This episode is a little different from our usual format. There's no patient story here. No before-and-after journey with a specific diagnosis. What you're getting instead is a window into a conversation that happened just before I hit record, one that turned into something so good I had to keep the tape rolling.
Dr. Barbara Eaton is my coach. She's also a chiropractor, the founder of a 56-day chiropractic business boot camp with nearly 500 members worldwide, and one of the most remarkably clear thinkers I have ever encountered. She operates from a framework called mind-thought-consciousness, which sounds clinical until she explains it, and then it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world.
I've been professionally excited about her since 2017, when I spotted her across a room at a chiropractic conference and walked up to a woman I had never met and said: "Hey, I'm Liz. I just want to give you a hug." That's how it started. Three years later, she came and spent a day with my entire staff at the Blair conference in Dallas, and the impact was immediate and lasting. My practice was already great. After that day, it became something else entirely.
I want to share some of what she shared with me, because it doesn't just apply to chiropractors. It applies to anyone who is trying to heal, make better decisions, or understand why they keep getting in their own way.
The Monkey Mind and What It's Covering Up
The conversation started because Dr. Barb caught me in a pattern she recognized immediately. I was talking about how I feel distracted when I visit my dad, how I want to see everyone, do everything, make the most of a trip. She listened and then asked: "Can I poke at that a little bit?"
What followed was a clean, clear dismantling of what she calls "monkey mind."
The key insight: you cannot feel anything you do not first think. So when I said I feel distracted, the real question isn't what do I feel? It's what is the truth about my thinking?
When I examined it honestly, I realized the distraction was fear of missing out. And when I looked underneath that, I realized what I'd actually be missing out on was time with my dad. Time that is finite and precious. When I sat with that truth, the monkey noise stopped. The answer was obvious. The distraction was just monkey covering up what I already knew.
She calls it monkey because that's what it is: noise, chatter, survival instinct running programs that were written a long time ago and may have nothing to do with the reality in front of you right now. It's not truth. It's not wisdom. It's just loud.
Innate Intelligence Is Always Live Streaming
Here's where Dr. Barb's framework connects directly to what I do every day in my chiropractic practice, and I find this profound every time I hear her say it.
Innate intelligence, the body's inborn intelligence, is always on. It is always live streaming. It operates in the right proportion, at the right time, with perfect accuracy. Think about it: your body doesn't start healing a cut before you get it. It doesn't finish healing next week. It heals right on time, every time. That is innate.
What interferes with innate doing its job? Subluxation. Disconnection. What she calls the four T's: thoughts, traumas, toxins, and technology.
As a chiropractor, my job is to remove the physical interference to that live stream. When C1 or C2 is misaligned and the nervous system is compressed, the signal gets interrupted. The body can't express its full intelligence. And when I make a Blair upper cervical correction and hold is restored, the live stream returns.
Dr. Barb does the same thing for the mind. She removes the interference to innate knowing so that wisdom can come through clearly again.
Two sides of the same principle. That is why this conversation meant so much to me.
Monkey vs. Knowing: How to Tell the Difference
Dr. Barb shared what I think is one of the most practical tools in this episode: how to distinguish between monkey and knowing when you're trying to make a decision.
Here's the short version:
Knowing is ever-present and always kind. Wisdom sometimes whispers, but it is always clear, because the truth is simple. Always. If something feels complicated and tangled and loud, that is monkey. If something feels quiet and clear and perhaps uncomfortable but undeniable, that is knowing.
Monkey creates urgency. It tells you that your future well-being depends on making the right decision right now, in this moment, without any information about how things will turn out. But here's the thing: you have never once known how things would turn out. You have made thousands of decisions without that certainty, and you are still here. The feeling that you must know before you can decide is monkey. It is not truth.
Wisdom reveals at the right time. If your innate knowing is nudging you toward something, it is because it already has more on offer than your current thinking can see. And if it wasn't the right time to expand, it would not nudge you.
That applies to a patient sitting on the fence about starting care. That applies to a chiropractor who keeps talking herself out of the next step in her practice. It applies to any of us when we can feel something pulling us forward and we keep stopping ourselves with noise.
From $256,000 to $46,000 and Back Again
Dr. Barb's personal story is extraordinary and I want to tell it briefly because it's the context for everything she teaches.
She opened her practice in 1998 in a town of 5,000 people, cash only, at Christmas. In 89 days she went from zero to 180 office visits a week. She built her practice, started coaching other chiropractors, and spent years thriving.
Then life happened. A divorce. A remarriage. A surgery in 2013 where she decided to do recovery her way, without asking for help, and her innate intelligence promptly told her who was boss by putting her flat on her back.
During that forced rest, she started telling herself smaller stories. She pulled back from being in over her head, which she now recognizes as the natural human state. She stayed busy but stopped making impact. By the end of 2016, her practice revenue had dropped from $256,000 in her first full year to $46,000. Seventeen years in.
She picked up Grant Cardone's 10X, got called forward again, built her boot camp, asked for help at every step, and is now coaching practitioners across the world. The turn happened not because she found a new strategy, but because she got back in alignment with what she already knew: be in over your head. Stay there. That is what human is.
We All Have the Same Operating System
This is the piece I keep coming back to.
Innate intelligence is the same in every human being. The operating system is identical. What differs is not what we're given; what differs is how much of the interference we've cleared and how deeply we've learned to trust the signal underneath it.
We have 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Eighty percent of them are negative. Ninety-eight percent are recycled from yesterday. It is no wonder so many of us are living Groundhog Day, making the same choices, getting the same results, wondering why nothing changes.
What we put into our minds matters. What we allow to occupy our thinking shapes what we see. Dr. Barb has a thought she genuinely holds: everyone on the planet wants to know her. So that is what she sees. Everywhere, people wanting to connect, to learn, to be in relationship. Someone else who has adopted the thought that no one cares about them sees that everywhere instead. Same world. Different thinking. Different reality.
Scripture calls it renewing the mind. Chiropractic calls it removing subluxation. Dr. Barb calls it expanding consciousness. The principle is the same: clear the interference and let what's already there come through.
Living in Alignment: The Football Field
When I asked Dr. Barb what it looks like for her to live her life in alignment, she gave me an image I haven't stopped thinking about.
Imagine your life is a football field. You're the player. You decide the rules of engagement, the boundaries, the goals, the way the game is played. Around the field are fans. Some cheer. Some boo. Some give you dirty looks from the stands.
None of it changes your game.
Because their thinking is their field. Their reactions come from their own consciousness, their own monkey, their own knowing. You are not on that field. You are just a fan observing. You don't have to play someone else's game. You don't have to take the field when someone else's fear or judgment comes your way.
You stay in your field. You make your plays. You adopt the thinking that aligns with the life you actually want to live. And you let wisdom, not monkey, call the shots.
That is alignment. And it is available to every one of us, right now, exactly as we are.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Barbara Eaton on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Dr. Barbara Eaton and her chiropractic boot camp at drbarbaraeaton.com.
