Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Mimi Bouchard on Rewiring Your Brain for Success and Confidence with Activations
05 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. When you hear the word manifestation, what do you think? Honestly, for some of you, you're probably going to be all about it. But for others, you might think it's too woo woo.
But what if those ideas weren't just mysterious and squishy and instead were actually backed by neuroscience and psychology? Well, today I'm talking to Mimi Bouchard, who's the founder of the app Activations, who's built a practical science-backed system for rewiring your brain to create real change in your life.
I've actually been using the app myself and I can confirm that it works for people who are a little averse to all the woo-woo. Activations is filled with pep talks. And that's how I like to think of it as a user anyway. The app has a ton of different guided audio pieces that you can listen to to build confidence, upgrade your money mindset, or just feel ready to tackle the day.
You'll hear that during our conversation, Mimi offers to hook up our money rehabbers with a discount, which you can snag at activations.com slash money rehab. She is the absolute sweetest. I am just obsessed with her and her app and everything that she's all about.
Mimi also tells me the origin story of the company, the real science behind how it works, and hacks for productivity that actually work. Since getting pregnant, I have been blown away by all the creative small businesses out there.
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Chapter 2: What is the concept of rewiring your brain for success?
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Mimi Bouchard, welcome to Money Rehab. Thank you for having me, Nicole. I'm so happy to be here.
I'm so happy to have you. I really, really admire what you've built and I'd love to dig into it. But as you know, everything starts in childhood. Let's go back to the beginning. What was your relationship with money and ambition like growing up?
Oh, boy. I know, let's just get into it. Okay, we'll dive right in. My relationship with money was incredibly different to my relationship with money now. It's been one of the biggest things that I've worked on over the past decade of my life. When I was younger, I grew up in a household that was very financially stressed.
My parents are artists, and I was always around lack when it comes to money growing up. There was always a lot of fighting around money, bankruptcies, and just... a lot of negative energy towards money and wealth. It gave me this feeling of deep insecurity as a kid. And I realized when I was young, you know what, I don't want this type of future for myself.
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Chapter 3: How did Mimi Bouchard develop the Activations app?
I grew up similarly. I used to think that was a weakness of mine, but I had so much work that I had to do to reframe all of that as my superpower because it really is. what made me who I am today.
It's very motivating when you don't come from it. It makes you realize that you want it quite badly. And yes, maybe there are disadvantages from not coming from money, where when I first started my first entrepreneurial venture, my parents couldn't back it up.
I had to work all summer at a restaurant to try to get tips to launch my first online venture, which was like an online magazine at the time. And it gives you a certain level of motivation
Once you started the work, because we all go through this journey, you looked at tools like journaling and meditation. How did that resonate with you?
I kind of reached this rock bottom at a certain stage in my journey about 11 years ago. And in this rock bottom, every pillar of my life was lacking. And I write about this in my book, Activate Your Future Self. You have five pillars to your life. Mental, physical, financial, social, and spiritual. And every single one of those areas was lacking. I didn't feel good in my body, my health.
I was 30 pounds heavier. I didn't feel good. I was going out every weekend. I was partying a lot. I was living paycheck to paycheck, feeling a lot of anxiety towards life.
my finances still at this stage in my life and i wasn't connected to myself i felt very low confidence and security so i reached a point where i decided i needed to change and that came with diving into self-development self-help and personal development and i started reading a bunch of books about it started listening to all these experts and started doing the things.
And one of those things that everyone told me to do that I couldn't quite stick with was meditation. Everyone said, okay, to be successful, you need to meditate every day. And I tried and I put it on my to-do list. And then half the time I'd forget to do it, or I wouldn't check it off. And then I'd feel guilt and shame. And I reached a point where I was like, you know what? Why would I do this?
Because I want something to invigorate me. I want something to make me feel alive and feel motivated and disciplined towards all these goals that I have. And sure, meditation is great if you want to calm your nervous system and clear your head. But I'm not really trying to do that in this phase of my life.
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Chapter 4: What are the five pillars of life according to Mimi?
Like subconsciously, it's like a need that we have, right? So if you get a raise and you have not brought your money dial up to 72 degrees, you're probably going to spend that extra money and get back down to this amount in savings. The same goes as if you had an unexpected bill, you're uncomfortable until you bring your money, your savings or your identity around money around this set point.
So what's interesting about this work is the more you do it, the more your set point kind of rises. For example, the baseline. So it would be uncomfortable for me to be making, let's say, less than 200 in a month.
Right. This idea of a money thermostat is just a honed way to look at money manifestation because I do think that money has energy. I've noticed we've talked about on the show when you put money out there, it comes back to you somehow. Do you believe that?
I think everything is energy, but that's not woo-woo. That's literally measured, right? And if you think about it on a subatomic level, like particles attract like particles. There are so many amazing theories that we could study in quantum physics that just open the mind to possibility. And our thoughts are energy. Our bodies are energy. That glass on the table is energy. So...
Yeah, I do believe it is. But I don't believe that when you think about something, it pops up in front of you. I don't believe in the movie, The Secret, where they try to emulate someone just thinking about a car and it pops up. That's not that's too woo woo for me.
That's not what I believe in is doing this work, becoming the person that has what you want and naturally creating this life because it's just who you are.
Did you meet your husband before? You started activations?
Oh, yeah. We met just over eight years ago. And I'll tell you something crazy. So this was around the time where I was still recording. I just started recording my own activations for myself as my little side hobby. I spend hours creating so many of these different, because it takes a long time to create with the music and everything. So I was a couple months into creating my own activations.
And on October 12th, 2017, I actually recorded an activation describing my person. And I described how he made me feel. And I literally met him on October 13th, 2017, the next day. Stop. Wow. Yeah. So maybe that's coincidence, maybe not. But I was definitely looking for what I wanted and it was in my subconscious and I found it.
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Chapter 5: How does visualization impact personal transformation?
Numbing, which is the opposite, is what I want to feel less of. Social media and doom scrolling and... You know, binge watching too much Netflix, even overeating, over drinking, drugs, anything that numbs you out, puts you into this state of just like disassociation, of fatigue, of exhaustion, of kind of taking your life force away. And then the opposite is aliveness.
And it gives you this juicy life force. And I really try to lean into things that give me that aliveness feeling. So whether it's listening to certain music, It's literally why I created activations. Every single one makes you feel aliveness. Whether that's having a beautiful, deep conversation with a friend, calling your mom and just sitting and not scrolling and just connecting.
Connection gives you aliveness. Waking up early, moving your body, dancing, laughing. That's aliveness. When you're in this aliveness state, time goes by slowly. You are literally soaking up your life in the most beautiful way. And when you're focusing on numbing activities and you're distracting yourself, time goes by very quickly and you don't feel good.
Even hours later, when you're not scrolling, you still feel this like haze of just brain kind of tiredness. So Again, I am not perfect and I still scroll, you know, throughout my day. Sometimes if social media is back on my phone, but I'm now a lot more aware of it.
And when I start to feel that kind of that feeling of numbness creep in, I often will just delete the apps so that there is just there's no way. And I've noticed that a lot of people that I speak to feel the same way.
I appreciate you saying that. It's true. Like you can try your best, but at the end of the day. You know, you're only human. And it was such a program thing. And as you say, these companies have to profit from getting your attention. Well, A Juicy Alive Life, sign me up. And thank you for spending time with us to help us create our own Juicy Alive Lives. Let's say that 10 times fast.
We end all of our episodes by asking a guest for one final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank.
I think my biggest tip here is you need to get very familiar with how it feels to have the amount of money that you desire. You need to start feeling very comfortable with that amount of money because if you're not, then your set point that we spoke about earlier, that identity thermostat is just never going to budge.
You need to feel a new standard inside of you and actually feel it in your body. This is again, not woo-woo. This is really just, this creates your self-image here. So Get very familiar and very comfortable with the amount of money that you desire. We specifically actually have a whole manifest money category in activations, by the way.
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