Exclusive Interview : Tim Shurr Shares the Method that Upgrades Fear and Scarcity-Based Unconscious Beliefs.

Tim Shurr, MA, and top Executive Mind Coach for many of the worlds highest achievers. After facilitating over 15,000 individual sessions and hundreds of corporate leadership, sales training, and culture-strengthening workshops over the last 35 years, Tim discovered how to quickly identify and replace the faulty beliefs, blind spots, and dysfunctional communication habits that hold people back from reaching their full potential.

His mesmerizing keynotes and coaching programs instantly and sustainably increase productivity, sales close rates, team collaboration, and belonging faster than any other approach. If you need to solve a people problem immediately or wish to take your business growth to the next level, his programs are the special forces of peak performance!

Prepare to embark on a riveting exploration of the life and work of Brian Tracy with this exclusive interview, where we unveil the secrets behind his extraordinary success and unravel the profound impact he has made on individuals from all walks of life. Get ready to be inspired, enlightened, and motivated as we delve into the world of a true visionary and masterful communicator. His Subconscious Reprogramming keynotes and training programs instantly empower, elevate, and transform you, your team, and your company culture by upgrading those limiting beliefs and blind spots.

Where were you before you got into learning and improving all the things that are happening about our beliefs? What did you do before? Where were you?

Well, I was just a kid struggling with anxiety and low self-esteem and insecurity and never quite feeling good enough and having all kinds of crazy experiences growing up with friends that would be friends with you one day and then act like your arch enemy the next day. And when I was 12 years old my dad was an electrician at a steel mill and there was an explosion and he got burned really bad. So, my brain started developing a belief, and I didn’t know it, but developing a belief that bad things could happen at any moment and you can’t play life to win. You got to play not to lose. How do I not lose? How do I not get hurt? That creates so much insecurity, so much fear, so much anxiety and I just kept feeling more and more anxious over the years. When I graduated high school, I thought I’m going to go to school for psychology and figure this stuff out, because I need to figure out how to be able to believe in myself and feel good about myself. That was 32 years ago I made that decision, and I’ve been looking for the cure for anxiety and the cure for insecurity ever since and I have found it. So now, I’ve spent my life sharing what I’ve learned and teaching people how their unconscious minds work and how their beliefs work and how to upgrade how they feel and behave really fast, faster than most people would even believe is possible.

Tim, how can we put this in schools and educate younger kids? Because you were 12 and you had to figure it out on your own until you grew older. What do you think? Just in your opinion? How can we put this lesson in school?

That’s actually a great question, and you can find the answer to anything if you ask the right question, so that was a very good one. In this last decade we’ve been focusing, I say we, I mean as a country, we’ve been focusing a little bit more on emotional intelligence, which many countries do not do that, including America. We’ve been starting to teach people how to respect themselves more so that they can respect others more and how to be more compassionate and aware of how our words and our actions affect others. And it’s a really good start. It’s nowhere close to where it needs to be, but it’s a really good start. I would think that as this evolves and as we continue to use technology, there will be more ways that we’re able to teach people how their mind works, how their unconscious mind works, and their conscious mind, how what they focus on they move towards, what they imagined in their mind influences them. What they hear around them or what they see in their environment is influencing them. So anybody that’s been studying personal development, this is obvious, but for 99% of the population these are secrets and insights that people are not aware of. They just don’t know how their mind works, so we accidentally sabotage ourselves, or we’re running our lives based on the beliefs that were developed when we were eight years old. So we’ve still got that little child inside of us, calling the shots in a lot of ways, and you can tell when people get angry, that kid comes out.

Yeah, and it’s not just kids that need to learn but for us too, even though we think we know a lot there’s always room to learn. Talking about fear, a lot of entrepreneurs are so creative, that’s why we want to be our own boss. But there’s a lot of challenges and fear and it leads to self-sabotage and not a lot of people get over it and overcome it. How can we overcome that?

 
Being an entrepreneur takes a serious amount of personal growth and courage. To feel the fear and to have amazing amounts of uncertainty and to still keep chasing your dreams anyway. Then learning how to stay focused, and learning how to not chase all the shiny objects, and learning how to stay resilient, and keep yourself going and motivated when things aren’t working or people don’t believe in you. And the instability of making a lot of money and then not making any money and going up and down, it is really brutal in a lot of ways, but also beautiful in a lot of ways because you have to grow inside to be able to experience more prosperity and inner peace. Some people experience that prosperity but they don’t have inner peace. Some people have inner peace but they never experienced prosperity. So being able to have both is really a challenge. It’s an art and a science, and there’s plenty of people that say they have the answers and the secrets and everything else. But I have found that it really takes a lot of maturity, a lot of personal growth, and believing in yourself and getting rid of the fears of not being good enough, the fears of being an imposter and really developing self-love and self-acceptance. And self-love and self-acceptance, I believe are the two keys that really allow us to continue to pursue our goals, and not just to be happy when we achieve our goals but to be happy when we’re not. To be happy even if we don’t feel like we have momentum. Momentum is everything for entrepreneurs. Are we making progress? Not am I happy, am I sad, but am I making progress? We’re so afraid that if we’re not making progress, then everything’s going to fall apart. I call it achiever syndrome. It keeps us from being relaxed, or being happy, or feeling at ease, or chasing pleasure because we’re so busy trying to avoid the pain of failure, the pain of judgment, the pain of being afraid that all our deepest fears are actually accurate. That I’m not really good enough to be able to pull this off or take it to the level that I want. I found that self-love and acceptance gives you that sense of peace that allows you to show up each day happy, and the happier you are, the more successful you seem to be.

I love when you say, we have to become a different person in order to get something that we never had before, to achieve something. Tell us a little bit about “One Belief Away,” what is it? What does it mean, “One Belief Away”?

For years, I facilitated over 15,000 individual hypnosis coaching sessions and it took me a couple of decades to do that. And so one hour at a time, one person at a time, 15,000 times, people would come in for a variety of goals and I found that when we figured out what the belief was that was holding them back. “I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy. I’m not smart enough. Things don’t work out for me. I’m not lucky. Whatever the belief was, I’m afraid of failure, I’m afraid of rejection, I’m afraid people are going to abandon me. I’m afraid that people are going to realize that I’m not as smart as I pretend to be online so I have that impostor syndrome.” There was always a belief that was formed when they were a kid that set that up, it set that pattern of fear and insecurity up. And when we would upgrade that belief from I’m not worthy of love to, I am worthy of love and I’m going to start loving myself more today. When we created that shift, immediately, their behavior improved, they started thinking in a way that was more supportive and encouraging, and immediately they started feeling more motivated and started taking positive action. We didn’t have to change all the negative symptoms, they would come in with a list of what’s going wrong and here’s what’s not working, but we didn’t have to go through that list. We upgraded the belief, we started at the foundation and it shifted what people focused on, whatever you’ve believed your mind is going to pay attention to that set of information because your mind likes to be right. So if it thinks you’re not good enough, then it’s going to find all these past memories of evidence to prove that you’re right, you’re not good enough. If you believe that you are good enough, your mind will pay attention to a new set of information that will start validating that you are enough. That’s why it’s so important to focus on the beliefs that we have, because in its essence causes your brain to pay attention to different information, and when you do that, it allows people to have breakthroughs so quickly. Even if they had struggled for years, even if they had been in personal development for years, I’ve worked with a ton of healers and a ton of coaches that still have the same insecurities and they’ve been to every Tony Robbins seminar and they still have the same things that they’re struggling with because they never got to that core belief, that core fear. You’re just one belief away from having a really big transformation in your life.

I’m asking this question for myself. So I knew what I used to believe, I used to believe that I wasn’t good enough. I’m a girl who came from a third-world country. When I first moved here, I didn’t speak English. I used to believe that I wasn’t smart enough to even drive on the same street with any American car, but now that belief is gone. I can see my business starting to take off but it’s not where I want it to be yet. So there must be some root of belief that I haven’t discovered yet. So how can we dig even deeper and discover what it is that we haven’t found that’s getting in our way?

 
A lot of times we have this idea that we should be more successful than we are right now or that it should have happened 10 years ago.

It’s not happening on our timeline and that robs us of our happiness. I think that sometimes what we want to do is adjust the goal, because the goal should be to be happy today and to get from today, instead of just trying to get through today so we can achieve some monetary goal. Because that’s what usually people say, “until I make five million dollars I’m not successful, until I’ve been on stages all over the world, I can’t be happy.” That is what sabotages our ability to be happy and to attract more opportunities that would bring that goal to us. When we are stressed and we’re asking lousy questions like, what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I have this? How come I’m not as good as everybody else? Then it causes your mind to find evidence to say, it’s because of this and because of that, and then it’s you’re not focused on those opportunities that will take you to that next level, you’re focused on the reasons why you can’t get there.

I’ll tell you a quick story, because you asked me this before the interview. So, I decided to write the “One Belief Away” book with my buddy, Joe Vitale, because he’s 15 years older than me and he’s just been down the road farther and he’s very insightful. I remember we were having a conversation and this is the moment when I decided, Joe has to help me finish this book. I wanted him to finish the final chapters of this book, so I said, “Joe, do you ever think that some people are just luckier than others?” Because at that moment that’s how I was feeling, I’m just not as lucky but I’m as smart as anybody else. I met some of these people and I’m way smarter than them. How come they have this and I don’t? And I said, “are some people just luckier than others?” Joe thought for a second and then he said, “well, there’s a lot of victimhood in that question.” I had this whole reaction in my mind, everything froze for a moment, and I thought am I being a victim right now? That’s impossible. I wrote the book on “Get Out of Your Way,” I can’t still be a victim. I can’t still be acting like poor me, I’ve worked on myself, but in fact, that’s what was happening. I was feeling sorry for myself because it hadn’t happened for me. Although I had been on TV 50 times, I did a Ted Talk, I wrote books, I knew all these cool people, but in my mind, it didn’t matter. All that mattered is what I didn’t have, not what I had already accomplished, and that was my trap. Then Joe said this and it really blew my mind. He said, “Tim let’s say there are lucky people in the world. Why don’t you just decide to be one of them?”

I can’t even think of this advice by myself just so you know.

Nobody can, that’s why we need each other. We’re interdependent creatures, we need each other. Most entrepreneurs are solo entrepreneurs, we’re trying to do it all by ourself.

You got to have coaches, you got to have collaborations, you’ve got to have people in your network, or in your sphere of influence that are helping you. I don’t want to do anything by myself anymore. Everything that I’ve been doing, I’ve been teaming up with amazing people and doing programs with them, Chris Weiner, Randy Gage, and Joe Vitale. All of these people that I wanted to partner up with. So, when Joe said that, I thought that was amazing. I’m just going to decide to be lucky, and because I decided that I’m lucky, I upgraded my belief. Instead of focusing on, why isn’t it happening for me? I focused on, I’m a lucky person. What would a lucky person do? What would be a big bold move that a lucky person would go for? And I thought I’m going to get a hold of Les Brown, I always wanted to meet him. I was scared to death that he wouldn’t like me which is more insecurity. Why would Les want to talk to me? But I ended up getting ahold of Les. When we first met, we talked every day for two weeks in a row. He was calling me at 9:00 at night saying, “Hello, great one,” for a while and I didn’t think he knew my name because he just kept saying, “Hello, great one.” Then Les hooked me up with Brian Tracy and Ken Blanchard and then the doors flew open. It was amazing and now I’m talking to Dennis Wheatley on the phone, hanging out talking to him, he’s been mentoring me. It was blowing my mind, all the people that I met because I shifted an idea in my mind, because beliefs are just ideas, they’re just opinions they’re not faxed. Now, I shifted that idea that I’m lucky and all of a sudden, it opened these doors, and then of course I took action. I had to find Les’ cell phone, I had to provide a lot of value first, to make that impression. I had to make the phone call a couple of times because the first couple times I called I didn’t get a hold of Les. It took me several months, I had to stay persistent. I had to keep putting in that action, but then it created that breakthrough.

But even then, knowing all those people, I did this Global Legend Summit, I brought all of them together at the same time, which was absolutely extraordinary.

I had 16 of the best speakers in the world and I teamed them up to have conversations. So, I had Brian Tracy and Les Brown hanging out, I had Bob Proctor and Denis Waitley hanging out, and I just kept doing it over and over with all these amazing people, and it was just absolutely amazing. But when that was over and the Legend Summit wrapped up, we did our last one this last January of 2021, my mind went back to, but what have you been doing lately? You haven’t been on the Today Show yet, you haven’t done a TED Talk lately, and it started going back to, now I know all these amazing people that I grew up listening to, I could call any one of them on my phone but my brains like, but that’s what you did, but what you don’t have is a hundred Keynotes booked. Even though we just went through a pandemic and they’re finally starting to rebook, my brain is like “yeah, but-” and I bet your brain does that too.

I mean look how amazing you are. You are a powerful woman that came from a third world country where you didn’t even know the language or if you were going to be able to drive on our crazy highways, and look at what you’ve accomplished. Look how amazing you are and how you’ve turned out and what you’ve been able to do. So obviously Nim, you are one of the lucky people as well, and now you’re attracting all these superstars into your life, why? Because you are one.

I’m speechless, I mean, again, like your example, it’s not about how many people you interview but overcoming your own self-sabotage, seriously Tim. And this is what I love about talking to you, somebody who already works so much on the mind. But Tim we have done a lot and overcome a lot of self-sabotage, but when life hits hard and the darkness comes in, the dark night of the soul, and I always ask this question, I asked Joe this question too and we almost cried. But how can we tell ourselves to get back up and not get in our own way? When you’re just one belief away but don’t want to do it, it’s a mindset that I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to think good or positive anymore. 

Yes, I love your questions. This is the stuff that I like to talk about the most, not all the happy shiny successful stuff that people promote on social media, but the days when you don’t want to get out of bed, when you’re sick of promoting, posting, trying to create another funnel. Wondering how am I going to make more money, or how am I going to get out of this credit card debt, or how am I going to pay my rent? When covid hit I lost 90% of my business overnight. And that’s happened a couple of times in 26 years, when 911 almost wiped out my practice, 2009 when the stock crash, and the housing mess happened. There’s a lot of things that happen that are completely out of our control that are not fair. We all go through what I call “Big T and Little T” traumas, and it’s how we handle them that matters more than anything else. Which is why I’ve adjusted what makes me happy, from how much money I make or how many goals I achieve to how I can be happy today? How can I make sure that I’m feeling peaceful today? It’s a very different goal for me than I ever had before, because my self-worth was connected to my net worth. So I’ve had to change that around and I think that when we are really scared, when we’re really frustrated, when we’re really doubting ourselves, when we are looking at the success that other people seem to have, and trust me I’ve hung out with a lot of super successful people and they don’t have very much more figured out than we do, they have their ups and downs. When I was doing my interviews for the book with Joe, he was going through a divorce. We had a very serious conversation and it started off with, “Joe, you’re the Law of Attraction Guru, how come you’re having a divorce?” That was a very painful way to start it out but Joe was so honest and so vulnerable, he has such a big heart that he wants to go there. And we had a really powerful conversation about it because bad things are going to happen to all of us, and sometimes the motivators are going to feel uninspired and we’re going to feel down. Nobody’s up 100% of the time, if they say they are, be quite suspicious of that. But in those moments, you go back to your tools that keep you going. You listen to podcasts like yours, or mine, “How to be Mesmerizing,” you listen to audio books, you crank up the music, you hang around really cool people that are inspiring. You don’t hide by yourself, you have to create that environment, create that network, create people, hire coaches. When I was feeling down from the pandemic and I lost all that business and all that money, all my Keynotes were canceled. But then I took the time and I hung out a lot with my family and my kids. I finished the “One Belief Away” book and I created The Legend Summit out of nothing. I met all my heroes from growing up and so that was amazing. But I was still struggling financially because I had lots of bills and no money coming in and it was scary. But I decided, how do I feel safe even if I feel broke? Because you can feel broke even if you have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Which I had that experience, I had a hundred thousand dollars in cash sitting in the bank and I felt broke and how is that possible, right? I would have ten thousand in the bank and I would feel the same feelings, or a million dollars in the bank and feel the same. What happens is when you make more money you buy more stuff and you find yourself broke at a higher level. So it’s not the money, it’s the beliefs, and our feelings of scarcity, and not being safe. We’ve got to focus on how do I feel safe, how do I feel comfortable in uncomfortable times? And that takes developing yourself, feeding your mind good information, hanging out with amazing people, and having a routine that constantly lifts you up so that when bad things happen, and they will, you will have a reserve to draw from.

Again, that’s great advice. So you talked about routine before you ended, I was going to ask what your routine is. I myself use affirmation and the power of I am. What do you use? What do you do for your routine to really stay in the lane?

So, first thing in the morning I get up and I’m usually doing my push-ups, some kind of exercise and because I’m 51 now, so if I don’t, then all of a sudden my back hurts, I throw my shoulder out, itch in my head, or something happens and I just start feeling a little rusty. So I’m usually exercising, and while I’m doing that I’m always listening to some video on YouTube. There’s so many motivational videos, or a new audio book, or a podcast from one of my friends, and that’s what inspires me. So, I’m feeding my mind while I’m strengthening my body. I don’t do it every day, but most days I do. If you’re not feeding your mind that good information, then you start to draw on what’s going on around you, or how the people around you are feeling. Most of the time when you’re an inspirational person or a motivational speaker, your family’s not usually like that, you don’t usually marry someone like that, and so you’ve got to make sure that you’re able to balance what’s going on in your life with what’s going on around those that you care about. But you got to have some way of filling yourself up because the rest of the time you’re focused on filling everybody else up, and if you don’t fill up then you run dry.

Do you do it just for yourself or are you including your kids and your family as well? In terms of like the routine to self-development.

I fill myself up, now I’ve done things where I’ve got my kids to exercise with me and things like that or I’ll go for walks with my wife. But it’s very important to fill yourself up and to take care of yourself because I find that people are either really good at taking care of themselves but not anybody else or they’re really good at taking care of everybody else but not themselves. We want to be able to get good at taking care of ourselves and others. But if you have a piture of water, and you spend your day pouring into everybody else and they’re not pouring into you, you’ve got to find a way to fill yourself up, right? A lot of times people walk around with empty cups, saying fill me up, and then they get mad if people don’t fill them up in the way that you think they should. So that’s why it’s important to focus on filling ourselves up, taking care of ourselves.

It’s not selfish, we get these weird beliefs that it’s somehow selfish if we take care of ourselves, if we’re not 100% taking care of everybody else. That’s false. Fill yourself up so that you are able to have that abundance that you can then share with others.

Thank you for sharing, I have two more questions for you. You’ve done a lot in the world already, what will your legacy look like from now on?

Well, two thoughts came to mind. First, I’m hoping that all of the love, the support, the insights, the awareness, and the emotional intelligence that my wife and I have been pouring into our two boys is going to stay with them, and that will influence how they raise their kids, and how those kids raise their kids. We’ve really taught them the importance of loving themselves, and taking care of others, and being respectful. We’ve poured a lot of that into our kids, and so for my family, that will be the legacy. Then I’m hoping with all the clients that I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, that teaching them how their mind works and pouring into them as well, showing how to program your mind and the power of your beliefs, and that what you focus on most of the time your life becomes, and how to use your imagination in ways that allow you to turn a bad day into a better day right away. As my friend Willy Jolley would say, “a setback is a setup for a comeback.” And so pouring that into my clients over the years or the company leaders, I work with a lot of companies and the best thing I hear from the managers is how they took these insights home and became a better parent, and a better spouse, and a better neighbor. I’m hoping that this education and heightened self-awareness has helped the families that I’ve been able to help. I feel like I’ve made a difference for thousands of people which is kind of amazing when you think about it. When I think about it I feel like I’ve already won. Everything else that I experience is an amazing bonus such as being on this show and spending this time with you Nim, it’s awesome that we get to have this time together.

Thank you so much, Tim. This is a bonus for us too, for me, and for my audience. What is the new exciting project that you’re working on right now? And how can our audience reach out to you?

That’s a great question. I spent all last year interviewing the most amazing personal development trainers on the planet, all the best motivational speakers and best-selling authors. So, this year I’m focusing on interviewing all the CEOs that everybody’s trying to get to. I’m interviewing all these amazing CEOs that are visionaries, that are people-centric, that are very culture focused, that are running several hundred million dollar companies, and understanding how they’re thinking and how they’re working with their people and building their culture up post covid. If you know somebody that is a really amazing CEO like that, then I would love to have a conversation and perhaps interview them for my “How to be Mesmerizing” podcast. Then I’m just finishing up my next round of “One Belief Away” books. I’ve got a series of topics that I’m focusing on, so I’m working on that, and then who knows what’ll happen from there. I’m excited. We’ll see what happens.

Awesome, and I will post your website in the description as well. Tim, such a great honor to be spending time with you. Thank you so much for being here and sharing, for me this is really deep advice for us. Not just thinking positive but really sometimes we don’t have to be too hard on ourselves, right?That’s right, it doesn’t matter what shows up, what matters is how you show up, and you can show up resourceful, confident, happy, or playful. You can show up any way you want once you realize that it’s a choice, and when you do that you can focus. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, what matters is where you’re headed. So let’s focus together on making the rest of your life, the best of your life.

Contact Tim Shurr :
http://www.timshurr.com