Your Golden Ticket out of suffering

All right, team, we're just going to dive straight in today. I hope you're doing well. I hope that you and your family are safe and sound amidst this quarantine. And I wanted to talk about the illusion of the golden ticket. And it's something that I have seen far too often, far too much in all parts of the world, and especially within personal development and the coaching space, the self help space, everyone is sort of like pushing their own version of the golden ticket. I mean, hell, I think Brennan Bouchard even had something called the golden ticket at some point. But this really plays into this idea, this craving, this longing that most of us have to one day find our golden ticket. And the golden ticket is the golden ticket out of suffering. And it's a very compelling story that we tell ourselves internally, right? Because when we are suffering, when we're stuck, when we feel like our relationship is broken or our career is going nowhere and we absolutely despise it, or we hate the company that we're in, but we feel like we have to stay there, or we haven't been able to lose the weight that we've wanted to lose, or we feel stuck with our family in some way. What we do, what our brain does, is it looks for the golden ticket. It looks for the golden ticket out of that suffering, and it looks for something simple and easy that we can just cling on to that allows us to get out of suffering immediately. And that place, this place of searching for the golden ticket, is a place of scarcity, a place of desperation, and a place where we as human beings are unbelievably.

And very easily manipulated. We are very susceptible to making poor decisions because we are in our sympathetic nervous system. We're in fight, flight or freeze. We're not in a healthy mind space. We're not in a healthy nervous system space. And we can get very easily caught with our pants down making bad decisions just to try and escape our current circumstances. So what do we do? Well, first and foremost, I think we just need to look at why we have such a prominent culture of this golden ticket mentality. And here's the thing that I want you to know. Your freedom, your freedom is going to arrive and will be birthed out of the letting go of the illusion that at some point in your life, you will have reached this magical fairyland of a place where everything's perfect, nothing's wrong, and you've somehow created this beautiful life where everything, every single day, is going amazing and there's no hardship. It is just a Fake. That's fake news right there. That's the biggest. That's the most fake news that I think that we tell ourselves, right? But our mind convinces us that we will not be complete until we reach this place of pure bliss without any suffering whatsoever. And we crave it. We desire it. Maybe it's not that extreme, right? Maybe it's not that extreme that we're wanting that. But for sure, in some way in our life. And I imagine, even if you probably don't have to think very hard or for very long to find a place in your life where you are rejecting reality, where you dislike the circumstances that you're in and feel trapped to get out of it, I imagine that you don't have to look very far to feel claustrophobic by circumstances in your life. Maybe it's the current circumstances of being quarantined, being stuck at home. Maybe it's the circumstances of your relationship that you feel trapped in or isolated in or misunderstood or not sexually satisfied or not emotionally connected. Maybe it's the circumstances of your career or your financial situation. And because of that, because of that suffering, because of that pain that you might be feeling, a part of your psyche will inevitably search for that. The golden ticket, the easy out, the silver bullet, right? The thing that is just the snap of the fingers, cure all, fix the problem, and you can just move on in a heartbeat. The reality is that 99.9% of the time.

That is not what is required. It's not a simple solution. It's not something that you just wake up and all of a sudden have the perfect answer to. That's not what happens most of the time. So we have to first understand that sometimes, in many cases, in much of our suffering, our desire for this golden ticket, our desire for this, as one client called it recently, winning the lottery, right? One of my clients said, I'm constantly looking to win the lottery with women in my finances, in my career. And this is a guy who's built an amazing career for himself. He has a wonderful life. But many of us are looking for this, winning the lottery to get out of this struggle that we feel. And so the very first step is to let go of the fantasy of the illusion that suddenly you will win the lottery and get out of suffering, that suddenly you will acquire some piece of information that you've read in a book or consumed on a podcast that that's going to liberate you from all of your suffering indefinitely. Right? I mean, good Lord, if I had that as a. As a promise, on this podcast, I would have surely failed 300 times over because it's very challenging. And while this may have provided you with insight and wisdom and liberation in some sense, surely it will not have provided you with some form of quintessential enlightenment indefinitely, right? And that's never the aim, because that is an almost impossible feat to guarantee. And yet we expect that of ourselves, mentally, emotionally, sexually. We expect ourselves to overcome our internal obstacles in an instant. We expect ourselves, even though we may have experienced abuse in childhood or abandonment or neglect, we expect ourselves to all of a sudden have extreme levels of. Of confidence and compassion with ourselves after having done no practice, after having not implemented it whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. And so the very first step is to let go of this illusion, to stop chasing some golden ticket. Stop hoping that at some point you're going to pick up a book and read something that is going to just set you completely free or solve all your problems. Let go of that illusion, right? I think Alan Watts said something along the lines of, hope is the carrot dangling in front of the donkey tied to its collar that it pursues and chases after, and yet does not know that it will never attain it. Right? So in this case, that carrot is our golden ticket, right? It's the silver bullet. It's a lottery that we continue to. To chase after, moving in all sorts of directions that usually don't even serve us. So we have to let it go. Let it go, let it go, let it go. Look at your life and look at where you are seeking the golden ticket. Look at where you are looking for the ultimate answer. And then the next step is to start to implement daily or weekly practices that will actually serve you in moving you closer to. To your objective or your aim, right? So, for example, if you're wanting to have a healthier, more connected relationship, what needs to go into that? Well, maybe you need to spend more time together and have more consistent, regular dates. Maybe you need to have more spontaneity. Maybe you need to share more appreciation with each other. So you build structures, you build some agreements within the relationship to actually implement those things so that you can do them, not waiting for some salvation to happen, right?

That's just one example. Another example that you could take is with your health, right? If you're wanting to get into shape, rather than waiting for the day where magically you've gotten into shape, you start to implement the structure and the order and the discipline in order to move you closer towards that which you ultimately know you are capable of not that which you desire, but that which you know you are capable of. You start to act in accordance with your potential. And one of the My favorite questions that I still ask myself almost every single day is, what would I do if I was acting from my highest potential? How would I act if I was acting from my highest potential? I ask myself that question all the time. If this was limitless, what would I do if I was tapping into my potential? How would I act? How would I respond? What email would I write? How would I communicate right now in this moment? How would I respond to my partner right now, in this moment, even though I'm triggered, even though I feel reactive, even though I'm hurt? How would I respond if I was responding from my highest potential? Because freedom resides in the small moments, in the structures and the order that we put in place, but also in our adherence to our agreements with ourselves. That is the freedom that we actually are craving. The Golden Ticket creates this illusion of freedom that we won't have to do any work. It's a very American dream, right?

It's like, well, if you just put in a little bit of effort, you can just get real rich quick. It's like the Gold Rush mentality. And some of us still have that Gold Rush mentality in our own personal growth and our own personal work. And that is the very first step is to let go of that Gold Rush mentality, let go of the lottery, the Golden Ticket mentality. From there, you can take action from that place. The path becomes so much more clear because you're not hoping, you're not praying, that suddenly things will magically rectify themselves, but rather, you become more willing and to put in the work that is required to produce the results that you know you're capable of in every aspect of your life, in every way. So that's my message for you today. Stop searching for the Golden Ticket. I know it's a very chaotic time. Many people are unsure and uncertain of what's going to happen tomorrow or what's going to come in a week from now or a month from now. And so come back to being able to focus in on what you can do today, how you want to respond today, how are you going to act from your potential today, right now, in this moment. So practice the question. Start now and execute on it diligently. Talk to you next week.