Rewire Your Brain: Subconscious Blocks Removed by Brandon Epstein

0:00Brandon Epstein:One of the core subconscious beliefs that I uncovered in my late 20s was the belief that I was worthless. If you would have asked me consciously, hey dude, do you believe you're worthless? I'd have been like, no, of course not. It's a silly thing to say. But the truth of the matter was that there is these core beliefs that live beneath our conscious awareness.

0:30We are here, and today's guest is someone I've been waiting to have a conversation with. He's written one of the best books that I've ever read, and is just a great follower and a believer of truth. He's a high-performance coach of elite entrepreneurs. He is the GOAT of all GOATs. Please join me in welcoming the insightful, the visionary, the impactful, Mr. Brandon Epstein. Brandon, how you doing today, brother?

1:00Brandon Epstein:Wow, man. What an intro. Jeez, she's going to make me blush, man. I'm doing well. No blushing, no blushing, no blushing. No, man. I'm truly honored to be here with you, dude. We're going to talk a lot about the success code. We're going to talk a lot about some of the things that you have going on and cooking up in the future. Because I know you well enough to know you always have something you're working on improving, man. But I love starting the show by asking my guest about their because. that thing that's deeper than their why, like that true passion and purpose that they have. And it changes from time to time.

1:38So if I were to say right now in this season that Brandon is in, what's your because today, brother?

1:45Brandon Epstein:Yeah, my because is to align with my most joyful expression in the present moment and guide other people to do the same. You know, because I work with, like you said, a lot of business owners, professional athletes, entertainers. And what I find is that that flow state, that zone, that place where their genius is really put on display is directly aligned with play, with joy, with coming into the present moment and feeling free. So I can't support anyone else with that unless I'm actually taking my own medicine. So I prioritize it for myself first and then try to bring it out to the people I work with.

2:23Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You know, again, a huge fan of you and going into your because a little bit, you know, you talk a lot and teach a lot on removing those subconscious blocks that we have. And it was through you that I realized that we actually have those subconscious blocks, man. Like, was there a specific block that you had to overcome that kind of led you to the discovery for yourself? Absolutely.

2:50Brandon Epstein:There's many, many, many many many many i think about our inner world our subconscious as our own inner planet we're living on and for me um i would say i was born into a celestial experience with a very dirty inner planet um subconscious program to make me fail in many ways and then just picking that up from environment, family, people you get exposed to. It programmed me to fail in many ways. And so there's too many to count, but I would probably say one of the core subconscious beliefs that I uncovered in my late 20s that's really set me free in a major way was the belief that I was worthless.

3:39Brandon Epstein:And if you would have asked me consciously, hey dude, do you believe you're worthless? I would have been like, no, of course not. It's a silly thing to say because I'd already been in the space of working on myself and helping others for over a decade. But the truth of the matter was that there is these core beliefs that live beneath our conscious awareness. And if you can get yourself down there beneath the known and you go into the unknown, which is where most people don't want to go because it's uncomfortable because you don't know. Yeah, that's where you get to the root of your suffering and you also get to the root of your potential expansion.

4:13Brandon Epstein:For me, it's worthless. Because think if I'm in a relationship with a woman, well, what the hell's wrong with her? If she wants to be with someone who's worthless, right? That's a subconscious code running. Oh, what if I'm trying to sell my something or sell my product? Well, I'm worthless. So why would you want anything from me? So that was a real deep core belief that I had to rewire for myself to expand and start to magnetize more of what I wanted in my life. Dude, that is so deep. and it kind of leads me into like the next segment, right? I like to call it the unplugged truths.

4:50And when I read Success Code, here's what I realized, and this is kind of my way of quantifying it because you say it so eloquently in the book too, is that most of us are trying to win externally, right? But we're losing internally, almost just like what you said. And then we never understand success because we don't really know what it feels like, right? Like we're so focused on this external, external, external, but on the inside is where we lose. And I'd love to break that truth down because I'm talking to the expert. And for those that are watching and listening, I'm about to ask a whole bunch of questions that I know you want to ask Brandon because I want to ask Brandon these questions.

5:35And so when I get the expert, I'm going selfishly into fixing Mick today.

5:40Brandon Epstein:Yeah, beautiful, man. Well, dude, I got to point to one of my goats. Tony Robbins has a quote that he says the ultimate failure is success without fulfillment. Right. And that's what we're talking about. Because most of us were programmed into this matrix, which is this reality we live in. And we're basically fed through media, through community, through our environment. what we should want, what should make us happy, what should give us a sense of peace, joy, love. But when we try to create our reality based off of what our head thinks we should want, we disconnect ourselves from the truth. And the truth always lives in the heart.

6:20Brandon Epstein:And the truth is directly connected to our higher power. So whatever that is, for me, it's God. And I can feel that moving through my heart in every moment. and the way I feel it is through inspiration. Inspiration lives in the heart. And so what I found, a cheat code for trying to create a reality that's going to feel full instead of empty, as in you're creating outcomes and results for yourself that are actually going to enrich your life at the emotional level, is always act from inspiration and not obligation. Because oftentimes if we're trying to create from this place of obligation, We're doing it from our head.

6:58Brandon Epstein:We're doing it from a story we've been told. That's not our own. And so you get there, you create the outcome. Look, I sold my business. Look, I got this type of romantic partner. Whatever that external thing is for you, if it's not connected to your heart-led inspiration, you're going to get there and you're going to feel empty. And it's going to be that ultimate failure Tony talks about. It's going to be like, oh, man, I put all this work in, and it wasn't worth it. you know this is something i need to ask you personally like i know that you coach this i coach this especially when i'm talking to sales people and you do a lot with helping leaders and individuals get access into their flow state right and i'm a big believer in it but i also understand, Brandon, I'm asking this question for every entrepreneur that exists today because of all the good distractions, right?

8:02Like I'm not even going to say bad distractions because some distractions are good. We just don't know how to get into the flow state to finish one segment to the next, right? And so with AI and the ability to build apps and the ability to sometimes do things on your own. Even though we can, I don't necessarily think that we should because for me personally, that interrupts my flow state, right? Like there's this new thing I can do and AI can do it for me. Well, guess what? I got to learn it. I have to train it. I have to validate it. I have to check it. And now I'm not in the flow state because I already knew how to do what I was trying to do anyway, but there was this new tool.

8:43And again, I'm not saying it's bad, but talk to us that are in this distracted world on flow state, why it's important, and more importantly, some tips that we could get to stay there. Yeah.

8:58Brandon Epstein:When I'm working with any client to try to get them into flow state, it's mostly addition by subtraction. So we can work our way down through that, right? So it starts with like the conscious low-hanging fruit. If someone were to audit their lives and they're like, all right, where does subtractions come from? where does procrastination come from? Where do you feel out of flow? I bet you most people could say, you know, a handful of things that they know if they stop doing these things, it's going to, it's going to create more spaciousness, it's going to create a better environment for getting into flow.

9:30So we have those conscious low hanging fruits, those things you already know.

9:34Brandon Epstein:And then we have the subconscious, which is definitely not low hanging fruit. It's not something that's readily available for you to get into. You actually have to access that stuff through your feeling body. We call it our somatic body, which means, okay, there's something I want to do and I want to feel in flow state, right? If I was a basketball player, for example, you know, NBA playoffs are on right now. I'm a big Knicks fan. So like if I'm watching Jalen Brunson, come on, we're not out of the playoffs yet. All right. So if you're seeing one of these guys and you want to, and they want to get into flow state, let's say for sport, because sport is usually a place where we talk about being in flow quite a bit.

10:18Brandon Epstein:You want to imagine yourself getting into that environment and playing your best and then you want to notice what are the emotions that come up that create resistance around the experience that you would like to have. So it might be a feeling of anxiety, self-doubt, lack of confidence. You actually welcome that in, right? Because what we resist is going to persist. So if there's any of that weird feeling beneath the surface, that's going to bubble up. It's going to prevent you from getting into the flow. So what we can accept can change. So what do we do? We welcome it in. We say, okay, doubt.

10:51Brandon Epstein:Let's see, where does this doubt live in my body? Let me feel into it. And you're actually feeling it. You're not just thinking about it. You're feeling the doubt. And if you can, find it in your physical body. That's going to help even more, let you access it. And when you feel it, you're going to ask yourself the question, what am I believing to be true right now? which is what is that piece of code running your subconscious that's filtering your reality that's the belief what am i believing to be true it's making me feel doubtful right now right and it could be for the nba player it could be oh well this guy's guarding me and last time i played him you know you know i was oh for nine from the field so i'm afraid that'll happen again right so if that comes up it's okay okay i believe i have doubt because i believe that the person i'm competing against is going to lock me down, right?

11:39And so we accept it and we surrender that story

11:42Brandon Epstein:into the past. And then we choose a new belief because everything in our known universe has a polarity, right? There's light and there's dark. It's good. There's evil. Everything has its polarity. So all we're doing is flipping the polarity. The opposite polarity would be, I believe that I'm going to light this guy up, right? But it's not an affirmation, right? These aren't just like things that you're choosing to say you're to yourself in front of the mirror. We have to understand the path that we took to get there. It lived in your body already. It was already filtering your reality. The doubt was inevitable.

12:15Brandon Epstein:And so we had to accept it to change it. We had to surrender it to create space for something new. And then we had to flip the polarity because that's how alchemy works, right? That's how we can change anything in our lives within ourselves or in our external world. The alchemy is the opposite polarity. The north versus the south polarity on a magnet. so we choose the opposite which is oh i'm gonna light this guy up we breathe through it we receive it into our body and then i like to tell my clients like repetition again tony the goat repetition is the mother of skill so i have them uncover some of these beliefs are that are going to be key for them getting into that flow state record a voice memo on their phone reading all these new beliefs and then listen to it like your own soundtrack for your life because that's going to program your subconscious in the background.

13:03Brandon Epstein:So your self-talk is going to automatically put you into that flow state. So that is how I would recommend anyone to get into more flow. Okay, here's something my younger self would have benefited from. Most of us picked a bank at 16 and never looked back. And it's been nickel and diming us ever since. That's where Chime comes in. Chime is changing the way people bank. They're not like those traditional old banks that gatekeep the perks and pile on fees unless you carry some massive balance chime is the most rewarding fee free banking no overdraft fees no monthly fees no minimum balance fees here's where it stacks up you get five percent cash back on your chime card in a category you choose like gas or groceries you build credit through regular everyday spending with no credit check your savings grow at a rate nine times the national average and if you're ever in a pinch spot me spots you up to two hundred fee-free.

13:57Join the millions who are already banking fee-free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com slash Mick. That is chime.com slash Mick. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and Mick Unplugged listeners can earn up to an extra$350. Love it. That was definitely a truth right there. And then this is also a truth that it took me some time to understand. And you talk a lot, you talk some of the book, but if you've ever followed Brandon and I suggest everybody do that, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, like he's got a lot of amazing content. You talk a lot about being rewired, right?

14:41And having these retreats. And again, it was something, I'm not going to say I didn't believe in it. I just didn't understand it. But you helped break it down for me. And so now I can have those same conversations with my teams. Talk to us about rewiring and those retreats, brother.

15:00Brandon Epstein:Yeah. So my rewired method is essentially what I just walked you through, right? Because when you go through the rewired method, you're essentially cleaning up all the garbage and the trash and the pollution on your own inner planet. And when you clean that up, the only thing that's remaining is a lush, beautiful world. So within, so without, right? And so when you look around the physical world, if we were just to live in harmony, I live in Columbia in South America. So we got the Amazon rainforest here and there's indigenous people that still live there. And those people, for the most part, they live in harmony with the earth.

15:36Brandon Epstein:They're like speaking to the trees. Hey, can I cut you down? They're like doing a prayer every time they take an animal from the forest and they're creating this equilibrium. But when we get out of balance in the external world, we start knocking down all the trees for greed and we start polluting the rivers out of convenience and all these things, it becomes a terrible place to live. It's like, oh, this is gross. I don't want to live here, right? Like going to some city that is like, they have no regulations around how to take care of their natural spaces. And that same thing holds true for your inner world.

16:12Brandon Epstein:You have to understand that. It's like if you've gone through trauma in your life, there's going to be this emotional scar tissue that's just creating pollution in your inner world. Until you go through, it could be mine, but there's many people who do this stuff in different ways. My method is the reroute method. So with my stuff, I'm literally just teaching you how to do this work that's been around since the beginning of time. Nothing new under the sun. This is nothing new. The only thing new is my unique perspective. right so my book is like here's my story here's the story about a young man how he discovered these things and applied it to his own life and started teaching it to others so it's my unique perspective of it and in that it's coming back to this universal law that says that yeah so within so without so you have to understand if there's pollution in your inner world we need to clean that up to create harmony within yourself so you feel good because when you feel good you're gonna have a natural inclination to want to behave in alignment with what your goals are and you'll naturally flow towards the desired outcomes in your life instead of having to push and punish yourself along the way that's why i had to talk to brandon ladies and gentlemen like i i have to get this out because i can't get this from anyone else and brandon i love a hot take bro I love a hot take and the success code was a bunch of hot takes, dude.

17:41Like it was hot take after hot take after hot take. And you said something and I wrote it down and I was like, holy crap. You said we've all been coded and it's costing us. Talk us through that quote and what that means to you and what all of us should get out of that.

18:02Brandon Epstein:Yeah, I think that, you know, to take it one step further, it's like, I feel like you're not really a sovereign adult until you go and examine the code that you've been given. Because otherwise you could be, you know, living the code that was imprinted in you as a kid, right? From zero to seven years old, those are our primary years of being coded by our environment, by our parents, whatever. I think our job is not to demonize our parents or our environment we grew up in. Instead, just understand that they're passing the baton to you, right? And now it's your turn to move forward with it. And so as you receive that baton, it could be that your parents were super stressed out about money.

18:43Brandon Epstein:And so whenever money came up in the household, you start like getting into a fight or flight state. That's not yours. You got that from them, right? But you have to also understand that now it's your turn to do the adult stuff, to actually go into that, to explore it and go through that rewired method to recode your beliefs around money. So it doesn't create this fight or flight this real response for you. It becomes more matter of fact. And that's what a lot of this work is. It's not about recoding yourself in the way that you're like all hyped up every day. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:16Brandon Epstein:No, you want everything just to feel matter of fact. It's just like, yeah, this is the next logical action for me to take. And that even keel place is where that consistency lies. Yeah, bro, again, hot take after hot take, but you give action and fundamental approaches to everything that you do and that you talk about in the book. And another thing that you got me thinking about and challenged me on is like reprogramming, man. And so, you know, we talk about rewiring, but you know this whole we've been conditioned to think that we need to work harder and you're like wait a second why don't you look at those limiting beliefs first and then you walk us through an action plan there and I sat there and I said doggone it Brandon is so right because I wanted to be the hardest worker I used to wear it as a badge of honor that nobody could outwork me right and it was the whole work smarter not harder and it's like well how can you really do all that.

20:11But then you got me to start thinking like, I just have a limiting belief that one, I need to work harder on something. And then how do I remove that limiting belief? Because then things started to open up much more clear. And so I would say for everybody that's watching or listening, we've all been coded to use Brandon's terminology to work harder, but what are you working harder to achieve? And what does that actually equal at the end of the day? Like to your point is it fulfillment is it joy and for most of us that answer is no yeah and i think like

20:46Brandon Epstein:like of course like i think hard work which is just like stacking consistent action that is a part of being great anything right right but yeah and what we're kind of getting what you're getting at is like is that hard work coming from inspiration or is it coming from obligation right Coming back to what I mentioned earlier is if you are working hard, but you feel inspired to work hard, it's like, cool, put in a 16-hour day. The inspiration's there. But if you're hating, you're working against yourself, I've just seen it so many times. And it's like if I ask someone, I'm like, well, what is the outcome you really want here?

21:18Brandon Epstein:And you really audit them. And you have them identify, okay, well, if this is what you say you really want, right? Let's take, for example, I work with a lot of successful business people. It's like, oh, I want. I want to work harder so I have more time to spend with my family. And you're looking at their life holistically. And you're going, so you're going to work. You already have$10 million in the bank, but you're going to work harder so you can spend more time with your family. It's like, dude, you're already there. You're already there. If you want to do that, you can do that. But we get stuck in this hard coding.

21:52Brandon Epstein:And it's also identifying that what got you here may not get you where you want to go. So that's a very common story for entrepreneurs. right? Like I think it might be unavoidable. Maybe this is my limiting belief, but I think every business owner, every entrepreneur is going to have a season where they almost have to disconnect from their feelings to just survive a period of growth to get to traction, right? It's just like, you just got to eat shit for a little bit just so you can get to that place you get traction. And every business owner I've talked to has to do that for a season, but then you have to understand, okay, I did it.

22:30Brandon Epstein:I put in these crazy hours. I did some things that like, I wouldn't choose this job but there's no one else to do it. So I fall on my shoulder and I had to do it. Okay, understand maybe that's a season of your life but pull your head out from the weeds, right? And look around like the guy who's like, I want to work harder so I have more time to build my family and realize, okay, maybe that's available for you right now. And maybe you need to shift the way you're working or operating because maybe what got you here is not gonna get you where you wanna go. And then maybe where you wanna go is not going to get you where you want to go in that next checkpoint.

22:59Brandon Epstein:So you just have to constantly stay in a state of awareness, which I talked about quite a bit in my book. And I think it's important just to create that space for yourself on a consistent basis, weekly, monthly, quarterly. So every six months, every year, just to drop in and see how much your actions are aligned with the life that you want to live, not just this idea of, I want to get to this place for the sake of getting there. I want to get this revenue number. Why? Like to what means? Like what is what's going to change your life you get there right maybe the fulfillment's going to be more there if like that isn't the number one priority instead you find something else to prioritize no so absolutely absolutely so i kind of gave my hot takes from the book i you're the author give me a couple of hot takes from the book that we didn't go into that you want to explore oh man i think fundamentally um many people see the world way too linearly linearly as in like if i do this and i'll create this if i do this then i get this and it creates this like transactional relationship with the universe with god whatever it is right and i would encourage everyone to break away from that like if i do this hard thing then i get this thing and reward instead start to build this relational relationship this surrender this opening up of yourself for miracles to happen in your life and it not to have to happen linearly because sometimes it's like all right well if i you know we've kind of been programmed right if i go to school and i go to a good school and i get good grades i'll get a good job and then i'll get this and this and this you talk about ai it's like that's probably all about to explode if it hasn't already right and that that's just an illusion and so instead what i encourage anyone to do is come up with the most inspiring outcome they could possibly imagine for their life and let go of any linear path to get there because god will just throw in miracles into your life if you create space for it if you let go of that just linear well i must get here so i can get here because you're just thinking too small you're thinking too short-sighted.