The Story That's Living Your Life

What I'm about to share with you has changed the lives of the highest performing and most exhausted people I have ever worked with.

You know, Olympians, world champions, Hall of Famers, CEOs, mothers, athletes, entrepreneurs, and honestly, some of the most quietly suffering successful humans you can imagine, and it's changed my own life more than anything I have ever taught.

So here's what I want to say.

First, upfront, this is not a motivational video.

I'm not going to tell you to believe in yourself.

I'm not going to tell you to manifest.

That's a whole nother video.

[laughs] I'm not going to hand you, you know, feel-good language and send you back into life where nothing actually changes.

What I'm going to do is walk you through a mechanism, something that is happening underneath your life right now and that you don't even know is happening.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it, and once you can't unsee it, you have real power over it.

And the mechanism has a name in my work, and I call it the story that's living your life.

Because there is a story in your brain wrote a long time ago out of your worst moments, and that story is not a memory.

It's not even a reflection.

It's an identity, and it's showing up to your life ahead of you every single day, and making choices and generating feelings and producing outcomes that you think are yours.

But they're not yours, they're the story's, and it's been running your life while you thought you were.

[laughs] So let me show you what I mean.

Let me tell you when I first understood this, because years ago, I was working with a woman who had done everything, like every book, every therapist, every retreat, every mindfulness course, every breathwork program, every wellness practice you can name.

She was accomplished, successful, deeply spiritual, and she was more exhausted than she had ever been.

And I remember sitting across from her, and I asked her one question.

I said, "If you had to finish this sentence in six words, what would you say? I'm someone who blank." And she got quiet, and then she said, "I'm someone who can't ever fully relax." And I said, "How long have you been that person?" And she said, "As long as I can remember." And in that exact moment, I understood something that reorganized my whole career.

This woman was not failing at peace because she hadn't tried hard enough.

She had tried harder than almost anyone I'd ever met.

She was failing at peace because the person doing the trying was an identity built out of every anxious moment she had ever had.

She was practicing peace as someone who can't ever fully relax, and no amount of peace practice done by that identity would ever produce peace because the identity was generating the anxiety underneath every practice.

So we did our work together, and I don't mean more coping tools.