The human mindset is a powerful force that shapes our thoughts, behaviors, and life experiences. Understanding and harnessing it is key to personal growth and success. But, have you ever wondered just how much control you have over your own mindset?
In this episode, I had an insightful talk with Sean Marshall, a Mindset Coach and Founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting. Our discussion ventured deep into the human mindset. Sean discussed the idea of fluid mindset and shares tips for mastering emotional control when faced with triggering situations. Sean shared what Shadow Work is and how it helped his clients.
Tune in for an enriching exploration of mindset and the techniques to harness its potential.
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Mindset Matters: Strategies for Mindful Living with Sean Marshall
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I start with this tagline every single time, “Your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less,” because, in its essence, this podcast is all about mindset. I share all kinds of stories about all kinds of people that have done amazing things and follow their true passions, follow their true dreams, but one of the things that is required in order to do that is the right mindset and it’s my hope that these stories, by being exposed to enough of them and being exposed to enough of the type of content that I provide, will help you improve your mindset so that you believe that whole, “I can, I will, and I should,” as far as whatever it is that you really want out of your life, in essence. My guest today, Sean Marshall, the founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting, is indeed a mindset coach and his work is all about improving his clients’ mindset.
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Sean, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me here.
Thank you for joining us and let’s start, let’s dive right into mindset. How would you describe your mindset as you approach Future Pace or any of your other endeavors in life?
So what I find serves me best, okay, is my mindset, I would imagine, just like most people’s, is fluid. Sometimes, my mindset is better than others than at other times and so what I like to look at my mindset is I’m curious. If I’m on a roll, I’m curious. If I’m having a day or two where things might present some opportunities for me to grab a learning to help me move down the path, that’s where the curiosity comes in.
And so I’m always looking at my behaviors and asking myself, by doing this, is this the person I want to become? Click To TweetSo that’s in any situation where you have a choice? Is that what you default to ask yourself?
I don’t believe that anybody has arrived.
Yeah.
We are all on our own journey, we’re all on our own path, and when I find myself presented with situations where I might look at things a little sideways or they might have me curious and just kind of showing up in a way that maybe isn’t who I’d want to be, I have to ask myself, I really have to ask myself, “What’s going on here?”
And it’s one thing to say, “Oh, that person drives me crazy,” and you’re pointing your finger at somebody, it’s not so much that you have three fingers pointing back at you saying, “Well, take a look at yourself,” it’s the fact that the person that you’re pointing at is the very thing or very person that you’re giving all of your power away to. And so when I work with my clients, I have to be able to do this with myself too. Anything that I asked my clients to do, it’s something that I’ve done for myself. I have to be able to be congruent in what I’m asking my clients and for that space, for that reason, for that purpose, I’m constantly running myself through these questions, this internal dialogue.
Now, you said that mindset is fluid and that’s pretty obvious in the sense that, one day, you’re in a good mood, the next day, you’re in a bad mood and stuff like that. Let’s say something bad happens to you one day and you’re just suddenly in a bad mood. Is that a shift in mindset or is that just a response to something that happened?
Let’s say that something comes up. I mean, it could be a trigger. I’ll share this, earlier this year, I got triggered, and if I’m responsible in how I say this, I really need to be saying this in a way of I triggered myself. So I got really angry. In fact, it was as angry as I can remember being maybe in the last 20 years.
Oh, wow.
It was a really good one and I’m sitting here going, “Okay, what’s going on here?” and I knew based on my behavior, I knew based on my response that it was overboard from the actual stimulus itself. Whatever it was that happened, my wife and I got into a discussion and I got sideways, I got triggered, she said something, I got triggered. I’ve got a look at that little nugget there as an opportunity to say, “Okay, how’s this happening for me? What is actually here?” And a lot of the work that I do with my clients is shadow work. Using the Carl Jung definition, shadow is the everything that I say I’m not. If I hold myself out in my ego to be good or full of integrity, then if I recognize a behavior that by my definition isn’t good or isn’t in integrity and I get upset about that, it’s a reflection of what’s going on inside of me of where I may not be holding myself to my own standard in terms of what’s good or what might integrity be about. And so if you’re getting upset about something, it really is a mirror. It’s a mirror holding the reflection back at you and it’s begging you to ask the question, “How is it that I’m benefiting by either not being good or not holding integrity?” And you can benefit from not being good, you can benefit from not being in integrity.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
You’ll pay the price for it. You’ll absolutely pay the price for it. Where it’ll often show up is it’ll show up in how you’re triggered. With my clients, if they’re overly sad or overly angry, and I really need to preface this with appropriateness, is the work I do and doesn’t set up a situation where my clients won’t have emotions. That would be irresponsible.
Yeah, that’s part of life.
What it does do is it blows out the root cause of anger, it blows out the root cause of sadness, and then after we’ve done that, we ask a Future Pace question, put yourself out in the future, if this were to happen again, would you have an inappropriate or unwarranted expression of that emotion? So if you’re going overboard, gosh, yeah, okay, let’s go back, let’s do some more release work. If you said, “No, I ought to be angry in that situation. Anger would serve me in that situation,” cool. What you want to be really mindful of is is it overboard?
Like disproportional to the stimulus.
Road rage is a really — it’s a classic example. I mean, how many of us have been driving down the road and we get cut off or we might cut somebody off and, all of a sudden, we didn’t even know we did something and we’re getting the finger from somebody and we’re like, “What the heck happened?”
Yeah, where did that come from.
Where did that come from? If you’re road raging, chances are there’s a root cause to that and that’s something that I can help my folks with in terms of their mindset.
Do you agree with the statement sadness is anger directed inward at yourself?
I’ve not heard that. So you bring in two emotions and it’s really important to address anger first because anger is a stimulant in our neuro connections up here. It’s a stimulant. Sadness is a depressant.
Yeah, that makes sense.
When I do the release work with my clients, it’s not uncommon at all after we release anger, they’ll feel sad. They’ll actually feel the emotion of sad because anger is now out of the way.
It sounds like what you do is you recognize, which everyone has, is like certain pattern, especially when you get like disproportionately angry, so it’s like one thing, someone grabs your shirt and starts punching you in the face and you punch them back because that’s kind of proportional to what happened versus, okay, someone accidentally stepped on the back of my shoe and, all of a sudden, I want to start stabbing the person. You’re just like, okay, maybe that’s a little bit disproportionate. And so is it about identifying those patterns, all the things that make you disproportionately angry, what is the root cause of it and what does that say about that’s kind of is your shadow? Is that kind of the right way of thinking about it?
Well, I tell you what, our thoughts are not our behavior and we are not our behavior. It’s really important to separate people from their behavior because when we can finally do that, we can actually address a root cause. Virginia Satir was one of the pioneers in NLP work. She was widely credited with the with the development of the meta model with NLP and she worked with the worst of the worst. She worked with wife abusers, sexual offenders.
I’m just going to pause you one second just to make sure my audience understands that. By NLP, you’re referring to neuro-linguistic programming, a tactic in which you use kind of the words you self-talk in your head. I just want to clarify that.
Great pause there. I’ll add on to that too. With NLP, it’s simply the language that we connect to the picture that’s in our head, our unconscious mind. Neuro, what’s going on in our mind, linguistic is the language of our mind, words, sounds, feelings, pictures, smells, tastes, those are all the language, and then programming is how does our language affect our neurology.
I see. Okay, so language is not just words, it’s like anything, like kind of just the delivery method.
Yeah. In fact, words actually only account for 7 percent of what’s communicated. The rest comes from body language, which is about 60, 65 percent, and tone of voice. The words actually make up very little of the communication.
Interesting, and now I’m just thinking in my head of phrases that could be portrayed very differently based on your tone of voice, right?
Absolutely.
“Oh, you’re a real one,” versus, “Ah, you’re a real one,” right? And that’s so different.
Yeah. Even your gestures that you use just then is the body language. Absolutely. Her motto was people are not their behavior. And, again, she worked with the worst of the worst offenders. She’s like, well, how can we ever hope to help somebody if we cannot separate somebody from the behavior that they did? How do we heal this person if we won’t allow them to be separated from the behavior? Doesn’t mean that they’re going to get out of jail, it doesn’t mean that at all or they’re going to get out of the institution where they might be. It will serve us much better to look at behavior separately from the person.
I think that makes sense. And so when you’re working with your clients, you’re kind of also imploring that and saying like, okay, you got angry, you got triggered, which we were talking about before, what you commonly get triggered by, and that’s separate from who you are essentially. Is this shadow type that you’re talking about with all the different archetypes and with the shadow, you said being kind of the things that you say you’re not, is that separate from your behavior then?
It can be. Well, one of the things I like to do with the work that I do is not to put definitive borders around any type of a problem because people are unique and they’re going to bring their own flavor, their own nuance to the situation, and it’s really in appreciating and respecting where they’re coming from that the best work gets done. And so to answer your question, I think, to go to a higher level here, I’ll ask questions in such a way that’ll help us identify patterns of behavior. And, again, once we can identify the pattern of behavior, we’ve got something to work with. And too often in life, I mean, I’ve certainly looked for this in my clients, is we look for cycles and rhythms in life that repeat themselves. A classic one is how many times have you encountered a friend who might date the same person over and over again only to get the same predictable catastrophic type of breakup.
Yeah, you see them repeat the same…
Yep.
And it’s like — and by same person, you don’t mean be exactly the same person but could be a very similar person with a very similar personality and priorities.
Yep. And they tend to be attracted to them and the relationship ends up falling apart and it falls apart even in a predictable and similar way because it’s happened time and time again. Somebody that’s gone through a work situation or a career even, and maybe they’re not able to hold a job and their behavior is they’re not showing up on time again and again and again, maybe they haven’t accepted the feedback, maybe they haven’t even been offered the feedback.
This is why it’s so important to understand the premise that people are not their behavior because our behavior is unconscious. Click To TweetWhat we do 99 percent of the time, we are on autopilot. We’re operating from our unconscious mind, especially with our habits and routines.
And the habits and routines are what eventually creates your life result is what — I’ve heard this so many times, like with the person that dates the same person, the person that ends up in the same terrible career situation over and over again, or the person that makes the same, I don’t know, stock market trading mistakes over and over again. So, is there hope, I guess, in the sense that you said, because over 90 percent of your behaviors are controlled by your subconscious and so we’re talking about these situations where you consciously know that these behaviors are not serving you well, they’re the reason why your life result is not where you want it to be, is this where this NLP and some of these other techniques kind of come into play? Are you trying to retrain your subconscious?
I want to first touch on something that you said here too is that is we might be conscious of the behavior, more than likely, we’re not conscious of it. More than likely, we’re not conscious of it. If we are conscious of it and we continue to do it, that’s going to put pressure on us at the unconscious level. That’s actually going to put pressure on our ego, it’s going to push through the persona that we’re trying to portray, and that eventually is going to put pressure on our shadow. We’re conscious of something and we continue to not take action. That is going to feel like all sorts of emotional baggage.
Oh, for sure.
You know the path you need to take and you’re not taking it, that’s a conscious thing and by not taking it, that is going to create all sorts of discomfort, all sorts of cognitive dissonance, because you have a knowing of what it is that you want and need to do and yet you’re not taking the action. And, sometimes here’s the thing with the unconscious mind, the unconscious mind might be holding you back because its highest directive is to keep you safe.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as you were saying that, the first word that popped in my head was fear.
Yep. The unconscious mind, the highest directive of the unconscious mind is to keep us safe and it’ll do it through — the simplest way I like to look at this is, given the choice, we like to think consciously about this, however, this is just the unconscious mind, it will choose to be accepted before it will choose to be authentic. Being accepted allows us to be part of a group. Being authentic, we risk being isolated and there’s not safety being isolated. This goes back to kind of like our croc brain, if you will. We want to be in a group, we want to be in a community where we can feel accepted and safe.
Yeah, that’s like evolutionarily most of human existence, if you were excluded from the group and left on your own, that was probably a death sentence.
Yeah, doesn’t work out. I mean, there are always going to be exceptions.
I think we can all think of a person, a person in our lives or a famous person or even a person who was like written about in a book or a blog that really bucks that trend and a person that really does like —
Rasputin.
Yeah, exactly, goes for the authenticity over the acceptance. And we also know that the people where it’s worked out really well for and I would even say some people like Elon Musk probably are in that category too where it’s like, okay, well, he became rich and he has a lot of people that now accept him but at one point, he made that decision, okay, he got his payout from PayPal and he’s going to put all of it into a new business and not even upgrade his apartment.
Yeah. Elon Musk is a fascinating character too. Never having met the man —
Of course, yeah.
I probably have as much exposure as the next person just based on what we see through social media about Elon Musk. I think I saw Jordan Peterson talking to Joe Rogan, I think he said to Joe Rogan, “You have reached and maintained your lift off from the fray which allows you to do whatever it is that you want to do.”
Yeah.
So he was basically — Jordan Peterson was saying to Joe Rogan you’ve gotten to this point now where you can be authentic you and the group can’t hurt you.
Oh. Yeah, we can think of all these people that reached that point, even in a particular field, the professor that’s been awarded 15 times and published 100 times and now if they say something that’s a little bit out of line, people are like curious, they’re like, “Oh, this person seems to know a lot and they’re saying something slightly different,” whereas if some, I don’t know, upstart 25-year-old that just got their PhD and is just trying to make it and they say something that’s totally off, people look at it way more suspiciously.
They might, yeah. They might not tend to give it as much credibility. But even with that, I mean, if we were to say, okay, somebody like Elon Musk, he certainly has his nuances.
Oh, for sure.
He’s wonderfully different, and yet, at the end of the day, would you want Elon Musk coaching you on relationship?
Probably not. I’m not going to say what everyone else listening wants but…
You know, an appreciation of what behaviors we’re each good at.
Yeah.
As a business mentor, man, if you can keep up with him, there might not be a better mentor.
If you can do those 80 hours a week, yeah.
Yeah. And he pays a price for it. He pays a price.
Oh, for sure. Sure. We all pay a price for decisions but it sounds like if you’re conscious of it, you’re either protecting yourself out of fear or continuing to do it out of cognitive dissonance because you’re getting some kind of reward for it, but what about these situations? It sounds like your bread and butter are these situations where people have behaviors that may not be serving them well but they’re not even conscious of it, they don’t even understand what’s happening, so even thinking about the person who has the same nasty breakup every year, there’s a different relationship, different person, same messy breakup every year and they think, “What’s wrong with me? Why does the same thing keep happening to me?” but they really, really don’t know in most of those situations, what you’re saying, they don’t know why they keep ending up there. Is the key to cognitively come to a mental understanding of why or is the key what you’re working with with the shadow work?
So, in shadow work and with the release techniques that I have, we finally learn what we’re meant to have learned on our path, because once we learn it, and we can actually dissociate from the situation and say, “Gosh, how silly was that behavior?”
Yeah.
“Look at how I was behaving in that situation. I no longer need to show up that way,” then and really only then, once we get the learning, does the release happen. And here’s the crazy thing too. This is so cool. We can get an unconscious learning and have release. We can have a connection to the energy that allows us to say, “Oof, oh my gosh, that didn’t serve, I don’t need to do that.” I may not have a specific conscious learning and yet, unconsciously, just because we looked at something from a different position, the energy could release very easily.
So you’re talking about a situation where it’s not necessarily intellectual and, say, the relationship person might not be like, “Well, I keep meeting these people and I try to change them and then they don’t change and they get mad at me,” and they understand intellectually the situation but it sounds like there’s some situations where it’s just like a purely energetic thing and you’re just like every time I’m in this energy, even someone that says I need to stop going to that place, I need to stop associating in those circles because they always just bring me into this energy and I need to kind of lean more into some other place and some other circle.
I love that you brought in the concept of energy.
Energy and environment will affect our behaviors before anything else will. Energy and your environment will drive your behaviors. Click To TweetIf we were to start with environment, how orderly is your car, how orderly is your desk, that is a metaphorical representation of how clean your thinking is as well. And so if we’re in a situation where we’re constantly finding ourselves surrounded by clutter, our thoughts are likely going to be cluttered as well. And so even by simply Feng Shui-ing your environment, you will Feng Shui your environment up here as well. That’s oversimplified, okay? Environment is also the people that you keep, that’s friends and associates. Many of us have heard by this point that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with. I would like to offer this to the audience here and just asking your audience to be real with yourself here. Sometimes, this is the hardest thing to ask somebody to do is to be real with yourself. If you’re the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with, how much time are you spending on social media? Are you spending more time on social media than you are with the five most important people in your life?
That’s a deep question.
Yeah. And if you are, then certainly there’s opportunity here to say, okay, how can I shift this if I’m recognizing it’s not supporting me? This goes back to habits. If I’m going to step into a habit, if I catch myself about to or in the middle of doing something that I’m desperately trying to break, Atomic Habits has a great one liner, is this thing that I’m about to do, is it in alignment with the person I wish to become? If you can have the recall to ask yourself that question when you catch yourself reaching for your phone and it’s a distraction mechanism or if you’re going to the fridge to grab a snack, it’s a distraction mechanism, or you’re going out for a smoke, if you can catch yourself in the moment of that stimulus to get up, ask yourself that question, it’ll help you frame, “Gosh, no, this isn’t in alignment with the person I wish to become. I wish to be a nonsmoker. I wish to be healthy,” is really the better way to look at it.
That’s such a powerful line and such a powerful statement because, I mean, obviously, I started a whole business around people spending less time in front of screens, less time on tech, but also this kind of unconscious decision, because it’s not all time in front of tech, it’s not even all the time on social media, if you have a clear reason for going to the site and you say like, “Okay, I’m gonna go on Instagram for 10 minutes because I wanna see photos, I wanna see what some of my friends are up to,” in order to facilitate a closer connection with them in person next time I see them, be like, “Oh, I saw your trip to Egypt and that was really, really nice,” or if you’re going on to promote your own business by making a post about how people with accounts do, then that makes perfect sense. If you’re doing something without even thinking about what it is and why and now, all of a sudden, you’ve said to people, for the 27th New Years in a row that you’re wanting to lose 20 pounds but you just reached for a piece of cake and you just reached for a doughnut and you don’t realize until you’ve already eaten it and you’re like, “Oh, shit, I wish I hadn’t done that.”
You’re going to wish for the next three hours while that sugar just crashes your system —
Oh, yeah, for sure.
— reached for the donut. This is actually a really cool exercise that we can do with NLP. Let’s say you have a craving for a food and so just imagine, Steven, if you could share with the audience here, what would your craving for a food be that you really like and, yet, if you could get rid of it for the rest of your life, you’d be okay with that?
Just the obvious thing that comes to my head is Doritos.
Doritos. Awesome. Awesome. And is it a specific type of Doritos or just any Dorito?
That red nacho cheese one. I mean, I’ll eat any but that’s the standard flavor of Doritos, yeah.
Okay, got it. So if I told you that in a matter of about 15 minutes, we could go through an exercise and you would never want Doritos again, would you be willing to — basically, I’ll say this, hack your mind so that you can move down your path and never have to worry about Doritos again?
I mean, that sounds pretty wonderful, to be honest.
It’s so easy to do. It’s so easy to do. I did it with a client who liked HI-CHEW candies.
I don’t even know what that is.
Imagine a starburst with a white center and he was addicted to them, you know, get the Costco bag, the 10-pound bag of whatever. And so, obviously, those weren’t serving him and we blew it out. In fact, even when he thinks about putting a HI-CHEW in his mouth, he has just the opposite effect.
So, I guess one thing I wonder is that is it possible to take this too far? One of my remaining screen time habits that I hate that I still have is watching too many YouTube videos sometimes, but, obviously, I want to be okay with I have something specific I’m curious about, how to fix a derailleur on my bicycle, what do experts predict for Jerome Powell’s next meeting with rate hikes where I’ll look it up and be like, “Okay, that’s pretty cool that I listened to it,” but that passive consumption, is there a way to — is it about drilling down to the specifics and say, like, rather than deleting the entire desire for it, just say, “I’m gonna delete the passive consumption”?
This really ends up opening up one’s conscious awareness. Let’s say, up until this point, Doritos were just unconscious. I mean, you reached for them, it was a thing that you liked. For me, it was donuts. I’ll be front and center here, I loved donuts. I could probably tell you where every donut shop in the city of Denver was. I’m not even joking. I loved donuts that much. This was over 50 pounds ago. And to answer your question, it served me to not have donuts. I do my best to live healthy. I’m a member of the 5 AM Club, I get up, I went for a walk this morning, I’m walking or I’m doing strength. Donuts was a bad habit for me. It was a convenience.
It’s like not the situation like, “Oh, a few donuts would be great,” like you wanted just completely off it.
Yep, completely off it. And so we don’t do anything in coaching, we don’t do anything with NLP, I don’t and then certainly the association that I’m certified through, we drill this down as part of our ethic is that we don’t do anything that would not be good for the client, it wouldn’t be good for the client’s immediate circle, i.e., their family, and it wouldn’t be good for the client’s community, their co-workers, their friend circles. If moving through an exercise with NLP, if we can’t answer one of those three or if one of those three comes up as a flag, we don’t do it. We don’t do it. So we bring in ecology. And along the lines there too, if you were to look up NLP online, you’re going to find as many horrible things said about it as you might find good things. And I really want to bring to the attention of the audience here because this is where the rubber meets the road. If you’re reading about NLP being used or spoken about unfavorably, it’s most likely because the person using NLP was being manipulative. When I work with a client, it’s all about influence and, okay, he might say, “Well, what’s the difference between manipulation and influence?” Well, influence is getting somebody to do something that they want to do — or let me rephrase that, influence is getting somebody to do something that I would prefer them to do and doing it for their reasons. Manipulation is getting somebody to do something for my reason. You could say that those who use NLP for manipulative purposes, they’re most likely they’re operating out of their shadow.
Ah, interesting way to like kind of bring it back full circle.
Yeah, I would say that they’re operating out of the shadow because they’re doing it from a self-centered motive.
I mean, this reminds me of kind of almost every tool that we have anywhere, whether it be money, whether it be religion, whether it be any other concept, like I had a previous guest say money is neither good nor evil until someone uses it to do something.
Beautifully said.
The same thing can be said about religion, spirituality, a whole bunch of other things. And one of the things that will happen is a lot of people will see the negative manifestations of a lot of these ideas and then just miss the entire idea, which there’s a danger in that as well.
It is so tempting for me to bring in the concept of duality here and we call it kind of in the school that I studied and that I participated in, we call it the law of creation, and that is, at the moment that we have a thought, a seed, a seed of thinking, a thought, our unconscious mind creates the equal and opposite of whatever it is that we are thinking about. For there to be hot, there must be?
Cold.
Cold. For there to be good, there must be?
Evil.
Okay. So what I just did is I asked you, Steven, where is your frame? Where is your dichotomy? Good and evil is a great one because it goes back to the Bible. The good and evil is kind of what Western civilization was formed around. It’s kind of what Western civilization and Christianity is formed around. To be good or to be bad, to be in favor of or to be cast out. And you can just look at the evolution and the history of Western civilization. The Inquisition. If you weren’t Christian, you were about to die is basically how far they took this right or wrong, this Christian or non-Christian. And other religions did it too, I’m not just picking on Christianity.
For sure. Yeah.
So this thing of writing good being accepted, going back to the accepted versus authentic, it’s safer for me to be a conformist than it is to be — that pattern has played out through all of human history.
Yeah, that reminds me of Nietzsche but, yeah.
Okay. So what do we do with this law of creation? For there to be good, there must be, you said?
Evil, yeah.
Got it. So I just want to invite you to your own paradigm, your own dichotomy, and so to the degree, Steven, I hope it’s okay that we’re working with you here for your audience.
Yeah, for sure.
To the degree that your dichotomy has good and evil, you will experience good and evil. You will be able to see evil, you will be able to label evil, and it’ll be your meaning of what evil is.
Yeah, we all have different meanings.
Nobody else has meaning. What if you had a dichotomy to where opposite of good, you had great? For there to be good, there gets to be great, so that is a frame that allows you to keep moving forward in a way that you want to go without having evil. This isn’t to say that we’re going to get through life without having some level of hardship, maybe even experiencing malevolence at the hands of another. It’s not to say that we’re going to get through life without having really hard times and really hard experiences. The death of a family member, the breakup of a relationship, these are all tragic things. How many spouses or how many boyfriends or girlfriends that you know have said something not so friendly about the person that they’re breaking up with?
Oh, yeah. I mean —
They’re evil. They’re blank. They’re blank. Well, okay. Got it. So, it’s in recognizing and appreciating that for every thought that you have, there’s an equal and opposite to it and it’s just now where do we take that? Where do we take that? And so if I find myself labeling everything through that lens, at the unconscious level, I’m going to be looking at things as either good or evil.
Now that you’ve kind of showed a little bit about how you work, what will be the best way for anyone listening to reach out to you, get a hold of you, if they’re interested in doing some of the shadow work?
Thanks for that. My phone number, I’ll just give it out here, 303-908-5530. My email address is sean@futurepacenow.com.
Futurepacenow.com, and that’s also your website, right?
I don’t have a website.
Oh, sorry, I misspoke.
No, that’s okay. I work with referrals.
If there’s one thing that our audience should be kind of taking away from this discussion about how anyone listening could kind of reorient their lives or kind of adjust their behaviors based on anything that they’ve heard, what will be the one most important takeaway?
You know, I’d like to offer them this. The work I do really boils down to unconscious level values. It’s really easy for us to say, “Well, gosh, I value family, I value money, I value career,” those are the conscious things that come up. Well, just like we have dichotomies, “I value family,” what’s on the other end of family might be, “Gosh, I value my isolation, I value my alone time,” or value career, oh, gosh, what’s on the other end of career? “Well, I really value my autonomy.” What’s on the other side of money? Well, gosh, my view of money is, “Gosh, I may never have enough money.” And so within our values, we have often belief systems at the unconscious level and what I’d like to do is offer your audience this question. Where is it that you’re spending your time? How is it that you’re evaluating the time that you spend? And begin to look at that in terms of what it is that you actually do value.
Where is it that you’re spending your time and how is it that you value the time that you spent?
How do you spend your time and how do you evaluate the time you spend, because value, at the end of the day, is where we put our time and energy, and so we can say that we value X, Y, and Z, and yet if our behavior and results don’t show it, then that’s not something that you value.
Yeah, for sure.
A good example is if I’m reaching for the phone to distract myself, well, I value safety over risking to learn or risking to put myself out there and be vulnerable, so I actually value safety so it may not be the actual item itself, it may actually be the benefit that you get from avoiding responsibility.
Yeah, avoiding the task that you need to do, avoiding the vulnerability of calling someone that may not want to hear from you.
I would ask your audience too, are your values getting you the results that you want? And these are unconscious and so it’s — because look at the results that you have and say, “Gosh, what is it that I want so badly that I’m willing to do something different to get the results that I haven’t been able to get?”
That is all really powerful stuff.
That’s where I shine with my clients. If I can give you just a brief example of what’s possible, and I have this client’s permission to talk about his story, so this client worked in financial services for like 10 years, and I’ve known him for a long time, he approached me just kind of head down and going, “Sean, I don’t know what’s going on. Been in this business for 10 years, I’ve never been able to make more than $50,000 a year and I’m a little bit ashamed about it, I’m a little bit — Can you help me?” I said, sure, let’s do a breakthrough session so we did a two-day breakthrough session where we dived deep into his thought structure. And this client of mine was a refugee from El Salvador, actually grew up during the civil war in El Salvador, and in the middle of the day, in the middle of the war, every day, he would have to walk down the battle line with a T-shirt wrapped around a stick and he would walk right down the battle line to the food depot on the other end of town to get food. And every day when he did this, he would say, “I’m going to do just enough. I’m gonna do just enough to survive today.” That became his thought, his unconscious pattern, his unconscious program, and that served him great. It kept him alive during the war. Fast forward, he’d come to the United States, that program is still driving him and so he would find himself in the middle of a workday saying, “I’m gonna do just enough today. I’m gonna do just enough.” He was unconscious to it, couldn’t see it. Could not see it. And so by the time we were done with the breakthrough session, he no longer had this unconscious belief that was driving him and he went from $50,000 a year to $250,000 in his very first year after working with me.
That’s amazing, and amazing example of an unconscious belief and kind of where it came from, right? Because we all have a spot that it came from.
There’s a root cause for every unconscious belief that we have and what I do is I help people discover those beliefs and then we blow them out with NLP. We get rid of them forever.
Well, I’m glad you’re able to find something also, which we get to touch on that really satisfies you in helping people. Sean, I’d like to thank you so much for coming on and joining us on Action’s Antidotes today, telling us about some concepts that maybe some of the audience is familiar with, some might not be, NLP and some of these ideas of shadow work and how we can overcome that. And I’d like to thank everyone out there listening and hope that, whatever mechanism you can use, that you find a way to become aware of whatever it is that you’re doing that might not be serving you well and find a way to find something that’s serving you better.
Steven, I so appreciate you having me on today. Thank you.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- Contact information: 303-908-5530
- Email address: sean@futurepacenow.com.
- Sean on Linkedin
- Future Pace Coaching
About Sean Marshall
Sean knows firsthand what it takes to help people truly identify and get what they really want out of a career – or purpose. His passion is discovering truth, and supporting his clients in getting to the root cause of things…all things that are in the way of getting results.
For nearly 10 years, he has been helping others discover and explore what makes them tick, helping them discover new choices and supporting them towards getting their results.
Sean Marshall is a member of the Association for Integrative Psychology and is a certified Master Practitioner in:
- NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming
- Mental and Emotional Release
- Integrative NLP Coach
- Hypnosis