Ep261. Your Beliefs Are Protected by Your Nervous System: And Both Are Trying to Keep You the Same.

Why do so many people sabotage the very success, love, freedom, and fulfillment they say they want? In this episode, Mike Kitko connects two of the most powerful concepts in personal development: your beliefs create your experience, and your nervous system works tirelessly to protect those beliefs by keeping you in familiar circumstances. When you understand how these two systems work together, you'll finally see why lasting change has felt so difficult—and what it really takes to create sustainable success. 

Mike also introduces the foundation of his upcoming webinar, The Science of Sustainable Success, and explains how retraining your nervous system and releasing limiting beliefs allows you to receive more wealth, happiness, love, fulfillment, freedom, and impact without unconsciously sabotaging yourself. 

Key Takeaways

1. Your Nervous System Prioritizes Survival Over Success
Your nervous system has one primary job: keeping you alive. It prefers familiar circumstances—even when they limit your growth. 

2. Your Beliefs Create the Life You Experience
You don't experience life as it is—you experience life through the beliefs you hold about yourself, other people, and what's possible. 

3. Your Nervous System Protects Your Beliefs
Even limiting beliefs feel "safe" to your nervous system. Releasing them requires moving through uncertainty until your body learns a new normal. 

4. Sustainable Success Requires Internal Change
Creating success is one thing. Keeping it requires expanding your capacity to receive it without your nervous system pulling you back to what's familiar. 

5. Receiving Requires Letting Go of Old Stories
When you release beliefs that no longer serve you, you create space to receive greater wealth, freedom, peace, fulfillment, love, and significance. 

Notable Quotes

• "Your nervous system has one job and one job only: to keep you alive. It doesn't care if you're wealthy, successful, happy, or fulfilled. It only cares that you're breathing."
• "You don't experience life as it is. You experience life as you believe it to be. Your beliefs create your reality."
• "Your nervous system protects the beliefs you're holding because those beliefs have become familiar—and familiar feels safe."
• "If you want to experience more, you've got to be willing to believe more. And that means allowing your nervous system to become uncomfortable for a while."
• "If your nervous system isn't comfortable holding success, it's only a matter of time before you'll sabotage it."

Call to Action

If this episode challenged the way you've been thinking about success, take a moment to reflect on the beliefs you've been protecting and the familiar patterns your nervous system has been working so hard to preserve. Real transformation begins when you become aware of what's been unconsciously directing your life.

Click here to join Mike for his free webinar, The Science of Sustainable Success, on August 4 at 6:00 PM Central, where you'll learn how your nervous system and belief system work together—and how to create lasting success without self-sabotage.

Then, if you're ready for a deeper transformation, click here to join the Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive Workshop on August 28–29 in St. Charles (just outside St. Louis), Missouri. You'll learn how to release limiting beliefs, retrain your nervous system, and become someone who can fully receive the wealth, success, peace, freedom, and fulfillment you've been working so hard to create.

Questions?

mike@innerwealthglobal.com

No assistant. No gatekeeper. Just a conversation about helping you rebuild from the inside out so you can finally receive the life you've always been capable of.

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Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

Transcript

Welcome To Inner Wealth

SPEAKER_00 2:11

You want to make up your money like your company just need your life. You want me to keep your business? Are you running your life or your life money? I'm my keep you and I'm hoping to 92 likes. Don't authenticate. You don't need to tiny just to wake up. A hoping to put your wealth exactly freedom from the inside out. Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day. Over the past, I don't know, five, six, seven episodes, we've talked a lot about receiving. And the current uh book that I'm writing, the current workshop that I'm launching that we're gonna have, the workshop is August 28th, 29th, right outside of St. Louis, Missouri, where where I live. And the workshop is titled Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive. And it's all about rebuilding yourself into someone who is capable of receiving. And the greatest lie ever, it's built on the greatest lie ever told and ever passed down from human to human, from generation to generation throughout the centuries is it's better give than receive. It is not better to give than receive. They're equal. And if you are living with the belief that it is better to give than receive, I guarantee you that that experience and that those circumstances that reflect that belief are showing up. And we're gonna dive deeper into that over the course of the next few minutes and the course of this episode. But it's we're gonna get away from receiving for a little bit. And I'm gonna take the camera, I guess, out of the weeds and bring it to 10,000 feet so we can see how that thing about your belief creating your experiences is showing up at a bigger level. But then we're gonna get back into that rebuild thing. Okay. So I'm gonna try to bring all of this stuff together because this morning and yesterday and this morning have been really insightful and impactful. In the last few weeks, I found myself saying the same thing over and over and over in all of my one-on-one calls, in my mastermind call

Giving Versus Receiving Belief

SPEAKER_00 4:36

and my my interwealth community call. And I intend to uh to launch when I do host the webinar or a uh the workshop, I intend to start it off in a very specific way. And if you haven't, if you're not following me on Facebook, especially, but if you're not following me across social media, please do so. All the links are in the uh comments of this episode. Whether you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube, do me a favor, ring the bell, subscribe, like, rate, review, share. Help me spread the word on this podcast. All right. I we get, especially ratings and reviews, we get uh greater visibility and wider reach the more uh the more people uh rate and review us. And and just do me a favor and and hit all of that to support the podcast. I put a lot of a lot of time and a lot of uh a lot of energy into this podcast, and I'd appreciate any help you can dish out. But uh if you'd not follow me on social media, please do so because I share a lot of what's happening uh in real time in both the business and both my life. And I post four or five times a day, especially on uh Facebook, and you'll you'll follow along, you'll track more with what's going on in my life and share about mine and Angie, Angie's my wife, her uh our our adventures, and just share a little bit more about life and business and growth and development, personal and professional development, all of it. Okay, so I'd appreciate it if you connected with me at a deeper level. But over uh yesterday, I had the idea. The the workshop is uh built to give, rebuild to receive, and it's it's August 28th, 29th. Uh and today is the uh today is the 27th, I believe, at recording time. And over uh yesterday, I was sitting trying to figure out, you know, I've got I've got 10 seats sold in the workshop. It's only four or 30 people. I've got four, four or five more weeks, whatever it is, to to get more people enrolled and to give the value. And this workshop is going to be super, super, super impactful, super valuable in helping you like level up in every uh circumstance in your life, whether it be wealth, success, happiness, freedom, fulfillment, love, all of it. It'll it'll positively impact every single aspect and area of your life. But yesterday I was sitting uh in the morning doing my morning contemplation and I thought about a webinar. I haven't done a webinar in a long time. And yesterday

Webinar And Workshop Announcements

SPEAKER_00 7:16

I announced on Facebook especially that I'm hosting a webinar August 4th uh at 6 p.m. Central Standard Time. All right. So if you're, and I'm gonna put the link in this podcast episode to the webinar. I would love it if you enrolled. All right. And what I want to do in that in that uh webinar is give you the kind of like the mechanics and the basics of what we're gonna cover in the workshop. But also this just this webinar will help you see things at a different level. And and uh hopefully it invites you into a deeper relationship with me and our my business, Interwealth Global, and to the work that we do together. All right. But I'm gonna start the webinar off the same way as I'm gonna start the workshop off. And now I'm going to reveal exactly what that is so that those of you who show up on the webinar and those of you who show up in the workshop, you're not gonna be surprised by this. All right. We're gonna go, there's a couple parallel paths we're gonna cover, but we're gonna start here. Your nervous system has one job and one job only. Now, if you're like most people, when I ask this question, when I say, What is it? the typical response is to keep you safe. And that is not a correct answer. There's there's an aspect of it, yes, but that is not the whole and complete answer to that question. And I I have asked this question probably 10 times per day over the last few weeks. And I find myself asking it in every single conversation I have. But today, I want I want you to like maybe write this down, tattoo it on your forehead, tattoo it on your forearm, tattoo it somewhere, where tattoo it on your chest so that when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, you're reminded of this. Your nervous system has one job and one job only, and it's not to keep you safe. It literally is to keep you alive. Make sure you record that the memory and you realize that your nervous system is not always working for you to feel good. Your nervous system is not always working for you to be comfortable. Your nervous system is not always working for you to be wealthy, successful, happy. A lot of times it's working against those things if you're not experiencing them right now. It doesn't care. Your nervous system doesn't care if you're wealthy, successful, happy, free, loved. Your nervous system cares about none of that. It only cares that you are alive. That's really, really important. And in 10 years of coaching, I think that is the literal most important thing that I could ever teach a human being

Your Nervous System’s Real Job

SPEAKER_00 10:21

that is looking to expand, to grow, to experience more higher level quality of life inside, higher level quality of life outside, experience more material wealth and abundance around the world and go places and see things. The number one thing that I can teach someone to help them experience all of that is your nervous system has one job and one job only, and that is to keep you alive. And it doesn't care what your dreams are, it doesn't care what your ambitions are, it doesn't care what you want in this world, it doesn't care what you need in the world, it only cares that it is keeping you alive. And it has a certain tactic to accomplish that. And that single tactic, sometimes a strategy, is to keep you mired in familiar circumstances. This is an important distinction to make, an important understanding, probably the most important thing that you could ever take away from the Interwealth podcast, from your workings with me, from our time together, or from any other personal development program or lesson or coursework or training or whatever. Your nervous system has one job and one job only, and that is to keep you alive. And it tries to keep you alive by trying to keep you in familiar circumstances. If you're broke, it's trying to keep you broke. If you're unsuccessful, it's trying to keep you unsuccessful. If you are alone, it's trying to keep you alone. If you feel unloved, it's trying to keep you feeling unloved. Because the reason it tries to keep you in familiar circumstances is because it has proven to be able to keep you alive in those circumstances. Because you're breathing right now. And if you're broke and alive, it's successful. If you're uh if you've fallen on your face in business and went bankrupt and and and you're alive, it's trying to keep you there. It doesn't, your nervous system does not care about your material circumstances. Please, please, please comprehend this and please, please, please understand and think about this at a deeper level and consider this in all aspects of your life. Put this first and foremost in your life. Your nervous system has one job and one job only is to keep you alive. It tries to keep you in familiar circumstances because it has proven to be able to keep you alive in those circumstances. Because here you are and you are breathing. Now, I want to I want to build a parallel path. We're gonna set that aside for a second, and we're gonna build a parallel path. All right. And then I'm gonna combine these two later at the end of this episode, as we near the end of the episode, and hopefully it'll like truly make sense for you because I'm seeing this at a clearer and deeper level than I ever have, and it's impacting people's lives in a more positive way because they're finally getting out of their own fucking way. Right? Understand this and anchor this concept in parallel to what we just discussed. Your beliefs create your reality, your beliefs create your experience of life. You don't experience life as it is, you experience life as you believe it to be. You don't experience everything that life has to offer, you experience what you believe that life has to offer. You don't experience what is truly available to you, you experience what you believe is available to you. You don't experience what you truly deserve, you experience what you believe you deserve. You don't experience what you are capable of, you experience what you believe you are capable of. And every single belief, every single belief that you have contains a seed of limitation, and by holding that belief, you are also carrying around and holding that limitation. And if you take the entire accumulation of all of our beliefs, what you believe about yourself, your business, your spouse, your partner, your friendships, your capabilities, religion, God, and you take all of those beliefs and put them together, the sum, sometimes even the product of all of those beliefs is your identity. And your beliefs create your identity, and your identity creates your freaking circumstances in life and your outcomes and what you

Why Familiar Feels Safer

SPEAKER_00 15:56

experience. And they all your total experience of life and the reality that you live in is based on the beliefs that you are holding. This isn't new. I've shared both of these concepts, these parallel concepts. I've shared both of them on this podcast many, many times, but I've never put them together. Today I want to help put them together, but we have to understand both at a much deeper level to really get the impact that the awareness of these two can carry forth, can bring forth. Your beliefs set the tone for what you're going to experience. If we protect our beliefs, then we are choosing our circumstances. We are choosing the limitations that come along with those beliefs. When I believed that I had nothing significant to add or nothing valuable to add to humanity, there was evidence of that everywhere in my life. When I felt like I was worthless, there was evidence of that everywhere. And people in my life set out to prove that that was true. Because I continued to attract things into my life to take that level of low self-worth, of low self-esteem, of my leaking any self-value that I had. And I attracted and I brought in and I chose experiences to amplify those because we don't see life as it is. We see life as we believe it. And our beliefs, our deepest beliefs, create our reality. We are not victims of life, we are only victims of the beliefs that we choose, hold, maintain, protect. And it's important that we let go of any victimhood. If you really want to master life, if we really want to elevate our material circumstances, if we really want to elevate the quality of life that we experience inside of ourselves, it's really important that we understand that if we protect our beliefs, we are choosing the same. Now, here's where these two collide and these two merge. It's because your nervous system has one job and one job only, and that is to keep you alive. And it tries to keep you alive by attempting and trying and doing everything possible to try to keep you in familiar circumstances and in things that are familiar.

Beliefs Build Identity And Outcomes

SPEAKER_00 18:51

And it does that because it has proven to be able to keep you alive. So if you believe that you do not deserve something, your nervous system is going to try to keep you there. If you believe that you don't have something significant to add or that you are not significant in this world, your nervous system is going to try to get you to hold on to that belief. If you believe that you're invisible, if you believe that you're not valuable, if you believe that you're not capable of achieving, of accomplishing, of accumulating, if you believe that these things aren't available to you, if you believe these things are always out of reach, if you believe these things are always available to somebody else and not to you, if you believe that these things can only come through other people, that you are not capable and competent enough to create these, then your nervous system will attempt to protect all of those beliefs because your nervous system has one job and one job only, and has to keep you alive. It tries to keep you alive by trying to keep you in familiar circumstances, including the beliefs that you're holding. And it tries to keep you in familiar circumstances because it has proven to be able to keep you alive there because you are breathing right now. So when I first met wealthy, successful, happy, generous entrepreneurs that were rich,

How The Body Protects Beliefs

SPEAKER_00 20:32

that were materially well off, they seemed like such a freaking aberration. It was almost like I was my nervous system was convincing me, and my inner dialogue was trying to convince me that they are lying. Because the belief that I held, I'm talking about back in 2016, the belief that I held was that wealthy people are greedy, they're selfish, they're judgmental, they they hurt people, that they're slimy and greedy. You can that's what I was taught when I was a kid. The beliefs that I held up to that point came from a foundation of religion, of parenting that said, if you have money, you are obviously a bad person. And my parents and the people that I loved, and teachers and pastors and nuns and priests and religious freaking authority and Catholic school and Sunday school, they all built this belief that wealth, success, wanting things for yourself was greedy, selfish, shameful. And and it was only, these things were only for people who were bad. And that was a belief that I held in my body, in my nervous system. And when I saw these people, the protection mechanism that my nervous system used was obviously to make them bad in some way. The evidence that none of that shit was true was there, but my nervous system went into protection mode to protect itself to say they must be lying, they must be tricking themselves and you, they must be hiding shit. My nervous system judged them to try to make them wrong because giving up that belief was uncertain and was unfamiliar. And in a situation that's uncertain and unfamiliar, your nervous system goes into threat mode because it doesn't know how to keep you alive there. The evidence that they were wealthy, successful, happy, loving, the generous, all of it. It was there, it was evident. And I kept meeting with these same people, and they kept proving over and over and over that they were real. And over time, I chose to let go of the belief that wealth, success, happiness, freedom, love, these were all available to anyone, not just people that were bad, that you literally could create these things while being of service, while being of positive impact, while being of benefit to society, because the evidence was there. They were showing me constantly. They were successful people helping other people become successful, but they were doing it in ways that were ethical. They were doing it in ways that were high value methods. They wouldn't hurt anyone in order to receive what they wanted to receive. And they kept showing me. And from that example, I got the opportunity to let go of that lower level belief that I experienced. And then more money started flowing into my life. Because when I tied this lower level belief that wealth, success, material abundance only comes when you do bad shit. When I let that go, I could be a good person, and my nervous system could allow myself to experience the material flow that I ultimately wanted. But until I let that belief go, and until I worked on letting the energy

Unlearning Money Shame And Judgment

SPEAKER_00 24:41

of that belief that was contained within my nervous system, the drill method, drop into your body, recognize what you're feeling, inquire and investigate, listen to what it's telling you, and ultimately let it go. As I let go of the energy that was trapped and contained in my nervous system, and let go of that belief at the somatic level, at the cell level, at the neuropathway level, not to get so freaking scientific. But as I began to let the energy of that go in my body, it started to let go in my mind and who I identified and how I experienced life started changing. But as long as the belief that I held was that bad people, only bad people can become wealthy. If I continued to hold on to that belief, then the only way I was ever going to get wealthy was by being a bad person in the world. And that was not true. But there are a lot of people out there in this world walking around with the assignment, the incorrect assignment, that wealth means you did something harmful to other people. And that's what creates envy and greed. But it doesn't look like greed materially. It looks like greed trying to get other people to give up their wealth, their material abundance. Because of their association and their belief of what it takes to create wealth. Your nervous system has one job and one job only, and that's to try to keep you alive. Tries to keep you alive by trying to keep you in familiar circumstances. And tries to keep you in familiar circumstances because it is proven to be able to keep you alive. I hope this like really lands and anchors. And your beliefs are protected, are contained within your nervous system and are protected inside of your nervous system. When my first book was The Imposter in Charge, I released it in 2019. And the reason that I was leading a very large $65 million organization, later a $350 million organization, and I felt like an imposter, like a fraud, it's because regardless of the circumstances, my nervous system wouldn't allow me to feel significant, to feel valuable, to feel talented. It wouldn't allow me to feel any sense of accomplishment or achievement because that was unfamiliar. I had never felt any of that for a sustained period of time up to that point. So the nervous system, my nervous system, viewed all of that as a threat. So regardless of the evidence of what was happening in my life, it continued to feel those things and to experience those things. And it refused to allow me to let go of any of that as a as a means of trying to keep me alive. And in its job, in its work, my nervous system felt it was being successful because we were alive and it didn't care that inside I was fucking miserable. And in the circumstances of a life where I could have felt truly fulfilled and accomplished and valuable and talented and worthy and deserving. I could have felt all those things, but my nervous system didn't know how to operate within them. I hope this is making sense. And if you don't love where you are right now, in your material wealth, in the impact that you've had, with the quality of your relationships, with the amount that you give and receive love, with your overall fulfillment in life, if you're not where you want to be in life, it's because of the beliefs that you're holding. And the only way to level up in those is to let go of the beliefs that you're holding. But your nervous system is going to do everything it can to protect those beliefs, including thinking like

Imposter Syndrome And Sustainable Success

SPEAKER_00 29:22

some kind of guilt or shame for letting go of a belief because it's a protection mechanism. And that's just the nervous system doing its job. But at some point, if we want to experience more, we've got to be willing to believe more. And if we want to believe more, we've got to be willing to allow our nervous system to be uncomfortable for a while and do some uncomfortable shit so that so that we can step into something unfamiliar, and that's what creates the discomfort. And when we step into something that's unfamiliar, over time it becomes safer. And over time, your nervous system rewires itself and learns how to operate in a sustainable way inside of those new circumstances. And this is why the webinar that I'm going to do next week is called The Science of Sustainable Success. It's understanding the impact that the nervous system has, understanding the impact that our belief system has, and bringing those together and merging them so that not only can we create success, but we can create sustainable success. Because if your nervous system isn't comfortable holding them and keeping them, it's just a matter of time before you'll sabotage them. Just like I did once in my mastermind when it got up to 75 people and then it completely collapsed because my nervous system wasn't willing and able to hold that level of admiration, of love, of success, of wealth, of visibility. My nervous system felt unsafe and it was uncertain. So we got rid of it so that it could do its job and keep me alive, even though there was no danger in any of that. I hope this has been helpful. Webinar next week, I'm going to put the link on August 4th at 6 p.m. Central Standard Time. I'm going to put the link in the podcast show notes. The workshop, August 28th, 29th, right? The workshop's called Built the Give, Rebuilt the Receive. It's really geared towards, it can help anyone understand all of this, but it's really built towards people that have overgiven and under received in their life to level up and get rid of that false belief that it's better to give than receive and learn how to do both equally because just giving and receiving is just like breathing. Inhaling is not more important than exhaling. And it's not better to inhale than exhale. And it's not better to exhale than inhale. They're both equal. We've got to be able to do both effectively to truly stay alive and thrive in this lifetime. Webinar, August 4th, 6 p.m. Workshop, August 28th, 29th. The links to both are going to be in the show notes. I'd love to see you there. It's going to be a good time. And we will together elevate every circumstance in our life inside and out.com for more tools.