Episode 44 - Rob Begg Mindset Coach
Your ego has read all the same books. We're making conversations about ego count!Rob Begg, Results Based Mindset Coach To Business Leaders & Teams
Making Conversations about Ego Count!

Rob Begg is a mindset coach that works with business owners and teams.
Admit it, you’ve said, “I’m not good enough”, more than once right?
Self-belief is one of our biggest challenges in business, and you can read more about it in Wendy’s best selling book, which you can order here.
It can take many guises -imposter syndrome… self limiting beliefs.
Whatever it sounds like in your own brain, this episode will definitely help you.
Rob Begg is a truly inspirational fella. He talks about non-duality.
You’ll need to listen to the episode to hear about how it needs to be understood so you can know how to get what you want.
If ever there was someone who spoke reason that you should listen to, it is indeed Rob Begg.
In this episode Wendy asks Rob lots of questions around how our ego and beliefs get in the way of our desires.
There are common mischievous beliefs that you’ll recognise:
“I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve it or I need to wait until the timing is right.”
You need to stop that right now.
Have you said this to yourself or someone else recently?
Listen to the end and you’ll know how to get started on the correct path.
Listen to other episodes on your favourite platform…
Full Episode Transcript
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Making Conversations Count – Episode Forty-Four
August 19th 2021
Wendy Harris & Rob Begg, Mindset Coach
Timestamps
00:00:00: Introductions
00:02:21: Non-duality explained
00:03:49: Common denominators
00:06:02: Understanding the mind and the ego
00:07:51: Problems with beliefs
00:09:31: Blocks or obstacles to challenges
00:12:10: Nothing exists outside our awareness
00:13:59: Imagination is the only creative power
00:15:41: Rob’s pivotal conversation
00:17:53: Reaching your full potential
00:19:08: Realistic is a belief system
00:20:44: Conditioning gets in the way
00:22:10: Time and money are big ego tricks
00:23:27: Final thoughts
Wendy Harris: How often have you heard the phrase, “I’m not good enough”, or “I don’t deserve it”? Well, today you’re going to want to listen to the whole episode, because this conversation is going to get down deep and dirty around all those self-limiting beliefs that we put on ourselves, because today, with Rob Begg, we’re going to be making conversations about ego count.
What’s new Wendy Woo? Well, I’m so glad you asked. We continue to show up in the entrepreneur charts, which is absolutely fantastic for the show. That means that we know you love listening to our conversations that count. So come on, send me some reviews, tell me your favourite guest so far, and even some suggestions would be great. We’re working on a new series where we’re going to be bringing you more value to those people that are in business, starting up, scaling up and shaking up.
Knowing that the conversation with Rob was coming up today, I’m going to do a selfless plug. Self-belief is certainly one of the biggest challenges that I come across when I’m working with people, who aren’t comfortable in picking up the phone, or indeed, talking to strangers face to face at networking or online. You can read more about this in my bestselling book Making Conversations Count, but why not take advantage of my PowerUp Session? This is where you get the opportunity to work with me and I can help you with your business, your self-belief and of course, being able to talk to strangers more. All the links you need, of course, are going to be in the notes.
So, Rob, you are a fast-growth sales and mindset coach. We’ve spoken before and I think it’s fair to say, that you have quite a unique approach to that form of growth. Do you have a name for it, Rob?
Rob Begg: Oh, some people would put it in the bracket of mindset; I’m not a big fan of the mindset as a word, even though I use it. What I really teach is something called, “non-duality”, which is very esoteric; it’s not commonly widely known, but that would be the label, but it’s not a label that people recognise or understand, so I tend not to lead with it.
Wendy Harris: I have to say that non-duality, you mentioned that to me in our first conversation. Now, I’ve been knocking around the sales world for a very long time, and I’d never head the term before, so where does it come from, what are its roots?
Rob Begg: Yeah, well it’s got nothing to do with sales, which would be why you’ve not heard of it in that context; it’s all to do with understanding the truth about who we really are, and about how we can have whatever it is we want in our lives.
So, in the context of selling, our results are a function of what’s going on in our minds, consciously or unconsciously. People are not earning what they’re earning or selling what they’re selling because that’s what they want to earn or how much they want to sell, they’re earning that because that’s fundamentally what they’re programmed or believe they’re capable of selling. Or fundamentally what they believe about the marketplace and about how much they can sell relative to the people they sell to and all the rest of it, and that’s all founded on a flawed premise.
So, when you take people back to the truth about who they really are and how their minds work, you start to open them up to possibilities about what they really can be, do or have, because we’re only limited by our imagination.
Wendy Harris: So, in the context of your world and how you help people, are there common denominators of people with set challenges that they face? I only ask this because people come to me saying that they need something, but what they want, and need is usually something completely different; do you find that yourself?
Rob Begg: Yes, that’s definitely the feature in my world too. So, a lot of the time I’m approached by, or be with business owners, who express that they want to get a better outcome in their life in some way, shape or form; either earn a lot more money, grow their business a lot faster, have more time for themselves, have a more joyful experience, all of that stuff. They’re typically looking at what are the strategies and systems and things that they can put in place to achieve all of that, clarifying their vision, working out their positioning of products, the functionality of the business, all that stuff; and I used to help business owners with that.
I spent eight years as a business coach, but fundamentally, the only thing, and I really mean this, the one and only thing they need to address is what’s going on in their own minds. We’re ignorant as to who we are and how it works and how the mind works, but I don’t say that to be in an egotistical sense. I was very ignorant for a long time, despite having read a thousand books on how to improve my life, and when I say a thousand books, I literally mean a thousand books; call me a slow learner! But the books didn’t help.
Wendy Harris: There are thousands of books out there, aren’t there, on different topics?
Rob Begg: Thousands upon thousands, and some great books. But the books, whilst they feel like they give us some relief in the moment, we read the book and we think, “Well yes, I’m on to something here, I’m on to something, this is really helping”; what we invariably find is it doesn’t actually help that much, or what we find is there might be part of our mind that doesn’t want us to change that says, “Oh, you need another book”.
Wendy Harris: It’ll talk you out of it.
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: Is there an example of an exercise that we can do to be-quiet that mind or answer it back, override it?
Rob Begg: Well, we need to understand the mind, we need to understand the ego. The ego has us identifying with our physical self and of course, most of us are brought up to believe that that’s who we are, our physical bodies, but we’re so much more than that.
You know one of questions I ask is, “Where do your thoughts come from?” If we do a post-mortem on somebody and we open the head up, we don’t find a whole load of thoughts that they just didn’t manage to use in their lifetime. Thoughts come in from what we call, “nowhere”, but we’re so much greater than our physical bodies; but the ego is the part of our mind that has us identifying as our physical entity, and the ego’s primary objective is to keep us safe.
The problem is that the best way it knows how to do that is to preserve the status quo, because right now, right now here, although we may be uncomfortable with our current position or our current earnings or our current life, and the higher part of ourself is the part of ourself that wants us to express more, earn more or do more, we’re here for richness of experience. The ego says, “No, no, I want you to be safe and therefore I want to preserve the status quo”.
So, when we step out to do something that’s more in line with what we want, the ego throws doubt, fear, worry and all the rest of it; so it’s more our understanding of what’s going on than trying to fight it or bypass it, because that’s what leads to problems; we fight it and of course, we all know it fights back.
Wendy Harris: It almost gives it power, doesn’t it, that fighting it back?
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: It’s kind of coming back to you saying, “Well see, I told you so, I told you this isn’t a good idea”. Yeah.
Rob Begg: Exactly, and of course, it’s knows all the tricks; it’s read all the books too!
Wendy Harris: Rob, I know that you help business owners with growth and mindset. You were talking to me about beliefs as being a big one. Is there one belief that you see that is a habitual problem in today’s society?
Rob Begg: I’m very wary of going off down what could be a long, dark, deep rabbit hole on this one. I don’t know much about your audience, Wendy, and who listens to this and so on, and this may bump into quite a number of your listeners’ beliefs, which is okay.
Our beliefs create our reality. What we call our physical world, our world, however much money we have in the bank, our life as a whole, is an expression of our beliefs; and the problem is that a lot of the personal development industry is focussed on supporting you to change your beliefs to change your life, and that makes perfect sense. If our lives are an expression of our beliefs, then change the belief to change your life.
But the problem is, it’s too hard or that’s most people’s experience, or you go digging for beliefs and you end up with thousands upon thousands of them; it’s a long, slow process. Whereas, if we go up a layer, if we go up to understanding that beliefs are held within a perspective that’s held within consciousness, which is who we really are, and we change at the level of consciousness, then the beliefs look after themselves.
To answer your question in a very roundabout fashion, the biggest belief that causes the biggest problem is believing that we are our limited physical self, and the most pervasive belief I’ve come across is the one of, “I’m not good enough; at some level I’m not good enough to live the life I really want to live or to be…”
Wendy Harris: Or, “I don’t deserve it”.
Rob Begg: Yeah, or, “I’m not worthy”. Yeah, exactly.
Wendy Harris: Rob, another reason that I was thrilled to have you on the show is that the listeners, I think, after listening to so many episodes of me with guests anyway, they like to be challenged and their thinking to be challenged.
Rob Begg: Okay.
Wendy Harris: I believe that in a lot of instances where there is a block or an obstacle or a challenge, it is to do with our attitude and approach to things, and that is exactly what you are talking about fundamentally, in helping people to see that. To kind of step over that obstacle that is our physical realm into some —
Rob Begg: Yes; we don’t really have any blocks.
Wendy Harris: No, and I think it was when you said, “What can you see in the past and what can you see in the future?”, and I was hemmed in, I was stuck, there was nowhere to go. But, Rob, I’m going to ask you to explain what you did there, because you kind of had me thinking for days after.
Rob Begg: Did I?
Wendy Harris: But this is great because this is the change that comes, and it doesn’t have to be a bullet between the eyes and it doesn’t have to be hitting a wall; it can just slowly manifest itself and that is what, I have to thank you, you have started to manifest something in that conversation. So, I think it’s only right that you share that with everybody else too.
Rob Begg: I don’t believe; I know, and there’s a difference between having a belief in something, having faith in something, and knowing. I know that the only thing to change any aspect of our life, irrespective of what it is, even if we believe that it pertains to things or people outside of ourselves, that’s just a belief and it’s a belief that’s founded in a lack of understanding of who we are.
So, I know that to change any aspect of our life, the only thing we need to do is to change our perception, to heal our perception or change our perception; because it all starts and ends within us. And I can help illustrate that point by asking you and your audience now to think of something, anything, that exists outside of your or their awareness of it. It’s a trick question because you can’t think of anything that exists outside of your awareness, because as soon as you think of it, it’s in your awareness. Yet we grow up, we go to school, and we’re told, or many of us are told, “If you want to survive in the outside world, you need to work hard”. There is no outside world; at least if there is, you can’t point to it.
Now I know this is getting a bit ethereal, but there is no reality for any of us outside of our own awareness or consciousness of it, it’s mystified scientists for years; or if there is, we can’t go and point to it, because then it’s in our awareness.
Wendy Harris: I came back to this living in the present.
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: That was the most powerful thing, because as soon as I started to think about outside and I started to think black holes. Well that’s a thing then, I’ve named it, I’ve given it a life by —
Rob Begg: It’s in your awareness, yeah.
Wendy Harris: So it can only be this in the present, now, and what I effect here, to the connection that I make — it could be somewhere else. I mean you’re in Scotland, for example right, and I’m in the Midlands, so my present at the moment is joined by two dots on a map.
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: It’s only a very small awareness of what I see of you in your present.
Rob Begg: Yes, and I’m in your reality and you’re in mine. I don’t want to end up causing smoke to pour out of your audiences’ ears, but back to that whole present piece, so nothing exists in our reality, or can exist in our reality, outside of our awareness of it; and yet, we’re trying to change our life by shifting things in what we call, “our outside world”. Well, there is no outside world as such, we just need to change how we hold our perception.
So many of us are hemmed in by our history, things that have happened in our past or our perceived past, guilt, shame, regret; or hemmed in by our concerns about the future, worry, doubt, fear, what if this doesn’t happen? And yet, can we go to the past physically? No. Can we go to the future physically? No. Why not? Because they only exist, as with everything else, in our own mind.
So, when it comes back to sales and fast growth and growing your business or getting what you want, living the life that you really want, living the life that we’re here to live, the only thing we need to do is to hold it in our mind differently; to allow ourselves to imagine, which is what imagination is for. It’s the one and only creative power in the whole universe.
Wendy Harris: Yes. You know you’re not going to achieve anything unless you set the goal, because you’ve got to sort of be able to imagine you being there to get there.
Rob Begg: You’ve got to know what you want.
Wendy Harris: Quite often it’s the journey getting there that holds us back, isn’t it? Not necessarily the goals that we have in our mind; it’s the physicality of that.
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: Yeah. I just think it’s absolutely fascinating what you do, Rob, and how you draw that picture for us to see the differential; it’s like the layers of the onion of consciousness to identify where we’re perhaps not firing on all cylinders.
Rob Begg: Yeah, exactly, and although I’m talking in a way that might be considered a bit ethereal today, you know I work with entrepreneurs and business owners who, when they come into my programme, are very intent on a specific physical, tangible outcome. So, I take them on a journey just to an understanding that it’s them, Then the journey to the goal, from an understanding of how the mind works and of who we are; the journey to the goal does not need to be full of struggle and strife and challenge, because it’s all coming from us anyway.
Wendy Harris: Yes, so why would you create yourself even more challenges and stress?
Rob Begg: Exactly! It’s all coming from our own mind, so why set it up in your own mind.
Wendy Harris: We are our worst enemies, aren’t we?
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: The bit that I really love getting to in every episode with my guest is asking you about that one conversation that you can recall that created a turning point. We all have one of those experiences that stays with us, and the listeners love it, because they can quite often find themselves and imagine themselves in that situation; they draw a lot from it, because they perhaps handled it in a different way. So, the way that other people handle those situations, they can start to imagine and apply themselves. So, what was your conversation about?
Rob Begg: Well, I guess I’ve had several over the years that have been pretty impactful, but the one that sticks in my mind is with an old mentor of mine, who said to me at a time when I was trying to grow my business and I was a bit challenged, and he said, “You’re problem, Rob, is in all you’re getting, the one thing you haven’t got, despite all the books you’ve read, is you haven’t got understanding”, and he said, “If you had understanding, you’d realise you only had two problems: weakness of attention and poverty of imagination”, and he kind of floored me.
I sat there and said, “Well what do you mean by that?”, and he said, “Well you don’t allow yourself to imagine the future that you want, you’re only allowing yourself to imagine the next step, or getting to the next — you’re not allowing yourself to go to what you really, really want. And because you’re not connected to what you really, really want, you’re lacking any real attention on what you want; because you don’t want what you want badly enough to focus enough on it”.
To be honest, it was only two or three years later that I really kind of got the magnitude of that and where I allowed myself to imagine a future that I absolutely did not believe was possible, and I guess that’s the one thing that really helps people shift is if they’ll just allow themselves to imagine possibility.
Wendy Harris: It can be a fun journey getting there, can’t it?
Rob Begg: It can be so much. We’re here for fun; it’s called the game of life, isn’t it, not the struggle or the war of life? And yet most of us are at war with ourselves, as we said.
Wendy Harris: There’s one word that has really sort of struck me as you were telling me, and that is that potential.
Rob Begg: Yes.
Wendy Harris: We all have such potential. How many of us ever really reach our full potential?
Rob Begg: Well, I would say nobody, because we’re infinite. We’re only hemmed in by our beliefs and yet some of those beliefs, depending on who you pay attention to and who’s doing what, some of them are pretty staggering. Like Elon Musk, he wants to die on Mars. I mean that’s pretty ambitious and based on his track record, I’d say he’s got a good chance of it, but why not choose to die on a planet in a galaxy that we’ve not yet discovered yet? Now he maybe wants to die on Mars, but maybe it just his belief system won’t take him there. We’re always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Wendy Harris: Yeah. Maybe his boundaries haven’t shifted enough yet. Elon, I’m going to message you!
Rob Begg: Yeah. He’s got a pretty impressive —
Wendy Harris: — and I’m going to say, “Rob Begg says…!”
Rob Begg: Yeah, please don’t!
Wendy Harris: It’s that consciousness that you talk about that we can’t imagine, so that is really where Elon Musk is going to be taking himself, isn’t it? It’s that statement was probably in the face of all of the media that said that we’d never get to Mars; now that step has happened that it’s realistic that you could go to Mars.
Rob Begg: But it’s only happened because somebody allowed themselves to imagine it and of course realistic is brilliant, isn’t it? How many of us are brought up with, “Be realistic”, but what is realistic, Wendy? I’ll tell you what realistic is, it’s a belief system.
Wendy Harris: Yeah.
Rob Begg: It’s a personal belief system, and it keeps people hemmed in, “Oh be realistic”; ridiculous. On one level, if we understand how our imagination works, the thing we must be to be happy is unrealistic: it’s realistic that’s the problem.
Wendy Harris: It’s that stretch and strive for reaching unknown, isn’t it?
Rob Begg: Yeah, and of course, that’s where the ego doesn’t want to go, which is why it’s the game, it’s the game. If we understand the rules of the game, we can have anything we want.
Wendy Harris: Yeah, I mean I’m just thinking now of inventors, musicians, artists, all of those people that push the boundaries, that don’t comply with normal.
Rob Begg: Free themselves up, yeah.
Wendy Harris: Yeah, wow!
Rob Begg: Free themselves up; and then where does it come from, where do your thoughts come from, where do they go to, where does that piece of music come from? Everything that you look at in our physical world started in someone’s mind.
Wendy Harris: Yeah, I mean I’m taken back now to a previous conversation that I have had with a guest, Nik Venios, and he was telling me about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic book and it’s about how ideas are literally floating around you all the time and they will come to you if you’re open to them. But they’re not going to stick around if you do nothing with them; they’re going to just find somebody else who will fulfil that idea.
It was a kind of magical theory, but one that I know has happened to me, but I couldn’t explain it. And it’s that, I suppose, that conditioning that if we can’t explain something, it’s not real and you shouldn’t really step into the light and draw attention to yourself.
Rob Begg: Absolutely.
Wendy Harris: Yeah.
Rob Begg: We’ve all had moments where we thought, “Oh, that would be lovely”, and then we’ve denied the desire, we’ve not paid attention to it, we’ve just denied it, buried it; we’ve put it in the one-day bucket or we’re not good enough or we’re not worthy, or I don’t know how. We don’t allow ourselves to pursue the desire, because we can’t work out how or we can’t see ourselves there, and yet the desire is given to us by us, for us to experience, but we don’t run with it.
Wendy Harris: Yeah.
Rob Begg: It’s the conditioning; as you say Wendy, the conditioning just gets in the way.
Wendy Harris: Those moments often can be about timing and to bring that into kind of real-life scenarios that I see repeatedly, working with business start-ups, working with people in business that are not sure whether to scale or grow, and I’m talking more as a female business owner, that there’s generally more constraints around, being a mum and a wife and a business owner.
The timing’s never right, you know, “Oh I’ve got to wait until my children are a certain age, because then it would be easier”, “I’ve got to wait until they’re of a certain age and then I can earn more money”, just does hold you back.
Rob Begg: Yes, and it’s all just beliefs. Time and money are two of the big ego tricks. The only time there ever is, is now, and if you’ve got a desire for doing something, the time is now; it’s not tomorrow, it’s not when the kids are older, the time is now, it’s all we’ve ever got. The only thing we are ever going to be held back by is belief, but that’s the trick of the ego, keeping us preserving the status quo. How many people get to the end of their lives and think, “I wish I’d been a bit more uptight, a bit more fearful, lived a little bit less, been a bit more worried about stuff”? No one; we’ve got to let ourselves go.
Wendy Harris: That’s a really great message to wrap up on there, Rob, is we do need to let ourselves go a bit more. Obviously, we’re not encouraging anybody to go and break the law or do anything mad! But certainly, if you have a desire to do something and achieve something, we would just, both Rob and I, be really encouraging of you to go out and do that.
Carry the conversation on. Get in touch with us after the show. That would be perfect for us and I’m sure that would be perfect for Rob to be able to just go, “Well okay, what’s stopping you?” That’s really the question, isn’t it?
Rob Begg: If you get emotionally involved enough in the idea, there’d be no stopping you; that’s the only job. Imagination and attention and emotional involvement, and then there’s no stopping you.
Wendy Harris: A great conversation with Rob there on how to talk ourselves out of talking ourselves out of things. I hope you’ll carry on the conversation with Rob following the links in the show notes. If you need to have a chat or if you want a copy of my book or a power-up session, follow the links in the show notes. I’d love to hear what your favourite part of today’s show was, so don’t forget to use that review link too.
Until next time.
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