← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
The Hidden Reason Your Business Feels Harder Than It Should with Dr. Shannon Irvine
00:20:39
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. Most business owners obsess over scaling revenue and almost none think about the person driving it. I did that for years. On paper, everything about my business looked great. But behind the scenes, my body was quietly falling apart and it almost took the business with me. If you're working more than ever and feeling worse than ever, this episode is for you and it's gonna get a little personal. This is also the science of scaling, but from a different vantage point. And I wanted to get really real with you here because all of the things I talk about, about the science of scaling and wiring your brain to get to the next level and the systems to scale. I would be remiss if I didn't share this part of my story, which started a little over a decade ago. And it was the birth of, of why I help scaling CEOs install systems so that they are not running the day to day because it's vital. But it's going to be told from a different vantage point than just the systems to scale. Because if you do not scale yourself, if your body, your health is running on fumes, no amount of strategy or systems is going to save you. And that's what we're talking about today. What you couldn't see on Instagram or any of that is that my stress hormones were through the roof, my labs were red everywhere, and I was walking around with toxic mold in my body. I was still performing on camera, still serving. I was leading my team. I was preaching brain based success and then collapsing when the cameras turned off. The shift for me was this. If your personal health dashboard looks like your business dashboard, would you still be proud of how you're running things? That was the question I had to face. And this might sound like a wellness episode, and it is, kind of, but I'm going to show you how my health became the real ceiling to our business growth. And by the end of this, you'll know how your business health correlates directly to your personal health. You'll know the three signals your body is already sending about your business and a simple way to start scaling you and growing your business without sacrificing your health and what you're doing it all for to begin with. So let Me show you what my body was trying to tell me long before I listened to. So I'd wake up in the morning and I wouldn't have energy. That was the first, like, signal. I would, of course, do what we all do. I'd pound the water, I was eating decently, I'd drink my coffee. And then that caffeine started to shift the energy in my body and I would start to deliver from that weight, started to not leave my body. And for the ladies on the call, on the phone, listening live, you understand when you're doing all the right things and your body is telling you you're in survival mode, I wasn't listening. My body was saying, now, was it hundreds of pounds? No, it was 20. But that £20 would not budge. Whether I fasted, whether I. I mean, I did a week long fast. And yes, some came off and it came right back on. So it was already giving me the signal that my body was holding on to something for dear life, for a reason. So my energy wasn't there. The weight was staying on. And the only way I could describe it is this. This spark I had for life, this drive, this passion, this you can't stop me kind of feeling was very, very, very muted. Now, I. I'm a woman of faith. I love the Lord, and I put my calling first. So I was still serving the orphans in Uganda through Mosaic Vision, and I was still serving my clients. But that fire, do you know what I'm talking about? The fire? The fire was down to like Bunsen burner level, right? That feeling of no energy, not feeling like myself, not having the spark that really is who. The center of who I am, who God made me to be. And then having this weight on me that just didn't feel like me really were the. The warning signs that I didn't pay attention to until it got a lot worse and I started going to doctors to try to figure it out. And if you've ever had this experience, if you go to a doctor, they're going to tell you to eat better. If you go to a surgeon, they're going to tell you to get surgery. If you go, you know, to a chiropractor, they're going to tell you you're out of adjustment, no shade at all thrown to any of you that are in those things. They're very, very important. But when I started going to doctor after doctor, talking about my energy, talking about the weight gain, talking about these things over and over and over again, I kept hearing the statement, oh, honey, this is Just something that happens when you're getting older. I don't know about you, but that just made me angry. I'm going to keep a PG here, but I'm just like, get behind me, Satan. So I started on a journey of uncovering what was going on inside that was affecting how I was performing outside. So I went to Function Health and pulled over 125 blood markers. Then I did deeper testing on my gut and my hormones, on my adrenals, on my heart. It was like looking at my internal P and L system. And it wasn't pretty. Years and years of running on fight or flight, terrified of failing, pushing harder, praying harder, hustling harder had turned into this perfect storm. And eventually I actually got my breast implants removed. Now I did an entire podcast episode on that, so that'll be linked down below if that is of interest to you. But this was my attempt of trying to really uncover what was it that was the root cause of these symptoms that were mild but devastating in my business. And after the surgery we discovered that they were basically full of toxic black mold. So my decisions were slower and foggier in the business. I started second guessing my own voice and instincts. When my camera was on, I was on. But when it was off, my energy, my creativity, my motivation, they were just gone. It was empty. Chronic stress led from fear and mold created inflammation and inflammation messed with my insulin and that created weight gain and brain fog and mood swings and. And that version of me was trying to lead a company. Now don't get me wrong, our company was at 5 million at the time. So from the outside every thing looked great. And when I was doing my work, I was delivering. But it was like literally when I finished the work, the cup was so empty, there was nothing left to give. Remember, I have two kiddos, I have two businesses, right? So this wasn't an option. And Function Health was the one thing that I started to do back then. It became public a few years ago, but this was something I was doing behind the scenes with them. And I am such a believer as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, if you do not know your body's numbers, it is the primary thing that's gonna affect your business numbers. So in the show notes somewhere down below, I actually put the link to Function labs. I think it's a non negotiable for every single person. It's I think under $400 for blood draws twice a year to really have a P and L for your body. It was the thing that allowed me to see what was going on. It was my body's dashboard. Once I could see the numbers inside my body, everything started to make sense. Because my business felt harder than it should be. Not because I was weak or had the wrong strategy or I wasn't serving or g or any of that. We had thousands of clients at the time. But because my internal operating system was literally overloaded. And if you're feeling that way, it's not that you can't hack it. It's your body is keeping score just like mine was. And if you try to scale on a broken health system, you will ultimately build a broken company. Health is not a reward for success. It's a prerequisite for for keeping it. Because I talk about the science of success and deeply understand the subconscious of what it takes to get to the next level, here's what I know now. You can't outwork, outperform or out hustle. Two things. Your subconscious mind and your body. They are your business's operating systems. Your best scaling weapon is optimizing your health. Hear me? Not perfect optimizing. Not the next tactic or the next hire. Your revenue, your client results, your leadership, your capacity, all of it follows the nervous system which is driven by your body, not your Google calendar. Just like in business, optimization comes from knowledge, but results only come from action. You can't affirm or brain prime your way out of bad labs. This is exactly why we build a team and a dashboard operating system inside Scaled CEO. You can't keep running your company out of your stress hormones and expect it to self scale. That's the work that we do with Scaled CEO. I just want you to imagine a year from now, right, you run the business from a simple dashboard from above the business your team owns, the day to day and revenue generation is off your back. Your biology is supporting that growth instead of quietly plotting against it. I want to give you the plan here. So step one is measuring what you're ignoring. It's super, super important. You would never run your company without numbers. So the question I had asked myself is why am I running my health that way? So that's my question to you. For me, step one was fully data. Emotions lie, numbers don't. And that is truth in business and truth for your health. So just to tell you what I did function health for the full baseline, I went to vibrant labs for gut hormones and adrenals. I'll link to all this in the chat because the numbers came back with all these cardiac measures, but it was truly just inflammation and we started to go after that inflammation from the standpoint of starting with reducing the stress, starting with changing the operating system that I was driving through. I did DNA testing with Gary Bracha so I knew where my genetic, my genetics had some breaks. And I started researching the cleanest and most effective supplements to heal and how to reverse aging or like I like to say, become ageless. This gave me an honest health dashboard. The same way you use your KPIs in your business gives you an honest business dashboard. And things really did start to shift. So when I say check your internal KPIs, how I mean labs, not vibes. Vibes and emotions can lie. They can be fabricated by caffeine. And trust me, that energy is not you. You'll know exactly where your real constraints are instead of guessing. Once I was able to do this, I could actually see where the breakdown was and slowing down to speed up. It's not a cute quote. It is absolutely biology. We started detoxing and calming that inflammation in my body. We worked on insulin resistance, so my energy and my brain actually had fuel again. We rebuilt my adrenals instead of asking them to sprint every day, 24 hours a day. And I layered in systems like Somatic, practicing emdr and deep no sleep rest and brain priming. I added targeted supplements that went after what was broken for my body to heal. This is stuff like clean protein, clean collagen, clean skin care. Ladies, the stuff that we put on our face causes inflammation in our body. And so again, links everywhere down below. I don't want to gatekeep. I want to share with you what I discovered because I don't want anyone to be suffering in silence while they're scaling a business. Everything looking beautiful from the outside and then breaking down from the inside. So clean protein, clean collagen, clean skin care, it all adds up. Now, practically speaking, here's something that I was doing. Daily walks, I was getting out in nature. Now, a lot of you know that I took a move to Dallas about five years ago and I am a beach girl in Dallas, right? I need to be by water. The beach was a grounding thing. I think it was taking some of my fight or flight out of me. But I realized I wasn't out in nature. So daily walks, I started holding all of my team meetings, walking. And yes, the team gets used to it. And the way we do things in scaled CEO, your meetings are run through a dashboard. It's not firefighting or making decisions on a, on a meeting. So we're really moving the needle through KPIs and numbers. So that's not what this is about today, but I want to talk about that. You can run your business but from a few hours a day from a dashboard with team owners owning the day to day and revenue generation. But back to what I was doing. So daily walks, doing my meetings via walks, I started reading actual books without a screen. That started to literally move the fog out of my brain. I put massive guardrails around my sleep and things like the bed that I sleep on, the temperature of the room, the light in the room really guarded. 7 to 8 hours minimum a night. And as I said earlier, only high quality tested supplements that matched my labs. And of course I'll let you know who that was below. Did a lot of research to figure that out. So today the good news is my biological age is 17 years younger than my actual age. My kids and I always joke around because they'll ask, wait, mom, how old are you? And no, I'm not going to say it here, but I'll show them my function, labs, biological age. And I'm not, I'm very proud of my wisdom and the time I've had on the earth to be able to give back and serve and glorify God. But the reality is to become ageless, to really have a business that scales. This, my friend, is potentially the thing that is worth all your attention. The real win is this. My desire, my creativity about a decade ago and my conviction came back with vengeance. Now most of you have known me since then, so you don't know the difference, but I feel like myself again. I know I feel like a better version of me in my 20s with a lot more wisdom and a lot more energy. So build a business that doesn't run your body into the ground. If you, if your company only works when you overwork like it was for me, you don't have a self scaling business. You have a very, very expensive, very fragile job with a lot of responsibility for others. So the last thing that I did after healing from the inside out, after becoming more ageless, after having the skin care and my supplements actually supporting things, seeing the markers go from 40 out of range down to four and supplementing for those four. That system that I did a long time ago to start to heal from this, is what created this intense passion for teaching CEOs how to build systems within their company. Because if your company only works when you overwork like it used to be for me, you don't have a self scaling business. You have a very Expensive, very fragile job running on your nervous system which are going to cause problems. Final piece was building a business operating system that didn't depend on my heroics. A team that owns the day to day in my business in revenue, a simple CEO calendar and dashboard and one weekly leadership rhythm and 90 day cycles on one critical number so the company can grow without me or you adding more hours and more stress. And I am passionate about getting this in the hands of every CEO out there. You're listening to this and thinking that's exactly where I am. Your next step isn't another strategy or course or agency. Your next step is to run labs on your business health and your personal health the same way I did. That's why we created the self scaling Business Diagnostic. It's your business lab work, so to speak. We score your CEO systems, your team systems and your scaling systems and and map a 90 day plan to start scaling you and the business together. If you're interested in figuring out the exact constraint holding your business growth back and likely your wellness back too, I'd love for you to click the link in the notes below and register and join me live on the workshop. It's a diagnostic we're going to really get under the hood there. Not a lot of business owners are sharing the real, the good, the bad, the ups, the downs that come with this journey. I hope you found a little bit of my story applying to you. And if you're looking for more videos on how to actually build these types of systems in your business, click here to watch more. I hope you are encouraged that the KPIs that you run for your business you need to run for your health. And when you know you can optimize, you don't need to be perfect in your health. Let's be done with that. Okay? But I want you to think if I don't know my numbers, I wouldn't run my business that way. Imagine never checking your bank account, never knowing if you could pay team and employees going on for your health it was for mine a decade plus ago and uncovering the inflammation, uncovering all of the cascade that happened and getting after it. Targeting it with numbers was really the thing that shifted and then helped me to become obsessed on growing my business in the same way that developed all the scaled CEO systems that we're teaching today and I've run over a decade with. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode a little more real real. But I want to share that with you, inspire you to keep taking steps forward, utilizing the science to scale. All right, that's what I have for you this week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram, please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters, those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course, if you want to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel, R. Shannon Ervin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.