The Unique Psychology of Entrepreneurs

Almost all the entrepreneurs had some type of early childhood challenge bordering on trauma. Unlike the average population that I was working with, the entrepreneurs had taken this trauma and they had transformed it into something that was valuable in some way. They took what they had lived through and then they built a better system, or they solved the problem in a really unique way, or they developed this like a defense mechanism or a survival strategy that allowed them to turn the challenge into something valuable for the world. All these people tend to have something spicy that happened in their childhood, but instead of spiraling into sort of feeling powerless, they took that trauma and they turned it into fuel for something meaningful, and they created something from it.

Welcome to the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, no filters, Just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. In today's episode of Inside the Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind, I am so excited to have Gemma Stone, who is one of the top gurus out there when it comes to psychology and entrepreneurship and mixing them together. And it's so, so important to learn and understand the psychology about the way many of us think and act and Following the gut and instinct, and she's going to guide us and share some incredible insights that's going to be really profound, that when you listen to this, you're really going to be rethinking about what's going right, what's not going right in your world. And I'm so excited to bring her. Welcome, Gemma Stone.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks, Eric.

So, my goodness. Well, first of all, I mean, I got to say, every time people are around you, when I'm around you, it's just— you exude such incredible energy. And I think you just got this natural aura about you that's just amazing. And And I think that's just part of what you do in sharing it. Just, you just ooze it. How's that happen?

Oh, I love that. I mean, a lot of work, I would say. I spent a lot of decades trying to cultivate that energy and sort of clear out my system so that I could really show up in the world in the way that I wanted to. So I appreciate your feedback cuz that's been, it's been a lot of intentional digging in to get to this place.

Amazing. Amazing. And just, yeah, always smiling and such a giver. And you know, part of what I like to do is, you know, we're talking to a lot of successful entrepreneurs inside Speakeasy Mastermind, but we didn't just start that way. I'm sure, like you just said, it took you a lot of work to get there, and you have such a unique kind of, you know, angle and craft about what you're doing with entrepreneurs in the coaching and helping us transform and get out of our own way. And we're going to talk a lot about some of the incredible mind work that you do, and even on this episode, giving us some couple suggestions on what we can be maybe thinking about today. But how did you get to where you are today? I mean, where did Gemma all start?

Well, it starts in a jungle in Guyana. Yeah, of course, like all stories do. Doing some international development work in Guyana, and I just, I really fell in love with the work and I came home and was looking for a university where I could pursue that work. And I ended up at the University of Calgary. After taking probably half my degree in international development and international relations, I had an instructor who said, if you get this degree, you're gonna be pushing papers. And they knew me well enough to know that policy was like not why I was doing the work. And so they advised me to do something a little bit more practical. So I was gonna go into international law. And as part of that, I took a couple psychology courses and the moment I landed in my first psychology course, I was like, oh, this is it. It felt like a homecoming. Like it just felt like—

you said law, you said Gemma and law. I was like, whoa, I don't know about that. It's gonna work. And thank God you put it there.

Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah. So it was that, it was a sense of like, kind of, I'm sure you've had these experiences, right? Where you like, you go to a place and it leads you to another place and it leads you to another place. And I just kept listening and following and trying to find my way until I had that sense of, oh, this is it. This is where I belong.

Yeah.

So that's how I ended up getting in there. I had did a couple degrees in psychology. I did all the traditional stuff. Like I used to build courses for universities. I was a clinical psychologist for 15 years. I had like a clinical practice where I had like a number of practitioners in our clinic and just really loved the field of psychology. One of the things that I found was that entrepreneurs have a very unique psychology and one that we're not in traditional academia, not trained to work with. So I just got lucky and started working with a couple entrepreneurs.

Okay, so you're running a clinic, but you were just dealing with like, who's your typical avatar? Just all different white lock, all different people, and then you just started loving the entrepreneur?

Totally. Yeah. All different people. So I started working with little kids in the beginning, and then I worked with adolescents, and then I was like, maybe I should be helping the people that are messing these kids up. So, hmm. Then I started working with adults and it was really just like any, like fear, anxiety, depression, like going through divorce, relationship changes, burnout. Like I just really was sort of helping all kinds of people with all kinds of things. And, but then I started getting some entrepreneurs that came in and then they started referring their friends and I realized like, ooh, this is an interesting profile, a psychological profile. And there's some things that are very different psychologically and neurologically for entrepreneurs compared to the non-entrepreneur population that I really enjoyed working with.

Wow. Oh my God, I'm so excited. I wanna dig into that because I think we all intuitively know what we're sort of out there and You know, sometimes we realize we're in this bubble and we always talk about, well, there's only the, you know, the top X percent are really entrepreneurs and not everybody's fit to be an entrepreneur. And, you know, X percent of us, high number, have some kind of ADHD, it seems like. And then we realize, well, maybe that can be harnessed into an actual, you know, weapon of strength versus a weapon of weakness, I suppose. But maybe that's a bad use of words there. But I mean, I'm fascinated. So I want to go— so you're in there, you're talking. I mean, what are you seeing as the common thing? And I want to touch on something you said also, because I'm now curious too of, you know, maybe some advice on entrepreneurs that have kids and families and what you've seen from that side of the coin. But on the entrepreneur side, what were you noticing?

A couple things. So one, I was noticing almost all the entrepreneurs had some type of early childhood challenge bordering on trauma. And unlike the average population that I was working with, the entrepreneurs had taken this trauma and they had transformed it into something that was valuable in some way in their, like, they, they took what they had lived through and then they built a better system or they built, you know, a better world, or they solved the problem in a really unique way, or they developed this like a defense mechanism or a survival strategy that allowed them to turn the challenge into something valuable for the world. All these people tend to have something spicy that happened in their childhood, but instead of spiraling into like sort of feeling powerless, they took that trauma and they turned it into fuel for something meaningful and they created something from it. So that, first of all, was like just incredibly intriguing for me. But the problem would be is that they would take that let's just call it like, let's say they grew up and they had, um, their parents were living in more like scarcity and poverty, and then they made a commitment to themselves like, I am never going to be broke again.

Right.

So then they would build themselves a really beautiful, like abundant world, but then they were driven by scarcity. And so the challenge would be now they've gotten to a certain place, they've created something remarkable for the world, and they're being driven by this fear that is now burning them out. It's causing them to disconnect from their family because they can't actually be present with their family cuz they're so afraid of failure. That they just will show up for 14, 16, 20-hour days and they'll not take care of themselves and they won't take care of their relationships. And so they end up like what got them to a great place is now the thing that's actually keeping them stuck. That was really intriguing to me.

Yeah, so you're probably interviewing a lot of these people that the outside world seems extremely successful, at least financially, and others, yet they were just, and I hear that a lot too. It's like people, some of the people just aren't happy and I always wonder what's going on there. And so a lot of it is driven through that, huh? But the, it's never enough scarcity. They keep, they don't know when to, which it goes rooted all the way back to their childhood.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was one of the things I saw, like really cool because there's other options, you know, if you can turn to an addiction instead to cope with your trauma, but instead they're building businesses that are changing the world. I'm like, this is great. And sometimes they use addiction as well to, you know, cope with the stress. So there's all those pieces. And then there's, there's actually like neurological differences. You mentioned ADHD. So that's much more common. People, entrepreneurs tend to have a little bit more neurospicy dynamics going on. And what I understand, there's different allele expressions so that there's certain parts of the brain that are a little bit more active in entrepreneurs. As well as like high-performance athletes and military people, they actually have like different brain structures that cause them to take more risks and also forget the pain of those risks more quickly compared to the average population. So in some ways that's really cool because it allows us to do these things where we're like, we're pushing the leading edge and we're being innovative and we're, you know, we're putting our house on the line for our business. But at the same time, sometimes it ends up becoming something that's a detriment. So helping entrepreneurs to understand their own personal psychology to understand what's driving them to do what they do and how can we evolve that psychology so that they can still do exceptional things and work with their mind instead of feeling like their mind is sort of sabotaging them.

Wow. Wow. Okay. That's really interesting. So I want to get back into that in a second, but I want to get back to you and your incredible journey. So we're going to rewind. You go out there working with many entrepreneurs. You find this lane of entrepreneurs being kind of a, wow, this is interesting. So then what happens?

Then I start to recognize myself. I'm like, oh, that's me. And so when I recognized myself and then I looked at my own sort of like my family, my dad was an entrepreneur, my grandparents were entrepreneurs, like then I was like, oh, I was also born with this sort of unique psychology. And at that time I was working a little bit more inside systems, like I had consulting with hospitals and building courses for universities and also feeling kind of dead inside. And I had this sense of I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do. Like I have these amazing contracts. I have, you know, a house, I've got a golden retriever. Like, why am I not happy with my life? Yeah. And then, so then when I started to understand the unique entrepreneur psychology a little bit more, I understood that entrepreneurs need to put themselves in certain environments so they can feel like they're alive and so they feel like they can really engage with life. And so slowly I started to shift my work from being more like practical, clinical, professional into more entrepreneurial. So I decided I was going to start running retreats, which at that point wasn't really something that psychologists were doing. And I wanted to understand the business, like a lot of challenges that psychologists have is they're great at their practice, but they're not great at the business. And so I decided to invest just as much in business as I was in psychology. I wanted to be a great practitioner. I also wanted to be a great entrepreneur. And so I learned how I could grow and how I could scale. And so I started doing things like running retreats and the retreats every year would double. So I started and then I doubled and then I doubled and then I doubled. And I got to this point that I was like sort of helping my entrepreneur people with is I got to the place where I was being driven by something. That wasn't healthy for me anymore. And then I just— I burnt out and I crashed because I just— I grew too quickly and didn't have the foundation.

So let's talk about that for a second, because, I mean, we can probably take some good learnings from that. So you're getting really successful, this momentum, the first taste of I'm doing it on my own, I'm doing something different out of the box. People are buying, they're coming, they're celebrating. What were you teaching? I mean, who was— what was the audience? What were you teaching at the retreats? And then ultimately, what led to— it seems like it was so successful. So what led to the fall for a minute there?

So the theme of the retreat was really conscious life design. It was the idea that a lot of times when we're kind of like going through our life, sort of like I did, we're handed a script by our parents, by our family, by our culture, a society that says, do these things and you'll be happy. And it's sort of like an unconscious script. We, you know, we go to school, you have 2.5 kids, you get married, you like, this is what you do and then you're happy. And I was finding that for myself, but also for my clients, that was not the recipe for happiness, but rather the recipe for happiness is not building a life according to our conditioning, but building a life according to like our core, like what's really like essential to who we are as a human and allowing that to be where we're building our life from instead of the place of like conditioning or call it like the constructed self.

Like you're almost in your head, you're battling like, wait a second, I'm told one thing, but I'm feeling over here and you're trying to— got it.

That was it. That, yeah, that was it. And I just saw it time and time again, like multiple reasons for things like anxiety and depression. But one of the things I was noticing is there's, so there's like biological basis for mental health struggles, and then there's environmental basis for mental health struggles, which means you're going through something challenging. You've lost your job, you're going through a divorce. So that's more of an environmental. But then there's almost like this soulful feeling of this doesn't feel like my life, or this feeling of I don't know who I am anymore, or this feeling of I'm living the life that I was told was gonna make me happy, but it's not. And then we have to go deeper and figure out like, What's beneath the surface? And exactly like you said, Eric, it's this process of reconditioning what we were taught and told is gonna bring us success, whether we're entrepreneurs or not. And then really coming home to this internal sense of clarity about knowing who we are and what life we wanna build. And that's what the retreat was all about.

So what are the typical symptoms that we should be looking for that when we have that identifies that? Is it more like, hey, there's success around me, but somehow I'm not happy, I'm losing sleep, I'm doing, you know, destructive things to my body and self? Like, what are the signs?

You just named some of the biggest ones. It is this feeling of I'm doing what I thought I was supposed to do and I'm not happy. I'm like Netflixing and binging at night. I have to have a bottle of wine to calm down. I'm not sleeping very well, or I'm like oversleeping. I'm not like, I just, there's almost like a lack of aliveness and it almost feels like we're just going through the motions. Like whether we're, you know, building a business or doing something different, it feels we're on a hamster wheel kind of, and we're not fully engaged. And at the end of the day, we don't fall asleep being like, even if it's hard, I'm really like, just fall— like, I'm in love with my life right now. I'm in love with my business. I feel lucky to be able to get up and do this thing day after day, whether it's parenting or relating or leading or creating. It's really the sense of aliveness or a lack of aliveness that is a sign that somewhere inside there's a gap that we need to fill.

Okay. And then Okay. So in the opposite of that, of course, is like you said, we're going to sleep, we're fired up, can't wait to do it the next day. But, and then, so, so if we're feeling that, so you brought us a lot of people who are having that feeling. They went to the retreat and you helped them through that stuff. And I want to get into that too. And then maybe we can get to that now. I mean, what tips do you have for us if we're starting? There's probably people listening to this right now that are saying, oh shit, you just basically identified what I'm feeling right now. What tips do you have or recommendations for that?

That's a good question of kind of like coming back to the core. Well, I teach about this a lot, so I'm going to I wasn't planning to do this, so this is not a very professional diagram, but sometimes when I'm working with my coaching clients, I just share this like super simple thing. So I'm going to show it up here. And for those of you that are not watching and you're listening, there's a little heart in the center, and this is like your core self. It's the signature of you. It's kind of like the blueprint. This is what, who you are at your core. And then around that little heart, there's another circle, and this is your conditioning. So we come into the world, and as all humans are, we experience conditioning. So we get to, we have parents, and our parents have gone through things, so they're carrying things like traumas and messages and limiting beliefs. Um, and they also give us some really good things. They give us some gifts, but sometimes they also hand us some expectations, like you're going to be a doctor. And that's all the conditioning. And it's also messages from our culture or from our religion or from, you know, our grade 7 basketball coach who told us, like, you know, we were never going to make the 3-pointer because we were too short. Whatever the thing, have all these messages that kind of like crowd out who we are at our core. And then to cope with all of the conditioning that we experience, we develop a constructed self. So this is the part of our identity we build to cope with the hard things we've been through. So my invitation to people is look at what's driving you. Do you feel like you're being driven by that essential part of you, that blueprint kind of feeling? Do you feel like you're being driven by the conditioning, like the messages you've got from the world? Or do you feel like you're being driven by the constructed self, like how you learn to cope with the conditioning that you went through? And the constructed self is a lot of defense mechanisms. So, You know, the feeling of if 50,000 people are following me, then I know I'm good enough because they're paying attention. That would be like a constructed self. Or sometimes where our constructed self is like, you're the funny one. And so you've, you learned how to cope with the hard things in life by being the entertaining one. This is one of the reasons why like there's a lot similar in Hollywood and comics. When you actually hear their early life story, there's a lot of trauma and they learned to be the comic to deal with that trauma. But inside there's still so much pain.

Isn't it why every once in a while somebody, you hear like this crazy, somebody took their life, God forbid, and you're like, I thought this person was happy. And it, it seems like that was just a shell of what, what was really going on. Is that, that accurate for me?

Physicians or comics or Hollywood actors and you're like, wow, I had no idea they put on such a good performance. And I think we do this in business too. Like, you know, we build the business we think is gonna provide us with, you know, the happiness, the relief, the satisfaction, the, the sense of significance. But none of those things come from anything outside of us. All of those things come from inside of us. And so we can never build enough. To be good enough. That's an inside job.

Got it. So I imagine a lot of what you do and your goal is to help people go back to what's in the heart and try to figure out how to get there and focus on that. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's it. Because when you build from that place, like you can still have 50,000 followers or you could still have a $50 million business from that place, but when you do, what you create has come from a different place. It's, and then therefore also the experience of whatever you've created in the world is very different. It's not driven by fear, it's not driven by scarcity, it's not driven by trauma. Like So therefore the business itself becomes healthier because, you know, the creator and the leader is healthier. And instead of emanating anxiety and fear and scarcity, we're emanating confidence and security and abundance and impact. And so the teams are healthier, the actual product or the service we produce is actually better. And then when we go home to our families, they get the version of us that we feel proud of and not the like burnt out empty version of us. And then, you know, in order to fulfill ourselves, we're not turning to a bottle of Merlot and a tub of Ben Jerry's, we're turning to let's go for a walk in nature or, you know, let's like book a camping trip. Up and connect with the people we love. Like, the way— what we build and then how we cope with the stress of life completely transforms depending on what it's being sourced from inside of us.

Amazing. So like, back to that comic example, they're going home at night, they had to adjust to get going, and they did the comic, but they were definitely off from what's really inside of their heart, and they never discovered that in a sense. Exactly. It's probably what led to the depression in that example. And that's really interesting. I mean, I'd love how you put it that way, and that was a cool, uh, little image there. And trying to find that heart, I love, I love that. So that was micro. I want to go back macro again. I'm take us back to the road of you. You said something interesting. It seemed like you had a lot of successes with these retreats, and now you have your entrepreneur hat and you're like, okay, I'm now stepping out, following my own heart, figuring out what your heart is, or at least going in that path, finding some success. And you said you just burned out and had to stop. What happened?

They say we teach the lessons we need to learn. So that was it for me. I was being driven by the needs for significance and also the combo of need for significance and also like a bit of a lone wolf vibe. And so I have my own early childhood traumas, and one of the ways that I learned to cope with it is by just taking care of everybody all by myself all the time. And so in business, I had not yet learned that like the people who support me are just as important as the people I'm supporting. And I hadn't built a foundation beneath me, so I was doubling and doubling and I wasn't bringing anyone else on. I was just handling more people. So I went from building the content, facilitating the content, and on the breaks I would be refilling the tea. And at the end, you know, and like at the end of the day I would be like filling out the forms and then I would go sign on, like I'd sign the contract and I'd do the release with the springs. And then like I was doing everything all by myself because my early pattern was you can't rely on anybody. And so I hadn't yet learned to build a team and it burnt me out to the extent that after my last retreat, which just grew, like we filled a ballroom, a gold, a beautiful golden ballroom in this like old Scottish castle. And it was incredible. But I'd walk into the room and I would start to facilitate and I would feel nauseous and I would just get this pounding headache and I would get vertigo. And then I'd have to go back and I would just leave the room and I'd breathe while they were doing— nobody knew I was sick, but— and then I would go back in and then I'd facilitate and then I'd give them a process and I'd leave and I'd find— so I did this all weekend. It was the— it was probably the worst sickness I've ever had. And then right after the retreat, I was taken out by vertigo, which I've never had before or after. For an entire month. I couldn't even get off a couch cuz I was so sick.

Wow.

And then, you know, so that's the thing though, sometimes you learn the lessons the hard way. And that was when I really had to face this, the sense of I can't do what I wanna do alone and had to learn how to let people in, how to rely on people. And then, you know, strategically and tactically how to build a team. But first it was the inside job. It was the inside piece of I have to be vulnerable enough to be able to really trust and rely on other people. And I hadn't yet learned how to do that in my life.

Yep. And that's such one of the most common mistakes I see with many entrepreneurs I run into. It's just the art of delegation properly and being able to— I mean, almost back to what you said, stay in the area of their heart-centered thing or their area of genius and finding out how to trust others, let others do. And what's weird, what you tend to remember, what I've learned is there's people, because we don't think like others, that, you know, they want to play that role. There's an admin that wants to play that role of administrative stuff, and that's what they're happiest, and they don't want to do They'd be scared to step on stage. And it's almost like we're not doing them a service by letting them play in the lane they want to. Yeah, you have this beautiful opportunity to let them do what they want to do all day long. And I think part of the growth, and I've been through that, sounds like you learned a lot of that, is just we are not all the same. And I learned that a lot personally, just all the different personality tests out there. To me, that's just so like fascinating when you start to dig in and really understand that we are truly not. I mean, you say that it's obvious to say we're not all the same, but when you truly understand psyche, for me personally, I've been through a lot of growth and just doing that and saying, oh, light bulbs went off. Wow, we are all different in different ways and how to work with each other.

Yeah, that part, Eric, that you shared is— it's such a potent lesson, that awareness of not everybody is like us, and there is in fact somebody whose exact purpose is to do the thing that I don't want to delegate because I don't want to give anybody a terrible job. It's just terrible to me, it's not terrible to them.

There's—

please give me this job, I would feel so fulfilled if I could do it. And So that was, yeah, that's one of the mindset pieces that I had to get around to. So I'm glad you named that cuz it is a barrier for a lot of entrepreneurs is recognizing the truth of that.

It, it is. And so then what happened? You, you got sick, you got better, and then you do rebuild something similar, but just now smarter.

Yeah, both of those things. So got sick, it actually took me a long, I had to lick my wounds for a bit because I also had a little bit of this sense of, well, maybe it's not meant for me. Maybe I actually put my ladder against the wrong wall again. And then I actually had to look at it. And the truth was I didn't put my ladder against the wrong wall. I wasn't chasing and climbing something that was incorrect for my core, like it truly is. And I feel it now 'cause I'm healthier now. But what I had to do was I had to heal and I had to evolve the way that I was building my business, and I had to do a lot of my own inner work. So for me, it actually looked like a good chunk of time. I would say 3 years after that. I don't think you know this little side quest that I went on, but after that I decided to write a book. That was all about like, how do you not build the wrong life for yourself? Basically, like, how do you build a life from your core? So I wrote a book and I was still kind of burnt out at the time. So, what's it called for all of us that wanna download and watch it? It's called Your Great Life: A Soulful and Strategic Guide to Designing a Life You Love. So it's a very practical, like, there's a lot of like, in the book you do the work. And I wrote the book like for me, the one that, you know, my past self who needed this and also some of my clients. But I was still burnt out at the time. So this is a little bit of the entrepreneurial vibe. I'm like, let's think outside the box. How can I not burn out? I decided to sell everything I own and I bought a Volkswagen van and I moved my children and the man I was actually also in the middle of a divorce with. We're mid-divorce and we decided to sell everything and move into this Volkswagen van and just travel North America and do a book tour, like a grassroots book tour in this Volkswagen van.

Oh my God.

So I did. I can't say that I rebuilt right away because I just, I tore everything down to the very bottom first. And then I kind of took a year off-ish. Like I worked a little bit on the road, but it's actually really difficult to live with an ex-husband and two children and run a business and do a 100-city book tour in a Volkswagen van. Like entrepreneurs are wired differently. Like we think something is a really good idea and we're like, I can pull this off.

Right.

So it was actually a really transformative experience. And the boys got to Worldschool for a year, which just transformed their life. I sort of mostly took a year off and I just traveled around and met people and signed books and, but didn't really work all that hard. And honestly, it was pretty rough with the father of my kids living, you know, we couldn't live in like 4,000 square feet together. So 80 square feet was a bit of a challenge.

I mean, we can go down that rabbit hole for 15, we can go a long time down that one. How you pulled that off was quite a feat.

Yeah, it has a happy ending. So we like, now Matt, who's the father of my kids, he's my operations guy. So he's my COO. He handles all my operations. So he, we built a really beautiful unconventional family and business. And it was only through that experience that we had to be in the fire and then we got to the other side. So. It actually was perfect. So now, speaking of letting people in and helping, you know, relying on people, it's kind of ironic, but the person I rely on in my business the most is my ex-husband. And we, like, we run everything together. I do front end, he does back end.

Talk about a great awareness and learning and growth. I mean, ultimately it's like you were sort of like, thought there was a reason why you guys should be together, but it was for the different reason.

Ultimately. Yeah, that's 100% it. You're so right, Eric. It's like trusting those nudges when they take us down a path. And this is the thing about entrepreneurs I think that's really cool is when we're really connected to ourself and our purpose. We hear those messages and then kind of unexpected, unconventional things happen, and that's how we innovate and that's how we create something valuable for the marketplace. Or that's what it was for me too.

Wow. Wow. That's incredible. Okay, so then you get out of the van, you decide that, okay, well, we could still be somewhat coexistent and we need to be coexistent, and you just rebuild now better with all the learns.

Yeah, did that, rebuilt, and then I got to the place. So rebuilt, did kind of all the things, rebuilt the business. Had a 3-year waitlist, was really happy.

Wow.

And then like every other entrepreneur started to feel a little bored. I need the next level now. And what happened is that I bumped up against the edge of my capacity as a clinical psychologist because there's rules and regulations that we have when we're doing this type of work, like certain ways that we can work and certain people we can work with. And so I kind of came to this place where this thing that I had probably spent half a million dollars on and 15 years of my life, like trying to earn, it now became a prison for me. It was the thing I most wanted in my life. And then it became this prison where I'm like, I can't grow anymore because there's all these, the confines of this license. So, so then I hit this edge where I was like, I have to let this go.

And what do you mean by that? Does it mean for your license there's only, there's certain rules you have to play by and if you do certain things outta the box, you get fined or you get slapped, you know, hand slapped kind of thing?

Yeah. All of that.

Huh.

Yeah. So there's certain, like we, you know, certain marketing we can't do. Uh, there's certain rates we can charge and can't charge. Um, there's certain places, like I was getting invitations, like my clients, because they were entrepreneurs, they were always moving. And I'm like, can you please stop moving? Because I can't work with you if you move to Dubai.

Right.

Because my clients would relocate and then I would have opportunities like to run retreats in different parts of the world. And I had to say no to a lot of things that I actually wanted to say yes to.

Yeah.

And so when I just had that mark of feeling like if I keep following, you know, what my core says is my next step, and if I keep trusting this path, I'm gonna continuously run into this fence. And it was tricky because that it brought me a lot of success and, you know, and accolades and there was so much sunk cost bias into it and my identity was all wrapped up in, I am this professional with all these initials behind my name. And I hit this place where I'm like, I can't go to the next level if I stay in this old way.

Interesting.

Then I let go of my license and then had the freedom to, so now I do more work online with people. I work with people all over the world. I'm running international retreats. I'm gonna, I'm working on another book. And that's how I became free enough to connect with you because now I can actually, you know, build, be in masterminds and have relationships with people that I'm also working with. And so now there's this level of freedom where I get to really build the business and the community that I desire and feel like I'm doing it from a healthy place now, not from a place of trauma. I'm really building from a place of love instead of a place of fear and also a place of freedom of this like kind of evolving identity that I find myself in instead of being stuck in the confines of who I used to be.

Love it. What a great story and a lesson for us. I wanted you to share. So, I mean, you took that risk with the fear. Obviously there's, I mean, I could totally see it, the fear of, oh shit, I just put all this money in. Am I going to lose business because I lose the doctor label? So magic question, obviously you're happier, but do you feel as though all of a sudden the fact that you didn't have the doctor's, you know, branding on you has cost you clients? Or what has been a result of that big decision other than the more freedom you've had?

That's a good question. It's both and, so I'm really grateful that I studied business, like in addition to psychology, because I had enough internal awareness of how to build a business that wasn't just dependent on my license. So the happy version is I was terrified also cuz I'm the primary provider for the family. Mm-hmm. So it wasn't just, I'm making this decision for me and it feels fun and free, but also is this the right decision for my children? Because they've got big dreams and those dreams are incredible, but they're also expensive.

Yeah.

So was kale. Like, I gotta keep like putting food on the table. And then also there's other people that are depending on me. And so it really, you know, Matt depends on me. And then there was also like my clients. I had this sense of, are my clients gonna be okay if I let my license go and then they can't work with me anymore? Because when you're licensed, then it's covered by insurance and different things like that. And so there was a lot of wrestling. It was a really hard decision. Probably I sat with it for a good 8 months before I made the call and Ultimately, I realized that if I stayed stuck in this sort of this old identity that I knew I would start to wither. I couldn't stay there. And if I'm withering, like nobody does well, my clients don't do well, the kids don't do well. So ultimately made the transition and thankfully like within the year I was able to replace all my income. I did lose some clients. I used to have a 3-year waitlist and, you know, and now it's 6 months. So my ego was a little like, a little hurt by that. And then I just made sure to take like excellent care of my clients and make sure that I could refer them to other people that they could keep working with and make the transition as seamless as possible for everybody. And now, you know, like the same thing that happened before is happening now. Now things are doubling and doubling and, but I'm growing a little bit more sustainably now than I was before.

Amazing. I mean, you said something interesting there that we all need to pay attention to, of course, is there's the logic side of the, of what you were talking about. And then there's the deep awareness side of, well, wait a second. I could do this and it's the safe way to go, but I'm not going to be ultimately happy because my true heart, as you showed in that picture earlier, is in the center. And that is a little bit not congruent with that. That's not what you're being called to do. So congrats for taking that leap. And I know you're happier there on that. I think we all probably face that all the time. I do think about that a lot and others do, you know, which would— we have to listen sometimes to our gut and do the thing that scares us the most sometimes to follow that. But it seems like that's always going to be the right path. Just to kind of take us on a different route, I mean, a couple things. One is in your bio, you said, um, we talk about conscious, subconscious, unconscious levels. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that and what, you know, just describe it a little bit more how that all works and what you mean by that?

Yeah, I love the yes. And this is where I geek out because in my traditional academic training, we were only trained on the conscious part of the mind. So the conscious part of the mind is about 5 to 10% of the mind. So it's thinking, rational, logical. A lot of the research-based techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, solution-focused therapy, it's all focused on the conscious part of the mind. And one of the things that I realized as I was doing work with people, and especially entrepreneurs, is that we are smart, self-aware, fairly emotionally intelligent, sophisticated humans, and sometimes we still do things that are against our best interest. And I was like, why is that? What's going on there? Like, they have the right answers. Why are these right answers not enough? Why, like, why is this problem still here? And then when I decided to go beyond my academic training and kind of expand out, I started to understand the mind a little bit more deeply, that there's the subconscious part of the mind, and this is about 80 to 90% of the mind. This is the part that really runs the show. And so in the subconscious part of the mind, we have all the maps, the cognitive maps that are the conditioning that I talked about before. So all of the things that we sort of semi-consciously do and think, it's all in the subconscious, and the subconscious drops us into automaticity. So we just automatically have certain habits of when we wake up and how we wake up and how we feed ourself and how we relate to our partners and when we're stressed out, how we respond to our children and how we cope with things. And we have all these subconscious maps that are much more powerful. And then at the unconscious level of the mind, there are things that influence us that we don't know influence us. So these are things that maybe these are like repressed memories or they're sort of like they're in the dark. We call them the shadow. And so there are all these things that are working and the conscious mind is only 5 to 10%. And so if we're only working with 5 to 10% of our mind, we can't effectively get to where we want to go. We need to work with the subconscious, the 89%, and the unconscious, and make sure that there's alignment between conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. So anytime it feels like there's a pull, one part wants to do something and another part wants to do another, or our conscious mind knows there's something that's right for us, and then our subconscious mind takes over, this is what's happening, is it feels like the mind is battling itself. So if you imagine, it's a little bit like the conscious mind is like a rider and the subconscious mind is like an elephant. And so the subconscious mind, if it wants to go left, if the elephant wants to go left and the rider's like yanking on it to go right, it doesn't matter how strong the rider is, the elephant is always going to win the battle. So then I became fascinated and absolutely obsessed with, yeah, but how do we go deeper? How do we reprogram the subconscious part of the mind? How do we shine light on the unconscious so we can see what's influencing us beneath the surface that we don't know? And make sure that all levels of the mind are working towards us, with us, so it feels like our mind is like our best friend and our greatest ally and our super cheerleader, instead of feeling like it's like it's holding us back and it's keeping us stuck.

Wow. And so part of your work is to help us understand that and teach that and get us more aligned with our minds. Wow, that's amazing. So I did— I mean, just understand, I like the elephant analogy, so I'm going to be thinking about that all night now today and figuring out who's dragging you over here or what's happening. All right, I was gonna ask you something earlier. I mentioned that I became more aware after I took a variety of different tests out there in the world? I mean, is there, what do you love? Like if you talk to clients and say, hey, have you, you know, you're working with corporations and hey, maybe you should take this test, have your staff take it or your significant other, what do you prefer?

Yeah, there's a couple that I really like for different reasons. So in terms of team dynamics and understanding ourselves, I really like the Working Genius model right now.

Okay.

It's fantastic for understanding kind of like where are our strengths, where are our challenges, and how do we make sure that it's called a widget, like all the little cogs in the widget are working together to create seamlessness. So Working Genius is amazing. For me, Kolbe was one of my very first ones that I trained in. I really loved it. I would say there's 4 different types of psychometrics. So there's cognitive, which is like IQ tests. There's affective, which is, you know, your StrengthsFinder, like your emotional is more like your values is more the affective test. And then there's conative tests, which are more instinct, like Kolbe. And then I'm going to say there's another level that's coming out. It's like the soulful. And so like human design would fit into that. Yeah, my co-captain Andrea is trained in it and she's on the daily telling me self me things about myself based on my human design. I'm like, how did you know?

Oh my God, I gotta talk to her about that. I gotta figure it out.

She's amazing. You know, the thing is that if you're really in touch with who you are, you've kind of worked through all of the different patterns. My experience has been they all kind of tell us the same thing and they just tell us in a little bit of a different way. And somewhat like for me, knowing what my true colors is and knowing what my Kolbe, like when I understood, like a lot of entrepreneurs have a pretty high quick start score on their Kolbe.

And what's your Kolbe?

I'm a 9.

What's the 4 letters?

I'm 5293 on my Kolbe.

5293. Yeah. We are similar. Oh, 5293. All right. Our last 2 letters are very similar. 3783.

You're a 3 for Fact Finder?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. That shocks me. Cause you're so good with like facts and details and all the spreadsheets and all the everything. That's a—

Let's just get into it. Quick start, low Fact Finder.

I love that. This is the thing, right? Like it's fun to be able to. Have different angles that tell us different things about ourselves. And then also we can relate to each other in different ways when we're like, what are your numbers? Yeah, but I'd say those are my favorite right now. Working Genius, Kolbe, and Human Design.

Human Design, which one are you?

I don't love this about my Human Design, to be honest. When I got— have you ever had— have you taken a psychometric before and you're like, I don't want this one, can I trade please?

Yeah, yeah, can I?

So I'm a projector. I'm an emotional projector, which makes sense. So the core theme around the projector is we go for depth. Almost like we're mind readers. We can see into the depths and we can see things that other people can't see. And usually then we empower the other people to go out in the world and do things because we can see and they can do.

Yeah.

And I didn't love that because I also love doing. And at the same time, I have to be really mindful of, according to the projector style, like my energy. And that's really true. Like I do have to be. When you talked about my energy at the beginning, it was such a compliment because I didn't used to take care of my energy and I felt like kind of like I was like a walking zombie, but I was very productive and doing a lot of things. So now that I'm more attuned to my energy because I know I'm a projector, I know that how my energy is what makes the biggest difference in my relationships and my business and my impact. So I have to prioritize my energy first.

Love it. And I am a what?

I don't know what you are. I would say probably a generator would be my guess.

A manifesting generator.

Are you a manifesting generator?

I don't know what that means, but I'm just learning. I'm a manifesting generator. All right.

Okay. Yeah, that tracks. That makes sense. When you first heard about you're manifesting generator, what was it like for you?

I'm still digging in, to be honest. This is somewhat new. So I've kind of have it on my chat, put it through in ChatGPT. I'm trying to get some clarity on all that, but now I'm going to talk to Andrea and she's going to give me more. Uh, but, but apparently I bend time and do some cool things. And, but yeah, don't exactly know, but I'll learn more.

Part 2, you can let me know what you learn.

And on that note, it's been so, so wonderful having you today and appreciate you sharing and teaching some great things and honestly creating a really cool awareness that we all need to be thinking about as we go through our entrepreneurial journeys. Ourselves and understanding the psychology of things, because we don't talk about that a lot yet. That's so important. I think that hits everybody at a deep level. So thank you so much for joining today, and we'll look forward to chatting with you soon. And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to Bye! Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room.