The Door to Your Greatest Future Is in Your Past

You used to know exactly who you were, but it never stopped you from imagining what you could be.

Back when you were five or 6 years old, you didn't struggle to use your imagination or repeat affirmations to manifest a different version of your life. You'd pick up a stick and it was a sword. You'd throw a blanket over your shoulders and you were flying like Superman.

You imagined because it made you happy.

Now, most adults use their imagination to experience the worst-case scenarios of their future.

But that same imagination can be used to go back into your past, into the bad memories you'd rather forget, and convert them into the door to the future you actually want.

Think about how easy it was to use your imagination as a younger version of yourself. That force is still alive inside of you, and it’s the vehicle for everything I'm describing in this lesson.

Your Imagination Goes in Two Directions

Your imagination can go down memory lane in two directions.

It can take you toward manifesting who you want to be, and it can take you back into the memories of when someone implanted a belief that you couldn't or shouldn’t be that.

There's a moment, or several moments, from your childhood still playing in the background of your mind every day. Those moments can shape how you handle money, success, relationships, and even how you treat yourself.

Hunting down those memories can reveal the door to your best future. When the feeling behind a memory is resolved and released through your imagination, you can finally move beyond the story you created from it.

When I’m working with clients, the ladies tend to be more enthusiastic about working with their inner child through these memories, but I want to make sure my brothers understand how powerful getting in touch with your younger self can be for your future self.

Somewhere around puberty, the pressure kicks in on a child, especially young boys, to bury their imagination and get realistic.

That is the trap that puts so many men on the pathway to a mediocre life they eventually want to break out of.

Society teaches that if you use your imagination too much as a grown man, people may label you delusional, immature, or childish. So you go through the conditioning to shut it off and ignore it.

But that’s the paradox of this 3-D reality.

The celebrities, entertainers, athletes, bestselling authors, visionaries, millionaire founders, and CEOs we admire are often the people who never stopped using their imaginations. They simply redirected that imagination toward the roles they play as adults.

If you don’t use yours, you can easily end up being a fan, follower, or employee of someone who does.

When Did You Stop Imagining?

I knew what I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel being that person at a very young age. I lived in my imagination constantly, and I can still remember some of those moments like they happened yesterday.

But I can also remember when I was told to let it go.

If you stopped using your imagination around that time as well, the excitement it used to give you may have eventually started to feel like a lie as you settled into your adult identity.

I see this in almost every client I coach.

When I look at the movie of their life through their retelling of it, the same patterns keep appearing regardless of their age or background.

They're afraid of doing the thing that excites them most, and they run straight toward what they can't stand or even feel apathetic about.

They want to become day traders for the money but aren’t passionate about what it takes to become one.

They want to scale their business but are afraid to hire more people so the business can actually grow.

They want to fix their relationships but are afraid to trust the next love of their life.

Society has conditioned millions of grown adults to keep their distance from the path that would make them happiest.

But your imagination is the reset button that can pull you out of this trap.

Who Are You?

The tool you might have abandoned as a kid is the same tool that can answer today’s million-dollar question:

Who are you?

Do you even know?

Don’t tell me the name you were given. Who are you at your deepest level?

You reach that answer by imagining it and experiencing it in your mind's eye.

Your imagination allows you to choose who you are and experience that identity without the negative beliefs and limitations that got stacked on top of you by your parents, family, school, and society.

Ask yourself:

What kind of person are you passionate about being?

What kind of life are you passionate about living?

You answer these questions by imagining the answer first and then mimicking that answer as closely as possible until it manifests into your physical life.

Your imagination can show you where you're headed, but it can also show you where you've been.

You can experience a glimpse of the future you want most, and on the other end, you can revisit the moments from your past that are keeping you from experiencing that future.

As a kid, you used your imagination without asking why you should use it or how to do it.

You just did it.

That’s a level of freedom you can tap back into as an adult.

Your childhood is where many of the memories you're still carrying live. But the weight of those memories isn't necessarily the memory itself.

It's the story you created about the memory.

Something happened when you were young, and your mind did what every young mind is designed to do: it created a story about why it happened in an attempt to protect you.

Your mind doesn’t only interpret what happened. It tries to explain why it happened.

The thinking mind creates a reason because that gives the ego something it can work with.

The subconscious is still a mystery to researchers, but one thing we can observe is how strongly the mind holds onto stories.

Think about your favorite movie.

Can you remember the first line?

What about the final line before the credits?

Probably not.

But you can almost certainly explain what the movie was about.

Your mind may not remember every detail of an event accurately, but it remembers the story it took away from experiencing it.

The downside is that your mind never stopped to check whether that story was true.

When this works in your favor, you celebrate it. When it works against you, you can begin hitting ceilings with your money, love life, health, and success.

The ego is focused on getting you through an experience and preventing you from experiencing something like it again. It is a survival program running in the background and doing its job the only way it knows how.

Your Adult Life is Running off of a Child’s story

As a grown adult, you may have a goal you want to achieve, but there’s a belief clogging up the lane to get there.

That belief may be attached to a memory that is still being interpreted by a six or seven-year-old version of you.

That kid created a story from their imagination decades ago to explain why something happened or didn’t happen.

Your identity can continue looking at your life 20, 30, or 40 years later through those same eyes.

Imagine trusting a story written by the version of you who probably couldn't tie their own shoes yet.

So how do you find the story?

It usually doesn't return as a crystal-clear memory at first.

It comes back as a feeling.

Start with the feeling in your body.

When something knocks you off your square today—rejection, losing part of an investment, missing out on a role you wanted, being passed over for a promotion—pay attention to the feeling that appears in your chest or gut.

Ask yourself:

When was the first time I ever felt this exact thing?

You may immediately remember something from your teenage years, but keep going.

Trace it further back.

Follow the feeling toward your preteen and childhood years. Keep going until you reach the earliest memory connected to that emotional experience.

When you picture that memory, whose eyes are you experiencing it through?

Are you inside your own body as that little kid, looking up at your parents or teacher?

Or are you observing your younger self from the perspective of the adult you are today?

You just used your imagination to search for the root of a negative story about yourself.

You found the moment it began using the same tool you may have stopped trusting years ago.

Many of the blocks, cycles, periods of stagnation, and delays you experience in adult life can point back to conclusions you formed during childhood.

The breakup with your lady.

The nervousness before asking for a higher salary.

The procrastination around starting your business.

The fear of scaling it to the next level.

These symptoms can point back toward an original cause you picked up as a kid.

Cut the weak link in the memory and the entire chain can begin loosening its grip around your life.

Imagination Is the Reset Button

Your imagination is the reset button.

Every exercise I teach is ultimately a way to get you back into your imagination.

That's the engine underneath these methods, which is why Neville Goddard described imagination as God. Neville and many of the old teachers were teaching their students to reclaim something they had possessed since childhood.

One of my favorite authors, Frederick Dodson, illustrates different levels of human motivation in his work. The basic idea is that we operate at different levels of drive and energy depending on our dominant mental and emotional state.

Many people operate primarily through punishment and pleasure. They’ll do something because there's a reward for doing it or because they fear the consequences of not doing it.

This is often why adults don't return to their imagination until their current reality becomes painful enough to motivate them.

As a kid, you didn't need motivation to imagine.

You didn't have to find your "why."

You didn't wait until you felt ready.

You imagined because you wanted to experience a different version of yourself.

Your Imagination Connects You to the Future

Your imagination is the pipeline through which you experience different versions of yourself.

It's the channel your higher mind uses to reach the physical mind.

Your higher mind speaks through ideas and passion, and imagination is the platform it uses to communicate.

Fear-based beliefs create static in that connection. They filter the message and bend what comes through into another reason to be afraid.

Think of the higher mind as a satellite orbiting your life from a higher perspective.

It knows where you are, where you’re going, and how to guide you there through the least amount of resistance.

Try to force your physical mind to figure out every single step and you’ll burn yourself out trying to make it perform a job it wasn't designed to perform.

Your physical mind cannot predict exactly how something is going to happen. It knows how things have already happened.

When you lock onto one exact way something has to happen, you shrink hundreds or thousands of possible paths into one narrow straw.

What you want may arrive through a path you didn't even know existed.

This is where your imagination becomes useful.

Instead of obsessing over every step, imagine the end state of what you want.

Create a mental image of an event that symbolizes reaching your goal.

Hold the image of where you're going and how it feels to be there. Let your higher mind, God, Source, the universe—or whatever language you use for it—sort out the route.

The steps will require action on your part.

Probably a lot of action.

But now you've tuned your navigation system toward the right coordinates instead of leaving everything to chance.

Essentially, this is what it means to live in the end.

You live from the emotional state of your end goal and begin mimicking the state of already having accomplished it.

I call this harmonization between the mind and body.

The mind thinks it.

The body does it.

Your mind can jump into countless possible versions of your life through imagination.

Your body cannot.

Your body exists here in the physical world, so physical actions are required to receive physical rewards.

Use your mind to establish the who, what, when, where, and why of the best version of yourself.

Then begin doing things the way that version of you would do them.

What Living in the End Actually Looks Like

Living in the end as a wealthy person has nothing to do with buying a fake watch or flexing on Instagram with things you can't afford.

It's about doing the small things a genuinely wealthy person might do in daily life.

Imagine you're worth $10 million.

You go out for lunch or dinner and the bill arrives.

What's one small thing you could do that matches your new relationship with money?

Leave a generous tip.

I’ve made this a practice over the last few years. As I started getting into rooms with seasoned millionaires, I noticed how generous many of them are toward the service they receive.

People with money understand that money isn't simply being spent. It's being put back into circulation.

The act may be tiny, but it helps synchronize your physical behavior with the mental state you're creating.

A wealthy, successful man is also usually good at delegating.

Stop trying to touch every part of your workflow yourself.

Hand work to other people.

To climb the ladder in a corporation, you eventually have to learn leadership and delegation. If you’re an entrepreneur, that may mean hiring a team or expanding the team you already have.

One thing I see stopping businessmen and women is the fear of bringing on talent that could actually help them make more money.

Go back to imagining yourself with $10 million.

If I asked how you run your business at that level, would you describe yourself doing absolutely everything alone?

Probably not.

So begin matching the body with the mind in whatever way is available to you now.

Action Pulls Thought Into the Physical World

Take action.

Action is what pulls thoughts into the 3-D world once they have been decided upon in the imagination.

Your mind can go anywhere. It can imagine anything. It can experience almost any future you hand it.

Your body cannot.

It lives here.

You use your mind to find the path you want, experience it, and lock onto it.

Then your body walks it.

Your body and nervous system are how your vision moves out of your imagination and into your physical life.

And that brings us full circle to the kid you once were with that deep, rich imagination that is still as powerful as it was then.

Back then, imagining and doing weren't separate worlds.

One fed the other.

That relationship between imagination and action is still available to you.

The Door to Your Future Is in Your Past

Your imagination is the vehicle you can use to pre-plan your life.

It can carry you back to the moment that's been running your life so you can use that same power to propel yourself toward the life you actually want.

You already know how to use it.

It's something you learned without anyone teaching you.

Go back to that God-given power.

Find the door in your memory you've been avoiding.

Open it.

And step through as the powerful adult you are today, rather than the scared kid who originally wrote the story.

Your greatest future may have been sitting behind that door the entire time.

Thank you for reading.