Transcription
You don't just create the life that you want by dreaming bigger, or by meditating every single day and thinking about it, or by chanting mantras out into the universe and just expecting that it's going to happen. You get what you want by making your dream life feel normal to your nervous system.
Now, you might be like, "What the hell does that mean?" If the life that you want feels like it's some fantasy that's off in the distant future, and it's years and years away, then that future that you want will always just kind of be out of reach. Your subconscious, whether you realize it or not, your nervous system, whether you realize it or not, will just quietly reject that future because it seems like something that's in the distance. So, it will always be in the distance. If you don't think that you'll have it, you'll never actually have it.
And you might be the best person in the world at vision boarding. Or you might be really great at manifesting, like a pro, but if you're sitting there and there's a little bit of "this doesn't feel normal," or there's a little bit of like you're doubting it, then I promise you it ain't happening. If you want to be there someday, it will always be someday.
And so what does that mean? What it means is if you really want to manifest something, if you really want some—which manifest can be spiritual or woo-woo or law of attraction, but manifest just means you create, right?—if you really want to create that future, you need to be there now. You need for it to feel like you're there now. You need to experience it now. And that's the really key phrase for what we're going to talk about today. You need to experience it now.
It's really important to understand this. Your nervous system doesn't move towards what is exciting. Your nervous system moves towards what is familiar. I'll give you a great example. There's so many people that reach out to me and they want to change their life and they're like, "I'm miserable. I hate my life." And they want to create something better, but they can't get themselves to create something better because their nervous system, even though it's miserable, it's familiar, and it will always move towards what's familiar. So let that sink in for just a second. It doesn't move towards what is exciting or what you want or what would be an amazing feeling. It moves towards what's familiar.
And so your brain, which you know thinks and creates your emotional operating system, doesn't crave the best life. It craves the most familiar life because what feels familiar feels safe. And if something feels unfamiliar, automatically to the brain and the body, it is a little bit unsafe because uncertainty is a threat to the human brain, even if it means like staying stuck and staying miserable and staying in the exact same place.
So, let's talk real quick about how to rewire your quote-unquote normal so that it actually matches the life that you want. Let's be real about this whole thing. You've probably at some point thought to yourself like, "I don't know why I keep self-sabotaging. I know what I want. I know what I need to do, but I'm just not doing it. Like, I just can't seem to get myself out of this rut." Well, I want you to know that's not usually laziness. It's not usually lack of willpower. It's your internal thermostat doing its job. If you think about a thermostat for an air conditioner or a heater, it keeps it at the exact same place no matter what. That is your internal thermostat keeping you in the place of what familiar is because familiar, once again, feels safe. So, it's just keeping you in the place of familiarity.
So if you grew up in a house that had chaos and struggle and scarcity, then the feeling of peace actually can feel threatening to your nervous system. Like you can even consciously want to feel peaceful, but it feels really unfamiliar, and that means unsafe to the nervous system. This is why people almost always get into relationships with people that mirror the traumas from their parents in childhood because even if they don't want those traumas again, it feels familiar to the nervous system. And this is really important to understand when we talk about manifesting things. You know, if you've dated people who are emotionally unavailable, then real love might feel boring or even wrong to you, right? So you're—you're—you have to understand your brain and nervous system are wired for normal, not thriving.
And I'll give you a real quick example. Maybe—I'm hopefully you—you've been in this situation before, but I've been in this situation before where I had friends who had parents that had a good amount of money, and you walk into a nice house, maybe even a mansion, and you're like, "Oh my god, this is amazing." And you're like blown away by the house and everything that they have and all of their toys. And you know, maybe as a kid you knew someone like this, or maybe as an adult you've been into a friend's house that has a really nice house, and it's—they've got the pool and the backyard and everything that you've ever wanted. But I remember as a kid, you know, you're blown away the first couple times you go over, and then if you go over and over and over and over again, after visiting five, six, 10 times, it's still really nice. It's still amazing, but it doesn't shock you anymore. It doesn't shock the nervous system. It's because your nervous system is adjusting and it's saying, "Oh, this exists. This is real. I've been here before. This is just normal when I go to Bobby's house."
And so you might be in the exact same situation. Or maybe you've been to a friend's house. You're like, "Holy crap, this place is amazing. This is great." And you go there 5, 10, 15 times. And when you walk through the door the 15th time, you're not like, "Oh my god, this is amazing." No, you're just over at John and Stacy's house, right? And so it's your nervous system becoming more normalized to going over to their house and this is what they have. And if it feels normal, it feels safe.
So, you know, and I want you to understand like if you want a life like that, if you want more, you're not crazy for wanting more. That's completely okay. But if that more feels like winning a lottery ticket, like it's—it's out of reach, I'd have to be really lucky to get it—if it feels in the distant future, it's never going to happen for you. You won't take aligned action toward it. And it'll be like a ghost that you keep chasing, but you can never actually grab.
And so, you know, you may have heard this phrase before: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, right? Why is it that kids who often grow up wealthy also become wealthy adults? Well, of course, there have been studies that show that, you know, there's a lot more opportunities and connections that are afforded to children that are wealthy. Their parents have better connections; they get into better schools, all of that as well. But it's also been studies to find out it's not just access. It's more of like the energetics behind it—success or wealthy or that life feels familiar to them. And the reason why this helps is because of the fact that it feels familiar. It doesn't feel intimidating. It feels expected more than anything else. It's part of their identity. And so studies have found that children who grew up in wealthy households expect to be wealthier. Now, this is, you know, it just feels normal. And this is important because I'm not saying that like every person who's raised in a wealthy household just immediately becomes wealthy. Absolutely not. But it becomes easier for them because, for them, it doesn't feel out of reach. It feels normal. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but because it is normal, it tends to be easier to get.
Now, on the flip side of that, if you grew up in a household that lived paycheck to paycheck, then abundance might feel overwhelming. It doesn't even feel normal to your nervous system. And so you'll find ways, if you start making money, to get rid of it, to spend it, to burn it, to avoid it, to downplay it, just so you get back to your baseline. This was one of the things that I did when I first started making money when I was younger. I realized when I started making more money and I looked at the end of the year and my first real time of making money when I was 21 years old, I made five times more than I had the year before. But when I looked at my bank account, I had the exact same amount because it just didn't feel normal to me. So I spent it on stupid things and getting rid of stupid things, you know? I was just—it was just dumb. I was done with it, right? So that I would get myself back to baseline, back to normal.
So let's talk about like the energetics of wanting something. Okay? When you want something, what does that mean inherently? It means that you don't have it. And if you don't have something, that means that you are in the energy—when you think about the thing—of lack, and it might surprise you because you know you might say, "Hey, this is the life that I want," but wanting something too much can actually work against you because wanting means "I don't have," and it signals lack, not alignment. Instead of wanting that house or that relationship or that business, you have to have the idea of like, "It's going to happen; it's already on its way to me; I'm aligning with that version of me." Like what I want is already coming to me. It just hasn't gotten here yet. So it's not like "I want this." It's like, "No, this thing is happening. I just haven't gotten it yet." It's really subtle, but your subconscious picks up on stuff like this.
Like at one point in my life, I really started to understand this in—in my early, probably my late 20s, early 30s. I stopped saying "I want XYZ," and I just started saying "I will have XYZ," and it's not just the saying of just saying it, but like actually feeling it and being like, "No, I'm positive that thing that I want I will get." But instead of saying "I want that thing," it's "I will have that thing," and I feel deep down inside of me "I will have this thing," and really like truly believing it—not like delusional or anything like that, but just a deep knowing within myself that it will happen.
And so what you want to do, if you're noticing what I'm talking about, is normalizing what it is that you want in the future. For me, I was very, very lucky as a kid, and I say this all the time. You know, my family, we didn't have any money. My dad was out of the picture when I was 9, 10 years old. My mom had to work multiple jobs to basically feed my sister and me. And I wasn't in—I wasn't raised in this energy of success. But I was very, very lucky because my aunt and uncle had a good amount of money. My uncle Dan had a successful glass business. He had 200 employees in his business. And I was really lucky because my aunt and uncle, their daughter had a son early on, and his name was Mike. And Mike is six days younger than I am. So any time that the family went on a vacation, because Mike needed someone to play with, I was almost always brought on this vacation.
And so what happened was I was living in a house, and I was, you know, we were just getting by, but then I would go on these vacations that were like awesome. And we would be on my—my—we'd go to the Bahamas on my uncle's 65-foot Hatteras, his giant boat, right? And we would go to Costa Rica and stay at these really nice resorts and stuff. And I didn't realize it then, but what was happening is something was changing in my nervous system. Like I got a taste of what was possible. I was super lucky in the fact that I had a taste of what was possible. And you know, I didn't like suddenly just become wealthy, but there was like the seed that was planted. And I remember being a kid and like leaving Costa Rica and looking at—the first time I'd ever been out of the country, I saw what was possible. And I remember I told myself, "I'm going to make a life where this is going to be possible for me. Like I'm going to do this. I don't care. This is happening." And that kind of life wasn't unreal anymore. It was just—it wasn't mine yet. And I was going to get it.
On the flip side of that, I have a good friend named Garen. And Garen talks about—I had him on my podcast before—he talks about growing up in poverty. He was—he was born in and raised in poverty. And he said that becoming successful—he's very successful now—becoming successful when you're raised in poverty is like speaking a different language. And it's like you have to learn the language. If you're raised around successful people, you're already speaking the language. But if you're raised and you don't have successful people around you, it's like a foreign language to you. Now, think about this. How do you best—like how do you learn a language best? You have to immerse yourself in that language, in a new country. And so what you want to do is immerse yourself in the life that you—we're going to say the word "want," but really the life that you're going to get in the future. Like you don't need to be a millionaire to start feeling like one. You just need to create exposure to it.
And so like if you want a certain car, the beautiful thing about nowadays is you can test drive that car. Go test drive that car as soon as you possibly can. It'll give you the feelings of, okay, now it's not out of reach because I've actually been inside of the car. Another thing you could do—like you could, if you want a Porsche, you could go and—to Porsche and test drive the car if you want to. Or you could also go on—there's an app called Turo, which is basically like Airbnb for cars, and you could rent the car for a weekend. And then you can start to normalize the feeling of actually having the car, seeing that car parked in the driveway, getting in the car, listening to the car when it starts up, what it feels like to hold on to the steering wheel. You're starting to normalize the feeling of having that life. You know, if you have a certain neighborhood that you want to live in and—that's the place where—you know, in your—the city that you live in, you're like, "I want to live in this neighborhood"—look on Airbnb. See if you can save up enough money and just book an Airbnb for a weekend in your dream neighborhood. Perfect. Do it. Do it as often as you possibly can. See what it feels like to wake up in that energy, to have your coffee with that view. Normalize the life that you want.
You know, if you want to be a successful CEO one day, work from a hotel lobby that is the nicest hotel in your entire area and start seeing people that walk in that have that success. You know, if you want to, you know, have a future self that's coming to you in the future, then—then journal it and visualize it every single day. Surround yourself with people who have what you want. That's one of the biggest things that I've seen is finding some sort of way to find mentors or people that I can barter with or people that I can pay to learn from or people that we have some exchange value. And you start surrounding yourself with people who have the lives that you want. Then those lives don't feel so foreign to you. They don't feel out of reach. And what you're doing, once again, is you are normalizing the life that you want. You're normalizing it so it doesn't feel like, "Oh, I hope it happens." Like, maybe if I get lucky, it'll happen. It's like, "No, I've been in this energy. I love this energy. I'm going to have this energy." Why? Because when you're around it, it stops feeling impossible. It starts feeling familiar. And that's when your nervous system gives you permission to actually move forward in it because it doesn't feel foreign. It doesn't feel dangerous.
And so really this is the reframe that changes everything. When you look at it this way, I hope that it helps you understand: if it feels out of reach, it will be. If it feels normal, it's inevitable. So your job right now is to stop chasing fantasy and really start—start putting yourself into situations where the life that you want starts to feel more familiar—the test drive the car and get the Airbnb and stay in the hotel or just work in the hotel for a couple of days a week—because the life that you want isn't just like about vision boards and goals and all of that. It's about becoming the type of person who says, "This will be my life one day," and not hoping that it'll happen but knowing that it will happen because the future that you want doesn't have to feel far away. It just has to feel normal to you.
So all in all, the thing that you have to understand is you want to normalize the life that you want. How can you normalize the life that you want? Because once your nervous system stops resisting it and it feels normal to you, your entire life starts to rise to match it. So go figure out how to get into the situations to live the life that you want—to be in the energy of it, to breathe it, to touch it, to taste it, whatever it might be. Walk around in it like it's yours. That is how you normalize the life that you want.
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