I Can Do Anything, I Am Amazing, I Am Success – James Shields
My grandmother was an exceptionally gifted medium, she could do things many would never believe, but she was too old by the time I arrived for me to witness her gift, I only heard about it in stories growing up. After she passed away I forgot about her abilities and never really thought about it. Until I met my wife, she was a Reiki master at the time I met her, and over time she taught me about Reiki and re-wakened in me an interest in spirituality, the energy system, chakra and I guess in the end, God. I was always agnostic growing up, never believing that the church got it right, that there was more to this planet than we could know, but not quite sure what that was. When I met Nicole she wasn’t very religious, but she had a strong belief in God and Jesus, just not so much a follower of the church. Over time I started to see the powerful impact her Reiki healing and other holistic practices had on other people and I started to have regular treatments and meditations. She made me specialist Bach flower remedies and helped me turn my life around. When we met I was in a dark place, I had gone through a bad break-up, my self-esteem was at an all-time low and to be honest I was suicidal. I had been through a string of failed relationships, I wasn’t really progressing in my career and I felt like I was destined to go round and round the merry-go-round of repeating the same cycles over and over. Opening my eyes to the possibilities of spirit changed everything, she helped me to see what I could achieve. She helped me to go to counselling, she supported me through everything. It was her guidance that helped me to deal with the abuse I’d received as a child, she helped me put myself back together stronger than ever, but it wasn’t just her influence that changed my life. At the same time, I started work for a company whose culture was that of the kaizen way. This was something they had adopted from Toyota, it’s the art of continual improvement. It was the perfect time for me as these two parts of my life came together to form a powerful medicine for the life I had been living. It was at this time I started really working on myself in every way. I read everything by Tony Robbins, Simon Sinek, Brendan Burchard and many many more, I read and read. Well, listened, because of my commute to work, I listened to audiobooks in my car. I learnt endless lessons on how to stop focusing on what I don’t want and focus on what I do want. It’s like manifesting misery and wondering why you’re always miserable? Energy flows where your focus goes after all. So I focused on making myself the best version of me. Instead of lamenting my situation and getting upset at my mistakes and faults I learnt from them, I saw the lessons, I pivoted my thinking to be more positive in the dark times, to see the silver lining where before I wouldn’t have. Since then I’ve become a Reiki Master, an Angelic Reiki practitioner, an NLP practitioner, a crystal healer and a fully qualified massage therapist. I’ve trained with shamanic practitioners to become part of the South American medicine wheel and a trainee curandero. I am a sound healer and a spiritual life coach. All of this I’ve trained to become, seeking teachings, readings and more from people all over the UK and now in Ibiza Spain. I am always looking for new teachers and guides to help me on my path, but most recently since becoming attuned to Angelic Reiki I have found my peace with God and the angelic realm, tapping into their 10th-dimensional wisdom for guidance and messages, this has been the most powerful transformation in recent years because the connection to source is so strong and so powerful, I literally talk with my healing angel regularly for guidance on all things, and it has helped me to become so much more than I ever thought possible. Now I want to use my experiences, my lessons, my mindset shift to help others to do the same. I have had a long and slow and peaceful spiritual awakening, it wasn’t fantastical like so often is reported, I was given support and guidance at every step, and I know that it was my grandmother helping with everything, her lightest touch has always been there throughout my entire life, only now do I see how blessed and protected I’ve been. I know that others don’t have that love and support, so I want to be one of the few male voices here to help others with that, especially other men, who don’t really know what to make of this kind of thing. That will be my gift back to the world, to help awaken the dreamers and support them on their journey.
Transcript: ( autogenerated )
James Shields: [00:00:00] Thank you. Well, um, thank you very much, Katie, for having me on your podcast today, I’m really excited to be here. Um, my name is Jay shields, and I would call myself a transformational.
Essentially my sort of my mission is to help all kinds of people. I guess you could say I’m more of a problem solver. I I’m, I’ve been on this path for the last five years and I use things like angelic Reiki, shamanic practices that are a lot of terror reading and what with pendulums, but more and more real-world things.
I use all the things like NLP, which is newer linguistic programming. Um, I used to do a sound healing. play a lot of instruments. Uh, my wife and I do soundbites. But I also do a lot of like life coaching and just trying to help people with our retreats here in Ibiza. in the last couple of years, my wife and I decided to take our holistic business over to the island.
because it’s very spiritual, beautiful place. Um, I didn’t know that before we came here, I thought it was [00:01:00] just a place to go for a good party, but it turns out that it’s actually very spiritual as well, which is kind of, which is very cool. Um, and it seems a bit of a Mecca for people to come for retreats for yoga.
basically my sort of mission is to, you know, help people to hack their lives, to become better versions of themselves. You know, I’ve, I’ve managed to do it for myself. And I really hope, um, that going forward, I’m going to be able to do it for a lot of other people. You know, I used to be a very negative person.
I used to be very, self-absorbed very arrogant, very angry at the world. but through the lessons that I’ve learned and the events that have happened to me and through meeting my amazing wife, um, I’ve learned to become more than I ever realized I could be. so that’s really brought me right down this path.
I never quite understood. People who are doing that. The whole self-help thing once upon a time, you know, it’s always been there. It’s always been, you know, personal growth. They used to call it and all sorts, you know? I never really understood it until about five, six years ago. [00:02:00] Um, I started working for a company and their ethos was the Kaizen way.
And if you have familiar with Kaizen, it’s a, it’s a Japanese. Which basically just means continual improvement. And it was adopted by a Toyota who, until Tesla turned up where the biggest car manufacturer in the world, and they had this continuous improvement, everything that they did. So when you think about it, in terms of a call factory, it was simple things like, you know, Voting and engine takes like an hour every day and they can just change one of the processes by maybe putting, you know, a box of nuts, like five centimeters, closer to the guy building it shapes five minutes off the building time.
They’re not the hundreds of motors that they build. They save hundreds of hours and blah, blah, blah. And that is incense, like sort of that’s why Kaizen was built for the Toyota. But then that sort of permeated into the business world, that’s permeated into like the [00:03:00] self-help mindset that I developed from being in that company.
And it helped me to start looking at every little process that I did and all the things that I do and understanding how you can just make small changes to have a huge compound improvements over time. Interestingly, there’s a fan. That’s the book called atomic habits that I highly recommend you read, because it’s exactly the same principle of that.
1% incremental improvements in all aspects of your life will have a compound, impact to make it just generally better. So before, yeah, it it’s, it’s quite amazing like loads of different things. I mean, there’s a fantastic, The story in the book about how the British cycling team hadn’t won a medal in years, like nothing they’ve been just not even on the radar of winning anything and the got, and they got a new coach in, and his ethos was 1% improvement in everything, even down to like the cotton they use to make the [00:04:00] underpants, you know, and the way that they went to sleep there, the food that they had.
This, everything, it was 1% improvement and everything. And the next time they went to the Olympics, they cleaned up, they took out, they took home loads of metals. They started winning the tour de France. They were, it was amazing. So, um, it really does have real world impact that just these 1%, but it’s all about building the habits.
When we, as people try and change, we always try and. Through like the, a big, huge change, like, oh, it’s new year, new me. I’m going to stop drinking for the whole of January and I’m going to lose weight and I’m going to go to the gym. But by week three, everybody stopped going to the gym. People are drinking again.
You know, we just can’t build huge life changes overnight. It just doesn’t happen. But small incremental change can happen. It’s as simple as just, you know, if you have three sugars in your coffee, have two next. And then in a couple of months, try and get down to one and then [00:05:00] maybe none. That’s exactly what I did with tea.
I used to have two or three. I was going, I got really bad once I was having like four, four sugars in my tea when I was really like the young and foolish. Um, and eventually I just got back to, I got to nothing. I don’t have any sugar in my team, my coffee, nothing. I just, over time got used to taking it out and not, and having less.
And for me, like before all of this, before I went on my journey, before I started to believe in myself, I, if I met my wife, I was in real robot. You know, I’ve been through really bad breakup with a fiance at the time. One of my best friends was killed in a work-related accident. And, you know, I was, I was good at my job, but I was in a position where, because I was good at what I did, they put me onto, uh, cause I’m, I’m a marketeer.
They put me on some marketing channel, which was dying, which was mailing. Like nobody really [00:06:00] opens mailers anymore. There’s not really any future for it. So although I was good at it and it was making it better. There was no future. And I basically felt like I was a complete zero, like rock bottom. I can remember, you know, many times thinking that there was just no way I was going to improve my life.
And I actually considered taking my own life quite a lot in those days. And then I met my wife
and she opened my eyes to so much. No. She helped me to find a new job. She helped me to heal my in a child’s, you know, when I was a kid, I’ve had some abuse from a, uh, a boy at school and she helped me to heal that she helped me to go to counseling, to overcome that she helped me to see the power within and to learn to really love myself.
Um, she really supported me through my darkest days, and that was really, I can’t express enough how much he did for. one day I just started to believe, it sounds really silly. There’s [00:07:00] like, you know, I read a lot of books where people have this epiphany moment or this shining light that comes down. But for me, it was just, I dunno, one day I’d have started to believe.
I had a purpose and I started to listen when she talked about Reiki. Like my wife is a Reiki master. She’s been doing Reiki for almost 20 years. Um, she’s super into God and Jesus and religion. Well, not religion, but more into guidance, self. And I, as a kid, I was a proper atheist. I was completely against any religion, but over time I became what I call what is called agnostic because I was at the opinion.
You can believe that there’s more to this world. I believe that there is a lot more to this world, but I didn’t know. I didn’t think religion really had it pegged. There’s too many different religions with too many different, nuances that are all basically the same. It’s just a different name for that same thing.
And this is the problem. And that’s, for me, that was why I was always of the opinion that maybe, you know, there is [00:08:00] something out there, but. All of these old books, they don’t really, they don’t really do it for me, which is why I became eventually spiritual from following my wife’s teachings, because spirituality is more inner work.
It’s not about insight and being, being true to yourself. So, um, It really was something that I started to listen to her and I started to read what she was, books that she was suggesting. And, um, I ended up getting attuned to Reiki and that really changed my whole life. I really can’t express enough how good Reiki is as an energy healing.
Because when I first met her, I was, I was like, yeah. Okay. Give me some Reiki. Yeah, that’s the manager. But I, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t, I’ll be honest. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t notice anything. I, I have clients who like, see these great visions and they feel moving energy and all these wonderful things, but I never did when I was being healed and I persisted with it.
I was like, yeah. Okay. Okay. I’m not feeling anything, but I’ll go. [00:09:00] Maybe it’s not perceptible. So maybe the whole thing with Reiki is it goes where it needs to go. You know, you might have a headache, but actually you’ve got some other pain or something inside you this worse. And then as he goes there to fix that, you know, it will last and my headache on well it’s because it went somewhere else where it was needed.
So eventually I got, uh, attuned to Reiki and that really changed everything. Like I, I could actually feel physically feel the energy in my arms and it was coming out and see colors and it really opened my whole world to all the possibilities of crazy stuff. So she really helped me. Yeah. She really helped me to sort of take control and, and, and at the time I didn’t really laugh at anything.
Oh, I might do like a fake laugh at a lot of stuff, but never actually a real true laugh. And she used to say, you need to find your laugh. And with her help, I found it.
KT Maschler: That’s perfect. Okay. So outside, obviously I love, [00:10:00] love, love that reflection on your wife that is seriously beautiful. Um, who is kind of like a big inspiration in your life, or where do you go to when you’re kind of lacking inspiration?
James Shields: Okay. So, um, I’m a bit of a cheat when it comes to inspiration. I’ve, I’ve already mentioned my wife, but she is, she is where I find most of my inspiration. She is hugely inspiring. I know it’s a bit of a cliche. Um, but she, she really is my best friend and amazing woman. Like she’s given me more than she’ll ever now.
And she’s constantly giving, not just to me, but so everybody. and I truly believe that she’ll become one of the great superheroes of tomorrow. She’s going to be giving so much back to the world in the years to come. Uh, she’s fantastic. when it comes to really, if I feel uninspired that she didn’t want to come, when I say I cheat, I use a NLP techniques.
Um, do you know much about NLP or neuro-linguistic programming?
KT Maschler: Few things?[00:11:00]
James Shields: Okay. Well, think of it. Like there’s a famous psychology experiment called Pavlov’s dogs. And in this experiment, the psychologist, he, every time he fed his dogs, he’d ring a little bell and it would make the dogs salivate. So eventually by just ringing the bell, the dogs would know they were going to be fed and they would salivate.
So neuro-linguistic programming and that’s called that’s good conditioning, classical conditioning. Uh, newer linguistic programming uses classical conditioning techniques to allow you to sort of hack your mind to achieve anything. So if you imagine you can ring a bell to make a dog like salivate, you could ring a bell to make yourself happy.
You could ring a bell to make yourself laugh. You can ring a bell to make yourself depressed. You can link, bring a balance to give yourself inspiration. Motivation. All you have to do is what’s called an anchor. That feeling. To that stimulus or trigger. So you usually within LP, you use several things. So you use like a color, you use a [00:12:00] special word or a sound and you use like a gesture because then all those three things together, help really anchor in.
So, I mean, I bet there’s times when you’ll hear a song and it’ll remind you of like some instance when you’re a kid or something that happened to you or some way you were maybe even a smell might do this. Our senses have these triggers that really take us back to places. So what I do is if I want to be really, truly inspired, I think of a time when I was truly inspired and I anchor that to a gesture.
So I’ll have like a pinch maybe between my thumb and my index finger. And I’ll say, you know, white rabbit or something like that is a completely random word, a color and a gesture. And it links back to that anchor. Of pure inspiration. And I do that a lot and that’s really helped me through not just feeling inspired, but feeling motivated.
I mean, this is the one thing I hear a lot at the moment is how do you beat procrastination? How’d you beat [00:13:00] like the motivation and you can literally anchor a feeling of real strong motivation. And just do that when you feel unmotivated and even just changing your posture, sustaining, sitting up straight and putting a shoulders back, having that power stance, all of these things come together and it’s all NLP, it’s all your brain chemistry, helping to give you that boost that inspiration, that power, that motivation really gets you through.
KT Maschler: Perfect. I love that. What are some other tools that you use? You mentioned Reiki, um, to live like intentionally and just like tools and resources that you kind of keep you mindful.
James Shields: Well, as the artist, so many, I’m such a cheat. I, at the end of the day, it’s all about life hacking. But yoga is a huge one.
I try and do yoga every morning and after yoga or I do like a 10, 15 minute meditation, um, [00:14:00] That if I don’t do that, my day is off, I find is such a way to ground and start your day and have focus and each yoga session as well. You set that intention for today. I want to be doing this. This is what I need to achieve.
And even, another way to take that to another level. Because I have a daily planner, I’m like a daily book. And in that planner asks you a few simple questions. Like, what do you want to achieve today? What are your top three goals? Who do you need to inspire today? Who do you need to be there for today?
If something’s going to trip you up today, what could it be and how would you fix it? It’s a great book by a guy called Brendan Burchard. I don’t know if you’re aware of Brendan is got a fantastic book. Um, go the high-performance habits and he’s got a, a high-performance daily planner. I absolutely swear by and highly recommend you go and get one.
It’s fantastic. It’s just a series of prompted questions and it really helps set the day up. So if you do that and then go and do your yoga and focus on what you know needs to be your [00:15:00] intention for the day, it’s like super, it’s like super powerful in terms of really setting your mindset and getting your neurochemistry all aligned.
It really works.
KT Maschler: Oh my gosh. I am totally going to go check that out right after this side is totally up my alley. do you have any like, kind of go-to mantras that you like kind of repeat on a day-to-day basis?
James Shields: Actually, I actually do. I’ve actually got it on my phone. I created this, um, a while back and I got it as like the, the, the, the screensaver on my phone.
Oh yeah. It’s disappeared. I, um, I’ve always struggled with my ego. I’ve always, it’s always been one of those things. Like, you know, the slightest criticism and I get like Superfly angry and my self confidence goes. So one of these mantras that I created for myself, uh, was, I am calm. I am cool. Nothing phases me.
I can do anything. [00:16:00] I am amazing. I am success. It’s a really nice little statement and people always go, yes, but isn’t it. I am successful. Or, you know, but I just like the, I am success because I want to embody success in everything that I do. Not just being successful in something. I want to be the embodiment of success.
So that’s my little mantra. I have it. Yeah. Screensaver on my phone. I try and say it to myself at least once or twice a day, just to try and keep to that. And it’s great for medic meditating with this. You
KT Maschler: absolutely glowed when you said that. That was so cool. Okay. So, um, any last piece of advice that you have for somebody who say was in this position you were a couple of years ago, or just in that like negative mindset that kind of needs help kind of pull out of that or, you know, in that situation?
James Shields: Definitely. I think.[00:17:00] One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that your pain is your goal. Your pain is your gift, the lessons, and the trials and tribulations that you go through. Now, although you may not feel that they are helping you because you know, you’re in a dark place and things are pretty dark, but they will eventually become.
So, what you have to learn to do is you have to learn to draw from within to accomplish your goals, because there are so many external factors in life that mold you as you grow. And many of them have real detrimental impacts on your development and your general happiness, you know, but the focus I found is that if you truly look within to understand what you want to be, who you want to be, and you know what they call it, your wife.
I don’t understand what that is. And then if you build your ethics, your morals, your opinions, and everything around to support that, why doing all your happiness from it and upholding that moral criteria. It means that if you always stay [00:18:00] true to who you are and your moral criteria in every situation, and you’ve pull all your happiness from only that source.
And nothing external ever help, uh, will ever be able to depress you. It will never be able to beat you. You’ll never be able to affect you. And essentially you will be unstoppable. It’s not, it’s not easy. You know, it sounds a very simple statement to make. Oh yeah. You know, because you know, we drive, we derive a lot of happiness from our friends.
Our relationships are. Are things we have to fill our lives with all these things, but oh, you know, if your house was to burn down tomorrow, you’d be devastated. But if you only get your happiness from being the person you really are and all of that stuff, if it were to go tomorrow, you yes, of course you’ve missed it and you’d be sad, but you wouldn’t lose your happiness because your happiness is drawn from your internal.
And I’m constantly striving to try and embody that thinking because it’s very hard because I brought a lot of happiness from my wife, my dogs, my [00:19:00] house, my life, all these things, but I always try to stay true to who I am and to my ethics. And that really in itself is where you can drive a lot of.
KT Maschler: I love that so much.
I will definitely, I definitely need to take a little bit of the happiness, my animals give to me and draw that into myself. Um, but yes. where can people find you contact you? If someone wanted to come visit you out in a Baeza? Wha how would they contact you or find.
James Shields: Yeah. Yeah, he’s got a couple of different ways.
You can find us on our website, which is, um, holistic serenity, uh, Cody, UK, or.org. Um, you can find us on social media. We’ve got a Facebook page, our Instagram, uh, the best one is probably holistic underscore serenity underscore limited, which is my wife’s profile, but that’s our main and this extremity profile.
Yeah, come, come find us. Come say hello, can follow us. And, uh, Ask me [00:20:00] anything you like, I’m always open to helping as many people as possible.
KT Maschler: Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time today. That was amazing.
James Shields: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. I was really excited as well. That’s cool. That’s really, really enjoyable today, Katie. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I love what you’re doing and love your podcasts.
KT Maschler: Thank you so much. Have an amazing evening, I guess, evening for you.
James Shields: Yeah.
Yes, it is. Morning. Well, have a great day. Thank you so much.
