thought to myself, hang on, what do I really believe about money? How do I really feel about money? And that's when it dawned on me that what was in my body, what was in my nervous system, as you mentioned, was that money equals unsafety because I borrowed that program from my mom and from my father. And so I went, holy shit, okay, I've got to change this because even if I have money, I still feel unsafe. And that's something that many listeners of yours could resonate with. So I changed it. I did exactly what you're doing in a very different way, I would imagine. But I rewired my nervous system from scarcity and contraction to abundance. So I want to ask, how do you do that with your clients when someone realizes, okay, it is about trauma, I know that the majority of my challenges are in the unconscious or subconscious mind. That is trauma. And unless I get to it, unless I find it, I can't change it. So what's the process that you use for them to be able to get access to this information and actually do the rewiring process?

Yeah. May I ask before I dive into that, what did you do? I'm curious what you did as well so I can understand and contextualize. Yeah.

Certainly. Well, I met a mentor and he looked at me and he said, so this is the situation that you're in and so on and so forth. And he asked me, would you like me to show you the problem? And I said, absolutely freaking lutely, you know. And I went and got my profit and loss and my balance sheet and I said, have a look at this. I thought maybe I spent too much on equipment, maybe I didn't manage the business right. And he took that and he just put it on the table and he grabbed my hand and he placed me right in front of the mirror. And he goes, there's your problem. And firstly, my ego was really offended because I was like, how dare you say that, you dickhead? Um, because I just lost everything. But secondly, I had to take a swallow, a big, uh, hard pill and say, I am the common denominator in my life. I am the creator of my financial abundance and my financial stress. I'm not going to point fingers at anyone. I know that I'm going to fix this because no one's coming to fix it for me. So either I, I die in poverty or I fix this and I don't pass this program on to my kids. So to answer your question, Mike, I had to take a good hard look in the mirror and take full responsibility for the way I had been showing up and for the way I wanted to be showing up in the future.

I love it. Yeah. And that's an empowering decision. And it feels like— let me ask you this— one of the things that I sensed that he had you do is he had you take obviously deep responsibility, which means you're taking authority and domain over the decisions and over the agreements that you have unconsciously and consciously made in your nervous system. And then that was the beginning point, right?

Yeah, spot on.

Well put. And yeah. And so what happens— so in our nervous system, and the reason it's so much deeper than our mindset is because It's our unconscious mind. So, I think of our subconscious mind or unconscious mind. I mean, there's interchangeable— like, it's obviously you can't fully define it and put a tight border around it like Kentucky to Tennessee or Australia to the ocean or whatever, right? Well, in your body, it becomes stored in your body, these agreements and these beliefs. So, when you're a little kid and your mom has these money beliefs or your dad have these money beliefs, and they say something, or it could be a mentor or coach, someone, anyone that you believe has the truth and you don't as a little kid. Because also, back to one thing I learned from Bruce Lipton, up to age 7, our brain is in a hypnotic state. So, it's in the alpha brainwave and meaning it just is going to absorb anything that it hears. So, when it's in that hypnotic state, then anything that we say, anything that we accept is true, it just becomes an agreement, and that agreement becomes true until someone confronts it or something confronts it head-on. And it actually also sometimes it gets buried so much, so deep in our subconscious, we can't ever access it. So, once it's buried so deep, like a lot of my clients, about half of my clients' memories that come up are stuff they've totally forgot about. Like, one of my clients, I'll break down how I get to it. I use a combination of tools. But I don't think there's one silver bullet. But if I'm going to rewire a core belief or core identity, because your identity is an outflow or your actions are an outflow of your identity, what you accept and believe is true about you. So, I got to go through identity. I got to go through beliefs, which are subsequent to identity. And I also got to go through energy. So, energy is— are you familiar with David Hawkins, I imagine, right? So, the maps of consciousness and all that jazz. Well, if you're in a state of suffering or a state of apathy or a state of shame or state of guilt or state of fear, it's a much lower vibration than a state of love or a state of acceptance or a state of courage or state of joy. And so, lots of my clients, they can't get to that next level and even myself. One of the things I'm working on is continuing to access higher levels of joy because as I access higher levels of joy and playfulness and fun, then it's going to attract more abundance into me. And I'm seeing it happen as I'm working, as I'm moving up the scale of maps of consciousness. But I got to get to that root cause. And for me, the most powerful tool I've found and I would arguably the biggest tool out there when coupled with other tools, not a standalone tool, is the use of psychedelics because you get this massive portal. It's like you got in a research report in 2023, they found that you have in humans, you have a portal of 3 to 6 hours with MDMA or psilocybin basically where your nervous system is more wide open than any known point in your lifetime. And so I can do literally a decade worth of work in that 3 to 6 hours. I can get to stuff that Tony Robbins can't get to in 7 days.