She Was Hundreds of Thousands in Debt — Then She Rewired Her Brain

26 Apr She Was Hundreds of Thousands in Debt — Then She Rewired Her Brain

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Dr. Lucette Beall, veterinarian turned best-selling author and mindset coach, tells Jeff Crilley how a cancer diagnosis, a brother's brain injury, and three years of financial free fall led her to create The Brain Reset Method.

The Morning Everything Changed

Dr. Lucette Beall is several hundred thousand dollars in debt. It is morning, and she has been here — stuck, grinding, sinking — for three years. She asks herself a question: "Are you willing to go bankrupt? Are you willing to walk away from your clients, customers, and not only that but walk away from the businesses that trusted you with their money, the people that you owe?"

The answer was no. "From an integrity point of view I couldn't do that," she recalled. "So then I said, alright, I have to make a decision, I'm not gonna go bankrupt, I have to make that decision every day and I have to do something different because what I've been doing is clearly not working."

Within a year, she was almost out of debt. By the end of the following year, she had put a large cash down payment on a new home and hit her first million-dollar year in business. The turnaround had nothing to do with a new strategy or a lucky break. It had everything to do with how she was talking to herself.

Divorce, Cancer, and a Brother's Crisis

Beall did not set out to study the brain. A veterinarian by training, she spent years going through life assuming, as she put it, "whatever thought goes through your head is whatever thought goes through your head, whatever happens happens and you just deal." Then life stopped letting her just deal.

Three days after her divorce was finalized, she found a lump in her breast. She was diagnosed with cancer — a single parent, self-employed, with no child support and no paid sick days, facing fifteen months of treatment that included multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation. She got through it. A few years later, her brother suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. He was not expected to survive, let alone leave an institution. He defied those odds, but ended up in a state mental hospital in Oklahoma.

"He was going to have to live the rest of his life there unless I stepped out to help him," Beall said. "And everybody told me not to — my banker, my parents, everybody — because they said I would fail, I would lose everything." She stepped out anyway, sold her home to cover costs, and tried to run her business while caring for him. The business buckled under the strain.

Three Years of Seeing Everything Wrong

For three years, Beall worked six days a week, did her own books, and watched the numbers get worse. The problem, she later realized, was not a lack of effort. It was a brain stuck in a loop. "During those three years I was beating myself up for not being enough," she explained. "I knew I was supposed to step out and help my brother but because it was hard I was blaming myself and I was saying all these things to myself."

When she finally shifted her internal language, she started noticing what had been invisible. "I started walking into the business and seeing everything that was going right," she said. "And in those three years I was walking in the business and seeing everything that was going wrong." The cortisol stayed high, the positive brain chemistry stayed low, and her reticular activating system — the brain's filtering mechanism — kept screening out solutions. "All those solutions that I found in that year that I almost got out of debt were available those three years that I was struggling," she told Crilley. "But because of what I was telling myself and what it was doing to my brain loop, I couldn't see them."

From Survival to The Brain Reset Method

When COVID hit and Beall found herself once again the only person who could care for family — this time her parents, who were in declining health on a ranch in Oklahoma — while simultaneously running an essential business during shutdown, she drew a hard line. "I swore then I'm like I'm not going back where I went when I was struggling," she said. She deployed everything she had learned, and then pushed further into the neuroscience to understand why it worked.

That research became The Brain Reset Method, structured as an acronym: B for Build 100% Responsibility, R for Reframe, A for Awareness and Appreciation, I for Integrity, Inspiration, and Intuition, and N for Neuro Aligned Navigation. Each letter corresponds to a principle about how the brain processes self-talk and filters reality. The method is the backbone of her coaching practice, where she primarily works with women in their forties through late sixties — though she noted she attracts younger women and men as well. "Really the brain reset method anybody can use," she said, "and we all talk to ourselves in ways that we shouldn't."

A key distinction Beall draws is between her method and what she calls toxic positivity. "You cannot go from I can't do math and I've been saying that for twenty years to I'm great at math and it's gonna happen," she explained. "What you feel inside is your barometer and you're not gonna believe it, so you can't — you can only receive as big as you believe." The reframe, she insisted, is incremental: write something that feels a little better, then revisit it weeks later from a new vantage point.

Cheerleaders, Olympians, and a Culture of Self-Punishment

Beall illustrated how deeply the pattern runs with a story from a recent walk. She spotted three girls, about twelve or thirteen years old, practicing cheerleading with no adults around. Every time one of them made a mistake, she ran a lap. "We've taught it so well that we should punish ourselves in order to learn," Beall said. "That's not how our brain works. The person who's running the most is gonna start feeling like she's a failure compared to the others."

The conversation turned to an Olympic gymnast who had been dubbed "the quad god" and spiraled after failing to win gold. Beall connected it back to external validation. "We have been taught to look at others to validate who we are," she said. She contrasted his story with that of a young female skater who walked away from the sport at sixteen after a similar experience, returned two years later on her own terms, and won — skating, as Beall described it, "for the joy of it." That skater, she said, "is the epitome of actually living the brain reset method, honestly."

Stop Shoulding on Yourself

The day before taping with Crilley, Beall gave a speech that landed hard with its audience. The topic: the word "should." "Stop shoulding on yourself," she told Crilley. "It is exactly what you think it is." The problem with "should," she explained, is that it points backward without offering the brain a next step. "Shoulding doesn't give your brain anything to change because we tend to be talking about the past and we don't take the next step. We just say these things and so it raises your cortisol, lowers your positive chemicals."

Her own fix was practical. She started journaling at the end of every day, listing what she had done well. "From that place now I've already changed the chemicals," she said. Sometimes the list eliminated the "should" entirely — the thing she was berating herself for skipping turned out to be less important than what she actually accomplished. And when it didn't, she at least had the clarity to plan a different approach. "Then you give your brain the opportunity to open up, be creative and come up with a solution," she said. "And when we're shoulding on ourselves we're not giving ourselves that opportunity."

A Four-Minute Bet

Beall offers a free email course — the Your Brain Reset Blueprint, available at yourbrainresetblueprint.com — that walks readers through five principles in five emails, each designed to be read in four minutes or less. It is a bet on brevity: the idea that the barrier to changing your internal wiring is not complexity but time. "The whole problem is so much of what we want to do takes too long," she said. "When you show up as all of you, you're a gift to everyone around you, and they deserve to have that just like you do."

Dr. Lucette Beall is a veterinarian, #1 international best-selling author, speaker, and coach, and the founder of The Brain Reset Method. Learn more at yourbrainresetblueprint.com. This article is based on her appearance on The Jeff Crilley Show, recorded at the Real News Communications Network studio.

Key Topics

  • the Brain Reset Method acronym
  • negative self-talk and the reticular activating system
  • from hundreds of thousands in debt to a million-dollar business
  • stop shoulding on yourself
  • reframing without toxic positivity
  • self-punishment as a learned behavior
  • journaling to change your brain chemistry
  • external validation vs. internal relationship

About the Guest

Dr. Lucette Beall is a veterinarian, best-selling author, speaker, and mindset coach who created the Brain Reset Method after overcoming cancer, financial crisis, and years of caretaking challenges. She specializes in coaching women in their forties through sixties and offers a free Brain Reset Blueprint at yourbrainresetblueprint.com.

Episode Timestamps

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Episode Chapters

  • 00:00 – Introduction
  • 01:21 – The Power of Negative Self-Talk
  • 01:58 – Dr. Lucette's Journey Through Adversity
  • 03:44 – From Debt to Million Dollar Business
  • 05:45 – How Your Brain Filters Out Solutions
  • 07:14 – Coaching and the Brain Reset Method Website
  • 08:06 – The BRAIN Acronym Explained
  • 09:44 – Free Brain Reset Blueprint Resource
  • 10:19 – Client Success Story: Rewriting the Journal
  • 12:21 – Teens, Punishment, and How We Learn Wrong
  • 13:29 – Olympic Athletes and External Validation
  • 15:48 – Stop Shoulding on Yourself
  • 17:33 – Final Thoughts and Where to Connect
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