Simon Lovell - Emotional & Energetic Intelligence for Super High Performance

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You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 442-22. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Well, everyone, thanks so much for joining me today. Always great to have you with me, especially when we have great guests like I have lined up today for you. I hope you have a pen and a pad of paper to take some notes. My first guest is, it's going to be kind of interesting for you, I think. Simon Levell went from being a bullied teen, addicted to drugs, alcohol, gambling. And then he built his own million dollar company, but he still wasn't happy. After healing his childhood trauma, he now helps CEOs and entrepreneurs become fulfilled through this proven 6 week transformational process called the super high performance formula. He's the author of The Black Ball. Does Anybody Else Have a Secret? And it's been featured on Entrepreneur and Forbes, and Simon's also the host of the Unshakeable Leaders podcast. And today we're going to talk about emotional and energetic intelligence for super high performance. Welcome, Simon. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here and uh share with you. Yeah, my pleasure. I look forward to this information. It's, it's always great to hear something, you know, people, people go through things, right? People go through, it's called life. People go through difficult times. It sounds like you went through an exceptional experience at a young age and came out of it. And so I love to hear inspiration. I think it helps our listeners. I think it might help their youngsters as well. So let's talk about that. Tell us a little bit more about your background. So I was born born in England and I mean I had a pretty normal childhood growing up, honestly, but then things started to change when I, when I went into secondary school and there was an incident in the shower that happened where I got heavily bullied and I didn't actually realize at the time, but this was a trauma and I'm working with a lot of people around trauma, but they don't realize that it's trauma and what a trauma is, you know, for example, if you get bullied, it's an interruption to our energetic system. And so our body goes into this fight or flight, and then basically we don't recover from it. So for example, animals like dogs, you'll see them oftentimes they shake, right? If they get attacked by another dog, they'll go into this shake. Well, that's actually shaking off the energy, but we don't do that as humans. And so for me, I experienced this trauma which created isolation and disconnection. And so then, because I got bullied by men, I started to push men away and isolate myself. And then I got addicted. Because of the trauma and I, and the opposite of addiction is connection. So when we're addicted to something, we're disconnected, but I didn't realize this at the time, and so it was a big struggle for me to actually, you know, go about my life like it was painful for me because I had this in my nervous system and so then I started to, to, you know, get addicted and I had the drug addiction, the alcohol, and this is my pattern. I would go out and I would, I would drink, I would smoke, I would take drugs and then I would gamble. That was my sequence of soothing. And so when we're in this pain, like me, we go to something to numb ourselves and so, you know, I had to recover from, I had to recover from that and so my journey has been a healing journey, honestly, and the more that I started to let go of, the more that I was able to grow my business and actually reach fulfillment, which is, I think, really important because there's a lot of um. I think pain in gross a lot of the times and and we forget that actually we actually really need to take care of ourselves to be able to get to that next level. Yeah, I think what you're saying all makes a lot of sense. I know that our brain has a tremendous capacity to store things like that, and I hadn't thought about animals shaking it off and That's that's what they're doing is actually shaking it off. That's interesting. And so when you turn to things that soothe yourself like drinking loosens you up and like you said makes maybe makes you feel better about things in general, and then gambling gives you a chance to be, I guess, a winner at that point. Maybe it's it's a healthy distraction. I wonder how many people maybe aren't suffering from that severe of an issue, but in some other way they feel like they haven't measured up and they're compensating for it in some way or another. How does all this come come about and how do you start on the journey towards towards actual healing? I mean it can manifest in so many different ways if we get if we don't feel love for ourselves, for example, then that can manifest in anger for an entrepreneur, for example, or for someone else it may be seeking validation or it can be the chase and the race and the compulsion. It's compulsion, erratic behavior, which is an energy and so how you'll feel that in your body is it's always kind of um uptight, like you're always. Kind of like um just kind of, you know, reacting to things badly and you're not calm in your body. Your body doesn't feel relaxed the most of the time, and I lived most of my, you know, entrepreneurial life up until this day, like in that place of like this constant angst of like the race to chase. And so actually when we start to connect with ourselves and meditation is a good starting point, but you need to go through consistency and depth of meditation. It's a good way to actually start to bring you into your center and and actually what happens is when you do that and you do it consistently and you go to depth, you start to access intuition, which then impacts better decision making that impacts how you relate to other people and, and um you know the the types of decisions you make in your personal life and also in your business that then can create more opportunity. And so by going inward and actually starting to become attuned with ourselves to a much deeper level and actually start to heal, then we feel more connected to other people. And the big thing that I notice a lot with the CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders is that they feel connected, sorry, they feel disconnected. They don't want to feel that way, you know, we want to be connected, but we seem to be pushing people away, and we're, we're putting something else as a priority versus our own self-care. Um, so that's what I've noticed. So, so we really start that journey by first of all, stage number one admitting the reality of the situation that we're in. For example, I'm angry most of the time, or I, you know, one of my clients, you know, I, I walk around the house like shouting, for example, like, but if you're not willing to admit actually who you are behind the scenes, you can't move into the next stage which is actually starting to resolve that. So you have to go back and undo what's what's been done and work on that in some ways and break it down before you can deal with it. It sounds like. And now let's talk about this emotional intelligence for our listeners that haven't heard that term before. Let's, before we get into how it impacts things, what is emotional intelligence? How do you define that? So emotional intelligence is is understanding our emotions and how that plays into our behavior and our results. Um, and so we go through these different feelings, but for a lot of people because they're disconnected, they, they're not able to sense actually how to handle that, right? So as we every time we develop one area of emotional intelligence. That actually impacts our level of performance and so actually a lot of top performers, they have high levels of emotional intelligence. Then also I layer onto that energetic intelligence, understanding energy within your body and how you can actually heal yourself and actually when to slow down because again. What I notice is, is that a lot of entrepreneurs CEOs are not listening to their body, and that's what creates burnout. Burnout happens when you're not listening to yourself because you're not in tune with yourself. So emotional intelligence and energetic intelligence is about you becoming attuned so that you can actually go, OK, my body is telling me this, so now I should do this, versus my body is telling me this and now I'm going to ignore it, and then you have what I call a universal slap. And that universal slap may be, hey, now I'm going to give you some anxiety to remind you about what you're not doing. Now I'm going to give you a little slap of depression because you're ignoring what I'm telling you. Now I'm going to give you a little slap of sadness again because you're ignoring what I'm telling you to do, which can be a difficult conversation with a partner. Which can be to go meditate, which can be any number of things. And so that is in essence, how we start to become aware that we actually have an intelligence within us that we need to be connected with and then exactly what to do to then go, go and actually become very intuitive in your business. You know what I think is interesting about all this, Simon, is that a lot of our listeners are baby boomer business owners, so they're, they're older, you know, we're, hey, we've been around for a while, but a lot of them have been doing what they do in their business for a long time, long enough that they may have lost their passion for what they're doing, and that may be, you know, may be part of just doing what they do for so long and maybe doing a lot of things. That they don't like and then when the economy goes bad or a person quits or you know things get harder, it can be a disaster when they're trying to monetize that business. So it's really important that people be in a good state of emotional intelligence as they move towards their exit and their transition out of their business. How does emotional intelligence impact performance in business? Well, it's because of energy and so basically when we have high energy, what happens is our thoughts change and so there's a sequence I want to explain this sequence. So when energy is low, thoughts go basically negative. When energy is high, then basically thoughts start to go positive. Now every thought that we have when repeated enough, creates a belief system. And then that belief system creates your identity. So when it comes to performance, we need high energy, we need to be energy rich, OK, as As we're putting more energy into our system and being energy rich, then we're actually able to perform. We'll be able to, we're able to perform at a high level. Now I actually talk about these different 4 levels of performance. We've got low performance with, uh, which is when energy is being pulled away from you. This is when you're doing something you're not passionate about. This is when these things are a struggle. For you, then we've got performing. That's when things are just kind of getting by. That's when kind of energy is neutral. Now we have high performance. Now high performance is a bit of a term which is a little bit dangerous because people see high performers that they've got everything together and of course none of us have everything together all the time, but I say why is it then that we have high performers? Everything seems to be OK. They've got the money, they've got whatever they want in their lives, but then we have people that take their own lives. Well, that's because Things haven't been resolved energetically resolved or completed from the past and so people don't feel love within them, that's why. Because if you felt love within you and you felt high energy, then you wouldn't be making these, these decisions, right? So performance is energy, that's it. If you shift energy and, and you can, if you're, for example, if you're mentally competing with something subconsciously from your past that's not been dealt with, shame, bullying, you know, trauma, like anything there, what you're trying to do is you're trying to compensate against what's already happened. What I do is I get into what's been unresolved and not dealt with, things that have been incomplete and start to complete those those cycles so that it frees up energy in the body. Then you start to feel on fire. That's when you start, and, and I hear from people, I feel lighter. Now I feel like more about myself again. And there's this great book called The Five Regrets of the Dying. And in that book, I think I remember like 4 of them, but the top ones are I wish I lived a life true to myself. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I was able to express my feelings. I wish I had made more friends. And what I hear from a lot of people, and this was the one for me, the one that stands out for me, and I'd be curious to ask you the question, which is the one that stands out for me, which is I wish I lived a life true to myself. I can tell you that I've I've talked with and met a lot of people that have, say they've taken over their family business, for example, and just to keep it in context with this, and I talked to them and now they're in their 60s and they say, you know, this was never my passion. And I, I've always kind of, it's been a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong, but it was never my passion, and now it's time that I that I move on and explore my, my true passion. So I can definitely relate to that one as well. Yeah, because when you're doing what you're passionate about, it energizes you. It's, it's like time passes, it's effortless. And sometimes we get caught up in things and I've let companies go that were making me a lot of money because they didn't align with who I was now. And when we're doing something that we don't want to want to do and it's taking energy away from us, we can actually start to feel pretty depressed. We can start to feel low, we can actually start to go into a negative cycle, and then we start to become confused because we just actually don't know how to get out of it. And that's when that's the time to start to ask for help and also actually really address it and sometimes you got to make difficult decisions, you know. Yeah, yeah, sometimes you have to, let's face it, sometimes in this in this civilization you have to do things you don't like to do, so you have to deal with it in some way or another. But if it's, if it's ruling your life, that's, that's a tough one. So let's talk about, you know, your book The Black Ball. Does anybody else have a Secret? What is a black ball? A black ball is the thing that you don't want to tell anyone else about. This is the question that you don't want to be asked. This is the, the shame, the embarrassment, the guilt from the thing that's happened in the past that you're keeping suppressed. And when we suppress something in our nervous system, it will flare up in another way. I'll give you an example of this. I was working with the CEO, an entrepreneur, and, and she used to go blood red every time she went to speak up. And the reason why that happened was she was attacked at gunpoint in the past, but she'd never actually resolved it energetically and dealt with it. And so when we have this thing that is suppressed and pushed down like the black ball, it's it's the, you know, it's the event from the past, it's the parent that left, it's the, it's the DUI, it's the, it's whatever it is that we, it's the, it's the I'm going to take this to my grave thing. When we actually start to resolve that, that's actually when you start to create true freedom. So the black ball is the heaviness of the secret that we don't want to share. Well, that certainly brings up some images for I'm sure for everyone that just heard that. I'm sure so does everybody have a black ball pretty much? Uh, I've not encountered the many people that don't, and many people have a few, um, and actually when they start to speak about it and get it out, it's liberating. I mean, it changes your entire life because it's shame, you know, it's shame, it's embarrassment, it's guilt, and, and that to the nervous system there's a great quote which is it takes a lot of energy to not be yourself. And also another one which is depressed is the need for deep rest from the character that we're playing, but we we present ourselves. And actually what's happening behind the scenes is something completely different. So authenticity is actually coming to the truth, the truth of actually who you are, and that's liberating. That's actually when you step into your power and then you actually free up this energy to get back into who you know you are. You get back into authentic power and things start moving again. You get back into momentum. Incredible. That sounds terrific. So what's the impact of meditation on a CEO or entrepreneur? You talked about that earlier, meditating. How does that help someone, for instance, in that's, you know, maybe a CEO of a business and they think, oh, I don't know, I don't have time for meditation. What's the benefit for them and the impact? Well, that, that, that's actually the most common thing I get, which is I don't have time for it, but actually meditation gives you time. And so let me explain that. Um, imagine if you've got your hand and it's racing really, I've got my hand to my head and I'm, I'm stinging it really fast. Well, that creates a lot of um like mental clutter. It's like trying to tune into a radio, but you're on the wrong signal. So meditation helps slow everything down so that then you can start to become relaxed in your body. Now this helps with efficiency and focus. So now if someone says to me, well, meditation, I don't have time for that, what I say to them is you don't not have time for it, because by slowing down the monkey brain and the chattering mind, you have more efficiency in your day to do the things that you need to do with more focus, with more discipline, with more preciseness, and actually that creates more time for you. Because if somebody wakes up and they're stressed out and they're just in their head and they then they're in a conversation and their body starts, it's very subtle, your body is very subtle in how it reacts, then we can miss things. We're not on point as much. So with meditation, with the consistency of the depth, what happens is you start to operate at a very different level, but you don't get to experience that until you do it. It's like going to the gym, right? You can't expect to get a. You know, the body that you want, for example, if you just do one gym session. So it's about consistency and depth, which is going for longer and also going deeper into your meditation because then what happens to the body is your body goes into relaxation and that is the best place to. Operate your business. It's from a relaxed body, a relaxed nervous system, but the reality is, is that most people are operating not from a relaxed place, and for many people, they've got used to it. They've got used to operating from this place and they don't know the difference. That's the truth. Mhm, yeah, yeah, I can definitely relate to that. I think that, you know, especially in our caffeine, our caffeine heavy society, we, we get, we get amped up and then things take off, and I know from experience, I mean, I had a situation a few years ago where I was diagnosed with a cancer and all of a sudden all I could think about was that. And I would imagine, you know, if you're a business owner, every day you've got problems coming at you. And, and they're just eating away at your peace of mind, I can imagine. And so the blackball, does anyone else, does anybody else have a secret is the book. And again, it's been featured on Entrepreneur and Forbes. But tell us a little bit before we go, Simon, it's really been fascinating. Tell us a little bit more about the Unshakeable Leaders podcast. I'd love to hear who do you interview and what do you talk about? So, um, it's a solo show and I started it during COVID because of the increased pressure that people were under because what I wanted to do was I wanted to put together a show that would talk about real stuff, emotional intelligence, and also give away a free meditation every week, which I do on every Monday around different topics specific to entrepreneurs and and and leaders. And so it's a place where. I'm sharing different stories and actually just what's worked for me and what's working for my clients to help them just feel better. So essentially it's like listen to the show and actually get into a place where actually then you can go away after 20 minutes and actually go about your day and feel better, and I did that, um, you know, as a as a real give back, you know, when COVID started. So, so yeah, that's the show. That's a great idea. I think everybody can use a little bit of that today, and I can tell, you know, through our conversation I can tell that you're someone who can help go deep into people's thoughts and and help bring them back out of it and soothe them. And I would definitely recommend that our listeners look into the book The Black Ball. Does anybody else have a secret and check out Unshakeable Leaders podcast with Simon Lovell. Simon, is there a Besides just Googling that information, is there a website that our listeners might go to to find out more about you and your services? Yeah, you can go to simon Lovell.com and you can also check out the super high performance formula, which is a 6 week quest where you're held accountable every single day for 6 weeks to become the best version of yourself. And so, Um, just you can check out some of the results from different CEOs, entrepreneurs who have been through that process, and it is deep work, you know, a lot of the time this is bringing up stuff from the past that people aren't even aware that they have had that's actually limiting them, and that's how they're actually able to reach the next level. So I would love to connect with your listeners if I can help in any way. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing with our listeners. I think it's very helpful for them to hear about that, especially in this stressful time that we're all going through, and I really appreciate you coming on. I hope you'll come on again and we can get deeper into some of these topics, no pun intended, but I think there's there's a lot we can talk about. I can tell that you're, you're an expert on this topic, and it's, it's great to find someone who can really help clarify some of these issues that our listeners might be going through. So thanks, thanks so much. Yeah, just the listeners just, you know, put yourself first, put yourself first so that then you can take yourself and your business to the next level and not a lot of people do that. So sometimes it's just gonna be a good little reminder. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. This podcast is supported by TalkSpace. When my husband came home from his military deployment, readjusting was hard for all of us. Thankfully, I found TalkSpace. Talkspace provides professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatric providers online. Military members, veterans, and their dependents ages 13 and older can get fast access to providers, all from the privacy of their computers or smartphones. I just answered a few questions online and TalkSpace matched me with a therapist. We meet when it's convenient for me, and I can message her anytime. It was so easy to set up, and they accept Tricare. Therapy was going so well, my husband and I started seeing a couples there. through TalkSpace too. TalkSpace works with most major insurers, including Tricare. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com/military. Go to Talkspace.com/military to get started today. That's Talkspace.com/military.