How to Manifest Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Are you letting life happen to you instead of piloting your own destiny? Are you ready to tap into your natural ability to manifest the life you truly desire? I'm going to share with you how to create your own self-fulfilling prophecies in order to shape your destiny.

Now, this is not just about visualization and intentional thinking. It's not some typical run-of-the-mill self-help technique either. It's a life-changing approach that has helped countless people take control of their lives and manifest their visions. You don't have a vision? Well, let's change that right now.

For a long time, I had read in personal development books about the power of having a vision, the importance of having a vision, the same with a mission. I'd also done a lot of business training where they talked about the same thing: "You need to have a vision for your business and you need to have a mission." And they don't really tell you too much else about that. They just tell you it's important to have one, so go write one. And I did that many times, especially in business plans. It was part of, uh, not a requirement, but something that was part of the protocol of the first business that I ever had. It was, uh, it wasn't a franchise, but it was something very similar, and you had to turn in a business plan. And every year, I tried to make a better vision and a better mission. And every year, I pretty much got the same results, which were not very good.

And I got to the point where I got so frustrated, I was like, "What is the point of writing these visions that feel so empty to me?" I don't really have a sense of like, "Well, yeah, just, you know, whatever sounds good, I'll throw that in there as my vision or as far as my mission goes." Whatever sounds good, then, yeah, I'll just do that. Or I would look at other people's visions and missions and go, "Well, that sounds good too." There was no real attachment deep down to something that was really, really important to me. I was just kind of making it up. And I find that most people are pretty much doing the same thing when it comes to creating a vision. Because I'll ask them a few questions about it, and I, it used to be very sincere about trying to find out, "What is the, what, how do you create a vision, a real vision, in a way that it's important?" Because they had never really done anything for me in the past. And so I would question people sincerely, trying to find out how they were doing it, because I thought everybody else was doing it right, and it was just me who was doing it wrong. That's typically how, how I start off solving a problem. I feel like everybody has this figured out, and then come to find out, once I've solved the problem, that a lot of people don't have it figured out. And then I can share my, my way of doing it and see if it helps you.

I found this to be very, very powerful, what I'm going to show you. For anyone who has tried it before, I get into that, though, I want to tell a story about this was one of the ways that I discovered how to create these visions. And what had happened was, I was walking around. Well, maybe I should start from another place. I was talking to a friend of mine, and we like to have in-depth conversations about where we want to take our lives. And he said, "If you had more money than you could ever spend, what would you do? And you didn't have to work anymore." And it wasn't hard for me to come up with. It was a good question because it wasn't hard for me to come up with what I wanted to do, but I hadn't really thought it out very much. And so I said, "Well, I would travel the world. I would read about history, go to the places that I'm reading about, and I would also start learning languages." It just seemed so clear to me. I was just like, "Yeah, I could." And I could see it in my mind as I was saying it.

I also noticed that there was someone with me. Even though at the time I was recently divorced, at the time that my friend asked me this question, I was recently divorced and I had no girlfriend. So, but someone was there in, in the vision. I didn't even think too much about that. And it was, it was two or three years later that I was walking around Rome with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I started getting an intense sense of déjà vu. I was like, "Why do I feel like I've been here before? I've never been to Rome before." And suddenly, it just felt really familiar, like I had just stepped into an old memory. And then suddenly, I realized that no, I had not stepped into a memory. I had stepped into my vision. And it really blew my mind. It was one of those moments where you kind of just want to sit down and and think, "Wow, that just happened." Like I just, I envisioned this. I didn't have, I didn't know it was Rome. Uh, I knew that there was someone else there, but I didn't know that it was, you know, going to work out this way. And here I was, walking around in Rome. I had started learning Romanian. No connection there. Romanian, the languages from, uh, Romania, the country, not Rome. But I was learning a language, I was learning about history, I was visiting the sites, I was doing exactly what I had envisioned, just from that conversation. So I learned a lot from that, and I wanted to understand how that happened so that I could recreate it. And that's the process I'm going to share with you. The more that I do this process, the more that it just keeps feeling as though I'm stepping into those visions that I create for myself. And then I create new visions and just keep stepping into it.

So, something that's important to understand is that every belief you have about yourself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter what the belief is. So if that's a negative belief you have about yourself, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have a positive belief about yourself, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. And if you think about where you are in your life right now, that is held in place by your beliefs. And all of those beliefs, like I said, create self-fulfilling prophecies, which create the life that you have now, and perpetually creates the life that you continue to live in. That can be a really good thing, or it could be a really bad thing. And there's room for in between as well.

Now, let's talk a little bit about a belief. I'm going to use the word belief and generalization interchangeably because to me, they're really the same thing. If you think about what a belief is, it really is a generalization. Generalization is a way, a meaning of something you make based on evidence or examples. In this case, it would be examples that happen in your life. So as things happen a certain way, you sort of draw a circle around that and you say, "Okay, this means this works this way." For example, you make a bad grade on a test. Oh, no. You make a good grade on a test when you're a kid. The teacher says, "Wow, you're really smart." You take that piece of paper home. Your mother, your mother looks at it and says, "Wow, you're really smart." Dad comes home, says the same thing. Your mother puts it on the refrigerator. And you hear the neighbors or your mother's friends talking about how smart your kid is. That reinforcement of that will help a person, a kid, generalize, "I must be smart."

Now, unfortunately, the opposite can happen as well. Somebody can say, you know, when you're a kid, I say, I usually use when you're a kid because you're more influential at that time, and most of your core beliefs are solidified early in age, and then the rest of the beliefs kind of pile on top of that or extensions of that. So you can be told that you're really stupid from a young age. And I hate to even think about kids being told that, but we know that they are from time to time from adults. Those are the ones who are going to have the most influence on the kid. And then that gets reinforced a few more times, and then somebody believes himself to be unintelligent.

Now, if you put those two kids side by side, one who believes they're intelligent, one who believes they are not, how do you think that that affects their lives going forward? The one who believes they're intelligent will find opportunities to grow their intelligence. They will do smarter things, make smarter decisions because they believe they are. And when they make smarter decisions and they grow their intelligence, that is further confirmation that they're intelligent, confirms the belief, and they keep growing with confidence in their intelligence throughout their life. The other person, exactly the opposite. Because they believe they're unintelligent, they just don't even try. And because they don't try to grow their intelligence, or they don't put themselves out there in ways that they would have to step up their intelligence and level up, they don't grow it. They don't cultivate it. And unfortunately, this goes unfulfilled as a potential that could have been fulfilled. So we're limited by that, by our, our beliefs, especially if they're negative beliefs.

So, you've, if you've watched my videos, you've heard me talk a lot about values because those are really what guide us. They're so, so important. They too are also generalizations. A value is a generalization about an experience that's important to you. So you have these experiences, and you would enjoy this certain kind of experience, and you notice there's a certain kind of feeling that goes with that experience. And then you learn the word "happy," and somehow that gets linked with that feeling that you're feeling when you have this type of experience. And so then you draw a circle around it, or you put those experiences into a box and you label that box "happy." And because you're involved in those experiences, it's you being happy. And you can then generalize yourself to be a happy person. And then you think, "Well, how does that affect your life when you believe you are a happy person?" And truly believe it. Not saying affirmations because you don't believe it. That's what a lot of people do is they say affirmations about things they don't believe, but that doesn't really help because it just creates more tension and resistance and friction against the belief.

So if you, but if you truly believe you're a happy person, that comes from selecting and collecting experiences that you experienced that were happy, that told you you are a happy person. And because you believe that, you seek out happy experiences, experiences that will make you happy, doing things that make you happy, spending your time with happiness. And then maybe you had some unhappy experiences. And maybe you didn't even generalize yourself to be an unhappy person, but somebody comes along, again, this usually happens early in life, and says, "Why are you such an unhappy person?" And you go, "Oh, okay. That just gave meaning to this kind of experience." And you know what? I've had a lot of these experiences before. So then you select and collect a lot of unhappy experiences. And because they all include you, you say, "Well, that's, that means I'm an unhappy person." And then you live from that belief, which then becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

How do we break out of this? Well, that's where your values come in, and that's why they're so important to know. Because your values are going to be what leads you out of these negative beliefs. You have to know where you want to go in order to transform into that person who creates that kind of life for yourself. You have to know the direction. And that's what values give you. They give you that direction.

Now, we can make this even stronger by turning your values into a vision. So if you don't know how to elicit your values, I did do a live on this, and I've done multiple videos on eliciting your values. And in the description of this video, you'll find a PDF to elicit your values. It'll walk you through it step by step. Because I've already done a video, well, multiple videos and a live on how to elicit your values, I'm not going to go through that process right now, but you have access to that.

So, like I said, I never really understood what it meant to create a vision, and I never understood what the point of it was until I realized that it has to be something, a vision has to be something deeply important to you, so much so that it guides you, it directs you. It's when you even think of it, you, you get excited about it, you want to be there already. And so learning values elicitation and how powerful it is to know your values, that's such a huge step. So clarity is such a huge step to getting what you want, into creating what you want.

I started looking at all the different ways that I could incorporate values. There, there were so many uses for using values. Because values, they actually are what we call a nominalization in NLP, which is when you take an an activity and turn it into a noun. Now, a lot of times, this is how we get unstuck out of something. Because we'll take something like even the word "stuck" is what we call a nominalization. Stuck is actually an action. It's being stuck. It's like you're, you're, you're trying to get out of something, but you're, you can't move forward. But there is a level of action. It's not so static. So it's more like sticking rather than being stuck. And so when sometimes when we turn actions into nouns, and they're not, because they're not actual tangible nouns, we get stuck in our minds. And so then we challenge that to break the person out of it. That's a meta-model, what we call a meta-model challenge.

And you can go the other way, though. And they had something called the, an NLP, there's something called the Milton model, which is very hypnotic. And that's when you use nominalizations. Because if you use nominalizations, it actually becomes very hypnotic and very trance-like. And if you've done a value solicitation, you might have gone into a trance like that while you're doing the value solicitation, because you're connecting with your values. And that can be very trance-like or very meditative. Meditation and trance are very similar.

So when you think about a value like "happy," it's a noun, technically by grammatical explanation. But really, it's kind of a happiness is a, is a, is an active, alive, engaging thing. So it's actually better to think of it as a, as an activity. But when we think about it as a noun, it's kind of strange thing happens where then there's all these possibilities of how you could be happy. It opens it up because it's kind of vague. Now, I'll explain better what I mean. So a goal, for example, you either cross the finish line or you don't. That's what a goal is. A goal is a way of making it tangible. Either it's either the goal is either achieved or it's not. When somebody says, "Well, my goal is to be happy," that's not a goal. You can say, "My goal is to make a million dollars this year." And then I might say, "Well, what would that do for you?" And you might say, "It'll make me happy." "Okay, good." Then I might say something like, "Is that the only way for you to be happy?" And if you thought about it, you'd go, "Well, no, there's probably many more ways to be happy."

So if what you really want is to fulfill the value of happiness, don't try to squeeze it through one possible strategy or goal. Go to the, go, put your attention on the happiness. And then what you'll start to access is many, many possibilities of being happy. And that will make you more adjustable and more flexible. And if you've not read enough self-help books, you'll know that flexibility and adjustability, uh, is one of the key components of successful people. That's what they're able to do. They're able to make adjustments in the moment. The quicker you can make adjustments, the more flexible you are, the more likely you are to come out with what it is that you want. And if you're competing with other people, and you're the most flexible one and the, the one who makes the adjustments the fastest, you're going to beat your competition.

So I started thinking about this a lot, and I thought, "Okay, so I elicit my values." And then I did the work of transforming my values into qualities of who I am. That's one direction you want to take values, and that's absolutely amazing when you do that. But I also wanted a sense of where I'm going, where do I want my life to go? So I started eliciting my values. What I would do is I would take, I'd break my life down into three to five major life contexts. I say three to five, so no fewer than three, into more than five. So it could be like career, relationship, could even be a hobby, social life. And I would think to myself, in each one of these, what do I want? Something tangible, an achievement, or maybe it was a material possession I wanted to acquire. I would elicit my values behind that. I'd go to the values. And from the values, I would take them and I would imagine there was a, a screen in front of me. And I keep talking about this in the past tense. I don't know why, because I still do this to this day. So let me shift to the present. So I imagine there's a screen in front of me, and I take each one of those values and project them in front of me on the screen, keeping it in the context of wherever I listed the values from. So if it's my career, I listed the values and I go, "Okay, here's my career. We could say my career canvas, like a painter painting on a canvas. And I'm going to paint this canvas with the values that I've elicited from this context. What do I see?"

And I like to surprise myself. This is an opportunity to invoke your creativity. Even Einstein said that if given the choice to be intelligent or creative, he would take creativity. And I think kind of what he was saying is that creativity is a kind of intelligence, an even stronger kind of intelligence, because you, he used creativity in thinking about his theories that helped him develop those theories. So that's what we're doing here too. Enough sense, you could think about goal setting as an experiment, an experiment to fulfill your values, which you can think about as your theories, or a theory. So allow yourself to get creative and paint that canvas with your values. So if happiness was one of my, is one of my values on my career, then I put happiness in there. And I asked myself, "What would happiness look like in my career? What do I see?" And I don't need many details, by the way. Your, a vision is supposed to be vague. Goals are specific. Your vision should be vague because you don't know exactly how you're going to arrive. Like I mentioned, when my friend asked me what would I do if I had more money than I could spend, I didn't know exactly where I was. I just saw historical places in my mind. I didn't know who I was with, but I did see that there was a woman with me. I also knew somehow that I was speaking other languages. I didn't know which language. I hadn't met my girlfriend yet at that point, who is Romanian, and that's when I started learning Romanian. You don't want too many details because if you put too many details in your vision, you might actually step into what would be a vision that would fulfill all your highest values, but you might reject it because it doesn't look or sound exactly like you imagined it. So you want it to be vague.

For those of you who say, "Well, I don't visualize very well," you don't need to. You only need to see what you need to see to recognize what you're seeing is your values. So I put happiness up there, and put freedom up there, joy, passion. These are all very important to me in my career. And then I put that on. I, you can ask yourself, like, "What would freedom look like? What would joy look like? What would passion look like in my career?" And allow your mind to, your mind will fill in this. When a lot of times when you ask your mind a question, it will fill in the information for you. It doesn't like voids. And then what I start to see is a visual representation of my values in this area of my life. And it looks very exciting. And if you do this, you will see. Once you can see your visual representations of your values, you'll feel very excited. This is what motivation is. You're connecting with your values. Connection with your values is what motivation is. And you will actually feel that it will, when you're doing it well, and you make your a very compelling vision based on your values, you will feel the pull. It's almost like you want to jump into it. I recommend that you don't. If you want to step into it, just to see what it feels like, of course, go ahead. But you always want to step back out. Because if you make it feel like you've already got it, you will lose motivation to move toward it. So we don't want to fool ourselves into feeling like we've already gotten it.

And then you want to make an image of yourself, the ideal you, who is living your highest values in this context of your life. And put that there inside the vision to give you more motivation to move toward the you you want to become in this situation. And then put that all together. And you will know that you're doing it right when you feel that pull. But don't go in there. Like I said, if you do, make sure you step back out before you're done. And so imagine you're seeing a vision in this area of your life, this context of your life. It's representing all of your highest values. And it's representing the you you need to become to enjoy this fulfillment, to fulfill this vision. Now, think about that. I've done this process with many, many people, and they are amazed at how motivated they feel, how connected they feel to their values, to this vision. And they can't wait to jump into that area of their life and really go after this.

And the best thing, the best part is, is when you forget it. I don't mean really forget it. What I mean is allow it to go, slip back into your unconscious. It's actually stronger and more powerful when the vision becomes unconscious. What do you think that is? If you've ever really consciously focused on trying to achieve something, and the more you focus and the harder you try, the more you pushed it away. This can be the problem of being overly conscious of what it is that you want, or overly conscious of the values that you're trying to fulfill, which often creates a lot of self-consciousness. This takes us out of the flow state. It sets us up for a lot of internal conflict.

So much of what you're operating from right now are beliefs that are completely unconscious. And that's why they're so effective. They're so effective in keeping you the way your life, the way that it is, and keeping you the way that you are because you're not aware of them. It's hard to change things that, change something that you're not aware of. So you don't fight it, you just go along with it. But we can go into that programming and we can change it. And we can give you, you can give yourself a new direction by creating these visions. Visions based on your values. So this is what you consciously and unconsciously want anyway, and you're just aligning yourself to it.

You also want to make sure that whatever goals you've set align with that vision. About half the time, they probably won't. Which is what that means is you need to change the goal. Trust me, the vision is far more important than the goal. Fulfilling your values is the whole point of achieving a goal. If it's the wrong goal, and it won't fulfill those values, it's the wrong goal. It's not going to help you to achieve it. Now, we do that a lot of times. A lot of times we do chase goals that aren't really going to fulfill our values, or and are not based on our values, because we don't know the difference between our own values and other people's values, or your culture's values, or your society's values. You know, all what you will always find in society and culture and other people, or they often value status. I mean, that is the valuation of you and your culture or your society as status. And if you chase status, not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with having status, but if you chase status and that's where you put your importance, I can tell you it's going to be very unfulfilling, not nearly as rewarding as fulfilling your own personal core values.

Now, there's a step that's very, very necessary when you're creating a vision. And if you don't take this step, it will, your vision will be rather useless. And that is to ask yourself, when you're looking at your vision, "What stops me?" If you're looking at that vision, and it's what you want, ask yourself, "What stops me from already having this?" And this is where we elicit the resistance. Most of the time, what will come up is some sort of fear. Fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of what others will think. It's not always fear, but a lot of the times it's fear.

So once you ask for this resistance to show itself, which is what you're doing when you say, "What stops me?" You want to welcome it. And you want to follow that process that I give you in the live that I did on resistance. It's kind of like eliciting your values. I'm not going to go through the whole thing here because I have a whole video dedicated to it. What you're going to do is elicit the values from that resistance. Yes, there's value in your resistance. This is, I feel like I've been talking about this for years, but it still seems to be like a big secret. You don't want to resist resistance. You don't want to fight resistance because you're just fighting yourself, and you're just slowing yourself down, and you're just making yourself less fulfilled. You elicit the values, the positive intention of that resistance. If you have a fear of failure, that's rooted in a positive intention. It's probably a part of you that's trying to protect you, and that's positive. So we say to the part, if that's what it's after, and say to the part, "What's important about protecting me from failure?" And it probably, what it probably wants instead of failure. And that's what I often do too. I say, "Well, what do you, what do you want instead of failure?" Oftentimes, it'll say success. Sometimes it'll say happiness. Sometimes it'll say joy. So this resistant part actually is trying to fulfill a value for you, but it's doing it in a way that's not helping very much. It's probably doing it in a very resistant sort of way because it's been disconnected from the rest of you.

Once you know what those values are that the resistance is trying to fulfill, then you can add those values to your vision to integrate that resistance. Oftentimes, what you will find in the resistance are the exact same values that you elicited from the goal. I always find that amazing when that happens. The part of you that you thought was trying to sabotage you is actually the, as a part of you trying to fulfill the exact same goals. It doesn't always happen that way. It's perfectly possible to elicit the values from your resistance and they're not the same values as the values from the goal. Well, that tells you something else. That was, submit those are some missing pieces of your puzzle to your vision that need to be included. If you do have the same values from your resistance as you got from the goal, you still want to add those values to your vision. Because what those values often represent, even though they may share the same name as the values of the goal, it probably offers an additional dimension of those values. Say, like "love" comes up from eliciting the values of your goal, and maybe "love" comes up from the resistance as well. Well, one might be more focused on being loving, and the other one might be more focused on being lovable, more receptive to love. So there's multiple dimensions of especially high-level values like love. When I say high-level, they're like big, very general values like happiness and peace. So you want to make sure that those other dimensions are added to it.

So if you have any resistance, and how we know that is by saying, "What stops me?" I'm looking at my vision. I'm very excited about it. It feels very compelling. And then I say, "What stops me?" Oh, yeah, there's that fear. That's that hesitation about something. And we elicit those values, and then we add them to the vision and let them integrate. And then you check in again with your now modified vision. Say, "Is there anything else stopping me?" Or "Are there any other objections?" Sometimes there will be, and sometimes there's not. If there are, keep eliciting the values from that resistance. I was working with a client one time, and I think it happened about 10 times. Every time I'd say, "Is there anything stopping you?" He would say, "Oh, yeah, there's this other thing." So we've been elicit the values and add it to his vision, and we just kept doing it over and over again until he had no resistance left.

Now, what do you think happens when there's no resistance left, and all your, all you have is this amazing value-filled vision of a vision composed of the values that are most important to you in life, and that's all you have right in front of you with no resistance? You become unstoppable because there's nothing in your way. And this is like having a compass rather than like a paper road map. I don't know when you use GPS now, but I'm old enough to remember having using paper maps to figure out where to go. Like, even first moved to Los Angeles, we had to print out maps all the time off a MapQuest to know where I was going. Well, sometimes the territory changes, doesn't it? Sometimes the map isn't accurate. But if you have a compass, you always know the right direction to go. You don't need to know exactly what the terrain looks like. You just need to know the right direction to go. And that's why visions should be vague, because we don't know exactly how we're going to get there, but we don't need to. We just need to know they want to, and we just need to know the direction we want to go. We'll find a way to get there. And if we unplug all of the resistance and integrate the values from that resistance, your vision's even more compelling, and you have nothing in your way, nothing stopping you. And then when this becomes unconscious, it's not a negotiation anymore. This is where you're headed. This is where you're going with no objections. And it's even working when you're sleeping, when you're not conscious of it, it's still drawing you in that direction, moving you in that direction, compelling you in that direction.

This has been one of the greatest discoveries I've come across in my life because I can feel me going deeper and going more and more into those visions. And when I create those visions, when I step into them, and they become the life that I'm living, then I create new ones. And there's no end to this. There's always going to be another vision. And it's not always about like arriving in the vision. It's the whole process of getting there where you're growing and you're learning and becoming more and more fulfilled.

Now, what I like to say about this is that it's so much better than a vision board. And some people get upset with me and they say, "Well, I still like my vision board." And I'm not going to argue with you about that. If you like your vision board and you think it helps, no arguments here. My wife is into it, she likes vision boards. They've never worked for me, and I've tried them. And I think the reason why they don't work for me is the way that I would do it. I would, I would either cut out of magazines or print the pictures off of the internet and put them on a board. The board would stay somewhere, usually in my bedroom, and I would see it maybe twice a day. And the images were two-dimensional. And I would get tired of them. They were motivating and compelling when I first saw them, but 30 days later, they're not so interesting anymore. And also, when you're, you could say, "Well, you weren't looking at your vision board enough. You needed to look at it five times a day, ten times a day." Well, that really keeps it in your conscious mind where it doesn't really manifest. When it only, you know, when it's so conscious, it needs to go into your unconscious to fully manifest. And so when you make a vision like this, and you remove all of the resistance to that vision, and it eventually goes into unconsciousness, it is guiding your choices and your decisions and your behavior, even when you're not realizing it, which is more powerful than having to concentrate and make yourself do the things that you need to do, especially if you don't really want to do them. When it's an unconscious vision, you just do it. It's more automatic. And so you put yourself on autopilot to move you to the vision of the life that you want to create.

And this test it, see for yourself. Don't just listen to me talking about it. Do it for yourself. This is not just a 15-minute NLP technique. It's a lifelong strategy for mastering your life. I can't think of anything more important than understanding what you want and having a vision to make it happen, which will naturally create the life you want to live. Don't leave your destiny up to chance. Take charge of it more and more each day as you shape your life into the life that you envision. And doing that guided by your values.

Now, like I said, value solicitation, if you want to know how to do that, you'll find it in the description here of this video. And just that alone will, will change things for you. And then if you start plugging it into what I'm talking about here, creating a vision, transforming yourself into those values, as like, as in making those values qualities of who you are, things will change. Things have to change for you. Even if you feel like you're already at the top of your game, and even if you already feel like you have a great life, because I feel like to have a great life too. It's been a long road. It's been a long journey. Finally arrived. And I keep doing this practice because I know there's always more. As long as we're alive, there's always more potential.

Okay, what was your big takeaway from this? Write it down. That'll make sure that it gets in there better. And even better, if you want to share what your big takeaway is, and just post it here in the comments. See, my mom tried NLP, so I learned. And thank you to you, helped me a lot. Oh, you're very welcome. Julie says, "Values are love, wholeness, complete purpose, and wanting a loving long-term relationship. Things stopping me is the other person." Now, what? Okay, all right. There's a lot to work with here. So, okay. So love is a great value. Wholeness is too general. Wholeness is what you're going to feel when you're fulfilling multiple very high-level values. Okay? So it's really, it's like self-esteem and confidence. They come as a result of fulfilling your values. So if you try to go at wholeness and completeness directly, it's like, where do you even start? Love is different. You can do loving things, and you can be a lovable person. Those are things that you can take action on. And purpose is the same way as wholeness and completeness. It's purpose is what you get when you're fulfilling your highest values. So you need to know what those values are. Uh, and wanting a loving long-term relationship. The thing that's stopping me is the other person. Now, what? Okay. Uh, you can't control other people. All right. Um, so I don't know if you're talking about a current relationship you're in, or if you're, if you're saying you haven't found that person yet. So either way, like I said, you don't control other people. So if it's in a, if it's a relationship you're currently in, yes, you can't make that other person do, go along with with your values or your vision. You can try to work with them. You can tell them what you're doing. My wife and I have, uh, shared our values together. What I also did when early on when we were dating, I elicited her values conversationally. She didn't know what I was doing. She, she's very, she's a lot younger than I am. So I thought, um, I need to, you know, keep her attention. And one way I thought to keep her attention was to know what she values in a relationship. And then, without again, without her even realizing it, I took her values and I painted a vision of both of us being together, fulfilling those values. And her eyes lit up, and her skin lit up, and she was like, you know, she was compelled by that vision. Now, some people have asked her, when I tell that story, "Well, hey, don't you, uh, you know, when Damon talks about what he did and you didn't know that that's what he was doing, you know, how do you feel about that? Do you feel manipulated or or exploited in any way?" And she said, "Well, no, because all he did was help me understand what I want, created a vision around it, and he fulfilled on it." So all the things that we talked about in the vision, I did. I came through on it. So it wasn't like I was a, a seller selling a promise, or salesman selling a promise and then not making good on that promise. I, by the way, this is very powerful if you use it in sales. So, and if you use it in relationships or sales, if you're using this with other people, do it in a compassionate way. Like, yes, you can absolutely manipulate people doing this, but I assure you, it's going to come back to harm you. Like, and I'm just going to assume that everyone here is in good faith and will only use this in beneficial ways, in positive ways. So if you're going to paint a vision, help someone paint a vision of doing something together, like a relationship, you just need to make sure that you fulfill on those things, rather than just painting that vision, getting someone all pumped up, motivated, and excited, and then you don't fulfill it. That's not okay. And it's the same thing in sales. You can elicit people's values and sales. I used to do this and then paint a little vision with their, uh, with their, uh, values by saying, "Well, this product that I got, or the service that I have, or this policy that I'm selling will," and I fill in their values. And then, so now they've attaching their values to what I'm selling. Now, you need to make sure that that, what you're selling will fulfill on that. If it doesn't, and it's not, you don't have anything that's a good fit for their values, don't, don't sell that. Don't try to sell it with their values. It's, it's really unethical, and like I said, it'll come back to bite you. So, Julie, I would say, get more clear about those values that will bring wholeness and completeness and purpose, because you need to know what those values are. Just wholeness, completeness, and purpose don't tell you much. Try to work with the person. If you're already in a relationship, give this a good shot. Now, my situation, I was once married, divorced. That person just was not moving in the same direction that I was moving, and she wasn't interested. So I left. That's sometimes the hard truth of two people who are not growing together, who are growing apart. So that's a possibility. It's a choice. I'm not telling you that's the right choice. You have to figure it out for yourself. And then when it comes to like finding the right person, well, this can be fun, and then it can be an adventure. Dating, finding the person who is a good fit for your values. And this does not mean that your values need to match the other person's values. That's not at all. It just needs to be that the values and the ways in which you fulfill those values are compatible with each other. They don't have to be the same, just compatible.

I often am dealing with people who overly value conscious control and have difficulty letting things drop into unconscious. When I get to this step, is there a frame or process that would help? Does that mean that you're coaching people through this process, and that's what's happening? Um, dealing with letting drop into unconscious. When I get to the step, is there, I mean, most of the time, you're just in general, everything in your mind eventually slips into unconsciousness unless you're actively engaging it. So if I help somebody create a vision, I just tell them, "Okay, you know, this is not something you're going to practice every single day. It's something you can revisit every three to six months." That's what I will say. You can go back to the process of eliciting your values because now you have more data. You know, you've lived more life, you've gotten more feedback. So you can, uh, revisit every three to six months, I would say. But if you're not daily practicing your vision, which you should not, it will slip into unconsciousness.

It's a big takeaway, really, like taking your values and projecting them onto the screen of your mind, into vision. That's really neat. Painting an internal canvas with your values. Okay, good. I don't know Italian, but I do know what "grazie" means. So, uh, you're welcome. And thank you. I was paralyzed 15 years ago, and as time goes on, I find self-satisfaction harder and harder. Do you have any suggestions? I'm sorry to hear about that. Um, I mean, I think it all, it all comes from, uh, knowing what your values are and knowing, um, and doing things, whatever you can to align with those values. And like I was saying before, the values have a lot of, because they're vague, they have a lot of possibilities. So you might need to go through a discovery process of what are the possibilities of aligning with your values and fulfilling those values. A lot of times people tell me they don't know what they want. And I say, "Okay, well, we can start there. You want to know what you want, right?" So that usually takes discovery and exploration. And instead of being in such a rush to arrive at what it is you want, or that satisfaction, it can be a lot of fun just exploring and discovering parts of you that you weren't aware of, and discovering things that you didn't, you didn't know made you happy or fulfilled. So don't just sit back and wait until you know what you want. That's the worst thing you can do. Get out there and start doing things, whatever you can do.

Every belief you have about yourself is itself a self-believing prophecy. Go to bed. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Does our mood matter when we create our vision? Would the vision be different if we are happy while creating our vision than otherwise? I'm thinking in terms of being well-rested. Well, I'd say, yeah, in general, you want to be in a good state. Um, you know, anytime you're in a good, resourceful state, you're just going to do better at whatever you're doing. But at the same time, I find when I listed my values, that it always puts me in a good state because I'm connecting with my values. And so that puts me in a very resourceful, positive state. So, uh, I mean, if I'm in a really negative state, hopefully I'm not there for long. Uh, usually I'm not. I wouldn't maybe start the process when I'm in a negative state, like if I just got really bad news. Um, I don't know that that would be the best time to do a value solicitation. But I don't need to be in a, you know, ready to do, jumping jacks and run around the, uh, the block a few times kind of enthusiasm or happiness. That's not necessary. Like I said, when you started listening your values, you usually puts you in a really good state. So you take away the great attention of being pointed at a vision of how you want to become from an honest understanding of where you are. Continually pulls you toward embodying that vision. Yes. Okay. Hand pink waving. I guess instead of the actual emoji coming up, it just described the emoji. Can you practice being your ideal self consciously? I've been doing the switch pattern, but it isn't sticking. Um, okay. Well, so you need to find what the problem is. There's something that's not causing it not to work. So work on it until it, you make it work. But after that, it's really important that you let the switch pattern go into unconsciousness. It works so much better if you're conscious of it all the time, then you can negate it, then you can debate it, or, um, go against it. But if it's unconscious, there's nothing to resist. It just happens. So the same thing with these visions, you know, the only time I say revisit it is like three to six months because it gives it plenty of time to slip into unconsciousness, start moving you in directions, in the right direction, and you probably start doing things you never thought you would do consciously. There's a lot of wisdom in your unconscious. It's a most Loa coaches say, "Step into your vision as if it's real." But you're saying, "Step out of it." Can you elaborate more on that? Sure. If you step into your vision as if it is real, it will diminish your motivation to go forward, to go toward it. It makes it less compelling. It's okay if you want to step into your vision and explore it. Sometimes you can get some good information there. Sometimes you step into your vision, you go, "Oh, okay, now I have a better sense of what I need to do," or "I need to add a better sense of what resources are necessary for me to do this." But always step out. When you're future pacing, you always want to see yourself doing the new thing that you want to do, or that whatever is different, because that makes it compelling. It makes it something to move toward. And that's why the swish pattern works. You switch to a, you, uh, disassociated the ideal you who you want to become. And because it's out there, it's in front of you, you want, you naturally want to move toward it. But if you, you switch the associated image of your ideal self, and you're like, "There," then you go, "Okay, well, um, I've already got that." When you don't, and so when you're tempted again to fall into whatever that bad habit is, you'll probably go and do it, still convinced that you are that ideal self. And this is where a lot, a lot of that cognitive dissonance, dissonance comes from. Okay, I'm a big, um, I'm very critical of "fake it till you make it." I don't, I don't think that that's a good thing or a healthy thing. I think, and something can be useful, almost, you know, there's always like some context or situation where something like that can be useful. So I'm not going to say absolutely never. But in most cases, "fake it till you make it" is a really bad idea because all it really does is it usually makes us a little delusional. And we think we can do something, or that we have something, or that we are something that we're not. And you can, if you take this really far, then you're that person who starts, who thinks you're something, and everyone else, you know, knows you're not. It's sort of like being in a room where you think you're the smartest person, and everybody thinks you're the dumbest. You don't want that. You want to have a more sense of, uh, a more accurate sense of self. Oh, you're very welcome, Stephen. Yes, it is quite a journey. And you're welcome, Dave and Shanzo. Well, thank you so much for joining me once again. And once again, I really love doing this, really love sharing this. And let's see, we are in, this was what day? Day 25. So we got five more to go. You guys can handle this. That's something to mind yourself with. An ideal job and it actually happened, and I wasn't ready for it. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, set yourself up for the best possible situation. See yourself and move toward it. I thought being associated would make it easier for us to slip into the subconscious. Uh, no, I don't see that as making it easier. All right, take care, everybody.