Your Worldview is Holding You Back

If you're always scanning, always scanning as a dominant frame for danger, well, guess what that does to your physical body. Stress, cortisol, discomfort, distrust. If that is true of your past, I want to let you know there's hope. That was true of my past. That's what I grew up in. That's what I experienced, is what I know. But I don't have to live there and stay there. You can shape a different world. And when you got that, you got real personal power. I cannot tell you how genius level Albert Einstein was when he said this. It's just like, wait a minute. This is one of the most important decisions we'll ever make. Is this a hostile or friendly world? And I want you to know that this question can be answered detached from your past experience. That we can as conscious adults go, you know what? I feel like it's a hostile universe because all these bad things happen to me, and here's all the reasons it is. Or I can say, you know what? Let me start shaping a friendly universe. This is what I did. I grew up in a very hostile place. So my emotions were primarily what you would call fear or avoidance driven emotions. Protect yourself, be careful. My thoughts were that way. My immediate anxieties were that way. So my sense of being on guard was all the time. And my thoughts were like, be careful, watch out. Can't trust this person. Can't trust this person. And it was always on the lookout, High levels of stress and cortisol following along with that mental frame. Does that make sense? If you're always scanning, always scanning as a dominant frame for danger, well, guess what that does to your physical body, right? Stress, cortisol, discomfort, distrust and avoidance, detachment, not being vulnerable, not sharing because you don't want to be hurt, shamed, attacked. And listen, if that is true of your past, I want to let you know there's hope that was true of my past. That's what I grew up in. That's what I experienced, is what I know. But I don't have to live there and stay there now. I didn't have to do therapy for it. I happened to be somebody who just did personal development. I read all these personal development books, which, by the way, everyone craps on personal development books. Half of them are written by psychologists, for Pete's sake. So it's like, wait, these were incredibly powerful and thoughtful people. And I was reading these personal development books, and it was saying, hey, even if you came from that, you now get to shape your current world based on intention. And I'm sure even our therapist friends will agree on this one. That's the switch. That's the power. That's where you find a new level of self control over life is go, oh yeah, maybe I did grow up in a hostile world. But I'm not going to perpetuate that. As Ed Milet says, I'm going to be the one to change that in the course of my family. I'm going to be one in this generation to shift us from a hostile family to a friendly family. Yet just because you had and you were in danger mode, it doesn't mean that you can't now decide to build a friendly world. And that's what I did. I said, you know what? I'm scared of everybody. I'm going to read how to Win Friends and Influence People and start building a friendly group of people around me. I'm going to learn to engage people and create friendships with people. That is going to allow me to live in that emotion, live in that feeling, live in that experience even more than the past. It doesn't say that those things didn't come up for me. It just says I was going to consciously create something different. You can shape a different world and when you got that, you got real personal power. I really believe you have more mental health. You can be aware of these things, you can be accepting of these things, you can be forgiving of these things. I'm not saying deny it. I'm saying yes, those things exist. But the switch in our human behavior, in changing the future happens that moment ago. I can create a friendly universe. The universe doesn't just happen to me. I have high agency in this. I can shape this. If I'm in a marriage that is hostile, I have input into this thing. I can shift this thing. I can shape this thing. I can leave this thing. I can do something about this thing. That's the moment people get freedom. And I want to give you that. You have the freedom to now choose. You have the freedom to see and sense and feel and experience things, but also create, shape, structure things right for me. Why do I meditate? Well, it's not just to move away from these negative things that happen in my life. It's to shape an entire new brain. It's to shape an entire new way of thinking, is to shape the feelings of freedom and presence that I want to experience more often. Now notice it doesn't happen. I meditate every day. In other words, I made it a practice, your emotions and putting yourself into emotions, feelings and moods that you want to experience becomes a practice. And the more you practice it, the more the world feels more friendly. Because you've got a guiding hand in it. Does that make sense? You're back in the game. You're back at the driver's wheel. This shifts everything. It doesn't mean you don't have negative experiences. I got tons of negative experiences. Negative people, negative days, negative events, negative emails, negative bills. All these things happen and are true. I don't deny them, but they don't drive me. What drives me is my positive conscious practices that allow me to feel good, to connect, to succeed in the world. Does that make sense? To feel good, to connect with other people, to achieve meaningful pursuits. You all have heard me share this before, that I believe that the four primary desires, and of course these all have emotional states with them too, that we all want. We all want Aliveness, connection, meaningful pursuits and growth. Aliveness, connection, meaningful pursuits and growth. Well, I can practice those things. As I practice those things, I feel those things. As I feel those things over and over and over and over again. It's like rebuilding and the inner architecture of my mind, body, spirit. And all of a sudden, the more I get to feel those things. Listen. The more I get to feel those things, sense those things. The more I practice the things that drum those things up, the more listen. My impulses start to fall in line. This is why change is possible. You practice positive things for you, your impulses start over time to fall in line. It doesn't mean that there's not still negative impulses. It means that a majority of your impulses start to fall in line with that conscious patterning and protocols and practices. So the reason I consciously and consistently practice things like meditation, good sleep, workout, good food and diet is because as I practice those things, my impulses lead towards those. As I practice connecting with my wife, my impulses lead to love. Does that make sense? Even though I grew up in a hostile place, the more I practice assertive, caring, kind love with my partner, as I get in the practice of that, my impulses start to fall. My intentions. When you're immature, your impulses drive your action. When you're mature, your intentions start to condition your impulses. Does that make sense? I'm not here to say I'm not that miracle guy. I hate those seminar guys who are like, you can change this thing in an instant forever. I'm like, no. Usually intention and practice starts to over time condition impulses to fall more in line. Not all of them, not forever, not instantaneously, but more of them. And so I went from a scared kid to a very approach kid, a friendly kid, a happy kid. I want you to know it's possible. It's possible. So friendly versus hostile. Choose friendly and put friendly practices into your life. Watch how your impulses change as you get more open to other people, more vulnerable, more assertive, more connecting, driven. The impulses start to fall in line over a period of time because the behavior starts shaping the emotion, the feeling, and the mood. Right? This is why sometimes they say, fake it till you make it. I never liked that phrase. What they're saying is, put yourself into play. The body and the mind, the spirit will eventually follow it, right? Put yourself onto that field. Even though you're not an athlete, over a period of time, you find yourself running, right? You got to put yourself in play. That's important for positive practices. Okay, second one. Abundance versus scarcity. This is very powerful, and this will be not liked by many people. I'm just going to say it. I want you to build abundance in your life. Notice I say I want you to have abundance. I want you to build it. I want you consciously to decide. I. I'm going to build an abundant life. Abundance of love, abundance of joy, abundance of wealth, abundance of health. I'm going to build that. As I build that, my behaviors align to that, my beliefs align to that, my impulses align to that. I didn't have abundance in my life. We grew up poor. I didn't understand that I could have things, build things, do things. I just thought that, you know, some people have have it, some people don't. But in every area, I didn't see an abundance of affection outside of my mom and dad. The community I was growing up in didn't have that. It was hostile. It was also scarce. There wasn't a lot of things. So even at school, kids stole stuff, stole my books, stole my pens, stole my backpack. There's like a lot of scarcity. And so I just learned to protect and grab and hoard, but I never learned to build and to generate. See, I'm putting you into higher agency here. I want you to build abundance. I want you to be very proud of yourself for having built abundance and wealth into your life. Building abundance of love into your life, because abundance requires intention. Abundance requires intention. You don't just get abundance. I believe abundance is here. It's accessible from the universe, from God. I'm somebody who has great belief in that. And if I don't intend myself to experience it and to explore it, it's like it's gone. So you have to access abundance. But more importantly, I want you to build it. I want you to be that person in this generation of your family who creates more abundance of affection, of health, of wealth, of contribution, of creativity. I want you to be that person only because you decide to you just so, oh, I'm going to have this abundant mindset. I'm going to align my actions with it, I'm going to build it. And then you know what? You get that self respect that comes in. And the more you get self respect because you've built something, you generated it. You had high agency. Guess what? Those doubtful, those diminishing impulses, thoughts, emotions, feelings, moods, those start to be diminished. Those start to go away because your confidence, your worth, your sense of ability and capability in life, it grows because you grew something. You made something more abundant. You grew it, right? You grew it. You grew more positive emotions, you grew more affection and love, you grew better relationships, you grew a business, you grew your wealth, you grew your health. And all of a sudden, in growing your practices of a positive life, you're like, yeah, I got this. And now you have the emotions that feel like encouraging emotions. Everyone put it in the chat. Encouraging emotions. It's almost like your emotions start supporting movement. Your emotions start feeling like high levels of like, let's engage, let's approach, let's do it. We can handle this. Your thoughts start feeling more driven by a sense of worth and self respect and capability that is at another level because you grew something. As you grow these areas of your life, you grow in self respect and your impulses align. I want you to write that down in your notes. Your impulses start to align. And remember, emotions are automatic impulses. They're automatic, they're reactive, they're circumstantial, they're physical and they're short. But you can start getting those to pop in more positive ways as you make progress in these areas. Okay? Third, is the world agentic or deterministic? I think you've probably seen this huge debate all around the world, especially the last couple years, is, is there free will? There are very brilliant thinkers from physics to psychology to more cultural, I would say cultural commentators who have come out and said, there is no free will. The universe is doing what it's doing. We're along for the ride. You know, fate is determined and your choices are actually determined based on things. You can't control. Your, you know how your body is processing right now. You can't control it based on the circumstances because Circumstances just happen randomly by chance. You can't control it. There's this big movement that there's no free will. And I'll share this story with you. I was being interviewed by a podcaster who did not run the interview because of what happened. But he was very highly. He says everything's deterministic. We don't have control. There is no free will. Brendan, there's no way you can say that humans can just choose to do something because we don't have the ability to do that. Like things make us and force us to do things, from how we think to how our body is being run to the people around us. And I think that was something I don't agree with because I've spent a career watching people like literally seeing their eyes make a choice. And that choice wasn't because of biological, it wasn't just because of cosmological, it wasn't just because of sociological. A higher intention or a higher spirit that was connected to something in the future. That was their consciousness making that choice. In fact, they had all the reasons to make other choices. Logic would have said, make this choice, but intention and consciousness and spirit said, make this choice. They acted far and above impulse. They acted far and above what their family did, what their circumstances was. They made a choice of character and consciousness that it would actually be hard to describe. We see it all the time when someone does something truly courageous and not an impulsive courageousness. Like they deliberated the real risk and they did it anyway. They went against their own human preservation. They risked their life to help somebody else. That is more of a moralistic, character driven or consciousness driven thing. That is a free will moment. There was five other people standing there. All of the right logic said, don't risk your physical body. Five other people didn't jump in. One person jumped in. That was a demonstration of free will. The person didn't agree with me. Made lots of good debates and very philosophical, by the way. Everyone usually who makes the argument there's no free will have never been a coach to other people over long term. Maybe they had interesting philosophical conversations, maybe they've read lots of books, but they've never coached somebody over the course of a year or two like they were personally responsible to coach this person and see them shift and change. And if you ever coach people, you learn about the power of free will. It's super obvious, of course, this argument is that it's one or the other. And that's where people get diminished. They think like, well, you know, there is either Free will or there is not. And I think, of course, do things influence us? Lots of things influence us. Tons of things influence us. But we can still make the decision on our own. For example, I told this podcaster, I said, when? He said, you know, he got in the argument, and I just went right to it. I said, I think when I was reading about you, I heard that you're married. And he said, yes. I said, how's that going? Because what do you mean? I said, your marriage, is it high quality, low quality? Are you happy with it, unhappy with it? How's it going? He says, I'm. Yeah, it's. I'm happy with it. I said, okay, well, what if you called your wife right now? What have you just decided to call your wife right now? Do you have a choice or do you have to call her? Because I just said, you should call her so that in this moment, there's your podcast team. They're watching you. Brendan Burchard just said, call your wife. You know, you could choose to or not. Seems like, of course you would, because you love her and you're probably someone who values love. Is that true? He goes like, where are you going with this? I said, well, if you love your wife and you have a choice in this moment to talk to her or me, who are you going to talk to? He learned a lot about free will in that moment. And I could tell you, he pulled out his phone and called his wife, because. Talk to Brennan or my wife. Who'd he called? His wife. He made a choice. Now, of course, social circumstances, said he should talk to me. I'm there, I flew in. You know, all these people are here. He makes money from the podcast he chose that day he was going to do like, this moment was all geared his whole life to be a podcaster. All of the situation was there. The money was all on the line, made said call, you know, just talk with me. But he could derail that by making a choice. Well, why do I go off on that? Even if you don't agree with me philosophically, that's fine. Coach more people and you'll start to realize people can make outstanding, extraordinary, uncommon, unexpected choices that are good, that are moral, that are beyond impulse, the social situation, the moment, and even every single thing that we know. They can choose something new. And it's like, wow, that choice should be liberating for you. The greater you feel that you have choice in life, the more you have freedom. But too often you think, well, she's just the way she is. I'M just the way that I am. My family was broke. This generation was like this. I'm black, I'm white. I'm this. I'm from there. He's from this. My strength is this. My Enneagram says this. We feel like we're fixed to these certain situations and we don't understand how fluid we are. We don't understand how adaptive we are. We don't understand our ability to choose growth over impulse. Discomfort even. Right. I always tell people, oh, you don't believe in free will? Go watch somebody run a Spartan race. Let's talk afterwards. You know, it's like, like there's a lot of choice. And I'm telling you, there's strength in your choice. Be a high agency person. If you want something, pursue it. If you want to build something, do it. Don't believe you are fixed and stuck. If you stay stuck, that's a choice. If you stay stuck in negative emotions, that's a choice. Freedom is going, I can choose a different thought. Freedom is, I can choose to build a different thing. I can start a new thing. I can quit a thing. I can adapt. I can shift that growth mindset. But that growth behavior is so vital. It's called having high agency in life. You feel that you are in command and you take actions to show it. It doesn't mean there aren't train wrecks. You don't mess up and there's not fail. What it means is you're back in the driver's seat. High agency, my friends.