Visualization Backfires: Why Your Future Has To Feel Boring

What is going on, guys? Welcome back to Rewired Live. Excited to be— these are going to be trainings going forward. I've done— I've brought some people on, and maybe we'll bring some people back on, um, later. But I wanted to do some— continue to do some live trainings for you all talking about Built Framework, how I've used it, and things you can start using today to notice a difference in your life. And I've been doing this on TikTok since January 1st. Okay, January 1st, every single day I've been on live on TikTok, every day. Like, I missed 3 days, and now I'm moving to more of like a Monday through Friday model. But for 5 months, I did every single day. You know how I did that? You know, I was able to get on TikTok live every single day for 5 months. Because I was operating from the identity of someone who did that. I was operating from the identity of a world-class personal development coach, world-class performance coach. That's who I know myself to be. That's, that's who I know that I am. So what does that type of person naturally do? They get on live, they teach, they coach, they make communities, they build programs, they change lives. That's what they do. It's like I had to get up every single day and discipline myself. Oh my God, another day. Another day I got to get on live, change people's lives. Dang, that sucks. No, that was never the feeling. Why? Because I rewired my self-image, how I saw myself. We have to understand that everything flows downstream of who you see yourself to be. Okay, everything flows downstream of who you see yourself to be, all behavior. So, and this is the biggest reason that you can't get the results that you want, because we have not rewired how we see ourselves. And there's a very specific process that you need to follow in order to rewire your self-image. It's not enough to just say, I wanna be this, I wanna be that, because your subconscious system says, rejects it. It goes, we're not that, right? Your subconscious patterning running 95% of your life, 95% of your thoughts, feelings, and actions, and reactions, and behaviors, and responses are subconscious, meaning they happen below your conscious mind. Consciously, you're on this live right now, and that's great, you're on this live. But then sometimes you're thinking about other things, right? But when, when you stop consciously putting your effort on something, your subconscious conditioning is running, how you've conditioned yourself to be. But we can change that, right? And the reason that's so difficult for us to change is because we are not operating from the identity of the person who does that thing. If you are naturally a person gets up early, like if you see yourself as a disciplined, successful entrepreneur, like you actually believe yourself to be that, what are you gonna do? You're gonna start acting in accordance naturally with what that type of person does. Gets up early, goes to the gym, is focused, has time for reflection, isn't distracted, isn't chaotic internally, right? They're stressed, they're regulated, they can make good decisions. It's easy. That's why the be, do, have is so important. You have to be the type of person, self-image. You have to see yourself as the type of person who has the result you want. We think that we can just picture the result we want, this amount of money, this amount of success, this career, this level. We think it's enough just to see the result and then do the things that gets there. You can do it, but it's so difficult, guys. Why? Because your system wants to stay in the familiar. It wants to stay in your familiar patterns. So if you don't see yourself as the successful person, like if you don't believe that that's who you are, if you don't believe that you're a coach, if you don't believe that you're a leader, if you don't really believe that you're an entrepreneur, you can have a business and still feel like a fraud. Why? Because you haven't changed your self-image yet. That's what imposter syndrome is. Imposter syndrome is you see yourself as this role, you get promoted, or you go into a new role, your self-image hasn't caught up to that new role yet, so you feel uncomfortable, you feel like you're a fraud, you feel like you're a fake. Because you externally, things change, but internally nothing has changed. And in order for you to really crush that new role, being an entrepreneur, getting to the next level in your business, you have to rewire your subconscious patterns to believe that that's who you are before you do anything. Right? Because if you can rewire those patterns and you feel like you're that person, you're going to naturally without effort, just do the things that that person does, right? On October 1st, 2025, when I created Built For Impact 9 months ago, I woke up one day and I just decided Built For Impact is the thing. This is the thing I've been wanting to build for years. Boom. I am this guy, Jake, personal development coach, performance coach. And I believe that to my core because I am acting in alignment with my heart, right? With my deepest soul desires. Like, what do I feel like I am here on this earth to do? It is this. So it's easy for me to believe that, right? And I think that goes for all of us. Anything that we're pursuing in life, our heart should be in it. Should never be doing anything for money. That's absolutely ridiculous. You do things because you want to contribute to the world, because it interests you, because it aligns with your values. And money is just a byproduct of the value that you provide everyone. That's it. Money is a byproduct. And the more you love what you do and the more passion and energy you have behind it, the more value you provide, the more money you get as a result. Money is just a byproduct of doing what you love to do and providing a ton of value to people. Like, we think it's like this, you know, I either make a lot of money or I enjoy what I do. I think it's mutually exclusive. It's not. It's not, we can do both. All right, little intro there. So today I wanna talk about visualization. We've talked about awareness, which is the B pillar, right? It's all about awareness, awareness of your thoughts, of your patterns. So your thoughts, you are not your thoughts, awareness of your beliefs, you're not your beliefs either. And your beliefs, what we believe we perceive. So if you believe that, it's a scarce world, you never have enough time, there's not enough opportunity, and people are out to get you, and it's always been difficult for you, your brain is filtering for those things, right? Predictive processing, whatever it believes, you are going to perceive, even though there are other opportunities out there, right? So you're not your thoughts, you're not your beliefs, you're not your identity patterns, right? What your identity patterns is everything that you do right now, the way you think, the way you feel, the way you act, the way you talk to yourself, your standard stress levels, your emotional tone, all of that stuff, thoughts, beliefs combined together is your identity. It's basically a system of familiar patterns, a system of familiarly conditioned patterns. That is what your identity is to your system. So you've basically been thinking, feeling, and acting so much for a certain period of time for the past 20 years, you've conditioned those patterns in so strongly that they just feel like they're who you are, but they're not. They're just patterns. And anything that is a pattern can just be repatterned. Anything that's a program can be reprogrammed. And that's the whole thing. Now, a key part of the awareness is that you need to— we're taking responsibility for these patterns though, right? We need to understand self-compassion. When you judge yourself, for your patterns, the way you think, the way you believe, the way you act, you close your system off to changing at all, okay? When you judge yourself, "Oh, you idiot, why'd you do that? I can't believe you're doing this again." You're so hard on yourself. That signals threat to your system, and your system closes off, and it doesn't wanna change. So you're sitting here trying to change your subconscious patterns, but then you're just judging yourself all day long and running around in guilt, and that's why you can't actually change. Your system's like, Think about a flower. It's open when you're, right? Or is it closed? Now you still take responsibility for the pattern. It's not like you can just fly off the handles and yell at someone and be like, "Sorry, it was a pattern." It's like, no, we take responsibility. Shouldn't have done that, but we're not shaming ourselves. We understand that it's just a pattern we've learned. We have to forgive ourselves for it and start to cultivate new patterns. So that's awareness. Upgrade your operating system. That's your nervous system. That's like the foundation foundational circuitry of your entire body. It's like the electrical system in a house. Awareness is like you're a hoarder. I use this analogy all the time. You've been a hoarder for 20 years and your house is a mess, okay? You've been living in that house with those limiting beliefs and thoughts that have been running your life and identity patterns that have not been serving you, but you've just been living that way for so long, you don't notice that it's a hoarder house. Just like hoarders, they think their house isn't that bad. And it's a horror house. But again, we open that door like we're gonna flip a house and we're a contractor walking through, okay, yep, that belief, that thought, ba ba ba ba ba, what needs to be changed? We're not doing anything yet though. Upgrade your operating system is like installing new systems in the house, new electrical, new plumbing, new HVAC. You can have a world-class kitchen, bathrooms, 8 different computers running, whatever, all this fancy in-home system, but if the electrical panels from 1950, it ain't gonna work. Same thing with you. You could have all these big dreams and visions and goals, but if you don't have a nervous system that can handle those goals, you short-circuit right back into survival. Brain is off, body is off. You're right back to that dysregulated state, which is the villain of high performance. The villain of high performance is a dysregulated state. Nervous system state, right? We look at the fundamental pillars of Built. We have basically the nervous system is the structure that runs everything, and then our identity is the software, right? So the nervous system is like the hardware, right? It's like how powerful is the computer. You can download iOS 2027, but if you have a Mac, the first MacBook that ever came out, it's gonna crash. Gotta build your nervous system. Nervous system is the hardware. Boom. The software is the identity, what you install on top of that hardware. But we gotta upgrade the hardware first. All right? So that's our nervous system. And we practice state regulation, state rehearsal. So different practices first, and that's why I build awareness first because awareness does two things. You gotta be aware of your patterns and to change them. And you also have to be aware of when you get dysregulated in your day. When you're getting dysregulated in your day-to-day, be aware of that so you can use the breath, right? Physiological sigh. Do 3 to 4 of those. So Huberman said is the most effective way in his lab. Huberman, if you don't know Andrew Huberman, the physiological sigh is the most effective way to instantly calm the nervous system. Just 2 sharp inhales and a long exhale. So And you can do this, um, anytime during the day, 3 to 4 times, anytime during the day. All right, now we're— now we get into the identity reconditioning. So when we start to visualize a new version of ourself, we have to familiarize ourselves with it. Title of this video is Why Visualization Backfires, because you're trying to visualize this grand, incredible moment, and it, it, it dysregulates you. That's why it's like, you got to dream big, power of 10x, all this stuff. Yes, but if you make your vision too big, too far away, too scary, what do you feel? Oh my God, instant anxiety and stress. Like, how am I going to get there? Seems overwhelming. I have to do all these things. I feel like I'm not enough because I'm not at this place yet. So it's not the size of your, of your vision that is causing your dysregulation is how you relate to your goals. So your goals need to serve as a North Star, okay? Basically like, yes, I want to build a million-dollar business, I want to be a millionaire, I want to get to this level, I want to blow up on social media, whatever it is. It's just a North Star, meaning you get up and it's just orienting your action every day. It's not even about getting there. It's about orienting your action. So because I'm walking this direction in my life, because I want to build this business, I want to get to this level, okay, how am I going to think, feel, and act today based upon where I'm going? That's all your job is. How do I think, feel, and act? Because we can't control the outcomes. But when we set this huge goal and it's like, oh my gosh, how the heck am I going to get there? Because also you're wrapped up in the result of the goal. You need the goal to feel enough. You're using this goal as like a destination that needs to be achieved instead of just that guiding North Star. 'Cause you can have the biggest goal in the world, I wanna build a billion-dollar company, but if it's just a North Star, it doesn't feel as much pressure 'cause there's no timeline to get there and you don't need to get it. It's just something that you wanna work towards today. It's orienting my thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Okay, if I'm gonna build a billion-dollar company, what am I gonna do? Okay, well, I'm gonna have to take care of myself first and foremost, emotional health, mental health, physical health. Great, do that. Well, I'm gonna have to build a big brand. I want a billion-dollar company, people gonna have to know about me and what I do. All right, I'm gonna start getting— going on social media. Those are the first few steps. But I'm not like trying to get there, which is where the pressure happens. So that's the first thing is how we orient towards the future. So visualization is two parts, right? Orienting towards our goals. And again, this is all how you build from peace instead of pressure. This is why you have so much anxiety and stress around your goals because you're trying to get there. And also, why are you trying to get there? Because also you don't feel like you're enough, so you need to go get this goal, you need to go get this thing to feel enough. That's why you don't feel enough. And you spend your whole life doing what? Trying to get the business and the money and the title and the status and travel and accomplish this and do that so that you will feel better. That's why you're doing it. You're not doing it because it, it's what interests you and it's how you wanna contribute to the world and it aligns with your values. That's how you should, that's why you should be doing things, but you're not. You're doing things and you gotta reflect on this. You gotta reflect on this. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you building the career? Why are you grinding so hard? It's for validation. It's because you're going to feel important. You're going to get money. Well, I just want financial freedom for my family. No, you want to feel like you're enough. You're sick of being stressed out. So you think if you have money in the bank, it's going to allow you to finally breathe. But money in the bank is not going to allow you to breathe because then guess what? Then you got to go get more money. You're afraid of losing the money. You've attached your internal sense of worth and safety and significance to an external thing. And there's only one thing for certain in this world, guys, and it's that everything is uncertain. Understand that. There's only one thing that's certain in this world, and it is that everything is uncertain. So if you go attaching your identity and your self-worth to everything you have, your job, your career, your money, your this, your that, then you're in this lack scarcity energy because you're trying to hold everything. You're trying to keep it in your world because, oh, if you lose the job or you lose the money, you lose the relationship, then you're nothing because your, your sense of peace and love and joy and excitement is wrapped up in these external things, which are fundamentally gonna change because that's what happens in the world. So you see what I'm getting at? It's a flawed perspective on life. We need to learn to cultivate those states of being internally instead of relying on everything externally. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have abundance, but you have to know where to cultivate. That's kind of pillar 5, but I did wanna bring it up. So how are we orienting towards the future? Are we just looking at it as a North Star to follow or are we chasing it? If you're chasing that future, right, you're always gonna be chasing, you're gonna get it, then you're gonna wanna go on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Okay, so visualization backfires because when you try to visualize this big outcome, it creates an identity gap, okay? An identity gap. You are here, you're trying to get here. So if I'm here and I want a million-dollar business, the version of me right now who doesn't have a million-dollar business inherently is not enough. I feel like a loser, I feel like a failure, I feel like I'm not good enough yet. So that identity gap causes your system to be dysregulated when you treat the future, which you're visualizing as a goal, right? I gotta get there. No, it's just a North Star. Your goal is just what orients your thinking, feeling, and acting every day. That's it. And you're following the process. Now in order to, if you're trying to accomplish your goal, guys, you gotta understand this. If you're trying to accomplish your goal or get to some point in your life, you need to, ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to be the version of yourself that accomplishes that thing. That is the highest leverage thing to do. It's not, oh my God, go do all the things to get the results. Like, no, who do I need to be first? And if I can be that person, all the doing will naturally come. So we use visualization for state rehearsal. Okay, when we visualize, your brain— difference between a vividly imagined reality and a physical reality, it doesn't know, right? Motor neuroscience tells us that the motor neurons in your brain are going to function the same way if you're vividly imagining something sitting down, or if you're actually doing it, which is incredibly powerful. So you can begin to hardwire in those neural circuits so they're a little bit more conditioned and easier to fire. So when we're using visualization, we want to visualize the identity of the person who has what we want. We don't want to visualize what we want. Think about athletes, Michael Phelps, or Olympians. They're not visualizing them holding the trophy. They're visualizing every part of their performance, right? They're walking up to the diving platform for Olympic swim, right? And they're visualizing every component, right? The crowd is there. It's intense energy. How are they feeling? They're relaxed. They're getting onto the podium. They're going down. They're visualizing it in first person. So, so when you're visualizing to fire the same motor neurons that you would actually be firing in real life, you want to make sure you're visualizing through the first person. Meaning in your mind, you gotta visualize through your eyes instead of like seeing yourself from third person. 'Cause if I'm visualizing myself on a sales call or in a meeting or having a difficult conversation, and I'm like seeing myself in the third person, right? That's not firing the same motor neurons. It's more of like simulating me sitting on a couch watching a TV, right? It's that third person view. So it's not the same. You wanna fire the same neural circuits as if you were actually doing the thing in real life. So that's why we wanna visualize through the first person, okay? So we sit down, we're visualizing, and 'cause they did a research, a study where they hooked someone up to an fMRI, okay? Like scans brain activity. They put a blindfold on this, or they showed an apple, right? And they marked the part of the brain that lit up, the neural circuits. Then they blindfold the guy and they said, imagine the apple in vivid detail. Imagine holding it, what it feels like, what it smells like, what it looks like, the, the stem, the red. And like 90% of the same neural circuits lit up in his brain. So that was like groundbreaking because it showed that the brain doesn't really know the difference between imagined reality and physical reality. Um, so if we're nervous for a presentation or a board meeting or a conversation or a call, or we're nervous for anything in our life, we can practice by sitting on our couch that experience in our head and familiarize our brain with how we're going to act, create those neural networks, those neural maps, so that when you go into the event, you already have the neural maps created. Because what happens is like we have all these neural networks in our head for the different things that we do. Like, I have a neural network for working on my computer, for going to the gym, right? Like, it's, it's already hardwired into my head. Whoa, let me, let me change this real quick. I think it's this light back here that really messes up the thing. That light really messes with it. Um, So we have these different neural networks. So like, if I'm going to the gym, I have a neural network for benching. Like, I don't need to consciously think about, okay, what do I do to bench? I got to put the weights on my hand here, here. It just— that's why our body runs subconscious systems, because it would take so much brain power to freaking consciously think about everything you did. Okay, I'm on my computer, I gotta put my hand on the mouse, let's go up here, then I gotta press my finger down, click that to go there. That is so much brain power. You wouldn't be able to get anything done. That's why your— that's why your body automates this stuff, right? Because everything is running on programming in the background because it takes a lot of effort to consciously do things. So we begin to familiarize the state of being, right? And when we do that, we familiarize ourselves sitting down in the board meeting, right? We walk into the meeting, maybe it's a presentation, and you literally just visualize walking in, right? Through your eyes, you open the door, you feel the handle, right? You've felt it 100 times. You walk in, it's tense, everyone's there, they're looking at you. You wanna visualize the stressful events of the thing. Visualize when you get the most nervous, right? 'Cause that's how you install calmer patterns. Like when you're sitting on your couch, visualize the high stakes moment, right? When you do the presentation, someone asks a hard question, or someone's grilling you. Don't visualize it going perfect. Visualize everything wrong going happen, right? Visualize what that— what going wrong looks like and then how you handle it. And over time, if you're visualizing all this stuff, you basically, you know, you have so much more confidence going into it because say something like that does happen, you've already done it in your mind. Boom, you have that neural network made. You know exactly how to respond. So that's what's so powerful about visualization. You can not only can we visualize specific events, so once we know who we wanna be, we can visualize how that person operates in the day-to-day. That's the first thing, okay? They walk in, they're confident, da-da-da-da. Literally familiarize your system with how this person operates. That's how you change your subconscious patterns. You don't do it by some one weekend event. You're not gonna change your patterns at one seminar, at one retreat, at one thing. Familiarity over time is what the science tells us. Familiarity over time, you keep firing these patterns, will rewire. It takes repetition. It takes repetition. People have known that forever. It's like, like Think and Grow Rich, he talked about autosuggestion. That's what that is. You repeat it over and over and over and over, over again. And Donald Hebb told us that neurons that fire together wire together. If you repeat it over and over and over again enough times, it will become more familiar than any other pattern, and then your system wants to stay in that familiar pattern. So reconditioning our self-image is all about familiarity. That's all it is. And that's why we want to use our brain to focus on the process of doing something, focus on how we act every day. So then one day you'll just be able to wake up and naturally do that thing. Because it's just who you are. Okay? So that's how we familiarize a new future. So visualization is gonna backfire if you're trying to visualize the moment and, oh my gosh, I got the trophy. That's not what's gonna help you get there. What's gonna help you get there is the process. And the future's gotta feel boring. Okay, it's gotta feel like you've been there a million times. And how you know when the visualization starts working is because one day you've been stressed out, dysregulated, whatever, for so long. One day though, you wake up, it's like a Tuesday or Wednesday, and you just realize, oh, I'm really not that nervous for sales calls anymore. Oh, I really haven't been reacting to that same person in the same way. Interesting. I don't really like react like that anymore. That's the key moment of realization when you know that your visualization has been working. You've been rehearsing the state so much that it just feels boring. It just feels normal. There's nothing crazy about it. We think it's like this big release, this big moment. No, it's just normal. It's the normal thing. So understand that it's just normal. So that's how we're going to use visualization to wire in our new identity, right? Everything flows downstream of our identity. How are we going to rewire our identity? Well, first we're going to be aware of the old patterns, the things that we don't want. We're going to be aware of them. We're going to let them go. We're going to learn to regulate our system, regulate our nervous system, practice state rehearsal. Remember the nervous system part is like the, the, um, it's like the hardware. You are a computer program. It's been programmed to act a certain way. Your nervous system is like your capacity. Again, if you have a Mac, the first ever MacBook created, and you go try to download iOS 27, not even a shot that it's going to work. So you can install this new identity and you're a billion-dollar entrepreneur Million dollars. If you haven't built your nervous system's capacity to handle what that version of you needs to be able to handle, you're gonna collapse right back to square one. That's why we're practicing nervous system first. Nervous system before we visualize the future self. 'Cause if you're not regulated and you don't have that capacity, you can't hold that future vision of yourself. You can't hold it. Sequence matters. Sequence matters in BILT, okay? It matters. Awareness first, have to cultivate awareness. You have to cultivate your nervous system skills. Then you do the visualization, then you do the identity work, then you reprogram your self-image. Powerful things. Tomorrow we're gonna get into letting go of the past and how as you become this new person, you're rewiring, old patterns come up, old trauma comes up. And as that stuff comes up, you need to be able to be aware of it and let go of it. So that you can hardwire in this new pattern. That's the other thing a lot of frameworks miss. A lot of frameworks don't talk about nervous system and they don't talk about somatic experiencing. So it's like releasing this trauma, right? It doesn't talk about releasing this trauma and letting it go. So we gotta do those two things, all right? Every day, 10:00 AM, we are doing these trainings. Um, they're on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. They save on YouTube. So go in there. If you have any questions on them, I'll get back to you. Put comments, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, put the comments. I'll get back to you. If you guys want to go deeper on this stuff, go into the school community. I just created the most life-changing $297 program that you will ever go through in your entire life. Okay? The Built For Impact Foundations. I just— the link is going to be in the bio to the community. And once you join, the Foundations is in there. This is the entry point to the full BUILT Framework. So I created the BUILT Framework and it was like amazing. Life-changing, right? But it was deep. It was too deep too quickly. It's too much information, overwhelms people, even though they're getting a lot of value out of it. So I had to make a foundations course that kind of teaches you how to swim before I just throw you in the deep end. So foundations is teaching you how to swim. It's opening you up to what is the Built Framework at a high level. How do you use it? How does it work for you? What are the 5 dysregulators? Dive into the framework at a high level so you can start to wrap your arms around it. Do a 7-day internal reset challenge where I walk you through the exact tools and things you need to use every single day to start rewiring your interstate to perform at a high level. Right? It's a jumping off point. And I promise you, if you take that leap and you want to change right now, it'll change your life. This Built stuff is my life's work, guys. It is my life's work. I have never put more attention, energy, effort, blood, sweat, love, and tears into this material. This isn't stuff that I just made up, guys. This is stuff I've really been working on these two programs for like the past 9 months. It's how long I've been working on these two programs. And all of my experience and research for the past 10 years before that, you know, 15 years, went into this. So this is like my life's work, guys. This isn't just something I threw together. This is stuff that changed my life, especially as an entrepreneur, changed how I operate fundamentally, allows me to scale a multimillion-dollar business while feeling peaceful, while having inner peace, while relaxing, while having energy. There's nothing that's more valuable in the world than that, guys. So links in the bio to join the school community. You can get in there, tap in. If you have any questions, let me know, comments. Till next time, all the peace, all the power.