Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous. This is episode number 190. We have the wonderful Erin Pheil back with us.

Erin Pheil [0:09]
Hi, this is Erin Pheil and you’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:15]
I’m so excited you are here again. Welcome! I hope you enjoyed the last episode with Erin, Unlock Your Power. Maybe you already have seen some changes on the way to remove your mental roadblocks. Today, I’m going to dive in with Erin on the question, “Are your beliefs true?” Erin will give us her perspective on what we can do to really figure out if the beliefs are ours or if we borrow them from someone and they are just in our way. Most people think that it takes a ton of effort and time to remove mental roadblocks. But Erin Pheil, the founder of the Mind Fixed Group has a track record of getting the lightning-fast results for her clients that are permanent. I’m super excited to dive in with her. Have fun, enjoy and don’t forget to take notes. I’m so excited to have you back on the show, Erin. Welcome.

Erin Pheil [1:16]
Thank you.

Christine Schlonski [1:17]
I’m so excited because we left a really, really amazing first interview and there’s this big question now open. How can you actually test if you believe it is true or not? I mean, if my whole body reaction shows me that I walk by that cat, we talked about in the first episode, so people if you haven’t checked it out, make sure you have a listen. Erin shared such amazing advice and the process you can find to actually find your hidden beliefs because if it’s not in your conscious mind if it’s in your unconscious mind and your subconscious, you’re probably not going to find it. So now we have we found a bunch of beliefs. And let’s just save as a kitty cat example. So my whole body cringes when I see the kitty cat you know, maybe I start sweating I feel the fear. So for me, that’s totally true. This belief is true. Like what can I do now?

Erin Pheil [2:17]
Well, I think the kittycat example is really great to show how a belief can impact your thoughts and can impact your emotions and then impacts your behavior. Like you’re sweating, you have a whole-body reaction. That’s your thoughts and your emotions and how you’re feeling are impacted. And that’s going to determine your actions. Because that’s such a simple example, though. It’s probably almost too simplistic to use as an example. For people who are trying to figure out, “Do I actually believe something to be true? So I might, I think I’m going to shift it.”

Christine Schlonski [2:56]
That’s better. I just gotta take it easy and go with kitty cat first and then shifted to sales. That was my strategic plan for this conversation. So but yes, please let’s skip the kitty cat. And let’s go to sales conversations and the emotions and everything that comes with it.

Erin Pheil [3:17]
Sure. We can take the example of let’s say someone is just starting out and they’re just getting into sales. And they’re excited and they’ve read some books, maybe they’ve had some consulting with you. They have a mentor. They are learning strategies and techniques to have good sales conversations. And they sit down and this is the month that they’re going to start doing their own sales calls. But what they notice is this pattern, that every time they wake up on a day they’re scheduled to have sales calls, they feel anxiety, they feel bad. And then as they get close to sales calls times they start to feel nervousness in their stomach and they start to have thoughts of, “How can they cancel this call?”, and they want to avoid. They’re having all of this, you know, this icky feeling. So they went from being excited to now that is do or die time and they’re supposed to have these calls, they’re noticing a desire to avoid. And they’re noticing anxiety and they say, “Okay, this is a pattern I do not want. I want to be able to show up to calls with joy, and love and be excited about connection. But no matter what I do, what I read, what I practice how much I meditate, how much sleep I get, what food I eat, it doesn’t matter. I’m still anxious. I still not looking forward to these calls. How do I change this pattern? How do I change? How do I get unstuck? How do I get out of my own way?” So what we talked about in the last episode is when you have a pattern, you write it down and you go, “Okay, anxiety before sales calls, anxiety and desire to procrastinate or avoid sales calls.” So that’s your pattern. The next thing you might do is, you brainstorm. You ask yourself that magic question, “What would I have to believe to be true in order to keep experiencing this?” So if someone were brainstorming, they might sit down for 10 minutes and say, “Okay, what would somebody have to believe to be true in order to experience anxiety?”, and they might write down a list of possible beliefs, like, “Sales is sleazy. If I do sales, means I’m a bad person. If I make a mistake or fail, I’m going to lose everything.” And they might come up with a list that they brainstorm of possible things where when you look at the list and you read it, you’re like, “Well, shoot!” Somebody believed all these things that would make a whole lot of sense that they’re nervous about getting on sales calls, this makes sense. So what you can do is you can actually test to see if you believe these things or not, because what’s really really interesting is we don’t actually intellectually or consciously believe a lot of the things that are holding us back. For example, in high school, in college, I was a straight-A kid, I want all of these awards. I graduated early. I was just a really great student, in the typical sense, if you have come up to me and said, “I think you’re stupid”, I would have punched you in the face and go, “I’m gonna prove you wrong. I’m not stupid. I’ve got awards. I’ve got straight A’s. I’ve got this grade point average, I got the scholarship. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.” So I didn’t intellectually believe that I was stupid. I didn’t consciously believe that. But if you had gone home at night and peeked in my diary, you would see all sorts of statements like, “I’m such an idiot. I’m so stupid. How could I have messed up? I’m just, I’m just, I’m not as smart as everybody else.” And you would have seen all sorts of statements that were putting my intellect down. So it was like coming out, as I was confessing onto paper. So consciously, I didn’t believe it intellectually, I didn’t believe it, but you could see a part of me underneath the surface believed it. So here’s how you can tell us some part of you, underneath the surface, believe something that intellectually and consciously you’re like, “No way. I don’t believe that.” Because honestly, if you went around, consciously believing things like, “I’m stupid. I’m not good enough. I’m not important. I’m not good at sales”, and you woke up and you are aware that you believe these things. You’d never get out of bed. So your mind is really brilliant. And it pushes a lot of these things down, underneath the surface like an iceberg, or like a beach ball underwater. And here’s how you can test to see if some of these beliefs are underneath the surface and outside of your awareness. So If you make a statement of something that you absolutely, positively, categorically do not believe. You have no reaction to that statement, kind of as if it’s a bunch of words strung, random words strung together. So if you were to say to yourself, whether it’s in your head or out loud, you say something ridiculous like, “I am a giraffe.” You say it, and it’s just words. There’s no reaction. There’s nothing. It’s just words. No part of you believes that to be true. So some really interesting things may happen when some part of you believe something to be true. So there are three main filters that I use with our clients when we’re trying to determine, “Does some part of you believe something to be true?” The first filter is very easy. So the filter might be, the filter is, you make a statement, and you simply ask, “Does it feel like the truth?” Like sometimes we’ll say something out loud. And when we believe it will just start nodding. So I am a female. Yes, it feels like the truth. Two plus two equals four. Yes, it just feels like the truth. So there are some statements that are just really obvious like that. And they just feel like the truth. Done! I literally was in Oregon this last weekend, and someone was telling me her life story. She’s in her 70s. And she was saying how she’s always had to work so hard, and she’s never made money, and she works herself to the bone. And I looked at her and I said, “You probably have the belief that work must be a struggle.” And she’s like, “Well, yes, of course. Yes, that’s true.” And I was like, “Oh, you have this belief like”, period, end of the story. She’s nodding. She’s saying yes, that feels like the truth. She didn’t even realize it. Like, she absolutely believes that as the truth. So that’s the first thing, but sometimes, like I just talked about our mind protects us. Our mind says, “You can’t walk around all day actually believing you’re stupid, Erin. You can’t walk around all day actually believing that sales are dirty, because you kind of pick sales as a profession and you got to do this.” So we push it down. So filter number two, to see if you believe something to be true if some part of you believe something to be true, is to say a statement out loud. And then see if you feel an emotion. So sometimes someone might say something. Like, I was at a party recently, and someone was nervous to talk to people and was nervous to talk about what was going on in their lives. They said, “I feel guilty taking time away from others.” And I said, “Out of curiosity, say the words, “I am a burden.” And the person ran it through the filter and they came back and I’m like, “Makes me so sad to say that out loud. It makes me so sad.” I was like, “Oh, okay, cool”, because when I had them say it out loud initially, they’re like, “No, I don’t believe that. That’s not true.” That’s like, “Okay, it doesn’t feel true. Let’s run it through the second filter. Do you feel something? Do you feel an emotion?” They said, “Yes, I feel so sad.”

Christine Schlonski [11:09]
When you have to say it out loud, right?

Erin Pheil [11:11]
When you say it out loud. Or if you’re in a crowded space and you can’t talk out loud, you can still just say it to yourself in your head. And you just are checking. If you have an emotional response, sadness, anger, whatever, it’s very likely that some part of you believes it to be true. Because if you say, “I am a draft”, other than laughing, which is just kind of like, “This is ridiculous.” There’s no sadness, there’s no anger, there’s no fear. There’s no anxiety. There’s no emotion that your body is trying to tell you, “Hey, we’re reacting to this.”

Christine Schlonski [11:42]
How about, especially when you have your own company, you are an entrepreneur, you have to sell something because otherwise, you don’t have a company and you probably package your own products or services. How about, “I’m a fraud.”

Erin Pheil [11:58]
That’s absolutely massive, super common belief, “I’m a fake. I’m a fraud.”

Christine Schlonski [12:05]
Go with that one, that would be awesome.

Erin Pheil [12:07]
I’m a fake. I’m a fraud. I’m a phony. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who had struggled in the initial stages of their entrepreneurial career and then achieved great success. In fact, there was someone from Australia I worked with recently. And they are getting invited to speak on stages around the world with some of the most famous people that you absolutely know. Here he is, he’s making millions a year. He’s working with clients that have budgets of million of dollars a day or more, and he’s having this incredible success. And yet, when I asked, I asked him, I said, “Say out loud, like, I’m a fraud.” And he’s like, “No, that’s not true.” And then I said, “Let’s run it through the second filter. Say it out loud. Do you feel an emotion? You said it, “I’m a fraud. Nope, no emotion”, which is interesting because he was fully disconnected from his emotions, his mind had been like, “You don’t feel any emotions.” There’s no fear, there’s no anxiety. Everything had been pushed down. And I said, “Let’s try the third filter. Say out loud, “I’m a fraud.” And tell me if you feel it anywhere in your body. Tell me if your body feels it.” He said it. “He’s like, “Oh, oh!”, and I said, “What?” He’s like, “I felt my throat start to tighten up. I felt a tightness in the back of my neck. And I felt a little pain in my stomach. Does that mean I have it?” And I was like, “Yes. You’re disconnected from it consciously. Your emotions are disconnected. But your body is like trying to tell you some part of you does believe it, because it’s not that neutral, no feeling.” So some people are disconnected from their emotions and usually, that’s when they start to feel things in their bodies. So those are the three filters. Does it feel real? Do you feel an emotion? Do you feel it in your body? You can run that any statement, “I’m a fake. I’m a fraud. I’m a phony.” It doesn’t mean it’s the truth. It means some part of you believes it’s the truth, big difference.

Christine Schlonski [14:03]
Then you can work with it, right?

Erin Pheil [14:05]
Yes, you can’t work with a belief unless you actually know, then you confirmed that you have it.

Christine Schlonski [14:10]
Yeah. Because what I see in the beautiful people I work with, that the struggles and sales, we talked about it in the last episode, about the past experiences. Something they have been passed on. What they believe that money is or sales are or the bad experience they have made themselves when purchasing something. Oftentimes when it comes to selling for somebody, and when you shift into selling for yourself, that’s like a whole different kind of planet. Because these feelings like, “Oh my goodness, I’m a fraud. I’m still figuring out how it works myself, like, oooh”. It’s such heavy emotions and I help people discover their value and really see that they aren’t a fraud. Because they support it. The way they are structured in their whole being is just, it’s not the truth. But deep down inside so many heart-centered, impact-driven entrepreneurs believe that they are a fraud. So that was really, really super, super helpful.

Erin Pheil [15:27]
Cool. Thank you.

Christine Schlonski [15:28]
Yeah, thank you. You are so confident and we talked about it that you were a straight-A student, you had all the awards, but deep inside you did feel some, let’s say, like, unworthiness or not being good enough or smart enough kind of things. So have you been always that confident? Or is this something that actually comes through the work you do now that you show up like fully confident, as we just heard?

Erin Pheil [15:58]
Oh, my gosh, no! Oh my god, has I always been confident? Absolutely not. Oh my goodness, like if you had looked through my journal over the years you would see someone who thought she was a complete fake, who thought she was a fraud. Thought she was a phony. I thought I was not important. I thought I wasn’t good enough. That was my big one. It was never good enough, no matter what I achieved. It was never, ever, ever enough. I never thought I was as smart as everyone else. Like I was on the opposite end of the spectrum, same person, same talents, same capabilities, same experiences, but I was the opposite person that you here today. I had a hard time with almost everything. Whether it was being on a sales call or giving a talk in front of an audience or talking about myself. I did not. I didn’t know I’d have the confidence that I do. What you are experiencing just in the conversation with me is a direct result of me being able to go in, go, “Oh, holy cow! I have these beliefs. I’m not important. I’m not smart. I’m not good enough. I’m not enough”, and actually go in and methodically clear them all out because when they’re not there, you don’t have those thoughts. They just don’t occur to you as you go throughout your day. You can hang with the world’s most brilliant business people and not blink an eye.

Christine Schlonski [17:26]
Yeah, totally. Totally. And it’s working process. So for everybody listening right now. You’re totally okay where you are. You are beautiful, amazing, talented. There’s just some stuff in the way that needs to be cleaned up. With every single person on this planet, no matter what accomplishments, no matter what names, they all have something they’re working on.

Erin Pheil [17:52]
Absolutely.

Christine Schlonski [17:53]
It is just something in progress. So never give up. Never give up. Keep moving and then you will discover how amazing you are. And one day will totally believe this is true.

Erin Pheil [18:07]
Yeah, and to build upon what you just said, there’s nothing broken or wrong with people. In fact, because of a lot of physical challenges that I had. Issues that I had gone through. Those were additional beliefs that I had to clear out. “I’m broken. I’m not fixable. No one can help me”, and that impact. When people would try to help me, those beliefs would come in, and self-sabotage, I’d be like, “You can’t help me. This isn’t going to work.” And things would stop working for me, but I want to build on what you said and share. There’s nothing broken, there’s nothing wrong. There are just some hurdles and invisible walls in your way. So you have the momentum and the desire and the flow. There are just things that are standing in your way. It’s not you there are just obstacles and it’s a matter of pulling are the obstacles so that you can move forward. But I do love what you just said that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just facing obstacles.

Christine Schlonski [19:09]
Yeah, totally. And I think it’s so important, but just having that understanding, that makes it so much easier to work on these challenges, because we know we’re not broken. Everybody on this planet has challenges. No matter if they made it to, I don’t know, President or movie star or whatever, it doesn’t matter or if it’s your next-door neighbor, we all have these challenges and just working on them. That’s what, that’s life. That’s what life is about, right?

Erin Pheil [19:46]
Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean, I’ve worked with a fellow in his 20s, who sold his company for a quarter of a billion dollars. A quarter of a billion. You think, “Oh, he’s got it. He’s successful. He has proved that he’s amazing. He came to us because he was saying, “I have all the money in the world. And yet I thought this would fix everything. I have more money than I’ll probably be able to spend.” He’s like, “For some reason, I still fear I’m going to lose all my money, even though I know it doesn’t make sense. I walk around every day, and I feel like I don’t actually deserve it. And I have this weird sense that something is going to go really, really wrong all the time.” He’s like, “So I have all the money. people go on, “You must be happy.” And yet I walk around every day and I’m a total train wreck and people go, “You must have it so good.” And again, what would someone have to believe in order to experience that when we dug down neath, we dug down deep, underneath we found, “I’m not deserving. Things can go wrong. Things will go wrong any second. It’s easy to lose all of your money no matter what.” Just some basic beliefs that he had picked up when he was younger, caused him to have all this anxiety and fear and literally not be able to enjoy the success that everybody thinks would solve all of the problems. Beliefs are that powerful that they can take someone who’s successful and has money and health and youth and make him absolutely miserable on a daily basis.

Christine Schlonski [20:13]
Yeah. So well, I’m happy that he was able to work through that, as well as everybody else who’s listening to that. So one question I would love to finish with is, what was the very, very first thing in your life that you ever sold?

Erin Pheil [21:44]
Oh, my goodness. I think it probably goes back to sixth grade. And we had this contest in sixth grade. We’re all the sixth graders were to sell magazine subscriptions. And I was so excited because once a week, every Monday, one of the teachers would come in and he literally had a shopping cart from the store. And it was filled overflowing with prizes, like games and candy bars and toys. And so the people who sold the most magazines would get a full-size Twix or Snickers bar, or they would get, you know, they would get a big, not just a regular Teddy Bear, but a big huge yellow teddy bear that’s like this size and you could carry it around at school or you get balloons. And just the idea of those prizes was so exciting for me. I went home. I had no idea about selling. And I think my mom and dad felt sorry for me and they bought one like home and garden magazine for me. And then I went home. I went back to school and then the next week I got a fun-size like Tootsie Roll or something like that, like the worst kind of candy for selling one magazine. And that was when I think I started and I got the belief sales is hard because I didn’t know what to do after mom and dad bought the magazine. Nobody gave me instructions. Nobody told me what to do. Nobody told me I could go to the neighbors. I had no idea what to say. I just went to school every day. And I saw all these kids who had sent their parents off to work and they came back and they’re like, “I have 80 magazines.” And I was like, “How is that possible? That’s not possible for me.” So my first experience with sales and getting people to buy things is that’s something other people do. That’s not something that I know how to do. And I never got more than that. I never got more than that tiny little piece of candy.

Christine Schlonski [23:48]
How smart. How smart is it to send kids to send subscriptions. Oh, this is like making kids work in a very interesting way. Wow, that’s like, that’s like a whole thing going on right there. But thank you so much for sharing this and for putting you believe onto it so that we could see like this can be solved. It’s definitely not true. You just didn’t know what to do. And so many people don’t know what to do. They just know they have something they want to give to the world, they have this amazing gift. And then they don’t know how to monetize. Because they just, try to give it to their mom or their best friend or whatever. But it’s not actually like this business often, unfortunately, people leave their jobs to make this big dream come true. And then they find out, “Oops, well, now I have to sell because if I don’t sell I have a hobby, and not a business. And now I totally feel that.”

Erin Pheil [24:56]
Yes.

Christine Schlonski [24:58]
Wow, awesome. What a wonderful conversation! I just loved every second, so valuable. So let people know where they need to go to connect with you, to check you out. Obviously, every link will be in the show notes as well. But if somebody wanted to go right now, where do they need to go?

Erin Pheil [25:16]
Sure, so they can find me. I’m pretty active still on Facebook, I’m the only Erin Pheil there. Or you can go to my website, which is https://www.mindfixgroup.com/ And we have a blog with lots of fun articles there. We have a results page that’s like 10 miles long that shows what’s possible when people are able to clear out the beliefs that are holding them back. And we’re also still offering a one-hour video training for free. There’s no charge and anybody who’s interested in diving deeper into how beliefs work and how they impact your thoughts and your emotions and your actions can go and sign up for the free training there.

Christine Schlonski [26:02]
Awesome. Well, I will put all the links in the show notes as well. And thank you so much for this fun conversation. So valuable, like so many golden nuggets, I really hope people took notes. And what’s even more important, they’re taking action. They kind of figure out like, what is this limiting belief and is it really true and then if they want to know more, they can connect with you.

Erin Pheil [26:25]
Perfect.

Christine Schlonski [26:26]
Awesome. Well, thank you so much and have a wonderful day.

Erin Pheil [26:29]
Thank you for having me.

Christine Schlonski [26:30]
I just could talk to Erin forever. I just love to learn how we can get over our mental roadblocks, how we can grow, how we can make sure that we are our true selves. We are authentic and true to our values and we are building our dreams and not someone else’s. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/. Find the podcast tab. You will have the show notes there. The transcript. Also, all the links that connect you to Erin in Episode 189 and 190. As well, when you over there, sign up for the empowerment notes if you have not already, this gets you empowerment right into your inbox with all the podcast updates that you need to know. And some very, very special content that I usually do not share outside on social media. Thank you so much for having been here. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world. And I’m saying bye for now.