Jen Casey (JC): Early in my entrepreneur career, I remember thinking that I was CURSED with not being confident and I truly believed that it was something that you either had or you didn’t have. I remember listening to Chalene Johnson and she was like, “Confidence is a habit!” I was like, “What?? I can build this?” I can laugh about it now, but it was a revolutionary thought for me at the time.

Shannon Irvine (SI): When we don’t take our thinking off of autopilot and we’re just letting thoughts happen, we don’t realize what we’re actually doing. You tell yourself, “I want this thing. I want this business. I want this success.” But you’re also telling yourself, “I don’t know what it takes. I don’t know what people will think.” If I could pull back your brain and show you what’s going on, your conscious thinking mind, the one we’re talking with right now, is in complete and 100 percent control. You really have everything you need within you to create whatever you want right now.

It’s not outside of you, but we tell ourselves over and over and over again, “I don’t know. I don’t have what it takes. I’m just not confident.” What we tell ourselves actually becomes programmed. It’s like your subconscious mind’s job is just to listen to what you’re telling it and say, “OK, that’s what you believe, great! I will automate that.”

Your subconscious mind automates it because it wants efficiency. That’s how we’re designed. Once it automates it, it’s like a 10 lane freeway that you cannot get on or off.

We can see on scans that 80 to 90 percent of your daily actions and decisions are actually coming from that subconscious, preprogrammed place. So we’re trying to get to another place, but 80 to 90 percent of our actions are working around those limiting stories that are  programmed and most people are just unaware of it. They’re just like, “That’s just me. That’s my identity.”

JC: That is huge and I think that can give everyone a lot of permission to give themselves a whole heck of a lot more grace. 80 to 90 percent! I know Joe Dispenza says 91 or 93 percent of the thoughts that you thought yesterday are the same ones you’re thinking today, which is exactly right. So when we are looking to break the pattern and rewire a new belief, a new thought, a new habit, what is the process for that?

SI: Yeah, I love this question. So we need to work on removing those limiting stories because you want the foot off the break. It’s a step by step process and it’s not difficult, it just takes practice. If you really want to get to that place, you need to practice that on a daily basis.

That’s where it’s super exciting because any habit and end result that you want to end up at, you can prime into your brain in the same way that you unknowingly primed those limiting stories into your subconscious. It’s a matter of reverse engineering what habit you want or what end result you want and breaking down the thought processes, the actions, and the decisions into daily steps, and then priming your brain and allowing it to have the information. 

We’ve seen, through research, that your brain doesn’t know the difference between experiencing something and rehearsing it with texture and emotion viscerally over and over and over again. It doesn’t know the difference. I had an opportunity to work with an athlete swimmer. I can’t say his name, but he was a high level swimmer and he wanted to add this specific type of stoke, in addition to the stroke he already had, and he agreed to brain prime with us in our research lab. Coaches came in and we did a brain scan and a muscle conductivity test. It was a small twitch muscle, so it needed to grow in order for that stroke to actually be able to happen. Next, we went through the brain priming. In his mind, he got in the pool, felt the water, did the stroke over and over and over again, but he was inside of our lab with his coach. He did that for a certain amount of time, about 62 days, and never was in the pool once. We scanned him at the end and his brain scans showed that the information that he had learned was at the center of the brain that we know is knowledge that’s learned.

The muscle conductivity test just blew our minds: 98 percent muscle growth! Never got in the pool. Eventually, he did get in the pool and won some amazing medals and he used that stroke. We’ve seen this kind of research over and over again and for an entrepreneur, that should just get you so jazzed up because you have that exact thing going on for you. You can truly step into that version of yourself now and give your brain the picture that you want for it to then believe and automate. So that’s the brain training that I do in kind of phase two, and then we go back and forth because the reality is, new level, new devil.

JC: I’m curious. Is brain priming different than typical teachings of visualization?

SI: That’s a great question because thoughts are energy, right? We know that thoughts are energy and it’s an energetic exchange. It’s not just visualization because visualization can be kind of 2D or sometimes 3D if somebody very practiced at it, but it’s just seeing it. It’s just one sense.

You want to think of brain priming as bringing in all the senses. The texture of the air, what you would hear… every piece of it is brain priming.

There’s also the sense of brain priming of the things that you want to believe. I’ll take people through an audio priming at the same time they see themselves at that end point. If you can get present in that end result space over and over again, as a practice in the morning right and before you go to bed, those are the times that the subconscious mind gets really open to that,  just give as much texture as you can. So, you’re in that room and you’ve got the success and you’re hearing this audio retraining that you ARE enough and you have what it takes. It’s a practice, but it is by far the most exciting thing because you’ll start small with one thing and all of a sudden it just opens it wide up and then it becomes, “What else could I do?” It gets pretty exciting for those of us who really want to take things to the next level.

JC: And how simple to be able to just close your eyes and create this experience for yourself without having to go and do the 10-mile run or whatever it may be. I would much rather just intensely visualize that and do some brain priming versus having to go through that experience. When somebody is doing the brain priming, what are the differences between the group of people who are doing the brain priming and the group of people who are actually doing the physical activity?

SI: We’ve seen this over and over again where the place of the brain from both groups, the learned activity, is in the exact same spot in both groups. The research has shown that the people who prime actually go, like in this piano example, actually play the scales better than the group who actually practiced the scales. That’s just the power that’s available to you and it’s been with you all this time and it’s just the top 3 to 4 percent that tap into it. But once you do, it’s pretty exciting.

There’s there’s a really cool other thing, which I think is like the superpower of our brain, which can work against you or for you. There’s a Reticular Activating System that only allows you to filter into your brain what your subconscious believes to be true, which is a problem if you’ve got a lot of self limiting beliefs. That’s why things aren’t coming to you and it’s difficult. It’s because there’s so much stimulus coming in that that’s its job, otherwise we would overload. Once that gets rewired and once you really start to put in the results that you want and it gets to that automated stage, then that’s why we hear people like Jen Casey and James Wedmore and all these people say, “Oh just kind of comes easily to me!” It’s because your brain is actually filtering in stuff. It was always there. You just couldn’t see it because you didn’t actually believe it.

JC: Yes, it is always available to you! I talk about this in relation to money quite often with people who say, “Oh, well, I can’t afford to invest in my business in this capacity because I don’t have the money or money’s hard to come by.” Almost the way that you would put on 3D glasses, where you have blue blockers or red blockers. Of course, if you have those 3D glasses on you could take them off, but we can’t take our beliefs off unless we make an intentional decision to change them and do the work. We’re basically seeing the world through this filtered lens, and what starts to happen when when that occurs?

SI: If you’re looking at your results that you have right now, that is actually a direct reflection of your thoughts. The thoughts create the emotions, not the other way around, which is what 90 percent of people think. No, you had a thought and then you had the emotion and then you had an action.

The thought always comes first, but those thoughts and emotions combine to become a belief.

I would challenge anybody that says they ‘can’t afford’, because ‘can’t afford’ is a scarcity mentality and it’s evidence of where you currently are. If you want to have abundance and you want to have a flow of money that you can easily impact more people with, you’ve got to unkink that hose. It’s like you’ve kinked the hose and there’s no water flowing out and you’re going, “Why isn’t the water flowing out?” It’s because the thinking is scarce and so your emotion is scarce and that belief then is ‘I can’t afford it’ and so you’re going to manifest more of not affording things because that is your belief. But if you unkink the hose and say, “You know what? There’s more than enough. There’s an abundance.”

So many people think it’s this finite pot of money, and if I take some money out and Jen takes some money out, then there’s less for everybody else. That just plain is not true. There are more millionaires today than there ever have been. So if that were the case, then that theory doesn’t work because the pot would have exploded!

JC: Money is a bunch of ones and zeros on a computer. We literally print more money every single day, so the idea that it’s finite is just not true.

SI: The reality is, we all can point to a moment in time where we didn’t have to work hard for money to come to us, whether your aunts decided to send you a check for your birthday or you won the lottery, whatever the case, there’s always those moments that justify that belief. If there’s evidence to the contrary, become the creator of your thoughts and really take ownership of that.

If you want to get to the place of abundance, abundance says ‘there’s more than enough to go around’. If I invest in this coaching, that’s going to allow me to have more abundance in the future versus ‘I can’t afford it right now.’ So they continue doing the same actions that are going to create not affording it next week and not afford it the week after that. It’s interesting because it seems money and those limiting stories are the two places where we all get weird about it. We don’t want to uncover those stories because we really see them as true, but they’re not true. Questioning what you believe about it really does break open those stories so that you can have the story you want, instead of the story you’ve been fed.

JC: It’s so true and we, as a society, agreed upon that being true, but that’s a belief. If you can accept that ‘the sky is blue’ is a belief, that will hopefully give you an entry point to start challenging some of the other things that you have going on. So I’m curious, you work with some of the most successful people in the world, what are their beliefs around money?

SI: I love it. This is something that I love talking about. Their thoughts aren’t even on money, to be honest with you. Their thoughts are on either impact or breakthroughs or next-level type of creation. Their minds are on putting value out into the world. Now, of course, there are greedy people in the world and you can find evidence to the opposite of that. Those just aren’t people I work with, so I don’t know how they think, but the people that I work with really do think, “What’s next? How can I serve? How can I help? How can I give value?”

They just have a knowing that it will come back to them like it’s a cycle. They don’t see it as that kind of exchange mentality, which 98 percent of us grew up under, and so therefore is a false belief appearing real. The reality is, if they make a monetary mistake or they lose money, they don’t see it as a failure. They don’t they just go, “Oh, well that didn’t work. Let me learn something from it and then apply that.” Then they make more money because they are very action-oriented and driven from a place of putting value and service out into the world. They don’t ever sit there and go, “OK, I’m going to put this out to the world so it will come back to me.” That doesn’t work. They released it. Their hands are off of it!

JC: So, SO good. You said there were 4 steps to what you teach and we kind of went a little bit through it. We’ve got the stories and we’re rewiring them. What does somebody do after that? Like you were saying, the most successful people get into that place of knowing and trusting and almost surrendering that things are going to come back to them. So in the next steps of the process, does that sink in a little bit more?

SI: Yeah, it does! The four step process is more around the Mind Matrix and removing those limiting beliefs. That process, in and of itself, is a great process to learn. I always tell my clients it’s like an onion layer. The basic players are on top and those are the hard ones to get off and end.

Typically, our limiting stories aren’t 10 or 20 stories, it’s usually like you’re only one story away from that breakthrough. Once we are able to rework and rewire that story, then you’re going to get to the next level.

Our mutual mentor, James Wedmore, always says, “Next level, next devil.” It’s so true because  there will be another limiting thought. At that point, you recognize it really quick, and because you have the process, you just stop what you’re doing, go through that, and then you get rid of it before it ever has a chance to get wired back into the subconscious. That’s why you see successful people keep leveling up because they trust that they do the work and it gets rid of it.

Priming the brain is really where the magic happens and making that a process a practice that  you really look forward to. As you’re priming and changing the way you think about things, you’ll eventually have success in an area that you’ve been priming around. Then you get to, “OK, what’s next?” That becomes the future journey as you’re strengthening your ability to be the creator of your thoughts, and through those thoughts, creating the identity of who you really wants to be, that very best version of yourself. There are some that come in and just try to get rid of the limiting beliefs, but never really push toward the brain priming and it’s a shame because it’s 50 percent of it. It’s all a matter of what we are thinking before the emotions and getting in that space between and allowing yourself to choose the thought that you want. It’s a practice that becomes really fulfilling.

JC: It’s some of the most powerful stuff. Earlier in my business coaching, I was giving people all this great strategy and then looking at why some people in this program are crushing it and hitting five figure months, the middle range of people that are getting their first couple clients, and then some people weren’t even opening the program, and it was like, “What’s going on??” I knew that I wasn’t serving at my highest level because even though that’s not what the promise of the program was, something just doesn’t feel in alignment because I’m not really helping people. I’m helping the few who are wired for success, but not these other people.

When you’re helping someone create new neural pathways, what are some of the first things that you would have them do? Do you recommend somebody pick one new habit or one new belief to work on for 21 day, or do you say, “You know, you can just change everything overnight if you want.”

SI: Yeah, it’s stacking and layering that seems to be a little bit more successful, but at the same time, I always want my clients to be able to see themselves and feel themselves and experience themselves at the end of that big goal. If not, then you’re not giving your brain a ‘why’ and you’re not giving it a picture to move toward, so I always encourage to prime that habit. That’s why we go through the process of reverse engineering.

It’s kind of how you set up your business, right? You go, “Here’s my 10 year plan and here’s my five year plan. Now I’m going to break it down into my 90 day and my 12 week plan.” Well, that’s how the brain works! Keep that 30,000 foot view and prime that into your brain because it needs to become a familiar emotion and feeling for you to be a 7 figure entrepreneur, and you’ll get there so much faster if you’re seeing that every day. Then, you allow your mind to shift over and focus on the habit or the steps that are going to take you right to that.

With my clients, when we move from the mindset toward the business, that’s when we start really going into how to use your brain to be productive and how to use your body to break down walls. The reality is, if you start to truly tap into that and just do two to three things every day that you’ve predefined as what’s going to get you to that goal, your brain LOVES that and it produces all these neural chemicals that help you get even more. It is compounding interest. It’s a beautiful system, but what we mostly do is make a ten mile long to do list and then wonder why we don’t feel successful at the end of the day and want to do Netflix the next day. Well, you’re not working with your brain. Your brain needs two to three things and you need to get up and celebrate it somehow. That gives you this beautiful dopamine cocktail that you don’t need to go out and get other ways! Your brain just starts to become convinced that, “Oh, I see the steps, so if I can see the steps, then I can do.”

JC: I think what’s so powerful about this is that so many entrepreneurs don’t define clearly what success actually is for them., and then they get ‘there’ and look around and feel like this isn’t what they thought it was going to be. So you know, that’s just an added bonus to all of this work. Feel good all the time, have a clear path, and know what your vision actually looks like. At this point, with all of this information, there’s really no reason not to take action on this.

SI: But what some people might do is say, “Oh, well, it just sounds hard.” That’s a story of course, so I’m going to blow your mind with this thing. This is how powerful brain priming is. I did a brain priming audio that you just listen to. It’s completely passive, except to use five minutes when you wake up and five minutes when you go to bed. Something to get your baby toe in the water. Anybody can listen to five minutes. It’s all around the majority of the stories that a lot of entrepreneurs hold and keep, and so it’s about reversing those and starting to build the other neural networks.

I just got an email the other day from somebody who I don’t even work with, she’s not in any my programs, but all she did was get the free brain priming audio and listened to it very consistently. She said, “You know what, I was very skeptical, but what I was doing wasn’t working so I thought what the heck.” She started listening to it and said she was making about 11,000 dollars a year on her business. She said the next month, all of a sudden, she made 40,000 thousand. Three months later, she made 190,000 and she’s on track to have a seven figure businesses this year! That’s the power of it right there and it’s not complicated. It’s just, can you commit to becoming the creator of your thoughts?

Listen to what you’re saying and choose if it serves you or not. If you can build legos, you can prime your brain.

JC: I’m obsessed with all of this! So many juicy things. I would love for you to share any last quick nuggets of wisdom that you feel would be powerful for people moving forward.

SI: If you didn’t hear anything, I really want you take away this: I want you to stop looking outside of yourself. I want you to understand that you were beautifully created with everything that you need to step into the biggest and boldest and brightest future you could even imagine, and then some!

There are people waiting right now for you to step into your vision and your mission, and you’re holding back because of things like these stories. You didn’t know that you could do anything with them, so I really want to challenge you because there’s people waiting for you. This is what I love about Jen, we’re like sisters from another Mr. and we teach similar things, but there’s no such thing as competition! I adore her. She’s going to be on my podcast as soon as we’re done here. The reality of that is, there’s only one you and only you are holding you back at this point. You have everything it takes, but you need to be able to become the creator of your thoughts and do the work around shifting the thinking that will get you to the next place.

JC: BOOM! I know quite a few people who are listening to this who needed that reminder, so thank you for that. Where can people go to learn more about you?

SI: All of the socials are @drshannonirvine, so you can get me there all across. You can jump on the website, which is www.drshannonirvine.com. You can grab the brain priming at drshannonirvine.com/mindyourbusiness.

JC: Thank you so much for being here! Guys, go follow, go check out that stuff, go grab that brain priming, and start putting it into practice. If you love this episode, because I already know that you do, be sure to tag us on Instagram (@heyjencasey and @drshannonirvine) and take a screenshot of the show! We want to have a conversation with you guys about your biggest takeaways from this episode. I can’t wait to chat with you guys and we’ll talk to you soon!