EPISODE 224 WITH TRACY PLESCHOURT: MASTERING SELF-TRUST AND REWIRING YOUR BRAIN FOR SUCCESS

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 224 with Tracy Pleschourt; Mastering Self-Trust and Rewiring Your Brain for Success

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. Hello. Hello. And welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast. My guest today, Tracy Pleschourt. I have to laugh at myself because I’m looking at your name. Like I don’t even know it. Right. We all have that moment of panic, but I’m excited about our conversation today. We’ve had so many good conversations since I met you, where you were starting to chat about something that is near and dear to my heart about how do you trust yourself?

Erin Marcus: So I can’t wait to get into that with you. But before we do that, Why don’t you tell everyone a little officially who you are and what you do?

Tracy Pleschourt: Sure. Well, I’m the founder of Self Made You and it is a school, I guess, in all practical purposes to help people really learn how to think. I think so many of us can resonate with the formal educational experience of being taught what to think.

Tracy Pleschourt: And so I created a school for anyone of any age, of any background, To really learn how to think so that they feel like they can trust themselves so that they feel like they can rely on themselves, so that they stop looking for all of the answers outside of themselves. And so, with that we have a vast curriculum.

Tracy Pleschourt: We can apply this. Way of thinking to an unlimited amount of topics. And so we help people overcome problems like weight loss relationships. We help them achieve goals like professional advancement. I mean, there really isn’t anything that I can think of that this could be applied to.

Erin Marcus: Well, and it’s a good point, like how you’re thinking, because one of the biggest shocks to me, When I started this business because I had my big fancy corporate experience and then I did very very well in a franchise that I owned, but this business was really mine from the ground up.

Erin Marcus: There was nothing in terms of structure that I didn’t have to create and it didn’t go as well in the beginning as my previous experiences, right? Because again, there was no structure and the shocking thing to me that I and I came to realize in my personal improvement journey was it had very little to do the challenges I was having was very little to do with what I was doing and everything to do with how I was thinking.

Erin Marcus: Exactly. Never saw that coming.

Tracy Pleschourt: Right. Yeah. And I think as human beings, we, you know, from the minute we’re born, we are being like I guess appreciated for or encouraged to do do do do do, right? It’s like you are learning to smile and you have all of the adults around you going, Oh, look at her smile, or when you’re learning how to walk, right?

Tracy Pleschourt: So it’s like we get Encouragement to do do do do do that we like lose sight of the fact that we are human beings and it’s more about the state of being and how do you think and feel is so much more important than what it is that you do. I’m not saying what it is that you do isn’t important. But I want to kind of lay out a prioritization and it really starts with how you think, because that drives how you feel and how you draw and how you feel drives your behavior.

Tracy Pleschourt: So if you’re trying to change anything or create anything, you always want to Start with like the root cause the, you know, genesis of it all of how you’re

Erin Marcus: thinking. Well, and as I’m listening to describe it, it’s, it’s what we have is we have this situation backwards, right? If you just think of it as simplistic as cause and effect.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. Yep. Or the effect is the behavior and the cause is how we’re thinking. And yet 99. 9 percent of our experiences and our education are all surrounding what we’re doing. Yeah. Which is the effect. And one of the ways I describe this in business is the pain, and it’s not just business, it goes along with what you’re saying, the pain that you feel is not the problem that you have.

Erin Marcus: Right. The pain, you know, going back to dieting that you mentioned is one of the ways to use this information. The pain that I feel is I can’t, you know, button my pants. The problem is donuts, right? Pain you feel is different than the problem that you have. And I see that with so, so many business owners that the pain that they feel is the effect of the pain.

Erin Marcus: In their business, but the problem that they’re having is how they’re thinking

Tracy Pleschourt: about the doughnuts,

Erin Marcus: about how they feel about the doughnuts. Yes. Yes. And what we’re making the doughnuts mean. Yeah,

Tracy Pleschourt: they think that if they don’t eat that doughnut that they see when they’re walking through the kitchen, they think that It’s not going to be there when I come back.

Tracy Pleschourt: So I better eat it right now. I don’t know who

Erin Marcus: you live with, but in my world, it won’t be there.

Tracy Pleschourt: And ultimately, why is that even a problem? Our primitive brain is sitting here saying,

like, it’s

Tracy Pleschourt: a problem. It’s a problem. Eat it. Hurry. Right. And that’s not, it’s really not a problem. Like, even if somebody else did eat it.

Tracy Pleschourt: Right. Target with the donut. Is right around, you

Erin Marcus: know, the supermarket with the bakery is right around the corner. We can get exactly.

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. So it’s truly a function. And this is a lot of what we teach is the neuroscience of your brain. Like you have, we all have that three pound organ that exists between our ears.

Tracy Pleschourt: And most of us have never been taught like how it is meant to function. Like there is a part of it that is meant to keep you safe, to keep you alive. We call that the primitive part and it runs on default because there was a point in time where that was the priority was just to stay alive. Well, but still a bit of the

Erin Marcus: priority.

Erin Marcus: I mean, it just, And this is one of the reasons when I work with clients, I’m sure you see this, like, I have all the empathy in the world for people who get stuck and how hard it is to break out of patterns. Because like you said, we’re literally up against neuroscience.

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. And it’s neuroscience that people don’t understand, like it’s just science.

Tracy Pleschourt: And so I think that a lot of my clients can kind of take that sigh of relief when they start connecting the dots and they’re like, Oh my God, I’m not broken. It’s just science.

Erin Marcus: It’s just science. So let’s extrapolate this out a step because one of the things we were talking about before is how do you learn how to trust yourself when in your experience all of your validation until you finally get the aha moment where like something’s gonna give here has been external and how does this literal scientific situation result in a lack of self trust?

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. So I like to use frameworks when I’m teaching anything. I consider myself a lifelong learner, but I also, and I’m not saying this in a d self de deprecating way, but I also think I’m a little bit of a slower learner. So I like to use frameworks and lo and behold, they’ve become very helpful for my clients too.

Tracy Pleschourt: So at Self-Made u we use a framework or an acronym, SELF. So that you really learn to like lean into using yourself so that you start to trust yourself so that you rely on yourself like you can use this acronym every step of every day. And so the S stands for start with a decision. No matter.

Erin Marcus: People do not like.

Erin Marcus: One of the, so I do business strategy, scalable business strategies, client acquisition systems and business strategies. And it always starts with the same question. What do you want exactly? And you think, and I get it, it’s the hardest question to ask. Like nobody knows because I don’t know if they lost.

Erin Marcus: The feeling that they have permission to want something. There’s

Tracy Pleschourt: right. I mean, there’s a lot of different reasons. I think in our world, we wake up and we immediately start looking at Facebook. And so then we’re like, already on this rat race, this hamster wheel where we lose sight of the basics. Right. And we go into like compare and despair and it’s like, Oh my God, I need to buy that.

Tracy Pleschourt: And you know, it’s like, it’s just distraction bill USA. And so I think that’s part of it. Like the simplicity of starting with a decision is lost on so many of us because we’re so stinking distracted. I have a A day planner that we created at the end of last year, which seems funny to already be saying

Erin Marcus: that, three days into the new year.

Erin Marcus: Yeah.

Tracy Pleschourt: It seems so long ago. We have our self made day planner and it literally walks you through every single day, the SELF framework, because it can so easily be forgotten. And so if you’re somebody who You know, appreciates routine, appreciates like really getting started off on the right foot every single day.

Tracy Pleschourt: Like it asks you these questions. So it’s, you start with a decision. What is it that you want today? Why do you want it? These are like critical decisions that, you know, we never

Erin Marcus: take the time we know. And what ends up happening. And I don’t know if it’s an age thing. I, you get to a certain point in your life and you’re like, I’m living in reaction mode.

Erin Marcus: Why am I not doing the things that I say are important

Tracy Pleschourt: to me? And the answer to that question is that you didn’t slow down enough to even make a decision about what it is that you want. So many people are like spinning out in this frustration and this overwhelm. A lot of fear and it can all be rectified.

Tracy Pleschourt: The antidote to all of that is just make a stinking decision. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can just be like, all I want in the next 10 minutes is to feel calm. Okay, great. Why do you want to feel calm?

Erin Marcus: Well, I think the key thing you just said though, is in the next 10 minutes. I think one of the challenges people have is we feel that every decision we make is the only version forever decision of that that we’re ever gonna get to make.

Erin Marcus: Right. Like human brains go very much into all or nothing.

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. So Erin, you’re going to love the next three steps because it just keeps getting easier. So the first step is start with a decision. What is it that you want? Why do you want it? Okay. Very simple questions. I will underline the importance of answering the questions.

Tracy Pleschourt: We’re really good at asking ourselves the questions and then not answering it.

Erin Marcus: Look, I did the work. I asked the question. Yeah, right.

Tracy Pleschourt: So you start with the decision, which requires you to answer the question. Secondly is eliminate the The self sabotage. So no sooner do you make the decision about what it is that you want and why you want it, you will hear the primitive brain narratives that are only trying to keep you safe, that are very riddled in fear, That will sabotage what it is that you’ve just decided you want if you aren’t aware of it.

Tracy Pleschourt: Okay, so we eliminate self sabotage by really heightening our awareness to what the primitive brain narratives are that we’re hearing. Right? Because if you don’t have awareness of it, you will react to it. And so many times,

Erin Marcus: awareness inherently solves the problem. Not every time, but there’s a lot of times where just being aware of what’s going on Kind of solves the problem,

Tracy Pleschourt: right?

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. Cause now you get it. Yeah. So there’s 10 very common saboteur narratives. The most universal is the judge. I would say another very relatable one is the people pleaser, the avoider. I tend to have like this hyper achiever narrative, Sounds pretty. But it’s really not. It’s helpful. Right. Like you attach your worthiness to your performance or to your ability to achieve.

Tracy Pleschourt: And it can be incredibly destructive. So I tend to hear that one quite often. I think a lot of entrepreneurs can relate. Yeah.

Erin Marcus: Yeah.

Tracy Pleschourt: So we have a, an assessment that’s totally free. That heightens your awareness to your point. Often, awareness can resolve that self sabotage risk in and of itself. So we heighten your awareness around what saboteur narratives you are most prone to hearing.

Tracy Pleschourt: Okay? So eliminating the self sabotage, we aren’t trying to eliminate the narratives. We are.

Erin Marcus: Because that’s the way the brains work. And I think that’s one of the things that I am watching happen in the self help world that is counterproductive. The, all the manifestation gurus talking about don’t reverse manifest, only think positive thought.

Erin Marcus: Like some of, I get what they’re saying, and I’m a big fan of manifestation and create the world you want with intention and all of this, but. To me, I think you stand a better chance of success if you become aware of how the brain works and then solve for the weaknesses as opposed to pretend that it’s not supposed to work that way.

Tracy Pleschourt: Exactly. Yeah. So when you have an awareness that you’re more likely to be hearing, you know, the judgmental thought, like, so you make a decision, I want to lose 10 pounds. Why do I want to lose 10 pounds? You know I don’t want to feel the impact. I want to be able to walk around the block without, you know, being winded.

Tracy Pleschourt: Okay. That’s a great decision. And those are great reasons that you like for making that decision. Perfect. We’ve, we’ve step one check. Second step is eliminate the self sabotage. What is, you have to be really honest with yourself, what is the narrative that you immediately hear upon making that decision?

Tracy Pleschourt: You’ve tried to lose weight. hundreds of times and you can’t, even if you do lose the weight, you can’t keep the weight off. Remember, let me just point your, you know, attention back to exhibit every January 1st for the last 20 years. Right? Exactly. Right. Cause that’s what your primitive brain does and it fights to be right.

Tracy Pleschourt: So it’s really offering you very loudly. All of this evidence. And so, and it sounds so judgmental, but just having the awareness of how normal that is. It’s just

Erin Marcus: part of the process, right? And you keep using the word judgmental, which I love because the other piece of that to me is don’t be judgmental over the fact that this happens.

Erin Marcus: Can you get to the point where one, you hear that, voicing your head. You’re like, Oh, look, there I go doing the thing again.

Tracy Pleschourt: Exactly. And just allow it to be there. Like you can almost, instead of judging you discern, it’s like, okay, I understand that this is a function of my primitive brain. It’s trying to keep me safe.

Tracy Pleschourt: I don’t have to react. I can, instead I could respond, or I could just allow it to be there. Like it’s part of the process. Okay. So that’s. It’s an easy way to eliminate the self sabotage. We offer all sorts of, you know, techniques, but if we’re going to move through the SELF, like just having awareness is such a huge step in the right direction.

Tracy Pleschourt: So then L is leveraging your prodigy brain strength. So I talked about that three pound organ that exists between your ears. If you were to cut it straight down the middle, half of it, the left side is your primitive brain. That’s meant to keep you safe, meant to keep you alive. That by default, we tend to operate from.

Tracy Pleschourt: I like to Put your focus on the right side of your brain, which is technically called your prefrontal cortex. I call it your prodigy brain because it is the more extraordinary part of your brain. It’s the part of your brain that can actually watch the thinking that’s going on, the subconscious thinking that’s going on, and you can actually respond to it.

Tracy Pleschourt: It is that part of your brain that accesses empathy, like empathy for your humanity. Right? Like we’re all human. We all have that part of our brain. I don’t have to make it mean that I’m a bad or broken person because I’m hearing those narratives or that I’ve reacted to them for 50 out of the 51 years of my life.

Tracy Pleschourt: Like there’s no time like the present to have a heightened sense of awareness around just the neuroscience. Of my brain, like so I can have that kind of empathy, but you can’t access empathy when you’re operating from your primitive brain. So we really put a strong emphasis on strengthening the other part of your brain, the prodigy part of your brain, and you strengthen it through utilizing it.

Tracy Pleschourt: Through staying aware, just through awareness, like that intentionality of being aware strengthens your prodigy brain and when you’re operating from your prodigy brain, simply by being aware or simply by making a decision and being intentional. Now you have access to strengths like empathy. Discovery.

Tracy Pleschourt: What else might be going on? Right? That curiosity, that stage of curiosity, curiosity. Exactly. Innovation, right? Think about there is no innovation, creativity going on when you’re spinning out in fear. Well, and it’s, I’m

Erin Marcus: listening to you. Like, so the way that I describe this and, and do this myself, and what’s funny is I literally, I very often do this in the shower, right?

Erin Marcus: Like I go exercise or I go outside. And then I, so we burn off the XX, the excess energy that, you know, the, the court, all the cortisol and all the things that are stopping me from being able to function like a, like how I want to, and then. It makes sense the way that you’re describing it left and right because the way I describe it is when we’re honed in on the problem, all we see is the problem.

Erin Marcus: Physically change directions. Don’t just try to think differently. But if you can physically point yourself, and I will literally do this in the shower, I’m like looking this way and then I’m looking that way, where I’m like, okay. In a world of infinite possibilities. So in your words, tapping into leveraging that like in a world of infinite possibilities, how might I handle this?

Erin Marcus: How this problem,

Tracy Pleschourt: right? Yeah. And you, through your prodigy brain, you can access like your future self. You can access. Your, you know, your inner being, your source you start to see the world differently. You start to see kind of the laws of the universe, laws of attraction. Like those are things that you can tap into from your prodigy brain.

Tracy Pleschourt: And so we really like, again, I have acronyms that I love to use to help people really, when I say leverage. I mean, like let’s underscore the word leverage because when you are intentional or when you’re being aware, you are operating from your prodigy brain, but I don’t want anybody stopping there.

Tracy Pleschourt: Like, I literally want you to squeeze the juice out of the fact that you’re there. I have clients that are like, I mean, yesterday on my group coaching call, I said, how are people feeling today about the new year? And most of them are going through my self made mind and body weight loss program. And so they’re like, Oh my God, we’re so excited to get started.

Tracy Pleschourt: Now, what I expected to hear was a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety, but the people that are excited, I’m going to talk to them too, because they are operating from their prodigy brain. They’re looking forward and they are probably like, Asking themselves the right questions, like, and they’re probably being really curious, but I want them to leverage the fact that they’re there.

Tracy Pleschourt: I want them to like tap into do something with this now. Yes. Yes. Tap into discovery, tap into innovation, tap into navigation, like really tap into your future self who like, Arguably is already there. It’s all that future self is already at the weight loss goal that you have. What does she have to tell you?

Tracy Pleschourt: That’s super fun, like to go there. So leverage those prodigy brain strengths is the L. And then the fourth and final step doesn’t get any easier than this because it’s the same step as step one. You finish with a decision this time though, the finishing decision is. What can I do right now, this very minute, this very second, that is so easy, it’s almost hard not to do, because when you finish with a decision that is so easy, it’s hard not to do, those incremental steps, when compounded, following the first three steps, Has got you on a path of progress towards where it is that you want to go.

Tracy Pleschourt: It doesn’t matter how small the step is. The fact of the matter is, is if you think of utilizing yourself, learning how to trust yourself, the SELF acronym, plus, you know, you’re really building confidence in yourself. If you use this every step of the way, then You can’t argue that there’s going to be an incremental compounded effect in the right direction

Erin Marcus: when I was where you know, and that’s another place where I think we fall short when we don’t do this is that all or nothing brain and.

Erin Marcus: Of course, if we want to lose 50 pounds or 20 pounds or whatever it is, just to keep with this example, if you only think of it as the total, it’s too big. Right. It’s too removed. It’s too elusive.

Tracy Pleschourt: Or so your primitive brain wants you to believe. Right,

Erin Marcus: right, right. But, you know, it really is the compounding effect of the tiny little steps.

Erin Marcus: Yes. Yes. And

Tracy Pleschourt: so again, it’s not just asking yourself the question of what’s the next step. That’s so easy. It’s hard not to do. It’s actually answering it. And so I, I hold my client’s feet to the fire. It’s like, give me what the next step is. That’s so easy. It’s hard not to do. And then we just start right back over right now.

Tracy Pleschourt: We look at where we’re at and we start right back over and we keep relying on ourself, which yeah. Starts to build trust in ourself. This is the way to think. That you’ve never been taught. We were all taught to look outside of ourselves for the answers, right? For the solutions. And this brings it all back to you.

Tracy Pleschourt: Like, Oh my God. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t resources out there that are going to be hugely important and supportive for you, but you’re not going to be hiring them or, or securing them from a place of desperation. You’re going to be hiring them and securing them from a place of like power creation, right from inspiration.

Tracy Pleschourt: Exactly. So yeah, it looks entirely different. The path, the life that you start to live is quite extraordinary and very abundant. When you learn how to trust yourself, when you learn how to think this way.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, and it really is the word that just keeps coming to my mind when I think about all this is Because it’s the language that I use all the time is where am I living with intention as opposed to living with reaction?

Erin Marcus: Absolutely.

I

Erin Marcus: love it. I you know, one of the things I like about it is I’m very I’m very action focused. So while I You know, study the universal law and I, I, I, I, there is a piece of this based in neuroscience that I think is attractive to a lot of people who that those quote unquote woo woo community has a different approach to it.

Erin Marcus: Right, right. That’s just belief, which is fantastic, but like hacks the system. If you can just believe that this is how it works, you just kind of hat, you know, shortcut system, but the neuroscience behind it just makes so much sense. And kind of to your point, you can apply this. to anything. It’s so similar to what I use with clients in decision making matrix, right?

Erin Marcus: What do we want? Take all the action, collect all the data, make a better decision, right? And it’s just a cycle. Exactly. And it’s just a cycle. Now, I absolutely love it. So if people want to learn more about this, you Not just weight loss, but all the other things, too. Right. Yeah. What is the best way to get a hold of you?

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. So, once a month, we launch another program. We call them Change Your Mind programs. And so, the month of January is Self Made Mind and Body, which is, it’s really steeped in metabolic fitness. So, we teach the mental science as well as the metabolic science. But Let’s see February, we’re going to go into confident leadership and dating, self made mind and dating.

Tracy Pleschourt: We have parenting coming up. So all of these topics are topics that we apply the framework to. And so we of course have best practices there. I believe that there are best practices in, you know, every. Journey. So we teach those, but we build up to those best practices by, you know, leaning into learning how to trust yourself, how to think differently about it, because it typically is the one component that’s left out of most programs because they want you to keep coming back.

Tracy Pleschourt: Exactly. Yeah. So if you go, I keep

Erin Marcus: calling, I keep calling what’s going on right now, end game capitalism. And my boyfriend just rolls his eyes at me, but I don’t know. Yeah,

Tracy Pleschourt: I agree. I agree. So yeah, so we have you can see all of the programming that we offer. We have a la carte offers, and then we have a membership too, for those people who really want to make this part of their life, and we do get a lot of clients who adopt it and are hugely successful.

Tracy Pleschourt: They usually come in through like the weight loss door and then they stay for like four and five years.

Erin Marcus: Right. Well, you learn a different approach and it’s amazing how you can, you know, you’ve been saying weight loss and I’ve been saying business and yet it’s the same,

Tracy Pleschourt: absolutely same

Erin Marcus: structure. So how do they find you?

Tracy Pleschourt: Yes. So our website is www dot self S E L F dash made M a D E. And then it’s the letter you. com. From there you’ll find all of our social media channels, all of our free resources. So that’s kind of the one stop shop. Awesome. And we will make sure that

Erin Marcus: we have the links in the show notes as well. So one, you’re just one click away.

Tracy Pleschourt: Yeah. Yeah. And we have we have a lot of free resources. So we have a free coaching Friday, every single Friday that anybody can join and get free coaching. And then we have a masterclass once a month too, that’s free.

Erin Marcus: Fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing the way that you describe this. I think it’s going to land differently with somebody, right?

Erin Marcus: And that’s what we’re looking for to make a difference. They’re going to hear it a different way and, and learn how to just dive right into it. So thank you for sharing your approach and I absolutely love what you’re doing.

Tracy Pleschourt: My pleasure. Thanks

Erin Marcus: for having me, Erin.