Mindset Matters: Strategies for Mindful Living with Sean Marshall

The human mindset is a powerful force that shapes our thoughts, behaviors, and life experiences. Understanding and harnessing it is key to personal growth and success. But, have you ever wondered just how much control you have over your own mindset? In this episode, I had an insightful talk with Sean Marshall, a Mindset Coach and Founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting. Our discussion ventured deep into the human mindset. Sean discussed the idea of fluid mindset and shares tips for mastering emotional control when faced with triggering situations. Sean shared what Shadow Work is and how it helped his clients. Tune in for an enriching exploration of mindset and the techniques to harness its potential. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mindset Matters: Strategies for Mindful Living with Sean Marshall Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I start with this tagline every single time, “Your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less,” because, in its essence, this podcast is all about mindset. I share all kinds of stories about all kinds of people that have done amazing things and follow their true passions, follow their true dreams, but one of the things that is required in order to do that is the right mindset and it’s my hope that these stories, by being exposed to enough of them and being exposed to enough of the type of content that I provide, will help you improve your mindset so that you believe that whole, “I can, I will, and I should,” as far as whatever it is that you really want out of your life, in essence. My guest today, Sean Marshall, the founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting, is indeed a mindset coach and his work is all about improving his clients’ mindset. --- Sean, welcome to the program. Thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me here. Thank you for joining us and let’s start, let’s dive right into mindset. How would you describe your mindset as you approach Future Pace or any of your other endeavors in life? So what I find serves me best, okay, is my mindset, I would imagine, just like most people’s, is fluid. Sometimes, my mindset is better than others than at other times and so what I like to look at my mindset is I’m curious. If I’m on a roll, I’m curious. If I’m having a day or two where things might present some opportunities for me to grab a learning to help me move down the path, that’s where the curiosity comes in. And so I’m always looking at my behaviors and asking myself, by doing this, is this the person I want to become?Share on X So that’s in any situation where you have a choice? Is that what you default to ask yourself? I don’t believe that anybody has arrived. Yeah. We are all on our own journey, we’re all on our own path, and when I find myself presented with situations where I might look at things a little sideways or they might have me curious and just kind of showing up in a way that maybe isn’t who I’d want to be, I have to ask myself, I really have to ask myself, “What’s going on here?” If I remain stuck, if I remain triggered, if I remain angry or trapped in some type of emotion, effectively, what I’m doing is I’m giving all my power away. And it’s one thing to say, “Oh, that person drives me crazy,” and you’re pointing your finger at somebody, it’s not so much that you have three fingers pointing back at you saying, “Well, take a look at yourself,” it’s the fact that the person that you’re pointing at is the very thing or very person that you’re giving all of your power away to. And so when I work with my clients, I have to be able to do this with myself too. Anything that I asked my clients to do, it’s something that I’ve done for myself. I have to be able to be congruent in what I’m asking my clients and for that space, for that reason, for that purpose, I’m constantly running myself through these questions, this internal dialogue. Now, you said that mindset is fluid and that’s pretty obvious in the sense that, one day, you’re in a good mood, the next day, you’re in a bad mood and stuff like that. Let’s say something bad happens to you one day and you’re just suddenly in a bad mood. Is that a shift in mindset or is that just a response to something that happened? Let’s say that something comes up. I mean, it could be a trigger. I’ll share this, earlier this year, I got triggered, and if I’m responsible in how I say this, I really need to be saying this in a way of I triggered myself. So I got really angry. In fact, it was as angry as I can remember being maybe in the last 20 years. Oh, wow. It was a really good one and I’m sitting here going, “Okay, what’s going on here?” and I knew based on my behavior, I knew based on my response that it was overboard from the actual stimulus itself. Whatever it was that happened, my wife and I got into a discussion and I got sideways, I got triggered, she said something, I got triggered. I’ve got a look at that little nugget there as an opportunity to say, “Okay, how’s this happening for me? What is actually here?” And a lot of the work that I do with my clients is shadow work. Using the Carl Jung definition, shadow is the everything that I say I’m not. If I hold myself out in my ego to be good or full of integrity, then if I recognize a behavior that by my definition isn’t good or isn’t in integrity and I get upset about that, it’s a reflection of what’s going on inside of me of where I may not be holding myself to my own standard in terms of what’s good or what might integrity be about. And so if you’re getting upset about something, it really is a mirror. It’s a mirror holding the reflection back at you and it’s begging you to ask the question, “How is it that I’m benefiting by either not being good or not holding integrity?” And you can benefit from not being good, you can benefit from not being in integrity. Oh, yeah, for sure. You’ll pay the price for it. You’ll absolutely pay the price for it. Where it’ll often show up is it’ll show up in how you’re triggered. With my clients, if they’re overly sad or overly angry, and I really need to preface this with appropriateness, is the work I do and doesn’t set up a situation where my clients won’t have emotions. That would be irresponsible. Yeah, that’s part of life. What it does do is it blows out the root cause of anger, it blows out the root cause of sadness, and then after we’ve done that, we ask a Future Pace question, put yourself out in the future, if this were to happen again, would you have an inappropriate or unwarranted expression of that emotion? So if you’re going overboard, gosh, yeah, okay, let’s go back, let’s do some more release work. If you said, “No, I ought to be angry in that situation. Anger would serve me in that situation,” cool. What you want to be really mindful of is is it overboard? Like disproportional to the stimulus. Road rage is a really --- it’s a classic example. I mean, how many of us have been driving down the road and we get cut off or we might cut somebody off and, all of a sudden, we didn’t even know we did something and we’re getting the finger from somebody and we’re like, “What the heck happened?” Yeah, where did that come from. Where did that come from? If you’re road raging, chances are there’s a root cause to that and that’s something that I can help my folks with in terms of their mindset. Do you agree with the statement sadness is anger directed inward at yourself? I’ve not heard that. So you bring in two emotions and it’s really important to address anger first because anger is a stimulant in our neuro connections up here. It’s a stimulant. Sadness is a depressant. Yeah, that makes sense. Anger is such a powerful emotion that it will often mask sadness. It will mask fear. It can even mask guilt or hurt. Those are the big five emotions and so we always go after anger first because that’s how we demonstrate most often a trigger. When I do the release work with my clients, it’s not uncommon at all after we release anger, they’ll feel sad. They’ll actually feel the emotion of sad because anger is now out of the way. It sounds like what you do is you recognize, which everyone has, is like certain pattern, especially when you get like disproportionately angry, so it’s like one thing, someone grabs your shirt and starts punching you in the face and you punch them back because that’s kind of proportional to what happened versus, okay, someone accidentally stepped on the back of my shoe and, all of a sudden, I want to start stabbing the person. You’re just like, okay, maybe that’s a little bit disproportionate. And so is it about identifying those patterns, all the things that make you disproportionately angry, what is the root cause of it and what does that say about that’s kind of is your shadow? Is that kind of the right way of thinking about it? Well, I tell you what, our thoughts are not our behavior and we are not our behavior. It’s really important to separate people from their behavior because when we can finally do that, we can actually address a root cause. Virginia Satir was one of the pioneers in NLP work. She was widely credited with the with the development of the meta model with NLP and she worked with the worst of the worst. She worked with wife abusers, sexual offenders. I’m just going to pause you one second just to make sure my audience understands that. By NLP, you’re referring to neuro-linguistic programming, a tactic in which you use kind of the words you self-talk in your head. I just want to clarify that. Great pause there. I’ll add on to that too. With NLP, it’s simply the language that we connect to the picture that’s in our head, our unconscious mind. Neuro,...