Why Therapy Didn't Work And What Finally Did

What if everything holding you back came down to one belief?

Celebrity hypnotist and executive coach Tim Shurr joins Rising from the Ashes to share the transformational truth behind anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic worry and why you don’t need years of therapy to heal it.

From an unexpected hypnosis demo in college to over 16,000 sessions with high performers, Tim reveals the real root of suffering:

“Most people are trapped in one belief I’m not good enough.”

This episode cuts through surface-level fixes and goes straight to the subconscious stories shaping your success, relationships, and self-worth.

🎯 What you'll learn:

• Why traditional therapy can’t always reach the root
• How “little t” trauma wires lifelong self-doubt
• The moment Tim helped his dad quit smoking on his first try
• Why you’re just one belief away from the life you actually want

💡 This is Part 1 of our 2-part series with Tim. Stay tuned for the exact 3-step process he uses to create lasting breakthroughs in Part 2.

🎧 Listen now and start unlearning the lies keeping you small.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Tim Sir, Celebrity Hypnotist
• 3:27 From Anxiety to Life-Changing Hypnosis
• 8:18 Breaking Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs
• 11:36 Trauma and Core Belief Formation
• 15:46 Preview of Breakthrough Strategy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Rice in the Ashes. We're on another episode and we have an amazing guest with us today. I met him through LinkedIn and he's really truly inspiring. His journey has taken him over 20 years through personal development, through hypnotherapy, and now he serves other people in his knowledge to make their lives a lot better. Other people in his knowledge to make their lives a lot better. Please welcome my guest, tim. Sir, how are you doing and I hope I spelled or said your second name right, because I'm terrible with names, so if I didn't, please correct me and tell me off Tim, how are you doing? Tell the world, tell the world what you do and who you are, please.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Oh well, thank you for having me, Baz, yeah, Tim Sir here. Celebrity hypnotist and top executive coach. What I really do is I've spent my whole adult life trying to figure out how to get rid of anxiety, how to get rid of our suffering, our worries and fears that we're not enough, that we're not going to be able to figure out how to make our life the way that we want it out, how to make our life the way that we want it, how to get rid of all the chronic worries about money, about relationships, about just how to feel peaceful and happy in general, I found that traditional psychology. I went to school to become a psychotherapist. I think I was more psycho than therapist.

Speaker 2: 1:21

I got my degrees, but I found that traditional talk therapy just wasn't cutting it. You could be in therapy for 10 years and still not feel better from talking about your problems, and so I wanted to find something that went deeper. I tried every approach and tool that there was. I was very skeptical, so I had this prove it attitude. Right, If you're telling me that it's going to change your life, prove it. And so I got into hypnotherapy by accident.

Speaker 2: 1:50

That was never the plan, but a guest speaker came to our college and asked for a volunteer and I thought I'll cluck like a chicken. I just only knew it about the entertainment side of it. But within five minutes I felt a sense of peace that I had never really felt before and it went away after about a week because I was really good at doing anxiety, making myself insecure, although I thought it was happening to me because I didn't understand the power of beliefs and what drives us at an unconscious level. So that opened me up to this whole new world of what was possible and what's going on in the part of our mind that we're not really connected to very often. And now it's been 30 years of being in practice. I facilitated over 16,000 sessions, individual sessions and hundreds of groups and have discovered a tremendous amount of how to stop playing not to lose and how to start playing to win, and I guess that's what we're going to talk about today.

Speaker 1: 2:50

It is partly, but I love your journey and there's always a baseline. Why you started and I know you mentioned about it was a chance encounter with a hypnotist, but you mentioned earlier you were studying to be a traditional therapist and psychotherapy. My wife's been in that field for a very long time. She doesn't do it so much now but, like you, she drifted away from that and found something else. What was the draw from corporate normality of structured therapy psychotherapy into? I want to try something new. Was it a journey for you to self, to rediscover yourself, or was it to begin with completely serving other people?

Speaker 2: 3:39

Well, it was definitely for me. First I'd love to say it was altruistic and I was out there trying to save the world, but I was just trying to feel more confident. I had a therapist tell me that I had generalized anxiety disorder and I'm like, well, how do I have generalized confidence? Because that's what I wanted. And it felt like the only way I ever got that was through alcohol. And then you never have enough, and so I would end up throwing up on the side of somebody's house, you know, and then just terrible cycle of never feeling good enough and then acting stupid to try to feel better and trying to avoid pain by engaging in activities that cause more of it. And so when I got hypnotized that first time sitting in that class that volunteer it was like a counseling processes class and that hypnotist said I'm going to count from five down to one and you're going to close your eyes and feel more peaceful. And then that's exactly what happened. And then I could hear my classmates giggling and stuff. And he didn't make me do anything silly, he was just telling me that I was going to feel confident and that I could believe in myself, and things that I never really heard before I grew up in the 70ss, and everybody was very condescending, everybody cut each other down and very sarcastic Sarcasm was the rule of the day, and so, you know, we were always just kind of tearing each other down and thinking it was funny, even though it wasn't a lot of times and it cut too deep and forms beliefs in our mind that make us feel like maybe that's real. You know, maybe I am a loser, maybe I don't deserve anything, maybe I'm not, you know, maybe I am the sinner that everybody tells me that I am, which we are, but that doesn't mean anything except that you have opportunities to grow and and, uh, improve your self-love and self-acceptance and self-belief, which can transform your life. So, um, so it was that feeling of that wow, something is actually different here. I don't feel that knot in my stomach. I feel peaceful, I feel light, I feel more at ease, and that week he said I was going to feel confident. All week and all week I felt confident. I walked a little taller, I had a little more, a little bit more peace inside.

Speaker 2: 5:51

I didn't feel like I had to constantly chase approval. I didn't feel like I had to constantly be around somebody else because I didn't like me, and so I didn't want to be just by myself, so I didn't have to constantly be around other people and keep myself occupied, because when I was alone and quiet, you know, they say an idle mind or an idle hands. Idle hands are the work of the devil, but an idle mind is much worse. So when you're there by yourself and you have all these worries and fears and stress, and and I had all of that and so, so that feeling caused me to start looking for hypnosis schools, and I didn't know anything about that stuff, but I found one and it was about four hours away and they had a training class, but it was only for doctors. It was only for physicians, right. So medical doctors or PhDs, and of course I was a kid working on my bachelor's degree, and so I didn't qualify. But I called up Dr Gazella-Zuszkowski, who was the teacher.

Speaker 1: 6:50

I know that name. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:52

And so I called her up and somehow she said we're doing a nine day training and intensive and I'll let you in. And so I went there. It was the first time I was away by myself anywhere and it was like 12 hour days and there was about 10 of us and I was the only one that wasn't a doctor that was in the room. So I'm hanging out with successful people, which I never thought of myself that way, and and I just got my mind blown. I mean, it was just one amazing experience after another after another after another. I used to chronically bite my nails till they bled. I couldn't stop because, you know, when you're nervous you have that energy and it's got to come out some way, and so so I was always chewing my nails since I was a little kid, till they would bleed, and I had tried band-aids sitting on my hands, hot sauce, I mean you name it and I would still chew them anyway, especially when I got nervous, which is most of the time and she hypnotized me to not chew my nails anymore and it worked. And you know, to this day, I have strong, beautiful, healthy fingernails, to this day. You know, 30 something years later, 30, yeah, like 34 years later, maybe something like that, I'm still still not doing. It was incredible. So.

Speaker 2: 8:17

And then I went back into my school environment and the head of the department was making fun of me because I said what about hypnosis? How come you don't teach it here? And they're like well, we're behavioralists, we don't believe in that, we're more BF Skinner and that kind of stuff doesn't really exist anyway. And I'm like well, do you have any training in it? Because I just got back from nine days of watching it in a room full of physicians and it was amazing. He got mad at me. He's like no, a lot of people, especially in authoritative positions, are saying a lot of things and they have no experience in it.

Speaker 2: 8:51

A lot of people talk about how hypnosis doesn't work, but they've never been hypnotized and they don't have any experience. Now I see therapists who are saying that AI is unethical and we're not ever using it and they have no experience in AI. So you know, this is a common problem that people have, and so so I think it was that, baz, that it was that I actually experienced a change. I experienced what we call a transformation or a breakthrough, and then it happened again. And then it happened again, first for myself.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Then I started just reading scripts, like the first person that I hypnotized was my dad to help him stop smoking, and I read a script out of a book and he stopped smoking, which shocked both of us. And so then I started doing this with other people and I found that the hypnosis was working way better than the cognitive behavioral therapy approaches that I was using. And so when I'm getting personal results and then I'm helping other people get results, and it's just working better than all the other techniques. That's why I stayed with it. I don't care what works, I just want it to work.

Speaker 1: 9:59

Yeah, I love what you've just said there because what I find I've had a lot of conversations over my time doing these interviews and coaching but one thing is common and it's the people who have gone through the hard stuff the alcohol stuff, the, the self-loathing, et cetera, et cetera who make the best people, who make the best transformationalists, because they know what it's like on the other end of the tunnel when they're in. You're in personally, in the tunnel going. This is not who I am and from what you were saying earlier, the alcohol and the, the stem from somewhere, but you did something about it and, like you said, the belief systems that people have, um in the 70s, 80s are gen x. So 70s, 80s and into the 90s, we're different. We're a different model.

Speaker 1: 10:58

We were, we had most of us unknowingly had very narcissistic parents not their fault, just what it was but that transferred on to us. We were told we're not allowed, we're not worthy, we. Money grows on tree doesn't grow on trees bloody blah. Jesus is always watching you. All of these belief systems were transferred hereditary through to us. Is that something that you find with your majority of your clients? And is there one singular problem or challenge your clients have. That you come across time and time again.

Speaker 2: 11:35

Um, yes, so the biggest core unconscious belief that we all have is that I'm not good enough, and that feeling of not being enough drives the fear of failure, the fear of being rejected, the fear of being humiliated, the fear of being abandoned, the fear that makes us chase approval, the fear that caused us to to struggle constantly with money. You have it and then you don't. You have it and then you don't what we call the feast or famine model. We struggle with our relationships. It's like we walk around with empty cups and we want everybody else to fill us up, and then we fight with each other when nobody feels fulfilled, and and so we have to learn how to fill ourselves up. So we walk around with all these beliefs, and these beliefs come from the experiences that we go through, and those experiences I call them big T and little T traumas.

Speaker 2: 12:32

Right, so little T traumas or you get embarrassed. You know, in the class, in the front of the classroom, somebody says some hurtful comment to you, like an authority figure, a teacher, a parent, I mean. When I was going to school, strangers could hit you. You know, adult strangers could paddle you in school or throw you across the classroom, or not just your dad, but your buddy's dad could hit you. And then you come home and your dad would be like well, what'd you do, right? I mean, it's completely different model than than what we have now, where everybody's being wrapped in bubble wrap. We've gone, we've swung the other way Right and the other extreme. We need to find our middle, which is what we're always trying to do. So so when we go through those little traumas not being picked to be on the team, your best friend goes out with your girlfriend you know all those little things. It can really hurt us. And then you have the big T traumas, which are the physical abuse, the emotional, the sexual abuse, the verbal abuse, a death in the family, an illness. You know the unexpected things that happen to us. Sometimes an event is traumatic just because it was so unexpected, and so it forms a belief in our brain, and that belief in our brain drives the symptoms that come afterwards.

Speaker 2: 13:57

So when we talk about PTSD, for example, or or chronic PTSD, it's the beliefs that are underneath it all. You know the beliefs of am I evil? The beliefs of am I worthy? The beliefs of you know I wasn't, I shouldn't have been the one that survived. I mean all these beliefs that we end up having when people go through sexual assault. It's, you know, I'm tainted now, I'm dirty, I'm not good enough, right.

Speaker 2: 14:23

When we go through poverty, then we have this belief that I'm not deserving. That's where imposter syndrome comes from, you know. Then we struggle to stay focused, we procrastinate when it comes to relationships. If we feel like I'm not safe, then we become very jealous, we become very self-centered, and so we fight about everything because we're comfortable with the chaos more than the peace, even though everybody says they want peace. So these beliefs I found it wasn't just the experiences, it was the beliefs that were driving our behavior that mattered more than anything else. And so I became a belief hunter. Right, I find the beliefs, I upgrade them and we replace, we pull those mental weeds and we replace them with flowers, because self-love is the key.

Speaker 1: 15:17

I love that and I think what you've just said is going to resonate with a lot of people who are listening to this right now going well, that sounds like oh, that sounds oh. And it starts to make sense. Tim, I want to pause it here for part one. Is there anything you'd love to leave the audience with that can tickle their little brains? Before we end for part one and pause for part two, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:46

so I have discovered over these 30 years that you are one belief away from having a significant breakthrough in your life, and in the next episode, I'm going to teach you my three-step strategy for how to make those breakthroughs.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Tim, you're amazing and you're graceful. You actually shine. There's few people that I actually meet on these podcasts, but there's something about you. You glow and I really like that about you. So thank you For my viewers, for my listeners, thank you very much for joining us. Please like, subscribe and share the video. It may change somebody's life. From myself and from Tim. We'll see you on part two. Talk soon.