We live in a world where we’re conditioned that giving up is normalized.
Conditioned to give into fear or not even begin going after our dreams because of others insecurity / past experiences of “failure” projected upon us.
April 16th, 2010, I signed over my life to the hands of a neurosurgeon & his team as I said goodbye & “I love you” to my younger brother & parents.
I was 21 years old & was responsible to sign off of all the profound risks of said brain surgery as a young adult, & the risks consisted of paralysis, going blind, having a stroke, or death as the top of what stood out & caught my attention.
As I sat there signing my life away, I remember this being the first time I truly experienced what life or death fear was like & the thought of dying, never seeing the people I love again, & never riding my bike again consumed me.
Not fear in the sense of thats “scary” or anxiety/worry. More like fear of actually dying & accepting this fact as they inserted the IV into my arm & prepared me for what’s to come with no looking back.
This moment in time where I accepted I may die was a turning point in my life in that something switched inside of me that no longer gave into fear of dying & I presented myself with a choice.
A choice to put my focus, & therefore my energy, into a worse case scenario I didn’t want. Or, a choice in the vision I desired after I woke up from surgery.
This choice to focus on my desired future-vision was a by-product of my being raised to work hard for the life I wanted & from BMX teaching me if you fall once, try twice if you want it bad enough.
This choice was a pivotal moment that would serve as fuel to overcome what was to come in the next 10 years leading to my reality today.
It taught me that so often do we make decisions disguised as fear to take the “easy route” rather than the route most would give up on.
I’m not special. I just made a choice to not give up. A choice to learn & grow.
A choice to prove to myself & others we’re capable of what we set our sights (internally & externally) on & the potential we all possess with a believe in ourselves.
So many of us, including myself, tend to think “if this then that” when it comes to how we think and feel.
We give away our power to create the lives we desire by believing that if we just had a little bit more money, if we lost a little more weight, if we obtained a few more things that represented success, and so on that THEN we would feel happy, secure, and confident.
The problem with this is that this way of thinking rarely leads to success with obtaining what we want and even less often are those things maintained in our lives.
Why?
I break this down in this article and explain why my client and I have broken out of this thought process and what it’s done for us.
WHY “if X then Y” Thinking Does NOT Work
I get it. You’re working your ass off to reach your goals and feel like if you could just get a taste of success, THEN you’d feel better about yourself.
If you could just get a little more money in the bank, THEN you’d feel more comfortable.
If you could lose a little more weight, THEN you’d feel more confident.
If you got that promotion or that raise, THEN you’d feel happier.
What I find with most people that want the weight loss, the bigger bank account, the promotion, the relationship, etc. is that they just want to feel whole.
They want to feel secure, happy, loved, appreciated, valued, and confident.
When all I could focus on was my bank account, I could not see the bigger picture holding me back.
It was my programming of not feeling complete that led me to always chasing something to fill the void.
Once I tripled my income in just one year, those same holes existed meaning, the same problems were present in my life.
I kept thinking, “if I could only make “x” more money this year, then I would feel secure, confident, and happy.”
Boy was I wrong.
This is what I call “if x then y” thinking, which I like to refer to as “at effect”.
The problem with this form of thinking is that you’re operating from a place of limiting belief and/or negative emotions, which highly influences your behavior and creates the reality you experience on a daily basis.
Your physical health, your bank account, your relationships, etc. are all just evidence of the greater problem with regards to your personal programming.
What I didn’t know is probably what you and many others also don’t know in this moment.
Rather than being the conductor of our lives (at cause for our reality), we are in the passenger seat of others’ lives (at effect to our environment and circumstances).
We are so focused on an OUTCOME, we skip over the type of person (IDENTITY) that we must become to obtain that which we want in our lives and then begin comparing and contrasting our reality to that of others based upon not having what we want.
Be honest with yourself.
How many times have you asked yourself, “am I becoming the type of person that has the life I want”?
It’s great to have a goal or an outcome you’re working towards, as that sets your sights on a target. But, identity is what drives the habits which shape the identity in a sort of loop of feedback based upon choices & habits.
People talk a lot about developing “good habits” to achieve what it is they are after.
But, habits are not about having anything (OUTCOMES), rather, they’re about becoming someone (IDENTITY).
Identity isn’t set in stone as many believe it is.
You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself and the actions/habits that affirm that belief.
You can choose an identity and then choose habits that reinforce that identity in every moment of your life. Adversely, you can unconsciously choose habits that reinforce a limiting belief about yourself that you don’t enjoy.
That’s why it’s important to become aware of your mental programming.
Your habits shape your identity and your identity shapes your habits in a “feedback loop” of mental and emotional information based upon choices, habits, and experiences.
Let value, principals, and desired identity drive this feedback loop rather than results or outcomes.
Continue to ask yourself, “who is the type of person that could GET the outcome I want” and audit your actions to see if they’re congruent with your answer.
Set your sights on the target (GOAL/OUTCOME) and then focus your energy on becoming the type of person (IDENTITY) that has what you want by voting on becoming that type of person with your choices in everyday scenarios.
It’s not about perfection.
It’s about a majority vote for the type of person you want to become.
Focusing on how that version of you thinks, feels, and behaves is what generates the outcome as a positive consequence.
Not the other way around like most of us tend to think.
Most of us think “if X then Y” in regards to thinking & feeling a certain way when we achieve a goal, get an outcome, or obtain something.
When we flip that around, we not only have a higher probability of obtaining the life we want, we have a higher probability of maintaining it.
This is exactly what I help my clients achieve whether they come to me for help losing weight or starting a business and/or increasing their business performance.
It’s all tied together as your health affects your performance which affects your career, relationships, and personal development, and vise versa.
The people I work with come to me to either lose weight or just feel better about themselves, inside and out.
With our time together, my clients not only learn how their current model of the world is creating the experiences in various aspects of their lives that they dislike but they also learn how they can take the wheel and create their IDEAL life.
After taking charge within my own life and sharing what I was learning and experiencing, and seeing the lives of others transform, I decided to dedicate my life’s work to helping others do the same and share it with their loved ones as well.
If you’re tired of feeling frustrated, insecure, like you’re not being valued like you should, feeling lonely, or just feeling like shit, reach out and let’s talk.
You DESERVE to have a chance at living your most IDEAL life and enjoying the process.
Don’t let past attempts or limiting beliefs hold you back from at least exploring the possibilities.
You owe it to yourself to have the opportunity to be as healthy, happy, and successful as you can.
I’ve taken all I’ve learned from BMX and have shared as much as I can but I’ve also uncovered deeper learnings from BMX and applied to my personal and professional life outside of the sport.
This has allowed me to build a 6-figure business based on my purpose to shift perspectives and empower others to achieve success in their lives, and it’s allowed me to experience the freedom I desire more and more.
For me, freedom means an equal balance of detachment and desire.
It means to surrender and let the feelings of empowerment and joy shine through liking the path to freedom.
The more I’ve reflected on the “things” we want in life and for what purpose, the more I’ve become aware that it traces back to an emotional feeling we’re seeking. Often times to cover up an insecurity we haven’t yet faced and accepted.
Steps one and two of freedom is to become aware / familiar with yourself and accept who you are in order to surrender to detachment and desire.
From there, you can begin paving the path to freedom with the simple internal decision to let go and put your focus on your intentions and match them with a heightened emotional state.
The thought sends the signal out and the emotion draws the event into your life.
If you want to speed up time, you gotta let go of past emotional baggage and focus on overcoming your past “known” self to create a new idea version of you that’s doing, feeling, and having the things and experiences you truly want.
I’m practicing this more and more, and I’ve been challenged to let go of many things that I did on a daily basis to affirm my identity.
I’m learning I don’t need that identity and it’s so freeing to know and feel.
Consciousness is step 1 to changing any aspect of our life.
Step 2 is to take ownership or responsibility of our reality. That’s a powerful step as it puts us back in the driver seat of our lives and empowers us to move forward as we’d like.
When we give blame to outside things or people, we give away our god given power to manifest the life we desire and deserve.
It’s not about blaming ourselves, it’s about creating self awareness and realizing that we are the problem to our undesirable experiences, feelings, actions, etc. which enables us to realize immediately that we’re the solution as well!
When we choose to believe we are the cause our of life rather than at effect to life, massive shifts begin to occur if we’re willing to take responsibility (response able) for our actions.
Step 3 is asking ourselves if we want to stay where we are? Do we want to continue playing the victim card? Do we want to continue complaining about what we don’t have or what we don’t get to do while others are putting in the work to do what we may be capable of?
If the answer is “no”, then the 4th step is to take action in making changes to your being and how you show up in life.
The last few years taught me that in order to achieve new results in our lives we must change who we are: what we think, what we feel, and what we do.
Are you conscious of your thoughts, language, and actions?
Ever heard the saying “the truth will set your free”? I felt confined most of my life with regards to speaking my truth to my fullest capacity.
This confinement lead to a gap between my truest self and what others perceived of me.
I suppressed my truth in various forms of my life during many experiences in different times.
The voice suppression began at a younger age with a violent and abusive step father that punished me in various forms for speaking out with how I felt, what I was thinking, and in general if it was a time that triggered his anger.
This voice suppression led into my adult years as I have realized I was conditioned to suppress my truth out of fear for getting hurt or being “wrong”. This conditioning almost killed me as I was 21 and let the medical authorities convince me that I was “fine” even though I was suffering on a daily basis until a concussion led to an MRI finding the cause- a brain tumor.
This conditioning led me to not showing up and expressing myself in my truest form, which affected many of my personal and business relationships.
This conditioning almost prevented me from sharing my truth around the ketogenic diet and lifestyle, which has allowed me to support many people around the globe with empowering themselves to improve their health and quality of life.
After a third brain tumor diagnosis, shortly after placing top 10 in the BMX World Series, I left my dream to speak my truth with no regard to anything besides the purpose of serving others around the world.
Since doing so, I’ve felt more free and have unlocked so much potential to do new things, reach more people, and learn more about myself.
I’ve made it my mission to inspire perspective in others that leads to owning their truth and speaking it as much as they possibly can while empowering themselves to be as healthy and happy as possible.
There’s no reason anyone should feel as if they don’t have a voice and it’s our responsibility to support each of our truths and voice to share that truth.
What are you willing to do for the things you say you “need” and “want” in your life?
Are you willing to sacrifice moments of instant gratification for the long game of sustainability?
Are you willing to put yourself in uncomfortable ale situations or moments of immense pain like I experienced in this photo?
The difference between a pro and amateur is the willingness to push past moments of physical and mental pain, fear, doubt, worry, judgment, stress and whatever else comes your way.
The future vision we create as a pro of our life’s journey is what defines us. We’re not defined by our past, who we showed up as yesterday, the times we fell down or “failed”, or the times we heard the word “no”. We are clear on our purpose behind the vision and won’t let anything stop us, no matter how far off course we find ourselves.
Pain is just information. Use the information to trouble shoot navigating forward to success.
When you find yourself comfortable, that should set off an alarm that it’s time to optimize.
Adaptations are healthy and necessary to build strength, but comfort can lead to stagnant phases in life and lead to unhappiness.
That’s what I’ve found in my life and BMX has taught me there’s always more in us to optimize our current level in area of life, if we’re willing to put the work in.
Get after it with clear, purposeful, and align intent that matches the vision you’ve created for your life.
Don’t settle for anything less and don’t let moment of pain persuade you off the path.
This was the moment I woke up from a 6 hour brain surgery.
This “gap” of who I wanted to be & how I felt internally, & how others perceived me and my life, developed from a young age and continued to grow as I progressed in my BMX career.
On the outside, others would often assume I lived “the life”, which I have been fortunate to have worked my ass off to live such a life with amazing experiences.
Others would assume my life was easy, I must have a ton of money, I was always happy, and would often say “it must be nice” when I got to travel the world, meet amazing human beings, and or design my days to do what I wanted when I wanted.
Although I did and do live such a abundant life, I have been suppressing deep rooted limiting beliefs, insecurities, pain, and unworthiness.
It took being told “Josh, you may die” at the young age of 21 to wake my ass up to begin expressing my true inner self, and to begin letting go of all those emotional blocks holding me back from true joy and fulfillment.
It lead me on a quest of progression to become the best version of myself, inside and out.
It taught me that we all have amazing amounts of potential to change our lives and the lives of others when the effort is put forth with a clear vision of what we want to create backed by an immense amount of purpose and dedication to that vision.
It taught me life is all about perspective- how we CHOOSE to see the world and our lives in regards to our personal reality and the actions we take to create that reality.
It taught me how health is an internal aspect of reality, not solely what’s on the outside or in a scale.
It taught me that our reality is a manifestation of our choices in life- what we consume (nutritionally and mentally), if and how we move our bodies, how we choose to think and what we choose to believe, and how we choose to act in our lives in which create an emotional experience, all of which makes up our identity known as “self”. At the end of the day, this moment in that surgical bed not only saved my life, it led me to my higher purpose of showing others what we are all capable of when the desire to write our own life script is large enough.
Without consciousness (awareness) of our personality, we can’t expect to change.
When we live each day as our past self, making the same choices, having the same thoughts, and creating the same emotional experiences, we trap ourselves into a loop of auto pilot.
The thoughts we have, the actions we choose, and the emotions we feel as a result creates our state of being.
In order to change, we must be greater than our state of being, which takes an immense amount of awareness, commitment, and faith in what we can not yet see.
I had a long conversation about this work with @lifesamitchism last week and something he reminded me of clicked. He reminded me that once we leave the “program” (our subconscious personality made of our thoughts, behaviors and emotions) and get into the seat of the observer, let go of judgment and just OBSERVE ourselves for what we see and surrender from controlling our past or future.
For me, letting go of past judgments of myself is a huge success in overcoming myself. I’ve always been so hard on myself and put unneeded pressure “to succeed” when in reality, we’ll “succeed” once we choose to feel as if we have already and can feel that emotion.
In order to get into the seat of the PROGRAMMER and change our reality, we have to let go of any intention and emotion that makes us the current version of “ME”. Once we can establish this new observation and behavior pattern (personality), we can begin to rePROGRAM our personality defined by a vision of the future we have for our lives.
To create a new reality, we have to shed the past / current state of being of ourselves that’s creating the current reality in which we desire to change.
Of course, if you’re truly happy and fulfilled with you’re reality then this may not apply but I argue this applies to all us striving to be the best we can be.
Biggest lesson so far from learning about this topic is “be before you become”. Don’t wait for a cause and effect situation, create the effect that draws the cause into fruition.
We all remember being asking this as a kid, right?
The possibilities are endless we were told.
But, how sincere was this question when it was asked & how true is the latter statement? How many of us manifested that dream into our reality, better yet, how many of us actually took a risk on that dream?
It seems, although sparking creativity & inspiring imagination, this question was a mask for confirmatory disguised as an idea of a dream when those asking this question most likely didn’t take a chance on theirs…maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.
I’ve realized there are few of us that take a risk on who it is we truly want to become when we grow up & that’s because few are often supported in being that person when they’re younger.
I was encouraged to “go big and fly high”, as my mom always told me, & my family backed anything I chose to do, as long as I worked hard at it and gave it my all.
I realize not everyone has a support system as I did growing up with, but I also had my own struggles along the way.
I often hear the phrase “must be nice” or “you’re so lucky” & it pisses me off.
To me, it negates all the hard ass work, the sacrifice in a “secure” career left behind to pursue and unlikely & unconventional path, pain and suffering endured to find my way (mentally and physically), risking my life, & the countless times I fell down (figuratively and literally) in order to get to a point people have the audacity to say such things to me.
To be on a path speaking my truth to people I don’t know, 100% fueled by passion & purpose, is crazy to sit back & reflect on.
It started with a self filled dream to become a professional BMX athlete and after many unfathomable adversities along the way, I got real clear on my purpose in life to show others what’s possible when we dig deep within ourselves, even when we thought we had nothing left.
This purpose is fueled with a mission to inspire new perspectives in others to step into that untapped potential empowerment by living through the lens of my life rather than waiting for catastrophic events to occur in your life to wake up.
