Hey, it's David. Welcome back to A Changed Mind, A Sanctuary for Your Spirit, a place where each and every episode I will remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I am your friend, your host, your guide, and man, am I so excited for this episode. First of all, I want to thank you for all of the wonderful comments, all of the incredible feedback on all of the episodes, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, and so many of you have asked a lot of questions, and so this episode was really motivated by you. So if you love this episode, then give yourself a little bit of love. Today we're going to be talking about how to overcome fear and how I trained my nervous system to become unafraid. I think it was Roosevelt who said, there's nothing to fear but fear itself, and it's true. Fear is the biggest thing that's holding us back. Whether you're wanting to make more money, whether you're wanting to grow your business, whether you're wanting to have better relationships, whether you're wanting to improve your health, whether you're wanting to have more clarity about how to move forward in your life, think about it. If there's something that you want to create and you are unafraid, then given enough time, you're going to have thoughts, you're going to have emotions, you're going to take action that will consistently, 100% and predictably produce the desired result. And if we were to look at the one thing that prevents us from creating any kind of change or growth in our lives, it is fear. And so my question is, do you think your fear is holding you back? So in this episode, I'm going to share with you how I trained my nervous system to become unafraid and as a result of that, over time, how I was able to attract and marry the woman of my dreams, how I was able to generate over $30 million in a business doing what I was meant to do in the world over a short few years, and also how being unafraid has contributed to me being clear on who I am and what I'm creating in my life. And so the first question I have for you, let's just keep going, Jonathan, and you can edit. When you're unafraid, you cannot powerfully create. And fear emerges in a variety of forms, from anger, to stress, to overwhelm, to anxiety, to depression. Hustle and grind is a form of fear, right? It comes from a place of desperation, fear of not having enough time, fear of not having enough money or economic insecurity. Indecision is a form of fear, being afraid to make a decision because you're afraid that there's a right decision or a wrong decision. Pairing yourself to other people is a form of fear. It's sort of a checking in on your current status and this fear of not being as far along as you should be. Perfectionism is a form of fear. Procrastination is a form of fear. And self-sabotage is a form of fear. In fact, it's starting to sound a lot like what my life was on a moment-by-moment, daily, consistent basis before I started to get into this work and before I started working with my emotions and working with my nervous system and realizing that I actually have the ability to start to retrain my body. I want you to think about how much time you spend in fear. We have a distinction that we teach called two states of being. The two states of being says that in any moment and in every single moment, you're in one of two states, either in what we would call a powerful state of being. Powerful states are states of being and emotions that feel good like joy, curiosity, excitement, compassion, empathy, enthusiasm, peace, and calm. Powerful states of being. Or primal states. Primal states of being are states of being that don't feel good. States like stress, anxiety, boredom, jealousy, anger, depression. You're always in one state of being or the other. And you're never in two states of being at the same time. And this is a really important distinction to understand because it allows you to start to evaluate how much time you're spending in fear. And I want you to think about it right now. If you added up all the time that you spend on an average day, even though you may be productive, even though you may be, you know, running your household in the morning and managing the kid, even though you may be at work and doing, how much time do you spend on an average daily basis in stress, anxiety, overwhelm, comparing, indecision, procrastination, judging what other people have said and being angry or resent towards other people, no matter how subtle that be. Judging and being angry at yourself in some form of self-judgment. Any amount of time that you spend in a moment where you would say, Hey, do I feel good or do I not feel right? Being in a prime, how much time do you spend in an average daily basis operating from a primal state? And if you're joining me on YouTube, you can just comment below and drop your number in and take a look at what other people have had to say. If you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, you can just yell it out, but it's a really good number for you to, to know, because what I would say is that's your number of up. You know, what we found is that most people are spending an average of at least six hours a day primal state. I know before I got into this work, before I started working a 12 step program, before I got into personal development and before I started living the teachings that I, that I teach, I was spending pretty much all of my waking hours in a primal state. Even if I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would wake up some form of fear. So it can be confusing this conversation around like, how do I create change in my life? How do I make more money? How do I find the perfect partner? How do I get more clarity on my, on my purpose? How do I heal my chronic disease or my autoimmune condition or feel better? How do I overcome my anxiety or my insomnia? Gosh, I mean, pretty much anything that you would want to create. It seems like there are like lots of different paths to pursue solutions. But one of the things I like about the understanding that I've come to that I want to share with you is that it's really just one game. And that one game is to downregulate our nervous system and detoxify ourselves fear. If you can detoxify yourself of fear, then the natural byproduct of that, number one, you're a happy being. And number two, you're actually producing and materializing the dreams and the vision you have. And this isn't some sort of woo-woo. This is like a fundamental understanding of behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology tells us that our beliefs, which were formed at a very young age through the meanings we gave experiences of our life, determine as adults on a moment-by-moment basis thoughts we habitually entertain or have. Those thoughts then, which are electrical activity in your brain, it's a lighting up of the neural networks of your brain in an activation memory. Those thoughts then transmit themselves through your nervous system and you experience those thoughts as emotions, feelings, depending on the quality of thought. And then your emotions and feelings will determine what action you do or take. And the action that you do or do not take will determine what results you do or do not produce. And those results, whether it's on a daily, weekly, monthly, or lifetime basis, and what they will reflect back to you is the same belief started to say, see, I knew I wasn't good enough. See, I knew bad things happened to good people. See, I knew money was hard to make. See, I knew if you want to do it right, you have to do things yourself. But that's not necessarily true. It's only true for you. It's true because of what behavioral psychology tells us, how the human being operating system functions. Your thought create your reality. This is also part of the new thought movement and understanding energy and vibration. So we could expand upon this conversation, talk about how that electrical activity in your brain and in your nervous system is radioactive, transmits a vibration received by the minds of other people and influences their unconscious behavior. And that's what creates synchronicities and coincidences. So when you have non-resistance or your beliefs about yourself, about money, about business, about other people, about relationships, about the world are in alignment with the results that you want to produce, then you produce the desired result. But when your beliefs are limiting beliefs or they are beliefs based on early, let's call it childhood trauma, I don't want to use that word to make you feel like it has to be big, hairy, and gnarly to form. But we use this language, traumatic experiences when we were children and then instantaneously the meanings gave the world. When those things are carried forward into our present reality, they invoke fear and they are self-fulfilling prophets. They produce undesired. That's why Einstein said the most important decision you make is whether you live in a friendly or a hostile universe. Because as Henry Ford said, the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can't are both right. So if you believe that the universe is hostile, that's going... So the work for us to do together is to start clearing out fear. If we clear out the fear, then all of the things that you want become a natural byproduct, fearless human being, or a happy human being, or a faithful human being. This is why, and I've talked about it in other episodes, I believe a belief in higher power is so important, whether it's the universe, or science, or nature, or God, or Jesus, or Allah, or whatever it is. Because when you believe that there is an external intelligence working to support you in the coordination, materialization, dreams, and the overcoming of challenges that you have, that becomes your reality, whether it's a placebo effect or not. So belief is very, very powerful. So what is this fear, right? If the name of the game is that we want to identify where our fear is and then translate or transform or metabolize fear into something else, faith, and non-resistant, you know, what is fear? Well, fear is unprocessed emotion. So for example, maybe when you were a kid, you were told that children should be seen and heard. And so now, as an adult, and when you experienced that when you were a child, it didn't feel, and I would suggest it didn't feel good because it wasn't in congruent alignment the way you were supposed to live with infinite possibility, right? Whoever told you that had their own unprocessed trauma and passed that on to you, saying children were to be seen and not heard. And so when you took that information in, your nervous system almost had like backlash or a response that was this negative feeling. And it was the way the information processed your nervous system. And so that became a memory. And now, as an adult, you know, as you're living your life, there's still this part of you that hasn't been fully processed yet. It hasn't fully worked with or retrained or reeducated. And so, you know, you're in a business meeting and you have something that you want to share, but then you feel like you can't share it. And then that same emotion comes up from when you were a child. And now you're not living congruently, you're not living authentically, and it creates emotional discomfort for you because you're reliving that memory within the environment of the work. But we're not aware that this is what happened. And that's why a lot of times in sort of personal growth 1.0, I was listening to a podcast interview, and I won't say with who, it's a very well-respected thought leader. And he said, yeah, you know, I've just learned in order to work fear, you notice when the fear comes up and then you start to question the fear and then, you know, you reeducate fear. And it's very similar to what I'm going to be sharing with you in today's episode. But I think you have to have this background contact in order to be successful in implement that. You know, it's sort of like you can get on the basketball court and you can kind of observe that the way the game works or the rules of game is to, you know, go to the other end court and put the ball in the basket and then you get some points for it. So, you know, I could just say, hey, like that's game. This is what you need to do. But it's very different than having a full contact game of basketball and having, you know, on the court intelligence like LeBron James being able to operate intuitively. And so I'm sharing this with you because this was necessary in order for me to actually integrate all of the things that I was hearing in personal growth. Because if you're here, this probably isn't your first, you know, personal development related video. But if you're a seeker who's looking to integrate the information that you've learning and what I've found is that proper content is essential to the integration. When you hear it in a particular way and you're able to understand like where this emotion came from and what's happening now, then you give yourself permission to work with it at a deeper level. And thanks to you, I understand this because you've left so many fantastic comments on my videos and my episodes letting me know that this has really been a breakthrough for you in the way that I'm explaining it. So I digress. Let me get back on track. So what happens is you're in the moment of your adult life or your teenage life, depending on how old right now you are, and you're experiencing a memory. So that's the first thing to acknowledge is like, oh, like this is just a memory. My nervous system and my brain have been trained to interpret this experience in the same way that I experienced something like this very early on in my life. And so that awareness begins to separate you from the fear itself, right? If I just tell you, hey, separate yourself from the fear, it's like, well, I can't. It's almost inside of me. It's almost like I'm wearing fear. But this small distinction that like, hey, this is just a memory that's showing up for you right now, allows you to now separate yourself and observe, okay, I'm having a memory of an experience. A lot of people spend a lot of time going back in history and looking at some of the original experiences, just like views, those original moments. And I think that can be beneficial. We leverage that in some of the tools we teach.but you don't have to. You can just be aware that like, Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm having this fear. It's an unprocessed emotion. And it's so what's the solution? Well, again, like I said, number one, know that it's coming past and know that in the present moment, now you can begin question. And the process of questioning the fear is to once you feel the fear, whether it's stress, anxiety, anger, number one, you know that this is just a memory, you know, it's not conducive to you actually creating what you want in your life. It's not conducive to you being a happy person. And so you dedicate yourself to actually working with this information as coming up. You know, you don't just go on with your day and go on with week and go on with months. You need to be the same person at some point in time, whether it's in the moment or later that day, or if kind of committing to do some personal work or growth work over the course of a weekend, you go back to that moment. And the first question you want to ask yourself is like, what was I, what was I thinking about? Right. I'm aware of the emotion. It was anger. It was stress. It was anxiety. It was some form of fear. I tell in the way that reacted in the way that I felt, what was I thinking? And you look at the thoughts because it's very important to understand that remember we talked about there's only two states of being powerful states and primal states. And the name of the game is to operate from a powerful state of being as much possible. You're not always going to operate power state. That's okay, right? Your nervous system is an ancient nervous system that's designed to help survive. It's just applying itself in inappropriate situations right now. You're not going to be eaten by a dinosaur, right? So, um, so, uh, what determined whether you're in a powerful state or a primal state, which is really the only important thing. If you want to create change in your life is your own thing. Your thoughts are the only thing determined whether you're in a powerful state or so the external circ thing there. That's, that's not what determining how you feel. Um, it's the, the meaning that you're giving. So like when you have an argument with your spouse, it's not what your spouse did that made anger. It's the meaning that you're giving the situation with your spouse. That's making sure the anger is in you. It's in your own thoughts, not external. Um, when you get a bill that you don't expect, you know, from your insurance company that they'd cover something. Now you owe another $800 and you move into a fear of financial security. It's not the bill that caused you to move into a fear of financial security, financial stress, worry. It's the meaning that you're giving the bill, right? I'm going to run out of money. I'm not going to have enough. That is what's creating the emotion in you in this case at prime state. So we want to, we want to look at these emotions and it's very important just as a side note, um, to understand that these emotions are coming up inside of you. So a lot of people, they, they blame their external environment for the emotion that, but really the emotion is, is in you. It's just in you and it's waiting to be transformed. It's coming up because it's wanting to be worked with, wanting to be re-understood and wanting to be rehabilitated so that you can have a more expansive life. And we make the mistake of, um, of thinking that it's the thing out there that's causing us to feel this. But really the way the mind works is this emotion comes up inside of you and then the mind justifies the emotion by looking externally to find something or to justify the emotion. But make no mistake, the only thing that's determining how you feel and whether you're in a powerful state or primal state are the thoughts that you're having. And what we found to be true is that 100% of the time when you're having thoughts move you into a primal state, it's some form of limiting belief or, or, or, or unprocessed trauma. And 100% of the time it turns out not to be true. It turns out not to be true that you can't trust other people. It just happened a few times in your life and you started looking for evidence to actually support that theory. And so now you've had multiples in your life where it happened, but the vast majority of time it was never true. It's not true that there's no good ones left, right? If you're looking for your soulmate, right? That's what we would call an untrue belief system. That's why it feels so bad inside your nervous system and it moves you into a primal state, right? What's true is that because of this belief, you're not showing up as charismatic, attractive, and you're not having at an unconscious level, the thoughts and ideas and make decisions go to certain places where you'll run into your soulmate. Like the great coordination of intelligence can't occur because you're operating in this sort of like dissonant, vibrationally disruptive environment that you've created as a result of one thing and one thing only, which untrue thinking. And so a really simple tool that we teach called the decision matrix, and you can catch some other episodes where I've walked, I've walked you step by step through it, or you can jump on over to my website and opt into our newsletter and go through a video series where I talk about decision is this idea that once you identify the thought or the limiting belief that was creating this emotion, right? This negative emotion or primal emotion that occurred for you. Um, and, and you now realize that it's a limiting belief and it's not true. You can, you can play a little game with, and the game would be, well, if, if this isn't true, even though it seems true, if this isn't true, then it must be the some form of the opposite. And you can establish what the op, uh, right. Uh, money, our world is a wash in a bun, right? Rather than money's hard. That would be the op. Um, you know, uh, most of the time I trust people and I trust people do and be exactly who they write. You're limiting trust. Um, if you're limiting belief, for example, is like, I'm not enough. I'm not good enough. Then the new empowering belief would be something I am worried. And then that's the second step, right? Establishing a new belief that's more congruent with what you want to create in your life. And you'll also notice that when you, uh, engage with this belief feels good, moves you in power. And then the third thing is to reinforce it by saying, what evidence do I have facts, new belief, true. See, what's happened over time is, um, your, your, your brain has not found the evidence that supports the empowered beliefs and so you've been having experiences that support this new belief system, but you've been filtering them out. There's a part of the brain called the reticular activating system. And that's that part of your brain. When you buy a new car, you see the car everywhere on road. Well what happens is as a result of this limiting belief for this childhood trauma, you've been only paying attention to information that aligns with the limiting belief trauma and you've been ignoring it now. But this little three step process I gave you of paying attention to your emotion and looking at thought and if it doesn't feel good coming up with a new but opposite belief and then looking for evidence of the new starts to activate dormant neural networks in your brain. Basically that's a fancy way of saying memory. So it starts to activate memories and if you're willing to sit with it, you know, I try to do this maybe once a week. I used to do it every morning. I'm just kind of working the top three to five limiting beliefs came up for me the previous day or the previous week. If you're willing to actually work this simple process and then, um, and be patient with it, at first you'll find some small apps and you'll be like, ah, that doesn't even really count. Money's money's easy to make. And I found, you know, a dollar on street. But then if you're willing to stick with it, you'll start to find more evidence and more evidence and more evidence and more evidence. And it just makes sense because what you're doing is you're bringing your awareness to a part of your brain that just hasn't been that act, but the memories are there. And so before you know it, you'll have three, four, five, 10 examples to support new belief. And if you and I were working in a private session, for example, and I would say, well, what about the limiting belief you'd go at? It doesn't even make sense. And what you, what you're, what you're doing in that process is called neural pruning. So your, your nervous system is used to going to the old information, but if you can do this work, you sort of force it into the new one. And so now that you've established this, you're like, Oh, I'm really aware of this limiting belief coming up for me. Cause I'm in this practice Dave recommended. And I also did the work. And so I've got this new belief and I've got evidence for it. Now what happens is, is you go out into your week and into your day, your nervous system is still going to get triggered. So the old limiting belief is, but now you've prepared, right? You're aware that the old limiting belief is untrue. You're aware of the emotion associated with it. You're aware of the thought go along with it. Like now you're ready to play the game. And so in that moment, then you're able to go, Oh, wait a minute. Like I feel this habit. And, and these are the thoughts that are habitual, but I remember I've already established for myself, right? I am where I've already established for myself. There is enough time to get all of the things done that need to get done. And what doesn't get done today will get done tomorrow. And I trust that process, right? If we're dealing, for example, with there's not a time. So you'll, you'll remind yourself in the moment of the new belief and you'll have the evidence to support it. And that's the new rep. That's the new, like being in the, in, in the mental gym. That's the new repetition that starts to move your brain in a new direction and starts to move you in a new direction. Because now this time you haven't spent five, 10, 15, 30 an hour, right? 60 minutes of your time entangled with the limiting belief, reinforcing the neural networks, deep deepening the myelin sheath and the connections essentially supporting the habit. You're now moving your, your thoughts and your emotions into a new direction. And that one rep builds a little bit of, and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again. And you'd be willing to do it imperfect. Like there are times where you're not going to do it. Shit. But entangled with this limiting belief two days, that's okay. Right? And, and then that awareness allows you to do a rep in the new direction. And so this is, this is how you, how you, how you develop a new habit. And you practice, uh, and you practice this as if it's the most in your life because it is, it's, it's more important than a nutritional practice, more important than a gym practice, more important than a business practice, because this is the root cause, all change that you're wanting to create in your life. And over time, what happens is you downregulate your nervous system and you start operating more from the parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest and relaxation rather than the sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight. And then the result of that over time are all the things that I, I mentioned to you before, you know, you start to relax into your life. That's how I met my wife through a series of intuitions and unconscious decisions that I made. You know, I made a decision back and I think it was the end of 2012 that I was, I had been single for 10 years and I was going to meet a beautiful Colombian woman and make her my wife. Two weeks later, through a series of incalculable synchronicities, I ended up meeting my wife, who's a beautiful Colombian. Um, it's this, this is the root cause of how we produced over $30 million in an impact driven business. If you look back, you could see that I implemented some strategies, but how did I choose those strategies and how did I get those strategies to work effectively? Well, it was all a result mindset being aligned, um, and being congruent with the results that I wanted to produce. You know, uh, in 2016, 2017, I started having chronic health conditions and I'm almost completely all the way through it. In fact, I am all the way through it. I'm just waiting for my body to catch up. Why? Well, because I've been able to heal or metabolize a lot of these misunderstandings of my limiting beliefs and my childhood traumas that were keeping my body essentially consistently or stuck in fight or flight. And now I'm spending a lot of time in rest and relaxation. And so what happens? Well, my labs are sorting out, you know, my heart rate coming, these conditions doctors couldn't blame just going away. So if you want to create change in your life, it's not complicated, right? It's not, it doesn't mean it's easy, but it's not complicated when you actually understand how the rules of the work. There's one thing that is preventing you from creating what you want to create in your life, no matter what area of your life it is. And that is this thing, fear. So the work we must do is to toxify ourselves of this fear by understanding what's happening in the present moment, which is fear is coming up as unprocessed information and having some simple tools to be able to work with that information as it comes up. The tool I gave you today is the decision matrix. Um, and there are a lot of great tools out there, whether they're my tools or someone else's tools. Um, and you know, and as you go deeper and deeper into healing some of these things that might be, let's call it a little bit more core, there are deeper sets of tools. We have an amazing process called the forgiveness framework, surrender experience, the self love system. You know, and all together, this allows you to return to being a whole human being. So, but you just want to be playing the right game. A lot of people are lost right now trying to control their external circumstances or not understanding why they're feeling anxious or depressed or why they're experiencing economic insecurity or why they're alone or why they're having relationship challenges. And the answer to like all of those whys is because there's unprocessed fear. And I find a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of comfort in knowing that that's, and it frankly, it becomes really exciting for me because once we can distill it down to just that, now it's like, okay, cool. So how can I get even better at identifying all these, you know, various forms of fear? It's very, um, we described it in an addiction because addiction is ultimate fear too, is cunning, baffling and powerful. How can I get better and better at the game, you know, against fear? And then I realized fear becomes teacher. Fear is not an enemy. Every time I'm able to re understand fear, uh, into a new empowered belief or a new empowered decision, I become more powerful and I'm able to create more. And so, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a pretty cool game when you understand how it works and you've got tools to be successful. Within it. And it can feel pretty hopeless when you don't understand the game, you feeling like you're in the, in the boxing ring, fighting an invisible boxer, but you're here. You're part of a changed mind. That's why we talk about this being a sanctuary for your spirit, because you've called forth and attracted this information and tools and community. And that means you're, you're doing great. You're on the right path. You're doing the work. And as long as you continue to ask the answer, so I hope you got some great answers today. Again, comment below. Give me, you know, any of the, um, big distinctions or takeaways or ask me any, any questions that you have. And it is important, you know, document the amount of time you spend in a primal state. You can drop it in the comment box and check out everybody else's. And we're going to work together to continue to grow, to continue to evolve and continue to move forward. So I love you very much. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you on.