Taking mental performance to the next level is something that creative professionals can only wish for, but it can be achieved with the right technique. Known as the “Celebrity Savior,” Robert Grigore helps actors, musicians, professional athletes and entrepreneurs achieve just that through EMDR, a breakthrough method of psychological processing. Robert is a certified EMDR therapist and the author of You NEED Therapy.: EMDR: Real People, With Real Problems, Getting Real Help. Join in as he talks to Chris Larsen about his own experiences and how they allow him to empathize with his clients. He also shares how EMDR has allowed him to help his clients go from months of therapy to only hours.

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Achieving Your Next Level Of Mental Performance With The “Celebrity Savior” Robert Grigore

You can get your free copy of our book at NextLevelIncome.com. This show is sponsored by MFIN Summit. That’s Multifamily Investor Nation Summit coming up January 21st through the 23rd. It’s a three-day information-packed event for multifamily investors with over 1,000 attendees. We’re going to have over 50 speakers. You’ll hear from experts about finding deals, raising capital, underwriting strategies, selecting markets, and so much more. Go to MFINSummit.com to grab your ticket and use promo code NEXTLEVEL to get $100 off. Whether you’re new to multifamily investing or a seasoned investor, you don’t want to miss this event. Join me at the Multifamily Investor Nation Summit in January 2021.

On this show, we have Robert Grigore. Robert, AKA The Celebrity Savior, specializes in eliminating anxiety, fear, depression, and more in as little as a single weekend. Robert is a certified EMDR therapist. He’s a speaker and the author of You NEED Therapy.: EMDR: Real People, with Real Problems, Getting Real Help. He also runs an exclusive private practice dedicated to freeing top creative professionals from the unconscious prisons that sabotage their extraordinary legacies. I’m excited to have you on, Robert. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m excited to be here. Thank you to the readers as well for me having me.

We first met in 2020 during an event called PodMAX. We brought a bunch of podcasters together. When I learned about you, I was like, “I have got to have this guy on the show,” because we talk about investments and money all the time. I had a guest on talking about how to save taxes. This is about life and living life and living your best life and being happy. I had to look up what EMDR is. Maybe you can tell the audience a little bit more about what that is and what you do.

Most people want me to explain that. It was awesome meeting you at PodMAX and I’m happy to be here too. Look how that all worked out. EMDR stands for Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a psychological processing therapy. What we do is we’re accelerating the brain’s natural healing process to process through trauma, which is stored maladaptively in the right hemisphere of the brain mostly. By doing something called bilateral stimulation, we’re accessing both hemispheres of the brain so it’s alternating fashions to access the human’s entire brain to work through a past event, which is the basis for your distress whether that be anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, whatever it might be. It’s all because earlier trauma that started long time ago. We can even get into that if we want to, but in a nutshell, that’s what it is. It’s an accelerating form of psychological processing.

I appreciate you sharing that. It’s one of these things. It’s becoming more mainstream. I watched the series, Billions. They have this therapist on staff to help people have better performances. Athletes now, they have coaches that help work through this and keep them there. When you’re talking about a game of seconds or inches or millimeters, it’s important. Who do you focus on working with?

I focus on our top creative professionals. The obvious candidates are celebrity actors and musicians, but also professional athletes because they have to be pretty top form in order to do their work, as well as CEOs. Entrepreneurs have an incredible amount of creativity that has to go into being an entrepreneur. Those are the main people. I work sometimes with coaches and others as they find me, but that’s who I’m after, who I like to work with me.

I’m part of a group called Strategic Coach. The coach in the group that we meet every quarter, he says, “Life is an energy game and business is an energy game.” It was that light bulb moment where it’s like if you don’t bring your A game every day, you’re not going to succeed. They said you don’t have to be on top of every day. They talked about how business and entrepreneurs are like athletes. You said it. You’re hitting all these people, actors, I didn’t even think about it. They got to be so on.

You have to be dialed in that top form or else you can’t perform.

Robert, tell me why did you go into this field. What led you in this field? I don’t need this therapy because everybody needs therapy. How did you come to this? For me, a numbers guy that likes to stare at spreadsheets, crunch and process, it’s fascinating.

I appreciate that. There’s 50% of the population that are mostly left brain. That means your default, your more dominant side. You are more analytical, logical. I’m definitely more right brain. There are two journeys. One journey is how I found EMDR and then one journey is how I found psychotherapy. The psychotherapy part is important because when I was growing up, I didn’t know I wanted to be a therapist. I wanted to be creative. I had a natural flair for arts and I express myself that way. The messaging that I got from my parents was, “Robert, you can do anything that you want, but it has to pay the bills.”

Musicians don’t make a lot of money unless you become world famous. Actors, it’s hard to get that job. You best go into medical field like my father is a doctor or cousins who are lawyers, a good handful of them. That was based on my parent’s scarcity mindset. I love them to death. They have the right intentions for me and they want my health and happiness, but they were unconsciously squashing my creativity. I went the complete other direction as a lot of kids do. I doubled down in my creative endeavors. I got my outlets with painting and drawing. I used to do comic books. That was my only outlet emotionally because I didn’t have a lot of guidance of what to do with my emotions.

I was struggling all the time. I’ve been suffering with anxiety, depression and addictions far before I even knew what they were. I was able to cope through that stuff with my art. That was the first thing that helped me with it. I didn’t even know what was going on though. I ended up finding psychotherapy as a total whim. I went into my own grad following my best friend because I was afraid of school. I wasn’t doing good in my high school. My grades were not great like one A-minus, maybe a couple of Bs. I ended up going into Graphic Communication Management, which is how to run a printing press, all but a dead field now. I’m glad I dodged a bullet there.

It was working, but it wasn’t going as fast as possible. On a whim, I went to a training for EMDR. I almost left first lunchbreak because I thought it was total hogwash. It was ridiculous that somebody can wave their hand in front of somebody’s face and all of a sudden, they’re feeling better. That’s crazy. I almost left and I thought Robert you’re spending $2,000 or whatever for the training. You get your money’s worth. Get the credits for your college. They need to see it.

Thank God I did it because research study after study, after case study, after story for my trainer, I started to, “It’s sounding like it makes sense now. There’s 30-plus years of research behind it. I’ll try it.” I tried it on my clients. For one of my clients, in three weeks, we were through his trauma instead of the last 2.5, 3 years that we’ve been spending, banging our head against the wall, but this works. It’s powerful stuff.

I’ve been on a couple of other shows I’ve guested on and we’ve talked about my experience. I like to say that F-upped is normal. We all have our challenges and our experiences. They affect how we go through life, which is what you were talking about. I sought out therapy earlier in my life dealing with the loss of my father, my best friend, and my mother and some different things. I realized that I was sabotaging some relationships that I was having. It helped me come to a realization of what I could focus on and that was traditional therapy. I hear you say you can accelerate this process. To me, that sounds awesome because it’s a challenge, busy professionals sitting down for an hour or two a week. How can you accelerate that process versus traditional therapy?

I appreciate that. First, I feel like I have to comment on thank you for sharing that with your audience because it does take people like you that are in this position, that your voice is reaching people. To know that you’ve gone through therapy, you’ve gone through troubles and you’re normalizing it for everybody. This is one of the best messages I could possibly hear. Thank you for that. To answer your question, how do I accelerate it quickly? There are three methods to it, three pillars of work.

Number one, it’s me. You’re getting me. There’s so much that I’ve been through in my life. I like to think that I’ve been through 10% of what everybody can experience in their lives. We didn’t even get to half of those stuff that I’ve been through. Everybody’s got their experience, but because of the range of experiences that I’ve had allows me to empathize with my clients on a deeper level, it’s allowed me to fine tune my intuition so I can have somebody who’s sitting in front of me now. Within 20, 30 seconds, I can tell exactly what it is that they’re struggling with. That’s important because you need to have a therapist that’s gone through something similar to some degree or has gone through their own work. That’s the other thing too, I’ve had about a decade of combination of therapies, EMDR.

One of them lately now, thank God, hence talk therapy. All of that together has been helpful for me to work all of my own stuff because I am human. It’s why a lot of therapists get into this job because we have our own issues to work through. What happens, the real magic is the EMDR where once we have exactly the root issue, the sequence in the brain identified as to what it is. It’s childhood environment and it’s going back further than that. Your parents’ parents and their parents’ parents.

Generationally, we’re talking. There are all kinds of things that get passed down. We’re identifying the main reasons why that person’s feeling the way they are. After we’ve solidified that negative belief system, that’s what it is. It gets stored in the brain as a belief system about yourself. There’s a somatic component and everything as well, but we then sit down for a much longer time than the regular therapist will do. I call that pay as you go or you come in for an hour here and 90 minutes there.

Busy professionals from my experience, that’s unrealistic for the most part, maybe for a little while you can do it but then it falls off. We’re going heavy for three days straight. It’s one of those Tony Robbins immersions where we’re going deep. We’re going to the root of it and we’re using bilateral stimulation to heal it. We’re going to a place that people have probably never gone before. What I’ve seen is incredible. That’s what it’s all about. It’s high level, fast transformations because of those three main components.

What you talk about in your book and if you’re thinking, this is the type of people that I can help them get to the next level in terms of performance going through that? Give us a couple of examples there.

The book was written for everybody. I want this message to go to everybody out there because an EMDR therapist is level-trained. There’s a benchmark that they have to reach in order to become an EMDR therapist. The message is clear. You don’t have to struggle for years and years. I can’t say the number of clients who’ve come to me and said, “Robert, I’ve been dealing with this issue for twenty years. You’re telling me that it can be eradicated in how long?” I was like, “Yeah, I get it.” The main question is first, do I even need therapy? The title is tongue-in-cheek.

We all need it. Once you’ve crossed that line, we’re talking about what type of therapy, what’s going on in your brain when you’re experiencing distress? What’s going on there. What all about EMDR from start to finish. For the standard EMDR, you can get anywhere from EMDR International Association-trained therapists and how to find the right therapist. That’s important. You got to find the therapist that clicks with you. All those tips are in there. That’s why I’ve written the book to make it accessible too. It’s 100 pages. You can read that in a weekend.

If you want to get a copy, go to our website. In all seriousness, I talk about in my book my racing history. When I was racing, I used visualization. I read sports psychology books and how your brain can’t discern whether you’re experiencing it now or whether you’re visualizing your head and imprinting those wins. As a kid, we used to do it. We’d run around and pretend we won. We’d throw our hands up. You can train yourself to be more successful.

If someone’s reading and they’re saying, “That’s great, Robert. I don’t think I need therapy, but how can I use this to accelerate my progress whether it’s in business or athletes?” I want to know why you’re called The Celebrity Savior. If you’re looking for somebody that’s more performance-oriented and maybe he doesn’t have their back against the wall, thinking that they have a problem, how can this help somebody like that?

It’ll help in many different ways. One of them being that you talked about visualization and the brain has to have the end goal in mind. For some people that’s easier than others. Think about professional athletes, CEOs, entrepreneurs, you got a goal in mind and you want to reach that goal. Let’s call that the positive side of your mind. Your brain is going to go. If you’re in a hot air balloon, that’s the sky you’re flying. That’s what you want. If you don’t cut those bags that are holding that hot air balloon, you’re going to go a lot slower. You’re going to struggle a lot harder because you’re having so much resistance friction. There’s a negative side from the positive goal, the positive belief that’s attached to it. Meaning maybe I am good enough or I am successful, whatever that means to you, or worthy of love or respect, whatever that might be. There’s a negative side that goes along with that. Everybody has an inner critic in the back of their mind that always doubts them.

I know you want to run race. Do you remember that one time when you sprained your ankle on that weird hole that you didn’t see coming? What if that happens again? We’ve all got that mindset. That is not something that magically appears overnight although it can feel that way. This is the one of the catches. People have had a lot of success sometimes they come to see me and they’re like, “I don’t know. I can’t perform. I can’t function.” You’ve heard of the yips when talking sports like all of a sudden, Tiger Woods can’t make a putt, best golfer in the world can’t make a putt. That’s called the yip. We have those negative beliefs that are saying something in the back of mind like, “You’re not good. You’re going to miss those putts, etc.” The point I want to make is that if you don’t eliminate those negative beliefs, then you’re going to end up struggling. You have to work ten times as hard to get to that finish line. Clear it away, let yourself soar. You’d be surprised how much easier things come to you. You probably have never even imagined. A whole new world can open up to you.

It’s hard unless you’ve gone through it to see that and see the positive shift. When you go through these things in your life and you are able to navigate through those and get through the other side. One of the statistics I thought was interesting and my father passing away when I was young, children that have lost a parent, they tend to be more successful because they have this finite idea of time. It can also be unhealthy. There are all these little things that are interrelated. I find it fascinating.

If you’re reading, you’re struggling with something where you’re looking to get to the next level. I encourage you take a look at Robert’s book. I can tell you from personal experience, having gone through some of this process, you deserve it and you can get through that other side. Circling this back to money, Robert. We were talking about how it’s one thing to make money, but if you don’t think you deserve it, you ultimately end up losing it. We hear the story of lottery winners. Somebody is poor, they win the lottery. A year later, two years later, they’re out of money again. What does that tie to? How is that important for somebody that’s going out there and doing that? You call it your money story.

There’s a strategy. Somebody like Chris can help you with strategizing of what to do with that money, how to invest it. We’re not talking about that. That’s important, but there’s a mindset around money. The story of what we’ve been told about money, if you win the lottery and that’s going to help you maybe get out of debt or something like that and that’s a positive thing. You don’t want to be in debt or whatever because that sucks. There may be a belief like, “Maybe money’s evil.” If I have money, then other people are not going to have money. I love this world. I want people to be happy. That’s all that’s going on underneath.

For me, my money story was you have to work hard. You have to struggle. Not just working hard, but struggling. You’ll never have a lot. You’re always going to be struggling. It comes from my parents and their parents, my grandmother on my father’s side, Romanian. She had three kids. She had to scrounge the ditches. She had to walk around all day long in the heat in these ditches looking for bottles that she can recycle so that she could feed her family. When you’re growing up in an environment like that, when every cent means the difference between eating that day or not, you’re going to have a different perspective of money.

I’m sure she came home some days and said, “This is hard. We don’t have much. We’re going to have to go without,” or something like that must have happened. It motivated my father, my uncle and all that, where one’s a doctor, a lawyer, it motivated but they still had the belief system. Even though you’re in a great position or you win the lottery, if you’re not programmed to maximize that, to grow it, to see money as something that could be seen like a tool, a lever that you can pull, that you can access something else and grow it instead of trying to hang onto it. You have this scarcity mind, like it’s going to go away and it’s never going to come back again and then I’ll have to struggle.

It’s hard to live life that way when there’s a whole other possible reality out there. That’s what the money story is all about when I think about it. This is what the stories that you’ve been told growing up. I encourage you to think about that and think about what did your parents tell you about money? How about their parents? Were they coming from war? If they’re a product of a great environment so there’s a lot that goes into it. What are the negative beliefs that come up for you when you think about money?

Everybody needs to consider that, what your money story is, what your money rules are. What’s going to happen is if you end up being successful? What are you going do with it? I got news for you. Having the money, it doesn’t make you happy and more of it doesn’t make you happy. I got two more questions for you, Robert. How did you get the name of The Celebrity Savior?

People started calling me that, but there’s a story behind a celebrity, we’ll call her Jane. I started getting a bit of a name for myself, this hot shot EMDR therapist in Vancouver. I was shortening my clients from 2, 3 years to 3, 6 months that was good. I was happy about that. She says, “Robert, I’m so-and-so.” I’m like, “Cool, nice to meet you.” She says, “I got this drinking problem and I can’t perform unless I have Ativan and I take a shot at whiskey or whatever it was.” This answer to my question at the time was do celebrities have performance anxiety? They do. That’s the thing.

She calls me. She comes from my first session. I start her off like everybody else. We do the first session or the history gathering, understanding what’s her problem. She gets up before the session is even over. She’s like, “I don’t think you can help me. Not fast enough anyway, I got to go on.” She walked out the door and I’m like flat on my face. I wasn’t hot shotty as I thought I was. I never heard from her again. Thanks to her it lit a fire under my behind and I wanted to help people even faster.

A celebrity that needs me, it can come in and you can clear the issue and you can go and perform like that is such a huge gift of doing that for people. That’s one of the reasons why I’m called The Celebrity Savior because these high-level professionals, these creative professionals struggle like everybody else even though some of their issues are a little bit different. What do you do when you’re born into a legacy, a family fortune, that’s a different reality and a lot of other people deal with?

The other reason is a mission that I look at celebrities as real leaders. Politicians are important. The people that influence our culture are celebrity. We follow them. They say, “Buy this car. I want that car. I want this. I’m going to do it.” Over the last decade, from my count, there has been over 150 celebrity suicides. Oftentimes, they’ve been dealing with depression, but he was doing fine. He was making great music, making good money. Money is not happiness. It’s part of the mission now. That’s all about The Celebrity Savior part.

I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. If you want to check out Robert’s book, if you want to learn how to learn more about EMDR, how to get in touch with him, what’s the best way to get ahold of you, Robert?

You can write to my website, that’s the easiest way, GrigoreCounseling.com and everything you need is on there.

My last question I told you I had two left. If you can go back to your 25-year-old self and give yourself some advice, what would it be?

Everything’s in Google. Fast, do it. I had a registered education savings plan. It was $15,000 or something like that, maybe $20,000. It was for school, but it was there. At that time, I had changed my major anyway. I knew nothing at all about investing like zero except that you want to buy low and sell high. That’s all I knew. Put everything in Google because that’s going to explode. People are starting to use it and it’s going well. I call my mutual funds broker or whoever his name is at the time, whoever it was, “This is what I want to do. It’s going to be good.”

This is the key. I was listening to my gut and the guy said, “Robert, it’s risky because stocks are volatile. You don’t know if they’re going to go up, they’re going to go down,” which is true, “the best avenue is to diversify a little bit here, a little bit there.” I was like, “That makes sense.” I can’t give you financial advice, but if I could go back, I’d say listen to your gut. By now, I would have been freaking rich and I could have done a whole lot of different things with my time. Although I will say I wouldn’t be where I am now and I’m thankful for where I am now. This is part of my journey. Listen to your gut, your intuition is valuable. I wish I had me now talking to me to my twenty-year-old self.

That’s some of the best that has been shared on this including the Google part. That was good. You can go back and do that. Robert. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I’ll certainly be in touch. If you want to get ahold of Robert’s book, check out his website. Check out our website, NextLevelIncome.com and get a copy of our book. If you enjoyed the episode, please like it, share it and give us a review. Everyone, thank you for your time. Robert, thanks.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• MFINSummit.com

• You NEED Therapy.: EMDR: Real People, with Real Problems, Getting Real Help

• EMDR International Association

• https://www.GrigoreCounselling.com/

About Robert Grigore

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Tagged: Next Level Mental Performance, EMDR Therapy, Psychological Processing, Celebrity Savior, Creative Professionals, Abundance Mindset, Group 2