Mimika Cooney On Finding The Correct Mindset For The Rough Journey
Everything that is in your mind will reflect through your emotions. You need to have the right mindset in life if you want to get through some difficult times. Join Chad Burmeister and his guest, Mimika Cooney, in this conversation about finding the right mindset. Mimika is a mindset and business coach who helps people grow by unsticking their minds. She is also an author, speaker, and podcaster. Tune in and learn how you can deal with your problems. Discover how your brain works and how to control your emotions.
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Mimika Cooney On Finding The Correct Mindset For The Rough Journey
We're talking with Mimika Cooney. Mimika wrote a cool book and more than one, in fact, two. One is in the top five on Amazon and will tell you about that one. If you visit Mimika’s LinkedIn, she talks about eight tips to supercharge your mindset. She not only does that but she's also the Mindset and Business Coach at Mimika Media and Coaching and a John Maxwell Team Coach, Speaker, Trainer and Behavior Consultant. We're talking to a real expert here. She ran into a buzzsaw as they say all of us do at some point in our lives that caused her to become on the path that she's on. We're going to dig into some of that because sometimes the most painful things that come at us in life become our biggest gifts and I'm sure Mimika is going to share some of that with us. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. That's an interesting introduction. I've never heard of the buzzsaw part. You're going to have to explain that to me. That's interesting how you look at our backgrounds and I love that what you said is true like about my twenty-year self had to look forward to my 45-year-old self. I'd be like, “How did you get there?” It's always the story of breadcrumbs that brings us to where we are.
The buzzsaw comes to me because I remember when I was a kid one of our neighbors was cutting a fence and the blades are supposed to be covered. He went to set it on his leg and it went down deep. We were there and he was our neighbor. My dad was the doctor in the neighborhood. They come to him and I remember going, “What is going on?” That's one of those physical buzzsaw moments but in life, we face emotional buzzsaw moments that sometimes open the wounds bigger than the physical ones do.
It’s the unseen struggles, as I say that and that's why I laugh when people read my bio because I was like, “You can read things online.” You can see somebody's highlight reel on Instagram and think they're having a fabulous life but everybody is dealing with some struggle and we just don't know it. We are good at putting on masks and showing the best version of ourselves. I'm open about my story. I'm going to tell it like as you can tell I'm from South Africa. We're direct and we get to the point. We sugarcoat nothing. We are a little bit more tough nuts to crack. It's exciting.
You're in Charlotte now. That's where I used to live. It turns out in the same zip code. It's 28173, if I remember. That's a small world too. We probably went to some of the same firework stands and whatever else is in town there. The CVS Pharmacy is on the corner there.
Correct Mindset: People are good at putting on masks to show the best version of themselves, but everybody is dealing with some kind of struggle.
You never know how you're connected. Six degrees of separation, somebody knows somebody who knows somebody.
Let's go back to Johannesburg, South Africa in your early childhood. A lot of times we put these filters and masks on throughout our life. We don't have the chance to do that when we're a kid. Our true uniqueness and one of one fingerprint is developed and understood when we're 5, 6 and 7. Talk to us a little bit about when you woke up in the morning you had the twinkle in your eye and you're like, “This is what I love to do.” What was that for you?
That was a no-brainer. I was talking. I was a born performer. I love classical ballet. My dad had a coffee table and I'd have my tap shoes and castanets. I'd be singing to Bamboleo and all those fun things. My dad is Greek. My mom's British and I was born and raised in South Africa. I have a very eclectic interesting childhood. We always had people of different languages. I was used to hearing French, German, Greek, Afrikaans, English and African languages. For me, it was interesting to meet people.
I was known to be chatty and I asked the question why a lot. I'd be like, “Why is the sky blue?” My mom was like, “Because why?” She's like, “You ask too many questions.” I was like, “Maybe this will serve me when I'm older.” As we grow and as we get past that fun childlike phase, we get to 10, 11, 12 and start to worry about what the world thinks. All of a sudden being chatty is, “You’re bossy. You talk too much. Stop talking.” You start to listen to what the world has to say. We start to hide who we are and then try and change. Even as adults, some of us that are stuck on things of our past. I like to call it the junk in our trunk. We're going on a journey but we still have some hidden suitcases and boxes that haven't been dealt with.
I can tell you from experience, just trying to push yourself forward, go through life and just go push, eventually that junk is going to slow you down. In my case, I had a full-on train fest. There were lots of signs along the way to slow down and pay attention. I call it the dark night of the soul moment. I'm sure many of us and by now I've had experience in life that you can't always go at that pace. My story goes, I grew up in South Africa. I married my childhood sweetheart. We are still married and we transplanted our family two times overseas, from South Africa to England and England to America, all within the space of five years. I started two businesses between the two of us. We had three babies and I didn't know how to stop.
I kept going and going until the rug was pulled out for me. My whole story even from what I'm doing now is different from pretty much where I was years ago. This is what I find beautiful about the last stories when we stop and pay attention is it always comes back. There are lots of things that I did as a kid and I was trained as a TV broadcaster. I thought I was going to read the evening news as a job. It turns out that wasn't useful until twenty years later.
In 2016, I had what I call my dark night of soul moment where I lost a very close family member. My mother-in-law passed away from cancer and she suffered terribly. There was a crisis of faith like, “God, why aren't you answering my prayers?” As a teenage child who has severe mental health issues and a business failure. Eventually what happens is we don't listen to the signs. Things do eventually fall apart and then physically out I was in bed for three months. I had burnout. I was exhausted and had migraines.
I had to take my foot off the gas and give myself that whole grief process. I've never experienced physical grief like that where you can go and go and be a hero until you're not. When it comes crashing down, you have to stop and think, “What am I doing? Why am I here? Is this what I wanted to be?” You start to think about your five-year-old self like, “Who was I? What did I enjoy? What was that childlike wonder that made me interested in doing the things I do?” That's why I find stories fascinating and I like asking people about their journey.
I went to my father and my mother’s house and my dad when I was leaving gave me a hockey stick that I played when I was 8 or 9 years old. Mine was blue and my brother's was yellow. My brother is two years younger. I got first to pick on a lot of things and mine was well played because it was rubbed off on the handle and my brother wasn't as much. I remember it brings back the competitive memory. That's the common thread through everything and that's how I ended up in sales because it's easy to say, “Did you hit your quota? How did you do compared to everybody else?” Realigning to being competitive for God it's like, “That's what I love to do is be competitive.” It doesn't matter what game. I could have been in swimming or played golf or done business. It doesn't matter. Learning what your uniqueness is and what you're one of one at is fun when you can hone in on that, live within that zone and be in the zone of genius.
In 2016, you had that buzzsaw moment. For anybody reading who's going through it, I talked to someone who's been out of work for a year and I'm helping him with some LinkedIn outreach. We're going to get him a job because he's a superstar but he needs to change his mindset before he can go get a job because there are plenty of jobs that are out there. What advice would you share? You've written books on this. What are the couple of things that people can do to slow down and take inventory? What do they need to do if they're in a depressed state?
It's not an easy place to be. Being stuck is frustrating. Even when you're moving forward and even when you're going down the wrong path that forward momentum creates something that makes you feel more motivated to do it. The thing is, we have to give ourselves permission to stop and rest. This is something that adults are bad at. We tend to go, push and we'll figure it out when this will work itself out. It's like we never want to stop to smell the roses.
All of us have lived through 2020 and that was a gigantic pause button for all of us. I'm grateful for the opportunity and that it's reset everybody’s mind like I say, “Hashtag the rat race has been canceled.” That even though things work before we have to be willing and you mentioned that mindset is key which is why I'm passionate about being the mindset coach. Through all the things I've done in my life, I realized and I look back on that time where I had to reassess myself like, “Why am I doing this? Was I doing this to please other people?” Because I'll admit I gave in my control freaks anonymous and I'm much happier because trying to please everyone and control everything was exhausting.
Correct Mindset: As adults, some people still have junk in their trunks. They go on a journey but have some hidden suitcases and boxes that they have to deal with.
When I came back to it and realize that every decision I made was based on my mind and the way I thought because you can be in any situation. You can be a millionaire and be miserable or you can be poor and you can be miserable but it's how you look at things. It's how you think about things. It takes one mindset shift for you to start to see and have those a-ha moments and realize, “I can't do this.” A few of the things I did is when you're in that situation and I always say, “When you're zoomed into your problem, you’re so close and you can't see it. It’s to take a step back, zoom out and to get a bigger picture. Separate the emotions from the logic of who you are like, “Let me look at this from a bigger picture. What am I doing? What was my motivation for doing this?”
An example is I didn't know this at the time but a lot of the things I had done over life were because I was a people pleaser. I constantly wanted to get that accolades and because it came down to the root of feeling unworthy. I had a root of rejection going back from when I was a kid. Every decision I made, a job I took and an opportunity or business I bought was all about how do I feel better about myself. How do I show people that I'm smart, capable and can do things?
Unfortunately, we start to see those fruits that show up in life. Eventually, we realize this isn't working for me anymore. What am I doing this for? It's going back to how am I thinking about myself and what are my motivations. For instance, someone who's on a trajectory wants to make a million dollars. They will do whatever it takes whether it means sacrificing relationships or time. They're focused on gung-ho about them making a million. They lose the plot and they haven't asked themselves why do I feel a million is important?
Here's a good thing that. It is something I learned from my five-year-old self which is to keep asking why. Why do I want to start this business? Is it because I want to make money? Why do you want to make money? Is it because you want to be a millionaire or was it because you want to pay the bills? Why do you want to be a millionaire? What are you worried about who's watching and thinking? Is it your dad or your family? Is it you?
As you start to go down the layers, I would suggest getting a journal and a piece of paper. This is something that happens in the brain is when you use pen and paper, you engage in other parts of the brain that helps you tap into your deep inner self, your subconscious self. Back in the day, we'd be doodling. I used to get in trouble at school for doodling because I wasn't paying attention but I was listening just doodling at the same time. As an adult, we've lost the joy of coloring, drawing and writing because there's something therapeutic about when you can get your thoughts out from your head onto paper.
The first thing I would do is think about what you're thinking about. What are those thoughts? When you start to interrupt them and realize, “I keep thinking that but I didn't realize that's a thought pattern and habitual. We're going to start believing that and then you start asking yourself the question. You start to dig a little deeper because once you get to the root of the problem then you can fix it. It's like a tree. You can have bad fruit and every year it keeps growing back food which is anxiety, depression, stress, anger and whatever else. You can cut off the fruit but if you don't get to the root, it's going to keep growing. Part of what I do is help people dig.
In sales, Skip Miller taught me early on three levels of why and most people stick with the first. Why is that important to you? The salesperson comes in and goes, “We have the best product that can fix that problem.” It's like, “You just stayed on the surface. You've got to go why.” It's more than three. You can go deep into the why part of it. There's a new company and they've got this thing called the chair of joy and they're bringing it to different states all around the country. It's called JOYELY. She had me sit in a chair and it's a big huge white chair with gold around the edges and it's bigger than yourself, it’s 8 feet tall and it was amazing.
I'm sitting in this chair and she said, “Think about if you could go through an exercise three times a day for a minute joy layering.” She said, “Just think of the time when maybe you had your 1st and 2nd kid or you got married.” It's amazing when you break up your day even just those three simple things. Your negative thought patterns can get interrupted and for the next couple of hours you're now in this different state of mind that like, “I did have joy at that particular moment and you bring that back into the here and now.” The mind is an interesting thing and it can be reprogrammed like a computer can.
This is what I love about it. The science is finally catching up. Neuroplasticity is that whole point of the fact is that our brains are malleable and can be rewired and retrained. Part of what I do with my clients is that I help them through this process. The first step is awareness like, “We have a problem.” We need to figure out that there's a problem because you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. The second of all is getting to the root of the problem and understanding why are we doing these things we do. What are our motivations and why part of the process is understanding your purpose and who you are? That's why I love the whole behavioral personality. I'm one of those geeks that love those personality tests like, “Tell me which one you are.”
As a certified behavioral specialist, I love to look at people's motivations and that helps to give you a lot more empathy and compassion for different people. This makes you a lot more patient because you realize not everybody thinks like you. We are all wired differently. We have different motivations and different experiences but at the root of everything is we all have a capable brain. We can allow our circumstances to keep us stuck by our thinking because here's the other thing. We have a lot of the mindset, mental health and then we have physical health. You go to the gym, you want to get fit and you want to lose weight. Let's take that for example. Someone who wants to lose weight. Often that's a mindset problem because our mind is our engine of the body and it rules everything else.
Often our emotions are a mirror of our mindset. If your emotions are at the creek and you're feeling angry and annoyed, I always say to people, “What were you thinking a couple of minutes ago? What triggered that emotion because your body is going to show it.” Like when we say anxiety, we have sweaty palms, stomachache and headaches. Our body is physically screaming and saying, “Something's wrong. Alert. Deal with this through your feelings.”
What we often forget to do as humans are we forget to think about the thought process in the beginning because your mind is the software and your brain is the hardware. The actual brain is the physical element of it. A lot of the time we forget that we're connected and the emotions are connected to the brain. We often want to compartmentalize life and say, “I need to lose weight. I need to stop eating badly.” Yes and no. How do you feel about food? What are your thought patterns about food? Why do you feel like food is medication? Why do you feel like food is soothing for you? Because you remember when you were five years old that when mom and dad were fighting, eating ice cream made you feel better. You start to reverse engineer the reasons for your behavior. It's fascinating when you start to dig into this. I love the epiphanies and the a-ha that my clients have when they click on something and it's like someone's giving you a pair of glasses. You go around life thinking that's how life looks like until someone gives you a shock set of 20/20 vision goggles and you're like, “3D.”
There is another one of those apps. I had the Founder of On Purpose on my show and he's been doing this for years. OnPurpose.me is one of those tests and it helps you discover your purpose in two words. I got to the end of it because it compares this one versus that and it keeps bringing up some of the same ones. You're like, “I've seen that one but now there's something else that trumps it.” You just keep going through. In the end, mine was embracing grace. I got the chills when I saw it because I would have never put those two words on a page but when you face off the two sentences against each other and you end up there, he's like, “I've been doing this for a lot of years and it's interesting to get to those two words.”
I have to look that up because I love that stuff. Understanding purpose and quizzes and how the mind works because it is fascinating when you start to realize that once you get this awareness that this is something that there is no second chance in life whether it's about money, relationships or physical health. That cannot be changed by the way that you think about it. Some people would be like, I don’t agree with you.” That's a big statement but it is true because our mind might seem small but it directs everything. If you think about our mind is what generates our heart rate. There's a lot of subconscious things that happen without us. We don't have to tell our brain to tell our heart to pump blood through our heart to keep us alive.
There are different levels of our mind. Some of its nurture. Some of its nature but even those who've come from the familiar land of bad habits like alcoholism in family lines, you don't have to live that story. People can change the story in the trajectory of their lives and their children's lives. Were they willing to do the hard work? It's a lot of hard work and often painful. It's like if you're going to the gym, you can't just wish we could pop a pill and all of a sudden be healthy. We have to embrace the process which includes pain, persistence, being resilient, doing the hard things, practice and doing it again.
It's part of the process of embracing that if I want to change things, I have to do the work to rewire my brain. There's a South African psychologist, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Also, she has an accent like me. It's fabulous. I love her stuff. In her studies, she's done a lot of brain scans on people and her work confirms that it takes 64 days to make a new habit. We always thought 21. That's just getting awareness of the habit. If you think about it, 64 days, that's a good chunk of change to invest your time into making change. Even as you start to get the slight changes, you still have to continue after that.
Correct Mindset: You can be a millionaire and be miserable, or you can be poor and be miserable. It takes a mindset shift for you to start to see how you look at things.
Living in a society where everything is instant, microwavable and an app for this is, a click of a button and swipe here to do that. We're used to instant. None of us want to wait and go through the process. We want to skip through and get to the end but that's not how life works. Character is built through time, resiliency and patience. The world has finally realized we've had to slow down. We've been forced to due to the pandemic.
I think this is the best time we've ever been in the world to reinvent, pivot, change, embrace new opportunities and things have never been more easy and accessible and easier to start a business, write a book, create a product that there have ever been that they are now. By flipping the switch that flipping the script on how we think about things and realize that we are living in a day and age when we are truly blessed to have what we have. The opportunities enabled us to have that gratitude and then we start to look at life differently. Having an attitude of gratitude changes your day.
Mimika, last question and that is I've met a lot of mindset people in my life and I'm starting to consider myself which is like, “That's wild. I’m living into that one. That's a big shoe to fill.” A lot of positions it as, “It’s all in your mind. You can change your mind.” I understand you're a person of faith. How do you rationalize what God does for me and what I need to do for me? How do those things play together if you're a mindset expert and say, “You are the all-powerful person, all you have to do is follow these eight steps and you'll be good versus just give it all to God and you'll be good.” How do you rationalize those two concepts?
It's a very good question and this comes back again to their compartmentalizing things. We all want to put things in inboxes. Mental health is out there and you've got psychotherapy and psychologists which are great but they have a very limited set of tools because we are focused on one tiny little area. Then you have the faith part where it's almost like presumption and faith like, “God will do it,” but there is always a middle ground where it always come back to free will. God will not interfere with our free will. That's why he doesn't come and just save us and scoop us up and why he allowed Adam and Eve to do what they did because he's a gentleman. He will never override a free will.
In the case of mindset and also, I'm not a proponent of just think positive and everything will be great. That's one tiny little step but what are you responsible to do and where do you then allow God to step in? For me, having faith is important because we have a lot of called body coaches, which is getting you physically fit. We have mental coaches which are coaching and psychotherapy and all that but few of us address the spirit. We are made of three parts, our spirit which is who we are intrinsically then we have our soul which is our mind, our will and emotions and we have our body.
For many centuries and years especially this modern age we want to compartmentalize everything but we're one. Our whole body, this whole holistic idea isn't a new age thing. It's how we are built. That's part of what I do with my coaching. I don't just say, “Think positive and you're good,” because we have limits to ourselves. As human beings, we are fallible. We’re not all-knowing that God is. God knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows what's better for us than we think we know for ourselves.
When you get yourself out of the driver's seat and you say, “God, who have you made me be? Where I am intrinsically destined to be? Who am I at a DNA level?” You start to tap into that and you remove the people-pleasing, anger, all the masks and all of those things and you get back to how do I think about myself? That's when you get to the core of understanding how you flip things because a lot of times with mindset coaching it's not just thinking positive and then you'll feel great. It is about understanding the reasons why you think that, which comes down to those roots. When you learn and get rid of that mental list you become so much more effective that you can then make the decisions, you can change your circumstances but faith is at the core of it. You can't take God out of it because we are spirit, soul and body. I always say to people, “I can help you think better but you have to understand who you are at the core.” That's why it all comes together.
What an amazing conversation. I think we can name it as God is a Gentleman because I've never heard of put like that before. You probably have never said that before.
I say it all the time.
I've never heard it like that. It’s fabulous talking with you. If someone wants to get in touch with you because you've moved them to someone who might be able to help them in their situation, how would they get in touch with you?
The best place to find me is on my website which is MimikaCooney.com. I'm also busy writing book number nine which is Unstick Your Mind which is taking a lot of the concepts that I teach. I also have an eight-week masterclass and then I do that in code. We started together with a group of people and that also is launching in the fall. I have my podcast and a lot of resources. I have books. I've got different books in different genres but the Mindset Makeover is available on Amazon in the USA for free if you want to get the eBook. You can find all these links to all my resources on my website, MimikaCooney.com. Come and check it out.
Mimika, it’s fabulous having you in the conversation. I appreciate your time and sharing of everything that you've gone through in life. Keep on this track because you're destined to change the world and help change a lot of mindsets for the good.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for joining the show. We'll catch you on the next one. Cheers.
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About Mimika Cooney
Mimika Cooney is a mindset and business coach that empowers leaders and entrepreneurs get mentally unstuck to unlock explosive growth in their life and business!
As a certified John Maxwell coach, speaker, and trainer; she loves to empower purpose-driven individuals to transform their lives by shifting their mindset as they pursue growth.
She is a Certified Maxwell Method DISC Behavioral Analysis Consultant equipped with advanced training. She is working on her Brain Health Certification with the Amen University.
She is a Motivational Speaker, Author, and host of the “Mimika TV Podcast”. Huffington Post nominated her as one of "50 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow in 2017". Podcasting Magazine nominated Mimika amongst the “Top 50 Moms in Podcasting” in 2020. She is an Award Winning Photographer from 12 years spent as a portrait photographer.
After experiencing rejection, bullying and a broken childhood; Mimika spent years pursuing accolades and addicted to approval, validation and confidence. Then God stepped in to heal her hurts, change her heart and awaken a passion for helping others seeking their purpose in life.
Mimika loves to spark honest conversations, blaze a trail where others fear to tread, and infuse positivity wherever she goes. She is known for building community, creating connections and helping others share their story with passion and purpose. Her persistence and tenacity toward overcoming struggles has equipped her to empower others to do the same.
Mimika is a native of South Africa and naturalized citizen of the USA. She is a ferocious reader and insatiably curious. She enjoys watching soppy romantic comedies with her dashing husband of 25 years (who is her childhood sweetheart), and vacations at the beach with her 3 kids (ages 22, 20 and 11). Her husband is the co-owner of a SaaS company, so startups and tech talk often make for dinner time discussion.
When she is not dreaming up creative concepts, speaking, training, writing books or hosting her podcast; she will be found perfecting her spins on the ice as a competitive adult figure skater. As a personal challenge, Mimika took up skating as an adult at age 33. She has made it her mission to retrain her brain and muscle memory to learn this new skill. It goes to show that you can teach an old dog new tricks!
