You’re Not Broken, Your Brain Is Protecting You

When strategy isn’t the problem, trauma often is. Brainspotting practitioner Jennie Hays explains why entrepreneurs get stuck even when they know exactly what to do, how the body stores unresolved trauma, and how removing emotional landmines creates real momentum. If willpower hasn’t worked, this conversation matters.

Website: https://jenniehays.com/brainspotting Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jennieshealthsolution LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniehays/ Alignable: https://www.alignable.com/moulton-tx/beyond-mindset-with-jennie-hays Email: jennie@jenniehays.com

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Jenny Hayes and I'm here with Nikki. We're gonna talk today a little bit about what I do. So I'm a brain spotting practitioner. What the heck does that mean? It means that we get to touch on both ends of the spectrum that you're here for both the mental health and the business.

Speaker 2: So I am an entrepreneur. I started a business, what, five years ago, and I hung up my shingle like a lot of people do. And I thought, where are people now? Come on, come to me. I've got the training. I know what I'm doing. Show up. What I wasn't doing was the stuff that my body was telling me not to do. That every coach, every course I bought, everything else was saying you have to do.

Speaker 2: I'd get to that point where I was ready to do it and I'd go, whew, you know what my body's saying? No. So this isn't for me. And for five years I made $267. [00:01:00] Obviously was not working. Ended up working for a wonderful company that I absolutely love. They help therapists to start and scale their practices.

Speaker 2: And they taught us brain spotting. So now not only is my business not working still, but now I'm helping other people be successful doing all the things that my body is saying can't do. And when they get stuck, I'm doing brain spotting for 'em and they're doing the thing. Until one day I was like, I feel broken.

Speaker 2: I feel like there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm just not meant to be an entrepreneur. Maybe I have to work for people for the rest of my life. And, there are people that, that works for and that fits for it didn't work for me 'cause I don't play politics very well. I'm always trying to innovate.

Speaker 2: I'm always trying to do something new and I would grind heads with people all the time. And so I was really in a broken spot. And a friend of mine said tell you what. [00:02:00] Let me do some brain spotting for you around this. And I was like, how in the world did I not even think of this? I did some brain spotting with her and my goodness, it was like the cork came out of the bottle.

Speaker 2: I figured out how to do those things and why my body was stuck and why, how to just. Move forward. And so now I've been doing this new business, the Brainspotting, for about seven months. By the time you see this, it'll be longer and hopefully I'll have made more money, but I'm profitable. Because I didn't treat it like it was something I needed to learn.

Speaker 2: I learned the things. I didn't treat it like I needed somebody else to do it. I'd had other people trying to do it. Don't ask about my website. I recognized that it was a mental health issue. It was an emotional issue, and the tool was so fast and easy. It [00:03:00] was crazy. We're talking almost overnight.

Speaker 2: The shift was incredible. Nikki, you got questions for me? Anything that comes to mind?

Speaker 3: But I was gonna ask I've been through a lot of different therapies and things and such because, trauma is a witch. But you said that you

Speaker 3: do what again?

Speaker 3: So it's a technique that's called Brainspotting, for those of you who have been in the therapy world.

Speaker 3: This is related to EMDR, eye movement, rapid desensitization I always get that wrong, but this is even faster and what we're doing. So here's the thing. Hopefully, you know by now that your brain, its job is to protect you. It is trying really hard to keep you from reliving [00:04:00] whatever traumas you've gone through in your life.

Speaker 3: Unfortunately, sometimes the rationale that it uses is not good. It can come up with excuses and reasons and connections that just aren't real. And. One of the ways that you know that there's something wrong with the way that your brain is processing something is when you can feel it in your body.

Speaker 3: 'cause your brain will lie to you flat out. 100% lie to you. But when you have that thought and you feel in your body that that doesn't feel good, really what your body is saying, you know what? That is not true. And so what somatic therapies do, so body mind therapies is they go in and they connect the brain and the body so they can actually communicate and release that trauma, move it from short-term memory where it's stuck into long-term memory, where it's just as important [00:05:00] as what you wore last Thursday.

Speaker 3: There's no emotion attached to it anymore. And brain spotting is just really fast at it and really good because. You don't even have to know what the trauma was. The only thing you need to know is where it's stopping you, whether that's in life. We were talking before we got started about, if you're afraid to get on the dance floor, is it because that's your personality or is it because you're afraid of fill in the blank?

Speaker 3: If it's a fill in the blank thing and it's not just that, like Nikki and I are just not meant for certain songs on the dance floor then you may just have some old trauma that said, hey, there is gonna be some harm that comes to me if I get seen, if people see my vulnerability. And the great thing about brain spotting is we can knock that out really fast.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I see you take a breath. What's on your mind?

Speaker 3: Does it [00:06:00] use lights or buzzies, I guess is what they call 'em an EMDR because the buzzy things don't work for me. 'cause they don't work for you.

Speaker 2: So yeah, the lights and the buzzy things, those are a way of connecting the two sides of your brain.

Speaker 2: In the MDR we can use music that'll do that. It's bilateral music. Not everybody likes it and it's okay because it's not required. What we're using is actually your eyes as a compass to where the trauma's stored in your brain. And once we figure that out, then we just let the body process it. And if you use the bilateral music, that's great.

Speaker 2: If you don't, that's great. And I do it all over Zoom. I've actually never done a session in person because it is just as good over zoom as it is in person. And. Yeah. Why not? I love my house, and you love yours, I'm guessing, yeah. I don't leave it too much. People more home.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. [00:07:00] Yeah. The only thing that we need, see if I've got mine, if the cats didn't knock on the floor, is that you'll see a lot of brain spotters use one of these, and it's just a collapsible rod. Some of them will put fancy rocks on the top for, and we use this to find the spot in your vision where things feel worse or better.

Speaker 2: An example of this is, if you think about a recent interaction it could have been in traffic, it could have been with a loved one could have been at work, where when you think about it, still you just don't feel real good about it. There's emotion left.

Speaker 2: If you take your eyes and you look just with your eyes all the way the right and think about that emotion and then come back to the middle and still thinking about that emotion, that interaction, and then go all the way to the left.

Speaker 2: Thinking about it, most people will be able to feel [00:08:00] more intensity in one spot than another, one side or the other. There are some people who can't, and usually that's their little dissociated, meaning that they're not as in touch with their body, but that's okay because guess what? Your face gives it away.

Speaker 2: And that's one of the great things about having a brain spotting practitioner is that even if you can't find it, I can. And then, yeah, we spend some time processing while using that gaze, and that's really all it takes is zoom, maybe a wand. And some time and maybe some music.

Speaker 3: Okay. I just have the sensory issues with touch.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And so the buzzies were

Speaker 3: like too much.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And a lot of people do, because if you think about it, our world, I have one young lady that I'm working with, so I advertise to entrepreneurs. That's my [00:09:00] bread and butter. I love that because you come in, you do one session, you get enough movement usually just to go and do the thing.

Speaker 2: If you wanna stick with me longer, I love it. But I love that rapid turnover. That's the paramedic in me, come in, let's fix the problem and move on. But if you have major trauma like I've got a young lady that I'm working with who had a sexual assault her mom sent me a list of eight major traumas in her life.

Speaker 2: And the sexual assault was just the final one. And we've been working together for a month and a half, and we're down to the last one because you can move that fast through trauma and it doesn't feel real, especially to someone who's been in therapy for years and years. But you really can and it's insane.

Speaker 2: Again, I think part of it is my paramedic background where I had 10 minutes with you.

Speaker: And my job was to fix you in [00:10:00] 10 minutes so that I could get you to the hospital. Alive. Alive was a good point. And knowing that I can help somebody do years of therapy in just a few sessions is super powerful.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I have been in therapy for lots of years and I did way back when I first started going to actual therapy, I had just been told that I had bipolar, which we no longer think I have, but this is what I was told at that time,

Speaker 3: and this lady goes, I can have you cured in six months. And I laughed in her face because as far as I know, there's no cure for bipolar.

Speaker 3: Misdiagnosis aside, you're telling me that you're gonna cure something in me that nobody else on the planet says they can cure.

Speaker 2: It depends on why you were showing bipolar symptoms. [00:11:00] If you were showing bipolar symptoms because of the physiology, the actual way your brain is made. Or chemicals that are actually imbalanced, which by the way all of you therapy followers there was a study that just released that they really don't think it's serotonin and dopamine issues in the brain causing depression.

Speaker 2: So keep an eye out for updates on that. But if it's no different than if you're missing an arm. I can't help you grow an arm. But if you're exhibiting the signs of bipolar, which actually specifically bipolar and A DHD and depression can all be from trauma. So if it's from trauma, yes. That's part of the reason I do a 30 minute free consult is that we start digging in and we look to see is this trauma, is this something we can't do?

Speaker 2: 'cause if it's something I can't do. I don't wanna waste your time. I [00:12:00] don't wanna waste your money. I don't wanna waste my time and break my heart because I couldn't help you the way I wanted to. But I think there's a lot more out there that is trauma related. I had an another young lady who came to me and for those of you who aren't Christian, apply this as you will to your beliefs.

Speaker 2: But she came because she couldn't hear God anymore and she was, her mom was really worried because she was acting depressed and she was just really overwhelmed. She's in medical school, she should be overwhelmed, but the depression was getting so bad that she was having trouble going to class. She was having trouble doing what she had to do.

Speaker 2: And she's brilliant. She's a brilliant young woman. And so we did a session around her fear that she wasn't connecting to God anymore. And when I followed up with her mood was so much lighter. You could feel a lightness [00:13:00] in her. And when I asked her about the depression symptoms, she was like not really.

Speaker 2: Not really at all. And then she had mentioned that, she had gotten some direction from God on some things. And depression like that, yeah, we can deal with it. Situational depression. Sometimes we can take the edge off of it enough until the situation goes because you make connections.

Speaker 2: That's talking to a friend of mine today that just had some brain spotting done and she realized that the combination of situations in her life triggered a trauma that had been around since she was little. Because she's in a financial bind right now and her dad is sick and she was afraid she was gonna lose him.

Speaker 2: And when she was younger, her dad had left the home and they were in a financial bind because dad had left home. [00:14:00] And so she was like, wow, I didn't realize that's where that overwhelm, that feeling of depression, the situational depression came from. Many of your listeners may realize that when we suffer things like depression, it actually changes our brain structure.

Speaker 2: And so sometimes it will take a little longer to do the brain spotting when someone's depressed to pull 'em out. Sometimes it'll knock it out right away. It just really depends on how long you've been in it, what the traumas are, how many there are. 'cause I wish I could say that we all just have one trauma.

Speaker 2: When you're a kid. Oh my gosh. The things that become traumatic to you, that hang in your brain and wait there for you kinda like little monsters to jump on. You are huge. There's so many of 'em because we do the best we can. Our brain does the best it can.

Speaker 3: [00:15:00] Because the list my therapist has is a lot longer than eight.

Speaker 2: But that's good because that means that you are uncovering 'em. So that's a good thing.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a really great therapist. Love her to death. Awesome. But, and I will make the connections, like something happens and I'll be like, oh that was stupid.

Speaker 3: How did that connect to that? Because I don't know, my brain is weird, and I will find the connections myself, and I'll go to my therapist and be like, you know what, I'm an idiot. And she's no, you're not. What did you do? Yeah. And I was like I did this and this happened. And she's so yeah, that triggered a nightmare because I'm an idiot and I shouldn't have, did a thing.

Speaker 3: And she's okay, first of all, calm down.

Speaker 2: Yeah. First of all, never call yourself an idiot because your brain will believe you.

Speaker 2: Right. It's a work in progress. Oh, I know. It took me a long time to, to flip that script and [00:16:00] realize that the words that I say I like to talk about how the, our brain has this big gate in front of it.

Speaker 2: And that there's these little centuries that are inside the gate. And when you bring a new thought into the brain I'm not an idiot. I'm a very intelligent woman when it comes to making mistakes, right? But that comes up to the brain. And the little messenger knocks on the door and he says, Hey, Nikki says she's brilliant.

Speaker 2: What do you think? And so the little centuries go back and they look through the old files and they go, no. She says she's an idiot. And so the little guy comes back down to you and says, no, sorry. You're an idiot. Traditional mindset and traditional therapy, what we do is we retrain the centuries little by little and we say, here's proof that you're not an idiot.

Speaker 2: Here's proof again that you're not an idiot. And little by little we get them going to these new boxes. Brain spotting comes in the [00:17:00] back door, says, boop, I see some boxes, let's clean those out. And so then when that little guy comes knocking the centuries go, oh, those boxes aren't there anymore.

Speaker 2: Let's look at these. And so your body and your brain believe what's going on because we no longer have that barrier. We no longer have those old things hanging around. Another way to look at it is traditional therapy and mindset work works around the landmine. So you say, such and such triggered you.

Speaker 2: And so it's natural for us to try to avoid the triggers. Brain spotting removes the trigger, so then you can just walk straight through.

Speaker 3: I don't like saying triggered because then I see somebody with blue hair screaming and yelling at somebody. And that is not what happens. That's not triggered. That might be

Speaker 2: another good [00:18:00] story.

Speaker 2: I may have to,

Speaker 3: yeah. No, another good analogy. For me when I say it triggered a nightmare, it means that night I had, you had a nightmare. Nightmares. And then the next day, oh, I don't remember exactly what my nightmares are. Never have. And I thank whoever for that because that's not something I wanna remember.

Speaker 3: Not in it for that I have enough splashbacks to deal with. Yeah. Don't need any more of that. But in the morning I was like, oh, this is connected to what I did yesterday. Because I haven't had a nightmare in six months, so I probably should not have done. Whatever it is, that's why.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And sometimes that is enough to work through things. Sometimes it is. All we have to do is go, oh, that's a block. Let's just work through it and get around it. Let's just go. A lot of times it's not. Now you said that you have [00:19:00] flashbacks. Do you have visual flashbacks or are they auditory or combination?

Speaker 2: It's a video. Have you ever played with the video and the way that it's stored?

Speaker 3: No. I try to make it stop as fast as possible.

Speaker 2: You up to playing. We can pick something that's not as traumatic. You try something that's not that one. Sure. Okay. And listeners can play along too. Okay.

Speaker 2: So when you think of something mildly traumatic, because we don't wanna actually do a full therapy session here,

Speaker 2: when you think of that is if you got something in your mind that you can use, and if you need a second, I can give you a second. Okay. If you don't have something in your mind, you're listening, pause it for a second and then come back. Now when you're seeing that, is it a video or is it a still I video.

Speaker 2: It's a video. Is it in color or is it in black and white

Speaker 2: [00:20:00] this time? Color? Color. Okay. I want you to look at that video and I want you to stop it on whatever scene. Doesn't matter. Okay, tell me when you got it stopped. Okay. Now I want you to change it from color to black and white.

Speaker 2: Okay. Which feels better. The black and white or the color

Speaker 3: Better Uhhuh. I didn't know they were supposed to feel good. I guess not good, but which one feels better? The black and white

Speaker 2: and does it feel better as a still or as the video? As a still. Okay. Now I want you to reach out in front of you physically with your hands.

Speaker 2: Now I want you to take the corners of that picture, okay? And what we're gonna do is we're gonna make it bigger and then we're gonna make it smaller in the black and white still. Now, I want you to do that a couple times, and I want you to let me know as it feel better, bigger, so feel better [00:21:00] smaller.

Speaker 2: It's smaller. Okay. How small can you go before your body won't let you make it as small as you can. Like here. Right there. Okay.

Speaker 2: Alright. How do you feel about that small picture versus the way you felt about that when you first started? Does it feel better?

Speaker 2: Okay. Will your body allow you to set it behind you? I want you to try it and I want you to affirm yourself and know that if you set it behind you and it doesn't feel good, you can pull it back in front of you. It's okay. Okay? Just physically try to put it back there and see if your body will allow you to do it.

Speaker 2: Does it feel okay back there? No. Bring it back. Bring it back. Okay. Now your job over the next few days, is to revisit that black and white. And see how [00:22:00] small you can get it. And then when you get it to, it's really tiny, see if you can put it behind you or see if you can crump it up and throw it away.

Speaker 2: Always throw it behind you. There's a reason that we say we, I put that behind me. Okay. What you are doing is you're, you are physically changing that memory. So we didn't remove the landmine, but maybe what we did is we made it a little bit smaller, a little less reactive, a little less something.

Speaker 2: So that your brain can tolerate it a little bit better. And it, what's amazing is that it'll stay that way if you'll let it. There's a technique called accelerated resolution therapy that actually takes those pictures and. Translates them into something completely different. So I don't remember what the trauma was, but when I was looking at the [00:23:00] training there was a young lady who had something going on, and there were a number of people that were involved, and she changed 'em all into little cockroaches, mariachi band cockroaches that were playing the, the luck, the gache.

Speaker 2: So every time she thought about that memory, that's what would pop into her head first. Now, if she kept really looking at it, she could pull the real memory out. So this is really good, even for people that have to go to court or things like that because you don't lose detail, but you lose the emotion attached to it.

Speaker 2: So it's really a lot about emotional healing that allows the brain to work like it should. And let's us go do those things we wanna do, like dance really badly in public, or go out and find that special someone that we want or run our business and market. 'cause I would not have been doing this a few years ago.[00:24:00]

Speaker 2: I would've been like, Nope, I can't do this. I, there's something telling me I can't do this.

Speaker 3: Okay. So you said something about a website earlier. Yep. What happened

Speaker 2: with the website? So the website was easy. The website was an easy fix. Oh, we were talking about the ugliness of the website.

Speaker 2: Okay. We were talking about paying other people to do. So I was a chicken I had the block and the the block for me. What I ended up finally figuring out it was, 'cause at first when I cleared it, I didn't know what it was. It took time for it to go, oh, that's what it was.

Speaker 2: I believe it was the fact that I was raised military.

Speaker 2: And we had to be perfect. You had to be exactly what everybody else wanted you to be in certain areas. And so there was a fear of not being enough, not being good enough. And so I thought I'll just pay [00:25:00] somebody to do my website. So I invested way too much.

Speaker 2: They wrote all the copy. They designed it. I keep that website. It's on Wix. I keep it to remind myself how bad. It can be because I hated the website. No matter what I did, they couldn't get the languaging right, because really, if you're in business, copy has to come from your heart. It can't come from somebody else's brain.

Speaker 2: And so yeah, I paid a steep price. That was just one of the many things that I did, trying to bypass these landmines and say, okay, I don't really have to market my business. I'll let somebody else do it. It doesn't work. It just really doesn't. The other time that my website came into play was a time when I was able to break through the block without [00:26:00] brainspotting, without anything other than recognizing it, putting the things together.

Speaker 2: When I started working for this company, I would help people build their websites all the time. I would help them develop their languaging all of those things and help them push the button, publish because you need to publish it or it's just sitting there, right? And it took me 18 months of procrastination to one day realize.

Speaker 2: It was like, wait a minute. Why do I keep procrastinating this when I know it's easy? I know I need a good website out there. 'cause I had long since canceled or canceled the other service. I had to pay a full year on that one. That was a nightmare. Like 300 bucks a month. Stupid. I guess it wasn't stupid at the time.

Speaker 2: I thought it was smart. But I advised people not to make that mistake. But it was like, okay, this is a block. This goes back to not wanting to be seen. I know how to do this. Worst case scenario, [00:27:00] nobody sees it doesn't matter. Let's just do it. Took me a day and a half while I was working full time for.

Speaker 2: That company to do my website because all I needed to do was recognize, that yucky feeling. It's just something I have to push through. And sometimes you can, but the marketing piece, the rest of it. I had to have help with that.

Speaker 3: That is something that I help some people with Yeah. Is the social media stuff.

Speaker 3: Online. I do the calendar posting, like making sure there's something posted every day and then let them do any extra posts they want to do to flavor it.

Speaker 2: But you probably get their heart and their sentiment into it. 'Cause that's critical. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Because there's no point in doing something.

Speaker 3: Because again, I was a military brat as well, so there's no point in doing something [00:28:00] if you're not gonna do it.

Speaker 2: Right. To a point, I do think that when you first start, there is a value to falling on your face. A few times. But then as you start to realize this isn't working, figuring out what will work is important.

Speaker 2: And so there definitely is a place for people to come in and help, but there's a difference between getting help and substituting help.

Speaker 2: Because you're afraid because you have a block.

Speaker 3: Most of the people I work with are, there are a couple of the people I work with who are great with technology and they do wonderful.

Speaker 3: But most of the people I work with, technology is not their friend.

Speaker 3: And so I am the one. Yeah. Did they come true with questions

Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's a definite value in that. Yeah. That's one of my goals is to have somebody do all my social media for me, because I am not I do [00:29:00] it, but I don't love social media.

Speaker 2: I love people. And I think that's part of what I don't like about social media is that social media, we tend to, we go right back into what I was doing before where it was fear-based, but it's intentional on social media where we try to paint this picture of us being perfect. And finding that balance has always been difficult for me.

Speaker 2: And now that I. This sounds terrible, but now that I really don't care whether you like my stuff or not. It does bring a lightness to it. I just put it on there and it's got a couple likes on. That one didn't get anything. Oh, that one went viral. Oh, wait a minute. That was the wrong one to go viral.

Speaker 3: So for me it's mostly I don't, none of the stuff I do is probably intended to go viral because it is basically, stuff that is, Hey, I'm here on social media. Look at me maybe. But it's not so much made for, [00:30:00] look, share this is the most brilliant thing on the planet because. That's

Speaker 2: the thing that I had go viral wasn't supposed to be either.

Speaker 2: It's a pin on Pinterest and the business before, what I'm doing now was actually for insulin resistance reversal. And that is haunting me because for seven months I've been trying to get Google to understand I'm not doing that anymore. But when you get 500, 600 clicks a month from this one pin, Google's you may not think you're doing insulin resistance, but they think you are.

Speaker 2: Somebody does. It's so I just spent the week putting schema all over my website and trying to convince Google, no, really, I've changed directions. I'll still do it, but it's not where I want to be long term.

Speaker 3: So for your business and others what has helped you the most? To not just break, 'cause you'd have the breakthrough from the brainspotting [00:31:00] thing, but then you still have to go and do I can have a breakthrough all day long.

Speaker 3: Oh yeah. This goes to that memory. That's why it's bad or whatever. That doesn't mean I'm going to change the direction of what I'm doing and complete it. So my question is, once you knew what the problem was, how did you go and do, because a lot of people don't get that. They go, oh yeah, no. Now I know what the problem is.

Speaker 3: I'm golden.

Speaker 2: Because No, you're not. Yeah. This is a different, so this isn't just knowing what the problem is, it's removing the problem. Do I still struggle a little bit with the, to do the doing part? Sure. I have a DHD I'm going to struggle a little bit with it, but there's not the. Can't do it feeling.

Speaker 2: And now it's more of a, okay, I know I have to do this, and this. Like when this comes out i'm going to be promoting it. And it's okay, what are my [00:32:00] motivations for promotion? And motivations are I'd like to have some people find my site, but I also want to return the favor to you for inviting me for this conversation.

Speaker 2: And so I feel an obligation to you and this helps me to do the thing. Same thing with the social media right now. It's okay, I have an actual objective. So when I get overwhelmed, flustered, when I wanna pull back, because I've had so much brain spotting, I say so much. I've had about eight or 10 sessions.

Speaker 2: In the last two and a half years. But because I've had so much brain spotting around things like this I know that if I just stop for a minute and ask myself the questions that my body and my brain told me I need to ask, which is, okay, are we stuck because we don't know where to start? Where do we start?

Speaker 2: Are we stuck because there's [00:33:00] something about it that doesn't align with who we are that we need to fix? Or do we not need to be doing this at all? And if so, what are we gonna do instead? And this is not something that you can really up. You can apply it for yourself, but the answer is actually inside of you.

Speaker 2: Your brain and your body will give you those tools to know, okay, this is what I do. A friend of mine now. Did her brain spotting. And it was really funny because we do the brain spotting and through the thing we started off because she was irritated, because she's I'm overwhelmed. I don't know how to promote myself.

Speaker 2: I feel like I'm going 80 different directions. What do I do? So okay let's do the brain spotting on it. So we do the brain spotting, and in the session she says, I just need to write a book. If I write my book, it'll all become clear. And this was actually fairly early in the session, not [00:34:00] like it usually is about halfway to three quarters that you get the click, but you got the click really early.

Speaker 2: And then we just kept processing some things. She came back for her followup a couple weeks later. And she said, I don't wanna talk about Brainspotting right now. I don't even know if it worked, but I gotta tell you what's going on. She said, I'm on chapter seven of my book and this is what I'm doing and this is who I'm marketing to, and this is how I'm doing the marketing and all of this.

Speaker 2: So I don't know if Brainspotting did anything for me or not. And so I said, hold on, let me get your transcript. And so I go back to her transcript and I said, if I can just write my book, I'll know what I need to do. And so her brain and her body knew what she needed to do. She'd already had the education.

Speaker 2: My gosh, how many? How many free YouTube videos, how many courses, how many coaches, how much money and time and effort have you spent learning about business?

Speaker 2: Your brain already has all of that in there. You [00:35:00] just need the freedom to know exactly where you need to be. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there's, for brand newbies who've never taken a course and never watched a YouTube video, you need a course, you need a video.

Speaker 2: Don't spend $10,000 on one like I did find. Yeah. Oh I have that t-shirt first. First one was six months for 10,000. I was gonna be on the beach with my laptop working one day a week. Does it look like I'm doing that? I know it's, I don't see a beach

Speaker 3: behind me. I see a guitar behind you.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And a cat tower.

Speaker 3: But there's no sand like cat.

Speaker 2: No. The walls are kind of ocean colored on purpose. Yeah. So I've been there. Don't spend the 10,000 upfront. Find somebody to mentor you. Find a coach that is not going to charge you an arm and a leg. I would say if you're brand new to [00:36:00] business, I wouldn't spend more than about five grand.

Speaker 2: You're your first one, and if you can get it under three grand, do it. Make sure that they've got a lot of great testimonials and learn and go on YouTube and absorb as much as you can. Go to every free thing that you can, and know that all those free things are leading you to purchase something, but you don't always need to purchase.

Speaker 2: Sometimes you can just glean a little piece from each one.

Speaker 2: When you're ready to make an investment, make sure that you love the person that you're investing with and that it's not a knee jerk reaction. I am the queen of kneejerk reactions. I have spent probably 25 grand on my business. It's yeah.

Speaker 3: I have not done the $10,000 thing. I did do a free, webinar for that Cardone, grant Cardone, yeah. 10 x whatever. He has great presence and stuff. But the guy he had [00:37:00] hosting the free webinar

Speaker 2: he was just, I'm so excited to be here and I'm just like. He is trying to steal his energy and his presence instead of being himself.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. It was wild. Yeah. Not that there's anything wrong with Grant Cardone, please don't come at me. That was just my opinion.

Speaker 2: No. And you weren't complaining about Grant Cardone.

Speaker 2: You were complaining about the guy that was hosting.

Speaker 3: Exactly. Like I said, don't come at me, it's whatever. And I do have a friend who does, who is certified to teach his stuff and yeah. I have no issues. It was just the guy was just wildly not himself.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And it comes through, authenticity is such a huge piece, but it's so hard to be authentic when our brain is going.

Speaker 2: Ooh. But if anybody sees you. They're not gonna like you, or if you don't act this way, which is probably what was going on in his brain, is that the only way that I will be like [00:38:00] Grant Cardone, is to steal Grant Cardone's energy. And he would've been so much more effective if he just would've been himself, even if he was not as bouncy and not as loud or, you would've appreciated.

Speaker 3: As somebody who has a lot of trauma, when I look at people, I see the truth of them. And I don't mean that makes me a psychic, orny that BS because I am not woowoo. Okay? There's no woowoo here. But what it is I have been through a lot of experiences that make me go is your face real or are do you have a mask up that is fake?

Speaker 3: And is it because you've been through trauma? Or is it because you're the wicked witch of the east and there's a problem?

Speaker 3: And so I see that. And so I saw his, he's just, I don't know what it was about him. He just didn't seem authentic to me. Yeah. And I see that in a lot of people who are online these days.

Speaker 3: Everybody's oh, I have to be, Ms. Sally Sunshine. [00:39:00] You know what? No, you don't. I've had people get on me before because, I am stressy depressing and all that good stuff. I am somebody who has P-T-S-D-C-P-T-S-D, I have major depression, major anxiety disorders. I am a mess.

Speaker 3: Okay. But I am still me. I don't try to act like anybody else. I know when to censor myself. So if I'm with one friend who I absolutely don't cuss near. Then I'm not being faked by not cussing near her. I am being appropriate with that person. You're being respectful. I was raised by a sailor who turned into a trucker.

Speaker 3: I have a mouth. Okay. I have a mouth. Yeah. You can guarantee I have a mouth on me. But for that one friend, I would never even think about going near her and saying any of this stuff that will fly out my mouth on the regular, around some other people. I have [00:40:00] a meeting with my sister and I'm just like, we're both cussing at each other.

Speaker 3: And you would think, oh, they're mad at each other. No, we're just having a conversation with pepper thrown in. Like it's nothing. Their words that add flavor to the conversation, that's nothing gonna add. Yeah. And everybody else in the room's, like

Speaker 2: they're about to

Speaker 3: kill each

Speaker 2: other. There's a difference between wearing a mask in front of people and.

Speaker 2: Tuning yourself to the room. Some of the best examples of this are you gonna act the same way at a party on a Friday night as you are at work or at church on Sunday? You don't have to be fake at any one of 'em, but you also don't want to pretend to be someone you're not. It made immediately made me think of a story.

Speaker 2: After my husband and I were married. We were standing in [00:41:00] church something and I got, I don't know if I was startled or something, just instantly, that instant flare of anger or whatever. And I cursed and he was like, Ugh. We're in the church and I was like, it's okay. God knows I curse.

Speaker 2: It's not like I'm gonna say it up on stage. This is a surprise for him. Yeah. This is not a surprise. There wasn't anybody around. It's just this building. Take me back to my teenage years and I would've pretended like I didn't curse in church. It would've been like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2: I am pure. I was like, yeah, no I'm not. Yeah, no, I'm real.

Speaker 3: So when I help people with social media or I see, the people I follow on social media are because they are authentic. Yes. There's this lady, I don't know what else to call her. She does swoop documentaries. She goes deep diving on different, things and drama that are happening and she [00:42:00] finds out exactly what's happening.

Speaker 3: It's really cool. She has trauma in her past, but she. She is real about it. There's nothing fake about her. Even if she's, a little excitable and she will be, petty. She can get, she'll make know petty.

Speaker 3: Sometimes she'll get petty 'cause of something somebody said or done or whatever, but you could tell that she still cares about things and people like, she won't show kids faces and things like that because even if the parents are showing the kid all over the internet, like it doesn't need to be, she

Speaker 2: doesn't need to do it.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I also like Charlotte Dore, I'm probably saying that wrong. I'm so sorry if I did, but, she does reaction videos, and she's mostly known for wedding mishaps. Oh. Where I've known her yet the mother-in-law comes to the wedding in a white dress and stupid stuff like that.

Speaker 3: I like her because again, she's still, she's talking about [00:43:00] stories that are happening, but you get pieces of her because she's oh, hell no.

Speaker 2: It's like the, it ma made me think of the lady on TikTok, the blonde I don't know her name. She's over in England, I believe, and she does the reviews of the cooking videos, especially when they use the big blocks of Vel Vita cheese.

Speaker 2: And she's sitting there drinking a drink. While she's doing it. And at the end of it she usually goes, oh hell no one runs out of the room. And she, it's not that she's trying to be mean or ugly, she's just having fun and playing. It's called comedy. And

Speaker 3: there's also the fact that people should know by now that you can't eat at everybody's house.

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Some of the stuff people be putting in stuff. I'm telling you now, if I come to your house for dinner and it smells nasty in there, I ain't nothing. No. I'm already nauseous. You're gonna make me puke if I actually eat it. That's not happening here. We aren't doing it. Yeah. I'm a very picky eater.

Speaker 3: I will very picky [00:44:00] eater it. I don't care what it looks, I get Uhuh. Nope, I've gotten him enough. I used to be starved out. I definitely can handle not eating for a couple days if that's what it takes to not have, whatever that mess is. I won't do it.

Speaker 2: See I was raised Baptist, so anytime there's food around you eat it anyway, because that's what they do.

Speaker 2: It's like social food is social and you just, it's oh, yeah, I don't like that. Yeah. Yeah. I just manage.

Speaker 3: I just manage. I ain't eaten. No. I was the one who would be like, yeah, there's nothing here for me to eat. And I'd just sit there. I didn't make a big deal out of it. My parents usually might do if you don't eat, you're, especially if it was at home meal in public, they wouldn't say anything.

Speaker 3: It was, at home, that thing

Speaker 2: that they would say something. Yeah,

Speaker 3: yeah. I always try. And then it was, you're not eating another meal until this one is finished. Oh. I'm like that's not gonna happen.

Speaker 2: Sat at the table. I can remember many times when I was younger, [00:45:00] orange Ruffy was my arch nemesis and the bottle of ketchup, which I don't like ketchup.

Speaker 2: Really, that was the only saving grace, is I finally would just put enough ketchup on it that I couldn't taste it, and then I would eat it. So I, yeah. It took me a long time to eat fish after I grew up long time.

Speaker 3: I am one of those people. My mom liked to do boiled dinners. Oh. And I don't like soggy food.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't like soup. Yeah. I don't like, I like, the only soup I like is actually a chowder. I like New England clam chowder. Oh yeah. And that's it. But I was raised a lot, navy brat, so I was eating me some chowder. Okay. Yeah. And I like that one, but. None of the other stuff.

Speaker 3: I don't even like to let my ramen noodles stay in water because the noodles get soggy and I will barf.

Speaker 3: I'm not eating what I don't like, it's I'm not doing it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And

Speaker 2: here's the thing. We wouldn't brain [00:46:00] spot that because there's no reason for you to do it.

Speaker 3: To have boiled cabbage. Like why would you do that? Oh, it smells like dirty butt. Let's not have that.

Speaker 2: That's a nice way of saying what it smells like, but I love it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh. Like it, it was something else. And we were talking, I was actually having this exact conversation with somebody and I was like, I don't like it. I'm not gonna like it. I don't wanna brain spot it. It might be trauma related. Don't care. I'm not gonna do it. Yeah. So there's no benefit to fixing it.

Speaker 2: That is just who

Speaker 3: I wanna be. And that's where networking comes in, because that's when you, at least in business, not for personal life. Yeah. I don't know what you do in your personal life, except for maybe not be around people who are going to boil cabbage and make the house smell like dirty butt for a week.

Speaker 2: Or go over to my house and we'll have some corn beef with the cabbage and we cook it in chicken broth and it's a little crispy still. And yeah. No. No thank you,

Speaker 3: but it does smell [00:47:00] and then you know that you, that sentence that people do. Oh, but you haven't had it the way I cooked it yet. I am telling you 100% of the time, that did not matter.

Speaker 3: I don't care what your recipe is. It still gets stuck in my throat or it still grows, like I'm not eating it. Stop it. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It sounds like yours is a sensory thing though. So that's a completely different thing most of than a taste thing because it can honestly be the difference. I've actually had two people in my life now, but hated tomatoes.

Speaker 2: Hated tomatoes, couldn't put tomatoes on anything. And then I introduced them to homegrown tomatoes and they were like, oh, these have flavor. These are good. So there can be situations where, yeah, you probably

Speaker 3: don't like seeds in the middle. I'm throwing that at somebody. It's hard on the outside. Soft on the inside.

Speaker 3: Are you insane? That's not something to eat.

Speaker 3: I like spaghetti sauce. As long as they don't [00:48:00] have chunks of tomato in them. And I like ketchup in small degrees. Like I'm not putting a mountain of ketchup on anything, which my mom used to do with meatloaf, which made it completely disgusting, but there you go. But the whole meal thing again, join us next week as we,

Speaker 2: as we publish Nikki's new cookbook, eating for Sensitive

Speaker 3: What Not to cook People in your life who are food sensitive.

Speaker 3: Yeah, apparently my parents didn't care and still tried to do it, but after a while they got it through their thick skulls and I would get to make a sandwich if they were doing some other thing because I would, I. Literally would not eat any of it.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I don't care. You. Oh, you want me to not eat for five days?

Speaker 3: Okay, that's fine. I just took over

Speaker 2: cooking and that, that solved that problem. I think I was, oh no, I don't. 11 when I started cooking and it was like, okay you guys are gonna cook this way. I'm gonna start, I'm gonna learn. And I figured it out and started doing it.

Speaker 3: No. When I first started to learn at [00:49:00] home, I mixed up like either baking powder or baking soda.

Speaker 3: The one that didn't belong in the cake, I put in the cake and had a my mom scream at me for literally 15 minutes with her face right here. So I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna learn how to cook here. And then I learned how to cook in a restaurant on a line. Which was interesting. And so I would cook for people and then people got picky.

Speaker 3: Oh, you didn't put salt and pepper on this? No. You're supposed to do that yourself. Oh, then you're supposed to do that. Oh, you didn't do this. Why didn't you do this? And so now I have panic attacks trying to cook for more than just me.

Speaker 2: So we could baseball that one. That's easy. That is a trauma that is stupid.

Speaker 2: People need leave me alone. But do you want to fix it? And that comes in the question, is that something that you wanna do? I don't want to cook. Okay, then you don't wanna brainstorm. Oh,

Speaker 3: [00:50:00] okay. Now that we are wildly off topic and not what I was trying to do at the beginning, I swear I had a point. But it's mainly that there are, look, you can have macaroni and cheese and most people will be like, yes, I will eat that, right?

Speaker 3: But some people can't cook it to save their life, me, I'm not cooking for massive amounts of people, and I do know a way to cook it, but I know that there are better ways to cook it. And that actually million different things ties all the way back, doesn't it? The big point is that where networking comes in, as I was trying to say, is for those things with your business, you network out and you find somebody like me who can, help you with your tech and social media and a bunch of other stuff because I cannot do one thing or I will rip all my pretty hair out and that's not a good thing.

Speaker 3: Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: If you haven't been on her [00:51:00] website, you need to go see all the stuff that she does. I was blown away.

Speaker 3: But you reach out to somebody like me to get the help that you need with the different things that you need help with. Some people want a super specific coach that does one super specific thing, go find them.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 3: You can find a coach that will teach you how to poo correctly, apparently. I don't know. You could do anything if you set your mind to it on the internet apparently. Okay. Don't go looking. It's not a good space but you can find it out there. You can find people like me. I am on Alignable. I see from the little thing I'm looking at over here that you're on Alignable. I am on Alignable, yes. Are we connected?

Speaker 2: I think so. Okay. I think that's actually how we ended up here.

Speaker 3: Okay. I think you set like a meeting up because of Alignable and then I was like, are you here for the podcast or this?

Speaker 3: And you were like, yeah. [00:52:00] You have a podcast?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I was like, networking. But if you have a podcast and I'm a fit for it, that sounds like fun. So yeah, because I love to network. I truly believe that the best way to grow your business is to help somebody else grow theirs. Because that's really what it's all about.

Speaker 2: That's a piece of that we've lost in our culture.

Speaker: Our

Speaker 2: culture has become about me. And it's a piece that we need to gain to learn, get back. We need to learn how to do that again, where we care about helping others

Speaker 3: without a camera being stuffed in your face.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Without having to do it because you put a mask on that says, oh the mask says I'm supposed to feel this way.

Speaker 2: But generally, like I have a gentleman that I networked with. That, he's got a daughter that he was shared a story about, and I was like can I pray for it? He was like, yes, it's wonderful. That was three months ago, and she's still on my mind when I get up in the morning and I'm doing my talk.

Speaker 2: It's I don't even remember [00:53:00] her name, but it's not important. What's important is she's on my mind

Speaker 2: and helping each other, even in small ways, little things like that, promoting each other. Everybody I network with, I'm like, Hey, tell me when you got a special going.

Speaker 2: Let me share it. It's, there's power in the group.

Speaker 3: So my whole philosophy. Is that I need to be helping others. I'm not in the, to make billions of dollars because that's just not my goal.

Speaker 2: Now I saw your bank account last time and you No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 3: Look, if you saw some zeros on there I would like you to hand me your glasses because I don't see them.

Speaker 3: Were they

Speaker 2: after the period? Is that where

Speaker 3: I saw the, probably

Speaker 3: This is not England where we put the a period instead of the comma, oh, there's that period means there, there's no zeros.

Speaker 2: Darn. I [00:54:00] was gonna ask you to give me some after this

Speaker 3: But I help in some of the groups that I'm active in, I will help whoever, if somebody comes in and is Hey, I need help with this. I'm helping that person.

Speaker 2: Yeah,

Speaker 3: I don't need to be paid every single time. I do a small little task for somebody. Not that I'm going to just start helping everybody and their brother who comes outta the woodwork because I said that, not the point.

Speaker 3: Yeah. But for me, a lot of my identity is I is tied into helping others because I didn't always have the help. Yeah. I didn't always have people around that would help. And that's why I'm going to help and I want that's why this podcast is here. Yeah. Because I wanna be able to help others get to services or people that make sense for them, whether it's business or with their mental health, because we all have something.

Speaker 3: I read something somewhere, don't quote me on where, 'cause I don't remember. [00:55:00] But we're all fighting demons that we know nothing about. Yep. The demons I'm fighting are a little bit louder than some people's demons. They're a little bit quieter than other people's demons. They're just mine and somebody else has to deal with theirs, and I want to help them quiet their demons because that's just who I am.

Speaker 3: You are not gonna find me at Burger King handed out burgers with a camera in my hand saying, here you go. Homeless people have a burger. Yeah. Because that is the rudest thing on the planet. That is not help. That is you being selfish.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's putting yourself before others to make yourself look of value.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I struggled with how I could do that for people with my business. And so I do the free intro. You call and I've got 30 minutes and we'll talk either mental health, if you wanna know if something can be [00:56:00] fixed or not, and I'll talk business with you and does it lead to a brain spotting conversation?

Speaker 2: Usually, but only if you need it. Sometimes it'll lead to, no you don't, this isn't gonna work for you. But I figured out something and it was like, oh, this is brilliant. So I do a free group brain spotting. And so we bring the power of the group in there and we touch on that little bit of healing to get you a taste of, oh, this is what she's talking about, and bring you a little relief.

Speaker 2: Just a little bit of breath back into the subject. And. It's spreading. I've actually already had another brain spotter who came and watched, and she's thinking about doing the same thing. And she actually, instead of working with entrepreneurs, she works with women with children who are recently no longer homeless.

Speaker 2: And so that's, it's wow, look what I'm spreading here. Because [00:57:00] now not only do I get to, to touch my people, but now what I've done is gonna touch these people. And then I've got another brain spotter who wants to learn about it. And then she works with a different, she works with a different group of people.

Speaker 2: And so it's gonna touch those people. And if you think about helping others as spreading that love and realizing that you get to touch so many people that you would never have touched before. Very few women who are recently not homeless. Are going to look looking for brainspotting for entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2: Maybe they will eventually because they've got some fire in them if they did that, but right away they're not. But I still get to touch them through her. How beautiful is that?

Speaker 2: And you get to do that by touching everybody with this podcast because there's somebody listening who either isn't getting treatment for their mental health, [00:58:00] or is confused or is upset, or is an entrepreneur who's looking for help, and you get to touch them, and then everybody that they touch and then everybody that they touch, it's exponential.

Speaker 2: And there's not much better. There's just not much better than knowing that there's that many more people who are going to have a smile on their face at some point.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I do to always say one more thing. You're not broken no matter what your brain tells you, no matter what other people tell you. You're not broken. I promise.

Speaker 3: Thank you for being on the podcast. All of your contact information will be below. And [00:59:00] we'll get people sent your way. Okay.