Mind · 29 episodes
Entrepreneurial Mindset for entrepreneurs
Every guest who talks about mindset on this show eventually says some version of the same thing: the business problem you think you have is usually a self problem wearing a business costume. Cash flow stress, burnout, imposter syndrome, stalled growth at a million dollars in revenue — trace them back far enough and you hit an unconscious belief about worth, control, or safety that was installed long before the business existed. That's not a metaphor guests reach for occasionally. It's the load-bearing idea across dozens of conversations.
Where they disagree is on the mechanism. Some point to the body — nervous system regulation, breathwork, hormetic stress, somatic awareness — as the fastest way in, arguing that the mind can't think its way out of a state the body is still stuck in. Others go cognitive: rewrite the belief, change the language, reframe the story, and the feeling follows. A few go further still, into astrology, psilocybin, reiki, and spiritual frameworks that would make a strict rationalist wince. Dr. Torrens doesn't force these into agreement, and you shouldn't either — the useful move is picking the entry point that matches how you're actually stuck, not the one that sounds most credible.
The other recurring split is about ambition itself. One camp treats burnout as a dosage problem — too much hustle, not enough recovery — and prescribes boundaries, sleep, and environment design. Another insists burnout has nothing to do with hours and everything to do with alignment: you can work reasonable hours doing the wrong thing and still burn out, or work brutal hours in flow and thrive. Both camps have receipts. The synthesis is that mindset work isn't one skill — it's knowing which of these problems you actually have before you apply a fix built for the other one.
What holds across every conversation
- •Before fixing a business problem, ask whether it's actually a belief problem — chronic cash stress, stalled growth, and burnout often trace back to unresolved worth or control issues, not tactics.
- •Use a body-based check before a cognitive one: a few minutes of breathwork, movement, or presence practice often unlocks decisions faster than trying to think your way to clarity.
- •Write worries and money numbers down instead of holding them in your head — vague dread shrinks dramatically once it's compartmentalized or made visible on paper.
- •Treat rejection as a numbers game with a known ratio, not a verdict on your worth — reframe each no as data collection, not failure.
- •Set a recovery non-negotiable before you're forced into one — several guests only built boundaries after a health scare or breakdown, not before.
- •If you're capped around the same revenue or same pattern repeatedly, look for the task or identity you refuse to delegate or release — that's usually the actual ceiling.
Burnout Is a Misalignment Signal
Multiple guests reject the idea that burnout is simply overwork, arguing instead that it's what happens when effort and identity point in different directions.
“Burnout isn't about doing too much. It's doing what's not true for you for too long. And so alignment feels different, right? There's still effort, but there's clarity of direction and growth.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 0:00· listen →
“If you break yourself down just to be successful in business, it's not even about enjoying the benefits of money and those things, it's about enjoying your life. And, I think that gets lost. We learn about the so-called hustle culture, #hustle. Everybody's like, grind, grind, grind. But, that really isn't accurate.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 2:51· listen →
“After it happened, it was probably the most difficult period of my life. I mean, even more difficult than growing and scaling the company because like, as I said, when you're like, when you're in it, John, you don't realize how much you're in it and how much of your every living drop of energy is going into it.”
David Kahl: From $100M CEO to Psilocybin Guide · 15:57· listen →
“I was actually in the higher education space. So to do this was probably a shocker to everybody, but no, I was in corporate, very successful for over 30 years. And I got to the point where, like many people, there was a lot of burnout and to the point that it didn't quite feel as fulfilling.”
Hypnotherapy for Imposter Syndrome With Christina L. Woods · 9:37· listen →
The Body Decides Before the Mind Does
A cluster of guests argue that intuition, trust, and even pain itself originate below the neck, and that entrepreneurs who only optimize cognition are missing their fastest signal.
“Everyone's living above the neck, but trust is below the neck. So we all live here and we think that our body's useful purpose is just to carry our head around. But all the magic and all the knowing and the intuition and the gut feeling, it's below the neck. So can we trust that a little bit more?”
Sara Gilbert: Intuition, Language & Leading with Courage · 5:42· listen →
“One thing broadly, our body knows, our body knows what we need. Our body has tremendous wisdom. The body knows how to heal itself. The body has all kinds of extraordinary abilities, which science is just beginning to understand, right? So the body is a tremendous source of wisdom and knowledge.”
Somatic Mindfulness for Entrepreneurs with Fleet Maull · 22:38· listen →
“We have nociceptors that are threat receptors. Touch a hot pan, threat receptors take the information, the threatening heat, danger. That sends the signal afferently to the brain, and really through the spinal cord and the brainstem. The brain then makes processes and makes a decision on the pain perception to come back out.”
Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance · 8:44· listen →
“Intuition is simply an expansion of all of your physical senses. Sight, smell, taste, hearing, knowing— our brain— feeling— skin. So it's what we've done is over thousands of years diminished our capacity to read energy and to receive information from anything except our core senses.”
Teresa Wornstaff: Using Intuition to Grow Your Business · 12:58· listen →
Worth Isn't Earned, It's Uncovered
Imposter syndrome, chronic 'not enoughness,' and the gap between external success and internal peace show up across founders at every stage, and guests treat it as a belief to excavate, not a fact to overcome.
“Deserving isn't earned, it's remembered, right? And so nobody in that room cares about you. Nobody in that room thinks about you. They're thinking the same thing whoever this person is thinking. They're thinking the same thing. What if they find out?”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 26:32· listen →
“And it was interesting when we started doing classes at Liberate, the curriculum would ask people to write down like 10 things they liked about themselves, and a lot of people couldn't write down a single thing.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 13:53· listen →
“What I see mostly is typically at an early age, some sense of need to seek the validation, sense of where that really served, and the continual path of seeking validation... And when you don't have a sense of, I'm good enough whether I do that or not, eventually you're left with, yeah, but what if I don't do that?”
Hypnotherapy for Imposter Syndrome With Christina L. Woods · 15:07· listen →
“Big Joy is all about realizing that we're born for joy and not for deficits. Most of the leaders, most of the souls, most of the amazing people we work with have been taught somewhere in their journey that they're going to have to perform some version of perfection that I never figured out.”
Dr. Jax Black: Redefining Success Through Joy · 4:07· listen →
Fear, Control, and the Survival Mindset
Decisions made under perceived threat — of failure, judgment, or loss of control — produce narrower, more defensive outcomes than decisions made from presence, and several guests offer concrete ways to catch yourself mid-reaction.
“We need to be very agile how we navigate in those times. To be agile, we need to be in that growth mindset, in that abundant mindset. So the framework helping me to pause, observe, and decide, that framework, if I practice it, I enter quickly into the abundance mindset and get out of the fear of the survival mindset.”
Conscious Leadership: Deciding from Presence, Not Fear · 5:46· listen →
“Here's what I say. So humans like to feel like they're in control. And so when you're in a startup business, you don't really feel like you have a whole lot of control here, right? So where our control comes from is through our choices.”
Dr. Gary Sprouse: Realistic Optimism to Beat Stress · 22:55· listen →
“I think that's a big mistake with serial entrepreneurship is people see it as diversifying their risk. But because the root cause of startup failure is the internal mismanagement that derails decision-making, what will happen is that you're going to be fighting fires everywhere.”
Phil Neil: Emotional Mastery & Entrepreneurial Reinvention · 16:46· listen →
“With social media today, we have a free global world stage. If we press public on our profile, you are a public figure, exposed. And so many people fear that, and it is What I noticed, not because they don't think they are good enough if they stay in their own bubble, because we all deep down know that what we bring to the table, what we bring out there can change someone's life.”
Personal Branding & Fear of Judgment With Ivana Ivanek · 20:01· listen →
Money as a Mirror, Not a Metric
Guests working in financial coaching converge on a specific claim: money stress and money ceilings are rarely arithmetic problems, they're relationship problems that show up as arithmetic.
“I've found time and time again that if you're somebody that experiences money stress, more money is not the solution to that problem because I've worked with clients with very little money coming in and they feel stressed... Because it's not about the amount of money, it's about your relationship with money.”
Money Stress, Scarcity & Abundance with Scarlett Stanhope · 13:08· listen →
“Your business revenue will never outperform your relationship with money.”
Redefining Prosperity: Money Mindset & Spirituality · 20:37· listen →
“True success is not measured by money. Money isn't success. Money is an outcome. Now, if you treat money like an outcome, you've just taken the lid off of possibility.”
Teresa Wornstaff: Using Intuition to Grow Your Business · 0:00· listen →
“I was spending money almost like it wasn't my own and treating the money like it wasn't mine... I am the business. Caitlin and I are the business. It is ours.”
Holly Conti: Scaling to 7 Figures with Mindset Work · 17:16· listen →
Resilience Is Trainable, Not Innate
Whether the language is athletic, muscular, or spiritual, guests agree that the capacity to absorb rejection and reset after failure is a skill built through repetition, not a trait you either have or don't.
“I've always stuck by the phrase of you'll flush it. That play's over. I'm going to flush it. I got to move on to the next thing... how do you have the mindset to just accept that, take the positive from it, learn from it and move forward and not make that same mistake again?”
Chris Streveler: NFL Mindset for Entrepreneurs · 62:48· listen →
“Even a successful entrepreneur has failed 1 billion times and been rejected 1 trillion times. Like, I have been rejected way more times than I have been accepted. I have failed way more times than I've been successful. At this point, I'm like almost immune to it, at least for the smaller ones.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 27:28· listen →
“I'm not going to go into the gym on day 1 and try to lift 100 pounds off the rack. You know, I'm going to go with a 5 or 10-pound weight. And then over time, I'm going to slowly increase the amount of weight that I can lift until I get to that 100-pound weight.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 22:30· listen →
“You just got to remember it probably doesn't matter in the big grand scheme of things. Any decision you make right now, you're probably going to be wrong in, and that's totally fine. It's called the no tax. It means you got to do 500 things wrong and get 500 nos before you get a yes.”
Grayson Cross on Scaling E-Commerce, AI, and Burnout · 29:37· listen →
The companion guide
Reading about entrepreneurial mindset is one thing. Changing it is another.
John’s companion guide turns what these conversations cover into something you can actually work through.
More moments worth hearing
Everything else these conversations turned up on this subject.
“Your soul should be the chief of the energy that your soul's leading from, because most people, have you noticed, lead from the outside and then address strategy, as opposed to the inside and out.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 5:43
“What's fascinating is we all avoid those discomforting topics because they're not comfortable for us, or they're what we actually came to learn, but we avoid them.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 9:19
“Anxiety tells me when they show up is that they're either living in the past or the future. They're not present right now.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 31:20
“I can have a crappy day and go get a massage and feel good for 24 hours, and the next day, if I did not address that crappy whatever's going on inside of me, it's back. So I can do things to feel good, but they're not solving the internal.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 45:15
“I believe every single human being has the beautiful power within them to transform, to come home to themselves, as I like to say. And so my role is really to provide the safety, the love, the education, and the tools that people need in order to kind of cross that bridge into self-transformation.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 2:25
“Everything is a choice. Truly, everything is a choice to wake up, to say yes, to say no.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 6:12
“I said, okay, well, I see the divorce and I raise you. I'm quitting the job, selling the house. I'm gonna go on this travel sabbatical and just, you know, kind of my own little Eat, Pray, Love adventure because I knew that I could handle whatever came my way.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 14:50
“It's really hard for judgment and curiosity to coexist, 'cause if we can truly embody curiosity and say, huh, where does that pattern come from? Why do I think that? What am I afraid is going to happen? Then that's where we're really opening a door rather than judging something and closing a door.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 16:19
“I also really love the one, worrying is like a rocking chair. It'll pass the time, but it won't get you anywhere.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 34:58
“That next big win is a weird thing... it's like doing drugs. And when you're doing things like that, you get this high and you're thinking to replicate it. If you keep chasing it that way, it's only going to destroy you.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 4:34
“First just make something cool and then worry about how you get it in front of people. It does not work the other way. That's where you see like the Hawktua girl... She had a shot and then didn't do anything with it because she wasn't prepared. So first, prepare your ideas and your cool content, and then worry about getting the people to see it.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 14:58
“Everyone is afraid to fail and they fear failure more than they love success... Failure, she and I, like we go way back, right? We all fail more than we succeed. A great baseball player bats .300. That means they failed 70% of the time.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 19:03
“Most of us suffer from imposter syndrome, right? Your skill level's going like this, your confidence level's going like that, and there's this gap.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 19:03
“I talk to myself sometimes and I would never talk to a friend like that ever. I forgot my flash drive. You piece of shit. Like, how are you not prepared for this? You know? And it's trying to stop yourself from doing that.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 21:50
“The valuation is going to always be the most speculative thing you can do in the world... So the 2 tips is find a way to find any way to justify some kind of valuation. But also find investors that are going to believe in what you're doing because creative stuff like might work, it might not.”
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business · 47:35
“You know, we move, journal, breathe, meditate to tone mental muscles, which are presence, courage, gratitude, confidence, and resilience. And within each mental muscle, there are different skills that you can cultivate and exercise in order to build that strength.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 11:05
“I think it's even harder too for younger generations with social media. Like, even if you're not being told you're not enough, you're looking at somebody else accomplish something and you're saying, oh, I couldn't have done that. There's like, it's just constant comparison, which really can create negative self-worth and negative self-talk and all of that. So stay off social media.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 16:27
“Imagine you want that person to have it be 80% positive or 70% positive. You have to start changing the way you talk to yourself, cuz of course you're gonna have imposter syndrome if everything you say to yourself is like, oh, you're not good enough. Oh, she's smarter than you. Oh, that outfit's better. Oh, you shouldn't be here. Oh, what are you doing? Like, of course you're not gonna feel good.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 20:00
“Or the other one I love is your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 23:58
“So it's like focusing on the end goal, you know, it's focusing on what matters and why you're doing it is really important for resilience. And then just being flexible, you know, things may not come to fruition in the exact way that you had imagined, but it doesn't mean that whatever you accomplish isn't a success.”
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser · 28:35
Every episode on entrepreneurial mindset
30 conversations, oldest to newest.
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout
Burnout comes from doing what's not true for you for too long, not from doing too much.
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban
Living safely and checking boxes for success often leads to burnout rather than fulfillment.
Matt Read: Building Spatchcock Funk's Media Business
Chasing the 'next big win' is like chasing a drug high and will eventually destroy you if you never stop to enjoy what you've built.
Building Mental Muscles with Olivia Bowser
Mental fitness can be trained like physical fitness through five 'mental muscles': presence, courage, gratitude, confidence, and resilience.
Positive Activity: Daily Mindset Habits with Lori Rogers
Daily positive activities like affirmations, gratitude journaling, and meditation are scientifically linked to increased sales, productivity, and resilience.
Dr. Gary Sprouse: Realistic Optimism to Beat Stress
Worry, guilt, and regret are side effects of the human skill of envisioning the future, not separate flaws to be eliminated.
Phil Neil: Emotional Mastery & Entrepreneurial Reinvention
Three emotions—uncertainty, fear, and unworthiness—derail entrepreneurial decision-making and push founders into a 'shadow' failure zone.
David Kahl: From $100M CEO to Psilocybin Guide
Selling a company can trigger a harder identity crisis than building it, because founders often don't realize how fused their identity is with the business.
Holly Conti: Scaling to 7 Figures with Mindset Work
Businesses are a physical representation of the inner work founders do on themselves, so scaling requires addressing limiting beliefs, not just tactics.
Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance
Pain is an output created by the brain's processing of threat signals, not an input from the injured body part, so changing sensory information can change pain perception.
Conscious Leadership: Deciding from Presence, Not Fear
Decisions made from fear and survival mindset produce competition and destruction, while decisions made from presence and abundance mindset align with purpose and values.
Sara Gilbert: Intuition, Language & Leading with Courage
Potentiality is the invisible expansion beyond what we consider our maximum potential, and most people treat their ceiling as a stopping point rather than a floor.
Dr. Jax Black: Redefining Success Through Joy
Joy, not deficits or trauma, is our natural born state, and fear of judgment or failure is taught by others rather than innate.
Billy Keels: Make Your Corporate Job Optional
Making a job 'optional' means building enough independent income and clarity that you go to work because you want to, not because you need the paycheck.
Chris Streveler: NFL Mindset for Entrepreneurs
Mental rehearsal and visualization, standing behind the starter and simulating throws, prepares you to seize opportunities when they suddenly appear.
Money Stress, Scarcity & Abundance with Scarlett Stanhope
More income doesn't resolve money stress because the problem is an unconscious, emotional relationship with money, not the amount earned.
Personal Branding & Fear of Judgment With Ivana Ivanek
Building a personal brand requires showing your real voice, face, and environment to build trust, not polished perfection.
Redefining Prosperity: Money Mindset & Spirituality
Prosperity is an inside job driven by subconscious money beliefs, not just practical financial tactics like bookkeeping and budgeting.
Grayson Cross on Scaling E-Commerce, AI, and Burnout
Scaling e-commerce brands depends on knowing exact customer acquisition cost and lifetime value rather than guessing based on gut feel.
Somatic Mindfulness for Entrepreneurs with Fleet Maull
A daily mindfulness practice as short as 12 minutes creates the mental gap needed to respond consciously instead of reacting from old conditioning.
Debt Strategy for Entrepreneurs: Leverage Without Crushing
Debt is leverage that helps a business grow when used within its cash-flow cushion, but becomes the primary cause of business failure when it exceeds what the business can safely service.
The Clarity Map: Lynn Mull on Purpose and Alignment
Career transitions away from toxic, high-pressure environments often take years and require deliberate financial and emotional planning, not a sudden leap.
Hypnotherapy for Imposter Syndrome With Christina L. Woods
Imposter syndrome and other performance blocks often come from a mismatch between a person's internal sense of self and their external achievements.
Bart Foster: Business Outside and the Power of Nature
Conducting business outdoors and walking shoulder-to-shoulder makes people calmer, more authentic, and more vulnerable, leading to deeper connections than coffee or lunch meetings.
Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs with Alan McLaren
Personal branding works best when framed as generous knowledge-sharing rather than self-promotion, which removes much of the anxiety around it.
The ROI of Health and Fitness for Entrepreneurs
Exercise and nutrition act like a natural 'smart drug,' boosting decision-making, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility for leaders.
Anthony DeNino: SMART Mindset for Entrepreneurs
Success follows a four-step SMART process: mindset, emotion, confident speech, and action.
The Spiritual Is Scientific with Rev. Tony Senf
The body is an effect of the mind and spirit, so entrepreneurs should prioritize source and spirit first for real effectiveness.
Teresa Wornstaff: Using Intuition to Grow Your Business
True success should not be measured by money, which is an outcome rather than the goal itself.
Somatic Therapy for Entrepreneurs with Chelsea Horton
Somatic therapy addresses emotions by working through the body's sensations rather than only intellectualizing feelings through the mind.