Nietzsche said it best man, you must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star
and that line it just gives me shivers
every time because he's stating the only fact you need to get rich.
Self destruction
precedes
creation.
To radically change what you get in this life you first must radically change who you fundamentally are. Call it a psychological
rebirth. Now to understand how to actually execute
that change it's imperative we debunk
a vicious trap which blocks most people from this radical transformation
which is self
improvement.
Self improvement
is like applying a band aid to a bullet wound, painting over the cracks of a crumbling building, the monk mode discipline, wake up at 5AM stuff. It feels productive
but it's surface level. It operates at the level of behavioral
change which of course
action or behavior doesn't happen in isolation, it's a downstream effect of your identity which is why no matter how many habits you stack into your day
nothing seems to radically change. Maybe there's just a new coat of paint but nothing
radically has changed
in your life. Tyler Durden
from Fight Club, excellent movie,
said it best,
self improvement is masturbation,
it's stimulation without creation.
People love to consume the idea of change without ever actually becoming somebody new and that's the problem.
Self improvement is not the move my friend.
It's all all of the leverage is found in identity. It's not self improvement, it's self destruction because you do not rise to the level of your desires or your short term behaviors.
You fall to the level of your identity
which is just who you believe yourself to be. And so the crucial reframe here is your identity is not who you are, it's not a truth,
it's a tool that you use
to manipulate your outcomes
and so you destroy the old self that is
holding you back from your goals and you cultivate a new one that supports those goals.
But this identity shift is not something you can just do. Right? Self destruction and transformation requires a very specific protocol known as omnimorphic
embodiment.
Omni meaning
total,
morph meaning transformation,
total transformation of who you fundamentally
are. Now this may disappoint some people but this isn't some sort of woo woo manifestation
technique.
What we're doing here
is consolidating
the relevant insights
from the last hundred years of neuroscience,
psychology, behavioral science
and much more into a
repeatable,
reliable
protocol
for intentionally shifting identity
to achieve certain desired outcomes.
Now let me be very clear before we go into this protocol which is
you will be radically
changing the fabric of who you are.
I'm giving you the bullets, I'm giving you the tools, use it at your own discretion in whatever direction you want. I'm not telling you where to shoot. That is the disclaimer.
I'm now legally protected.
I'm not a lawyer.
The central thesis,
the central aim of this protocol is very simple,
to embody the version of you for whom your goal
is inevitable.
The wording there is crucial. It's a version of you right now for whom the goal would be unavoidable. It would be improbable
for you not to achieve it and we approach that
frame across the six and that is six. Six components
or dimensions that create yourself or identity.
The first is emotion, then action,
thought,
environment,
attention, and appraisal.
These six are interconnected
into this web that create your identity in a very interesting and fascinating way in which we'll zoom in on later, but the crucial point here is omnimorphic,
is total transformation
of
each and every six of these components
all together
all at once because if you neglect any
they will come back to bite you which explains why most people snap back to their old life like an elastic band. And so we'll go through each individual components
and how to
take control of them and align them with your goals, and then we'll zoom out to see how they all connect with each other in this interesting system that creates your reality.
The first component is emotion.
Emotion at first principles
refers to a brief subjective
feeling paired with a characteristic
bodily
sensation.
Now
the big insight that I've come to this year and it was a tough pill for me to swallow, the brutal truth to accept
was that emotion
isn't something you're just subjected to.
It is a state that you're constantly engineering whether you realize it or not. Most people believe that emotion
is like the weather. If it's raining, it's raining, there's nothing I can do about that. If it's sunny, great.
And they think their emotions are just happening to them. They're like a paper airplane in a storm and wherever that airplane goes
they're along for the ride, there's nothing they can do about it, but this fundamentally isn't the case and this is a belief that I had to change which is you can take radical responsibility
for your emotions because you are engineering them whether you realize it or not and you are engineering
and modulating your emotions through two specific levers.
The first is focus and the second is physiology.
And so let's dive through both and I'll show you how to modulate your emotions by using these levers.
Focus
refers to what you direct your attention toward right?
We have consciousness
and that is what your that is the component of reality which your attention has landed on.
And so we can modulate emotion
by modulating focus
specifically
both internally
and externally.
Right? So you're always focusing on something internally,
the thoughts that are arising
in this passing moment, what you're replaying,
simulating,
fantasizing,
ruminating,
catastrophizing,
and everything in between. The different scenarios which you're running through on your mind to a large degree are determining how you feel.
The thoughts you think and the emotions you feel are inextricably
linked in this
this self reinforcing
loop. What you focus on within your mind I. E. What you think about
is to a large degree going to determine how you feel. Now you have the ability to engineer your thoughts,
you also have the ability
to choose which thoughts you entertain with and which thoughts you just let pass. Using those two capabilities,
those two unlocks,
you can choose which thoughts influence your emotions
through modulating your internal focus
you can modulate how you feel.
The second dimension of focus is external. This is everything that's going on outside of your mind. Well, nothing is really going on outside your mind this is all mind but you know what I mean.
What you
point your senses at and what you act on. So this is in the realm of action but also just what you're observing and what you're paying attention to in your environment. You know we'll explore this later with the fifth component attention but we absorb 50,000,000 bits of sensory
data every single second
and yet out of that 50,000,000
we are only consciously sorry it's 11,000,000 I'm getting mixed because it's out of those 11,000,000 bits we are only conscious consciously
aware of 50
and so you are consciously aware of about 0.0001%
of your total sensory data that is coming in.
And so to a large degree what you externally focus on is
what you're experiencing,
but that isn't what is actually going on. Two people can go through the exact same circumstance and walk away with entirely different conclusions
depending on what those 50 bits landed on. And so what you want to do is modulate your focus externally
on the things that serve you rather than them serving
whatever negative emotional spiral you're in. We can look into this more in the fifth component when it comes to modulating attention,
but it's worthwhile knowing
that partially
your emotions are an emergent property of what you're focusing on. They really are if you break them down at first principles, emotions are your body's reaction
to what is going on in your mind and in reality at large. So that's the first lever we have. The second is physiology.
Your that's wrong. Your body leads your mind. Your mind does not lead your body. Your body leads your mind. Now this is the cutting edge
of
neuroscience on emotions. There's a neuroscientist called Lisa Feldman Barrett who's done a lot of
studies on this which is the relationship between your mind, body, and your emotions. We're not gonna get into the technical nitty gritty here because it's actually not too relevant to
the the protocol,
but
the headline is
your body budget, your energy levels,
how you feel
in your body to a large degree determines your emotional state and there's this bidirectional
relationship which is constantly feeding back and forth. This is all under the the guise of predictive processing in neuroscience.
Super interesting stuff if you want to look into it I highly suggest you look at Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Very knowledgeable.
And so the the body leads the mind in the way that you feel. If you energize the body the mind will follow.
And so we can energize or we can change our physiology
which is the state of our physical body through different protocols you know exercise,
breath work, Wim Hof, cyclic hyperventilation,
different types of breath work can change your your nervous system from parasympathetic
to sympathetic.
If you're apathetic you wanna psych yourself up, you may wanna do some hyperventilation.
If you're feeling nervous you may want to
calm down a little bit and that's a different breath work protocols. There's different stuff for different emotional states. You've got cold exposure that doesn't just mean cold plunging that could be splashing water on directly onto your face,
uh, activates the the dive reflex which is again going to activate a parasympathetic
state,
spike norepinephrine
or adrenaline. You can change your physiology
again through posture.
Something as basic as making yourself sit
sitting with a better posture or doing certain physical movements change your emotional state. There's a lot of scientific evidence around this. Just movement in general, going for a walk, being outdoors
is calming.
And so depending on the emotional state that you have, we have two levers that we can use to modulate and change it. What we focus on internally,
externally,
and what we do with our physiology.
And so taking the frame of I am responsible for my emotions
is one of the most liberating things you can do Because if you do not take responsibility for your emotions, you're not in control of them. Responsibility is the prerequisite
of control.
And so taking responsibility
and at least trying your best to try modulate your emotions when they're not serving your goals with focus, with physiology
is incredibly liberating.
Now the frame in which you approach this is very simple. You ask yourself the question,
what would the version of me for whom my goal is inevitable
feel today?
What emotional states would they be running through in this specific context or this event or this action or this opportunity?
Right? This all comes back to this inevitable self. This question will be asked on every single component of
the dimensions of self because ultimately that is the version of you who achieves the goal.
And so what does that individual feel?
Understand those emotional states and then modulate these inputs what you're focusing on in your mind corresponding thoughts, confident thoughts to breed a confident emotion for example.
Change your physiology.
Energy you know, energize your body and the mind will follow. You can use these tools to modulate
your emotional state which is an incredibly
powerful tool, but you need to have this belief that you can change the way you feel. Do not just think it's like weather. You are in control of it whether you realize it or not. You can engineer
it and so engineer the inputs that produce those emotional states that you recognize in that inevitable identity
and that is the first component that you need to change. Ultimately if you don't change the way you feel
not much else is really going to change because to a large degree how you feel determines what you do, what you think, and all the rest of it. As I said they're interconnected we'll get into that.
The second component is action.
Now action at first principles refers to any purposeful or automatic output that produces a change in external reality no matter how small.
Now there's a ongoing fierce debate
on the role that action plays
in the achievement of your goals. We can simplify this into two camps. You have a manifestation camp
who
just to to quite a large extent,
guess,
dismiss
the impact that action has in terms of achieving your goals. Some people will go as far to say that action is relevant and you can sort of operate on the quantum field or the spiritual plane or the mental plane or some variation of this. It will differ depending on what guru you're listening to and what esoteric framing they put on it. As you can probably tell I'm not too keen on that philosophy.
And then you have the other camp which are kind of like a hustle bro or these like productivity gurus who are super focused on action and will neglect any other aspect beyond that.
These two camps have fallen into the tribalistic trap. They're they're lost in binary thinking.
Ultimately the nuance is this,
action is the only way we can interact with the world around us and we can make change. I don't care how good of a manifesto you are. If I put you in a dark cave and you're not allowed to leave that cave, don't care how good you are at changing your frequency,
your vibration,
or visualizations,
or your affirmations,
you're not changing anything outside of that cave.
And anyone who tries to convince you that you are and explaining that through some sort of quantum method
or
spiritual esoteric you have to ask yourself why is it being framed in this really complicated convoluted
way
when it could all just be explained through psychology and neuroscience? That's a question you need to ask these individuals.
But also
okay action is the only way we interact with the world around us and make change but it also doesn't happen in isolation.
It's not the only thing going on and so focusing on it entirely which is what these productivity bros are doing is a mistake. You see most people know what they need to do they just don't do enough of it because they are not in in control of their emotions, their thoughts, the other components which create their actions, their beliefs, their identity.
And so you know if action were just something you could just do,
well then people would do it. It's not that simple. And so the nuance is that action doesn't happen in isolation. Yes. There are other things influencing it, but it's also incredibly important if you don't take action nothing will change.
And so what we do
is we change everything all at once. Why just change action alone when you need when you can change the things that influence it as well? And that's the philosophy of omnimorphism
total transformation of everything.
Now the frame in which we approach action is again very simple. You ask yourself the leading question,
how would the version of me for whom my goal is inevitable behave in whatever context you're trying to discover behavior in?
And you need to identify three things from this inevitable self, Their routines,
their habits,
and their inputs.
Now the routine is the structure and rhythm of their day. Their morning routine,
you know, how much they work on, you know, do they work on Sundays, these these like these different questions you need to ask yourself. You know, when are they going to the gym? What are they doing? Structure and routine is your best friend. Stick to it. Identify what your inevitable version of you does
and stick and go and do that routine.
Habits. Identify
all of the unlocking habits.
Not just the random habits that feel good like
probably waking up at 5AM has got nothing to do with your goal. It doesn't have a direct impact. Figure out the habits which genuinely
move the needle in your goal.
The repeated
behaviors that are executed without thought. Write down the habits that this individual
has.
And then crucially
write down the inputs
that the inevitable self executes on. These are the needle moving actions that move you toward the outcome. You're gonna have one or two inputs and in a business context
this is the thing that actually moves the cash. The first action you need to take typically it's gonna be sales or marketing related. The thing that actually moves the needle. Identify your inputs
and spam them. Spam the inputs. You know the line from Humosey, do so much volume it would be unreasonable
for you not to succeed. That is the perfect frame to approach this from. Do not neglect action. I don't care how much work you do with your thoughts or emotions if you do not change your actions nothing will change.
You need to look at action
as a vote.
Right? We're undergoing this process of
identity destruction and then creation,
but to do this you need to look at and reframe
action as a vote for the new or old identity.
Every present moment that passes
you are offered an opportunity
to take action
and you can either take action in alignment with the old self which means you're voting for it or you can take action in alignment with the new self which means you're also voting for it. You can cast a vote for one or the other. There is no other way. And so how do you know which self you're casting the vote for? It's very simple. The actions you take under comfort are most likely casting the vote for the old self and the actions taken under pain are casting votes for the new self and this is all in the context and pursuit
of your goal.
And so really the frame that you need to look at this is seeking
discomfort.
Discomfort
meeting resistance and taking action anyway through the fear, the apathy,
the anger, the guilt, the shame, the doubt, dread.
Those are the growing pains. That is the actual signal
that you are moving closer towards your identity. You're going through this process of metamorphosis
and you are shifting, you're destroying the old self. Every vote is an arrow that you know a bullet that you can shoot at that old identity.
It is the literal sensation of changing who
you are and so you need to go out and seek that sensation of discomfort
and vote for the new self. Action is incredibly important tool. You need to recognize it, it's important. Use every single present moment that you can to take relentless action and cast a vote for this new identity to destroy the old one. Now
the third dimension
of self is thought. Thought at first principles refers to the transient mental content.
In visual, auditory, or abstract
form.
Now most people
are lost in this unmitigated
rushing river of mental noise and chatter. It's this churning of catastrophization,
fantasization
and daydreaming and and living in this simulation that's not real, this rushing river of
thought and narrative.
And the stats here are pretty potent and pretty
sobering.
The average person thinks 60 to 70,000 thoughts per day. 90%
of those thoughts are identical
to the ones they had the day before.
They're running the same narrative,
the same scripts, the same patterns
and therefore they achieve the same outcomes.
Now out of those thoughts 60 to 70,000 that they're having they're having most of them lean completely negative and so it's this cycle of automatic negative thoughts that are running the exact you know throughout
every single day of your life and most of them are the exact same.
Now most people recognize these thoughts as themselves.
They think that they are the thinker.
That's who they are and therefore
they follow it.
They treat it as if it's part of them and therefore they act in alignment with that individual.
But of course the thinker isn't who you are and we can debunk this very easily
by doing a very simple thought experiment or try not to think experiment.
I'm gonna ask you not to think of a certain thing
and if you were truly the thinker behind your thoughts you'd be in perfect control of that.
Do not think
of a green apple. Don't think of a green apple right now.
You see? What was that? I mean you're not in control of your thoughts.
The thinking
is a process of the mind in the same way beating is a process of the heart. It happens to you not from you and that's the crucial point you need to understand.
And so we can break identification
with thought but you can only do this when you observe your thoughts.
You cannot
be the thinker if you're both observing
the thoughts at the same time
and so we achieve this state of observation
through a skill known as metacognition.
Metacognition
refers to the act of observing
the activities
of your mind
and it's metacognition
which creates separation
from this rushing river of mental noise.
Instead of being the thinker
that is lost inside it and therefore being influenced by your thoughts, you are now standing on the riverbed or the riverbank
and you're now watching your thoughts go past.
And as you become the observer of your thoughts you create separation
from them. There's this quote from Viktor Frankl between stimulus and response
lies your power.
It's your power to choose how you want to respond. When you're the thinker identified with your thoughts you don't have a choice. If you think something that's what's happening and that's that you know that's that's that's what you think and so you behave in alignment with that thought.
But with metacognition you create separation from this rushing river and therefore
you regain the ability
to choose how you want to respond and the types of actions that you want to take, liberating your ability to create new outcomes,
escape this loop of 90% of the same thoughts.
And the process here is simple, so we've got a protocol we can run through here in terms of how to interrupt and replace your thoughts. And again,
you need to ask yourself what would the version of me for whom the goal is inevitable, what would they think on a daily basis? How would they speak to themselves?
And that's the way we wanna interrupt. So the first stage is interruption.
You need to catch yourself in this automatic negative thought spiral the moment it occurs.
Right? What you'll notice is how often you're distracted by your own thoughts
and you'll get better and better
at
catching them the more metacognitive you are. And metacognition
is something you train through Vipassana meditation.
It's it's something I've spoken about at length in other lessons if you want to seek that out and learn a bit more about that.
The second step is replacement.
Now once you've interrupted the thought we do have the ability to conjure up
unique thoughts. So we don't have the ability to control our thoughts, they're just coming at us, but we can add a couple of new thoughts into that river.
And so you swap whatever negative catastrophization
or visualization you are running for a positive version. This is not aimless sort of positive thinking. We go through a very specific protocol here. It's called WHOOP and this is from
a scientist called Gabrielle Uttagen.
I don't know if I mispronounced the name there, but she's done a lot of research on visualization
and there's
a really good insight here not exactly relevant to this but I think you should know which is anybody who's talking about visualizing the outcome assuming that you've already achieved the goal and feeling the goal as if it's already been achieved,
there is very compelling scientific evidence
to suggest that that sort of visualization of the outcome reduces your allostatic load which reduces your motivation
to take action.
And so that type of visualization alone is fairly ineffective.
The type of visualization you want to follow follows the structure of wish,
outcome,
obstacle,
plan.
Okay. So the wish and outcome is visualizing the outcome and then you achieving it,
but the crucial point here
is you need to visualize the process,
the actions that get you there,
and you don't want to visualize it all going well and and picture everything going swimmingly because of course it won't. It's not going to be a walk in the park. And so the crucial point here is anticipating friction
and based on that friction setting an implementation
intention.
An implementation intention is a fancy psychological word for if x happens then I will do y. If this thing that will probably go wrong, if it does go wrong, I will do this thing.
And you visualize these intentions.
You overcoming
the adversity, the resistance,
and you do this on a loop. You keep going through different bouts of adversity
and this doesn't necessarily have to be a formal practice that you do every single day.
You can just notice yourself
getting lost in your own mind throughout the day and you interrupt it and you replace it with a form of positive visualization where you actually out you go through the outcome that you want, you create a positive expectation effect, a positive placebo effect,
you you
you but you don't just fantasize
about it you actually
visualize and picture the plan and something going wrong and overcoming it. That's the idea.
And what we're doing here is killing the looping narrative that your old self is clinging onto and it's running these scripts on repeat in these patterns which are holding you back and you cultivate
a new
rehearsed
narrative,
the way that you think to yourself and at the very least
you are not reacting to your old thoughts anymore in a way that controls your behaviors.
Now that brings us on to the fourth component which is environment.
At first principles your environment refers to external configuration
of your social, physical, and digital cues
that surround you and continually continuously
feed evidence
back into who you are.
A cue
in this context
refers to a contextual trigger
that prompts behavioral or psychological
response.
Mostly this is happening non consciously but behind the curtain of your conscious awareness.
You need to understand your environment that you exist in, the physical,
social, and digital environment that you operate in in a daily on a daily basis
is a museum
of your past.
It is littered
with cues
that are constantly encoding
an old outdated
identity that no longer serves you.
And so your old identity,
doesn't matter how much behavior you try and change, is constantly encoding itself
through your environment,
through these hidden cues,
and so you need to go through a process of destruction
and cultivation.
You know there's a scene from Fight Club and I guess this whole video is Fight Club Coded because they do talk about this idea of self destruction and transformation
where he detonates his apartment. The first stage to changing
as a man is destroying your apartment. Now I don't reckon recommend you detonate your apartment,
but you do want to radically change
your surroundings to a large degree destroying the cues that hold together your old self and cultivating new cues
that support your new self. So through your social,
physical,
and digital environments
ask yourself the question,
what would the version of me for whom my goals are inevitable,
what environment would they exist in?
And social is the people, the friends, the family,
circles,
the types of relationships you have
and most likely the version of you for whom your goal is inevitable, you're surrounding yourself around different people or at least you're exposing yourselves to new people for whom the the behaviors which you need to do are normalized and the minimum expectation.
Physical environment this is simple. This is your where you're working, where you operate and it has to be conducive.
It has to make the actions easy and obvious and these this is basically the whole book of Atomic Habits is engineering your physical environment.
Next is your digital environment which to a large degree people spend most of their day on.
You need to engineer
your digital environment in a way that doesn't
bring back all the old habits that represent your old self and cultivate new cues. Perhaps you put your phone on grayscale or you permanently do do not disturb or whatever you want to do to reinforce a new version of yourself that represents this inevitable identity.
Ultimately,
the reframe here is detonation.
The as much
change you can make as possible
is the move. Right? Even if that change isn't necessarily relevant to adding new cues, just reorganize your environment in a very radical way. That is the best approach here because you just want to change things up because that forces
your brain to
move that that forces your brain to shift from system
two which is this sort of automatic
primal
limbic system which is just operating on these patterns
into system one which is more forebrain focused. You activate your PFC or prefrontal cortex and it forces you to think.
When you change your environment it forces you to think about the environment and therefore the behaviors that you want to take instead of running on these automatic grooves and loops which you've programmed in.
And so again operate
from this question and spend a long time
designing your environment your social, physical, and your digital environment.
Do it once and it will serve you for the rest of your life because your identity is constantly being encoded in the background whether you realize it or not. And so that now brings us on to the fifth dimension
of your identity which we need to shift to undergo this process
of
self destruction
following the omnimorphic
protocol
and that is
your attention.
Attention is the gatekeeper
of your experienced reality.
Attention at first principles
refers to awareness concentrated
on a specific component of reality.
Right. We have a reality as a whole and you have consciousness. You can look at your consciousness like the spotlight
and wherever that spotlight lands on that is your attention.
And so as I mentioned earlier,
every single second you are unconsciously,
your sensory channels are receiving
about 11,000,000 bits of information every single second through your eyes, vision, hearing, everything
altogether.
And there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system which I'm sure you've heard of before and that is what is selecting
what and you actually notice.
What actually
reaches conscious awareness.
Now what's so remarkable here is how radical the filtering actually is. Out of those 11,000,000
bits
of information that you receive,
you are only consciously aware
of 50.
50. You are
experiencing maybe 0.0001%
of the total sensory data that's coming in. You are experiencing a tiny sliver of what is actually going on in your reality.
To a large degree,
what you pay attention to
is determining your subjective reality.
Now of course, what you subjectively
experience
determines what you subjectively feel. Therefore what you think about, what you do, and then ultimately your results to a large degree.
It is your attention
that determines
much of everything else that happens in your life through your RAS.
And so the direction in which this filtering
goes is incredibly important because if we're filtering out
every single opportunity,
if we're
not noticing
the opportunities to take action or if we're constantly filtering things
the things that are going wrong
or that represent our old life and that old identity,
we're gonna struggle.
And so we need to modulate your attention if you wanna stand any chance at changing your circumstances and your behavior.
And we do this through questions.
You see
questions are this incredibly useful tool that we can use to modulate attention.
Giving a
tactically
phrased question
and having a question that already has presupposed
conclusions
within them forces your brain to search for the answer.
This is very important because
most people ask themselves questions that presuppose
a negative
Why does this always happen to me? What's wrong with me? Why can't I get this right? They're trying to find the answer for the mistake for something that's holding them back that represents that old self.
But the moment you start asking yourself questions that presupposes
change,
that presupposes your ability to overcome adversity,
you change your attention.
Ask yourself the question, what would the version of me for whom this is inevitable be focused on right now?
What would they be doing? How would they be feeling? What would they be thinking?
Where is the best opportunity for action?
You see this presupposes
there is a best opportunity
and so your brain forces the look function. Let me find that opportunity
and you're going to find the best move on the chessboard by asking yourself these questions with tactical presuppositions.
What am I grateful for that confirms this is working?
What is the highest leverage move available to me today? Asking yourself these questions
forces
your
filtering mechanism
to go in a different direction
and find information
that gives you an answer to this question. Now this question is worded in a way that presupposes
information that will support
your current identity
oh, sorry, your your desired or your new identity.
And so what we're doing here is modulating attention
by changing the questions that you ask yourself. Change the questions, you change the filter.
So those 11 those 50 bits now shift into something that actually serves you rather than just running the same subjective reality which is keeping you chained to where you're currently at.
The sixth
and final
dimension of self. I know we've been through a lot. This is dense, but I promise you this is all gonna interconnect in a very powerful way is appraisal.
Appraisal at first principles refers to the automatic assignment of meaning
to whatever attention
has selected.
There's this quote from Epictetus who is a very good stoic philosopher. I highly recommend his book.
It is not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters. He said this over two thousand years ago and it still holds up today.
Ultimately,
things are things.
Events are neutral and this may not immediately
seem obvious,
but
hard
does not exist in objective reality.
Big does not exist.
These describers,
these adjectives that we add to reality
are subjective.
They originate from our own mind.
Things are just things until you add interpretation
to them, and appraisal
is that layer of interpretation.
You can look at appraisal
like the active layer of your beliefs. Right? Your beliefs refer to
held conclusions your mind holds as true.
Appraisal are those conclusions in action.
Appraisal is those the the meaning that you hold in your belief being
moved into its active form. Right? So this is why two people can go through the exact same event
and walk away with entirely different conclusions. You see this a lot with politics. This is the easiest way to see it. You watch a political debate and you look at the comments section, one person says another thing, the other the other person saw a completely different thing. The event itself is the same objectively.
The subjective experience of it is different. Now most people are subjectively experiencing
their old self's appraisal system based on their old self's beliefs.
Rejection proves you're unworthy. Setback,
uh, proves you'll never make it.
Whereas, we need to modulate our appraisal
in a way that rejection redirects you to the right path. Setback is data not a verdict. So this would be a big example for sales for example. People who look at sales rejection as sort of a
blotch on their self worth versus someone who sees a sales rejection
as data for their next call and as a positive rather than a negative.
The same event,
two entirely different appraisals of what that actually means.
And so what we need to do is use cognition or thought to interrupt
appraisal
and this is the basis of CBT Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy. Now we don't need to do therapy to gain insights from this so let's quickly run through this. The first step is noticing.
Appraisal usually comes with emotional charge.
That's the signal of appraisal running. That that's your mind has assigned meaning to something and the emotion is the reaction to that meaning. And so just notice that your mind has appraised a certain situation
and especially when you feel negative emotion that should be a punctate,
that should be a
clear indicator
that
you are running a negative
appraisal and this should be interrupted. So the first stage is noticing.
The second stage is pausing.
The space between stimulus and response is where the work happens here.
You pause before your response
and in that pause you just ask yourself the question, what else could this mean?
Pull from the inevitable self's frame. What would they interpret this event as?
Look at different perspectives of viewing the situation,
viewing the the event or the context or the opportunity.
And just ask yourself, how else could I look at this?
In what way is this thing good?
Is a very powerful question. Again that presupposes good linking back to that fifth component attention.
And so by going through this process which they use in CBT which is cognitive reappraisal,
asking yourself what does this actually mean? Looking at it from a different angle,
you kill the meaning that confirms the old self and you cultivate meanings that hold together a new one. You know, throughout every single component that we've gone through here, I'm talking about destroying and cultivation.
Destroy the old self, self destruction,
but identity
can never it doesn't leave a vacuum. You're always gonna believe in something, and so at the same time you're destroying
your your old actions, old environment, your old thoughts, your emotions,
you need to cultivate something new that represents this inevitable identity, and that's the importance of approaching it from that frame throughout every single component.
But now we've gone through
the six dimensions that create a self.
Right? The the emotions they feel, the actions they take, the thoughts they think,
the environment in which they operate in,
the attend what they focus on, the where their attention lands, and ultimately the appraisal, the meaning that they assign their reality
determines who you are. That that that is your identity in action.
And so these all interrelate
into this self reinforcing loop. Now as I was walking through this, I'm sure you could hear me referencing different and other components and how they interrelate with each other, but these six dimensions are not six separate problems.
They are nodes in one engine that work together.
Every second of your life,
you are producing
this loop. There is a loop, this self reinforcing loop that is happening on autopilot
every single day of your life.
And so let me run you through this loop of how every node interacts with each other. So let's let's first start off with action which is what you actually do, the behavior.
The actions you take determine the outcomes that you get.
Right? We can agree on that. If I'm in a cave I'm not changing anything outside of that cave. I've got to leave the cave and take actions with my body to change external reality.
Now the outcomes that you get serve as evidence for the type of person that you are. That evidence supports beliefs that you hold. Those beliefs hold together your identity. Right? Belief is the atomic structure of identity. You can look at identity like a brick wall. Beliefs are the bricks that hold together that wall.
Now the beliefs that you hold
to a large degree determine
what you pay attention to, what's important to you, and what that means.
Remember appraisal
is the
active
layer of belief.
Appraisal is just the meaning that you assign something and that meaning
comes from the preconceived
notions you had about it stored
in your beliefs based on the evidence that you create.
Now what you pay attention to and what that means to you to a large degree determines your emotions
and your thoughts. How you think and how you feel. How you think and how you feel, you've got to ignore this this was a mistake, determines your actions.
And then again your actions determine your outcomes which produces more evidence, reinforces the same beliefs,
which creates the same attention and appraisal systems running the same automatic negative thoughts, running the same automatic negative emotions,
which were reinforced
the same automatic negative action.
Now most individuals
are running on this automatic loop
every single second of their life and the beliefs that they already hold that form through childhood through random experiences
are controlling
every single aspect of their life and therefore their outcomes which is why
you know the people who just try to change with their behavior
you know they just try and intervene at the level of behavior get wiped out. Most people snap back like an elastic band. They don't create lasting change because the emotions and the thoughts and the attention and the appraisal and beliefs are still running in the background that eventually control their actions.
The vast majority of the action you take is happening below the conscious
curtain of awareness
and so there's only so much you can do with conscious will. There's only so much discipline that you can allocate.
This is the power of omnimorphic change. Now of course also on the other side of the coin if you just try and change your thoughts and emotions, your attention and appraisal,
nothing will change because you're not changing your actions which create your outcomes.
And so you cannot be binary here. You need to change everything all at once. If you neglect one of these nodes, they're gonna create a feedback system. Right? So if if we neglect our
environment or what our outcomes for example,
our outcomes are still going to reinforce
our old self. It's going to act as feedback for our old identity.
And so even if we get everything else right, there's a good chance that our environment pulls us back because there's such overwhelming
data
in that section of ourself.
Our environment, it may seem like it's out there, it's all going on in here and the cues assigned to it is very much a large degree a part of who you are.
By default, the loop is calibrated to one thing which is confirming
who you are already,
magnifying magnifying
and maintaining
the existing beliefs that you already have, creating the existing outcomes
through the
habits and the existing behaviors which you take.
And so omnimorphic
embodiment,
it's all six simultaneously.
This is what I call holistic change.
No node is left untouched.
The old self runs out of evidence.
The system has no choice but to converge on new identity.
What you're doing is providing such overwhelming
evidence
in such a short period of time that your old identity has no choice but to die. It just doesn't have any evidence. Nothing feeding it anymore. You can look at each component,
each dimension as oxygen
for an identity.
It can either be feeding the fire of your old identity or the new one and so you
it cannot be
it cannot be either way. You you have to choose the old or the new and if you neglect one of them the fire of the old self is still gonna be burning bright which is why people fail to create lasting change.
And that is where omnimorphic
reality
plugs into. It removes
any failure point from the equation.
It is this reliable
simple but repeatable pro protocol
you can follow to reliably shift your identity, fundamentally change who you are,
and this change
is happening all through the layer of belief.
Now
belief is not something we can just switch on and off like a light switch. I cannot just say I believe
in
some I cannot just say I believe that the sky is red
when I know it's blue.
Right? You cannot just change your beliefs in the same way you can change your thoughts or your emotions or your actions.
And so we change our beliefs by changing the evidence of those beliefs. Right? We change our actions first. We change our thoughts and our emotions and what we pay attention to and what that means to us. We change these first
and then the belief takes that feedback
and there's new evidence that supports these new empowering beliefs.
But the process of change is happening through belief. Your identity is just who you believe yourself to be, it's a construct.
And so every revolution of the loop deposits evidence into your self-concept or your identity.
That accumulated weight of evidence is what you experience as who you are. Who you are is just this cluster of random beliefs that you have. Your identity is not this permanent structure and we can explain this through the
I think it's a parable or a fable of Theseus' ship. I'm not gonna explain the full story but there was this famous man called
Theseus and he went on a big mission on this ship. And this ship was saved in ancient Greece for a very long time and the ship got very old. And so over time they had to replace the the wooden planks that made up this ship. But eventually they get they got to a point
where the original ship was no more. Every single plank from that old ship had been replaced.
And so by this point, is that still the same ship? All of the planks of wood are the exact same, but everything has been replaced over time. At what point does that become a new ship? Identity is the exact same. Each plank is just a reference or a belief. References are just the evidence which hold together certain beliefs.
Change one belief at a time and the identity is shifting, it's dynamic, but there is no solid identity which you can touch. It's this dynamic moving cluster
that is an emergent property
of the beliefs that you hold about yourself.
You see the etymology of identity or just the the origin of the word identity
comes from the Latin idem meaning the same.
Identity literally means the person you are being, the role that you are playing.
You can think of identity like the character that you're just repeating.
Identity is just who you repeat and the role that that is. And so what we're doing with omnomorphic
embodiment is changing the person that we repeat.
We are changing the planks of wood on this boat that creates your identity.
And by changing all of the planks of wood, by changing the references
and therefore the beliefs,
we fundamentally change who you are. You change the entire boat and that's the process of destruction into creation.
Replace every plank and nothing of the old ship remains,
nothing to recognize.
You haven't improved. Now this is the problem with self improvement optimization.
Most people are trying to improve the old ship. They're trying to optimize
the the self that is keeping them the same, which is why they see marginal gains,
but nothing really exiting the comfort zone. They're not radically changing who they are, and so they're not radically changing what they get.
Identity was never really a thing in the first place. It's not this solid thing that you can touch.
It was an emergent property of every belief that held in place by every dimension of the self. Okay. So the the it's important to understand it. Belief creates your identity.
Okay? Your identity is just a cluster of beliefs you hold about yourself.
What we can call a self-concept.
But your beliefs are formed
through the dimensions of yourself. Those are the six things that we went through here because this is where your beliefs find evidence. What you think is evidence. What you do is evidence. How you feel is evidence. What you pay attention to is evidence. You get the idea. And so we can use these six dimensions of self that we ran through as nodes, as as tools that we can use to engineer evidence for a new identity.
It's nuanced. I get there's a lot of density of information here, but this is the cutting edge of how you actually change who you are and therefore your results.
And this could be related to business,
making money, but you know anything in human endeavor. I mean this could be any goal health, wealth, relationships, you name it. You identify the version of you for whom that goal is inevitable and you engineer them across these six components of self.
Now the big way that you approach this, the frame in which you need to approach this is the method.
The method is a I'm I'm not an acting specialist,
but it's essentially when you absorb yourself with your character
behind the camera and out you know, when you're not behind the camera or when you're in front of the camera and when you're behind the camera. You act as this individual throughout your entire day or at least during the shoot. And there are some famous examples of this. Daniel Day Lewis in
Daniel Plainview in the I think the movie is There Will Be Blood. Great movie.
Famously, Heath Ledger playing the Joker lived as the character until it consumed him. Perhaps it probably killed him, many would argue.
Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman refused to break set character on set. These people are method acting.
They're absorbing themselves with the character, and still it just becomes a part of who they are. The crucial point here is you method act this inevitable identity.
You identify who they are across these six components
and you stick to that. Now at first it's going to feel alien.
At first it will feel foreign,
but remember identity
is just the role that you're repeating. All that you're doing through omnimorphic
embodiment is changing that role, changing the character that you're playing. And so after a long enough time
the cost the identity was always a costume.
The old one just felt like the skin.
It's it's
not
permanent.
And so by repeating something else for a long enough period of time, that can feel just as normal.
And you just need to go through this transition period of it going from alien to normal, which all of these actors have famously done
and to a large degree changed who they fundamentally
are through this process of just absorbing yourself
with this character,
with this individual.
Now
this is a version of who you are.
You can become intimately
familiar with this individual. It's a version of who you are and in fact sometimes
you are probably being this person when you are at your very best. What you wanna do is cultivate this as a minimum standard,
as something you you know you won't drop below as a minimum tolerance
and that's the person you become. You commit to it. You method act
and you go no matter what. Now what you must understand is this is not as easy as just becoming a new person. That's an oversimplification
because the old self will always fight back. The real war isn't becoming someone new, it's destroying the version of you that won't let you become someone new. Right? Your old self has something known as psychological
immunity.
It's the survival mechanism that the old self deploys the moment it senses an attempt to override it. Right? Every living
organism on this planet has a survival bias.
It biases survival or it wouldn't be around. It's an evolutionary
trait. You need you need to bias survival, and your old self, your old identity, the beliefs that hold it together is no different.
When it feels threatened
it uses
its defense mechanism and that defense mechanism is resistance.
Resistance at first principles can be defined as emotional friction toward goal aligned action. The usual suspects are the same perhaps it's apathy, doubt, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, whatever it may be. People have different flavors of resistance, but it's all emotional
in nature.
Resistance is a phantom, a literal sensation
of an old identity
being threatened.
Whenever you feel negative emotion, you know that you're sitting outside of your current comfort zone. Comfort zone is just what you deem is familiar,
and so you know for a fact that your old
self feels threatened and therefore you're going in the right direction. Remember we were talking about seeking discomfort in the second component that is action.
Now
as I've said
previously in this lesson, hard does not exist in objective reality.
The resistance that you feel, the obstacles that you feel are not going on out there. It's all going on within the mind. Hard is what the old self calls anything that doesn't confirm it, that threatens its existence.
Right? The barbell isn't hard, it's not heavy, it just is what it is.
There is no description. That that's all subjective.
The old self is voting against it and you're experiencing that vote as difficulty.
And so you're in a perpetual war with your old self. You need to destroy it. You see, most people are addicted to their old self. You know, the most addictive drug in the universe is not sold
in a blacked out BMW by a sketchy man. No. The most addictive drug in the universe is your current self.
You know, people are addicted
to their to familiarity
despite familiarity
creating outcomes that they hate and they fear.
That is the crucial point. It doesn't matter how much you hate the life. You are still addicted to the familiarity
of it.
And so the way that we overcome and destroy this old self
is through four steps. Firstly,
seek out the resistance.
Resistance is a is an indicator that you're going in the right direction, that your old self is threatened and therefore
when you take action through it it will degrade. Every action you take in the face of discomfort is a vote for that new self and therefore degrading the old self. They exist on a polarity.
Seek out the resistance.
Secondly feel gratitude for it. This is a reframe. This is a cognitive reframe following the the lessons from CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If we can cognitively reappraise
what resistance means as something that is good, it's a green light, it's petrol for progress rather than something that holds you back, feel gratitude for it, it flips the entire equation on its head. Resistance now becomes something you want rather than something you avoid.
The third is of course take action.
Once you have found the resistance you feel gratitude and then you instantly beeline toward taking imperfect action. You move through it, you cast the vote for your new self.
And then fourthly
you sit in the pain. You need to become comfortable
with discomfort.
This is a really good skill to master.
The new self is built in the space
of
discomfort.
It's what the old self deemed as deemed as something that's a threat, and you need to identify those threats as opportunities and something that you can be comfortable with.
Most people fear fear itself, and if you can become comfortable
with the feeling of fear, with the feeling of doubt or anxiety or sadness or guilt and just be okay with it. Not necessarily love it, but just be comfortable
with the feeling of discomfort. You become unstoppable.
You become an antifragile
system which is essentially what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The resistance can't hurt you because you feel gruff you want it. You feel grateful for it. You flip the entire equation on its head. The old self weapon has now become your weapon to degrade and destroy it. That's the process of self destruction.
Because all of these tools that we we named up here in terms of embodying the new self, this is offense,
this is becoming the new version of us. It doesn't matter how good we are at becoming
if the old self can just drag us back through that negative resistance.
And so you need to be good at offense
and defense,
defending yourself against this resistance and taking action through it. And so there's two sides of the coin, self destruction and self creation.
Killing
and cultivation.
It's always
they exist on a polarity, the old self and the new self, and so you need to be doing both and that's the crucial point here. You need to approach
every component,
every dimension of the self from a pros from a perspective of where can I destroy the old? Where can I cultivate and grow the new? You know, this exists everywhere in nature. You cannot plant
something new without unrooting the old, and that's the exact same process we're going through here.
It's all about breaking the addiction
to who you have been.
Disarm the only weapon the old self has and it has no more
influence
over your outcomes
and your behaviors.
And that's the entire protocol. That is everything
that you need to know about
shifting your identity. It is your identity above all else which determines your outcomes. If you're not able to modulate it, you won't be in full control
of your
behaviors.
Now this is a system that plugs in
to my broader
mindset system
that you should definitely check out. I've got a full master class on discipline. It's a game changer and not many people have seen it so you can get a competitive advantage in on that one. I'll see you in there. Thanks for watching. Godspeed.