Hi, everyone. Welcome to Your Superpowered Mind. I’m your host, Kristin Maxwell and in the show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life.
So learning how to use your mind to feel secure, learning how to use the power of your mind to prepare you rather than scare you is the greatest superpower any of us can learn to embrace.
Today, we are going to be talking to Tim Shurr about how to eliminate self-sabotage to finally reach your goals. Tim Shurr is an award-winning leadership speaker and business growth specialist with over 31 years of experience in psychology, NLP, and hypnotism. He’s facilitated over 15,000 one-on-one coaching sessions and worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies around eliminating that unconscious programming that holds us back from productivity and competence. He’s the author of several books, including The Power of Optimism, Losing Weight Without Losing Your Mind and Get Out of Your Way. He’s been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and the TEDx stage. I’m really excited to have him here today to share some of his mind secrets. So Tim, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you, Kristin. I’m happy to be here.
As you may know, my first question is always, what superpower did you uncover as a result of mastering your mind?
That’s a great question. The superpower that I discovered about myself is the same superpower that you have and that all your listeners have as well, and that is the ability to use the power of your mind to create your life by design and specifically, how to upgrade your beliefs and how to start telling yourself a new story that makes you feel safe and secure inside. Because one of the things that I’ve learned from doing thousands and thousands of individual coaching sessions over the last 25 years is that our biggest fear is that we’re not good enough. We’re not good enough because we’re not enough, we’re not going to be loved. And so how do we get love? those feelings cause so much stress and you actually keep us from feeling those feelings. So learning how to use your mind to feel secure, learning how to use the power of your mind to prepare you rather than scare you is the greatest superpower any of us can learn to embrace.
Wow. That is truly amazing because that feeling of fear and insecurity and being sort of in the clutches of our mind is how I think a lot of people feel. How did you learn to use the power of your mind to create the life that you want rather than feeling like your mind is controlling you? How did you discover that?
Well, first I discovered how to use the power of my mind to make myself crazy, and scared and stressed and broke and unhappy and frustrated, and how to build things up and then watch them fell apart, and so a big part of it was just learning what not to do.
And so the whole thing started. I was a kid, I was 12 years old, and the phone rang and I answered and I said, “Hello,” and the woman on the other end, she was calling from my dad’s work, and she said, “Honey, find your mom. There’s been an accident.” So my dad was working. He was an electrician at a steel mill. He was working on a big electrical box and, while he was in there, somebody turned it on and it exploded, so it burnt my dad real bad, 40% of his body. I didn’t see him for months after that and when I did see him, he was at the Loyola burn unit and he didn’t look like my dad, and it was very traumatic.
Now the good news is that he made it, and even though he has the scars on the outside, all of us had these scars on the inside, what today people would call posttraumatic stress. So in my mind, I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t have the language for it, but something shifted inside of me and I wasn’t playing life to win. I was playing not to lose. How do I not get hurt? How do I not have something bad happen? And of course, when you play not to lose, what happens is you keep losing, even if on the outside it looks like you’re winning.
So I got into psychology with the idea I’m going to figure myself out and then I found that the psychological tools were a little too slow. It wasn’t really getting me there. I was talking about my feelings, but nothing was changing. Then I started getting into other peak performance tools, like hypnosis, NLP, things like that, and that’s when I started to realize the power of your beliefs and the power of what’s going on in your unconscious mind. I got really fascinated with how do you upgrade that programming that’s running in your brain? Because you can’t just talk yourself out of it. You have to go in there and make some shifts inside, that your computer runs software programs. You can’t just tell your program or your computer to change the program. You’ve got to go in there and manually do it, and the same is true for your brain. Where we run these programs from our childhood, and often these programs need to be upgraded.
I started figuring out how to feel safer, how to feel more loved, how to talk to myself differently, how to use different words, how to hold my body in a new way, how to breathe differently. I mean, a bunch of little tiny little brain hacks. And then I started teaching them to all my clients who were coming in for all kinds of reasons, they wanted to stop smoking or lose weight, or they had dramatic situations from their past, and I started realizing that all of us feel wounded inside and we’re looking for a way to feel safe. And so over the years, I’ve just kept developing these new tools and techniques and experiences to help us to feel safe and secure inside, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Wow. When did you realize you had that realization that you were playing life not to lose? How did that shift? I can see how you got on the trajectory of I need to stay safe, but how did you realize, “Wait, okay, I want to shift how I’m looking at things overall in my entire perspective”?
A lot of us out there think we’re making it about other people when it really is still about ourselves, and so that’s why people will get so far and then it falls apart or they build something up and then it crumbles because they really haven’t developed that sense of inner peace.
Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So I would say that it probably happened around the age of 35. So I’m 49 right now. When I was around 35, that’s when I first started hiring business coaches, because I’ve gone to lots of seminars on personal growth and development and psychology seminars, and it was trying to help me have some breakthroughs and stuff, but it wasn’t until I started hiring business coaches that they started helping me understand my relationship with money, or my relationship with customers, or my relationship with how I spent my time and what I really focused on and I was lucky enough to find a coach who focused more on my personal life than my business life because both of those are intertwined and people don’t think so. They always think, “Well, just teach me how to make more money,” but if they’re not feeling good, or they’re chasing significance, or they’re not feeling connected with their spouse, then they bring that into their work life and then come from a place of scarcity, then they show up needy and then they make a whole bunch of bad choices, and that’s what I was doing too.
That’s when I started to put together that, wow, this is really showing up in all the areas of my life and so I need to learn how to play to win and in order to play to win, you have to feel secure so that you don’t have to make it about yourself anymore and then you can make it about other people. A lot of us out there think we’re making it about other people when it really is still about ourselves, and so that’s why people will get so far and then it falls apart or they build something up and then it crumbles because they really haven’t developed that sense of inner peace. And even if you are successful financially. I mean, I coach a lot of very top performing rich, wealthy people, but they come to me because they’re stressed out and I find that they still have what I call achievers syndrome. They’re still at some level trying to prove themselves through what they accomplish at work, which inherently means you never will.Â
It was around that time that I started really growing a business that that level of awareness started to become more clear for me.
Wow, that’s great. I’m so curious to dig more into what it is that we do and how we can start to harness some of those tweaks ourselves, but we do need to go to a break. Before we go, can you let people know where they can learn more about you and what you do?
You can go to timshurr.com, and it’ll be in the show notes and you can grab a free copy of the mesmerizing secrets, mindset secrets checklist, or grab a copy of my book, Get Out of Your Way. Just hang out because after the break I’m going to teach you the number one way to train your brain for success.
That’s perfect. Great. So hang on, we’re going to come back and talk more about how to eliminate self-sabotage and meet your goals.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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