Just F*cking Do It

I had dreamed my whole childhood of parading on a Hollywood set or dancing in a Broadway show. The fact I couldn’t act or sing very well was a minor technicality but what was more worrying was the resounding noise from the adults in my life that such ambitions were unrealistic, and I would forever need a backup plan. My imagination and capacity to daydream was quashed and I was slowly moulded into a girl who believed those kinds of things were not possible.

I played by the rules and did what I needed to do, but then felt even more confused because nothing ever felt right. I was a round peg surrounded by a bazillion square holes. Do you know that feeling? I thought that there must be something wrong with me because when I looked at everyone around me they seemed to be getting jobs with fancy titles and getting all the usual trappings of a successful career.

What the heck was I meant to be doing in my life? Or, going deeper, what was the point of life?

When we are born into this magical place called the world as joyful little babies, we are full of potential for taking centre stage in our life. We all have the capacity to do something awesome and we are right on track to do it … until … well, life happens.

Parents happen, school happens, society happens and, as I’ve explained, we get lost in an abyss of conditioning and end up being someone or doing something because we feel we have to or because we have learned to be that way. Since you are now aware of what comparing yourself has done for you (see Chapter 4) and you are now making a serious commitment to focus on you, I need you to figure out who the hell you are. I want to strip you down and find out who you really are underneath, wobbly bits and all …

• Not who you have had to be in your family

• Not who you have had to be at work

• Not who you have had to be to please your partner.

Who are you?

I want you to recognize where along the way you have been moulded into someone you perhaps don’t want to be. Because if you base how you live your life on how everyone expects you to, you literally give all your power over to other people and become debilitatingly dependent on someone outside of yourself for validation.

When you can peel back the layers, you will find someone truly spectacular who really believes in themselves – someone unique, who has talents and a big fat purpose on this planet. When you uncover that purpose and what lights you up, it’s like snorting unicorn crack and you get this divine buzz of happiness. It’s the best legal high going.

However, uncovering who you really are takes some Soul-digging, and setting the goals that you truly want to achieve is the first step. This is your first indication of who you really are and what is important to you. Then you can rewrite the conditioning by making the conscious choice to choose who you want to be.

That was one of the most powerful things that anyone ever told me – that I could choose to be who I wanted to be; that I had a choice to drop the need to be what my parents expected, my school wanted, and society pushed for. I could say goodbye to the self-imposed labels of ‘depressed’, ‘anxious’, ‘envious’ or ‘unsuccessful’ and choose a new identity that was empowering.

Because underneath it all the real you is so powerful. I want you to understand that who you are at the very core is the most powerful version of you. Who you are at the very core isn’t bothered about comparing yourself with others, isn’t worried about failing, and unequivocally knows that you can create the life you daydream about.

Just for a moment, imagine what our world would be like if everyone was happy to be themselves and shamelessly loved themselves so much that they weren’t bothered by the opinions of others, the colour of their skin, how educated they were or whether they were a man one day or a woman the next. We should all be allowed to be whoever the hell we want to be unapologetically.

I want you to choose who you want to be and own it like a boss.

The psychology

Your present self-image – the idea you have of your abilities, appearance and personality – was created by your own imagination from pictures of yourself; pictures built up from interpretations and evaluations that you placed on your experiences. You may remember, from Chapter 1, that when I was four years old a girl walked up to me in the playground and quizzed me about the bushiness of my eyebrows. Ugh. Under the age of seven, what we hear, we believe to be fact. I interpreted that experience in my little head and came to the conclusion that I was different and ugly. This became the self-image I held about myself for two long decades.

In addition, you also learn what to believe and how to behave from those closest to you through a process called ‘modelling’. If your mum constantly nags your father, and you father always puts up with it, it will be likely that you will adopt that way of operating around your future partners. This happens on a subconscious level and is why we are so similar to one or both of our parents. We become conditioned to behave in a certain way. All this comes about because of the totally erroneous idea that ‘I should be like everybody else’.

So, as you can see, it is all the events and experiences throughout your life that have created layers of smog around the most empowered version of you that lies at your core. The way that you see yourself is absolutely crucial to the life you manifest. Your self-image will dictate all your thoughts, which in turn will create your feelings, actions and behaviours. It also affects your abilities.

However, if your self-image hasn’t been helping you reach the success you want, then you will be thrilled to know that you can change it. Your past identity, which has brought you to where you are today, does not and will not be the identity that takes you to the new phase of your rock star life.

In the same way that you have created an identity that has got you to where you are today, you will create an even better one to get you to where you want to be next month, next year or a decade away. Numerous studies have shown that anybody, young or old, can alter the ways they not only see themselves but also how they act and consequently their life. BOOM!

One of the reasons we humans think it is so hard to reshape ourselves is because it has taken us decades to become the person we are today, so it is clearly no easy feat to redesign ourselves all over again. When you become habituated to one way of doing and being, everything becomes so deeply engrained that you believe it’s all unchangeable. You will strongly hold on to your beliefs even if they are sabotaging your success. Henry Ford so wisely said: ‘The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right’. So which camp are you in? If you don’t believe you can achieve it, whatever it is, there is absolutely no chance that you will.

Let me be crystal clear: changing your self-image isn’t just about repeating ‘positive words’ and hoping that, in a puff of smoke, you will magically turn from a frog into a prince or princess. You cannot just sprinkle unicorn glitter on to a pile of shit and expect that pile of shit to smell or look any better. Changing how you see yourself is deep work and requires a good clean out of the crap first. It is also impossible to think positively if your self-image is negative at its core.

Your beliefs about who you are shape everything that happens before you even take the first step towards your goals. Your self-image is there before you make a plan. If you identify yourself as a risk-averse person and wear this caution with pride, guess how you will go into every new situation? … Cautiously. Herein the conflict lies – how do you take a leap of faith into the unknown with the possibility of an amazing life, if you think of yourself as highly risk averse? Well, you can’t – that particular self-image is limiting and self-fulfilling.

In order to achieve all the goals you set out in Chapter 3, you need to ferociously believe that you are capable of doing so. You need to have the self-esteem, confidence and trust in yourself. You need to be proud of who you are. When your self-image is conducive to success, then you can go for your goals with such gusto that nothing will stop you. When you start peeling away the layers of conditioning and tap into your Soul for guidance, your unique talents and gifts will surface and lead you to fulfil your passion and purpose in life. I truly believe that we all have unique talents and that, if we let ourselves, we can use them to create our most abundant life.

The hardest part in changing our self-image is that it is buried in our subconscious, which, after all, runs 80 per cent of what we do, and it takes some digging deep. You may be asking: ‘But how do I change this?’ You may be looking at your list of goals and all you can think of is how you have ‘failed’ in the past. Well, one insanely powerful way of loosening the psychological hold that your past has over you is by judging all your future-based goals in terms of your new identity (and not your old one), the identity that you have chosen for yourself. You will become the person who can achieve those goals once you let go of the person who has ‘failed’ in the past.

How I chose to change

I had made the choice to change how I saw myself around two weeks prior to receiving the news that marked the beginning of the radical change in my life. I was on a plane to Hawaii full of excitement about the week ahead on a paradise island that had been patiently sitting on my bucket list for a decade. I was finally going there. I had brought some light reading, a book by the incredibly wise Wayne Dyer called The Power of Intention. I’ll never forget the words he wrote that jumped off the page letter by letter and tattooed themselves firmly on the organ between my ears: ‘All situations are emotionally neutral. We can decide how we feel about any given situation.’

Those were the words that would save me from a downward spiral over the coming weeks.

As I landed on the beautiful island of Oahu, I had no idea that the next few weeks would chokeslam the fuck out of me and cause me to be reborn as the woman I am today.

As I walked down to breakfast with my kids and husband in tow, ready to casually order my fresh orange and poached eggs, my phone rang. It was my sister. I felt something inside me tell me that something bad was about to happen and I was right.

I held back the tears while shielding my face behind my breakfast menu so my daughters wouldn’t see me break down. My sister delivered the devastating news that my youngest brother, who was eight at the time, had been diagnosed with leukaemia. ‘He’s riddled with infection and cancer’ were her words.

I felt sick. You never think it will happen to your family.

I looked at my two beautiful girls, who were just a few years younger than my brother, and the stab of pain in my heart almost took my breath away. I imagined the news being delivered about my own children. I couldn’t hold the tears back knowing that, at that moment, my dad must have felt that his world was falling down around him.

After several phone calls back and forth to the UK, I made the decision to carry on with our plans to visit a waterfall and go for a hike. That day I swam in a beautiful waterfall and I chose to do something that most people wouldn’t understand. I kept repeating, ‘I am grateful.’ I had to believe that there was a greater lesson, something wonderful had to be at the end of this holy mess.

There was something deeply comforting about appreciating the majesty of nature, even in a moment of total distress. I had to believe that this piece of news was a gift in ugly wrapping and that the gift would make itself known after time. I chose to be the person who saw the good in even the darkest of times. I chose to see the situation as emotionally neutral and attach a positive feeling to it.

Did it stop the hurting? No. Did it make my brother better within a week or remove the need for an agonizing course of chemotherapy? No. Did it give me hope? Absafuckinglutely.

You see, you can choose to be a Debbie Downer, a victim, a gossip queen or the person who moans because that is what they are used to doing. But when you choose to tap into love and gratitude, you open the doors for your pure potential and the ability to manifest that what you want. I badly wanted my brother to get better, and months later, against the odds, he was in full remission. That six months could have been full of negativity, anger and fear. They could have been full of love. I chose love.

What you need to understand is that the Soul’s default mode is love (there’s more on your Soul in the next chapter). The more we are kind and joyful and make the care of, and service to, others our priority, we quieten the Ego. Love, kindness and joy are like kryptonite to the Ego. It cannot survive them. Those positive emotions set the stage for your Soul to communicate with you and help you tap into its excellent guidance. When you moan, groan, bitch and complain, Ego knows that this is its jam and, oomph, it will appear on cue and start running the show with gusto again.

It’s also imperative that you learn to see the possibilities in spite of how dark or dreary life seems.

You have a choice: to be the person who sees everything as an opportunity or the person who sees everything as an opportunity to beat yourself up. If you let yourself be beaten up, it doesn’t matter how well you do in life. So …

• You have achieved great sales? You’ll always find a way to berate yourself for not getting more.

• You’re in a wonderful relationship? You’ll always find a way of focusing on the 10 per cent that’s missing.

• You’re feeling in the best shape after a year of personal training? You’ll always look for the flabby bits.

It’s important to shift your thinking from that which is led by fear or doubt or negativity to that which is empowering and positive. There will always be duality in life that is ever present and inevitable. Where there is light, there is dark; where there is wet, there is dry; where there is good, there is bad; where there is a bottle of champagne, there is an empty glass. Of course, in every situation above, as in life, you can always choose to accept the reality, the duality, and move on to see the possibility.

It really is time for that spiritual facelift

Now, it’s time for you to choose who you want to be. Let’s start the process of removing your emotional scars, amending your attitude and repairing your thought processes. It’s time to remove your beliefs of lack, loss, failure resentment and forgive yourself. I give you full permission to take on a new identity, of someone who ‘thinks that you can’.

We were created for a reason and, whatever beliefs you hold around creation, it does not make sense that we were created to fail. Nothing is intentionally created with the goal of failing. Each and every one of us is designed for success and, when we embody that belief in our identity, our thoughts then create actions that lead us to success.

We were not designed to fail. We were not put on this planet to have anything less than that which we wish for. Our default ‘factory setting’ at birth was programmed to succeed. We humans were put on this planet to thrive, and as long as you know the end results you want and how to become the person you need to be to go for them, then the world is your big, glistening oyster. But you need to reset your programming.

Your new identity will shape everything you do. There are many ways in which to start creating this identity. And none of them depends on actually achieving anything, so don’t worry about your recent track record:

• Choose to be awesome.

• Choose to have confidence.

• Choose to be successful.

• Choose to be smart.

• Choose to be disciplined.

• Choose to be sexy.

• Choose to be fearless.

• Choose to be inspiring.

• Choose to be classy.

• Choose to be sassy.

• Choose to be a little badassy.

It doesn’t really matter who you choose to be – I just want you to fucking do it, my darling.

One of the most powerful ways to reprogram our self-image is through visualization. We are the only species on the planet that has been given the gift of imagination. Imagination allows us to create and dream. This is an important part of the manifestation puzzle because the only difference between the successful people out there and the unsuccessful ones is the choice they make about what they think about. Because, as I have explained, our thoughts become things.

Let me give you an example of the power of imagination. For one moment, I just want you to take a deep breath in. Now I want you to imagine that you go to your fruit bowl and you see a nice big juicy yellow lemon. I want you to pick it up, go get a knife and cut it in half. I want you to imagine licking and sucking on it. What happens? Can you feel your lips pursing? Can you taste the sourness of the imaginary lemon? Yes? Your mind, you see, doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways (interconnections between parts of our nervous system). As with building muscle, the more we ‘work out’ certain neural pathways, the stronger they become. Strong pathways become our favoured psychological ‘highways’, and so by using our imagination through visualizations that are also attached to strong emotion, we can create new ways of thinking and being.

When we visualize on a regular basis, we actually create new ‘memories’ that replace the ‘old’, stored memories of our past identity that weren’t serving us. Even though these new ‘memories’ aren’t reality in the physical world, your brain does not know the difference and will start to work to help you to move towards your desired outcome. The more precise you are, the stronger your vision will be, and the more you empower your brain to come up with ways to turn that vision into reality.

‘What you imagine, you create,’ said the Buddha.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Your beliefs about who you are shape your identity. They govern every action you take in your life.

• You are born with the capacity and power to do something awesome until conditioning moulds you into something else.

• You need to recognize where along the way you have been shaped into someone you perhaps don’t want to be. You must be restored to ‘factory settings’.

• Peeling back the layers and removing the mask is crucial for tuning into the right frequency for manifesting.

• Your past identity will not be the identity that takes you to the new phase of your rock star life. It’s time to create a self-image that is conducive to success.

JFDI!

Practise the art of visualization

In Chapter 5 you considered what you believed you had failed at. You investigated who had set the yardsticks of that failure for you.

Now I want you to dig a little deeper and write down why you wouldn’t be able to get to your goals. What are your fears? What personality traits would stop you? What are the limiting beliefs that you hold at your core? I want you to write down everything that comes into your mind, even if it seems inferior or silly.

Next I want you to go through your list and repeat the words ‘I forgive myself, I love myself’, as you cross out each one of these fears, traits and beliefs. You need to say this out loud so as to start reprogramming your subconscious.

Now you can start creating ‘new’ memories and a strong mental picture of who you choose to be moving forward. Really think about the goals you set out for yourself.

Who do you need to be to achieve those goals?

I knew I needed to be disciplined. I knew I needed to be courageous.

Get super-duper clear on the person who has achieved the goals you set out:

• How do they show up in the world?

• What are their personality traits?

• What are they doing day to day?

• How is their physical body?

• What do people say about them?

Once you have crafted your ‘mind movie’ of your new chosen identity, you need to spend 15 minutes a day visualizing this.

Visualize yourself celebrating the manifestation of your intentions as already accomplished. If it’s your relationships you want to fix, picture yourself vividly enjoying the relationship you dream of. If it’s weight loss you desire, imagine yourself working out at the gym and enjoying it. If it’s a successful business, mentally picture yourself doing deals, celebrating milestones and banking large sums of money. Imagine yourself showing up as the best version of yourself.

Breaking through negative chatter while visualizing takes practice. At first, when you try to do it, it will seem difficult and demanding. But if you start small and try it repeatedly every day, you will gradually become stronger. And, before long, it will become effortless. If it helps, listen to some music that inspires you. Remember, when we attach each positive emotion to a visualization, it creates those new neural pathways.

Have patience and the results will astound you. Oh, and if you think this sounds like hassle to take 15 minutes out of your day to do this, then shame on you. Excuses are dream thieves – so just fucking do it!