Breaking Through Success Barriers That No One Talks About

Welcome to Dawn of a New Era, where we talk all things millionaire mindset and scaling strategy so you can think, feel, and scale like the top 1%. I'm Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach, Forbes mentor, and serial entrepreneur. Each week, we'll ditch the fluff, dive into the neuroscience of success, and share the good, the bad, and the ugly of building wealth, impact, and freedom. If you're ready to play bigger and rewrite the rules of business, you're in the right place.

Let's go. So I'm going to be dropping some truth bombs in today's podcast because we're going to be talking about breaking through success barriers that no one talks about. And this really is key in every business owner's journey because every ambitious entrepreneur, right, who's ever thought this statement falls into this category because if I just had the perfect strategy, I'd be at my next level now. So we've all done it.

If I could, if I could just, you know, it's one of those things that we say almost daily, and I want you to really be conscious about your language because what happens here is that we are not aware that we're actually conditioning our brain around our narrative, the way that we talk. We create these stories based on what we're saying and we're doing. So what we want to do is retrain our brain, and we want to be open to the fact that we are aware that we are magical people who are doing amazing things and creating impact and transformation and changing lives. But we have to be mindful that we are the catalyst in these changes because here's the thing, like strategy alone is not going to be The winning ticket.

And a lot of people lean into strategy. They talk about it. You may have heard, like, the difference between masculine and feminine energy. They lean into their masculinity and they start just driving action.

Now, the thing is here that certain strategies will work better for different types of people, and it depends on what your belief system is and also what your own unique personal success strategies are. Now, they're based on what your success barriers are, because the thing is, is that we could be pushing at a strategy, but until we actually reduce those barriers and manage how that you use them as a superpower, or reduce those barriers, or overcome them, or start to challenge some of those barriers, these concepts will not fly in your business because it's all about what to do instead. And I think the difference here is, is that when I meet people who are self-aware, they have a different understanding of how their mind works. And this, for me, was something that changed the way that I did business.

Back in my late teens, early twenties, I started really kind of leaning into psychology, studying business and marketing, and I felt that they all went hand in hand because they were all about how people think and what they do and their behavior. And for me, if we could understand that and understanding how people's minds worked, we could improve how they felt. We could— Grow businesses, we could literally align our marketing strategies to sell more. So this was kind of like the hub, the heart of everything, understanding the mind.

And I started to delve into neuroscience. I started to look at NLP, holistic modalities, and I started to study around business performance coaching and mentoring. And this is really when my whole fascination of the mind started. And over the past 25 years, I have been fascinated around habits of highly successful people.

I've been fascinated about the difference between people and cultures and the way that people do business. For me, the more I understood, the easier things flowed. And when I talk about actually having alignment in my business, I don't believe that we ever really truly have work-life balance. But what I do believe we can have is complete alignment around our purpose and our mission and vision.

I believe that we can do things to proactively boost our health, our wealth, our happiness. And I believe that we can change our habits into more positive, not through changing the habit, but through changing the environment. Now, this is true when people come to me and say, Dawn, I want to scale my business. Dawn, my strategy is not working.

Dawn, I don't know why I can't get consistent high-income cash months. Dawn, I'm stuck at an income level. All of these things really have to be understood from a matter of the mind, because if you do actions without understanding the why, that's when they don't fly. So if there's one thing that you take from this, if you feel that maybe you're doing something in your business and it feels clunky, it feels tough, it feels just incongruent, it just doesn't feel aligned to you, then it probably isn't.

So stop and rethink it. What we need to do is often rewire the brain in the CEO, in the founder, in the business owner before moving into the scaling strategy. And this is why I always talk about millionaire mindset and scaling strategy, because I believe the two go hand in hand. Now, if you think about strategy, the one part I want to talk about now is something that literally, if I go as far back as I can remember, even back to school, I remember this principle, and I remember Pareto's law, the 80/20 rule.

Now, what I believe in is 80% mindset and 20% strategy, because over the past two decades, you know, through mentoring 30,000 different entrepreneurs, I promise you, in every single case, the ones who have scaled to six and seven and eight and nine figures fastest weren't the ones with the flashiest funnels. They weren't the ones with the most polished offers, and they weren't the ones with the most experience. What were they? They were the ones who really mastered mindset.

They understood how their brain worked, and even further, they started to understand how their ideal clients' brains worked. Now, this is the key, because when we get so transfixed on what we want to do, and it could be a goal, it could be that you want a financial goal, you want a freedom goal, you have a dream, or you want to buy something or do something or go somewhere. It doesn't matter what the goal is, but we become so transfixed on it that we forget that there will be little barriers and little curveballs and pitfalls along the way. Now, what we need to do to navigate them is understand that often the challenge, the biggest challenge in any business right now, Is you.

And it's true. We are often the person who gets in our own way. We are often the number one success barrier because you can have the most airtight business plan in the world. But if your beliefs and your habits and your self-image isn't aligned with those goals, you'll sabotage definitely your own progress.

And the amount of people that I see that when I start working with them, they might say to me, you know, I'm doing this and I'm putting all the effort, all the time, all the money in, and we look at it, and the biggest problem is them. And I would put myself center first in a lot of the biggest fails I've had or the biggest challenges. It's me. I have been the problem.

And when I've understood that, you know, this is not about running a business with ego. This is understanding that when you drop the ego and you understand that you are the problem, then life gets easier. And I laugh because for so long I used to tell myself it was the market, it was this, it was that that was the problem. And actually, it was me.

Classic example of this: spent ages, ages perfecting an offer, going to market, launching it, massive goals, absolutely flopped, failed, disaster, hated every minute of it. But I went again. And what I knew from that was I was the problem. I had spent so long trying to make it perfect that actually, if I'd launched it faster, I'd have learned quicker.

I'd have understood that the marketing and the messaging was off. And actually, instead of designing it all internally with my team, thinking this is what people want, I'd only managed to create interest in the market. I failed massively to create desire, which is when purchase is happening. So when purchases happen, this is understanding.

Psychology of buying, and this is why the mind comes into every single part of our business. Because most conventional strategies are maybe, like, designed for corporate or linear thinkers, and they'll fail us entrepreneurs and founders. Why? Because our brains are wired differently.

And when we understand this, and we understand that our brains are wired for things like novelty and speed and high reward, we're like, Oh, I get it. This is why it's not working. Because that means your growth plan has to work with your brain, not against it. Strategy first that is aligned to your way of thinking.

Founders tend to be quite good expansive and quite good creative thinkers. At the end of the day, a business owner has created a business from a blank canvas. You know, that's pretty special in itself. But they've taken risks, but they're motivated differently.

And you know yourself as a business owner, if you understand what your true motivations are, you'll probably realize that often, like, money isn't the biggest factor. You know, when we start to see people really stepping into true happiness is when they've got enrichment. It's when their day flows and they live in joy and flow. And that comes from enjoying what you're doing, the experience, not just being transfixed on the end goal, but really experiencing and lavishing the journey that it takes.

You know, so often we just think, I just need to get to somewhere. No, wrong way of thinking. We need to do different things to get to our destination that align with how our brains work. And if we're lit up and we feel in alignment.

We feel joy. You know, you know those times in your business that you felt good. So this brings me on to the second part of my podcast, and one of the things that I really want to cover here is that it's around the science and the neuroscience of success. I'm often asked, like, what does neuroscience mean, and like, what's that got to do with strategy?

And why do you talk about Japanese wisdom and psychodynamics and quantum psychology? I don't get it. It doesn't seem like it's the same topic. It absolutely is.

It's almost like these are the cluster of things that go hand in hand with strategy. These are the things that make understanding the brain, really getting a handle on your mindset, really, really important. Because when we understand how the brain works, I want to explain kind of like when the science kicks in, what happens in the mind. Because your brain basically has this built-in filter, and it's called our reticular activating system.

Now, RAS is something that often you'll have heard, like reticular syndrome. So it's almost like we become aware of something because we've been told about it. So think about this: 95% of your actions every single day, every single day, you're not even conscious of. So we are just floating through life unconsciously, like not even aware of what we're doing.

You know, it's like driving a car. We're literally just so into our routine that we are literally driving along, and we don't even know maybe what we passed. We don't remember the journey. How often has that happened?

So its job here for the reticular activating system is to decide what information reaches your conscious mind. Now, you've basically told it what you believe is important, so it's just front-loading those certain things. Now, if your internal programming is saying, Oh, scaling is risky, or maybe you've got the narrative of like, I'm not ready for 100K months yet, or I don't deserve 100K months, or 100K months are not something that I will ever do; they're for other people, then your brain is literally filtering that out and taking away those opportunities that you could have. So what we have to do is, it's almost like having like a personal assistant who keeps bidding the most important, like, invitations, and they're not sharing that with you.

They're just like, Oh, no, not for you, not for you, not for you. They filtered that out. And this is why when we think about rewiring, it's so important and so critical for your success that we need to focus on it, and we need to make certain things come into your conscious mind. And this is called conscious conditioning.

So what you start consciously— so I suppose a better way of saying is, so when you start consciously priming your reticular activating system to see opportunities, support, and solutions, you'll be shocked about what's actually been hiding in plain sight. And I think the thing is here is that we start to notice things differently. As soon as we bring things into our conscious mind, we're like, Oh, I never saw that before. I never realized it looked like this.

This is about re-establishing what's important to you instead of doing actions that you think you should be doing or things that people are telling you should be doing. This is about— Consciously committing to the actions aligned to your goal and telling yourself 100%, this is my goal, and then stepping into your highest version of yourself and imagining you living this. Because the more that we can bring this into your reality, the more your brain believes this is the new truth. So let me share a little bit next about psychodynamics, because psychodynamics is like the tool for uncovering these hidden barriers.

And what we want to do here is, is that it's like putting the third piece of the puzzle in. And when you understand psychodynamics, you understand the power that this concept, these principles can have. Because when I started to understand and delve into psychodynamics, it was like seeing how our unconscious mind is actually influencing my business decisions and your business decisions. So we have to lean into the concepts, and these principles are things that I love and adore in business because I know what a difference they made to me.

And when I share them and I start to see people living them and actioning them in their business, everything starts to change and flow differently. So it's things like temporal discounting, or whether you've heard this term before. It's about prioritizing short-term comfort over long-term gain. Now, as business owners, that's something that we're not very good at doing.

And basically, it's like if you've had inherited money scripts, for instance, like from childhood. One thing that can happen is that these start to keep you from seeing success. They keep you under the success ceiling. And one of the tools I use with clients is what I call the identity excavation.

So temporal discounting is around tricking your brain into a different way of thinking about achieving goals. And what we actually start to do here in the identity excavation is that we dig into the hidden beliefs. We start to look at family stories and past experiences that maybe are still dictating how you price, or could be how you pitch, or how big that you actually allow yourself to play. So we have to understand these past narratives, these stories that are in our mind, because they are influencing what we think and how we feel and what we do.

And what we're trying to do is we ultimately want to think, feel and do like the 1%. So when you bring these patterns into full view, you're almost kind of shining a light on them and you take away their power. What happens is, is you stop unconsciously avoiding the very actions that would move you forward. So you start to move into action and you start doing things differently.

So if you've ever been stuck, and we've all been there, every single business owner listening to this right now has had an instance that they've been either stuck at the same revenue, could be for years, months, weeks, whatever. It's not because you're missing this kind of like magical strategy. It's because you're not in alignment, and a lot of it's to do with identity. So it's the identity that you hold of yourself and the way that your brain is filtering reality and the unconscious patterns that you're running that are actually holding you back.

So they're all quietly kind of going on and deciding.

Like how far you're going to go without you consciously being aware of it. So what we want to do is shift those patterns. So when people say to me, Well, what work do you do? Like, what strategy will you do?

Strategy is later. Strategy comes into flow as soon as we start to understand some of the patterns. That can happen super quick. I mean, I can be on a call with someone and start seeing patterns that we can do pattern interrupts and pattern breaks on quite quickly, and then we start to weave the strategy in.

Now, the more I know somebody and the more that I understand their stories and their narratives and their path beliefs and the way that their brain is thinking and the way that their brain is currently deciding and making decisions for them, I start to see what's holding them back, and it's almost like a release. We can unlock them. And I think the thing is here is that there's probably one part that every single business owner resonates in what I've said, because we all know that if something isn't working, that it's time to start breaking through those success barriers and, you know, really, like, mastering the mindset. Because when you rewire your brain for success, what starts to happen is that we think differently.

And this is a very fast catalyst. When you have even shifted one small tweak, you can see changes in as little as seven days, and you can see big shifts, you know, in revenue changes and the way that you are working or the freedom in your calendar so quickly. So think about this, because what we're trying to do here is almost apply the reticular activating hack. And this is about really kind of putting something into your conscious, making it so almost like, and this is my favorite saying, say it, claim it, so it is.

And bringing this idea that you may have or a distant dream and making it so vivid and so clear that you absolutely feel like you're living it right now. So the magic here is that in just 24 hours, you can start to understand your brain so differently, and you can start to, just even after this podcast episode, start putting things into your conscious mind and telling yourself the new narrative of who you want to be, what next level you want to be at, and also telling yourself that you absolutely deserve it and that you're going to make it happen. So I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I can't wait for you to join me on the next one, where we'll be talking even more about mindset, rewiring the brain, and talking about how to think, feel, and scale like the 1%.