9. From impossible to inevitable: create what you most want
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 9 | 26 November 2024
Notes
What’s standing between you and what you truly want? Whether it’s finding love, achieving career success, mastering a new skill, or transforming your mindset, the key lies in one powerful question shared in this episode.
We dive deep into the Belief Ladder—moving from impossibility to inevitability—and how your mindset shapes your actions and, ultimately, your results. Listen up for personal stories, coaching insights, and actionable tips to help you break through your belief ceilings, commit fully to your goals, and take massive action.
By the end, you’ll have the tools to stop dreaming and start creating the life you want. Ready to turn your "what ifs" into "when"? Tune in now and make it inevitable.
Transcript
Hello, how are you my friend, colleague, comrade? I'm fantastic. I'm not fully recovered yet from my weird neurological mystery, but I am doing well. I'm moving forward anyway. Things are falling into place somehow, and I am taking it all one day at a time, which is really all you can do when you have so little control over a situation.
Now, without further ado, I wanna talk about what you want that you don't yet have, and how to make it happen.
So if you had a magic wand, what would you want to have?
Maybe you want to find someone to love and who loves you back, someone to spend the rest of your life with and cook with and go on walks with and watch movies with. Maybe you want to stop losing your temper and become a person who no matter what is going on around them, manages to stay calm and say things with measured words.
Maybe you want to learn to balance your workload better so you're not constantly overwhelmed and exhausted and burning out.
Or you want to buy a place in Europe.
Or you want to sound more confident in meetings.
Or maybe you're after some steel abs and butt or whatever your body, fitness, beauty criteria is.
Whatever it is you want, I'm going to tell you something that may sound really obvious to you, but it ain't: In order to make what you want to happen, you first have to believe that it can happen. I know, right? I know it sounds so obvious, but you would not believe the number of people who tell me that having a better job, a great partner, less stress would all be very nice and that they want all those things while at the same time, not believing that it can happen for them.
"It's not going to happen", "No effing way", "not in a million years". Ah.
Y'all, every single circumstance that has ever been created by a human had to have that human believe it could happen first and foremost. A few things have happened by accident, but overall, that's not really how it works.
So this is what we're doing in this episode.
Pick a thing you really want, be it love, zen, fitness, money, promotion, good relationships, portfolio, you name it.
First, I'm going to walk you through the different levels of belief and what they do for you. And then I'm going to tell you the steps that I take my coachees through to change whatever belief level they're on and help them climb the belief ladder, if you will.
I'm really excited to share this stuff with you and see what you make with it.
So the belief ladder. Simply put, the first level of that ladder is impossibility. The second level is possibility and the third level would be inevitability. That's the gist. We're going to go through each and every one of them. I break it down a bit more in my sessions, we get more granular, but I really want to keep the podcasts short because I know you don't have much time. And really this is all that you need to know.
It's very important to get clear on what stage or level of belief you're in for whatever it is you want so that you stop being confused or frustrated on why you may not be getting what you want.
Your level of belief creates your results. Here's why:
Your level of belief determines your level of commitment to those results.
Your level of commitment determines how much and what type of actions you're willing to take towards those results.
And very importantly, it also determines how likely you are to give up when you meet.
So level one, as I said, is impossibility. It's basically the first time that some idea enters your awareness. Your brain doesn't even allow you to go there. It doesn't even consider it a possibility or it makes a ton of effort to discredit the very thought of it being a possibility for you.
I see it every day with the people who seek coaching with me and even my close friends. People wanting a fixed term position at the UN, they say, "Oh, forget it. I don't have the right gender. I don't have the right nationality. I don't have the right experience".
Or people wanting to find a strong loving relationship where they could feel inspired and seen and loved. And they'll tell me, "Oh, forget it. All the good ones are taken. Forget it. Guys just want to have sex. Um, girls are just too much drama", whatever it is, right? "It's not for me", "I've never managed to be in a long-term relationship before". That kind of stuff.
So for me, for the longest time, for example, I wouldn't even try to control my emotions. People have always been very emotional in my family, yelling, silent treatment, anger, lots of loudness, lots of crying. Emotional management wasn't something I believed I could ever access. I admired a lot the people who had that ability and I judged the crap out of myself for not having that ability. And for the longest time, I never even began to entertain the thought that I could develop that ability. My brain just couldn't go there. I had to first start believing it was possible to start taking action, to start trying, to start looking for what I needed to learn, to start looking for the coaches that were teaching this stuff.
I've come a long way since, but the first step was that I had to stop believing it wasn't possible for me.
The second level of belief is the possibility level. This is when you're flirting with an idea with something that you want, but you're not fully convinced it's available to you, or that you have much control over whether it happens or not.
So the thoughts are something along the lines of, "yeah, maybe, why not?", "If the right conditions are in place", "potentially, it could work out", "Who knows?"...
Now I want you to imagine the energy with which you approach applying for a job or dating or changing something about you that you're not a fan of with these kinds of thoughts running through your head. Some days you might show up fully for that dream or goal. And some days you just might not. Most days you'll half ass it. You'll half ass the written test. You'll half ass the dating profile. You'll half ass the discipline with which you study whatever it is you're trying to learn.
The actions you'll take will be the easier ones. The ones that everyone takes, the ones that don't set you apart. And more importantly, your chances of quitting when it starts taking too long or when it starts feeling hard are quite high.
Now I want to point out that thinking that things are potentially possible, just possible can really screw you. When you don't fully believe something can happen for you, you don't take massive action, you don't take the difficult action. And so then it's likely to take longer than if you believed it was happening for sure. So you have more probability of getting discouraged and you might quit from that discouragement.
So for example, for all of my adult life, I've been wanting to be fluent in Arabic while also not really believing I could ever be fluent. And so I showed up to class without really doing my homework. I didn't try to speak with Arabic speakers, just half-assing it all around. Right? My results are exactly what you guessed. I can say "hello", I can ask for a few simple things, I can read. I mix all the dialects though, and I feel shame every time I open my mouth to speak Arabic, so I open less and less my mouth, I try less and less, and I have quit about a thousand times in the past 20 years.
So that's what believing that things are possible can do for you. And, you know, while it's better than believing things are impossible, it's not the best you can do.
The best you can do is level three. It's the level of inevitability. This is the space where you believe that there's no way you won't make happen what you want one way or another. "For sure I'll get where I'm going, no matter how long it takes, no matter the hurdles", "I will get it done". This is a space for massive action. And this is a space for no excuses. Excuselessness, right?
It's the energy you have when you order a package in the mail. The package might get delayed, you might need to call customer service, but you are a hundred percent convinced that eventually you will get it.
This space of inevitability is how you can decide to approach your dreams and your goals. It's available to you. And I'm going to show you how to get there.
Now, to summarize the three stages:
- when you believe it's impossible or improbable, you have 0% belief, you have 0 determination to make it happen and you take 0 action or close to 0 action, and you also have all the chances of quitting before you even start considering pursuing your dream.
- when you believe it's possible (so level two of the belief scale or the belief ladder), you're around 50/50 belief that things could happen for you or not. So you have some determination to make it happen. You have some actions, the easy ones, the half-assed ones. But you're also very susceptible to the idea that it's not for you and to quitting the minute you encounter resistance or difficulty.
- and finally, you have level three where you believe it's inevitable. You believe there's a 100% chance it will happen sooner or later. You may not know how, you don't know when exactly, but you know it deep in your bones, it is happening 100%. You feel a 100% determined to pursue it. And you'll take a 100% of the actions available to you or close to a 100%. And there's close to 0 chances that you'll quit.
So those are the three stages that matter the most: impossibility, possibility and inevitability.
Be super honest with yourself based on the amount and type of action you're taking based on the sentences that are floating in your head on whether you think what you want is a "pipe dream" or something that you believe "could happen, I guess", or something that you believe "will happen for sure".
Now, if you really want something, you're going to need to be on level two or level three of this belief ladder, right? Possibility at least, level two, or inevitability at best, level three.
Now part of the value of getting coached or some forms of therapy or having the best friends or the best parents on this planet, is that they can hold belief for you when you can't they can see possibility and opportunity for you when you don't and they tend to believe that anything you want is available to you if you put your mind to it you can borrow the way they see you.
You can borrow their beliefs but they cannot do the work for you so it's important that you believe things are possible for you that you believe things are inevitable if you want to make them inevitable.
And as a professional coach who has done this for a while now, I'm going to give you a few tips to move up the belief ladder.
The first one is for you to choose to shift your mindset from "getting or finding" what you want to "creating" what you want. I know this sounds like semantics, but guys, this is everything. In one, you delegate a huge portion of your power and responsibility. When you think what you want is yours to create, you are going to be seeing all the ways you can influence and even control your outcomes. So instead of, I want to "find" love, tell yourself you are looking to "create" love. Instead of, I want to "get" a new job. Look for how you can "create" that new reality for you.
That mindset shift will kick you into the next gear.
The second tip I can give you is to practice possibility daily. Now, what do I mean by that? A number of things.
You first have to visualize the possibility, right? So visualize your dating going well, your job search going well, the skill you're trying to develop going well. Give airtime in your brain for things working out the way you want them to work out, not just to the ways they could go wrong, right? Your brain will naturally take care of visualizing worst case scenarios, but you have to deliberately choose to visualize best case scenarios. And this is not about magic or manifestations. This is about setting yourself up to be willing to take action in the direction that matters to you. If you think only of the ways it will never happen, you just won't take action. And it will indeed, of course, never happen.
Another way to practice possibility is to write down 20 reasons why it's possible for you. Do it. I know it sounds tedious, but do it. It can change everything.
Another way to practice possibility would be to pick a main thought that you can use to redirect systematically your brain whenever it wants to dive into "never happening" territory. So for example, for me, if I go back to my Arabic struggle, every time I fall into "it's too hard, too complicated, there's too many dialects, it's too confusing", I redirect my thoughts to "I can learn anything I want to learn if I put the right effort into it". That's it. It's that simple.
A third tip I want to give you is for you to decide to refuse to quit. Decide today. It isn't hard. It's just a decision you have to make that no matter how long it will take, no matter how many faceplants you will have to endure, you will not quit trying. The same way that when you're driving a car to go somewhere and you run into a red light or a stop sign or a deviation, you don't go, "Oh, I guess we, we hit a wall here. There's just no going through, I guess we've got to go home. No, you keep going". You know you're going to reach your destination. You don't stop at the first obstacle, right? So that's the energy. Refuse to quit, decide today.
And the final and most valuable tip I want to share with you today is this million dollar question. What would it take to make it inevitable? That is one of my favorite questions ever. It's a question that has allowed me to make a bunch of things happen that other people considered impossible.
What would it take to make it inevitable? And write down the list of actions it would take and go tackle every one of the items on the list. That's how you create what you want in your life.
This is how I stopped losing my temper. This is how I stopped putting on unwanted weight. This is how I trained for marathons in some really harsh conditions. One after the other, I'm not kidding: "It will happen. It's inevitable. I know it", right? Because I'm taking massive action.
Now, impossibility is full of certainty and declarations that something can't happen. To move to possibility and inevitability, you have to be willing to drop your certainties of powerlessness, which I know we like to hold on to, like there are security blankets.
"OK, it's impossible. But if it were possible, what would it take to make it possible?" "And if I wanted to make it inevitable, what would it take?"
Then go take action my friend, you only live once. I don't know how old you are, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are definitely too old to not live life on your own terms and to not go create what you truly want.
That's what I got for you this week on how to move from impossibility mindset to inevitability mindset and create what you want, no matter what.
When you believe something is impossible, you create that impossibility with 0 belief, 0 actions, 0 results.
When you believe something is possible, you create the possibility of it. Half belief, half-assed actions, half-assed results.
When you believe something is inevitable, you actually create the inevitability of it: 100% belief, you'll take 100% of actions available to you, and 100% results are guaranteed sooner or later.
I want to take this opportunity to give a shout out to the wonderful humans I have the privilege of coaching every week in Bamako, in Kyiv, in Juba, in Gaza, in Goma, in Addis Ababa, in New York, in Toronto, in Abuja, in Rome.
Rain or shine, even when the internet gods are not on our side.
You show up every week for yourselves. You are creating beautiful, meaningful relationships. You're growing your self-confidence like there's no tomorrow. You're fighting to be team leaders in alignment with your values. When your brains are setting traps for you, you dismantle them like ninjas. You are investing in your dreams and in your lives, and it's an honor, really an honor, to be able to help you create what you truly want and to hold belief for you when your own belief is letting you down. I really cannot wait to see what else you make happen for yourselves in this sector that is so hard to navigate. I'm honestly just cheering up, just thinking about it.
To everyone who is listening, I want to invite you to go on a similar journey. If you know what you want, what are you waiting for? Go make it inevitable. Go!
Thank you for listening. I'll be right here next week. Until then, promise me to take care of yourself.