[00:00:00] Gino Wickman: Welcome to the Shed and Shine podcast. I am Gino Wickman. This is where Rob Dube and I help driven entrepreneurs shed their shit, free their True Selves, unlock True entrepreneurial freedom, and shine. We truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with us and we hope to make a huge impact on you.
This is riff number two. I strongly urge you to listen to riff number one if you haven't. The first two riffs serve to create an important context before we go deep in all future episodes. The context I'd like to make clear in this episode is the “what” behind our journey together. Remember the purpose of this journey is to free your True Self, helping you to make a bigger impact while experiencing greater inner peace, and ultimately realizing that it is possible to be driven and have peace. I'm going to paint a vivid picture of the 3 Discoveries to Free your True Self in this episode, which will help you to clearly see what is possible and will serve as a simple, practical, and clear context for where we are heading.
I would like to start by reading the definition of True Self to you so you know exactly what your True Self is. Here goes.
Your True Self is the real you, the most authentic version of who you are. It's unshaped by societal expectations, professional roles, or social masks. It's the core identity that remains constant beneath the various hats you wear in different areas of your life.
It is typically buried behind your ego, personality and the suit of armor that you have developed over your lifetime due to pain, trauma, and conditioning. Freeing your True Self allows you to be authentic, free spirited, liberated, unconstrained, unbounded, and unapologetic. It allows you to realize and fulfill your potential, live in alignment with your values, your passions, beliefs, and desires, rather than conforming to societal norms or external expectations.
You will then bring the best version of yourself to everything in your life. Your True Self wants to be free. It can be free. When you are free and fully your True Self, you will experience peace, bliss, and love. The opportunity is to remove everything preventing you from being your True Self. Then you will be more creative, intuitive, impactful, and in flow. And you will shine as bright as possible.
With that definition in mind, here is a vivid description of the 3 Discoveries to Free Your True Self. Now, when I say vivid description, assuming you've read Rob and my book Shine, and you understand the 3 Discoveries to Freeing Your True Self. And even if you haven't, my goal here is to help you see it.
I just want you to see it. And what you'll find in Shine is a very practical, structural way of thinking about what I'm about to share with you. Again, the goal here is to help you see it. So again, the 3 Discoveries. So Discovery #1 is that I am Driven. And so the discovery here is that you discover that you have the soul of a driven person.
You are one of the 10 percent on the planet that are driven. And furthermore, you're a driven entrepreneur. Which makes you one of the 4 percent on the planet. So you have a very unique soul. Your True Self is unique. And in this first discovery is to understand that that soul of a driven entrepreneur is a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that we are the creators of most things on this planet. The blessing is that we are born with superhuman stamina. We can endure more than most, and we are the problem solvers on the planet. The curse is that we do a lot of damage to ourselves, both mentally and physically, as well as emotionally, and we do a lot of damage to our relationships.
We do a lot of damage to the loved ones around us. We tend to leave a black trail behind us. And so again, the discovery is just to understand you are driven, know the blessing, know the curse. It's in your DNA. There's actually an allele in your gene, the D2, D4 gene, that you just do not feel the same satisfaction as others.
You are always looking for an endorphin hit. And as a result, that can get you in trouble. And what we do with that trouble and that pain and that trauma is we numb it through addictive behaviors, one of which is being workaholics. We just love to work and bury ourselves in our work and numb ourselves so we never have to confront that pain.
We are the workers. Your DNA is that of one of the workers in the world. We love to work. We love to do. We love to create. And so in this first discovery, the idea is just to understand that you are driven. Discovery #2 is that All Decisions Are Made Out of Love or Fear. And so what's so important, as I said, I'm trying to paint a vivid picture for you.
If you can picture in your mind right now, that soul that I just described, that beautiful soul, your True Self, is this ball of energy. It is this bright, burning ball of energy that wants to shine and does shine. It vibrates at a very high level. And so if you can picture that now, picture that wrapped in a cocoon, a dark black cocoon. In that dark, black cocoon is your ego.
Your ego is trying to protect you. And so there is that powerful soul, True Self, at the center around that protective layer. Well, when we say all decisions are made out of love or fear, that means that the decisions you're making are either coming from that center, that True Self, or your decisions are coming from that protective layer, that dark protective layer.
When it comes from the center, it's coming from love. When it comes from the protective layer, your ego, it's coming from fear. With that understanding, I'm now going to take you four levels deep into understanding the root of why your decisions are coming from love or fear. And when I say decisions, this also includes emotions, thoughts, feelings, and decisions.
And so as we drop down to level one, the understanding here is to simply understand that your True Self is in there. Just understand your True Self is in there. Picture that visual I just outlined for you. And so it's in there. And once you realize it's in there, and you see how your ego just simply has it protected in this protective layer, we call them layers, but you could also call that kind of a block of marble, which is another way to look at it.
That has to just simply be chipped away. You could look at this as a suit of armor, but nonetheless, the idea is just to see it. Once you see that, we then go down another level and that takes us to the energy level. And it's the understanding that you are pure energy. That visual that I described for you, that's all energy.
It's scientifically proven. We are pure energy. And so that soul at the center is pure energy. That protective shell around it is pure energy. You are walking pure energy. And the idea here is just to understand that fact, because when you understand that you are pure energy, you will understand that you either burn and shine very bright or you don't.
And when you don't, that just means you have that protective layer around you that's not letting you shine, i. e. your ego. Once that's clear, we then go down another level to that third level, and that level is the blocked energy level. So once you understand it's all energy, you can then clearly see your blocks.
These blocks have been called many things over thousands of years. They've been called samskaras, you can call them mental imprints, you can call them energetic blocks, it's been called gunk, so lots of different words, but the idea here is to understand. Now with that visual, zoom out, your pure energy, the blocked energy level says it's all just blocked energy.
Now I'm getting you to visualize it as this protective layer, but that blocked energy is all throughout your body in different parts of your body. And the idea is just to realize that when you're not shining fully bright, you just simply have these blocks. But the most important message is that you can remove those blocks.
You can remove all of them. And when that protective layer is finally gone, i.e. your ego, then your soul will truly shine. Once you understand that, that you can remove the blocked energy, shed your shit, as we like to call it, we now go to the fourth and final level. And that level is simply called the awareness level.
And that's just simply being aware. Being fully conscious. Awareness is just simply you stopping, and creating time and space in your life. And that's what the 10 Disciplines do for you. Create the time and the space in your life to shed all that stuff. And so, awareness helps it to come up. Being conscious helps it to come up.
So we can no longer hide from it, so that we no longer bury ourselves in our work. The idea is just to be aware. And with awareness, all of a sudden stuff will come up. You'll start to be aware of every decision you're making. And you'll be aware when it comes from love or when it comes from fear.
And so sadly for most of us on this planet, most of our decisions are coming from fear. We're running it through that ego layer. So it's coming from the outside-in, as opposed to the inside-out, the way that it's supposed to. And with that awareness, when you feel an emotion, a thought, make a decision, that's from fear.
With that awareness, you can now work your way through those levels and realize that wow, this is a block and you just sit with it and you can process that block. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about all the ways to process those blocks. But once you process the block and it dissipates, all of a sudden you shoot up to the next level, again, where you're pure energy and your energy is burning bright and you're vibrating higher, which then takes you up to the next level where your True Self is free and you're burning as bright as possible.
And when we talk about shedding layers, that's why we want you to tell your inner story, know your inner story, understand your inner story, because the idea is to finally let it go so that you can be free. Which then takes us to the third Discovery. Discovery #3 is that It is Possible to be Driven and Have Peace.
Oh, what a discovery. And so these discoveries are the discoveries that I have made in the last four years. And this discovery, the third one, is what it's all about. You see, for me and for many of us driven entrepreneurs, we think it's a choice. We thought it was a choice. I thought it was a choice that you either had to be driven or have peace, that the two could not go together.
I really thought that if I ever truly found peace that I would lose everything. I would lose my edge. When I first felt peace for the first time in my life, it was when my daughter was born, it lasted an hour. I can only describe it as bliss and it scared the hell out of me. It felt weak. It felt wimpy.
And so I stopped and stuffed it back down because it wasn't in accordance with the tough guy image that I had created. And so I stuffed that darn thing down because my fear was that if I found peace, I'd want to live in a hut at the top of a mountain and meditate all day for the rest of my life and I would not be productive.
Well, it's just the opposite. We, the driven entrepreneurs, it actually 10X's our fuel. When we find peace, we're actually more driven, more impactful, more creative. We are the workers. We love to work. And it is possible to both continue to bring your craft to the world and make that huge impact while experiencing inner peace.
Peace. It's possible. And that's what we want to show you and have you experience as a result of this podcast. So there is a vivid image of the 3 Discoveries to Free Your True Self. Oh, I hope that made sense. This is what we're going to be talking about in this podcast. It will be a deeper dive into the context, into those 3 Discoveries, the “what,” and a deep dive into those ten disciplines, the “how.”
I look forward to going deeper with you in the next episode. And I'll see you then.
Thank you for listening in today. We truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with us and please tune in for the next episode until then, if you'd like to see where you are on your True Self journey, go to shedandshinepodcast.com. To take the True Self Assessment and receive personalized guidance. If you're all ready to begin your inner world journey with Rob and myself, please join us for the next round of the 10 Disciplines group coaching program. We wish you all the best in freeing your True Self. Stay focused and much love.
