How to Silence Your Mind Like Never Before Without Meditation or Gratitude Lists with John McIntyre

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Content is Profit. Today, we'll be breaking down how to silence your mind like never before without meditation or gratitude lists. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to John Wood, aka John McIntyre from Drop Dead Copy, into EO Fire Studios. John is the founder of Rage Heart, a new online tool that teaches people how to silence their minds like never before. Without meditation, gratitude lists, or$49 moleskin journals.

0:40And today at Fire Nation, we'll talk about why entrepreneurs should learn how to silence their mind, how to do it, the root issue of a busy mind, system dysregulation, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John and our sponsors. Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners who want to get straight to the point. Join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions. Recent episodes include five must-knows to sell your online course, program, or membership, and four steps to grow your email list for your next launch.

1:18Listen to Imperfect Action wherever you get your podcasts. John, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? I've been on this, going down this rabbit hole of learning about the nervous system and something called nervous system regulation, which is something that most people have no idea. They've never even heard the term. And yet, for me, learning to work with my nervous system, learning to get into the body, because that's a big part of what it is, learning to create safety, learning to release stress and emotion from the past has been, it's changed my life.

2:00more than, you know, I've done all the different things people do to try and be healthier and happier and whatnot. And this thing has become the new standard that I measure everything by, because if it's not helping me to get into my body, if it's not helping me to work with the energetics of the past and release them, it's just not as good. And as far as success goes, I think a lot of what holds people back is this stuff. You know, everyone's trying to work with it in different ways. They might see a coach or a therapist. They might journal about it. A lot of people meditate these days, but I have not found like this nervous system stuff, which we'll talk about today.

2:34It has been not just a little bit better than all the other stuff. It's like, it's in a category of its own. So to me, that learning to work with the nervous system, get into the body, work with stress from the past is a huge key to the puzzle of success and success being not just money, you know, in business, a lot of people focus on money, but fulfillment and meaning and purpose and feeling like I am home. I am home in my body. I'm home with myself. I'm alive. Like that kind of success, which is I think the success that everyone's seeking. So that's my answer. Fire Nation, I know that you're excited to hear more about this topic, which is all around how to silence your mind like never before without meditation, without gratitude lists.

3:19Because I hear people all the time saying, John, everybody's like meditation, you got to do it every day. It just doesn't work for me. Everybody's like, John, I'm told to like write these lists of gratitude every day. I just never find myself doing it and it doesn't work for me. So we're going to talk about other options another way. And thanks to a little band called the Tremelos, we know that silence is golden, but why John? Why should entrepreneurs learn how to silence their mind? I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's probably fairly self-explanatory in the sense that anytime we set out to do something in life, we're going to have some thoughts about it.

3:59Some of those thoughts are helpful, but a lot of them are not helpful. You know, it's the standard worry script. What if this doesn't work? What if people don't like me? What if I get rejected? What if I'm successful? And it just goes on and on and on. And most of us, most people in the modern world have a mind that never shuts up. I think that's pretty – I think you could take anyone off the street and if you could look inside their head and look at their thoughts, you'd find that most people are thinking most of the time, 99 % of the time. And we have these rare moments when things quieten down and that's when the joy comes in.

4:32That's when we feel alive. That's when we feel really, really happy. And so – and from that place, if we can learn to be in that place more than when it comes to business and being an entrepreneur, I think that's when everything opens up. That's when creativity starts to flow. That's when motivation comes in. And that's when we're less likely to procrastinate because we're not trying to avoid something. Now, you believe that there is something very wrong with the traditional approach of meditation, of gratitude lists, of journaling, of talk therapy, you know, as you talked about these $49 Moleskine journals.

5:03Tell us more about your belief here. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm like most people. I tried a lot of that stuff and I still do it occasionally. I haven't meditated in a long time. But when I stumbled across the sort of world of nervous system healing, I didn't invent it of course. There's some very smart people out there who've done a lot of research in this area. By getting into it and learning about the nervous system and fight, flight, freeze, why it's moving into different states, how do I bring it out of these different states, I remember thinking it's like within a week or two, it's like this is what everything else is trying to do.

5:33Everything's trying to work on our baggage in different ways, all these different tools that we do. I'd never found a unifying theory. Physicists are trying to find a unifying theory of, I don't know if it's gravity or physics maybe, or the universe. This to me felt like a unifying theory of being healthy, being happy. Not so much physically necessarily, that's part of it, but throughout the entire system, throughout the mind, the body, the soul, the whole thing. And it all goes down to the basic idea that the problem, the root problem is in the nervous system. the problem is not really the mind.

6:11And in our world, we think about mental health, you know, it's a mental health industry. And we think about when we have thoughts going around, we have emotions, trouble with different emotions, we can't focus, we're procrastinating, we think about these things as we're depressed or anxious, we're afraid, it's a mental health problem. And it's so I mean, this really speaks to our culture where it's such a, it's hard to see this until you get a bit outside of it. But it's a very intellectual culture. And there's a lot of beauty in that and it's given us so much. But there's a lot more to, or how would I put it?

6:43I would say that like the mind, at least what I've been learning over the last few years, is the mind is more like a reflection of what's happening at a deeper level. It's a reflection of what's happening in the nervous system. So when we treat the mind, we go and journal and we analyze our thoughts. We try and figure our thoughts out. We might try and be grateful. You know, we try and take a negative thought and push it away by replacing it with a positive thought. meditation, depending on how it's done, can head in this direction where we're just, you know, we're not listening to the mind, but we're not really getting into the body.

7:14We're not really dealing with the root issue. And so really my journey has been figuring out, this mind stuff is part of the issue, but it's so much of it is just a reflection of something else that's going on much deeper below the surface and something else, something that most people have never even heard of. Fire Nation, these are some powerful words. And we have many more words around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a startup with big goals, then it's important to find a CRM that can keep up, but I get it. When you're in startup mode, it can be tough to know which platform is right for you and your business.

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9:01And by following tips from other hosts, within about six months, we earned super host status. With how easy it is to get started, I'm just sorry I didn't do it sooner. Later this year, we'll be traveling to see family in California and Maine for a couple of months, and we're considering putting our own home on Airbnb while we're away. That's right. While you're away, your home could be an Airbnb. Find out how much your home could be worth at airbnb.com slash host. So what do you believe the root issue with a busy mind is? Because a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to control their busy minds without ever really understanding what the root issue is.

9:39Nervous system dysregulation. And that essentially means that, just some context with the nervous system, right? Most people are familiar with, we have fight or flight, right? If we get stressed, we might try and attack the threat. Whether the threat is some work or it's a person, and we might yell at it, scream at it, attack it with a certain energy. We might go to the gym and use the same kind of energy. We might also run away from it. So we could think about procrastination as a form of the flight response. We're trying to avoid the threat, the threat being the work, the threat being people who might reject us.

10:10There's another part of the freeze response. We don't have time to go into all of the freeze responses when we get shut down and we start to disconnect. We can't feel anything. We feel numb. So people might think about that as feeling more depressed or needing adrenaline sports to feel alive. And then there's another response called the fawn response, which is more like when we're feeling stressed, we might go into people-pleasing mode, right? So a lot of that explains a lot of the various dysfunctional patterns that humans everywhere have. And so when I say about nervous system dysregulation, we can think about these four responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, as different expressions of, we would say, the sympathetic aspect end of the nervous system, the part of the nervous system that helps us deal with stress when there's a threat around, when we have to do something.

10:55But the other side of the nervous system is the parasympathetic side, which is when we're relaxed, when we're sleeping, when we're eating food and we're having a podcast interview like this, we're at the other end. And a simple way to think about it is we've got a break that slows us down. That's the parasympathetic end. And then we have an accelerator, which is the sympathetic end. So when we're getting up and even just walking around, we're starting to use the sympathetic system. When we're sitting down, we're reading a book, we're starting to move into parasympathetic. And so in a really healthy, well-regulated nervous system, we go between these two poles as needed, right?

11:26So when we sleep, we go easily into parasympathetic, we fall asleep, we feel good, wake up refreshed. And then when it's time to go to the gym or time to do some work, we can go into sympathetic or defend ourselves from someone. We can easily move into that sympathetic energy. But if we're dysregulated, what happens is we start to get stuck at different sort of ends of this nervous system. So you could think about someone who's always numb, who complains that they don't feel anything or that they need adrenaline sports and intense experiences to feel alive. One way to understand a person like that is they're predominantly parasympathetic.

11:59They're stuck with the brake on too much. And so they don't feel anything, right? They find they're not motivated to do anything. They might want to sleep all the time. And on the other end, you have people who get stuck in sympathetic. They stuck with the accelerate it down. And so they're the people who can't sit still. A lot of entrepreneurs are like this. We're just always doing something, always thinking, always dreaming, always making the next plan, setting the next goal. And so there's value in both of these things. We need the entire spectrum of these aspects of our nervous system, but most of us get stuck in different places.

12:32Or we have default responses that we go to in stressful situations that get us into trouble. Like say in a family situation or an employee situation, someone comes to us with a problem and instead of being able to listen to it with patience and understanding and compassion, we fly off the handle at them. We say something that we probably would be better off not saying. So the problem is nervous system dysregulation. And what that really means is we're getting stuck instead of being able to flow between all these different states as the situation demands. You mentioned a couple of quick things, but I really want to dive into next about how we can go ahead and fix this nervous system dysregulation, because I think we really do understand the what, the cause, the why, but how do we fix it?

13:15There's really two parts. And this is how I teach people. It is really a map for the, because we're talking about a territory, right? A terrain that we're trying to traverse the terrain of our internal landscape. And so just like, if you're hiking in the mountains, you want a map of what is the territory. And so when I talk about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn and parasympathetic and sympathetic, that's really starting to lay out the terrain. We're trying to lay out the map of the area that we're trying to cover. And one reason I love this approach is because the map is so much more detailed and just so much more effective than a lot of the other maps that people throw around, like the gratitude lists and meditation and things like that.

13:50It's all the same terrain, but the better the map we have, the better we're going to be able to get to our destination. So part of the solution is the map is learning about the nervous system, learning about these different, like going much more in depth into these different issues. And then really the step two or the second part is the techniques. How do you actually work with it? What do you do? What's the practical side? And there's loads of different things to, that you can explore and get into a lot of it. A lot of it is about learning to be in the body, learning to be present and not just silent, like we might in meditation, but learning to, it's a funny thing, right?

14:25So it's a bit hard to explain, but when I started playing with this, it was like, Oh, I can literally feel it's like my whole sense of myself was being concentrated, sensations in my body being concentrated in my head. And as I started to work with these tools, It's like I could feel myself starting to take up and inhabit my entire body. That might sound weird to some people, but there's no other way to describe it. Like it's a thing you have to experience. As for how to do it, really the foundation of it or the core of it is number one, safety. So learning to recognize what safety is because if we're feeling – if we're in sympathetic, we've got our accelerator on.

15:02It means that we're feeling stressed. We're feeling activated. We feel there might be a threat nearby, even if the threat is at work, right? Someone who might reject us. And the solution to that, to bring us out of that survival mode, out of the accelerator on mode is to start to feel safe. How do we feel safe? It's not about saying I'm safe. It's about looking around and orienting to the safety in the environment. And the idea behind this is that if we've been through a lot of stuff in our lives, we can be very good at sensing danger knowing all the signs that something's dangerous around us and so part of this work is learning to cultivate and build a map of safety learning to recognize what safety looks like knowing what it feels like because then as we start to to really get a grip on that then our system goes oh i don't need to be so stressed all the time i don't need to stay with the accelerator and i can let it off because i'm actually pretty safe most of the time there's no real threats around most of the time.

15:58So that's one piece. And that's looking around at the environment. And that brings me to really the core of this work of learning to be in the body is looking around. That's what I tell people when I'm teaching them, guiding them. Look around, feel the ground and breathe. Look around, feel the ground and breathe. And it starts, this is about looking around at the environment taking a moment to just see and feeling the ground or the chair the our connection to the environment through our sense of touch and then the breath and then as our skill develops with this we start pairing these things can i see and feel the ground at the same time can i see and notice my breath at the same time kind of like i'm weaving two threads of awareness together can i do all three can i see and feel the ground and notice my breath.

16:51And we all have different, they call it capacity in the nervous system world, but we all have a different level where we're going to be at with this, depending on how much work we've done already. The goal is to be able to, you know, bring all these things together, but we might only be able to do one right now. You know, we're looking around. Once we focus on the ground, we lose the environment, you know, that what we're seeing. So it's about cultivating this over time. And this thing, this basic practice of looking around, feeling the ground and noticing my breath. It is the cornerstone of my work that I do with this stuff.

17:19It's what I teach people. It's what I'm still doing four years after I got into this. It's changed everything and it's very easy to underestimate it. That's why I'm sort of belaboring the point a little bit. It's amazing if people commit to it and actually really learn to work with it. There's all kinds of other techniques, but they all sort of hang off this basic idea of learning to be here, learning to be in the body, learning to feel the ground and do what we're talking about. Fire Nation, you can hear John's passion. You can hear that he just has gone through this process himself, helped others through this process.

17:51And while he was talking about it, one quote that really jumped up that I do love, it's from Mark Twain, which is, I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happens. And when you can really understand that and absorb that and say to yourself, you know what? Wow, like I am worried right now about this or stress out about that. but guess what? A lot of those worries and stresses are never going to come to actual fruition. They're never going to actually happen. It's just life is going to continue to go on. So there's a lot of great practices that John talked about that you can really ground yourself with to make sure that you are continuing to silence that busy mind that we all have.

18:32Now, John, you've shared a lot of great stuff around this topic. What is the one thing that you want to bring home to Fire Nation from our entire conversation today? If this sounds like it might work, if this sounds kind of interesting to you and there's a bit of an impulse, I would say follow that. Explore it. I'm not the only one teaching this, so you don't have to learn it from me, but this has changed my life. And I've seen it change other people's lives too. And it's become, people talk about a purpose or a mission that they want to find, and that was me a few years ago. Now I found this.

19:05I'm like, this needs to be in the mainstream. Everyone needs to know about this stuff. This needs to be taught in schools. This is amazing. And yet very few people know about it because it's easy to dismiss. A lot of dudes, they don't really want to feel stuff, feelings for girls, but it's incredible. And it brings so much joy, so much purpose and meaning and fulfillment and happiness and all the things people are searching for. So I would just leave people with that, that this is amazing. And if there's an impulse there, check it out, find a way to learn more about it and get involved. And if Fire Nation wanted to learn more from you, connect with you, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

19:40Yeah. So the best place for me, if they want to know if they're feeling called to work with me, go to Rage Heart. That's like Brave Heart, but Rage Heart. R-A-G-E heart.co. And there is a link on there to read, depending on when this goes out, there'll be a link on there to read a manifesto, which will give you more information about this approach. And you can go down the rabbit hole if you like. So that's rageheart.co. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with John and John Lee today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type John, J-O-H-M in the search bar.

20:20The show notes page will pop right up. And John, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and John for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk.

20:58The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners who want to get straight to the point. Join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions. Recent episodes include five must knows to sell your online course, program or membership, and four steps to grow your email list for your next launch.

21:35Listen to Imperfect Action wherever you get your podcasts.