Creating Your Personal Awakening with Bill McKenna

Do you ever feel stuck like you're living your life on autopilot? Are you ready to shift into high gear and reach the success you so richly deserve? Welcome to the Play Big Movement podcast. I am your host, Sharon Lecter, entrepreneur, business strategist, and bestselling author.

Playing big is not about settling for good enough or being comfortable. It is about reaching your highest potential and achieving your greatest success. Join me in my Play Big Movement as I interview top experts in business, money, and entrepreneurship, all ready to serve you and to help you play big, be number one in your field, live your legacy, and create maximum impact. Hello, everyone.

Welcome to this segment of the Play Big Movement podcast. I am Sharon Lecter, your host, and today I get to introduce a new friend. I met him a few weeks ago at a speaking event I did in California and had an opportunity to hear a little bit about what he does, and it was intriguing me. I always tell you what you want is somebody to say, tell me more.

Well, that's exactly what I said to him. So I invited him to come here today to tell me more, but to let you sit and listen too, because it's kind of an interesting concept. So Bill McKenna, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, what a joy.

It was so great to meet you. The entire, by the way, the entire crowd loved her, as everybody here does. It was really, it was great to be in the room. Well, we're going to talk about your Cogno movement issue.

But what I like to do with my guests, I always like to start by asking you about Little Bill. How did you get started and get to this point? Oh, my gosh. Wow.

I didn't expect that question. Well, Little Bill, a little Bill basically was brought up not in a, I would, well, I would call it a traditional Irish upbringing. We had alcoholism, mental illness, you know, beatings and, you know, that sort of thing. Anyway, I make fun of it, but it helped to shape me and my 12 other siblings into entrepreneurs and also a real dynamic group.

13 of you. Wow. Yeah, there was quite a few of us. That's exciting.

And so how did you get into this? Because this is a relatively recent initiative you started writing, right? Tell me a little bit about Cogna Movement and how you came to have that as a passion. Well, I spent the first part of my life very much involved in entrepreneurial aspects of high tech and payment processing.

And we had a pretty good sized exit, a few, maybe I think 330 million or so. And we were very good at what we did. It was a long, hard road to get there, but we got an exit. And after the exit, well, it was right about the time of the exit, which was 2008, right before the crash.

interestingly, weeks before, they never would have closed. But right afterwards, the market crashed. We got our deal done. But right after that, I had basically a complete change in my life.

It went from the entrepreneurial aspects to a real desire to help people with really the underlying core issue. What is going on emotionally, physically, mentally with them, their brains and their nervous system? Eventually, over a decade ago, me and my business partner, Liz Larson, started Cognomovement. And it started with an idea.

And I had gone over to one of my friends' house. He asked for a ride to the airport And I said well I do it but you got to try this weird idea I have And all I I don need to know what your problem is but I just need you to focus on your big problem that you have And, and I'm going to throw you this ball and we're going to, we're going to do some physical exercises while you focus on the problem. And then we'll, uh, what we'll do is, uh, then I'll give you a ride to the airport, see how it goes.

Well, we did the exercise. I didn't say word one. I just said, focus on your problem. And we did this physical exercise where we caused information to move from the left hemisphere, the creative side to the logic side.

There's a way to physically do this. and what ended up happening is he he we were there in this session and session was only like 20 minutes but he said my after a minute or two my belly button is hot and then and then i was like that's crazy i've never heard of that before and he was sweating profusely but i was just like uh no big deal uh you know you're i i i'm just acting like it's normal but i've never seen this before a few minutes later he was like I'm having a heart attack I and I was like I don't think he is I just keep going focus on the problem and then and then he then he started choking a few minutes later and he was like I can't breathe and I said how's your heart he was like my heart's fine and then and then he a few minutes later he felt it in his head and and then it was gone And I gave him a ride to the airport and he said, you know, this big problem in his life, he couldn't feel it anymore.

It didn't exist. I didn't know what the problem was until six months later, him and his wife came over to my house and they were just talking about, hey, how are things going? Well, we bought three properties in Kanab, Utah, and they cash flow day one with 10% down. And they were making this huge margin and paying down the mortgage on those properties.

Three of them, they were all rented day one with 10% down. I was like, oh my God, that's not possible in California. that is never never never never and then he and then he said well and then i got the idea like i'm going to i have this garage area i'm going to create a one room apartment out of it and we did it and we started renting it and then oh i started a bee business and we're making money at that he was making all kinds of money it's a pain down the mortgage and and and his wife chimed in and He said, well, you know, all this became possible after you did that weird thing with him.

And I was like, what was the problem? What did we work on? I don't I didn't even know what the problem was. And he said, well, he's coming up on retirement age.

And the only thing that he could think of as a solution, because he's in the military industrial complex, you know, and, you know, fixed income. And he didn't really have that much money saved. And he said, you know, my plan was to get a trailer and go to the desert and homestead a piece of dirt out in the desert, you know, like real, like, you know, that kind of the whiskey and the screen door and tumbleweeds, you know, not a good lifestyle. And I was, and his wife said, yeah, it's like all, everything opened up after that.

And he said, yeah, you know, I, my wife had mentioned these things to me in the past. Like, you know, we could buy property in Utah and it'll cash flow and it, you know, not possible. Couldn't think of it. But the, the emotion was so strong in him.

It created an electric fence of his life. He couldn't go beyond the electric fence. Couldn't see it literally when it was right in front of him. But today now, you know, it's a decade later and he's got more money than he spends every month.

Happily retired for many years. And he said it's growing and growing and it's been great. I love that. That wonderful You wrote a book called The Only Lesson Tell me about the book Oh the book The Only Lesson Well that was about the journey after the exit I had, for lack of a better term, kind of an awakening, if you will.

You know, my prior life was very much, you know, how much can I amass? You know, it was all about financial. And, you know, I had a couple of helicopters, a yacht, beach house, you know, and lots of other toys and stuff. And that was probably the most important thing to me.

And, you know, I was pretty much serving myself. and the awakening was around being able to help others and to ultimately to love. And helping others is just a way to love them. Well, in essence, what you're doing with this movement is exactly that, helping others.

So for the people that are watching and listening and they might be rolling their eyes, but maybe they have those blocks and that electric fence around their being. What's your recommendation? How can they find help? What should they be doing?

Well, how do I know? You know, everybody's watching this here and they have some level of financial literacy. That this financial literacy, you've been helping people for decades and really good at it. What we're talking about is financial safety.

So what do I mean by financial safety is you may clearly know what to do, but maybe you do it and you get success and then you self-sabotage. Maybe you don't put the effort in to follow through or something else that you end up self-sabotaging or not being comfortable when a large amount of money comes in, or to be able to even hear the opportunity, like my friend couldn't even hear it. But the work that we're talking about is to find the part of your brain and your nervous system that has a feeling.

That feeling creates the electric fence. The way that you can do this to know is actually through your eyeballs. Your eyes are directly connected to your brain and your spine. And when you have a feeling like that's not so good for you, it'll show up in your eyes.

If you roll your eyes around, like in a big circle, I love that what you said is they're rolling their eyes. Roll your eyes, you're looking at different parts of your brain. When we look down, for example, everybody knows if I showed up and I was looking down, you're like, oh, they're looking down, they're sad, or they're disconnected, they don't want to. Everybody knows this because it's this part of the brain that is associated with sadness.

And there's other parts of the brain, like looking up here, that's associated with what they call the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is all about inspiration. It's about new ideas. It's about higher levels of thought, thinking about others, thinking about the future in a positive way.

Um, when they, when they did brain scans, they found one thing in common across everyone that it was like, like Sharon, you are perpetually positive, chronically positive. And if we did a brain scan on Sharon, I guarantee you right here, about an inch into the skull in the brain, that area of her brain is lit up like a Christmas tree. Now, there's a way that you can start to exercise this physically through your eyes. And it be a place that when you exercise this there a place with your eyes that may feel a little uncomfortable And with these exercises you can do, we have a free exercise for you at the end.

I'll give you the link. But it'll start to exercise that part of your brain and you will find that you have more positivity. you can actually hear those new ideas like my friend who couldn't hear it, even though he was being told. The link for that, by the way, is Cognomovement.

com forward slash gateway. There's a free class for you there. Wonderful. Wonderful.

And they can find out more about your other products and services at that same link, right? Yes. Super, super. So what are you most passionate about today?

What are you working on right now? So what I'm most passionate about is really two things. The first is that I'm most passionate about working with what we call VIPs. So these are the entrepreneurs out there that really want to progress.

But they may have had something in their life happen, like a divorce, like a concussion, like a downturn in the market that they lost a lot. But they still have that desire to perform. Or they have a great company. Maybe they're doing eight or nine figures and they're ready to go to nine to 10 figures.

So those are my VIPs that I work with on programs over six to 12 months, and we get their brains running optimally for everything that comes up. They're raising money. They, you know, they're planning the exit. They're planning an acquisition.

All of the things are all associated, whether it succeeds or fails, on what's going on with them, removing those electric fence so they can see clearly. So I love that work. I'm very passionate about it. We have several billionaires that are on doing the work.

And it brings me to tears because it's not one aspect of their life. it's all aspects of the life their relationships their finances their health everything is connected with what's going on in the brain so if we fix one thing and other things get fixed so it's a it's a wonderful thing the other thing that i'm very passionate about is the uh getting it out to the world. We have programs for practitioners that are out there and we certify them globally so that they can go out and do this work as well.

It's about a six-month program. Wonderful. Wonderful. Intellectual property, creating that certification.

That's great. Love it. Creating assets. Remember my favorite word, assets.

And successful businesses solve problems and serve needs. And that's exactly what Bill's doing, helping people get rid of those blocks. I love it. So Bill, you're going to hang in with me.

We're going to do another interview for the private Facebook group for the Play Big Movement. But thank you so much for being here. And again, tell us again what the website connection would be. Okay.

For the free class, It's cognomovement, that's like cognitive, C-O-G-N-O-M-O-V-E-M-E-N-T dot com forward slash gateway. Perfect. I love it. Well, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you, Bill. And thank you all for watching and listening to this episode of the Play Big Movement podcast. Make sure you join the Play Big Movement so you can see the rest of Bill's story. Take care.