If you feel like you’re constantly fighting yourself when it comes to your goals, the problem isn’t discipline—it’s your subconscious.
Today on Financial Feminist, I’m joined by returning guest Thais Gibson, a world-renowned expert on the subconscious mind, to explain why willpower alone doesn’t work, and what actually does. We break down how 95% of your behavior is driven by subconscious programming, why “self-sabotage” isn’t real, and how you can rewire limiting beliefs and build goals that stick in just three minutes a day. If you’re ready to start creating habits that actually stick, this conversation will completely shift how you think about motivation and success.
Key takeaways:
Most of your behavior isn’t driven by willpower—it’s driven by your subconscious.
Thais explains that 95–97% of your thoughts, emotions, and actions come from subconscious programming formed early in life. This means when goals fail, it’s not because you’re lazy or undisciplined, it’s because your conscious desires and subconscious conditioning aren’t aligned. Real change requires working with the subconscious, not trying to overpower it.
Goals fail when they stay abstract instead of emotional and visual.
Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand language, it responds to emotion and imagery. Simply saying “I want to save more money” isn’t enough. You have to visualize what that money changes in your daily life: your schedule, your stress levels, your sense of safety. This emotional specificity is what turns a goal into something your brain actually supports.
Three minutes a day can rewire habits.
By recording your goals in emotionally rich language and listening back for 21 days—especially in the morning or before bed—you activate the brain’s most suggestible states. This repetition helps build new neural pathways, making the desired behavior feel natural instead of forced. Small, consistent effort beats motivation every time.
Self-sabotage” is really subconscious self-protection.
When your brain resists a goal, it’s often trying to keep you safe, from rejection, failure, pain, or instability. Understanding what you’re afraid will happen if you succeed allows you to surface and reprogram the belief that’s blocking you, rather than judging yourself for not following through.
Goals become effortless when they’re linked to your subconscious needs.
Everyone has core needs that drive subconscious behavior. Core needs like safety, connection, novelty, comfort, or achievement. When goals conflict with those needs, resistance shows up. When goals are designed to meet those needs, motivation skyrockets. This alignment is the difference between forcing habits and actually enjoying them.
Limiting beliefs can be rewritten, not “pushed through.”
Beliefs aren’t facts, they’re learned patterns reinforced by emotion and repetition. Thais outlines a practical process for identifying a limiting belief, gathering real evidence against it, and reinforcing a new belief through repetition, imagery, and emotional recall. This is how lasting change happens beneath the surface.
Notable quotes
“Our conscious mind cannot outwill or overpower our subconscious mind.”
“Your subconscious mind does not register language. It speaks in emotion and imagery.”
“There’s no such thing as self-sabotage—what’s happening is that consciously we intend one thing and subconsciously we have a different set of goals.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
00:47 Intentional Goal Setting
01:54 Understanding Your Subconscious Mind
04:27 How Subconscious Blocks Prevent Goal Achievement
07:18 Step 1: Converting Goals into Subconscious Language
14:05 Step 2: The 21-Day Rewiring Process
20:32 Step 3: Linking Goals to Your Subconscious Needs
28:44 Step 4: Discovering Your Personal Subconscious Needs
38:38 Why Routine & Structure Matter for Habit Formation
51:00 Removing Limiting Beliefs: The 3-Step Framework
54:27 Why Avoiding Money Actually Creates More Stress
57:19 Your 3-Minute Morning/Evening Routine
Thais’s Links:
Website: http://university.personaldevelopmentschool.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepersonaldevelopmentschool/?hl=en
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQ4lSaKRap5HyrpitrTOhQ
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Meet Thais
Thais Gibson is the co-founder of The Personal Development School (PDS), a best-selling author, host of The Thais Gibson Podcast, Ph.D. recipient, and a recognized leader in the field of personal transformation. With over 13 certifications across modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Hypnosis, Thais spent nearly a decade in private practice helping clients heal deep emotional wounds and break recurring life patterns. Her work revealed a clear need for accessible, affordable, and research-based tools for emotional healing, leading to the creation of The Personal Development School, which has now reached over 60,000 members in 130+ countries, with 70,000+ course enrollments and over 75 million YouTube views. Thais is known globally as a pioneer in attachment trauma healing and subconscious reprogramming, blending neuroscience, psychology, and emotional tools to help people rewire their minds and relationships from the inside out.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
You’ve already given up on all of your New Year’s goals for 2026 and all of the reasons why and how you can change it are in today’s episode. If you are sick and tired of sabotaging your goals of trying to just use willpower to save money or to go to the gym, today we are rewiring your subconscious mind to help you actually achieve your goals. Return guest to the show, Thais Gibson is a world renowned expert in your brain, how to get the life that you want and how to get your brain on board to actually do it. Today we’re revealing the four-step process to overcome limiting beliefs and to figure out your subconscious needs, how to reverse engineer your goals so they actually become habits and how to change your life in just three minutes a day. Let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
I am so excited to have you back on the show. Why is setting intentional goals key to building the kind of life that we want?
Thais Gibson:
Because if we do not set intentional goals for ourselves in life, then we run through our lives on autopilot. And unfortunately what that actually means is that your subconscious conditioning from childhood is running the show. So, if you grew up in a family where you had a lot of lack beliefs because you constantly heard people talk about how they didn’t have enough money, then that’s going to be running the show for you. If you grew up in a household or dynamic where you felt like you could never achieve the things that you wanted to because you were faced with a lot of criticism or you didn’t have people who believed in you and encouraged you, then that’s going to be the type of output you see in your life. And so, we actually have to be able to address those things and it starts with visualizing where we want to be going.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, you just mentioned the subconscious mind and we’re going to spend a lot of time today talking about that because I think every time we start a new year, every time we talk about goal setting, it goes to smart goals and visualization and all of that’s helpful, but you’re here to talk about how the subconscious mind could actually be hindering our goals. What is our subconscious mind? How does it work? Why do we even have it?
Thais Gibson:
Okay. So, such an important topic. First things first, your subconscious mind is responsible for 95% to 97% of all of your beliefs, your thoughts, your emotions, and actions. It is your programmed habituated self. Your subconscious mind stores all information ever. It stores all of your memories, all the things you experience. It consolidates some of that information over time in terms of how we encode memory, but it’s literally all of your programs that you’ve learned about how to show up for life, how to give and receive love, how to communicate with people. It’s driving all of our behaviors. And what’s wild is that your conscious mind, that part of us that’s our logical thinking self, that’s only responsible for 3% to 5% of all of our beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and choices. And our conscious mind cannot outwill or overpower our subconscious mind. So, when you talk about smart goals or, “Oh, we’re going to visualize or we’re going to do these different things.” Unless you’re engaging the subconscious mind in the process, it’s almost worth nothing to be quite honest.
And I don’t like to reign on anybody’s parade because obviously it’s better to have smart goals than anything. But if you have blocks at the subconscious level, then what’s going to happen is, and you see this all the time, 88% of people, they fill their New Year’s resolutions in the first week because they are just setting conscious goals. So, when we tell ourselves, “Oh, I’m going to quit eating chocolate this New Year’s.” Or, “I’m going to go to the gym every day.” Or, “I’m going to start that business I’ve always wanted to,” and then we fail. It’s not that we’re weak. It’s not that we’re not capable or that we can’t make moves in this way. It’s that we haven’t learned how to engage our subconscious mind in the process of setting and achieving our goals. And our conscious mind is not going to be the one to get us there, unfortunately.
Tori Dunlap:
I have to drill down on what you just said. So, our conscious mind is only responsible 3% versus subconscious. That’s crazy. So, 95% to 97% is subconscious. So, is that why so many people struggle even if they genuinely want change?
Thais Gibson:
That’s exactly why. That is the only main reason why. And that’s why it blows my mind that more people aren’t talking about this because that’s when we feel so disempowered. We’re trying so hard for something, maybe you’re trying to change your relationship patterns or your money habits or your career goals and you’re intending and you don’t follow through and then we judge ourselves and criticize ourselves. And the reality is that we just usually haven’t learned the framework of how to actually navigate these things at a subconscious level. And so, it’s not really our fault.
Tori Dunlap:
So, that 95% to 97%, how does the fact that so much of the majority of our thoughts and behaviors coming from the subconscious mind, how does that actually impact how we set and achieve our goals?
Thais Gibson:
Yeah, so great question. So, let’s say we say we want to be better with money in 2026. So, that’s a conscious desire. What we are already doing, our preexisting habits, the ways we already show up around money, that’s our subconscious patterning or conditioning. And so, if you say, “Okay, I want to be better with money in 2026,” but then you’re not already building a second stream of income, you’re not reading financial books or educating yourself on a regular basis, then chances are that’s at the 3% to 5% of you. And then we tell ourselves, “Oh, why am I not doing it? What’s going on?” Well, there’s usually that 95% to 97% of you that is either disengaged or blocking yourself. And there’s two major reasons that we’re going to get stuck within our subconscious programming. One is a disengagement reason and one is a subconscious block.
So, what we can do today is actually go in and find what those two things are and how to, on one hand, supercharge by engaging our subconscious mind in the process in our goals and on the other hand, actually rewire our limiting beliefs that are blocking us at a deeper level.
Tori Dunlap:
So, much of the work we’ve done on this show and in my book has talked about, you can have every good intention to say, “Yeah, I’m going to be better with money this year.” And first of all, it’s not very specific. You do not know if by the end of 2026 you’ve gotten better with money or not. That’s kind of like a wish, not a goal. A goal can be very precise. Goal is either I did it or not. So, I think that’s one problem. But so much about money, as we know, is psychological. We were talking before we started recording about how so much of personal finance, so much of money is rooted in trauma, rooted in scarcity. So, is that part of the subconscious mind too of we have stories about money or we have stories about the way we were raised around money that is blocking us unless we work through those first?
Thais Gibson:
Absolutely. And so, it’s really going to boil down into these two categories and we can kind of go through one at a time. So, we’ll call the second category those limiting beliefs, those subconscious beliefs. And at a high level, I’ll actually be able to take listeners through action steps that they can dive into. So, actual action steps to pull out and find their own specific blocks and how to navigate them in questions you can ask yourself to really retrieve them from your subconscious mind and see clearly what they are. But I like to start with the idea of engaging first because, and you’re sort of touching on it indirectly. There are, you think of smart goals, specific, measurable, actionable, these types of things. This is good because in some ways it tends to engage the subconscious mind a little bit, but one of the first things is we have a conscious desire, but then no subconscious drivers around that.
And so, we’ll just say this-
Tori Dunlap:
There’s no why?
Thais Gibson:
Exactly. It’s just very superficial level. So, we can take this concept of a why and we can drive it way deeper. So, the first thing, if we want to start is we want to get into, “Okay, how do we engage our subconscious mind in the process?” And the first thing we have to understand even to begin is that your conscious mind speaks language. So, your conscious mind actually hears language. Your subconscious mind does not even register language. It speaks in emotion and imagery. And you can see an example of this. If I say to you, “Okay, whatever you do, do not think of the pink elephant.” You probably flash an image of a pink elephant and your conscious mind hears you not, but before your conscious mind can even intervene, your subconscious flashes out in image, right? Imagery because that’s its language.
And so, we have to be able to say, “Okay, if I want to engage this 95% to 97% of me, I better start by doing that with emotions and imagery.” And so, the first thing I get people to do, and you’re touching on that a little bit with the specificity piece, and that is one of the benefits of smart goals is like, “Okay, we want to start, we want to get specific. Okay, what do I specifically want the outcome to be?” But then we want to supercharge that in the language of the subconscious. And so what that means is if it’s like, “I want to get better with money in 2026.” Okay, let’s make it more specific. “We want to have X amount of dollars in our bank account over X amount of time and you want to specify a little bit more, but then we want to actually see what does that look like.”
I’m trying to actually engage my subconscious mind in the process. And now I have to be like, “Where am I living? What am I wearing? What are my surroundings? How am I spending that-
Tori Dunlap:
What time am I getting up in the morning? Yep, yep.
Thais Gibson:
Literally. And we want to engage as many sense perceptions as possible. So, the more images we have, the more kinesthetic sort of feelings we have around that, the more we have a sense of like what that actually feels like in our body. We’re really engaging the subconscious mind in that process because the subconscious mind and our somatic experiences tend to go hand in hand. So, the more we can even like sight, touch, smell, taste, all of these different things, anything we can engage in there, the better because now it’s actually being picked up on from that imagery part of our subconscious mind. And then the more we’re engaging the emotions, what that truly feels like, what we feel like. Do we have a greater sense of self-confidence? Do we speak differently to people? Do we carry ourselves differently? Do we feel a greater sense of safety in our body because we’re not worrying about money? What does that experience look like?
And so, that’s how we start to engage. There’s quite a few steps in here. This is step one, okay? That’s like getting things a little bit more specific. And I’ll let you jump in if you have anything you want to add in there, because we’ll go through a few different steps.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I think that’s just so smart because one of the things I didn’t even intentionally do in that way, I didn’t have the subconscious mind terminology, but when I walk people through goal setting in my book, I talk about that your goals need to be specific, they need to be timely, but they need to be mission-driven. And one of the things I tell people is that the number one thing that you’re actually missing when you set goals is you don’t have the fantasy yet in the good way of like, what does this look like to not be in debt? How does it feel in your body? How does it feel to not owe anybody any money? And I walk people through that practice and it was the same thing with my first big financial goal, which was my own $100K. Yes, I said, “Okay, I want to save $100K at 25 years old.” That was specific, that was timely.
But I also said, “What does that $100K actually mean? What does that $100K get me?” And it was the ability to quit the job I didn’t want to work anymore so I could run Her First $100K full time. And that was mission, absolutely. But I also got really specific and visual about how my life looks. So, I interjected of what time I woke up. That was a big thing for me of like, “Okay, I’m not getting up to commute anymore. I’m not going and commuting to a job. I am not staying at this job at my desk even if my work’s already done. I get to pick my own schedule. I get to do the work that I want to do in a mission-driven way.” All of that became very visual for me and it got my brain on board to go, “This isn’t something I should do or something somebody else wants for me.” It was very clear how this concretely was going to not only change my life, but better my life. And I think that’s what you’re talking about here.
Thais Gibson:
That’s exactly right. And it’s so cool to hear that because what you did is you incidentally, you engaged emotions and images. So, you actually used your conscious mind and now-
Tori Dunlap:
Because we know it’s important, right?
Thais Gibson:
Exactly. And so, you use your conscious mind to engage your subconscious mind in the process and that’s step one. So, I love that. That’s such a cool share.
Tori Dunlap:
The thing though that I want to go back to really quick before we go to step two, you mentioned willpower. And I think that that’s something that it’s so easy for shame to creep in immediately, I think for women especially where until we understand this part about the subconscious mind, it is, “Oh, I’m not disciplined enough,” or, “Oh, I don’t have enough willpower,” or, “I’m lazy.” You might not have those words, but that is the feeling of like, “I’m not trying hard enough.” Tell me how we make peace with that voice, knowing that there’s so much more going on under the surface that we maybe haven’t touched yet.
Thais Gibson:
I would say in the cold, hard truth, the blatant truth is that it literally willpower, there’s really no such thing. We’re being fed all the wrong information about willpower. What it truly is, is either disengagement at a subconscious level and people who, even if you think of people who say they’re lazy, what’s actually happening is they’re just driven by different needs than what their conscious mind says. So, I tell people all the time, there’s no such thing even as self-sabotage. What’s happening when we perceive self-sabotage from a purely neuroscience perspective is that consciously we intend one thing. Subconsciously, we have a different set of goals, drivers, and intentions. And so, the friction, the cognitive dissonance, that uphill battle we feel where it grinds our gears to try to take action, that’s an engagement problem at the subconscious level or a blocking problem at the subconscious level because of your limiting beliefs.
You simply cannot will your way out of your subconscious conditioning. You can reprogram it, you can remove the blocks, you can supercharge into the engagement, all of which we’re going to cover here today, but truly there’s no point in even judging yourself that way. It’s better that you instead introspect. You’re like, “Well, where am I disengaged?” Because if you set a goal and you have no subconscious engagement, no subconscious drivers for that goal, you’re going to feel like you’re “lazy or you’re self-sabotaging,” but nobody consciously wakes up and says, “I’m going to sabotage myself today and see how I feel.” It’s actually just your conscious mind says, “I want to do one thing and your subconscious is pulling you a different direction.” And that’s what we experience as resistance, sabotage, procrastination, laziness. And we can actually, and what we’re going to really dive in throughout today is decoding that and packing that and learning how we can actually reverse engineer changing that for ourselves.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and we feel that friction I think all the time of, “I know I should go to the gym, but I’m not going to.” And then you feel guilty about not going to the gym. That is literally your conscious mind versus subconscious mind playing out every single day. “Oh, I should eat a salad. I want a chicken sandwich instead.” And then I feel bad about not eating the salad. “I should save money.” “Oh, I spent money.” You’re so right. Okay. So, you mentioned more steps. So, let’s do number two. What does that look like?
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. So, step number two is once we start engaging, so we’re starting to drive this imagery and emotion into our subconscious mind. And you can think of step number one as almost being like, “I’m taking my goal and I’m converting it into language that my subconscious can understand.” Step two then becomes research shows us from a neuroscience perspective, we need at least 21 days of firing and wiring something in to make it part of our own conditioning. So, neural pathways are like muscles. If you work out your bicep muscle all day, it gets stronger, it gets bigger, we build it up. If you stop working it out, neural pathways just like muscles, they atrophy over time. And so, step two is really, we now need to fire and wire this and we need to build this goal into our brain. And so, what we then do is we record ourselves.
Saying it out loud is the best thing that you can do. Let’s say you write out this goal and you get it really imagery-focused, your sense, perceptions, what it feels like. Let’s say it’s half a page long. Ideally you record yourself saying it into your phone and we start listening back for at least 21 days because now we’re actually conditioning ourselves to be in alignment with our goal at a subconscious level and we’re diminishing that first form of cognitive dissonance between our conscious and subconscious mind. And what you’re then doing is once you record it each morning or each evening, generally in the first hour that you wake up or the last hour before you go to sleep, you listen back to it. And we really want to engage the sense, perceptions, the feelings, the images, the more we can really feed. We’re not listening to ourselves saying the words, we’re visualizing it, we’re feeling about it.
And the reason we do the first hour that we wake up or the last hour before we go to sleep is because that’s when our brain is producing mostly alpha and theta brainwaves, which means this is the state in which we are more suggestible. And suggestible means our subconscious mind can actually sponge up all this information and it’s more likely to stick. So, when we’re doing that for 21 days and we’re feeling it back, all of a sudden, one of the byproducts of this, which is so cool, is that we have this mechanism in our brain called the reticular activating system and it’s sort of the filtering system of your brain and it works on behalf of your focus areas. It works on behalf of what you’re feeding it all the time. So, the most obvious analogy people use when describing the RAS or reticular activating system is if you’re about to buy a car and let’s say you’re about to buy a white Jeep and you’ve never really noticed white Jeeps when you’re driving, but now you’re thinking of buying a white Jeep and now you see them everywhere on the road.
Tori Dunlap:
All you see is white Jeeps.
Thais Gibson:
That’s your RAS at work. And so, we’re actually trying to get our RAS to start working on behalf of our goals by saying, “Okay, if it’s about the money, we’re going to be better with money in 2026 by having this amount of money across this time, this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like.” This is all the imagery and everything in there. We’re feeding that to ourselves. We’re feeling about it. And now the reticular activating system starts working on behalf of this. It starts seeing opportunities differently. It starts seeing the possibilities for ourselves. And we’ll actually see the way we start to think about our goals and ourselves in relationship to our goals will naturally start to shift just as a result of these first two steps.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. You said, I think too, I mean, that whole thing was incredible, but two really powerful things. One is that we can literally hack our brains and use science to build the life that we want using that kind of 21 days early in the morning, late at night. I grew up in a competitive choir. I did choir competitively. I know I’m such a nerd, but one of the things that my voice teacher told me was you study your music right before you go to bed because your brain’s more likely to retain it to be able to memorize the lyrics, memorize the music after you go to bed, when your brain is processing. So, I love that.
And I think the second thing that was so powerful is that you have not only the ability to change this and to use the science yourself, but also that you can say, “Okay, I am going to start finding or searching for the things that I want.” The white Jeeps were always there, but now you’re starting to see them. It’s no different than last week or last month, the Jeeps have always been passing you, you’re just now noticing them and saying, “Okay, I’m just more perceptive about the things that I want or the things I’m pursuing.” And I think that it’s easier said than done. We’re like, “Oh yeah, we’ll notice the white Jeeps,” until you’re actually doing the science behind making sure that your subconscious brain is processing it.
Thais Gibson:
I love that you said that because literally the things when I work with people doing these sorts of things, the things that I hear like clockwork, like I would say close to 100% of the time is people will be like, “Oh, my gosh, I never thought that I could just call my friend and ask for mentorship. Oh, my gosh, I never realized this person was in my life. And when I talk to them about this, they connected me with this person who’s doing this thing I’m trying to get into for my second stream of income.” And you hear a lot of the terminology like I never realized. And so exactly to your point, it really opens up your perceptiveness. I love that you use that word, to start seeing the opportunities and possibilities, which in turn starts to really supercharge and feed the whole process that you’re trying to achieve simultaneously.
The very second part there is that you also said the competitive choir and before bed and actually before bed, we encode memory better before bed. And we also encode memory, the more emotions are there. Even if you look at people in studies who are like the Guinness Book of World Record individuals with memory and their ability to remember large strings of numbers and in the shortest period of time, all these individuals, you’ll hear of their processes for things and it goes right hand in hand with the neuroscience behind it, which is that the more that we emotionally connect things, especially before bed or in these alpha states, that’s what’s really supercharging things going forward.
Tori Dunlap:
We also have a million examples of Olympic athletes, of people who do eight shows a week on Broadway who… I think there’s a clip. I’m trying to remember which athlete it is. She’s a sprinter, but you can literally watch her at the starting line before the race go, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” You can read her lips and she’s like, “We’re going to do this hurdle and then we’re going to do this.” And she’s literally visualizing and actually talking herself through what it looks like to win this race. And that I think is so incredibly powerful in what we’re talking about here.
So, step one is kind of understanding the subconscious is there. Step two is like making this a habit of, okay, recording yourself, going through the visualization, listening to it when you wake up, listening to it before you go to bed. What is step three?
Thais Gibson:
Step three is tying it to the things we already care about the most. And so this in turn supercharges our goals further. So you gave a really good example a few moments ago where you said sometimes people will say, “I should go to the gym,” but we don’t. Or, “I should eat the salad,” but eat the chicken burger, and things like this. And what’s actually really interesting is that there’s subconscious reasons why we do these things. So, everything our subconscious mind does all day long is essentially to try to get a need met while avoiding wounds. And so, what’s really interesting is what’s happening a lot of the time is when we say… The people that say who do go to the gym seven days a week, just as a really stereotypical example or analogy, they’re usually people who have natural subconscious needs around health or fitness.
So, they actually, at a subconscious level, love health and fitness, love those things, show up for those things. They think about them all day long, they’re focused in those areas, so they have a lot less resistance to those things. You see other people who are thriving in their career, right? Okay, well, generally people who are thriving in career, they have big subconscious needs around career growth, achievement, wealth building perhaps. And so, because they’re naturally wired to drive towards those things, then they have a lot less resistance showing up for them. So, what’s really interesting, and I’ll give an example here. I had a woman come to me years ago when I was running my private practice and she said, “Thais, I am,” and this is such a good stereotypical analogy. She said, “Hey, I just found out from my doctor. I’m pre-diabetic.” Now, I don’t work in the health field. I work with people purely from a psychological perspective. She said, “I’m pre-diabetic.” And every year I tell myself, “I need to change my habits and I don’t.”
Tori Dunlap:
I’m laughing because this woman is quite literally me. Keep going. Keep going.
Thais Gibson:
So, it’s so interesting. What are the chances, right? So, she came to me and she said, “Hey, I’m really struggling to work on these things.” And she’s like, “I’ve spoken to nutritionists. I’ve spoken to my doctor, but I’m not changing anything. Can you help me psychologically?” So, I was like, “Okay.” So, we looked and what’s really important to note here as a sidebar is that we all have the system of subconscious personality needs. We all have them. We have a top five or six major ones. We’re going to get into how to find those and connect our goals to them in a second. But we found for her, her subconscious biggest needs were family was huge for her, social connection. She was a social butterfly. I loved being around people, loved her friendships, comfort and security. So, these were her top four.
We did her top five or six, but these were your top four drive you the most. So, quite literally what happens is your conscious mind says, “I am going to go to the gym every day and I’m going to eat healthier and change how I move my body and do these things.” And basically your subconscious mind, which is that 95% of you says, “No, thank you because that’s going to take time away from social time that we can spend with people, time with our family, and then literally our comfort and security. We don’t feel comfortable going outside of our comforts and going into this gym with all these people where we don’t really know how to use the machines or what it all looks like.” And so, we found, “Okay. Well, no wonder you’re struggling because you’re conscious and subconscious are working against one another.”
So, what we did is we said, “Okay. Well, let’s line them up.” And so the easiest solve is we want to link our conscious minds goals with our subconscious needs. And so, what we found is we got her to start doing things like she joined a group spinning class with her two closest friends. She joined a hiking club in her community with other community members and friends that she loved. And then she started going to the park with her family on weekends, going bike riding with her kids and she would walk with her husband while her little kids rode their bikes. And then she started taking cooking classes with her husband to cook healthier meals and to learn about nutrition. And so all of a sudden these things that originally felt out of her comfort zone, away from family, away from friendships, she instead lined up together. And this is literally one of the most effective strategies we can use to supercharge our goals because we get out of cognitive dissonance and into cognitive resonance instead.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, that was so helpful. Yeah. You just read me for filth. One of the things, again, that might surprise somebody listening because I’m a very driven person. Obviously money is not a blocker for me. I’m very good at it. It makes sense to me. And I have often thought, “Why can I not have the same relationship with food that I do with money?” Because I eat relatively healthy, but I also, I have to have chocolate and typically two or three things of chocolate every single day. I can’t have one peanut butter cup. I got to have two or three and I have to have it every single day. And I teach people all the time, you can have a lot of things that you want. You just can’t have everything that you want. And I’ve tried to work with a nutritionist of like, “Okay, you can have dessert three times a week.”
And for some reason, my body’s like, “No, I want chocolate and I want it every single day.” And I have often thought to myself, “Why are you able to curb your spending but not have self-control, willpower over whether or not you have chocolate?” And I think it’s because I view money as a game. I view making money as a game of, “If I pull this lever, how much money can I make? If I do this thing, oh, it didn’t work. Let me try this other thing.” It is a fun game to me. I do not feel the same about food because I love it so much and I want all of it. I want all of the food. I don’t want to restrict myself. And so, it sounds like I got to figure out how to connect my subconscious and my conscious mind.
Thais Gibson:
And so, I just love that you’re sharing this example because A, I feel like so many people struggle with this and it’s just like such the most obvious example of that’s the age-old question is, “Well, why am I so good with this stuff over here? But I’m not seeing the same type of self-control or results over here.” And so, I would guess, and this will bring me to step four, the last step of the supercharging your goals, we have to find out what our needs are. But I would just guess at a high level, you probably have subconscious needs around wealth building, career growth, achievement. You probably have these natural drivers that you’ve developed over your life.
Tori Dunlap:
And also comfort. Comfort’s a huge thing for me.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
And so food is so comforting. And again, I am someone with, I don’t think I have a disordered relationship with food. I eat vegetables every day, but also I have to have chocolate. And something about my brain is like, “No, you’re not, you can’t skip a day.” And that bothers me mostly because I’m not trying to demonize chocolate or demonize food, but because I’m like, “This shouldn’t have this kind of power over me.” And I think that that’s the frustration for me is it’s like, “I know I can’t spend money on everything I want.” But something about my brain is like, “No, you deserve that little piece of chocolate every single day, even if you’re already full.” So, yeah.
Thais Gibson:
And so, people, so if you want to get into the neuroscience just quickly as a sidebar.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Yeah.
Thais Gibson:
So, our deepest, most subconscious and even unconscious emotional conditioning around food is when we’re being breastfed. And when a parent is breastfeeding their child, there’s a tremendous amount of oxytocin produced between mother and child. So, you have all of this oxytocin, which is the bonding neurochemical. So, literally, and when you’re being breastfed, what happens? You’re being held, you’re being cradled, you’re safe, you’re comfortable. So, our deepest wiring for every human being around food, at least to start off with is food equals connection, it equals comfort and equals safety. And so, a lot of times when people are like starving for food, and let’s say in a more extreme situation where somebody does have a disordered relationship to food, you’re seeing all the time that they actually have a disordered relationship to connection, comfort, and safety first.
Maybe their nervous system’s too dysregulated all the time, they feel in fight or flight a lot, or they’re pushing themselves too much, not resting enough. So, now they’re starving for comfort and safety because they’re feeling like they’re upregulated too much, or they’re pushing themselves so out of their comfort zone so frequently in some areas that then they’re seeking comfort deeply in others, and food just so happens to be the one thing that will give you all of those things at once. So, that has a lot to do with those subconscious drivers.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And it’s a social thing for me. It’s often, “Okay, I’m sitting down for a meal with somebody else.” Or even, “Okay, I’m sitting down on my own, but it’s my little treat where I get to watch my TV show at the same time.” So, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Okay. So, you said step number four. Let’s talk more about what that looks like, this final step.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. So, that was such a great analogy and share because the step is to find out what your own individual needs are so that you can then link your conscious minds goals to them. And so, I’m going to give a few questions people can use to start deciphering theirs. And of course, there tend to be 20 major needs that people are driven for the most, and I can list some of that at a high level, but the questions you want to ask yourself are things that show your behavior already. So, what we talked about at the beginning is that your conscious mind is your desires, it’s your logical analytical mind, and your subconscious mind is your habituated self. It’s your behaviors that are already happening. So, what we want to look for, and maybe I can ask you as sort of an example if you’re open to it.
Tori Dunlap:
I will be guinea pig. Yeah, that’s fine.
Thais Gibson:
Perfect. So, the first question is, how do you spend your time? And what you’re looking at is your habit. So, if you had to say how you spend your time, what would you say?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot of things. It is work. I do love moving my body. I also have this, how much trauma do we want to go into? How many things? But I have chronic pain. So, I always have in the back of my head, “Okay.” I literally did my bar class yesterday or two days ago and then my back flared up and it always seems to happen at some point. So, I’m always like, “Okay, we’re going to move until I get hurt again.” I think it’s time spent with my partner, time spent with my friends. I travel a lot both for work and for fun. I love food. I love cooking. I love eating food. I watch a lot of food network and I read a lot as well. So, that’s probably how I spend the majority of my time.
Thais Gibson:
And I’m hearing too a lot of work probably as well, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Definitely a lot of work, but because I get joy out of it. When I was journaling and reflecting about last year in particular, 2024, we’re recording this in 2025 at the end, that that was the first year I truly felt like I did have a good balance of work and the rest of my life. I felt like I had other exciting things that I was doing or pursuing that didn’t have anything to do with work.
Thais Gibson:
Okay. I love that. So, now what you do is you take some of these answers and we’re looking at what needs they meet. You said work. So, what does work mean to you? Is it career growth? Is it financial growth? Is it achievement? What are the things that really light you up there?
Tori Dunlap:
I think it used to be very achievement based. I think if I’m honest with myself, it still is. But it’s less about competition with other people and it’s more like I know I’m capable of these sorts of things or I know I’m capable of doing this. I think it’s also, again, it’s the game. One of the reasons I’m still so interested in running my business, I have very similar days. We’ve done 200 and almost 300 episodes of the podcast. I’ve written the book. I’ve done these things that feel very formulaic. We’ve posted on Instagram every day, sometimes multiple times a day for years, is that it still feels like a game. It still feels like, “How can I test certain things or what can I do?” I love looking at the amount of money we make, not because that money is something I’m actively pursuing, but because that is a marker of, “Oh, we are doing these sorts of things.” It’s like a concrete metric that I can look at.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s the growth of that. Yeah, totally.
Thais Gibson:
So, that’s where you have, for some people, work is something they don’t feel good about. But when it’s linked to your needs, you can see that for you, you probably already have growth and achievement needs. So, it’s less like… And achievement doesn’t necessarily mean competition, but it’s like self-achievement. I can do this. I got this. Look what I did. And so, you can hear in there already that it’s like work equals the growth, the game of growth. How much more can I grow? And watching that and feeling like there’s that progress in a sense through testing things and seeing what works and then achieves even-
Tori Dunlap:
But I’ve also gotten to the point where I am not willing to do certain things to grow the company. And I think this is just my maturity and me getting older. There are certain things I’m not willing to do even though I know they would grow the company, but that might overwork my team or push me too hard or be unethical. So, I think that that is the balance or the thing that I have more knowledge and more just thought about is that growth is not at all with no holds barred. That growth now has asterisks on it.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. I think that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. So, you can see some needs in there. And then you also said food, you said food network, food. What does food mean to you? What needs would you say food meets?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I think food is sometimes my creativity, to be honest. I think that it’s one of the places I feel most creative. And it’s also, I think it’s the best entryway into somebody’s culture. So, when I travel, my primary goal is to eat really good food. That is my primary goal because I think it helps me understand somebody’s culture, help me understand the country or the region. It also helps me connect with other people. And I just love eating good food. The sensory experience of that, I think that it was described to me as the only thing that uses all five senses.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
When you’re eating, you’re using all five senses in that experience.
Thais Gibson:
I love that.
Tori Dunlap:
And I just also just… There’s nothing better than good tasting food. It makes me cry. It makes me very emotional.
Thais Gibson:
And would you say that these things together would be like novelty, creativity and comfort? The novelty-
Tori Dunlap:
Probably.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. And those are-
Tori Dunlap:
It’s also from my background is in theater and music, and I get a very same experience when I have a good meal to when I go to good theater or when I see an incredible musician perform. It’s very life affirming for me. It’s very much like, I’m so thankful I’m alive. I’m so thankful I get to experience this. I think travel, food and entertainment arts are probably the three things that make me feel that feeling of being alive.
Thais Gibson:
I love that. And that’s creativity for you, that creative connection?
Tori Dunlap:
Probably.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. That’s beautiful. And then the only last thing you said that I think wasn’t covered in here was work and partner. So, I’m assuming that’s a big connection need probably.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it definitely is.
Thais Gibson:
Sorry. I said work and partner. I meant partner and social. Partner and social.
Tori Dunlap:
Work and partner. No, I think it’s definitely a huge form of connection, but also growth in its own way. Being in a partnership is both so supportive and also at times very challenging and it teaches me new things about myself. And yeah, I think that that is also a huge part of my life now.
Thais Gibson:
I love that. That’s beautiful. So, connection and growth, again, you see these themes.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Thais Gibson:
So, there’s other questions and obviously we won’t have time to go through all of them, but the next question, so just so listeners saw that first one. So, what you do is your next question is after how you spend your time, then it’s how you spend your money, which will tell us exactly about our needs. We spend money-
Tori Dunlap:
And I spend it on food. I spend it a lot on food and I spend it on travel. And also charitable giving at this point because I feel like, “Okay, I pretty much have enough money, at least in this current life for what my needs are.” It feels very important and necessary to pass that along too.
Thais Gibson:
That’s beautiful. And if I had to guess, I would say that makes you feel a sense of connection. And if I also had to guess, I would say that you probably also sometimes spend money on reinvesting into your work. So, there’s that to fill that growth and achievement needs.
Tori Dunlap:
Absolutely.
Thais Gibson:
And what you’ll see is as people go through each of the questions, how do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? What do you talk to people about the most? What triggers you the most? Because you’re most protective around things. What do you love to learn about the most? Those are five major questions people can see. And then we’re thinking like, what needs do these meet? And you’ll see that there’s themes exactly throughout. Just as you just discovered, you’re like, “Oh, I would see I spend my money on novelty and creativity and comfort and food.”
You’ll see these same repeating patterns and that’s because that’s our subconscious individual programming. And what’s so cool about this is when we understand our subconscious needs, now going back to that example that I was sharing with that woman, she just had to link them like, “Okay, my conscious mind goal is to move my body more, to get out more. Okay, my subconscious needs are around these things. Okay, I should start doing things that are movement based with people.” And so, what listeners can do is if their goal is like 2026, I want to make more money, then we want to start just to review those first four steps on the supercharging and then we’ll get into the removing the blocks part. But you got to get that goal really specific. You have to feed it into your subconscious mind with that imagery, that emotion.
You have to write it down, listen back for 21 days, you engage your reticular activating system into this. Then we actually want to make sure we’re going a little bit deeper and we’re starting to discover our needs and then we’re linking them to our needs too. So, once you start knowing your needs, we’re going to link it to the things that we naturally are driven to care about the most because then what you start feeling is this effortlessness. So, just like that woman that I was mentioning, instead of feeling like, “Oh, gosh, it’s such a dreading thing to go to the gym.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to the gym with my friends and we’re going to do a class together and I have the comfort of having them there and I have the social connection and community there.” And now when you’ve linked these things together, instead of feeling like, “Oh, saving your money is this chore.”
And I’ll tell one other just really brief story. I had a client come in years ago and he was a doctor and he said, “Thais, I can’t save money.” And we looked at needs and we found that all of his needs, it was so interesting, his top needs were around like materialism and approval. So, of course his conscious mind says save money, subconscious mind is going, “Spend it on approval, get the fancy car, get the fancy house you can afford, go out.” Social was a huge one. So, it was like going out to fancy dinners, picking up the bill to look good in front of everybody. So, no wonder we do these things and we get stuck. So, instead, if we can link our conscious goals to these things, we stop having these two aspects of ourselves working against each other.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. So, we have to talk about the barriers or the things that get us tripped up. One thing I just wrote down as we’re talking about me personally liking some novelty, I also love routine. I love routine, but I live a very, at times, a routine-focused life. And for half the year I’m in a hotel or I’m in a new city or I’m in a new time zone and there’s no routine anymore. I imagine that is a good example of one of the things that can trip us up. Can we talk about like how do we keep a routine that supports our habits and goals while also knowing that just human brains need novelty?
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. So, really, really great question. Also for you especially, just as a side note, it’s because of novelty and comfort, which sometimes is tricky because-
Tori Dunlap:
It’s fun.
Thais Gibson:
It’s called competing needs. Sometimes we’ll have a need and I know we’re not going to talk all about needs only today because we could go so down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you have competing needs and it can cause a little bit of internal friction where you want the comfort and the structure, but then novelty’s basically like constantly pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. So, you can feel this kind of push-pull dynamic within yourself. I don’t know if that resonates with you a little bit.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. The example I gave for many, many years that I’ve probably said on the show as well is that part of me wants to like have a New York life is what I call it in my brain, which is the like, I live in the city and I see people all the time and I’m staying up until midnight and I’m like doing all these things for the business. And the other part of me deeply wants to be in a cabin in the woods with like my partner and a dog where I read and I do puzzles and I hike in the woods. And that is how in the past couple of years I’ve described the two competing parts of me. Absolutely.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. And so, in that case, one thing that you can do if you have that is you ideally want to make structure and time for both. And if we go into these times where we go too far in one and ignore the other for long periods, it can actually cause us to feel anxiety sometimes. So, you can be like so in the novelty that you forget the comfort and then you’ll actually, your nervous system will tell you, you’ll start to feel anxiety and distress and then you’ll feed back into comfort and you’ll get relief. But then if you then go over, if the pendulum swings too much, you go too far into comfort at the expense of novelty, then you’ll get restless and you can keep going through the cycle. So, you want structured time for both. So, to go back to your original question though, was how do we create that structure and organization in our life?
So, one of the best things that you’re going to do is once you have that sort of supercharge, like now you’ve actually got your conscious and subconscious on the same page, we set everything up, we actually want clarity. Again, the clarity is going to be really important for our subconscious to be able to take part in things. We ideally want to timebox when we’re going to do things on a regular basis. So, whatever the goal is, let’s say the 2026, we’re going to save X amount of money across X amount of time. Great. “What are our habits? Every Tuesday evening for an hour, I’m going to review my finances and my bank account. Every Friday for half an hour and Sunday for half an hour, I’m going to review my investments for the week.” So, we want to have actual timeboxed times that we do this.
And the more we have habits and structure, the other thing, and that’s why we need that repetition and emotion of hearing our goals back for 21 days and listening to them back is because it takes about 21 days to really build neural networks that are strong enough to stick. And so, you can think of your habits that you’re forming as being the very things that are actually going to condition these to be your new baseline or set point. And so, we’ve all had experiences where you, I’ll use a personal example. I took up pickleball in the last year and my husband got me really into it and I was like, “No, that looks silly. I’m not going to like it.” And then at the beginning, I kind of got into it and you can usually feel like around the 21-day mark, I was like, “I love this. I’m going to do this all the time.”
And to the point where I do that on a regular basis throughout the week now and it’s the habit build. And we’ve all done something where it wasn’t a habit and then we kind of get into it and we’re working towards it and then it becomes habituated and it’s our new normal. And that’s what we want to reverse engineer for ourselves on purpose when it comes to our goals. So, having actual timebox structures sticking to it after you do it for about 21 days, it will go from feeling mechanical to actually feeling natural. And you want to be patient with that mechanical part. Another analogy is if somebody’s learning to drive a car, when you first drive a car, it’s terrifying. It’s like stay between the lines, rearview mirror, signals, and you’re trying to remember everything, but then eventually you start driving the car for long enough and it feels normal. You listen to your podcast while you’re in the car or the radio.
Tori Dunlap:
You sometimes even forget you’re in the car at all. Maybe it’s just me disassociating, but sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I’ve been driving for 15 minutes.”
Thais Gibson:
Totally.
Tori Dunlap:
Especially on the highway. I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m driving a two-ton car. Oh yeah, cool.”
Thais Gibson:
That’s exactly it. And so, once we get to that point that we want to make our goals natural. So, we want to have that structure. So, it starts with timeboxing and then habituating. So, we want to actually have, “Okay, we’re doing this X amount of times per week.” The more you really stick to it for your first 21 days, the more it will feel natural over time. And then we can actually get into like, “Now let’s remove the blocks that could get in our way.” And that’s that next sort of big piece there.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things that you just touched on that I, in this moment just discovered about myself and might be helpful for other people, I think we talk about, “Okay, I’m going to do things X times a week. So, yeah, I’m going to go to the gym, I don’t know, three times a week and I’m going to do these things X amount of times.” There’s something that works in my brain about every Wednesday we’re doing this or every Friday morning, we’re doing this. And I don’t think I have that right now where it is dependable. And as someone who grew up Catholic, it was like, “No, you go to church every Sunday.” And there was something very routine about that of like, “Okay, 11:00 AM, we’re going to church on Sunday at 11:00 every single Sunday.” And I think we have lost that just as a community and as a culture.
And I also think that so much of the advice around goals is like, yeah, X times a week as opposed to, “Yep, I’m going Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” Or, “I’m going Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday,” whatever that looks like. Or, “I’m meeting up with somebody every Tuesday night.” And that is not only something to look forward to, but it gives that structure that I think so many of us are craving that I really currently don’t have. Fridays are my date day with my partner and I look forward to Fridays every time because I know unless something’s going on, that is my designated day with him. I think I need more of that.
Thais Gibson:
Yes. And the subconscious minds respond better to structure because it can visualize it. It can see it, so it knows what’s happening, it knows what to expect. And there’s a certain part of certainty in there that’s really easy. And so, whenever we’re trying to habituate things, we want structure number one and number two, and this will kind of tie into how we can find and rewire our limiting beliefs in a second as well, because that’s such an important piece. But the second part is that we also want to be mindful about our relationship to the structure. So, we are all wired by emotional association. So, if you are like, “Oh, I’m going to check on my finances every Tuesday, Thursday,” and maybe you’re starting to just get out of debt and be more mindful about your spending, and maybe for some people, I’m sure you probably have a lot of listeners who are terrified of that, who are really scared of looking at their bank account and starting at that point.
And if you’re in that position, our goal is to do things that help us actually feel empowered because if we start feeling negative feelings about the habit that we’re taking part in, then it’s quite likely that we’re going to constantly wire in resistance. We think of the thing, “Oh, Wednesday evening, oh God, that again, I have to look at my bank account.” So, instead we want to kind of titrate it. And a really good analogy of this is, I remember listening a decade ago to a Tim Ferriss podcast and he said, “I don’t like writing books.” And when I try to write a book, I tell myself, “I’m going to write two crappy pages a day.” And what happens is at worst, I sit down, I write my two crappy pages and I’m like, “Okay.” But a lot of times I actually get into it and I feel better.
And so, what he’s done is he’s kept the bar low so that he’ll show up for it, but then over time we actually feel like, “Hey, that actually wasn’t so bad. I can kind of do this.” And we build confidence and competency. And so, we want to keep that bar low for things as well. We don’t want to be like, “We’re going to do it all at once. We’re going to save all this money in the first month,” and then we don’t get our goals. We want to keep something we can be consistent about, something that we have the bar low. “I’ll look at my bank account for 15 minutes. I’ll go through just a little bit of it.” And then the more we can reward or empower ourselves afterwards, like, “Hey, good for me for doing that. I faced my fear as I showed up.” The more we can have that mind frame, we actually start wiring in positive emotional associations to the task, which makes us much more likely to feel good about sticking to it past that 21-day mark.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. That’s so helpful. One of the things I’ve done in my life is I try to journal every single evening and sometimes it doesn’t happen, but at the bare minimum, I journal three things I’m grateful for and three affirmations and sometimes that is all I have energy for. And other times I write 17 pages, but that is the bare minimum that I have the expectation for from me and it’s been so helpful. Okay. Let’s talk about limiting beliefs. All of this has been so helpful, right? The 21 days, the structure and the routine and also visualization of what does this actually look like, but what does it really look like to reprogram a limiting belief at the subconscious level?
Thais Gibson:
Okay. So, it will all sort of tie in here together. So, here’s the first thing, and we can do this part in steps too. So, we did the engagement steps, we did the structuring. So, how to supercharge your goals? We cover those four steps. The structuring and tying things together, we covered a step there. And then we have like, “Okay, remove your block steps.” So, this is the framework here. So, number one. Once you’ve got your goal clear from visualizing it, knowing what you really want, you ask yourself the question, “What am I afraid will happen if I commit to this?” And what that does is it brings up your limiting beliefs. It actually is literally like you’re fishing with a fishing rod and you’ll catch your fish. You’re going to find what comes out of your subconscious mind.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I already have one for me, which is I’m afraid of getting hurt. I’m afraid because it happens all the time that I am going to throw my back out and it’s going to be more serious this time and that’s what I’m afraid of.
Thais Gibson:
Yep. Yeah. So, you’ll see exactly that, right? So, then, and that’s no wonder, right? So, if you’re talking in the reference of the fitness goals and things like that, we’re like, “Geez, no wonder.” And so, that’s what’s going to happen. So, then actually what happens is your subconscious will keep sabotaging things like that because it’s protecting you. That’s its attempt and our subconscious mind is trying to protect us at the end of the day. So, sometimes we’ll demonize ourselves, but usually there’s actually “good” hidden reasons why we’re not taking action more towards something because there’s some protective belief there. There’s some belief there that’s negative that we’re trying to protect ourselves from.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Thais Gibson:
So, here’s the second thing that we do. So, once we’ve… And for a lot of people it’ll be like, “Oh, if I focus on money, then I’m going to take time away from A, B, C and I’ll be abandoned by my partner.” Or, “Then they’ll have more money and everybody will be jealous of me.” Or, “I’ll have more money and then we’ll fight over money.” Or depending on what the goal is, if it’s a relationship goal, “I’ll try to put myself out there and be vulnerable, but then I’ll get hurt emotionally.”
So, we usually have these hidden blocks because of painful experiences that we’ve had over the past that we’ve stored. And I think it’s important to note that everybody’s subconscious mind works this way on purpose. I use the analogy if you go into the woods and you see a bear and the bear chases you and you run away and thank goodness you escape the bear, but let’s say for whatever reason the next day you have to go back into the woods, well, what does your mind do?
Tori Dunlap:
There’s a bear lurking behind every fucking tree. Yeah, absolutely.
Thais Gibson:
Exactly. And that works well if we’re being chased by a bear. That’s actually a good thing. But when we’re not being chased by a bear, it’s challenging. Then we’re like, “Okay, we worry about everything. We’re constantly fearing abandonment or jealousy in relationships if we have more money or being,” whatever it is, hurting ourselves. So, then we keep buffering out and sabotaging our goal. And again, there’s no such thing as self-sabotage. Nobody’s consciously like, “I’m going to sabotage myself.” It’s your conscious mind intending one thing and you’re subconscious thing, “No, you’re going to get hurt.” No, this bad thing’s going to happen and that’s why we get there. So, there’s a really cool process we can use to rewire it because beliefs are not, you’re not born with them, they get conditioned into you through repetition, emotion and imagery and we can rewire them. So, there’s three steps.
Step one is find your limiting belief and what its opposite is. Okay? If somebody’s like, “I’ll fail at my new business.” Or, “I’ll fail at making more money.” Or for you, in your case, “I can be safe and not get hurt.” And we want to frame it in the positive. So, instead of saying, “I won’t get hurt,” because your subconscious doesn’t really hear negatives because it’s language, you want to say like, “I can exercise and still stay safe.” And then what we do is the second piece is we need to speak the language of the subconscious mind. So, what we need is we need three ingredients. We need repetition, emotions and images. This is how we reprogram.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Thais Gibson:
Because we get the firing and wiring through repetition, then we get the emotions and imagery, which are the language of the subconscious. So, in this case, if somebody’s saying, “Okay, I’m not good enough to achieve my goal or I will fail.” If we just use not good enough as a very simple example, what you would do is you’d look for 10 pieces of memory of times that you felt good enough. Why do we do that? Because memory is a container for emotions and images. If you think of your favorite childhood memory and you were playing at the playground, you might see the images of the slide and your friends. And when we see people recall old memories, they laugh, they smile, they cry if it’s a sad memory. So, now what we’re doing is we’re leveraging repetition for firing and wiring, emotion and imagery to fire and wire at the subconscious level.
And so, we’re going to come up with 10 pieces. And in your case, it would be 10 reasons that it’s possible for me to still stay safe with exercise and we come up with that. And in your case specifically, because it’s like a physical injury, you can also think of ways specifically that you could stay safe. Like, “I’ll be mindful about these boundaries. I won’t do these types of exercises. I can do more walking instead of…” What was it you were doing? Pilates class or bar class?
Tori Dunlap:
I do bar and that’s actually usually fine. The reason I think that I had a little bit of a flare up was it was my first bar class in a couple of weeks and I probably pushed it too hard, so yep.
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. And so in that, you would be looking for things that you’re going to be mindful of. They have to be practical, real things. So, we can’t say, “Oh, I’ll never get hurt ever doing exercise.” They have to be real things. “So, I’ll be mindful by pushing myself at 20% increments. I’ll be mindful by A, B, C.” So, you get your repetition emotion, but it has to be believable for your subconscious mind. Or, “I’ll walk more instead of do things that could injure my back.” Or, “I’ll make sure I’m always operating at 50% of my capacity when it’s anything to do with my back.” So, you can do these things, but what we’re doing is we’re feeding our subconscious mind essentially reasons why through memories and proof and evidence, our goal is possible. And so, if somebody’s like, “I am not capable of saving enough money. I’m not capable of earning more money.” Well, here’s actually the reasons I am capable of earning. I’ve had these hard conversations. I’ve negotiated these things.”
And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get 10 pieces of evidence. And if anybody’s struggling, ask your friends, ask your family, ask for people around you for support what they see in you so that you can come up with these pieces of evidence. And then our last step is to record it and listen back for 21 days first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening and we actually rewire the beliefs to the point, by the way, that we’ve had over 60,000 people go through our programs specifically to target beliefs and people who finish, so who actually reported completely finishing their 21 days and doing this right, they gave us, it was a score, an NPS score of 99.7%. So, what that tells us is that there’s a very high effectiveness rate.
I used to work in private practice with people. It really works. It takes two to three minutes a day to actually do to listen back in the morning and feel about it and visualize it across 21 days. And it is so much more of a burden to carry those beliefs everywhere, to have those things blocking you when there’s such solvable problems.
Tori Dunlap:
I think that’s one thing that, especially into this next year, I have to remind people is that, especially regarding money, so many people come to me and they say, “I don’t look at my money because it stresses me out.” And I’m like, “It’s not actually the money that’s stressing you out. It’s the fact that you have no idea what’s going on.” And the example I give is it’s like, if I get in a car that doesn’t have a gas gauge and I start driving, I am so nervous that I could break down at any time. That’s not an enjoyable drive. And the reality is, yeah, I could be stranded on the side of the road in a place I’ve never been at 2:00 in the morning without cell reception, but if I have a gas gauge, even if the gas gauge tells me, “You need to get gas right now,” my light’s on. “Okay, I know I need to get gas in the next two miles.”
That’s at least helpful. It’s not ideal, but I know now, “Okay, I can’t drive to Portland from Seattle. I don’t have enough gas to get me there.” And I think that’s the reality for a lot of people with money is they’re like, “Oh, the money stresses me out, so I’m not going to look at it.” I’m like, “No, you’re actually stressed because you have no idea what’s going on and that’s just going in the back of your mind and you’re subconscious all the time going, “Is your car going to decline? Do you have enough money to buy that thing?” You don’t even know. That’s the thing that’s actually stressing you out.
Thais Gibson:
Okay. So, I love that so much because you can actually hear those two things in there. So, usually it’s very common for people to have a basic need for security or certainty. So, when we don’t know anything about money, we are missing in the first, you know how we talked about like the supercharging and then the removing the beliefs. You can hear like if you have a need for certainty and you have no certainty around money because you don’t even know how it works or what you’ve got going on there, then already it’s threatening a need, which is going to feel dysregulating and then it’s going to cause us to spiral. And on the other hand, there’s never, things are not neutral, it’s what we make them mean. And then you’ll hear your belief in that. It’s not money, it’s what you make money mean to you.
If money’s like, “Oh, no, whenever I think of money, I feel out of control or I feel helpless or powerless.” Or, “I feel like I’m not good enough with money.” Then every time we think about our relationship to money, if we have those limiting beliefs about ourselves with money, that’s actually what’s triggering us. It’s not the money. Money’s neutral. For some people, money’s numbers in a bank account, it’s pieces of paper, it’s neutral things, but it’s like what our internal subconscious relationship is to money or programming about money. And that’s what’s firing off for each of us. And that’s why rewiring those beliefs around money can change your emotional relationship to something first, which then in turn will inevitably change your habits and patterns.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. This has been so, so helpful. I am so excited for people to listen to this episode, to share it with other people. I want to just go back to that concrete thing that we can do every day. So, you’ve already mentioned it, but remind us, what are we doing every morning or every evening? What are those steps?
Thais Gibson:
Yeah. So, every morning, the first thing that we’re going to do in summary is you want to be really clear about your goal in a way that your subconscious can pick it up. So, we’re going to convert language into emotions and images, and then we’re going to really feed that to our subconscious mind. And ideally, we’re going to do it in a way that allows our reticular activating system to tune into it by doing it repeatedly across 21 days. And that in turn will also help us make sure that we’re feeling clear about it. And if we’re on top of that, can then link it to our needs, the things we care about the most, the things that naturally light us up and the things that we’re already doing on a regular basis, we can link them together. We’ve now supercharged our goals. So that’s that first major step.
Second intermediary piece is we want structure. We want to timebox things. We want to have certainty that helps us really build on those habits across 21 days through our actions and behavior. So, it’s not just psychological. We meet ourselves there with action and behavior. And the last thing that we can do is so that we then… And the way I think about it almost is like, you’re on one side of a maze, if you think of a maze and your goal is on the other side of the maze and supercharging your goals by linking them to your needs and getting that emotion and imagery and clarity, that helps you run faster through the maze, but then your limiting beliefs are all the walls of the maze. They’re the things that are going to block you. And so, when we can then use that framework we use to find your limiting belief by asking that question, then once we’ve surfaced it, use that three steps to actually rewire the limiting beliefs.
All of a sudden what you’re now doing is you’ve removed all the walls in the maze and now you can get from one side to the other sprinting full speed without being blocked by anything. And what you’ll see is if you really truly dig into both parts there, you supercharge your goals on one side, you get the habits and structure, and then you rewire the beliefs that would block you at a subconscious level, now you’re actually engaging that 95% to 97% of you in a way that’s going to allow you to move effortlessly. You’re not going to have as much resistance, procrastination, sabotage, you’re going to be free of all of that and are going to feel so empowered in regards to money or relationships or health or whatever area of our lives that we’re focusing on by knowing how to get the conscious and subconscious to work together.
Tori Dunlap:
And I know there’s a listener out here who’s going like, “Oh, that feels like a little bit of work.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it is. It’s going to be a little little bit of work,” but to your point before, it is easier to start working with what you have and uncovering things so that you’re not self-sabotaging, so that you’re not allowing your subconscious to control your life versus just continuing the negative patterns that make you feel like shit at the end of the day, or the negative beliefs that you’re having about yourself. Yeah, this will probably be a little bit of work, but it’s going to help you build the life that you say you want and the relationship with money or your partner or food or fitness that you say you want. And I just think all of this is so, so helpful.
Thais Gibson:
Thank you so much. I always say to people, it’s always way more work not to do the work. And if you just fill it down, it’s like three or four minutes a day. Once you just set it up and tee it up for yourself a little bit, three or four minutes a day-
Tori Dunlap:
We all have three or four minutes a day. We can make three or four minutes a day.
Thais Gibson:
You can streamline.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for coming back on the show. Tell us where we can find out more about your work.
Thais Gibson:
So, I am at the Personal Development School. It’s personaldevelopmentschool.com. We have all courses. Everything is personal development for your subconscious mind so you can work on any area of your life, your money blocks or your relationships or your goals. We have all sorts of different courses in there. I’m on YouTube, which is Thais Gibson-Personal Development School or Instagram, which is @thepersonaldevelopmentschool.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Thank you so much.
Thais Gibson:
Thank you so much for having me. I love being here with you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist a Her First $100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
