S6E6 Mastermind Launch! BONUS: How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs and Self Sabotage...

You can book a call with me and we can chat about where you're coming from and what you're looking to get from it. There's a couple spots left for that if you wanna snag those. But we talked about last week, it gave you a sneak peek into defining deep success. And we talked about that there actually are four layers to success. So you have that appearance and the appearance doesn't equal success.

There's a phenomenal quote by Robin Sharma the author of the Man who sold his Ferrari excellent book I recommend it, but he says, "No matter how beautiful your outer world looks it's what's on the inside that is important. And if your inner world is messy and unhealthy, nothing that you get on the outside will ever make you happy. No matter how much we collect nothing, nothing can ever make up for any incompleteness we feel within ourselves." So powerful.

And that's what I talk about with those layers of success. We have that appearance of success. And it can look beautiful and it can look perfect. But when we start to unwrap it, we actually have, do I feel like a success? I might look like it, but do I feel like it? And do I feel like it in those different areas of our life, so physically and spiritually, mentally, emotionally, relationally, financially, do I feel like a success? And underneath that we have those stories.

We have the narratives, we have all the identities and stuff that we've created for ourselves that directly affect how we feel. And then below that we have developing the presence and awareness to actually realize and take advantage and be present with every moment that we are given as a very fundamental deep layer of what I would call success. And what has just been fascinating to me for a very long time is looking at success. We have the traditional definition of success and we have happiness.

And can we get both is the question. Can we achieve the success that we want on one hand? And what does that look like? And how can we intentionally define that? But can we also be happy? Can we develop a life that we live very fulfilled and very happily and full of purpose on the other hand? And that's where and I gave you a little preview of Shirzad Chamine's work with positive intelligence.

So for this episode, I'm gonna dive into that a little bit more, and again, give you a sneak peek of some of what we cover in the mastermind. So this is how we overcome our limiting beliefs and our self sabotage. So we've all been there. We've had a dream, we've had a goal that we wanted to do. And then we all kind of sabotage ourselves differently, but you know, we really wanna achieve it.

And then when it gets to that point where we take action or we don't, somehow we talk ourselves out of it or we navigate around it whatever that looks like for us, somehow we sabotage ourselves. So I'm gonna talk about all the research around how we actually overcome these limiting beliefs and how we train to do things differently.

So again, this is incredible seminal work developed by Shirzad Chamine and you can read about it in his book, Positive Intelligence why 20% of teams and people succeed, and 80% don't. Phenomenal book, I would again, highly recommend it. So what he did is he started to look at this question. He was actually the CEO of coach training Institute. So the largest Institute for coaching in the world.

He's been a CEO multiple times of different businesses, but he began by asking the question why as coaches, and just when we're looking at interventions in general in life, why do so few people actually maintain the results from whatever that intervention was? And when he started diving into the research, he actually found that only one in 5% of people, and this applies to teams as well, and companies only one in five.

When they do an intervention, whether that's for a performance to improve in whatever arena, whether that's an intervention to try to be happier. Only one, one in five or 20% we have Pareto's law, the 80, 20 principle, only 20% of the people or companies or teams end up actually having a consistent sustained increase in performance or happiness. And he's like, why is this?

So he started to look at all the research in positive intelligence, research in neuroscience, and behavioral psychology, the peak performance side of things. And he was like, why does this happen? Why do we maybe see initial results, but then those results aren't maintained over the long period of time. So he did a factor analysis on this.

And what that basically means is taking all of the research thousands of studies and looking at it and going can we simplify this down to the factors that actually contribute to all of these different things? Are there common threads? Other people call it first principles basically. So are there first principles that affect every other area, whether it's emotional intelligence, whether it's, you know, performance for teams and corporations, are there things that affect every one of those areas.

And the example is essentially thousands of colors that we have, all the colors that we can see on our visible spectrum, they come from three different colors, so red, yellow, and blue. So that's a factor analysis on every single color. It comes down to these three things and just like that, he discover there's actually three core mental muscles.

And the terminology use is very specific with that because these are things we can develop and train, but there's three things that are responsible for all the rest of the peak performance and happiness. And it comes down to our ability to be aware of our saboteurs, the things that sabotage us. And again, we'll get into more depth on what those are. I gave you just a glimpse on the last episode. So our ability to be able to recognize those, to intercept them.

And these are habitual unconscious patterns that we have that have developed through our past and through childhood. Then the ability to command ourselves to do a different response. And we have those saboteurs. Then we have our Sage responses, which is the foundation of emotional intelligence, it actually operates in a different part of the brain. And we'll talk about that as well, but can we become aware of our saboteur?

Command ourselves to choose, to operate out of a different motivation, that lights up the different circuitry in our brain. That's actually associated with creativity and empathy and curiosity. And a lot of those form the foundation, again for the work in resilience, the work done in emotional intelligence, that kind of thing. So through all of this research that he did, he developed, what's called positive intelligence.

So we have your IQ, you know, which is your ability to be able to understand things and recite facts, that kind of thing. Then there's all the work done in emotional intelligence. So you EQ and he developed what's called positive intelligence or your PQ.

Essentially what positive intelligence is at a very simple level is basically we have different regions of our brain and what percentage of our day, do we spend with our brain actually helping us and supporting us and encouraging us versus detracting versus sabotaging us. And that's fundamentally what positive intelligence is. What percentage of your day is your brain your friend versus being your enemy?

And he found in all the research and analysis that he's done that 75% is a critical tipping point and this is just a percentage that represents your day. So if 75% of your day or higher you spend with your brain encouraging you, supporting you, helping you, then that's typically equated with the peak performance is also equated with happiness as well, below 75% and 80% of people and teams again, fall below 75%, this critical tipping point.

That means that below 75% of your day is spent with your brain sabotaging yourself. Okay. So that's the positive intelligence definition. What mental fitness is similar, but slightly different. Basically it is your capacity to respond to life's challenges with positive, rather than a negative mindset. So with a positive mindset, rather than a negative mindset. Mental fitness is training to be able to operate from a higher level of positive intelligence. And the impact of that is on performance.

It's on peace of mind and wellness and healthy relationships as well. And the research he has done, he has personally coached Shirzad that has personally coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams from fortune 100 companies, fortune 500 companies, he's a professor at Stanford, he's coach world class athletes, and then the participants in his programs and the research stuff that he's done is over 500,000 participants from 50 different countries. Entrepreneurs, leaders all over the world.

So just incredible. When you do analysis of over 200 scientific studies, collectively testing over 275,000 people, it showed that higher levels of positive intelligence is correlated with higher salary, greater success in areas of work. Marriage health, sociability, friendship, and creativity. And when they did a comparison of 60 different teams, they showed that the team's positive intelligence was the greatest predictor of its achievement.

So phenomenal in terms of its ability to be correlated with achievement, but then also the other areas of life too. So it's like that holy grail, where you can achieve success and achieve happiness at the same time. So let's dive into what this actually looks like. And again, can't go into it too much in detail, and we'll cover a lot more of this in the mastermind. Cuz. It's a lot, right?

It's an incredible amount of research that he has done an amount of practical analysis that he has done in coaching and training with tons and other people, But getting into it, we have those different saboteurs and I mentioned them yesterday. So we have the main one. And this is the one that everybody has, and this is the big one, right? All the other ones accomplice saboteurs to this one. And this is your judge.

And especially as entrepreneurs, we are all very familiar with this character in our brain. So the judge there's three different ways that the judge judges typically. So it judges yourself. We're very familiar with that one. This is where the not enoughness comes in. Always saying you're not enough. You're not enough. It judges other people. So we look at them and saying, they're not enough. They're not performing well as they should be or whatever we wanna say.

And then we judge our circumstances and we say, oh, the circumstances, you know, this affected that. And you know, we're judging the circumstances for what ended up happening. And this is the big one to start to unravel. And remember there's those three core muscles. So first we have to recognize when these saboteurs are speaking to us. So when we're judging ourselves, other people, the circumstances, can we intercept that and I'll give you some tools to be able to do that.

And then can we actually operate out of a different motivation, a different even neural pathways in our brain. So that's the big one. And then you have the other saboteurs are things like the controller, right?

So this is, we always have to control every little bit of our life and all of these, again, I can't go too much depth on it, but they have different motivations, they have different styles as well, different things that they're looking for, whether it's independence, whether it's acceptance from other people, whether it's safety and security. There's different ways that we use that have been triggered in our past.

Basically created these to keep ourselves safe when we are kids for whatever reason, whatever environment we were in, whatever, you know, our parents, did or didn't do for us. We use these saboteurs to keep our safe and they function really, they well for us at that period of time to get our needs met, but eventually we have to go, this is no longer serving us.

And they're of sneaky, cuz all of 'em have a little liar, a little deception where they say, I can get you this acceptance, but it's actually at a cost to our happiness or our performance in some way. So that's where the saboteur comes in. So control. Wanna control every little thing. The hyper achiever, this is where a lot of entrepreneurs have this one. This is a big one for myself as well.

It's that constant never feeling enough because we're striving for some sort of acceptance and that can be an acceptance of ourselves with ourselves actually accepting ourselves as we are, again, you know, tying in with that judge, but then it can be an acceptance from other people as well. Then we have the restless. So this has a lot to do with safety, where we have to constantly be in action. We're constantly trying and it ties in with the controller as well. We're constantly fidgeting.

We're constantly thinking about what we need to do. These saboteurs aren't quite cut and dried, one doesn't just operate by itself. They tie in together. So constantly just trying to create safety in our life. And this is similar to another one, which is the hypervigilant, always looking out for those threats. We're always going, what could go wrong and how can I plan for it? And we never feel safe. Then you have something like the pleaser.

Which is, we are always trying to please other people we have to again, get acceptance from other people. So everything we do is we need to make sure we're getting this acceptance from other people and we're pleasing them. Then you have this stickler, which is just everything has to be perfect. It's another way that we use to control our life. And other people. So we do this for ourselves the same with the judge.

So we'll be a super stickler with our life, but then oftentimes, especially in entrepreneurs, we can be a stickler with the people we're leading. So it has to be perfect. You know, maybe they did a good job, but it wasn't a great job. And then other ways that we can avoid things or sabotage yourself is actually the avoider. So this is where we have a big problem and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And we just, you know, like the ostrich, we just stuff our head in the sand and avoid it.

Then you have the victim and this has a lot to do with looking at the circumstances and going, wow, there, there was nothing that I could have done and I'm a victim and this person did this, or this situation affected me in this. And then the last one is hyper rational. So being rational is good. Being hyper rational. Again, we all have that slight kind of deception where these things say, Hey, I'm trying to keep you safe by logically thinking through everything.

But if we're too rational, we miss out on the emotions of the people around us and how that it can affect you know, our team's decisions, how that it can affect our company, how that's even important avenue to be able to explore in ourselves. And we miss out on that. So all of these things, we need to be able to again, recognize them.

choose, you know, arrest them and choose a different pathway that reflects the research around the positive intelligence and emotional intelligence and what those kind of constitute. So these saboteurs, again, they activate different parts of our brain. So the saboteurs typically. Activate our brain stem our limbic system. This is known what's called our lizard brain.

So it's the very instinctual it has to do with our amygdala, which is where, our very primal fears, anger, all of that stuff is operates out of this part of our brain and there's different parts of the left brain that this will activate as well. And this is in contrast with what he calls the Sage powers. And this is things like the ability to be able to explore situations. So this is a lot to do with curiosity. This is empathy with both ourselves and with other people.

This is also, you know, your innovate out of a situation. So instead of just thinking in one way, this is your ability to be able to step back, to view the big picture, to find a different situation, to see where the gift and the opportunity is in the situation. One of these sage powers is the ability to take conscious clear, focused action. So action that isn't muddied and detracted by from the saboteurs. This is our ability to be able to analyze the situation.

Look at all the information, gather the information from ourselves, from other people, whatever we need to do and take the best course of action and implement it. So all of these Sage powers are associated with our middle prefrontal cortex and a lot of the empathy circuitry of the brain, parts of the right brain, which are typically associated more with creativity, innovation, curiosity, things like that.

And then what's so incredible about this is like I said it's that holy grail the saboteurs motivate you through negative emotions. So this is emotions like fear, like stress, anger, feeling guilty, feeling shameful, feeling insecure. So all of those things are the motivations. And again, as entrepreneurs and just people in general, but as entrepreneurs, we are very familiar with actually leveraging those fears, anger, guilt, you know, shame, whatever we feel to perform.

But the fascinating thing, and again, you just ask different questions. I love just what if we asked different questions? Could we create a life that feels differently? And the research backs us up. So it shows on the Sage part of your brain. These motivates you through positive emotions, all the things that we mentioned. So curiosity, creativity, passion, purpose. This is all associated with that side of your brain. So the question is again, and the, again, the research backs this up.

Can you operate at higher than 75% of your time and be incredibly motivated still and accomplish a ton and perform at a high level, but be happy and fulfilled and passionate at the same time. And that's what I love about this framework is yes, you absolutely can. So the saboteurs, they might generate success. But they don't generate happiness. And the Sage has been shown to generate your highest levels of success and sustained happiness, which is what we're all looking for.

That's what we're trying to strive. Even if we might not know it or we've covered over it and we pretend we're not. The question that inevitably comes up is, are negative emotions good for you? And the follow up question to put this in perspective is pain good for you? You have to ask what function does pain serve for you? So if you put your hand on a hot stove pain, lets you know, this is really bad, you are hurting yourself. This is detrimental.

This is unhealthy to you in some way you need to pull your hand back. So pain is an incredible network that our body has to actually let us know something is going wrong and we need to change it. And so often in the Western world, especially we have a headache or we have these different symptoms that our body's telling us and we try to mask that we basically just masked the pain. But the pain can be serving as a signal to go something's wrong.

We need to change something about what we're doing, and this is the same with negative emotions. So negative emotions, they are helpful for a very brief period of time as an alert signal. So anger, the fear, the frustration, the stress, you know, the guilt, the shame, those things. Let us know that there is something going wrong. There's something at a deeper level that we're missing.

But the problem is if we stay in those negative emotions, that's where it affects our ability to see clearly to respond with empathy and curiosity and those different Sage powers like we talked about. So sustained negative emotions is basically what sabotages us. And this is what we can look at. So essentially the framework and this it's simple, which is again, phenomenal, cuz we don't need things that are more complicated and more crazy in our life right now.

So if you are feeling a negative emotion of any type, stop, recognize the saboteur that's around that and you can even just label it. Like I feel scared. Angry, you know, frustrated, stressed, guilty, whatever. The noticing and naming is a powerful tool in any therapy, being able to notice and then name what you're feeling is awesome. So first step you notice you're in negative emotion. You recognize it. Then you do what he classifies as a PQ rep. So positive intelligence rep.

And it can be short as 10 seconds. What this does is this gets you out of your brain, and the emotions and the, how they just go off on their rampage and get lost in your head. And it actually brings you back into the present moment. It brings you back into your body. There's different ways to do this. He has an incredible system and app that he's developed for this. And you actually get access to that as a part of the 12 week mastermind.

And we'll go through that in a deeper level, but if I'm gonna simplify this is anything that you can do to bring yourself back into the present moment and into the body. So at the elite special force level, they do, what's called a box breathing. So it's breathing in for six seconds. Holding it for six seconds breathing out for six seconds and then holding that exhale for six seconds as well.

And this is literally, at the elite, most dangerous level, this is what they do to step back from the fear, the uncertainty, the unpredictability of these situations to reset into their body and to actually deliberately control their physiological response. Because if you can't do that then you can't think. If your heart rate's above 170, you just lose the ability to think with the prefrontal cortex basically.

So when we have that fight or flight response, all of our blood is directed from our brain. Not all of it, but it's directed towards our muscles so that we can either fight or run away essentially. Again, oversimplification, but that's what it looks like. So what we need to do is we need to get it back into being able to think about this situation accurately and correct. And so that's one method to do it. Another thing is just a mind body scan.

So it's super powerful to actually be able to tie what you're thinking, what you're feeling emotionally and what you're feeling physically. And not very many people can do this. And it's as simple as just starting at the top of your head and scanning down your body and going, what am I feeling physically? You know, maybe my forehead's all clenched together. And my jaws clenched and my shoulders are tight.

You know, my shoulders are pulled up towards my ears or my chest is tight or what whatever that is, you scan your way down and you go, what am I feeling physically? Then you associate, oh wow. I'm actually feeling really stressed or maybe I'm angry and all of those things have different physiologies to 'em and all of these saboteurs actually have different physiologies to 'em as well.

And this is what elite performers do really well is they have the ability to change their state based on what tools and resources they need to bring to the situation. And now once that situation's gone, they also have the ability to shut down and not keep that highly activated state not keep that going on longer than what the situation requires. So being able to do that scan and look at what am I feeling physically, what am I feeling emotionally? And what am I thinking?

And tie those together is incredibly powerful to be able to do, or just focusing on your breath and especially a longer exhale cuz the longer exhale it activates what's called your parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated more with rest relaxation, with calm so that you can appropriately handle the situation without being overactivated. So that's a very simplistic way to classify, you know, these 10, second PQ reps where you recognize the negative emotion.

Maybe you label it, maybe you recognize the saboteur. You're like, oh, I am judging myself. So you recognize that you come back into your body. This could be even visually, like you see what's around you, you see what you're feeling, things like that. So that's that self command and then you choose. the different response. How can I choose a different response? How can I innovate? How can I explore this situation? How can I take action to remedy the situation?

And then again, as I mentioned, in the last episode, we can get into those levels of situational awareness, the drama, stepping back from that, looking at the situation, but then that ability to choose who you want to be in that situation, who you wanna show app as. This is incredibly powerful to be able to do, if you have trained yourself, to always be able to choose who you wanna show up in the situation as.

And then part of that Sage perspective is to look at every outcome and circumstance and it can be turned into a gift and opportunity. And that's difficult, especially with some of those crazy situations, the very traumatic ones, but. when we really believe that even if it might take a longer period of time, that is what essentially we can do. So the operating system fundamentally is, if you feel yourself in a negative emotion, you stop. You recognize the saboteurs, do some of those PQ reps.

So come back into your body, come back into being able to think. And then look at where is the gift? Where is the opportunity? Generate that by looking at empathy for yourself, for other people, the curiosity, the creativity, the calm, clear action. So the question becomes is it really possible in that moment to shift from sabotaging yourself to having that different Sage response even when things are really tough?

And the answer is yes, but the speed, and the depth of which the shift happens depends on how much you've trained. So your mental muscle strength. So the more you train this, the quicker, you can notice it, the quicker you can shift to the state to what you want to be and approach it from the perspective that you want to have it. And so all of that change takes practice And lasting positive change really 20% of that is the insight. We can get these cool insights and we're like, that's amazing.

It's gonna change my life. But really the 80% comes from training that insight and baking it into our life. So again, this is what we cover in the 12 week mastermind. And we actually have access to the same app that Shirzad developed that he's used with fortune 100 CEOs and their executive teams and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. And we have access to that app as a part of the elite mindset training for entrepreneurs. Again, it launches this week.

We still have couple spots open if you are interested. And we dive into what we talked about last week really defining deep success. We explore the fundamental human needs. That a lot of times underpin the behaviors that we making that we might not even be aware of. And we look at how we can meet those fundamental needs in more positive ways. We look at the fear inoculation. I mentioned this briefly how can we actually recognize fear and inoculate ourselves to it in a very systematic.

We incorporate the positive intelligence program that's developed by Shirzad Chamine. We look at goal setting frameworks habit formation frameworks, and then how we can use these different frameworks and these different principles to optimize every area. So optimizing our health, optimizing our relationships, optimizing our mental health. So again, if you're interested in that you can go to success engineering.org, and you can just click on the mastermind application there on the homepage.

Get a call with me. I'd love to talk with you and hear what you're looking at. Even if you don't end up doing that. Again, I wanted to give you a little bit of sneak peek of what is entailed in that mastermind, but also give you encouragement so that you can achieve an incredible level of success, but you can actually be happy as well. And again, it seems like that holy grail, but that's what we're looking for can I perform at a elite level, and still live an incredible happy, fulfilled life.

So take those tools. I hope you implement them. Start to recognize those saboteurs that you have in your life. Start to come back into the moment, come back into your body and then choose who you wanna be, who you want to show up in the moment as change your state. The more you do that, the more repetition you have around that. The quicker, the easier it'll be and the easier it'll become for you to actually choose what your life is and how you want to feel as you go about your day.

So hope you enjoy that tool. I know I do. It has made such a difference in my own personal life as well. So till next week, keep engineering your success.