In this episode of the Invest Like A Billionaire podcast, join host Ben Fraser as he welcomes Dr. Shannon Irvine, a distinguished expert with a PhD in neuro psychology, Business and Mindset High Performance Coach of Epic Success, and host of Epic Success Podcast, to explore the captivating world of brain science and its impact on investing and business success. Dr. Irvine’s expertise in unraveling the intricacies of limiting beliefs and harnessing the power of neuroscience offers listeners invaluable insights and a clear path to overcoming obstacles, making this episode a must-listen for anyone striving to reach their full potential in building their wealth or their businesses.
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Transcription
Ben Fraser: Hello, Future Billionaires! Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I’m your host Ben Fraser, and today we brought on a very special guest. Her name is Dr. Shannon Irvine and she has a PhD in Neuropsychology. And so this is a really fascinating area of science and her whole goal is to help activate entrepreneurs, investors to reach epic levels of success. So she has a podcast called Epic Success Podcast and just really cool the intersection of where we have limiting beliefs, but also the actual brain science about how to move past those, how to crush your obstacles and get to that next level of success, whatever that looks like for you.
So this is a really long podcast to go for nearly an hour diving into, different stories that she has and then the actual specific four step process that she walks her clients through to get to these new levels of success. So this is something you really wanna listen to. We all have these limiting beliefs, even as entrepreneurs, as investors and things that are holding us back from getting to that next level.
So this is something I wanna listen to a few times. I think I’m gonna go back and listen to it again, and I think you’re really gonna enjoy this kind of unique episode in our podcast. And, be sure to share this if you’re enjoying it, you a five star review. We appreciate that and hope you enjoy it.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I’m very excited about today’s guest. This is Dr. Shannon Irvine and she has a PhD in neuropsychology. And one that’s just impressive right off the bat but two, what I think is really gonna be fun. We’re big on investments and economics and doing due diligence and understanding how to invest like the ultra wealthy.
But what I’ve found in so many discussions with individuals that are investing passively, entrepreneurs, others that are, trying to do this, investing in alternative assets. Inevitably, there’s always some level of limiting beliefs and things that people just don’t feel, like they have the competence to do something or to learn this or even how to make the decisions.
And so when I was talking with you in a mastermind together, which is really cool. Just sharing what your expertise is. I was like, oh, this would be perfect for our listeners because so much of what we focus on is the kind of tactile, tangible, here’s how you look at a deal, here’s how you understand the macro, but not much on the kind of inner battle, inner challenges, the eliminating beliefs, the roadblocks that everyone faces, whether it’s running a business or an investor.
So way too long of an issue. I gotta let the expert talk here. Dr. Irvine, thanks so much for coming on.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Oh my gosh. I’m so excited to be here with your tribe because what you just said was so true. We learn from incredible people like you, how to do the thing that we know we need to do strategically, which is amazing.
And then there’s this hidden piece of the puzzle. We’re in a conversation in our minds around I like this, or, it’d be amazing. And they’re probably knowing your audience. They’re probably binge listening to your podcast. They’re doing, they’re learners. I know because they’re hanging out with you and what you teach.
Yet still we will find ourselves playing smaller than we want to, whether it be in business or investing. We’ll find ourselves taking safe steps. We’ll find ourselves really in this place, I really want that. And even planning, yes, I’m gonna do this next year, or I’m gonna, but yet that timeframe never comes.
And really it’s because our brain is wired to keep you safe, not successful.
Ben Fraser: That’s a powerful statement right there. So before we dig into it, I’d love just to understand a little bit. So what is neuropsychology? I know what neuro is and I know what psychology is.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah, so neuropsychology is really the study of how the brain affects how we think and what we do. And honestly, I would like to say I’m super smart and that’s why I did that. But I’ll be honest. I was just, I say the doctor stands for desperate enough because I was so frustrated with this glass ceiling I saw above me.
Like I knew everything to do, all the strategies. I could teach the strategies if I wanted to because that’s how much I had learned. But yet still, I couldn’t get past this level in my business. And if you don’t mind, then I wanna tell this story because it applies to investing, it applies to entrepreneurship, just the same.
Where I could do only so much and then somehow, I would sabotage somehow. I would procrastinate. Somehow I would find some reason, and that number for me was 200,000. I could get my business to 199,999. I’m not joking. Somehow I would cool the temperature back down underneath that 200,000 level.
Ben Fraser: Is it a conscious awareness or just all looking back, you realize?
Yeah, absolutely not. No.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: What. In fact, it was this culmination where I hired a mentor, drained my savings account at the time, told my husband later, love you, babe. Sorry about that. And started working with a mentor because she seemed to be just like me. She put her family first. She put God first, but yet she had three multi-billion dollar businesses with a B.
I figured I was gonna mentor her. She was gonna tell me the secret strategy that she had, that I didn’t. And in the time with her, I figured out or discovered that I was doing everything she was doing. There was no strategy that she was doing that I wasn’t. But she thought differently about money.
She thought differently about time. She thought differently about her worth, she thought differently about her impact in the marketplace. That’s what made me start to really go and think, like, why does she think differently than me? And she gave me a challenge. She said, go and drive in a neighborhood, multimillion dollar home that you’ll buy when you, which when you get to this place.
And I said, okay, I’ve done that many times before. I love doing that. So I was driving around, and she said no. Go make an appointment with a realtor. Walk in, act like you’re gonna buy it. Always good as I was cruising around the neighborhoods, but as soon as I got out and shook the hand of the real estate agent, I heard my dad’s voice on the backs of good people that make 200,000 or more.
One of my core values is to be generous and to be a good person and honor God and so it makes sense. My brain was doing everything it could. To have me simmer down when I was getting across that 200,000 LE lever level and whatever it is for you, you’ve got one too. And it’s only because as I was growing up, this belief was repeated so much around me that my brain saw it as such a threat to pass over that threshold.
It meant I would become a bad person and start using people. And That’s the right turn for me. I’ve gotta go figure out how to train my brain differently and open up this door to studying, thinking and success. And that led to an obsession around how do you change it? And then I was just the one desperate enough to go and study it under a PhD, which was a fun experience too, honestly, Ben, because.
I was the only entrepreneur in the room, only believer in the room, and I was solving mine. So I was trying to combine things as we do, as entrepreneurs to solve the problem. And my professors could not wait to get me out and get my dissertation approved because they were so tired of trying to solve how we think.
And it was at that time that I created this brain-based model too. Remove limitations and build a success pathway or success switch that you can flip in your brain to actually allow that next level to happen.
Ben Fraser: Man I’m very excited to keep going here. So with the limiting beliefs, do you find most of it comes from, like the environments that we’re in or what is usually the source of.
These things that become, really subconscious ceilings that we put on ourselves. Yeah.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: One of the best questions I’ve honestly ever been asked, because first of all, 99 0, 90% of your daily current actions, decisions and results are coming not from your thinking mind, not from your prefrontal cortex, but from your cautiousness. Automated pre-programmed patterns that are in your subconscious to help you. Your subconscious does this because if we had to think all 60,000 thoughts per day, we would not get out of bed. So the system itself is meant to help you. It’s meant to use less glucose, which is the energy we use to think with.
However, it doesn’t look at our vision board and it does not look at what we have business goals or investment goals. It looks at what gets repeated and here’s the key to what you just asked. The part of our brain that can call BSS on something like that’s the thinking part of our mind doesn’t fully develop till we’re 21 for women and 24 for men.
So every limiting belief that you have, it’s not your fault. You actually didn’t create it. It was created either in your family of origin, environment of origin. I just gave you a story of one of mine. That I had this part of my brain that could say, that’s not right. These are good people.
That part of my mind was not anywhere near entering. The equation. And so what gets repeated over you, whether you had the best family, the worst, or somewhere in between, you don’t have to go back there, which is great news. But it’s been repeated over you so much that it just became an automation, a belief that went into your subconscious around money spending, worth investing, all of it.
So it isn’t your fault, you actually didn’t create it, but now after this interview, I hope you get a passion for it. Going in and uncovering what is running in automation so that you can then choose if you wanna keep it or not. So really, environment of origin, family of origin plays a huge role on what limitations are there and what also positive beliefs are there that are helping you to right the things that you’re doing.
All of it is there. And so obviously the things that are working for you and you just keep doing, but. You really more important than any strategy or tactic is getting super uber committed to knowing what is running the show 90% of the time so that you can choose a goal.
Ben Fraser: You alluded to this earlier, but the reason that we have these, or our brain creates these is a safety mechanism, right? So it’s focused on protection, it’s focused on keeping things stable, keeping our organs working, and us, out of danger and other things that are just innate. But then when you come up to these, it’s, it’s, it does the downside of it, which is the limitations.
Am I thinking about that, right? Is it a hundred percent
Dr. Shannon Irvine: right? Yeah. Because here’s what we do as investors and as entrepreneurs, we, our brain’s job is to keep everything aligned with what’s in subconscious automation. Right now, every limitation and every positive, it’s, that’s what it’s protecting at all costs.
And so here’s where we come along as entrepreneurs and investors, we’re wired differently, right? And We want these big visions, these big dreams, and so we’ve got an automation running 90% of the show. That’s saying stay safe. Don’t invest, don’t take risks, don’t move from this place. And then you’ve got our thinking mind saying, I want a billion dollar investment portfolio.
I wanna be wealthy like billionaires. I wanna have this successful business. And we put our brain in a bind. And the good news is when you do that, you can actually uncover some of the stories that are no longer serving you and get rid of them.
Ben Fraser: Man, I’m reading a book right now and I feel like it applies to this.
It’s called 10 X is Easier Than Two X. Are you familiar with Dan Sullivan? That’s great, yeah. And he talks about creating the frameworks for growth, right? And making the argument that 10 Xing your growth is actually easier than two Xing. And the whole kind of simple process but of doing this is looking at the Pareto principle of, 20% of your efforts, your inputs are creating.
80% of your outcomes. And the flip side of that is 80% of the things you’re doing are only producing 20% of what you’re doing. So the more you can continue to do what works, right? And it conceptually that, that sounds simple, right? Oh, let’s do more of what works. But what he talks about is.
80% is a crutch for most people, because that’s the comforting thing. I know what I can expect if I continue to do this. It’s 80%, at least I know what the result is gonna be, even though I know in the back of my mind, it’s not actually getting me where I want to be. It’s helping me stay safe in this place.
And it takes courage. It takes bravery to go and say, I’m gonna just cut out 80% of what I’m doing. To do more of this. And sometimes it actually requires a step back. It requires a toll rewrite of the things that you’re doing in a new evaluation. So it’s just interesting hearing you talk about that.
That’s the first thing that’s coming to my brain. ’cause I’m in this process right now of evaluating, like, how do I go to that next level and get out of the safety of the things that aren’t really producing when I wanna produce.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah. And as typical driven, ambitious people, we have a belief and I know your listeners are just like you.
And so we have a belief that somehow we can outperform it out, figure it out, like somehow we’re gonna muscle our way, hustle our way, do whatever we can do. We’ll figure it out. We’ll figure out, right? However, this is the imagery I wanna give you. And if I hope this helps somebody really get acceleration today, no pun intended, because like you, myself, most entrepreneurs, most investors, we’re constantly learning, doing, we’ve got our foot on the gas of our business or of our investing.
We don’t have to be encouraged to continue to grow. We naturally, Are wired that way. Most of the people who listen, you are gonna be that way. People who listen to me. So I’m not saying everybody’s that way, but certainly entrepreneurs, certainly investors that listen to us, they’re gonna be that kind of person.
So your foot’s on the gas all the time, and that’s where the frustration lies, right? ’cause they’re like, I’m doing like I’m doing all the right things to get this breakthrough, to get to the next level to move. Why isn’t it happening quite for me? But it’s like you’ve put the foot on the gas, but yet at the same time, There are these automations running about what is a safe amount of money, right?
What is a safe number of profit? What is a safe number or what is a safe amount to put yourself out there and take risks that’s running autopilot? And if I can give you an imagery, it’s not that you’re not putting the right things, doing the right things, pulling the right levers, foot’s on the gas, but your foot with those stories are on the break at the same time.
I don’t know if you like that resonates so much with me ’cause that’s exactly what it feels like. Like you can see where you wanna go, you can touch it, you can taste it because that’s how we are. But yet still it just feels like there’s this massive tension. Or like you imagine if you were full speed ahead in a Ferrari and you put your foot on the brake at the same time, it’s not gonna be good.
Yet we invest more in putting in more gas. Instead of saying, wait a minute, sometimes we’ve gotta slow down to speed up, slow down a little bit to speed up super fast, and it’s like getting that foot off the brake. Removing the limitations, which is the great news, is such a brain-based, simple, step-by-step process that once you’re able to do that, then there’s nothing that stands in your way.
There’s no conversation about what I need to do to get to the next level? You just get to the next level. Because the things tethering you back are cut and so you fly.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. Okay. What would you say are some of the most common limiting beliefs? Or what are some of the biggest things? Like for me I feel like I’ve struggled with, if I’m busy, then I’m being productive.
Busiest equals productivity and that’s definitely not always the case. And it’s, as time fills up, That’s part of the challenge is I’d need to cut some things to make more room for the things that actually work. But what are some other things you’d find? Like obviously you had this one, like a certain number of this is a number that I.
Is it just, if I go beyond this and there’s maybe moral, ethical problems with who I am, right? Or core identity issues. What are some other kinds of key ones that you find with people? You
Dr. Shannon Irvine: know, you just hit it. Ironically we hate these things as business owners because they’re not tactical, but they are identities, right?
So it’s where things hit our identities and. Where the core three and again, I talk to entrepreneurs and people that you talk to, so these aren’t like your everyday folks, but these are us. The big three for us is how are we feeling valued as a human being? So a lot of us, what we do and our identity is mixed up, right?
The more we do, the more valuable we feel. And Obviously that keeps us in this hustle. Do more. Yet it’s never getting us, it’s keeping us safe because I’m doing so, therefore I’m feeling valued. But it’s not. It’s putting you in opposition to where you wanna go. And the other one is for a lot of people, especially if you’re a newer entrepreneur or newer investor, it’s you’re scared to be like, Judged or seen as faulty or seen as not enough.
And that kind of comes down to that place where we all need to be loved. So these stories always get created around our basic identity cu human needs, which is to be loved, to be enough or valued. And then for us, we have the extra layer of the temperature barometer around money. So you’ll probably, and I’m just curious from your experience with your clients, Like we all have a level, like I had that $200,000 level.
That up to that point is fine. Anything beyond it has a different identity attached to it. And as long as you didn’t hear any negative identities attached with those next levels of income investing or income generation, it’s okay. But if you did, if there, if the moment you like, I’m good with the million in profit, but 10 million in profit.
Like I want it, and I’m not saying that for myself, but I’m just saying like I want it. But what it makes me think about the person that creates that, and you can, you know this just by thinking that one question, what do I think about a person that’s at insert number here? Or what do I think about somebody who can invest?
Insert number here. And when you start to feel some of those negative identity associations with whatever level that is, that’s your cap. You cannot go past it unless you lose that identity on purpose.
Ben Fraser: And you’re saying before, like with the $200,000 number, you would. You’d get close, but then you would start self-sabotaging, right?
Yeah. So without even knowing it, it’s just like you’re not gonna go past. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: As you can probably tell, I’m a little bit of a type A person and so like I’m a doer and all of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch. If you talk to any of my friends, that’s not something I generally spend a lot of time doing.
All of a sudden I do that. Or I would do what I call entrepreneur procrastination. We’re so different from the rest of the world. We don’t just sit down and chill. We’re like, I’ll go work on this other thing that’s not really creating any income. Oh, I’ll go help my kids with X, Y, Z, or we’re doing this interesting diversion.
Kind of procrastination. That’s what I was doing. Busy, I felt like I was doing a lot of things. Yep. Yet, the one thing I knew would move the needle over 200,000. I was, my brain was throwing all the neurochemicals at me to not do it.
Ben Fraser: Okay. All right. Let’s shift gears here. Everyone’s dying Ben, stop asking questions.
Let her tell us what the steps are, but, okay, so let’s break it down here. So what was Your journey in discovering this, and then what are the kind of practical things that you discover with kinda the brain size?
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, they couldn’t wait to get me out of that PhD because I was trying to solve me.
And so I kept combining different modalities and I will always say I am not. A snowflake or a special unicorn. I’m not. And so when I noticed like limitations were starting to fall off of me, I knew okay, this is pretty incredible. This is how God wired our brains and when we know it and I’ll give you the steps, like how amazing.
’cause then we remove limitations by keeping us from anything that we want, but. Being an entrepreneur, I’m like, I gotta prove this out. So I had about 10 one-on-one clients at the time, and I said, business coaching them. And I’m, my, my promise at that time was to help them get to six figures and beyond.
And I said, listen, I’m just gonna add this on top, and this is what I want you to hear as investors, as entrepreneurs, this isn’t an either or, this is a, if you add this layer on top of what you’re doing, this is the secret sauce that changes it all. That missing thing or that hidden thing that you’ve been looking for.
So I did that. I said, let’s keep business coaching, but I wanna take you through this model, which we call in our world the neuro coach model. And I have one guy that I was coaching that had one limitation. And by the way, you don’t have thousands, so don’t worry about this, we really only have one or two core ones.
They all are tentacles. I’ll lead back to one or two. He had one. We moved him through this process, which I’ll tell you the simple steps that we took him through. His business within 30 days went from six figures to eight. It was the only thing in the way it was just this one thing He couldn’t see, let’s call it a blind spot, but he couldn’t, he didn’t know why and how frustrating that is when you don’t know why and you want it so much.
And then I saw this, on and on with all my clients, and I’m like, okay. That’s when I took it online and really started coaching people and certifying coaches with it. But
Ben Fraser: The, and was this something that to you is like an obvious flaw or thing that you could see or was it through the process of dialoguing or, to me it seems like if there’s something that’s that big of a roadblock, suddenly you think you’d be self-aware enough to understand that, but what was that?
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Our blind spots are just that they’re not huge. If they’re huge, we can see ’em and sense ’em. Our blind spots usually always love that story about the gold rush. Have you ever heard that story where the guy that originally bought all the mining equipment mined for the first time in California, have you heard this story?
No. No. Tell me the story. He bought like all the equipment, leveraged all his relationships, bought all the equipment. And he drilled to find gold, and he was drilling this way and that way, this way, and that way has lots of applications for what we do and investing in entrepreneurship. And he finally just was so busy doing it, he said, I can’t keep going.
I just have to sell it. So he sold it and the gentleman who bought it saw all of the paths that he was trying to take to get there. He said, I just told the people he hired to drill. I just want you to stay in the same line and keep drilling. And the guy was two inches from the biggest goal brush that has ever been reformed in the name of history of our, the state of California.
And why that’s important is sometimes we’re just the smallest bit that is literally pumping the brakes. Of the biggest breakthrough that we could possibly imagine. But because we’re doing what’s only familiar to us, we just can’t see it. We can’t experience it as a blind spot. So long story to say, usually you’re so close to it, you can’t see it, and that’s when the steps that we take you through really allow it to break wide open.
And here’s the great news, if you’re investing or you’re an entrepreneur, We are people that we put ourselves in resistance to opportunities all the time, and either we take them or we play smaller. But that’s, remember when I was telling the story about me, it wasn’t until I put myself in that position where I was shaking the person’s hand.
Maybe for an investor, it’s making that next investment that you’ve been wanting to do forever, but you haven’t. So you start, acting like you’re gonna go do it. As an entrepreneur, it’s like putting an offer out there, whatever it is. As you lean into the version of yourself you wanna be versus the safe version, your brain, naturally, this is just a natural occurrence.
The part of your brain that is running subconsciously right now, that you are running 90% of the show, when you start moving into the unsafe territory, it gets louder and louder and louder. So it throws a lot of neurochemicals at you to get you to stop. If that doesn’t work, then it starts, you start to hear the story.
And like I said, on the backs of good people that make 200,000 or more, I heard the story. So we just, I just started working with him around, okay, let, what is the next thing you know you wanna go do, but you haven’t done it ’cause you’re playing safe. And he told me, I said, okay today. And we made a plan for him to do it and then get on a call with me because I knew it would come to the surface.
And that’s why having a coach in your corner like Ben or like myself, it really helps. But as that statement came forward for him, which was interesting because he was a very powerful guy, but he had this thing like, no one will listen to me because he, to his childhood, no one listened to him. He was like the last child of seven.
No one would listen to him. So it’s to see how little that is? It’s so little. Oh yeah. But yet, like he’s Okay. I did it, but I don’t know if he’s gonna listen to me. I’m like, there it is. So the four simple steps, ’cause that is the question you asked, is first you’ve gotta recognize it and the only way to do that is to lean into resistance.
If you do what is safe and familiar, you, your subconscious will protect the story to protect the pattern. But if you lean into
Ben Fraser: And how do you lean into that? For you in your stories that you. Took the step of going and looking at the bigger houses that you couldn’t afford at that point yet, right?
Yeah. So what is that kind of like a practical way to just go put yourself in a position that you’re gonna be uncomfortable in
Dr. Shannon Irvine: And you’re gonna be uncomfortable? See? Yeah. Our brain is keeping us thinking about everything that’s in your subconscious and repeating what you’ve already created.
It’s not creating what you wanna create at all. Its job is to keep you safe, not eaten by tigers, not attacked. That’s its job. And so for me it was meeting the real estate agent. I was good at driving around the neighborhoods all day long. But it was when I had to get out and say my name and have the conversation like I was gonna potentially buy this house.
So for somebody else it might be actually calling me and you would know the steps for an investor or for an entrepreneur. It might be if you’re just getting started, it’s. Putting yourself out there speaking or putting yourself out, it’s actually going to do the thing that is scaring you. It doesn’t mean you actually are completing it all the way, but it’s, you’re taking all the necessary steps.
You’re making the phone call to get on the stage. You’re doing the work behind the big thing that you’re, you honestly have stopped yourself from right. And it’s beautiful. It’s just the way God created our minds. It just, Comes to the surface. ’cause that’s actually how your brain is wired.
It’s wired to get louder and louder to protect you. So we’re hacking that system by learning like you think, like here’s your automations, here’s where you wanna go. If you put a rubber band between there, that creates all this tension, right? So your brain is like, Throwing neurochemicals your way to get you to collapse back down.
But instead you’re saying, okay, I’m gonna lean toward this, and then my subconscious mind’s gonna give me what it is that’s keeping me in fear or keeping me separated from it. So it’s just the first thing that is recognized and then it’s as simple as that. And this is gonna look so rudimentary. You’re gonna be like, really?
That’s not that exciting. It’s not. I told you it was four steps. Simple. It’s not easy. It’s simple though. So recognize number one. Number two, you gotta physically write it down. Why say record it? You’ve gotta physically write down what you heard. No one ever says, I have imposter syndrome, or I’m overwhelmed.
They say things like My clients, who the heck is gonna listen to me? It’s very specific words. That’s why it isn’t cookie cutter. It’s based on your background, your environment of origin, your family of origin. So what the words that you hear in that block, you actually physically write ’em down.
The reason behind that is if you think about everything that makes up your subconscious mind, it’s visual stuff that you see. It’s. Kinesthetic, it’s using all of the things like you’re writing and your vision and your hearing. It’s using those systems. ’cause those things are what create memories and repetition.
So what we wanna do is really pull it out to your thinking mind. So when we physically write it down, we’re just really pulling that statement all the way out of your subconscious to, to, for you to look at. At that point, you make a call, Hey, this works for me. I’m gonna keep it cool. Do nothing, keep going.
That’s usually not what it is though. ’cause usually we’ve we’re, but if you don’t like it, this is gonna stop me from everything that I want. So now I’ve recognized what it is. I’ve written it down. And the third step is, and we take ’em people through a specific process around it, but. Is to actually put it on trial because as if it’s not something that’s gonna serve you, it’s a lie, right?
It no longer serves you. It’s a lie. You do not want that. It’s not serving you. So we put it on trial like a lawyer would put a defendant on trial, and we do that in a logical way. Come up with all the evidence against it, right? So in my 200,000 story, I came up with all the evidence that the more money I made, the more impact I can have.
At that time, I’d already started our charity and we were three years into helping AIDS orphans in Uganda. And so the more money I made, the more money I can give to these kids that we were serving in our ministry. So I came up with as much evidence as I could. Statement was false. A lie, right?
Direct evidence. Indirect evidence. In that example, how many people do I know that make over 200,000 that are incredible human beings doing incredible things, right? So I was really building a case for myself, remember, this isn’t just building a case for me, Shannon, or you, Ben. It’s building a case that what’s in automation is faulty.
Because we were doing a brain-based process. We’ve repeated it so much. Family of origin, environment of origin. It’s seen as a belief and your brain’s protecting that belief. So now you’re bringing it out and you’re saying it’s not a belief. It’s not a belief. It’s wrong.
So what’s happening, neurochemically is like a jackhammer to a freeway. Your subconscious is waiting a minute, I thought this was. To put a voice behind your subconscious. I thought this was a hundred percent belief. I guess it’s not. ’cause look at all this evidence they’re coming up with against it.
And you also have to do an emotional process too, which I won’t go in depth with. But you do need to handle the logical and the emotional ’cause. That’s how we store things. But the great news is once you have that and you feel like it’s solid, like there’s no more proof you need to come up with. Then we literally create what I call a truth prime, and you just listen to it.
You just literally retrain your brain, build a freeway toward the truth, which completely eradicates or in a fancier term, synaptically, prunes away this automation that’s running that is literally blocking you from everything you want. So it seems so simple, like really, like I could do that and. Half hour.
Yeah, you really could.
Ben Fraser: With starting with the recognition, I mean that, that’s probably half the challenge, right? If it’s a blind spot, how do you say, leaning into the resistance and so you have to take account of where I feel the resistance and what, what does that mean, right?
Because naturally your body, maybe you. Get short of breath or palms get sweaty, or you have a physical reaction, but it’s just your body and your brain trying to protect. And and then going through that, and you talk about, ’cause I do love the science side of this, selfishly I love to understand because, as I’ve said, a little bit of psychology not a massive amount, but like old frameworks of psychology is that the brain was this, once you hit a certain age.
Your neuro pathways are pretty deep. They’re forms hard to change, but the idea of neuroplasticity has revolutionized a lot of things that we can do and allow for these changes, right? Instead of, oh, man, I had this trauma that happened to me when I was, 12 years old, or whatever it is.
I, that’s just who I am. That’s just what I am, that’s my lot in life, and so I have to accept this. But So talk about just the actual science, the brain side of this, because like you’re saying, You can actually rebuild these new neural pathways and I might be using the wrong terminology.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: You’re the expert here. No, it’s great. Exactly what it is. These are automated neural pathways that when the repetitions happened, when you were growing up, childhood origin, it’s, there’s a certain amount of repetitions that build an automated pathway that goes to the subconscious. Really, there’s.
If there’s two sides of the fence, there’s a normal thought, which is, thoughts are just energy, it’s just glucose. And you probably heard there’s this synaptic gap that a thought has to jump over. So as we’re thinking, planning, all this stuff we’re doing with our prefrontal cortex, if I scanned your brain, there would be a thought and it would be jumping a synaptic gap.
That’s a healthy brain with new information, new processing, that kind of thing. And then when it, when repetition happens, that gap. Closes and it gets closer and closer and closer. And then, there’s a moment where we can see that actual bond happen, which I, this is the part that I love.
’cause then you’re like, that’s now in the subconscious. We can see. That’s cool. Like it’s automated now. And again, remember it doesn’t see the vision board. It just automates what you repeat. That’s good news. That’s great news. And then the newer science of synaptic pruning, we think of that side of things as the bad thing as you get older like parts of your brain disappear.
No. Like you can on purpose go in and prune away the thoughts that aren’t serving you. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with what I just told you, which we call the My Matrix is we can see an automated glued together neural pathway. Start to pull apart in what we call prune, where the two sides of that neural pathway literally fall so far apart that thought can’t fire again, not on that pathway.
Now, if you built it again, of course it would create again, but that’s when you see it like that, you realize, wow, I didn’t know I had this Ferrari operating system sitting on the top of my shoulders, that I had the capacity to decide what stays and what goes. So when you build in this automation on top of this, and we call this brain priming, but when you build a vision prime into where you wanna go, now that has a freeway.
And that’s when you really flip that success switch on in your brain when you’re not just affirming or doing affirmations and some of these kinds of half measures, but you’re building a brain-based pathway toward where you wanna go. As if it’s happening right now, your brain takes it as safe and it starts automating those things and that’s when you see people speed up.
When you see people like go super fast toward their goals, it’s because that’s, that process is happening whether they realize they’re doing it or not, which
Ben Fraser: is, yeah. Wow. Very interesting. Another thing that you said just on the third step of putting it on trial to me was interesting. As I think about my own.
Kind of limiting beliefs or like what you’re saying, just connecting to if I make more money, then that just means I might be a selfish person or know, not whatever. But for me, as I think about wanting to invest well and grow wealth and there’s certain numbers in my head that you just as a, again, type a person like you, like I wanna go achieve, but then take a step back it’s what’s the purpose, right?
What’s the point? And that could almost be. A limiter as well, because I’m conflicted with, I have this inner drive, but is it connected to something that’s bigger than just, in this case, accumulation. That’s not something that I’m, there’s a certain, at a certain point you’re gonna be fine, but I.
For you as connecting it to this ministry that you have this nonprofit that is serving a higher purpose and now it actually becomes a motivator, right? To where, the more money you make, the more you can do. I think for a lot of investors and people and entrepreneurs where you have an inner drive and sometimes you think, the initial goal is just a certain number, whatever that number is, right?
If I just hit this number, then I’ll be happy. But we all know because we’ve heard so many stories. Once you hit that, nothing really changes. Like the gap that in your soul is, yeah, it’s just, bigger problems, different problems that you have, but it’s, you’re tying it to a why, tying it to a bigger purpose.
Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I feel like that’s a little bit a nuance that could be pretty powerful in this process.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Super powerful and honestly, both parts are incredible. But this is the part that I love to do, and this is why we call it brain priming. It’s. You’ve gotta, you don’t wanna put your brain in a bind.
So you, what we were talking about is doing just that. I want to, but the outcome of that want causes me pain. And so when we do that, when we set goals or create a vision and we don’t have the deep why behind it, I wanna do it. And the simple way to go through that exercise is just to ask yourself.
So what? Like I wanna make $10 million. Why? So that I can be safe in my family. Great. Why? And just keep asking yourself that question because as you keep answering that question, the top line’s gonna sound very superficial. It’s all who you are. So don’t look at it that way, but it might be something like, because I wanna help a ton of people and I wanna make an impact and I wanna, and that’s true. But as you get deeper, keep asking yourself why. You know what, where I got for me was, Because I never want my child to feel the way I feel. As desperate as I felt, not knowing where my next meal was gonna come from. I’m not, I don’t want, ever want my children to think they don’t have a purpose, right?
So it started with, I wanna make money, I wanna do purpose. But as you drill down personal to you, now you’ve attached your brain. This powerful fuel behind every action you take toward the result that you want to get. And this is a big part of brain priming. So we’re always, in our world with our clients, we’re always working on two three big scales.
We’re always building this brain-based belief and never putting our brain in a bind. I wanna make more money, but money makes me evil, right? That’s gonna keep you sabotaging. So we’ve gotta make sure that’s where you’re headed. Really is developed out to where every, everything that’s gonna happen as if it’s already happened.
And that’s the key. Your brain doesn’t need to see it to believe it, but it absolutely needs to believe it, to see it, for you to see it. And I’ll illustrate that point. Prior to leaving my PhD I did a lot of work with research. I found research really interesting and I continue to do it with entrepreneurs.
It was, it’s very intriguing how our particular subset of brains work very differently than the rest of the world. And I’m gonna be writing a book on that at some point. But what I didn’t get to participate with was this research and. There’s lots of the research that we did, but this one stands out for high performers like us.
We worked with an athlete, and this athlete was an Olympic level athlete that kept missing. He was a swimmer and he kept missing like 0.002 from the first place, and they agreed, he and his coach agreed to work in the lab with us working through this idea of brain priming. So the deal was you worked with us for 60 days.
There’s a key 67 day metric. That’s why we call our program the 67 day year they take. That’s about the time it takes to create an automation all the way through to where it’s automated in your subconscious. So we worked with ’em for 67 days. We measured. His knowledge of a stroke initiation. So if you’re a swimmer, this makes a lot of sense.
If you’re not like me, it did not. But evidently, there’s more than one way to initiate a stroke and that takes small twitch muscles, which are usually not very developed. So we measured his learned knowledge of this. This new stroke initiation, there was none. That’s very simple science that’s gone on for a long time.
We also measured the muscle Connectivity, the growth in that muscle, that small twitch muscle, which I think at the time was like three and a half percent or 4%. It’s just not a muscle that he needed to use in his craft or in his sport. So we worked with him, training his brain to believe it. He never got in the pool for those 67 days, all the others, but never did this stroke initiation.
At the end of it, 67 days later, we measured his brain. Again, a hundred percent learned knowledge. We see that a lot. So that wasn’t, we weren’t surprised by that outcome. ’cause it’s something we see a lot like people doing this kind of thing, learning the piano and never touching the keys. We’ve done a lot of that, but the muscle grew by 98%.
What? Yeah. And that’s wild. They went on to close that gap in time and That’s the power that’s available to us when we align our brain to believe it first so that we can see it. And that connection to why I want it in the first place is a super powerful piece of the puzzle. So that when you automate that future place as if it’s existing right now, your brain just sees it as this place that is inevitable.
And then, By nature, we have a part of our brain called retic, reticular activating system that starts to allow things to draw that to us. It’s crazy,
Ben Fraser: right? It’s crazy. That is really wild.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: No counsel. I’m like, this is way too exciting to yeah. We all need to know it because we’re entrepreneurs.
I believe investors and entrepreneurs, I would say, are the same. We were put on the earth, I believe, to change people’s lives. And to make the world a better place. And the more we can train our brain to, to prime our brain so that our brain sees where we need to go. The faster we get there and the more we remove these limitations, the faster we get there.
So these are two like hacks. And the third is just aligning with your brain in terms of how you accomplish things. And. We probably need a different podcast for that, but a lot of the current goal setting is in opposition to how we work our Braves work.
Ben Fraser: Man, yeah, I think we gotta have you back on, ’cause this, I feel like we’re just getting going.
I’ll like getting a free counseling session here, so that’s awesome stuff, this is great. So what’s the best way for folks to get it? Into what you’re doing, and I think you have an event coming up and is what your real main offer is. Like you have coaches that kinda walk people through this process.
Give a little bit of sense of what you do and what, how you can help people and where to find you.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: You, you’re so sweet. So we have a coaching program called the 67 Day Year and create a year’s worth of business growth in 67 days. And we’re doing a free live event coming up called The Unleashed Entrepreneur, where we’re gonna walk through and teach you the main entrepreneurial strategic levers in how to train your brain at each point so that you can have income acceleration and grow.
And we’re gonna do that for free. And yeah, we do have a program called 67 a year where we take you through and coach you through this process. And it’s not a long drawn out process. It’s a 67 day process. You can keep doing it over and over again. And we also teach you how to align with your brain to accomplish more.
And it’s so much fun. We deliver the entire communication on what you need to know in three days. Then you coach through the 67 days and get unleashed to next levels and next levels. And then we also certify coaches. That’s a different program, but they can go to unleashed entrepreneur.com if they’d like to come for the live event and start to learn how to train their brain to transform everything in their life.
Ben Fraser: Okay. You guys heard it Go to http://unleashedentrepreneur.com/, and sign up for this event. And you have a podcast too, so that’s Tell us the name of that again.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: The Epic Success Podcast and yeah, you can, we talk, we need to dive on all these topics so you can jump over there and learn more.
Ben Fraser: Alright, great. All right. Thanks again for coming on.
Dr. Shannon Irvine: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
