Episode 6 - Gino's Riff -
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[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. Hi, this is Gino Wickman and welcome to riff number three.
Once again, I urge you to please make sure you've listened to riffs number one and two. They are the foundation and kind of set the stage and give you context for what I'm about to say to make sense and for us to get to work. And so we're officially now off to the races with the foundation set. With that said, just want to remind you of the overall context for this podcast, and that is to help you free your True Self, help you make a bigger impact on the world while experiencing inner peace and to understand and realize that it is possible to be driven And have peace.
This content is also in Rob and my book, Shine. And so we urge you to please read Shine to really help your understanding. But worst case, it's okay if you have not read Shine, this will all still resonate and make sense. And through this podcast, the foundation will be the three discoveries to free your True Self and the 10 disciplines to maximize your impact in the world.
and peace. And so we'll bounce around that content from time to time, but with the foundation set, we're now able to drill deep where we feel it's time to drill deep. And for today's riff, the topic is going to be shedding layers. And so I take you all the way to, again, high level the three discoveries to free your True Self.
I then take you to the second discovery that all decisions are made out of love or fear. And then to take you all the way down to the root of that second discovery, we're going to talk about Awareness, Shedding Layers, Freeing Your True Self, and Shining Bright. So quick recap on that discovery at a very high level.
If you want a deeper dive, again, listen to Riff Number 2. But in Discovery 2, the point is that all decisions are made out of love. And it's about creating awareness and understanding when your thoughts, feelings, emotions are coming from either love or fear. And understand the context that your True Self, your soul shines bright.
But in a lot of cases, it's trapped behind that cocoon that I shared with you. That is your ego protecting you. Protecting you from the world. And unfortunately, when that cocoon exists, you're just not shining as bright as possible. And so your True Self is trapped in there. It then leads you to the understanding that we are all pure energy.
We are just balls of energy. And some of us burn bright and some of us don't burn so bright. And for those of us that aren't burning bright, we just simply have blocks. In our energy. And when we have blocks, it is possible to remove those blocks. It's an understanding that it's possible and to understand you're this ball of energy and where there's a block, it can simply be removed.
And with that understanding, again, it's about just being aware. Know when these blocks come up. As Eckhart Tolle teaches us, with awareness comes transformation and freedom. And so the more aware we are, of when a decision is coming from love or fear, we can shift from more fear based decisions to love based decisions.
And even a 10 percent shift is literally like a Richter scale, you will see a noticeable improvement in your life. And so with that awareness, when you're noticing fear based decisions, emotions, and thoughts, again, they're simply blocks and it's time to remove that block. And when we talk about removing blocks, that's what we lovingly describe as shedding layers.
I came up with the term shedding layers going back over 25 years ago when I started to do this work and started to shed layers as I called it. What I realized is that I had this protective layer around me. And so what are layers? We can call it a lot of different things, a lot of different analogies, but one again is just that protective shell around you, that cocoon.
Another way to think of it is, you know, is kind of a suit of armor that you put on somewhere in your life to protect you from the world so that you don't ever feel the pain from the past again. Another way to think about it is picture yourself in this block of marble, and at the center of that block of marble is you, this perfect, Masterpiece statue, your True Self waiting to shine in the world, but it's buried under this block of marble.
Well, it's just a matter of chipping away all of the marble that isn't truly you. It's a matter of shedding the layers that aren't you. It's a matter of taking off that suit of armor. That's what we mean by shedding layers. And I always lovingly say every time you shed a layer, There will be tears, and so as I looked back, you know, roughly age 30 is when I started the journey, each time I would shed a layer, there would be tears, um, but I just described it as this next level of almost freedom where I would shine a little brighter every time I shed a layer.
So with all of that said, Layers are anything that isn't your True Self. Anything that isn't truly you and you shining at the brightest level, vibrating at the highest level. It just isn't you. And so it's just a matter of simply removing that energy. Now as we talk about shedding layers, I want to share a quote from one of our EOS implementers, Joe Stewart, who said, You can't shed your shit if you think you're the shit.
So of the 10 disciplines that we'll go deeper into in this podcast, discipline number 10 is to be humble. And so this Joe's quote hits this perfectly because if you are not humble, vulnerable, open, real, authentic, ready to go here, you really are going to struggle. And in the interest of shedding layers, what I believe is that I believe there are some number of people, a small number of course, but a some number of people that once they understand this Podcast Context, you know, this second discipline, this concept of shedding layers, removing blocked energy, there will be people that will literally shed their stuff.
Instantly in a snap, I'll snap my fingers. Most of us I don't think are that fortunate. So for me, I've been on this journey for over 25 years. It's been most profound for me in the last four years. So unfortunately, I'm taking the multi decade approach to shedding all of my layers, but I do believe that there will be people that will shed in an instant.
And I hope that is one of you out there. I hope that is you listening right now. No guarantees. And so what we're going to talk about in this riff, as we've been, is specifically ways to do it. And I'm going to walk you through some examples of how I have shed layers, experiences that I've done to shed layers.
Just to give you examples, please understand there are thousands of ways to shed layers. These are not the one and only. But as I go into the specifics with you, the last little piece of context is as we've talked about in previous episodes in this podcast, we've talked about your inner story. So again, we all have an outer story.
We all have an inner story. The outer story for us driven entrepreneurs is this wonderful story of success, building the business, having the stuff and the people and the money. The inner story is what's going on under the surface, the tectonic plates that are shifting, the central nervous system that's amped up.
And it's a matter of really understanding your inner story. And if there's anxiety and pain and trauma and discomfort in there, it's really understanding the root of all of that. And then again, removing that, letting it go. And so the idea, again, behind understanding your inner story is to get clear on it so you can set it free.
Let it go. Let go of that story from the past. It is a block. They are blocks. And so the idea is to let it go, but you can't let it go. So you kind of have an understanding or you can feel what's really going on. And how it has attached itself to you. And so the big chunk, the big piece I want you to be aware of is again, letting go of that inner story with these specifics.
Sometimes you're releasing a small block. Sometimes it's a big block, but nonetheless, here are some specific examples for how to shed shine. Again, take off the suit of armor, chip away the marble, get rid of the cocoon. The first is two books that I highly recommend to all of our clients. Number one is Letting Go by Dr. David Hawkins. A very powerful book to help you understand energy and understand how we all vibrate on a scale of zero to a thousand and thousand is the highest level enlightenment. And what it teaches us is that we are all vibrating somewhere on that scale at the lower levels, it's fear based emotions at the higher level, it's love based emotions.
But what's so powerful about that book is he takes you chapter through chapter in understanding these emotions at the lowest to the highest level and you're able to relate to what's going on for you and so I cannot tell you the number of layers I shed and there were things like even shame. I didn't know what the word shame meant before I read that book four years ago. I didn't realize I had shame. I experienced shame. And to understand it deeply and then to understand the roots of it and release it was very, very powerful. The second book I recommend is a book called Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. Again, in the same premise, it's just helping you to let go.
It's helping you to understand you. The ego's impact and how it works and helping you to, again, just let go and shed layers. So two powerful books there. So highly recommend books. I will also tell you as I go through these specifics, Rob and I offer in the book Shine on page 223, 20 plus other resources.
So I'm just going to hit on a handful here. So please understand, like I said, there are thousands, but there are also some specifics in the book Shine available for you. The second way to shed layers is therapy. Now there are a lot of forms of therapy. I'm going to specifically speak to talk therapy.
That's what I did. I have gone to therapy three times in my life, in my twenties, in my forties, and then recently in my fifties. What I'd like to say about Therapy is, in my twenties, it was helpful, but I really didn't have a breakthrough because I was not ready to be completely honest with myself and my ego was still hijacking what I was saying, thinking, and doing, but there was some progress.
In my forties, it was a little better, but it was most profound in my fifties when I was really ready to be honest and let go of my ego and let it fly. So talk therapy can be very powerful. I'm for shedding layers. The third form is meditation. And so one of the disciplines Rob and I teach in the 10 disciplines is stillness.
And so for me, my greatest form of stillness is meditation, but stillness is meditation, prayer, contemplation, journaling, whatever works best for you while still. We recommend 30 minutes a day, In stillness. But again, meditation for me has been very profound in shedding layers, because what happens is when you are sitting there still and your body calms down and your central nervous system calms down, things will come up.
You will get these sensations in your body and you will start to realize where they're coming from. Sometimes what they are, you don't always need to know what they are, but you're able to then process them. You just sit with those emotions as they come up. Sometimes they will come up in my stomach.
Sometimes they will come up in my heart. my chest. What I've learned is when it comes up in my chest, it has something to do with the past. When it comes up in my stomach, it has something to do with the future, but nonetheless, you don't always need to know what it is, but the idea is to process it. Let your body process it.
Let the energy process it. Let your body remove that energetic block, i. e. layer. The fourth is plant medicine or medicine journeys, things like ayahuasca, psilocybin, ketamine. I don't run out and tell the world to do this. Uh, it is a movement in the entrepreneurial world right now, and it is healing a lot of people.
It is healing a lot of PTSD. Now, again, I'm not preaching it to the world, but it has been helpful for me and what I find that it does for me and what I've learned is it basically just turns off your ego for a few hours. It's known as the default mode network in your brain. So I'm not going to get scientific here, but in its simplest form, it's turning off your ego so you can listen to your True Self.
younger self, unfiltered. And so what it's done for me is it's really helped me to understand my ego and when my ego kicks in. And so if it is something you're interested in looking into, what I urge is a couple really important disclaimers because I'm not an expert on this. Number one, Just put the word out.
You'll find the right resource for you. You'll find there are thousands of resources for this, but assuming you do it, what's important to understand is that integration is vital. And so the studies are showing that it's kind of net neutral for most people that just simply do a recreational journey, uh, and then do nothing with it.
They just kind of go back to who they were within months or years. But integration, where you really internalize what you've learned, take good notes, do the work afterwards, incorporate some therapy into it. That is where most of the benefit will come from. And then I would just urge also strongly consider more of a clinical setting of the podcast.
than a recreational setting. So those first four examples are the four examples that have been the most profound for me. And again, the goal here is just to give you examples. In addition to that, I go to Boulder, Colorado with two other friends. We've been doing this for over 20 years and every time we go to Boulder, we'll engage someone to kind of help take us deep.
So I've done lots of other things. I've done sweat lodges and mini vision quests and engaged healers. BYE! All of that said, I probably do too much for lack of a better term. The important point to understand is there are thousands of ways to remove blocks and it's just the understanding that you may have some blocked energy that needs to be removed and there are lots of ways to do it.
So again, page 223 and Shine will give you over 20 additional resources to help you Uh, in addition to what I just shared with you, and again, just remember the context. If you feel you're ready to shed some layers, I urge you to just heighten your awareness that you're looking for a resource and it will be presented to you.
And again, like I said, some people will listen to this recording and they will shed all of their layers In an instant, because it really is that simple. We are balls of energy trapped in that cocoon and that cocoon can come down in an instant. And I just wasn't that lucky. I wish you happy shedding.
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.
