083: Desperate to Determined Part 1

In this episode of 'No Silver Spoons,' host Sarah Beth Herman, a seasoned entrepreneur and business mentor, opens up about her personal journey from struggle to success. She shares how she turned moments of desperation into opportunities by leveraging neuroscience principles like neuroplasticity and the Reticular Activating System (RAS). Sarah recounts her challenging times in 2014, where she started building her business from scratch, emphasizing the importance of combining mindset, method, and action to achieve goals. She offers listeners practical advice on writing and visualizing goals, the science behind these techniques, and how to take consistent, aligned actions. The episode also includes valuable resources and ends with actionable steps for the week, encouraging listeners to introspect and apply these methods in their lives.

What is imposter syndrome and how can you combat it? - Elizabeth Cox - YouTube

Chapters

• 3:31 From Desperation to Direction
• 6:38 Brain Training Without Knowing It
• 8:36 The Science of Rewiring: Neuroplasticity & RAS
• 11:21 Mindset + Method + Motion = Manifestation
• 13:08 Imposter Syndrome Is Lying to You

Transcript

  📍  Hey everyone. Welcome back to Know Silver Spoons. I'm your host, Sarah Beth Herman. I am a five time CEOA business mentor, a public speaker, and someone who has built multiple companies from the ground up. But more than all of that, I want you to know that I'm here for you in leadership, in life, and in the pursuit of something really good.

 I've walked the hard road just like many of you. But I've also learned how to build from broken pieces, and today I want to walk you through something both gently and confidently. This is a two-part series that I believe will speak to your heart and your head. We're going to talk about desperation, survival, leadership, neuroscience, and even how to train your brain to change your life.

This is not an episode about manifesting magic. It's about manifesting through method. And I want you to remember that exact phrase we are manifesting through method, through science, through commitment, through action, and most importantly, through heart. I want this space here to feel like you're sitting across the table from me, like we're just sipping a latte together and I'm saying, Hey, I've been there and I've got you.

If you happen to stumble upon this episode because you are in the dental industry. I wrote a whole free training blog to go with this episode. You can find it on the free training page of dentistry support.com/freetraining. That blog goes live Thursday before any of my episodes air. So if you've been ahead of the game, you already read that.

If not, go take a look after you listen to this episode. Everything that I mentioned today from Ted Talks, articles, neuroscience resources, all of it is linked in the show notes.

My encouragement for you today is that you can use this episode as a coaching tool with your team. Or for yourself as a private reminder of what is possible when your thoughts align with your strategy. I'm walking you through what it looked like for me, how I applied it, and where I've made mistakes to, because that part matters.

This isn't a highlight reel. It's the real reel. Let's take time back to 2014. I bring you back to that year a lot because it was one of the hardest years of my life. We didn't have any money. I was in that messy middle of survival mode situation, and the idea for dentistry support was actually born that year.

Not in a brainstorm session, but in a moment where I needed a way out. I've sat at my dining room table and cried many tears more than one time asking God what to do. The bills didn't stop coming and my confidence was actually on empty. I didn't have the answers, but I did have desperation and desperation.

When you pair it with a little bit of belief, it becomes direction. So I started writing things down. I would get on the phone with my husband and brainstorm with him. I'd go for drives and we would just talk about it. I started imagining what I wanted our life to look like.

You see, my husband, he's always been the one that believed in making dream boards and writing goals down, and every time he would try to get me to do this, I really did it haphazardly. I wasn't really doing it to do it.

I did it because he wanted me to, and I wanted him to see that I cared about things he cared about. But if I'm being honest, I really didn't care about it. A little bit kooky for me, like, okay, let's cut out pictures from a magazine and write down that one day we're gonna have a million dollars.

I wanna say this loud and clear manifestation without movement is just daydreaming. And I don't say that to be ugly to you or to make you feel bad about yourself, but because I just wanna be real with you for a minute, we don't want to just say we manifest and then do nothing about our manifesting because we're literally just daydreaming.

I was not sitting around waiting for the universe. I was moving. I was taking messy action. I was saying yes to anything that got me closer to the version of me that I had already written down for me that looked like saying yes to part-time side work that looked like staying up after everyone else had gone to bed.

To look up EIN forms and LLC paperwork and reaching out to friends to help me figure out what this looked like. That looked like looking for a domain name and researching how to actually build a website. I was Googling how to invoice someone professionally because I had never even done that before. I started using Google Forms, and now when I go back to that Google form that I used for onboarding, I literally cringe.

I was trying to recall what other IT companies had done with dental offices I had worked in so that I could appear that I knew what I was talking about. When I was setting up remote access for things, I was doing something that science now fully supports something that rewires our minds for growth and for achievement.

I just didn't know the terms yet. I didn't know I was creating thought patterns, but I did know something in my gut. If I keep going, something had to break loose.

Now, neuroscience is not something new to this podcast. No silver spoons. I've talked about it before in previous episodes, and I'm gonna link that previous episode in the show notes, so go listen to that.

But let's just give a little bit of a refresher here. Neuroplasticity, that is the brain's ability to rewire itself based on repeated thought and action. Now, think about that for a minute, just for one second. It studies from MIT and Harvard show that writing and visualizing goals activates the prefrontal cortex and it builds new neural pathways.

So when you rehearse a goal, your brain lays track like a train telling the body, prepare to move here. So when I started writing my goals down in 2014. I didn't know I was rewiring my brain, but I was, repetition is one of the key mechanisms behind neuroplasticity. So every time I repeated that line, I have built a company that supports our family.

I was laying a new track. Then there's reticular activating system, or known as RAS. This is your brain's filter. It sorts through millions of pieces of information that you encounter every day. And it decides what is important based on what you are focused on. Dr. Andrew Huberman explains that when you write a goal and you reread it daily, your RAS goes to work, scanning your world for anything that matches.

So opportunities, people, ideas, they all start popping up. I remember specifically writing that I wanted to work with dental offices all across the country. At the time I had one, but within months I was meeting people online, I was joining forums. I was having conversations that never would've happened if I hadn't trained my mind to look for them.

So if you are ever thinking about a business you wanna start, or a leadership problem, or a mentor that you want to be, or a mentor you want to have, if you're ever thinking about how to get new business and you're like, oh, this idea just came into my mind. And you are actively creating this. You are actively doing this in your mind.

A new way to do marketing or a new thought of how to market. Or someone I heard say something transitions into an idea. Now I have in my mind about how to grow my business. And I'm like, wait, that's crazy. No, it's not crazy. It's science. Science is happening all around you.

Let's talk about mirror neurons and motor cortex activation. So I'm gonna say those again because it's kind of like a little bit of a tongue twister, but I want you to start remembering these words and phrases because this is going to help you as you continue to grow mirror neurons and motor cortex activation.

So when you visualize yourself achieving something, your brain activates it as though you are already doing it. So a Stanford University study showed that athletes who visualize winning significantly improve their performance. The same principle works for leadership and business visualization isn't make believe it's actually brain training.

I would imagine client calls going really well, even the bad ones. Like before I would hop on the call, I would talk about how positive it was. I would see emails saying. And then all of a sudden I would start seeing emails coming in, like, I'm ready to enroll. I would pretend I was onboarding a new office or a new client.

It made me better when the real moments came because I would actually walk through what that looked like. If you ask my team today, I am absolutely known for being like, Hey guys, um, I just thought of something that needs to be added to our onboarding form or our onboarding process. Can you do X, Y, Z or add this for the next client that we onboard?

I mean, it's just this constant visualization, this constant realization that you're already where you are meant to go.

There have been many moments in my life where visualization is hard, though it, it's hard to take my mind there and to say I'm already there, especially if I feel like I'm losing or if I'm not achieving where I should be. Or if it hasn't quite happened exactly how I wanted it to. A few years back, I started writing this sentence.

Every single week I would write, I have added $10,000 in revenue to X business. This was a specific business I was trying to grow at the time. Now I didn't say I want to grow by $10,000 in revenue. I said, I have. I have added. $10,000 in revenue to X business. Here's the wild part about that. Every single week that month we did it, we hit that $10,000 growth each week, four weeks, four winning weeks.

But here's what you don't see  the behind the scenes structure. I wasn't just sitting in good vibe. I was redoing SOPs, redoing videos, redoing training. I was reevaluating offers. I was designing, articulating, and writing new podcasts. I was making training. I was working on social media, thoughts and ideas.

I was meeting with my team and having honest conversations about our strengths and where we were wasting time. I was waking up early to look at financials. I wasn't hoping I was aligning. Me, this is what I want you to understand. Mindset plus method Plus motion equals manifestation. So write that down.

Open your notes up on your phone. Grab a piece of paper, a sticky note. I don't care what you need. Mindset plus method plus motion equals manifestation. Every day I lived like the revenue was already there. I held meetings like the clients were already coming in. I carried myself like someone who was leading a $10,000 growth .

That's the difference. Most people want the result without the rewiring, but when you combine belief and behavior, you start to see real measurable progress. You don't just hit numbers, you become the kind of leader who sustains them. We're gonna go back to my Beverly Hills venture, the job that gave me a lot.

It gave me a lot of money, a lot of structure, and a new environment, but it also gave me anxiety like I had never experienced before. I would lie awake at night and wake up in the morning and live my day every day with one thought and one thought only imposter syndrome, but I didn't know it was imposter syndrome at the time.

I was just constantly in the thought that they're gonna figure it out, that I'm not good enough and they're gonna fire me. I'm never gonna be able to live up to these people's expectations. I literally thought that every waking moment and every sleeping moment, so much so that I started grasping on MLMs, that I could start in hopes that I would make money from them.

Then I started working on side businesses and looking for other jobs. Because I was just so convinced that they were gonna figure me out that I just wasn't good enough and didn't deserve the job that I had. Now, if you've never heard of imposter syndrome or you have heard of imposter syndrome, I want to remind you what it actually is, because we all suffer from it.

I'm not the only person that's ever thought it, especially when having a new job or a new title. We all experience it. Even the people that look really, really confident

imposter syndrome is that internal narrative. The one that says you're not qualified even when you absolutely are qualified. And I'm here to tell you that it happens. . It's this narrative. It's this thing that says you're not qualified, but you absolutely are. It's the fear that success happened by accident.

That any moment now someone will find out that you don't belong. Valerie Young defines it as chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence. So how do you know if you have it? Well, if you minimize your wins over, prepare to prove you're good enough or feel like you fooled people into trusting you, you're probably facing it.

But here's the breakthrough mindset changes everything. When I started to visualize myself as already belonging, things started to shift. I didn't wait for validation. I received what was already mine. Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches that the brain doesn't know the difference between what's happening and what is vividly imagined, so why not imagine that it's meant for you?

I still had anxiety, but I wasn't led by it anymore. I was led by vision. And when you're led by vision, you start showing up differently in your work, in your words, and in your decisions. So let's put this to work. Here's how you can start applying this method. Yes. This method to your life and to your leadership.

Right in the present tense. I have built a business that pays me x dollar amount. Write it every day.

Present tense locks the brain into belief. Say it out loud every morning. This activates the Brocas area. There were Nicks area and the auditory processing all parts of the brain involved in encoding long-term memory. Visualize it, close your eyes for 60 seconds and picture one decision you'd make today. If your goal were already met, then I want you to take one aligned action.

Manifestation without movement is just daydreaming. We talked about that every day. Take at least one small step that aligns with your written belief. Your spoken belief, your thought belief. If you do this consistently for 30 days, I promise you you'll feel different. And when you feel different, you act different.

And when you act different, you get different results. That's the compound effect of thought plus action. And it works because your brain is wired to create patterns. So why not build patterns on purpose? Every episode we bring in a that's good moment where I talk about what we've talked about. And I set our intentions together.

You are not waiting for permission. You are not stuck because you are broken. You just haven't trained the right muscles and your brain is more than willing to help you build it. You are the one that gets to build the road that you work on, the road you walk on the road you think in, and it doesn't have to be perfect.

It just has to be practiced. Every word you say over your future is a seed you are planting right now. So if you've been stuck in this whirlwind of just sharing really popular quotes online and being an encourager for other people, but your life isn't actually moving anywhere, now is the time to start truly changing and manifesting where you want to be and where you want to go, and where you are already meant to be.

Your action steps for this week are simple. I want you to journal your I have sentence, write it every morning for the next seven days. Check out the free training, both available on dentistry support.com/freetraining or sarah beth herman.com both of these sites will break down this episode into digestible content for your team and your growth depending on your industry.

Review the links in the show notes. Review the TED Talks, the studies, especially Huberman Lab, Dr. Joe Dispenza and Dr. Tara Swart and Valerie Young. And as a little bonus set, a calendar reminder to revisit this episode in 30 days. Measure what has changed in part two of this series. We're going to go deeper into routines, rituals, and rewiring.

We're gonna talk about how leadership identity is formed, how repeating belief shapes your decisions, and how to help your team do this too. Thank you for spending this time with me this week. Next week will be part two, and we are building on even more. Your brain is already ready for it.  📍 I'll catch you on the next episode.