There was this point in my journey when I realized that accomplishment was tied. Was neurologically linked to shame? I didn't fully understand it. You know, the memory where it all started was me being two years old, being so excited about something I had done running in the room to tell my mom and overjoyed, and I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I got thrown across the room.
I don't know if I startled her and she turned around fast and kicked me or what exactly happened, but my head hit the door jam and got a black eye and split my lip. My mom proceeded to yell at me. Now, I'd have no idea what was going on with her at the time. I can't speak to that. So all of a sudden I am getting told that what I did was wrong and bad and terrible, and it was compounded by this physical pain and this physical impact.
And so for me, that was one of the beginnings of this link of accomplishment to shame. everything you know about business mindset is bullshit. Now if you know anything about mindset and business coaching, you probably know who Tony Robbins is. He is the number one business coach in the whole world, and he will tell you that the choke hold, these are his words, that the choke hold in your business is always you. It's always your psychology and or your skills.
And he goes on to say that it's 80% psychology. And 20% skills. And of course we know most people are focusing on the skills and the strategies, but what is the psychology? What does he mean by that? And of course you could say, oh, we're talking about mindset, you know, and there's, that's a ton of people who that will say, and pretty much every successful entrepreneur will say mindset is everything. And they're right. But it's deeper than that. It's deeper than you can do it, or?
I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. And it's not motivational quotes or affirmations in the mirror. That shit, if you like those things, great. Have at 'em. But it won't be the thing that makes a turning point in your business. Reminding yourself and telling yourself, I am enough. I can do this, I can achieve anything. Those kinds of things do not change your mindset, and that's because to change your mindset, you have to break through these walls that your brain has built.
One of my past guests, she talked about her debt cycle and she talked about how she kept repeating the same patterns. So first when she was 18, she got into debt and then her dad came and saved her, and then she got to debt with her business and finally owned up to her husband and that was gonna supposedly save her, but it didn't. She still kept investing and going deeper and deeper into debt. And this time she was hitting six figures of debt.
Because she just kept investing in things that she thought would help her business. It wasn't until she had this breaking point where she knew her marriage was on the line and she was going to lose everything in that respect that her brain changed, that the mindset changed, and she would always say to her clients and everybody else, oh, mindset is everything. And she believed in herself and she put in the work and she did those things that most people think mindset. will have them do.
Oh, I'm consistent. I'm working hard every day. I follow through. I do what I say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I believe in myself. That's what I need. That's the mindset I need. But it goes deeper. And this woman, she kept ending up. In over her head, over and over. She kept repeating the same cycles and this is what we do. We change it up a little bit. So right. It was not her dad that was gonna save her, it was her husband
. It took something that big of almost losing her marriage to change the psychology of her patterns. So when we talk about mindset being deeper, it's changing the psychology of your patterns. And this is why so many successful entrepreneurs have lost everything, sometimes multiple times before they ever succeed because it usually takes something that big, that catastrophic to actually change their psychology.
I knew when my business wasn't working, that it wasn't because my strategies were flawed. I mean, yes, there were some holes in them, but there were holes in them because there was something going on in my mind. My psychology in my mindset, and I kept digging because I know how to reprogram my subconscious mind. I know how to rewire that stuff. I kept digging and digging, and my business was not working. Still not working. My clients were Having great success.
I, on the other hand, was having shit success and I had one of those big catastrophic events where I was on the verge of losing everything and and something broke inside of me. And when it broke, I was able to analyze and figure out what it was exactly and then how to rewire and recover from it. And then how to bring people through that big shift without having to have that big, massive catastrophic loss.
So it usually takes something really big to change your psychology, and this is because you have a base operating system. And it includes how and why you make decisions, what motivates you, what you're afraid of, and what you think will get you what you want. And neurological links that predetermine what those experiences mean. And most of this operating system, most of it was formed before you were. Age 12, and between the ages of nine and 12 is when a circuit in your brain comes online.
That's called the default mode network. I won't go too into the scientifics of it, but what it does is it basically shortcuts everything. It compares. Whatever's happening in your life now to pretty much anything that happened in your life before the age of 12. And it makes correlations and assessments and assigns meaning. It's a shortcut so that you don't have to process and figure out what's happening. Now. It's like, oh, this person is yelling at me.
It's like that time when mom yelled at me, so therefore I need to respond like this. So it's a brain circuit that just makes everything automatic and it makes it fast. It was done for survival so this fast processing made it easy for you to react and respond very quickly, and so most of the way you react and respond is based on what happened to you before the age of 12. And who are the people that are around you the most? When you are young? Of course, it's your parents.
And people may stretch up one or two levels higher than their parents as far as their success, especially if their parents push them in that direction. But very few people will create a life that's wildly different. And those that do. Do it because they're breaking through that psychology. So your psychology is informed by, of course, your parents' psychology. It's not because they put it on you. I'm not talking about like, let's blame our parents for everything that's wrong in my life.
They made me feel not enough and blah, we're not gonna do that bullshit. And if you feel that way, I get it. I spent many years of my life in that place, so I understand how awful it is when you start connecting the dots and you see these correlations to what your parents did to how you felt, but. Just because two things were happening at the same time does not mean that one thing created the other.
It's like if a hurricane happens at the same time, I fall out of bed, do I make the assumption that hurricanes make me fall out of bed? No. But when we're trying to put together our psychology, that is often what we do. It's like. Oh, I felt this way and what was happening is my mom was yelling at me or my mom was doing this thing, whatever it was, and so therefore, I must be feeling that way because she was doing this. So we tend to do a lot of that in our lives across the board.
And so we make up a lot of assumptions that are not actually true. So it's not that your parents put it on you. It's because they were the ones who were around the most when you were little. We are meaning making machines, and what that means is, here I'm gonna make a meaning for you. You can make your own meaning, but here is what meaning making machine means to me and to a lot of other people, is we see something and we decide what it means.
So if I see a red coat, I decide if it means that coat is really cool, you might decide that it's ugly. And so my meaning of the Red Coat is different than your meaning of the Red coat. I may think the Red coat looks preppy. You might think the red coat looks rock and roll. So we each have our own perception of how we make a meaning of things. Some of the things you have decided.
What they mean is based on things that you picked up from other people, you know, your parents might have said, you must behave properly to get what you want. Or maybe they said, if you work hard, you will succeed. And so you picked up those meanings. Working hard means success, behaving properly means I get what I want. Right? And notice the meaning, the correlation that you have decided. That it means.
And see, even though your parents said that and they told you it was true, at some point you still had to decide to accept that. As true. So one of the things that happens is you tend to pick up more from what you experience, especially in those early ages, because under the age of seven you are literally a sponge. You soak up everything. You see everything in a way that we adults do not see because that default mode network narrows our focus.
Is tracking for the things that we know and the things that are familiar as opposed to seeing everything and taking everything in. So as the little kid, we see it all. So if your parents told you to work very hard, working hard, will make you successful, but they worked very hard and were never successful, you'll have this inner conflict. You'll have this. You wanna work hard to make your parents proud, but you don't really believe that you'll get the success.
And here's the thing that sucks when you have a belief or a conflict like that, is you get the thing that you believe. You might work really hard. And so you're making your parents proud. Sure, that's great, but you won't get the success because you saw. Over and over how hard your parents worked and didn't get the success. So you decided to make it mean that working hard does not equal success. So you do the working hard 'cause that's what you should do, but you don't get the success.
Because you get what you believe. There's that saying, whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. So if your parents worked hard and they were successful, then you can probably repeat that same pattern. But if they worked hard and were not successful, you likely made a correlation. That working hard does not equal success. Now, if somebody questions what you're doing, you might make it mean they don't trust you.
Because maybe your parents or caregivers or the teachers would question what you did because they didn't think you were doing it right. They thought you weren't capable. And so you created a meaning that when someone questions you, it means they don't trust you. And you might have some illogical ones. Like if somebody praises you, it means they want to take something from you. Maybe you had a brother or a sister who would be nice to you only when they wanted something from you.
And so now whenever somebody praises you, you're on guard and you look at them kind of like they're a pariah. And of course that in turn probably triggers some other meaning, like, you look into me this way, like, Ew, I don't wanna talk to you. And the example of this, I was on a call with a very successful multimillion dollar business owner. And I said something nice before I asked the question I wanted to ask, and I noticed her energy shift. I'm, I'm super sensitive to that stuff.
It's one of the things that makes me really good at the work I do with my clients, but I noticed her energy shift and it put her on the defensive, and she answered my question, but she was definitely not warm to me. And then I watched her interact with other people who did not do that. And she was very warm and friendly. And then a couple other people that said something nice about her first before they asked the question. This same thing happened.
There's this pattern where she goes on the defensive when somebody says something nice, and it's not always because somebody wants something, but it will create a shift in energy that will affect her business results and her life results. So this is what I'm talking about when we're talking about the psychology. There's mindset in there, but you have to unwind and.
And break those meanings and those associations and that is deeper than your typical mindset stuff, saying you're enough, a million times doing hypnosis of confidence and all of those things. I'm trained in hypnotherapy. Hypnosis is great, but you have to break those associations, in order to change the behavior. So for me, I'll give you a really good and deep example. There was this point in my journey when I realized that accomplishment was tied. Was neurologically linked to shame?
I didn't fully understand it. You know, the memory where it all started was me being two years old, being so excited about something I had done running in the room to tell my mom and overjoyed, and I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I got thrown across the room. I don't know if I startled her and she turned around fast and kicked me or what exactly happened, but my head hit the door jam and got a black eye and split my lip. My mom proceeded to yell at me.
Now, I'd have no idea what was going on with her at the time. I can't speak to that. So all of a sudden I am getting told that what I did was wrong and bad and terrible, and it was compounded by this physical pain and this physical impact. And so for me, that was one of the beginnings of this link of accomplishment to shame. And then it was reinforced. Over time. So lots of other situations where my mom didn't like it.
When I succeeded, where she would tell me I would need to do it another way or that I shouldn't do it even though I succeeded. So there was always this link to shame. And so I knew that and I understood it, and I worked on clearing it, and I started clearing levels and levels of shame, and every time I cleared a level of shame, I had more access to being able to accomplish more, and I was able to do more in my business. That was a huge breakthrough. But it was still my mom's fault.
It was still not really in my control. It was something that was happening to me, and , I kept peeling back the layers, and then it finally changed. All of a sudden I could see. That somewhere along the line I decided that accomplishment meant shame. So yes, maybe those things happened over and over in my childhood, and so it's a very logical thing that you would make that association and make that meaning. But the reality was, in my life.
What kept happening was that I would accomplish something and then subconsciously I would try to create shame. So in my photography business, I would put things on my credit card that I wanted so that I could accomplish things, but it would automatically be tied to shame because in my family, debt was bad. So I would complete that cycle very quickly. I would accomplish a whole lot in a day and then I wouldn't be able to sleep because subconsciously I'd be fighting that feeling of shame.
That would always follow because there was neurological link saying that once this happens, this has to happen. And so everything, every accomplishment in my life was tied to shame. I traveled the country and photographed ghost bikes in my photography career, and I self-published a book and I put a lot of books out there, but then I still had hundreds of books sitting in my hallway that were a source of shame because I never followed through to sell them and get them out there.
And I never could because that big accomplishment had to be tied to shame because that neurological link had to be completed. So once I finally realized that I was the one. Who decided, and I could see that the two things were separate, that I felt accomplishment and maybe something happened where my mom created shame or whatnot, but that was separate, that they were two different things, that they were not actually linked together. Once I could see that distinction, then everything changed.
Then that neurological link. Unhooked and so then I became free to accomplish without having to follow it with some bullshit thing that would make me feel bad about myself. Like I, A big example too would be, I would accomplish something and then I would immediately find that thing wrong. So if you're one of those people who, every time you succeed, you automatically notice what's wrong, what the next thing is. That's not good enough.
Is you might have a similar link in your brain that needs to be broken, and you've got to get to that point where you can see that it's not somebody else's fault because you can't change it if it's somebody else's fault. You can only change it when you can see and take responsibility for it yourself. And one of my old business coaches, he used to say every major uptick in his business happened after a major mind shift. And I've noticed the same in my business and my clients too.
One of my clients is a solopreneur and every time he has a big like mind breakthrough with me, more people opt in for his product seemingly. Out of nowhere. He ends up getting a client out of the blue when he hasn't even necessarily been doing something. But just that shift in energy opens doors and allows things in. So this mindset shift, the mind shifts. They're not just understanding something new, it's deeper. Like I understood that the shame and the. Accomplishment were linked.
I understood that, but it wasn't enough to break it. It wasn't until my subconscious mind could see that there were two separate things, and I had that aha breakthrough epiphany. And when you have those aha breakthrough epiphanies, it changes your behavior for good. And I know you've all had an aha that changed you. Where you just had it and all of a sudden you just stopped doing something that you used to do.
And that's the moment where the subconscious mind finally gets it and understands, and it's not like you're getting better at something, you just are better. It becomes a part of who you are and your greater understanding that builds into who you are being who the person you are is. So to change your mindset, to really change it, to change the psychology, you have to unravel the meanings that you made of things when you were young.
These are, people talk about limiting beliefs, and yes, this is it, but the key is to actually identify the limiting beliefs that are getting in your way. So for me, the limiting belief with that shame story was that she is separate than me. Her reaction is separate from me. That it actually didn't really have anything to do with my accomplishment. And when I could really understand that to the bones of my body, that link broke.
You have to unravel the meanings you made of those things when you were young, and most of this stuff is below your consciousness. It's been a part of you for so long that you don't even know it's there. You don't know what it would be like to not have it because. You really just don't know anything different, and your mind will do everything in its power to hang onto those disempowering meanings.
This is why entrepreneurs have to lose everything so often before they actually break those associations. They learn that they won't die. They'll hit rock bottom when there's nothing left to lose. The fear of letting go of the old mindset becomes irrelevant because your subconscious mind knows that it will never get you what it thinks it was gonna get you. So this is all why I do what I do.
There are so many business coaches out there who will teach you the strategy and who will focus with you on that, and a lot who work with you on mindset. But most people cannot go deep enough to break through those deep neurological connections. So I do this. So you don't have to go through those crazy experiences of loss and heartbreak and tragedy and losing everything to actually get your psychology and your mind to change. I mean, most coaches, they do, they hold you accountable.
And they'll have you do things their way. But if you have underlying meanings and beliefs that conflict with what they say, there's always gonna be this push and pull. Your results will not be consistent. And I know one of my coaches in the past. Triggered me to respond like I did with my mom. Like she was just an authority figure as a woman.
And so what I did as a result of that, the meaning I had to make of how to deal with a. Authority figure who's a woman, is that I need to bend to whatever she says instead of doing what's right for me. And that was the meaning I had. And so when she would not like something or be a little flustered about something I was doing, then I would just bend to what I thought she thought. I should do, and that caused me to go in the wrong direction for me.
It was the right direction for maybe somebody else but the wrong direction for me for over a year. And even with all my training and experience, it took me a really long time to see what was really going on. So most coaches, they're not equipped to help you see and get rid of those really deep patterns, even the ones who work on mindset.
Because even if they see it and you have to see it before you can get rid of it, even if they see it, they don't know how to get your brain to have that shift to break the association. And when you do that, you have to also neutralize whatever it was that created the old ways of thinking. And that's a big thing that a lot of coaches just don't have the training and the skills to do. But once you do that. You'll be free whether you do it on your own or you work with somebody.
I've worked with some great coaches who've helped me see some of my patterns. They gave me that door to walk through, but it always came down to the internal work that I did. On myself, the same kind of work I do with my clients, that set me free. So if you are feeling like you have some of those patterns, you need to work with a person who can help you do the deeper inner work to break those associations.
If you're struggling in your business and you've been at it for a while, you've tried a handful of different strategies and it's not working, it's probably safe to say that your problem is less about strategy and more about the psychology. And people will spend years chasing strategies instead of working on the real problem. So you want to find someone who can help you.
I don't care if it's me, just find somebody who can help you get through this deeper stuff so that you won't have to figure out on your own without having to have a major catastrophe like losing everything. Now you can get on my mailing list so you can understand more about how's this psychology affects your business. You can do that by getting my free gift that's at be the wolf gift.com. Open up your browsers, do it now. Be the wolf gift.com.
It'll give you access to the three secrets the business gurus never talk about. So you'll get that instantly. And then you'll also have instant access to another video that teaches you about your success zone, which is really. The core of a lot of this psychology stuff. So grab that at be the wolf gift.com. And remember everybody, when you unleash the power of you, humanity evolves. We'll see you next time on Be The Wolf. Bye everyone.