Hello, my friends. Welcome to a very special week on the podcast. It's the What's Possible Special Series.
This is the first half of a book I wrote a few years ago, and it will include the 10 truths extraordinarily successful women know. I will offer two of these truths per day over the next five days. If you want coaching on these topics, make sure you join me for What's Possible Coach Week starting soon.
You can go to the lifecoachschool.com board slash possible to find out more. Seven, we know we don't get the how until we're there. The first thing new students ask me when they create new possibilities for their future is, how do I do it?
It's the equivalent of asking what's on the test in high school. They want to know the exact thing to study and do so they can have their result. And they would prefer to have it right now so they know exactly what they're up against.
Knowing the how seems to make believing easier. If we have a clear path from here to there, then we get to keep some sense of certainty. But the problem with doing things we've never done before is that there is no certainty.
It's a collection of days filled with not knowing exactly how to get there and lots of risking and failing. The skill in art is learning how to believe in something so hard that you actually start being the person who has accomplished it in your own mind. As you start being this person who has already done this amazing thing you want to do, you start making decisions from that place and taking action from that place.
When you fail at something, you don't make it mean something terrible. You simply learn from it and move on. The how starts to emerge only in the rear view mirror after you've already done it.
We are used to having the path laid out before us, but with new, bigger, and sometimes currently impossible goals, we only see the path after we have created it. This is a new experience for most of us. We have little or no training on how to do this in school, so we need to learn it now.
The process basically looks like falling down a lot. It sounds like no a lot. It feels like overwhelm and confusion.
And yet, if we believe in the goal we have set, and we believe in the possibility of an extraordinary future, we keep moving towards creating the path to success with many wrong turns and missteps along the way. If you have to know the how before you attempt any goal, you will only be able to do goals that you've already done before. Those are the only goals where there is a certain how.
But if you want to create and innovate something new with a new extraordinary possibility, you're going to have to start and believe without the how. When I look back over my career and I see where I am now, it's almost laughable to imagine that I could have known the path here when I started. It is impossible.
I had no idea about Facebook ads or iTunes podcasts. I couldn't have guessed I would create tools like the model, the manual, the urge jar, how to solve any problem or stop over drinking. I couldn't have known then what I learned by doing.
When my students ask me what they should do, I tell them to do something and a lot of it. This is so much easier than it sounds. It sounds so much easier to wait.
It seems so much safer to learn more or understand more or get some sense of the right thing before we venture into action. But the opposite is true. The more belief you can muster, the more you will want to go.
You will want to find out how you get there by attempting to get there. You will learn what works by finding out what doesn't work. I watch my best students do this so well.
They just start trying all the things. They try things I tell them to do. And if that doesn't work, they make up things to try.
They just keep going, doing what we call massive action until they get the result they most want. Inevitably, when they get there, a newer student will ask them, how did you do it? I love to watch this exchange.
The successful student will give the new student a very clear prescription of exactly what they did. They will look back over their path and explain it beautifully step by step. They might say something like this, well, I just clarified my niche and my customer, and then I created an online funnel, and I wrote some good copy, and then I sold my program as a group, and it worked out really well.
They make it sound so lovely, so easy. But I was there for the journey, and it wasn't like that at all. It was more like they cried and complained for about three days.
Then they picked a niche that they weren't sure would work. Then they tried 10 different Facebook ads, and they all failed until one got some traction. Then they changed their sales page seven times until it was readable and made sense.
And then they got their first sale. At that point, they decided to quit and told me it was all too much. Then two days later, they had a great idea for a new program and tried that, and it worked really well.
Then they had too many clients and decided they wanted to go back to their old job. But they got there. They really don't remember how crazy the path was, but they did it.
This is how anything newly created works. It's an unknown how until it's done. It takes a very determined mind to stay with something you don't know how to do.
Your mind will always want to tell you that you will never figure it out, that it's impossible, that you're completely wasting your time. This is the reason why everyone doesn't do extraordinary things. The brain is not wired for the risk it requires.
So just know that if you desperately want to know the how of success, you have to create the success to find out the how. There's no prescription, and this is precisely why they don't teach us this in school. They like clean, linear, testable curriculums inside the school walls.
But extraordinary lives aren't like that. They are the opposite of that. Try something, learn what works, learn what doesn't.
Repeat. Good luck. Nothing is certain, but the ride is worth it.
One more thing. Please don't quit until you find out how to do it. I watch way too many people quit halfway there.
They start to figure out something. because they aren't there yet, they think they aren't making progress. They think they're failing because they don't have the finish line in front of them.
It's like turning around halfway to the grocery store because you hit a red light. It is maddening as a teacher to watch. Retrain your brain to keep going until you get what you want.
Don't wait for the how. Create it. 8.
We know it's not better there than here. I have some very bad news. It's not better there than here.
If you're in a hurry to get extraordinary success because you think that is when life will get better, you might as well stop now. To same life. Still 50-50.
You will still be you, the world will still be the world, and other people will still be human. You can count on it. Success doesn't feel like winning the lottery or falling in love when you get there.
Feels like another day when the sun comes up and half of life is spectacular and the other half still sucks. You still have all the same negative emotion that you've always had and you still worry about things that don't matter at all. This is the exact reason why you don't want to be in a hurry to succeed.
There is no rush to get there because it's not going to be better. You don't have to work 80 hours a week now in the hopes that when you arrive, you'll be able to cut back and finally enjoy your life. The money won't make everything better.
The accomplishment won't make it all better. And the acknowledgement won't make it all better. But you know what?
It doesn't need to be better. If you create a new possibility for your life because you hate the life you have now, you're going to be so disappointed. because a new, more successful life won't make you love life more, it's impossible.
When you are a person who can't appreciate the life you have, money or success won't change that. Part of achieving huge success is not being attached to what you think it means. It actually means very little.
Everything will be the same, except you will have more money and more achievement. So why do it? Why bother?
If the goal isn't to make my life better, why go through all the failure and all the work to do it? If I can just enjoy and appreciate my life without the success, why not just do that? It's a great question and one that I highly recommend you consider before venturing out into the journey of extraordinary success.
What really is the point? It will be different for all of us, but it comes down to what you want your life to be and who you want to end up being. You will always be human who has to contend with the human experience of 50-50, but what will you have done and contributed and completed at the end of your life?
Will you have risked and shown up in the way that you most want to? Will you have contributed everything you know in your heart you want to contribute? That is the difference.
When you're creating a future based on the value you want to create with your life, there is no rush. When your purpose becomes something beyond you and beyond your life, it doesn't have to pay off with something better for you. because it isn't about a selfish motive of pleasure anymore.
It's about what you want to give your life to, and who you want to be when it's all said and done. Doing something you've never done, maybe something no one has ever done, is the ultimate in evolution. And as humans, we have a calling to evolve.
We have an instinct to create. When we hear this nudge and act on it, the experience of being alive changes. When we don't hear it, when we muffle it with food or drugs or distraction, it torments us with mischanneled energy and desire.
It's not better there, and yet that doesn't matter. The journey is purposeful, and the alternative of not going on is stagnation, and that never changes. Success brings new problems and new pain, so it isn't as much as better as it is different.
It's better in some ways and worse in others, but the ultimate high is learning that we can get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that negative emotion doesn't have to keep us hiding. We can live the biggest version of our life knowing that it can't get better and it can't get worse. It's always the human experience, and the safety and the exposure are the same.
When I teach this concept, students often ask me why the journey is worth it if it doesn't make our lives better or make us happier more of the time. The question itself reveals our bias towards believing that the purpose in life is to be happier more, and if something doesn't promise happiness, it's not worth doing. I'm asking you to consider that this paradigm is not useful.
Chasing happiness never works because our brain is wired for contrast, and the world is set up for a myriad of emotions and responses to both positive and negative interpretations. So the motivation becomes different as we consider new possibilities for our lives. We let go of the idea that more happiness lives somewhere in the future, and we start creating a new future for different reasons.
The reason I often share with my students is the reason of prefrontal evolvement. This sounds fancy and scientific, but really, it's just the process of being human at the highest possible level. It's embracing how amazing it can be to have a human brain and create a future that hasn't ever existed.
Planning way into the future is a skill that is reserved for humans. Being able to imagine a future that isn't based on the past is a human superpower. It is the very superpower that has created all the amazing technology and advances in medicine and improvements in society that we can observe all around us.
All the manmade things that create our world were created by the evolving human brain. This is not something you will see animals doing. They aren't creating at the pace and level that requires a human imagination.
The issue that we have as we explore new possibilities is that we have our animalistic, primitive brain and our prefrontal human brain all in the same head. So although we have the ability to create and believe in any future we want, we also have the primitive brain embracing safety and comfort and discouraging any type of unknown activity. This is why you will notice that your biggest dreams will also come with built-in discouragement.
Alert from your primitive brain, which is unknowingly preventing you from evolving by sending unneeded signals of danger based on old programming. Your imagination is your possibility creator. You can imagine a different future, and you can live into that future completely with your imagination, making it more familiar to yourself and therefore more comfortable.
Once something becomes familiar to your brain, the primitive brain will turn off all the alarm danger bells and settle into the new reality. This can be even before you've accomplished anything. This is simply through rehearsing the possibility in your mind before you've created it in reality.
In this way, right now, you're able to experience the future in your mind fully. You're able to create the feelings you will feel when you have the achieved result. It's not better there than here because you've created the experience of being there before you actually even get there.
You create it while you're here. You are living it within your imagination over and over and feeling it now. Often when my students achieve their big and possible dreams, it feels a bit anticlimactic because they have been living it for so long in their heads that they barely recognize the difference between it materializing and the experience they have been practicing over and over each day in their minds.
This is what we mean when we say the journey is the actual experience of the accomplishment. The process of believing the dream is what creates the result. But the feeling of the result we experience all along the journey.
It's not better there than here because the brain doesn't know the difference.
If you've enjoyed listening to the What's Possible Series, you must join me for our What's Possible Coach Week, where I will be coaching you live on all of these topics, on what's possible for you, and introducing you to the possibility formula, which is the second half of the book that I wrote that teaches you how to execute these truths in your life. You can come to the lifecoachschool.com/possible in order to join us live. We'll see you then.
