How to Create Lasting Change in Your Life

Get ready to unlock your full potential. This week is all about taking you on a journey of personal growth and self-discovery, and is packed with practical tips and strategies for becoming the best version of yourself. Discover the transformative power of vulnerability and self-acceptance, and learn how to change your habits and identity for the better. It will help you deal with unresolved baggage and trauma, value your time, and become comfortable with uncertainty. Plus, it highlights how to identify your "why" and fully commit to your personal growth journey. With the added benefits of meditation, gratitude, and a media diet, you'll be well on your way to reaching new heights.

Full podcast episodes available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ⁠⁠⁠

Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠⁠Tim Ferriss⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Sam Harris⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jonathan Haight⁠⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠⁠Niall Ferguson⁠⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠⁠Bill Gurely⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jason Calacanis⁠⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Howard Marks⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ray Dalio⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Naval Ravikant⁠⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠⁠Todd McFarlane⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Bill Burr⁠⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠⁠Hugh Jackman⁠⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠⁠James Clear⁠⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠⁠Seth Godin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Susan Cain⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Morgan Housel⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jocko Willink⁠⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠⁠Tamara Levitt⁠⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠⁠, ⁠David Deutsch⁠, ⁠Richard Dawkins⁠, ⁠John Vervaeke⁠,

Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

• Suggested third party resources to help facilitate change

Discussion

• Brene Brown and the power of vulnerability and self acceptance

• Discussion of James Clear, changing your habits and identity

• Dealing with unresolved baggage and trauma

• Setting your aspirational hourly rate and valuing your time

• Becoming aware of and comfortable with uncertainty

• Identifying your "why"

• How to fully take that step to become the person that ultimately changes your reality

• Meditation, Gratitude and Media Diet

• Engage in Awe and Utilize the Eight Fold Path

Transcript

Hello beautiful people. Today we’ll be taking a break from the macro and coming back to the individual. One of my constant refrains on this channel is that we are fractals of society, society is made up of individuals. And a society prospers or suffers based on the individuals that comprise it.

So by doing this work to be the best person you can be, you’re not only creating emotional, spiritual and financial fulfillment in your own life. Your actions ripple throughout society. And if enough people can achieve fulfillment, we will have harmony in our civilization.

It’s the macro solution to all the micro problems. So if you’re listening, I assume it's because you’d like to make a few changes in your life for the better. And I welcome you to this journey and I’m proud you’re here.

A few resources I’d like to suggest at the top of the show to help you would be Atomic Habits, by James Clear. It’s an excellent book which provides practical advice about how to change bad habits and cultivate good ones to achieve lasting change. And if you don’t feel like paying for the book, his podcast episode on the Tim Ferriss show does a good job encapsulating the message.

I created a PDF that serves as an effective complement to this episode, which can be found in the link in my bio. It’s a 32 page compendium with three different modules, designed to help you achieve lasting change, find your purpose, and define your fears so you can achieve your dreams. It goes into deeper detail of the concepts discussed in this episode and provides even more actionable steps you can take in each of the three modules.

And the website Zen Habits, created by Leo Baubata, is a treasure trove. Leo is a zen buddhist who cultivated a variety of different mindsets to help himself quit smoking, get out of debt, and start exercising. He first quit smoking, then, emboldened by his success, he began to exercise and lost 30 pounds, ran a five k and then a marathon, created a plan with his wife and got out of debt, and went on to move to San Francisco and became an entrepreneur and life coach. A big component of his mindset is accountability, which definitely is a bit of a super power.

But I really want to start with Brene Brown. Brené Brown is an American professor, lecturer, author, who was kind of thrust into the spotlight. She was a researcher working on shame and vulnerability at the University of Houston and her book Daring Greatly, published in 2010 became a best seller. Then her Ted Talk on the Power of Vulnerability in 2011 garnered over 19 million views.

One of the things she’s said, which has stuck with me, is that true and lasting change can only be driven by self acceptance. You can go to the Michael Jordan school of success, drive and whip and kill yourself for a season, a book, or a year, and you can accomplish some thing, sometimes something amazing.

But at the end of what you’ve been trying to accomplish, you have to wrestle with the thorny question: what now? Often times people set lofty goals because they think the goal will make them happy. And when they get what they want, and they realize they’re fundamentally the same person, this can plunge them into a state of hopelessness and depression. True and lasting change starts with you, and can only be driven by self acceptance.

In a similar sense, James Clear has a quote from his book that true change can only come about as a change of identity. If you really want to change your habits, and thereby your life, you have to change your identity.

And you can start by cultivating better habits. Start by making the habits you want to cultivate easy, feasible, and frictionless and making bad habits, difficult, invisible, and full of friction.

But the only thing that’s going to get those habits to stick is if you change your identity.

If you want to get healthier, a good place to start is by buying fresh fruits and vegetables and lean protein to cook at home. But the more important aspect is you have to cultivate a mindset of taking pride in being a person who eats healthy and lives an active lifestyle.

Otherwise you’ll just end up ordering pizza or Taco Bell because you think you “deserve it”. You rationalize it as a reward for all the hard work you’ve been putting in. But that’s missing the point. The reward is the pride you should feel from living a life you desire.

If you want to meet new people, new friends, new collaborators, new romantic interests, despite what people might tell you, it’s not a numbers game. Rather than building yourself up to talk to every girl you find attractive, its much more efficient to just take pride in being the type of person who likes talking to people.

If you take pride in talking to people and enjoy just having conversations with people, then natural friendships, and romantic situations will emerge from those organic situations. You don’t need pickup lines or hamfisted one liners.

Something I talk about in depth in module one of my PDF is if you are trying to create real and lasting change in your life, you have to deal with any unresolved trauma, or just baggage that you still have in your life.

Just like in investing, before you’re likely to see any benefit from investing capital, it's a best practice to deal with your liabilities first. Pay down your debt and then use your surplus to invest and allow it to compound. And the same is true when investing in yourself.

Dealing with any unresolved trauma or baggage means becoming aware of any limiting beliefs you may be harboring, addressing them and releasing them.

These limiting beliefs can be incredibly deep seated, even subconscious and you’re not even aware that you really have them.

Journaling and meditation can be incredibly helpful because it allows you to take a step back from your emotions and thoughts and spend time in a more objective landscape. Witnessing your thoughts and emotions with impartiality.

Therapy is of course another option, but I think that talk therapy works better for women because women are naturally better or perhaps more inclined to talk about their feelings at length.

Men are more solution oriented, so endlessly talking about feelings, thoughts or emotions without ending the session with an actionable game plan can feel demoralizing. For men, or for people who identify more with their masculine energy, it's less about feeling loved and accepted and more about feeling capable.

For example. When is a man the happiest? When a woman asks him to open a jar. When a man can help someone who is expressing vulnerability, he feels protective and purposeful. He has a goal, albeit a simple one, and when he achieves it and the feminine / vulnerable energy shows true appreciation, he feels loved, accepted and competent.

Give a man a purpose and a way to achieve it and he will crawl across broken glass with a smile. So that’s why talk therapy is less effective for men, in my experience, because they’re like okay great I already knew my dad was a cold fish, how do we fix me.

So for me, art has been an effective way for me to bypass my conscious mind and access some of the subconscious issues bucketing around in there.

I suppose you’d call this art therapy, but similar to meditation, it creates a certain amount of distance because you’re writing a story and you fashion characters who interact with each other.

And if you’re doing it correctly, you’re not really consciously thinking about it, but each character is a projection of your own subconscious and value judgments about the world.

Even, and perhaps especially important, are the way you write antagonists or villains, because they represent the darkness or less accepted aspects of yourself and can give you clues about your shadow.

And you can do this with writing, painting, journaling, even music. The intuitive, creative, emotional, fluid, and cyclical nature of art is a great way to balance the feminine energy within you as well as access some of the limiting beliefs or baggage that make be lurking in the subconscious.

And once you can become aware of any of the limiting beliefs or negativity that you are harboring, I’ve found the EFT tapping to be helpful.

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom technique, and it's a type of counseling intervention that stimulates acupuncture points by pressuring, tapping or rubbing these points while focusing on situations that represent personal fear or trauma.

Whether this is placebo effect or whether it actually works, I found it to be helpful, although if you do have or have had very significant trauma occur in your life that I definitely would recommend speaking to a professional, who is well trained and certified to be handling that kind of thing. I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist and don’t pretend to play one on TV.

Once you have a thorough grasp on your life, you have done the work, you know who you are, you've made peace with yourself, you're eating healthy, your thoughts are healthy, you have positive self talk and have a healthy self image, you can really begin to design the life that you really want and create lasting and change.

A good place to start is you have to start to really value your own time.

The entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant has a very applicable piece of advice here, and that’s create your own aspirational hourly rate.

Your aspirational hourly rate should feel absurdly high. And before you start to even think about this, just know I’ve actually worked with entertainment lawyers who have charged $1000 an hour and it wasn’t ridiculous. It was their rate that they charged for their time and their expertise.

They valued their time, so whatever you think of as ridiculous, I’d say double that. Let’s set an aspiration rate of $5,000 per hour.

Now use this as a filter. Whenever you’re faced with doing something you really want to say no to, but you feel compelled to do it by desire, fear or social pressure, think about your aspirational hourly rate,

Are you willing to forgo $5,000 to drive across town to return a shirt or argue with a vendor? Would that person who doesn’t have your best interests at heart be willing to compensate you for your hourly rate based on all the effort and kindness you keep showing them?

Anything that is not providing you either tangible value or is not a two-way street or is not giving you energy and making you happy, needs to go. And I talk a lot about boundary setting in my PDF, but another good resource is Matt Mochary the entrepreneur turned CEO coach.

You have a finite amount of energy to do really important things everyday. You have maybe four hours every day where you have the brain power and mental energy to do deep, creative, mental, intensive work. Then you have maybe another four hours where you have the energy to do less labor intensive tasks whether that’s editing your previous work, paying bills, washing your car, cooking nutritious meals, whatever you need to do that day that doesn’t require problem solving per say.

And you need time to recharge. Read, relax, spend time with friends and people who uplift you. And of course, sleep, which is the cornerstone of a healthy and productive life.

You can’t afford to be spending any of your time or energy on people who aren’t serving you in the long run.

OK so now that you value yourself, you value your time, you are only allowing people, things experiences and connections in your life that give you energy even if that means quitting or leaving an unfulfilling job or relationship.

Now that’s a scary prospect. The way our educational system is set up, we start in kindergarten and progress to first grade and then second grade and then third, ect all the way through college. And you know what is coming down the pipe next year. You know what is expected of you.

And then you graduate and suddenly there is no road map anymore. Adult life is your oyster, but the blank slate is also terrifying. As Soren Kirkeggard would say in 1844, anxiety is the 'dizziness of freedom', of looking into the boundlessness of one's own possibilities. Without anxiety there would be no possibility and therefore no capacity to grow and develop as a human being.

So rather than trying to look inward to see who the individual is as a human being and what they have to offer the world, most people do what they have been conditioned to do since birth. Find a preconstructed path where most of the decisions have already been made by an authority figure and learn how to paint between the lines in that new sandbox.

And while there is truly nothing wrong with this, there is a whole world of potential within all of us that is just waiting to be unlocked.

Following someone else’s preconstructed road map is like driving through Vermont using a map of New Hampshire as a guide. Sure you’ll get somewhere if you just keep going north, but its unlikely to be the place you thought you were going.

So your first main thing you have to do is figure out your why. Your reason for being. Vince Lombardi said the difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of a will.

Success is not how you look on the outside. You may look like a mean Lamborghini and clean everywhere you go. But what matters is what’s under the hood.

Which is why you need a why that is so powerful. You can walk the walls with it.

When I was in California aspiring to be a screenwriter, my “why” that I was very attached to was very ego driven.

Things like creating the next great masterpiece, creating a legacy that would define a decade, making millions of dollars, and living an opulent and pleasure filled lifestyle.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of those things they’re pretty healthy normal natural things for a human person to desire.

But when it comes to a “why”, it’s a pretty weak why. I mean it was strong enough to get me to organize a move across the country, bear uncertainty until I had a good job and solid living situation, write 15 screenplays and spend countless hours reading and watching film, and go to networking events as an introvert. Which are all huge accomplishments in and of themselves.

But to go back to Leo Baubata of Zen Habits, its because when the shit really hits the fan and you’re faced with a once in a century pandemic, unemployment, and massive disruption of an entire industry which is now implicitly black balling based on race and sexual orientation, my “why” just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

And just like J Paul Getty, who I talked about two episodes ago, a lifestyle of opulence and pleasure gets old and listless pretty quickly.

So let’s find a better why.

Creative expression is not necessarily a bad why as long as there’s no expectations around it.

As Rich Rubin says in his book, the Creative Act, they point of Art is to get in touch with source and to create something that is the best that it can be, and then release it into the world. That’s it. It’s a cyclical process of receiving, creating, shaping, polishing and releasing. ‘

Once its out in the world we can’t and shouldn’t want to control the outcome. The moment you release it, you’ve accomplished your goal. You’ve succeeded. That’s a very good why.

Doing something for a reason that is greater than yourself, like your family, your wife, your kids your community. That’s a very good why.

Creating a product or service that is going to actionable help people, that’s a very good why.

Money and success are byproducts of your why. If you think money and success will bring you happiness, you have it backwards. If you think friends and a romantic partner will bring you confidence and joy, you have it backwards.

Because there will be bumps, and difficulties and challenges, some seemingly insurmountable. But this is just another limiting belief.

So if you know why you started and it’s a good “why” which is greater than yourself, it will carry you where you want to go.

Is what you are doing with your life benefiting others? The most successful entrepreneurs find a need in the market that isn’t being met and they create a product that serves that need. It provides value to people and people reward the entrepreneur for fulfilling this need. It's balanced.

Parents are naturally doing something with their lives which are benefiting others, by raising their children and often times, participating in their community by carpooling and hosting play dates and enrichment activities for other children as well.

What you do ideally should be equally as good for you as for others. You have to find fulfillment doing it. It has to be balanced.

In his most recent stand up special, Hassan Minaj speaks about Aldan Global Capital, which leverages debt to buy distressed businesses, like book stores and newsrooms. Then they fire a bunch of people who probably can’t afford to be fired, and run the companies lean so the profit margins align, and then flip the business for a profit.

In Hassan’s words, “I don’t think it’s fair to buy something you don’t own, with money that isn’t yours, and be able to make real money by fucking over poor people.”

Is it a shrewd way to make money? Yes. Is aligned with your highest good and the highest good of others. Probably not? They’re not buying these stores or companies to get them working better. They’re buying them to make a profit. And in the meantime, people get hurt. I don’t believe in Cartesian Ethics, I believe in Utilitarian Ethics. And from the utilitarian perspective, these outputs don’t align. Just something to chew on in your own life.

When visualizing your future, it should be more like an outline than a shot list. For those without an entertainment background, an outline is a rough map of where you are going, and what should generally be happening as you reach certain beats. But if another more interesting idea of prospect appears at one of the junctures, you can feel free to explore that possibility as long as it is in alignment with where you want to go.

A shot list is a strict shot by shot linear direction of what needs to be done that day. When shooting a movie, scenes aren’t short in linear order. Usually, all the outdoor scenes in certain area will be shot in the same day or span of days. A shot list does not allow for any variation and forces you to stick to the script, literally.

So you need your why do you need your vision any to go away? Need to know where you’re going you need to be able to visualize roughly it doesn’t have to be perfect, but where you want to go it was always so in writing I would always have a very rough outline I was never someone who like to outline too heavily just Y and there’s never super drawn to directing because directing is really executing a script. It’s creating a shot list that you have to be exact and you have to create a shot by shot. Shot list of story board of this is exactly how it’s gonna happen and of course they included take of improvisation, but it’s really about executing a script.

You want to live your life more like an outline and less like a shot list.

You definitely want to know where your going and why, but you also don’t wanna be grasping so tightly to your shot list that you miss some incredible opportunities or people along the way.

OK so now you’re the type of person who has let go of the baggage from their past, they value their time and expertise, they have a a reason for being that is greater than themselves and they know roughly what they want to accomplish.

So now how do we fully take that step to fully become that person and ultimately change our reality?

You need are three components:

You need positive beliefs which have replaced your limiting beliefs. You need to make sure your vibration is in alignment with what you have visualized for yourself, and then you need to take inspired action.

Tim Ferriss the entrepreneur has a great quote about how haphazard action is actually just laziness, disguised as busyness or something to that effect. Basically his point is that even though it feels like you’re doing a lot if you have 20 zoom meeting every day or if you’re writing 12 hours a day, or always moving and always on the go.

Even though it feels like you’re busy, you’re actually just being lazy because you haven’t thought it through. You’re not actually creating a plan. You’re not creating that outline and deciding at the top of each day “okay what is my priority today.”

In the words of Niall Ferguson, the word “priority” means a thing that is regarded as more important than another. Thing. Singular. If you went back in time 100 years and said to someone these are my priorities for the day, they would look at you like you didn’t know what the word meant.

Figure out what you need to do with that four hours of golden time to accomplish your goal. What is the one thing you need to do today? And just know, the one thing you may need to do today is rest.

You can be lazy by doing nothing and you can be lazy by doing too much without actually thinking about what you need to be doing. Either is laziness, you're either being lazy of the body or lazy of the mind.

That’s what inspired action is. You need to get your beliefs and order which is why I said that EFT tapping helps because you can help rewire your beliefs and to be in in line with what you want to believe about your future.

There’s no reason why the things that happened in your past have to continue as a pattern in your future.

So you have to release your past and then you have to get clear on what you want to have happen in the future

Then you have to get your vibration in alignment with what you want. If what you want for yourself is a future full of joy and peace and friendship and trust and laughter and love, then you have to embody those qualities. Love and gratitude is one of the highest possible vibrations so you have to consciously embody it.

How?

Listen to high vibrational music as much as possible. Music is literally vibration coming into contact with you, sometimes intimately and directly through your ears with earbuds or airpods.

If you need to move through a powerful emotion, there’s nothing wrong with listening to sad or melancholy music to help you move through the emotion, but you shouldn’t be doing that on the norm

Sing and dance as much as possible. Fredrick Nietzsche had a saying, that was a day without song or dance of the day wasted.

Meditate: I love the Calm app for its wide variety of meditations but you can also try headspace, Sam Harris waking up app or free meditations on YouTube.

Through meditation you’ll be able to note and label your thoughts. Keep your thoughts on things that you want to appear in your future. Worry is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere. When something “bad” happens, remind yourself of the story of the Chinese farmer and remember that you don’t know in this moment if this is a blessing or a redirection to something better. Tell the story of the chinese farmer.

Express gratitude: Jess Heslop has a fantastic morning meditation I listen to every morning and I keep a gratitude journal at night and write down five things I’m grateful for. Being grateful makes you focus on what you have rather than what you lack. Because whatever you focus on grows.

The gratitude journal doubles as a visualization journal because I write the things I’m grateful for that are already in my life alongside the things I’m grateful for which are not yet in my life in the same tense. So my subconscious gets used to the idea of the things I want already being in my life.

Drastically limit your consumption of social media and porn if you still spend time utilizing either. Both are energy takers. Social media gets you to focus on a static highlight reel of someone else’s fabricated reality and often makes you feel bad because you are comparing your day to day to someone else’s top 1% of all moments that don’t even tell half of their story.

Porn gives an unrealistic view of sexuality and the sexual act and can rewire your brain to think of women as sex objects and not subjects with their own unique sense of self. In a similar way to porn you are seeing a fabricated one dimensional reality. And just on a side note, making sperm uses a lot of energy that you could be utilizing elsewhere.

Read more, look at screens less. Actively cultivate your information diet. Just as you are what you eat, you are what you watch. I actively make a choice not to watch or play violent video games or violent shows anymore. I used to really enjoy them. From Breaking Bad to Sons of Anarchy to Game of Thrones. I even wrote a spec pilot for Mindhunter when I was living in LA and got really deep in the world of serial killers and true crime, which was fascinating. But it deeply affects how you perceive the world and what your internal vibration is subconsciously.

What I’m watching these days is Chef’s Table, an Emmy nominated series during which each episodes explores an inspiring story about a chef overcoming adversity to become Michelin starred or something that like. There are beautiful visuals and a the element of the indomitable human spirit in each episode.

And I’ve been re-watching Avatar the last air bender, because, and this is going to sound really woo woo, but it helps me reconnect to my inner child and remind myself not to take life too seriously. Ang the main character, while he’s literally on a journey of self mastery to save the world, never takes himself to seriously and knows how to have fun which I something I could have help with.

And so continuing on that note, actively cultivate your social media feed. I still use and consume social media but if there’s something I don’t want to see, it’s not enough to just scroll by, I actively block the account.

You have to teach the algorithm what you want to watch, not let it control you. The algorithm wants you to stay on the app. So if you actively block accounts you don’t want to see, it will have no choice but to send you more of what you want to see.

And so on that same note.

Stop watching the news. The news is designed to lower your vibration. It shows you everything going wrong in the world. Curate your information diet by finding a wide variety of trusted individuals across many disciplines, backgrounds and political leanings and get your information from them. If something is truly important you’ll hear it from those sources or people around you (like at work).

Visualize your ideal future before you go to bed listen to positive affirmations right when you wake up. Your mind right when you fall asleep and right when you wake up is in a theta wave state meaning it’s incredibly impressionable to messaging at this time. So this is the best time to reprogram your subconscious mind with what you want to be there, rather than any baggage you may have picked up

On this same note Do not look at your email or social media until at least 1 hour after waking up. You don’t want anything getting into your subconscious that you don’t want there

Get out in nature for at least and hour every day. If you can’t do that, get at least 20 minutes of sunshine everyday, even if is just allowing it into your office or room while you work.

Exercise every day. It could be as simple as walking around your block for 20 mins

Take what you want off a pedestal. Life is a string of experiences you you string together one by one. Just like the parable of the farmer you don’t know if the experience your in is a turd or a pearl. But every turd has a pearl in it, and every pearl has a bit of turd in it.

Everything has good and bad in it. Ying yang. You’ll still argue with your soul mate, your luggage will get lost while traveling the world, and you’ll have stressful days at you dream job.

It will be every bit as fulfilling as you imaged, but it will also annoy you at times. Which is freeing because it allows you to take it off the pedestal and realize it won’t make you happy. You can choose to be happy, and optimize your life to look the way you want it to.

Eat fresh, real food. It doesn’t have to be organic non gmo or vegan, I mean good for you if it is but just make sure it’s not processed. The fewer the ingredients the better.

Eat lots of fruits and vegetables and real meat that you cook yourself at home. Nothing wrong with indulging or having a cheat day but it should not be the standard.

Engage in awe. Children are often awestruck by the most simple of things. If you can reconnect with this state of a child like wonder for the ordinary you will soon find your life becoming extraordinary.

This is actually really addicting in an amazing way. If you are out in nature, just pause when you see something beautiful and just pick a spot and stare at it. Let your eyes go slack, focus on what you hear.

Be fully immersed in the moment. You’ll find the image changes. Becomes deeper. You connect with this profound sense of peace. You connect with the ultimate intelligence, for more on that listen to my episode on the Nature of God.

An easy way to start doing this is to connect with things that are already awe inspiring no matter what age you are. Watch, nature documentaries about natural wonders of the world.

Learn about the planets in our solar system, because crazy and all inspiring things are happening all around us on a daily basis that we can barely even begin to rationalize.

The more you can get in touch with the state of awe the more you can connect with the state of being that is awe inspiring and simply be that in your life.

In Buddhism, the path to achieving Nirvana is known as the Noble Eightfold Path, which is a set of ethical and mental guidelines that are intended to lead the practitioner towards the cessation of suffering and the attainment of enlightenment. The Noble Eightfold Path consists of the following eight elements:

1. Right Understanding: Developing an accurate understanding of the nature of reality, particularly the nature of suffering and the impermanence of all things.

2. Right Intent: Cultivating the intention to practice the path to liberation and enlightenment, and to act with kindness and compassion towards all beings.

3. Right Speech: Practicing truthful, kind, and helpful speech, and refraining from harmful speech such as lying, gossip, or harsh language.

4. Right Action: Acting with integrity, kindness, and compassion, and refraining from actions that harm oneself or others.

5. Right Livelihood: Making a living in a way that is ethical and does not cause harm to others.

6. Right Effort: Making a sustained effort to cultivate positive mental states, such as loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity, and to overcome negative mental states, such as greed, hatred, and delusion.

7. Right Mindfulness: Cultivating a focused and clear awareness of the present moment, and the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise within it.

8. Right Concentration: Developing the ability to concentrate the mind and focus it on a single object, in order to cultivate deeper levels of insight and wisdom.

This will allow you to act from your highest good, not constrained by fear or social judgment.

So now you have your why, you have your beliefs in order, you’ve raised your vibration to be in alignment with the future that you’re dreaming for yourself so you know where you wanna end up and you believe that you can get there.

And, this is key, you already feel as good now as you would when everything you want comes into your reality.

That’s an important thing. This isn’t an If - then statement. You aren’t saying “I’ll be happy when this comes in”

you’re saying because I am on this path and because I am excited to be on this path and because I am moving in the direction that I want to be going in.

You have to take the inspired action, but at the same time you have to be a little bit detached and just be happy and grateful with what you have and where you are and just keep putting in the work in and then one day you’ll look up and you’ll realize oh wow it would look at the empire I’ve created. Look at the life I’ve created for myself. I’m where I want to be and I get to do this everyday.

Whenever you’re not really sure what to do or what you should be doing or you’re stuck in a fear or doubt spiral, just think “if I were who I wanted to be, this theoretical person who had it all, what would I be doing right now?”

Sometimes the answer is work. Sometimes the answer is rest. Sometimes the answer is watch something inspiring. Sometimes the answer is spending time with friends. Sometimes the answer is go to a museum. You get the idea.

By doing this you’re literally merging two timelines. You’re merging the potential and the actual. You’re merging the potential into the actual.

You’re moving the potential fantasy that you have for yourself and your life into the actual and eventually there won’t be a potential anymore. It’ll just be who you are and I’ll just be reality and then you can dream a new dream while you continue to live in the wonderful world that you’ve created.

And that’s how you create real and lasting change in your life.

Light and love my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.

Outro: Good Thing Barns Courtney