(upbeat music) - It's time. It's our time, my friends. Time for millions of entrepreneurs, 55 plus, who are hashtag not done by a long shot to revolutionize how we lead, do business, and innovate our world. I'm your host, Janette Anderson, and welcome to my conversations with fascinating people who would rather inspire than retire. (upbeat music) - Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Purpose and Profit Sisterhood. I'm excited about this one, and I know I say that I have fabulous speakers all the time, but this time, I am excited because this person actually gave me a kick in the context. Which frankly doesn't happen very often. In fact, I was just talking to my coach this morning. I have two coaches, if you're a coach or a leader, then you better be having other mentors and coaches and so forth. And we're talking about playing a bigger game. What does that mean? How does that really look? And how do you make a contextual leap, an expansion in who you're being in the world in such a way that it shifts your results? And that's what we're gonna be talking about today with Court McDermott. So welcome, Court, I'm so glad you're here. - Thank you, Jeanette. I'm excited to be here with you. - So where are you located physically in the world? - I just moved to California. I, in Southern California, I was living in Italy. I have been living in Italy for 20, last 23 years, I was living there. And yeah, France before that, England before that, and Chicago before that, so yeah. - Okay, so you get around, where are you originally from? - Chicago, Southside suburbs, yeah. - Yeah, awesome, okay. So let me give you the official bio as usual, everybody. And it's impressive, so hang on to your seat belts. And then we're gonna talk about how to really increase your or unlock the confidence to lead with intuition. Now, this might sound like a really kind of touchy-feely topic. Some of you might go, yeah, yeah, whatever. But I want you to listen because there's some tangible results that you can create in your life, tangible shifts, tangible expansions to the difference that you can make in the world when we get the underlying principles that we're gonna be talking about today. So listen up, stop doing what you're doing, stop multitasking, 'cause this is gonna be a really great conversation. So court, McDermott, Courtney, is a best-selling author, 10x speaker and human potential enthusiast with the Masters of Science from the London School of Economics. Her work in the field of self-development and business strategy has been featured in Inc, Women's Health, Success, The Huffington Post, Fox News and many other mainstream business and lifestyle media. Courtney's career highlights include her time as an executive at Vanity Fair Corporation, Vice President of Sustainability Partners Inc, and then running her own businesses with clients and audiences at Universal Music Group, Google, Nike and Virgin Unite. Courtney speaks four languages and lives between Italy and the US. So, like I said, impressive resume, lots of experience, and yet you look like you just got out of university, so I'm not entirely sure how that's all feasible. (laughing) - Thank you, I'll take that. - Tell us something about you that people wouldn't guess, maybe even your friends don't know. - Oh, okay, I really want to be a musician. - I'm really? - Okay. (laughing) - And that's gonna be a gig at some point 'cause I really want to be, I play some and I sing and I really, I think I want to turn that into something, so yeah. - Awesome, and so what do you play? - I play the guitar, I play the piano a little bit and I play the ukulele a little bit and like I said, voice is the main instrument, so. - Okay, so you are a musician already, what you mean is you want to become, do it as a living? - What I mean is I want to share it more broadly, I used to sing in public years ago and I'd love to bring it back, either the singing or some mix of all of that, so yeah. - Okay, awesome. Well, and you could go stand the street corner and sing, but you just want to play it at a bigger level, I'm guessing, right? - Well, no, tiny cafes would be great, anything, yeah. - Cool, all right. - Yeah, it sounds hot here in Southern California, but something else, yeah. - All right, so we'll be talking about the real meaning of confidence and its impact on leadership and intuition and life frequency and other topics like that. Before we launch into that, why do you do what you do? What's your purpose in life? - I love that you're asking that question 'cause I don't get it very often, surprisingly, and there's a huge reason why I do what I do. I wasn't originally aware of this reason. I started working in human potential, it was kind of how I call it umbrella wise. I think when I was little after I was born, basically, I was always looking for resources, answers to questions that I had about the human dilemma, you know, all of our existential crises, what was going on. Also, I grew up in a very tumultuous environment and I had a lot of, there were a lot of mental health issues that ran through my family and my family lines and why I do what I do, I think stem from a real deep desire that came from just the pain of all that suffering of witnessing it, of experiencing it firsthand, of seeing how it runs through, like I said, runs through the DNA and the channels of my intimate family and just really, really wanting to heal that. So that's where all my work comes from, yeah. - And is there any particular issues in general or is it just any kind of mental health blocks that get in our way? - Depression, anxiety, huge, it also seems there were some bipolar tendencies running on my mother's side of the family, those weren't diagnosed, but just looking in my own personal studies just on my own, not professionally, but just looking into some of what was going on. I mean, they definitely look like there were some serious psychosis and so yeah, those were the main ones. So depression was a huge one in my family, huge. And also for me personally, for a long time. - Okay, so let's talk about how you go from that and being in that situation, which I think a lot of people can probably relate to, to becoming such a high achiever so quickly, because a lot of people will have come out of, like myself out of very tumultuous situations, lots of mental health issues, lots of problems. And we all go in whatever direction we go in. We might be a victim of it, we might overcome it. How did you go from that to being such a high achiever to have accomplished so much in such a relatively short time? - I, my take on it is actually most of the people that I've seen who've had serious suffering in their, whatever it was in their youth, but even later, they do, there, a lot of us do tend to go to high achievement as a way to sort of just calm that all of the kind of anxiety and fears and things that we have. And so I noticed that time and time again in my work and I noticed it with myself, I was racing away from, from myself. And there's this ride, I used to, when we were young, I remember we went to Disney, I don't know if it was Disneyland or Disney World, but there was this ride and it had this sign, this sign on the wall, I think it was called Rocky Mountain. And it had this sign that said, "Can't run away from trouble, ain't no place that far." And for whatever reason, I remember reading that sign, you can't run away from yourself, ain't no place that far. And I just, when I finally kind of got that, I was like, "Wait a second, okay." So I'm running away through all these different things. And we all use different things. Some are more or less socially acceptable, right? High achievement tends to be one that's really acceptable and people say, "Wow, that's amazing." You did all these things. But unless it comes with this sense of just relaxed, openness, that is where it is now. And then it is kind of like you're almost constantly crumbling under the weight of your own lack of acceptance. And so what I learned at a certain point, and the high achievement thing was my drug. And then I was like, "Wait, it's not that I don't like to do these things, but it's what am I really chasing after? What am I running away from?" And when I look at specifically depression, which ran so fiercely through my family, one of the things I started to realize, it was actually Jim Carrey, I heard him talking about, depressed, I love that man. He was talking about depressed being another word for deep rest. And what I started to realize was actually, the only way you're going to come home to yourself is through deep rest and really getting with it. You've got to really get with it. Whatever it is. And so that sort of again, started to change. It was a huge perception shift for me because I went from doing, doing, doing, doing, doing to who am I being, which is what you and I were talking about at the beginning. And then what's beautiful is when you really come from that place of who am I being, the doing happens through you as a result of who you are. - Yeah, absolutely. There's a bunch of things that I wanna ask you about all of what you just said, 'cause there was lots of depth in there. But basically, I think you're right, many of us who come from some version of Not Enough, which is essentially everybody on the planet, but it gets turned, the volume gets turned up on it for some people in terms of the chaos or the mayhem or whatever and the depth of the Not Enoughness. They're, one of the ways we can go is I'll show you. I am all that and a bag of chips. And basically it's our FU to the universe that becomes a way to create something else, a different experience. It can get to be very disabling because we have to be more and more and more 'cause it doesn't really address the Not Enough. And so coming back to the question of be, be, do have, we are a society of doo-doo. And we were talking about that earlier. I once asked a really brilliant speaker, Mito Cobain, professional speaker and philanthropist and businessman, what the difference was between a, an educational speech and a transformational speech. And what he said can be applied to program, coaching, organizational shift, et cetera. And that is if I need to figure out what they need to do, or if it's educational, I need to figure out what they need to do. If it's transformational, I need to figure out who they need to be in order to do that. And that's what I am committed to myself and what you're committed to is really clarifying the being and out of that comes the doing in that context. Which is again, fascinating, just the conversation I had with my coach earlier today. So let's talk about your journey and how that tangibly has played out in a fascinating, what I'm gonna call contextual expansion. There are lots of people and I do wanna talk about confidence and leadership and all of that. But there, as I said to you before, and I don't mean this in any slight way to, I don't mean to insult you, but basically a lot of what you talk about, lots of people talk about, you know, what is confidence, how do you trust in yourself? How do you transform your perception of money and wealth? But you have taken it to a really significant level. In terms of how you're living into that in your business. So can you tell me just a little bit about your transformational journey and how you expanded your context so much? - Well, yeah. So when I started out in this business, which is predominantly at this point speaking and my books and when I started out in this business, I didn't know what I was doing, honestly. Like so few of us do and it was really just trial and error. What I did notice, which was really important was, and I think really important to the context of this conversation is that it was so much less about anything that I was gonna prescribe. And I didn't realize this right away because we very much get into a prescriptive mode in this industry, like if you just do these five things or whatever else it is, then it's so deceptively misleading when we do that because the truth of the matter is every resource that is of any validity as far as I'm concerned is pointing back to you. And I think very, very little people that I've seen in the space or the work that I've seen in the space does that. It's pointing externally. And when we look externally, we've missed the mark period. There's no way around missing the mark when you do that. When, however, you have the audacity and the courage. And I will say the confidence 'cause I do speak of confidence very differently than most people to go within to source your answers than what's happening outside of you begins to shift. And frankly, I think very few people are giving that message in a clear and concise way, much less giving it in a way that ties into the scientific understanding because the Eastern traditions have known this for millennia. But the Western science has been catching up over the past couple hundred years. And a lot of my work really delves deep into very, in very simple ways. As Davinci said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, but it goes into these operating systems we're all walking around with. And it says, you know what? You don't need to understand a million things. You need to understand a couple of things about how they work in order to see massive shifts in your life. And when you're working at this level, as you called it, the difference is in the millimeters. I work with extremely high performance. I work mostly with celebrity clients at this point in my business, in my private one-on-one practice, which is very niche. But when I work with them, we're looking at changing that millimeter, but that millimeter, just like in golf, will change the entire trajectory of the shot. And if you understand that, then you are ready, you're like ready to go to that place so that you've tried everything else. You've exhausted all the other resources. And I talk about this a little bit in my first book because that was where I was. I was like, what I call miserably successful. And you just weren't there. You weren't living joyously. You didn't feel inflow. It wasn't okay when you weren't okay. Why? So I think my work addresses things very, very differently. I think that's why it's spread the way it has. That's why it has the word of mouth it has. And of course, that comes from my own experience. I worked also at the upper echelons of many different organizations and know what it's like to be chasing after that dream that then shatters in front of you. Each time you think you caught it. So I think there's just a mix of experience, but all of this has come from within me. It's my unique offering. That is, like I said, I don't call myself a coach. I don't call myself anything. I try to avoid calling myself anything, actually. And we can get into that if you'd like, 'cause that gets a whole persona conversation that I just love. But there you are, Jeanette. That's the shortest answer, I think, in this law. - So you started your business how long ago? - I officially started my first business in 2017. When I launched, I think it was, or 2016, 2017, but that's when I launched the first book. That's when my TEDx around that book came out as well. Yeah, that was 2017. - Okay. And talk a little bit about your book. So you've got two books. So tell us about the TEDx and the two books. - Okay, so the change starts within you was the first, so change, sorry, not the change starts within you, was the first book. And that was really kind of showcasing, getting to that place that everyone thinks you wanna be, and realizing it's not it. So I start the book and that talk, which was a, we could have a whole talk about the talk. That was my least favorite talk. But I start both of those with, with, you know, I'm sitting on the corporate jet. I'm sitting the espresso. I've got all the things, right? I'm the marathoner, I'm a mom, I'm a whatever, all the things. I got the Jimmy Choo's on, and I'm miserable. I'm just miserable. And this question was coming, like, you know, who's script is this? And it was really time, it was a, it was a nudge. Sometimes it was a, it was a full on, you know, hose, water hose of like, you got a change, this isn't working. And then realizing like the change was never gonna come from, like I said, from externalities. The change had to come and be born with it. And it wasn't that I had to change because something was wrong with me. It was that it was time to evolve. And it is time to evolve. It's not that you have to fix anything. You are just being called to evolutionary principles that are coursing through you. And that was what was happening to me. So in that first book, I talk again, very, very simple delivery of like what I did to start to emerge from that place. And even also to shorten the learning curve. Like if you're realizing, because if you, if you notice every time you chase an externality, it never gives you the long-term satisfaction you're after. And we see this over and over and over again, it's demonstrated in studies, but we can also just know it, we know it. And yet we do it because we are inundated with the message that that's what we have to do. And so the timeout is very scary. And I talk about how to time out if you're in that vortex. So that first book is about that. The second book, Give Yourself Permission, which I'm just so on about. We just finished the audio books for both of them, but the audio book for Give Yourself Permission is coming out now. So I'm so excited. 'Cause I felt like it really had to be my voice. And so we're getting it out there now. And I just love it. I am in love with this book. And that one talks about how I started to see all these spontaneous transformations and changes within me. And I didn't understand how they were happening. I didn't understand the science behind how they were happening. And so I really wanted to get clear on what's happening in my brain, what's happening because I was seeing spontaneous shifts even in my body. And I talk about this at the beginning of the book. And it would seem almost like impossible, but the people around me witnessed it too. So it wasn't just, oh, I think I'm changing. They were tangible, very, very clear changes even in my physical form. I sometimes when I give presentations around the world, I'll show a slide of me from 10 years ago when I was working in corporate in a slide of me today. And most people in the audience don't even recognize me. That's how dramatic the change has been. And those who do start to recognize me, their mouths are a gape and they're just a can't believe that it's the same human standing in front of them. And I'm not talking about any gimmick. I'm talking about that shine that's meant to emerge from your form that the formless wants to express to your specific form, whatever that looks like. It may change your form in similar ways that it changed mine. It may change them in other ways, but it's really deciding enough. I am going to shine. And so the second book is about that. It's give yourself permission. Every chapter is give yourself permission too. So there's like give yourself permission to do what you love, give yourself permission to make a lot of money doing what you love. I heard a previous podcast episode of yours where you were talking about this a little bit and it's like, yes, yes, wake up. There is so much available to you when you wake up. It's so it's an awakening book, but it does deliver the science, which I think is really helpful. I work with super, super smart people. They're not the one standing in front of the mirror. Just say like, I'm good enough. I'm smart enough, dog on to people like me. Like they want strategy. They wanna know what actually is gonna move that needle. Like I said at the beginning, that millimeter of difference to shift their consciousness, which is a whole nother game then shifting something you're doing. - Yeah, absolutely. Okay, there's so much depth in there that we could talk about, but let's go back to the definition of confidence because you mentioned that you talked about it and think about it differently. So let's start with that. And then I wanna talk about some of the permission and transformation on specific areas. So what is confidence in your world? - Sure. Okay, so confidence actually that term has gotten really diluted. Confidence comes from kung-fi-de-re, which means with trust or with reliance, with full reliance. And when we look at that, when we really sit with that for a second, it's like, why am I not trusting? And the bizarre thing, when you start to really look at it, what you'll notice is that you are trusting 99.9999999 semi-percent of what is occurring both within you and outside of you. You have to for your survival. So in other words, you are trusting that the trillions of biochemical reactions occurring in your body every second are gonna keep doing what they need to do. And they're gonna keep coordinating one with another so that you can keep doing the things you're doing. And you don't stop and say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Let me make a five-year plan for that. To make sure everything stays on track. - Yes. - In the same way you're not doing that with what's happening externally. I mean, most of us, unless you have a serious psychosis, we're not going to bed at night and saying, is the sun gonna come up in the morning? Is it not gonna come up? Is it gonna come up? Is it not? And just sweating our brains out, trying to figure out whether this thing is gonna keep, whether this tiny speck of dust that we're on is gonna keep circling and keep doing what it needs to do. And the paths of the plants are gonna stay on track. We don't say, oh, no, no, no, no. That I cannot trust that. We have to. We would literally go ballistic. So the funniest thing, and it's quite curious, is that we take that incantasimal part that's left over, that 0.0000, whatever, 1%. And we say, not that. Not that. If my business isn't doing it this way, then, I have to have a plan and I better go to Peepopoppo and make sure that I stay on that plan. If my body isn't, you know, if it's not doing this, I better do this. So what we do is we actually add layer and layer and layer of complication, rather than allowing, and one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time is the dau. And the dau, it's so simple and so profound that literally you could sit with just that book for the rest of your life, and you would be there. That book is it. And there's this point in the dau where it's like, it's really talking about you becoming, exactly what we were saying, becoming and trusting and resting in that trust, relaxing in the trust around life. And that is what confidence is, it's, I trust you, I trust me, I trust the universe. Even when things look really, really bleak, I trust it. And one of my favorite ways of thinking about this is literally like if you were watching a movie and you're not gonna leave mid-movie if you like the movie or whatever, but you're not gonna leave and say, oh, no, no, no, I don't like where this is going, I better leave, you know? I don't wanna, I don't wanna deal with this. I mean, if you do, you'll never get to the resolution, right? But if you stick with it, you're like, oh, wow, there was this, you know, for the most part. Not always, but there was this beautiful resolution and you're not freaking out because you know it's just characters, you know it's just a movie. Well, it can be the same way with your life. And trust me, I know how scary that is. I'm even in situations all the time where I'm like, oh crap, it is hard to trust, but I'm going rogue here. I'm gonna trust and I'm scared, but I gotta trust. Doesn't change the fact that I'm scared. It doesn't change the fact that I'm challenged, but I choose to trust. That is what confidence or confit that it really means. And when you trust, you move to the world in a very different way. Beautiful distinctions. And I want to, it's fascinating 'cause I'm going through this process in a kind of a deeper level of this process myself. So perfect timing. Thank you, universe. I just wanna say, there are times where I or my clients, but especially for myself, I have gone to, there's a site that you can go in and Google and find that tells you how many days you've been alive. And I will sometimes put on a post-it note, 26,472, the number or whatever. And the point behind it is to remind me that 26,472 times I've done an experiment and the experiment has always had the same result that I'm okay. And to say that the 26,473rd time, it won't is really illogical, really, really irrational. And so there are times where I have to remind myself that way, which is what you're talking about is that conscious choice of trust and getting that really it is pretty ludicrous to not trust. It is really working hard to get outside of what is. Get it with mistrust. And that said, there are lots of people, business owners myself, where I, it's so funny 'cause I literally pulled some cards yesterday about, okay, how do I let go of having to know what to focus on in terms of revenue generation for scaling my business because I'm twisting and spinning in what's the thin edge of the wedge? What, where do I put my strategic focus? 'Cause there's so many different possibilities and options for growing the mature printer world and trying to figure it out. And of course, the card said, get out of your head, stop it, right? And it's like, okay, but seriously, how the fuck do I do it if I don't get in my head? Like seriously, how do I know what thing to focus on? And of course, the second card was silence and just still and listen, you know? And so I know that's true, but for those people out there, like me at times, how do we get out of that need to control, command, figure it out, use our, you know, live from the neck up? What is the key to trusting in a tangible way as opposed to, oh yeah, I trust, but I'm gonna go figure this out and create a five year plan, right? Yeah, yeah, okay, I love it. So I'm going to give you three keys, even though I'm the one who always says no three, whatever, or five or whatever, but I'm going to give you three keys that are so simple, but they are going to take a lot of reframing to really incorporate. But if you do, if you do, my promise, and I don't make promises lately, is that things will really start to shift, okay? - Yeah, I'm ready. - So it's so simple. And like I said, please therefore do not discount it, all right? The first one, and it's inside of this first one, I'm going to give you two specifics. There are three specific things I'm going to talk about, but in this first notion, I'm going to offer two, which is relax. - Mm-hmm. - Relax. Yeah. Just like that, you know, when you go to that, however many thousands of days you've been here, and you realize, oh, well, I, that experiment went, it went okay, I mean, I'm still here, okay? Let me relax. The two specific, I'll call them strategies, which is just so cute, but I'll call them strategies, they're very much techniques actually, if you look at the origin of that word, but however, I digress. The first is yawning, okay? Yawning, so if you're finding it difficult to relax because most of us are, because it's just like you said, it was like, oh, wait a second, what do I do, right? So we get back in the frenzy. So yawning, yawning is actually considered one of the best kept secrets of neuroscience. Yawning both energizes you, there you go, I love it. Yawn away, it energizes you and it relaxes you at the same time. It is actually such a detrimental thing that we are taught not to yawn, or that people believe it somehow indicates boredom. Yawning is the body's very natural way of supplying you with an increase of oxygen, relaxing your nervous system, and enhancing your energy. And if you yawn for about 30 seconds, you will start to experience shifts in your physical state. You will be more relaxed. What will happen is you will also dip into other brainwave frequencies, because when you're in that doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, you're more than likely in beta, which is that the best way I've ever heard you described is having a four-year race car and going around in first gear. So you've got a race car, you've got a Ferrari, as they say in Italy, and you are, or a Mazarati, or whatever, you know, they've got so many Lamborghini. And you're using this magnificent system in ways that are just gonna burn it out. So yawn, yawn, yawn. It also releases massive amounts of oxytocin, it releases serotonin, which is what you're, you know, using all these other things to kind of get, you've got it, your body will naturally produce it when you yawn. Oxytocin, by the way, is great for bonding with people. I often suggest that people are having issues yawned together, just yawned together as much as you possibly can. It's like wild cats. This is why they do it before and after a fight. There is a reason. So yawning. And again, that's under this umbrella of relax. It's okay, it's okay. The second one is get horizontal. And I always tell people that I ran across it by accident. I swear, Jeanette, this was the coolest thing ever. I had been writing, you know, in a traditional way, like sit down at your computer and write and, you know, stay there until you get to the prisoner of your keyboard and you've just got to get this thing out there, whatever that is. I've written for many different mainstream lifestyle and business publications, obviously written books. And I felt like I need, the only way I could do that was it first gear. And then what I realized and luckily, this sort of happened by accident, but I started, I was working on client summaries and my client summaries are extensive. So when I work with the client one on one, I provide an extensive summary that's specific to them after every single session. And it is very tailored, it's so beautiful. I never know what's gonna come out. And what was happening was I started to actually lay down and dictate these summaries on my phone. And I would have my phone on airplane mode and I'd be dictating these summaries. And the most magnificent insights were coming through me because I was relaxed. And again, because my brainwave frequencies were for sure moving, I wasn't monitoring this, but for sure they were moving into alpha and theta and they were just naturally moving into these places where we have access to what you could call this intelligence, the same intelligence that's coursing through us. We have direct access. And so I was getting, so then I started to write other things that way, I ended up writing, for example, the intro to my second book came out that way, and other parts of my second book came out that way. I was writing press responses for huge press requests. I was writing them that way. And it was just so beautiful. I was like, wow, actually I didn't need to toil and spin. Look at the daisies of the field or the violets, I don't remember, but the reference is they don't toil and spin. So it was like, I let all that go. So that's the second one. So under, okay, we got three here. Under, there's the relaxing and under that is the yawn and get horizontal. I promised you they will reap amazing results. And if you don't think you can lay down for 10 minutes, lay down longer. As the Dalai Lama said, if you don't think you can meditate for, I think it was something like five minutes, meditate for an hour, okay. By the way, I also wanna drop in another little thing 'cause you talked about silence. Most of the time when most high performers are people who are trying to quote unquote get somewhere without realizing that you're there, silence becomes another task. It becomes another duty. It becomes another thing you have to do. It is not this grooving that I'm talking about. That's a very different thing. In meditation, I think Alan Watts put it so beautifully. He said, when you're doing it, you're just grooving. You are not, there's no forcing. And this again, we go back to the Tao. We go back to some of those ancient principles. It's not forcing. It's really, oof, I'm dancing. I am dancing with life. And that leads me straight into the third thing that I will share that has been highly transformative for me just as a very simple, practical thing to do is moving. Whatever that looks like for you, one of my favorite exercises is something called shaking. I shake through every part of my body to a fast-paced song. And what happens is you're actually releasing the stuck stagnant energy in your body when you do this. So lots of times we think things are all mental and all that, but really that's because you just have so much stuck stagnant energy in your physical body that you can't get through it. It's almost like just layers and layers and layers that you just can't penetrate. So the more, when I first started shaking, by the way, I couldn't even shake one of my legs. That's how stiff I was. Now I'm like a gummy, you know, whatever that character, that green one, I'm like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. But it took, just to say to someone listening, you might start this and you might be like, I can't do this. Stick with it. Compound interest is real. And there's a reason why Einstein called it the eighth wonder of the universe. So this is the simplest way that I found when the, the founder of this movement called Koya, I was in the south of France and I was doing this retreat. And she talked about shaking like this and I just loved it. So I always quoted her. She said, you know, she had us take both of our hands and she had to shake one of them vigorously while she was talking. And whoever's listening, if you wanna try this, you will feel the difference. And so you just shake and shake and shake. And she told us the story of a gazelle being chased through the wetlands by a tiger. The gazelle gets away. However, the gazelle does not go to therapy. You keep shaking for the next 10 years about this time that there was a lion chasing her through the wetlands with the, or the grasslands. What the gazelle does is she shakes through every part of her body, releasing the tension, releasing the fear and goes back to being a gazelle. Now, if you hold out those two hands, the one that was shaking and the one that wasn't, you will notice a perceptible difference. What do you notice, Jenette? - This one is kingly more vibrant, I would say. This one feels stiffer. Yeah, this one just feels more kind of alive. - Yes, and I love when you're doing that, you kind of go like this. It's like, whoa, you know? And for whoever's listening, it's like she just lifted her hand up. And that I see that a lot when I tell this, I'm sorry. And I tell it on big stages, thousands of people. And it's like you can feel, and you might want to shake out your other hand just even out there, even the mouth. 'Cause you said something else is beautiful. Stiff, stiff energy, stuck energy. It's stiffness. You have calcified into a persona. Again, we can get in a persona as I love it. It's a fascinating conversation. But you've calcified into this persona. And the more you keep trying to reinforce that, the tighter and tighter it becomes. Okay, so when we stop shaking and when you just notice, you'll notice, and again, we could go into the science. The science behind us is fascinating. I share that in my book, I share other ways to liberate this energy. When you look at the science, you actually will realize that we're actually talking about real neural peptides, right? That are being released from these different energy centers in your body. Again, the Eastern traditions knew this all along. The Western traditions are really catching up. You can see this on brain body scans. You can see what happens as you start to release these neural peptides, which are literally like almost like little, I like to call them critters. And they get stuck in like these sponges that are your organs. And you just free it up so that you can be more of where you are. So you can shine that light that we were talking about a little bit ago. - All right. So, okay, I think I missed number two. So three keys, number one. So two, and really how I'm thinking of this is how to go from the spin cycle to trust and to really consciously dropping down out of that, you know, heady space. So first, relax, yawning and get horizontal. And what was number two? - Okay. So I was including those as two separate keys. I can give you another key. I can give you lots of keys, you know, there's so many that we could play with, but those two of yawning and getting horizontal are the ways to relax. And they're very specific, very tangible, very simple, not the easiest because if you're in a mental spin and you know, we could get into keys around your mind. I love talking about the mind. I'm fascinated by all of it. So wherever you want to go, but those were the three was, and the third one was obviously the shaking, the physical. Get physical, it doesn't have to be shaking, but get physical. You'll notice that those times that you even go around the block and you take a little break, all of a sudden the insight comes. Again, why you're freeing up the energy, you're not trying to force it, you're freeing it. There's a huge massive shift when you stop forcing and you start freeing. - Yes, okay, that's a good mic drop. I'm giving all of these bumper sticker mic drop. So I'm writing down. - Love it. - So I love it, that was awesome. Okay, let's talk about personas because that is fascinating and you've got a different perspective on that. And there are so many things we could talk about, but let's talk about personas and then see what we have time for. - Okay, okay, great. So we use this word person, which I just love. I love, I love etymology. I love the origin of words. I love languages, I study languages. And I mean, it's one of the things I love to study. And the origin of the word persona or person, it comes from persona, they were the masks. They wore an ancient Greek theater. - I just wanna pause on that for a second. Masks, mm-hmm. And if you really stop to consider it, even just for a moment, you will realize, oh, I'm wearing a mask. And guess what? That's also okay. There's nothing wrong. You need, in order to operate in this dimension, we need masks. I love my masks. It's like I always say to everybody, I love my ego, you know? Like I am the last person in the world who trashed the ego. The ego is the lowercase I. The ego is the character. It's when you start to believe that you are the character. The best way I ever heard this described was so beautiful. And I wish I could attribute it to someone 'cause I don't know where it came from, but he was talking about someone who was playing Macbeth in New York. And he's on Broadway and he's playing Macbeth, he's playing Macbeth. And he believes he is Macbeth. And he goes around, he's ordering the coffee and he's like, what's this size? See before me, you know? And he's got this whole dramatic, whatever. And everyone's just like, what the hell is do you think he's the character? That's what I'm talking about. You've slipped into it. And not only have you're like in, you know, most of us are insisting on this character. And I talk about this in my book because I go briefly into epigenetics and how to start changing things. Even genetically, we're understanding more and more about how to change your genetic makeup, which goes back to the origin of this conversation and why I do what I do. But it's like, you not only are saying, I am this person, you want everyone else to get it. So the way what I liken it to, and also in my book, I liken it to this, is imagine you had this library just full of books of infinite potentials available to you. And every single day, you're pulling out the same book and you're like, this is my book, you know? I'm Pippa Papo and I live on Viai Vitarelli and my best friend's name is Sam and my girlfriend's name is George. Like, whatever it is, right? And you pull out this book and not only do you say, this is my book for yourself and you're memorizing it and you're repeating it to yourself all the time, but you show it to everybody else too. You're like, hey, this is my book. Make sure that you understand that this is my book. And what you are doing is you're literally calcifying, I call it calcifying into a persona. So it's literally almost like, dang, you get this heaviness. You're like, oh crap, and now I have to be this person. I have to be this character, I can't play any other one. And what's so fun is when you start to really not understand this cognitively, 'cause lots of people listening might be like, oh yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. No, no, no, I'm talking about an experiential knowing when the masks dissolve. And I, again, share in my book like how that's happened to me and different things that I personally have gone to for that. But it's like, you start to dissolve it and you're like, oh wait, that's fun. I get to play that. So like I said, I love my masks, I love the egos. What puts me in the fortune, forget 500, it's what puts me in the fortune 50 rooms where I feel totally at ease talking to whomever it is because that's my character and I love my character. It's great character. It's what gets me up on the stages. It's all those things. But it's not the ultimate truth of who I am. It's a play on form. It is a play on form. So the persona is just a play on form. Now when you start to really get this and you start to really groove with it is when you get to change costumes characters, there's a little bit of a white fire involved in that, I always say, 'cause the minute you first start doing it, everyone around you's been memorizing your book. So they're like, wait, you can't change books right now but didn't you do it anyway. And you can experiment with this slowly. I like the way, I think it was Warren Buffett he once said, don't test the depths of the water with both feet. I'm not talking about multiple personality disorder, which by the way is fascinating. I love studying stuff like that. I talk about some of this in my talks around the world is like what we've gleaned from multiple personality disorder, which is a wicked disorder, it's awful. I mean, it seems awful, I don't know. But what we've gleaned is that people who have this quote unquote disorder are actually able to change significantly instantaneously. And I'm talking about, they drop weight. I'm talking about people with serious eczema where it vanishes. I had a client once come to me, a very young client and I didn't wanna work with someone so young but I had some reasons for doing it. And she had terrible eczema, she had been everywhere and this was coming from an extremely wealthy family. They'd done everything to try to cure this eczema. I've been years. She took one session and eczema was gone, it was gone. It never came back. This is happening internally and when you open up and recognize and understand that this is, you get to play internally and this doesn't mean you close yourself off and you go and live in a Himalaya. I've definitely thought about that numerous times but it's just not the Himalaya, but some are hidden. You know, once you get to it, you're like, whoa, it's like Dorothy with the red slippers. Holy crap, I had it all along. - So I can hear some people in the audience thinking masks, that means inauthentic and authenticity is the buzzword of the decade. I love your phrase, play on form. And what I hear and what you're saying is choose who you're going to be. We are all of it. And what we think, like you said, this one book is all of who I am, but what if we are all the books in the library? And so it's not inauthentic to be this book today or this book today. It is the choosing the I am as opposed to faking it till you make it, which is a very big difference in distinction. Am I picking up what you're laying down? - I like that a lot. Where I think what's so important too for people to really understand is the point that you made, this is the ultimate point, you are all of it. And, you know, quantum physics demonstrates this very beautifully, very seamlessly, you know, the particle is the wave. The space-time continuum, like all of that, collapsing on itself, you know, all these things that Einstein was talking about when he was talking about spooky stuff at a distance, entanglement, the fact that I can impact you or spooky action at a distance, that I can have an impact on you being nowhere near you and having no physical communication with you. I talk about this too in terms of brainwave frequencies and how to ship them. What's important is forget the terms, forget authentic, forget character, forget mask, forget all of it, forget it, forget it, forget it. Everything you pick up, drop it. Everything you pick up, drop it. I talk about this in the second book too, where I say, if you grabbed a hot potato out of the oven, you would not hold it in your hands until you get second degree burns. You would drop that thing faster than fast. Here's my invitation, drop everything and see what happens. Drop it all. And it knows gonna be scary AF when you start, but just keep dropping, keep dropping and keep trusting, every time you realize, "Oh, I'm holding that thing, drop it," whether that's something you like, whether that's something you don't like, whether that's something you're indifferent about, drop it. And you will see there's just so much magic that evolves because there are different games that we can play, you know, Lila, Divine Play, like the whole thing is that, supposedly. And I would tend to subscribe to that theory, but there are all sorts of different games that we can play. You know, there's a great book called Infinite Games. There's all sorts of games, but here's the thing, there's also a point where you can just stop playing all the games. You're not gonna fit in in the way you have, but you're gonna start seeing and creating massive change, if that's what you want. And it is really about an evolution and consciousness. It's hard to do this. We are, as I said earlier, inundated with messages that say, do not do, go anywhere else but there. And it's really funny, okay, no, I don't wanna go on, I know we have time constraints, but there we go. That's what I'll say about that. - I love that too. Keep dropping and keep dropping and keep trusting, basically. The book that I just read, listen to is not surrender experiment. Michael Singer. - Love that man. - Yeah, and in the book is out of my head right now. - On Tethered Soul. - On Tethered Soul, thank you very much. Is a great way to kind of get this concept that you're talking about a little more cognitively. Like he's very good at kind of taking you step by step through some of the science and so forth. So that your brain has something to chew on while your soul gets that it doesn't need anything to chew on. So he's good at that. As are you. Okay, one last thing, although I seriously could talk to you for hours, tell me a bit more about all the things we've been talking about in terms of transforming perception of money and wealth. And because you have, you know, when I say contextual expansion, I'm talking about creating a bigger container. The, you know, we can only fit so much in this container. And if we want more to be, do or have more, we have to have a bigger container. You've done a really good job of expanding your container to go from struggling and challenges and so forth to highly successful, to highly successful with joy and meaning and even more successful. How do we apply these notions to the area of money and abundance and perceptions of those? Yeah, so I dedicate an entire chapter to wealth and money and how to make a lot of money doing what you love. I will share a couple of things from there since obviously long in time is what it is. But the things I will share are that there are some really important principles that you kind of have to understand in order to create a different wealth, reality in your life, okay? And I cover all those in the book and I actually counsel people, keep coming back to these principles once you have really embodied them and you've really understood them, you will be living from them. And again, very different from, oh, I'm gonna now I'm gonna try to look over here and now I'm gonna look over there and what can I do? And you know, all this stuff, it's like, no, no, no, understand that for example, all the wealth that you could ever imagine is inside you. Now again, this sounds like a platitude. It sounds like something you may have heard. If it sounds like that, go back, go back, go back, go back until you recognize it as something completely different. You will know when that happens. There will be a point where you realize, holy smokes, all the wealth I ever could have desired was actually right here. It's like this diamond story. This is a true story. As someone looking for diamonds in South Africa and came along this diamond mines, the man who was living there didn't know it was a diamond mine thought they were just stones, glittery stones, all the kids were playing with them. This man takes some of them back. He comes back, he offers to buy the diamond mine, he buys it and he becomes one of the richest men, if not the richest man in the world. You're sitting on the diamonds. And just to illustrate this in one more way, I'm gonna illustrate it with another story that's just so profound and beautiful and such a way to kind of like get people to tune into this principle. There is a mendicant who's going through India and he's wandering around and this one man just races up to him, he runs up to him and he says, "Give me the diamond, give me the diamond." And this one or this mystic, he says, "What diamond?" And he says, "The diamond, the stone, it's in your bag. Give it to me, give it to me." And the man reaches this mystic, reaches into his bag, he pulls out the stone and he says, "This, you want this?" And the man says, "Yes." And he says, "Yes," you know, and he's very greedy and he hands it over and the man takes it. And he says, "Thank you." And he said, "I had a vision last night. Krishna came to me and said, I think it was, I don't know, Krishna, I'm making that part up. But he says, "Came to me and says that there was a man with a stone and if I had it, I'd be the richest man in the world now. I'm the richest man in the world." And he runs off, okay? He says, "Thank you." I don't even know if he says, "Thank you," but he runs off. A little while later, this same man sits under a tree. He's got his huge diamond there and he's sitting there and he's just kind of contemplating and he slowly makes his way back to the mystic and he says, "Here, take the stone. Can you give me the riches that made it possible for you to give this away so freely?" What's your chasing after will never, ever soothe whatever it is you're trying to soothe? The riches are in you. And yes, the material ones will come once you understand this truly. And I mean, again, the difference between it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it and it's all rational ever to only smokes, I got it. And yeah, all those things are available in whatever ways you want. I mean, it's also arbitrary. It's a little bit like when I was telling you this before we hopped on the recording, which was that I love that story Wayne Dyer was saying something years and years ago. When I was a little kid, I used to listen to Wayne Dyer if you could imagine that. I was little and I was listening to his audiobooks and he would talk about going up. He said, "You could go up to the ocean of abundance every day with a little spoon and you could take that much out and you could say, "This is my lot. This is what's there for me." Or you could go up there with a Mac truck every day and take as much as you want, as many times as you want and it will never diminish the abundance that is available to you. It does not diminish. I'm not, what I'm talking about here is so, again, it's actually quite simple, but you've got to sit with it and just lay down, like I said, lay down and yawn with it and see what comes up. And there are other principles, but yeah, that's probably the most important one. - Oh, there's so much depth in the things that you've been sharing and I really hope that those of you who are listening to this, listen to it again and again, 'cause each one will drop differently or you'll hear it differently and deeper at different times. So, and I obviously recommend that and I'm going to go by it right away. I really want the audio too, so I'll go get that as soon as it comes out. I love actually doing both at the same time, but I do the audio 'cause I drive a lot and so 'cause I'm polyhomers, they're nomadic, live in mobile lifestyle. But what I've recently found is that reading the book while listening to it is actually the most powerful way to retain and get the concept. So, yes, I will get both. So tell people how they can get the books and/or get more of you, whatever, 'cause I know people will find you yummy and want more of you, so how does that look? - Right, well, thank you first of all so much and thank you to everyone who listened. I'm so excited to be here with women like you who are really changing things or shifting things, really open to evolution and whatever that looks like, so thank you so much for this space. I can be found pretty much wherever books are sold. My name is Without a You, so it's important that when you're spelling Courtney, if you spell the whole name, that it's C-O-R-T-N-E-Y, McDermott, and then my website, the short URL is courtinc, so C-O-R-T-I-N-C, like Incorporated.com. And you can find the books, you can find a couple other resources, you can find some other podcasts, they're not as fresh, because I do so many interviews, I've given hundreds of interviews for the second book, especially, but you'll find some talks, there are at least some snippets of those, there's a free meditation on my website too, that you can download, just kind of quickly reset your autonomic nervous system. And yeah, there's, and I'm on social media, wherever you find Courtney McDermott, Without a You. So connect with me on Instagram, let us know, I have a team on there, but let us know where you heard this, we can send some more resources if you ask for those. And yeah, thank you, thank you so much for creating this community, Jeanette. - Beautiful, thank you so much, Court, for all of the wealth of resources and information and accesses, ways to think of things, but also really the reinforcement for being, that it's not about a bunch of doing, it is about choosing who we choose to be. One of the taglines that I use a lot is be the difference that only you can be, because that's truly what it's about, and it's about the being aspect of that. So what's one last piece of advice you'd love to leave people with on the topic of confidence in leadership, using your intuition or just anything, what do you feel inspired to leave people with? - It's gonna be okay. You know, I don't know, the last couple of days I've had that movie, Shakespeare in Love. I've never seen that movie. There's this line, and I can't recall, it's been years, but there's this line where he says, "If everything's not okay, it's not the end." And it's just, "It's gonna be okay." Whatever you're going for, it's gonna be okay. And lean into it, you are so much more, and I mean you, whoever's listening, all of us, there's so much more, and it's gonna be okay. - Beautiful. Well, normally I provide some kind of wrap up comment, but I'm gonna leave it right at that. Thank you for being here, Court, I appreciate you, and everybody, I hope you heard that. Take care. Bye bye. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening. I'd love it if you left a comment and subscribed, and if you wanna watch the video of this and other fascinating interviews, you can go to our maturepreneur channel on YouTube, and I encourage you to apply one aha from this interview right away so you can turn your wisdom into wealth and your contribution into positive change. Bye for now. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You
