Episode 147 – Why Most People Never Get What They Want

Subscribe on: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE | RSS

Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Most people spend their lives believing that imagination is simply daydreaming, a luxury reserved for idle moments. But neuroscience shows us something radically different: your brain does not know the difference between imagination and reality. Whether you’re playing the piano or only imagining yourself playing, the same neural networks light up. In other words, you can literally build a memory of a future that has not yet happened. When I finally understood this—not as a quote on the internet but as an embodied truth—my entire approach to creating changed. I stopped waiting for evidence and started rehearsing the reality I had decided to live. And slowly, then suddenly, life began to organize itself around my decision.

I’ve spent more than a decade testing, failing, learning, and refining a way of creating that is both deeply spiritual and ruthlessly practical. Out of that lived experience emerged five principles I return to every single day: desire, decision, discernment, relaxation, and faith. These aren’t theories. They’re the scaffolding I’ve used to build a marriage I love, a family I cherish, a company that has generated tens of millions in revenue, and a way of living that feels coherent, peaceful, and powerful. I want to walk you through these principles with the texture they deserve—not as a checklist, but as a path you can feel under your feet.

Desire Is the Catalyst for All Change

Every creation begins with a sentence that sounds deceptively simple: What do you want? I ask that question in almost every coaching conversation because desire is the spark that wakes the creative intelligence of life. Desire is not selfish. Desire is sacred. Desire is the way your future calls you forward from inside your present. When you say, “I want deeper love, vibrant health, more money, meaningful work,” you are not making a random wish; you are answering a summons. Your nervous system, your imagination, and the unseen order that holds this universe all begin to reorganize around that signal.

We forget this because we’ve been trained to recite what we don’t want. I don’t want debt. I don’t want loneliness. I don’t want to feel stuck. But contrast is the midwife of clarity. The pain you’ve known is not proof you’re cursed; it’s the precise texture that births the desire for something truer. When I was early in recovery, I was deeply grateful for my wife and the new life we were building, yet I felt the ache of thin community. I wanted real brotherhood—men who would challenge me and love me, men I could sharpen and be sharpened by. Instead of rehearsing the story of isolation—What’s wrong with me that I don’t have close friends?—I tuned to desire. Within weeks, the invitations began: a mastermind I would’ve ignored a month before, a dinner that turned into a monthly gathering, a conversation with Garrett Gunderson that became a friendship deep enough for him to stand as my best man. Desire set every domino in motion.

The same thing happened with work. For years I built businesses that looked impressive from the outside but left me hollow on the inside. The contrast made me honest: I wanted to spend my life helping people change the way they think and, in doing so, change the way they live. That desire didn’t hand me a blueprint. It handed me a compass. And compasses don’t eliminate the wilderness—they keep you oriented while you walk through it.

Decision Unlocks the Path

Desire without decision is a beautiful daydream. Decision is the conversion moment where desire becomes instruction. A decision says, This will be my reality. Neville Goddard taught that the instant you desire, the thing desired exists in the field of potential, waiting for your loyalty. Decision is loyalty. Decision is the line in the sand between dabbling and devotion. Most people delay decision because they want to respect their fear or because they’re waiting to know the “how.” But the how is the province of a future you cannot access from where you’re standing. Your job is to decide. Life’s job is to reveal the how one breadcrumb at a time.

When Carol and I decided we would host our first large-scale live event, we didn’t have the venue, the budget, the team, or the marketing plan. We had a decision. We rehearsed it in imagination until it felt inevitable. We spoke from the stage in our minds, felt the room, smelled the air, heard the music swell. Then the breadcrumbs appeared—introductions, partnerships, a flash of a better structure for the curriculum, a single ad test that outperformed everything else we’d tried. Decision turned randomness into choreography.

There is a tenderness to decision that often gets missed. It isn’t a clenched jaw and a white-knuckled vow. It’s a relaxed certainty. It is the energy of already mine, not maybe if I’m good enough. When I decide, I’m not impressing God or the universe. I’m joining the frequency of what already exists and allowing it to find me.

Discernment Guides the Action

Creation is a dance between your choice and life’s response. That means action matters. But not all action is created equal. Desperate action—fueled by scarcity, soaked in hurry—creates brittle results and burnout. Discerned action feels different in the body. It may be just as bold, but it carries a clean line of peace through the center. Discernment is the art of catching what life is pitching.

Think of it as crossing a river on stepping stones. You must step to find the stones that hold. Some will wobble, some will sink, some will surprise you with how sturdy they are. I’ve launched offers that landed with a thud and others that sold out in hours. Early on, I misread the feedback: if a stone sank, I declared myself a failure. Now I see it as data. The river is teaching me the path. Every “no” refines the “yes.” Discernment is not perfection at selection; it is humility in iteration.

Discernment also protects against spiritual bypass. Deciding for prosperity and then refusing to learn how to read a P&L is magical thinking masquerading as faith. Faith says, I will be met, and then picks up the phone, sends the pitch, reviews the metrics, and keeps learning. When I entered the online space, I knew nothing about funnels, ad copy, or media buying. Discernment didn’t mean I sat on a cushion waiting for divine deposits; it meant I took action that matched the future I had decided for, and I let the feedback shape me without shaming me.

Relax Through the Contrast

Every birth involves contraction. We love the expansion: the idea that lights the room, the new client who says yes, the day the scale confirms what your body already feels. But creation’s rhythm is expansion and contraction. A campaign flops. A month misses the mark. A conversation with your partner stirs old wounds you thought were gone. The mind screams, It’s not working. But contraction is not a verdict. Contraction is instruction.

In 2021, after years of explosive growth, our company contracted. Algorithms shifted. Costs rose. Engagement softened. We had to make decisions that bruised my ego and blessed my integrity. The old way of doing things needed to die so the next iteration could breathe. If I had used contraction as proof that the dream was over, I would have aborted the very process designed to mature me. Instead, I learned to relax in the squeeze. I told the truth sooner. I widened my time horizon. I let offerings go that no longer carried life, even if they had once been cash machines. The next expansion arrived with a different texture—cleaner, sturdier, saner—because I didn’t bail during the birth canal.

Relaxation isn’t apathy. It is the refusal to add inner violence to outer difficulty. It is the choice to treat your nervous system as an ally instead of a mule. When contraction hits, I return to my breath, to the heart, to presence. I take the next right action without assigning catastrophic meaning. This is how you stay open while the old echoes finish dissolving.

Faith in the System

Underneath every principle is a deeper trust: that life is intelligible, relational, and loyal. Call that Source, Spirit, God, the field—what you call it is less important than whether you relate to it. Faith is not naive optimism; it is fidelity to the architecture of reality. Doubt isn’t a moral failing, but it is a creative brake. The moment you decide and begin to act, the old reality will throw a tantrum. Faith keeps you from interpreting the tantrum as a prophecy. Faith says, What’s coming is going. Faith says, The evidence is catching up. Faith is the quiet courage to keep your hand on the plow while you still smell last season’s fire.

In practice, faith changes your physiology. Your nervous system downshifts. Your perception widens. You begin to notice the soft signals that were drowned out by panic: the friend who mentions a person you needed to meet, the book title that falls off a shelf at the exact moment you ask for clarity, the surprising mercy in a door that closes. Faith is not performance; it’s posture. It’s how you stand while you wait.

What These Principles Look Like in Real Life

Let me pull these out of abstraction. A client I’ll call Marcus wanted to triple his firm’s revenue without losing his marriage in the process. Desire was easy: he knew what he wanted. Decision came when he set a target and put a date on it. Discernment showed up as a sequence of experiments—changing positioning, testing new pricing, reworking their service delivery to increase margins. The first quarter was messy. Contraction everywhere. His default meaning was panic. We reframed it as calibration: the business wasn’t failing; it was shedding the identity that couldn’t carry the next level. He relaxed enough to stop micromanaging and start leading. In month nine, the numbers turned. By month twelve, revenue had more than tripled and, more importantly, his evenings were spent with his wife and kids rather than inside a spreadsheet at 10 p.m. The growth happened outside because the meaning changed inside.

Another client, Sienna, came to me heartbroken after a series of relationships that all collapsed in the same pattern. The temptation was to decide she was broken. Instead, we started with desire: a partnership that felt like friendship, devotion, and fun. Decision meant shutting the back door on relationships that ran on chemistry but starved on character. Discernment meant listening when her body said no, even if the story in her head said yes. Contraction arrived as lonely weekends and the grief of old habits dying. Faith kept her from calling it failure. Two years later, she sent me a photo from a tiny ceremony under a live oak. She didn’t find love by hunting it down. She became a woman who could receive it and stay with it.

Imagination Is a Discipline, Not an Escape

I treat imagination like training. Each morning, before emails and metrics, I let my body rehearse the world I’ve decided for. Not as some vague collage of yachts and sunsets, but as lived detail: the feel of my son’s hand in mine on a Tuesday afternoon because I built a business that prioritizes fatherhood; the texture of a team meeting where the atmosphere is excellence without anxiety; the sound of a room rising to its feet at an event because truth just rearranged something tender and important in them. I let gratitude flood my nervous system for realities that haven’t yet crossed the threshold of matter. Then I get up and make phone calls.

Imagination is not pretending. It is previewing. It puts your brain and body into relationship with the future so that when it arrives, you recognize each other. Athletes have known this for decades because championships are won long before the whistle; they are won in the rehearsal the body believes.

When the Old Reality Echoes

There is a moment in every creation where the old reality sends a final echo—a bill you didn’t expect, a flare of symptoms, a familiar fear in a new outfit. This is where many people look back like Orpheus and fall back into the underworld. They take the echo as a verdict. Don’t. The echo is the sound of something leaving. You don’t negotiate with an echo. You keep walking while it fades. Loyalty to your decision in that moment is the difference between a temporary change and a permanent transformation.

The Ethics of Creation

A brief but essential word: these principles are not a hall pass for narcissism. Desire doesn’t absolve you from integrity. Decision doesn’t cancel consent. Discernment isn’t an excuse to ghost commitments when they aren’t immediately pleasurable. Relaxation isn’t laziness in disguise, and faith isn’t a replacement for stewardship. Creation is ethical when it expands your life and the lives of the people you touch. If your vision requires lying, using, or dehumanizing, it’s not vision—it’s ego in a costume. The future worth living asks for your wholeness, not your hustle.

Money, Health, and Relationships Through the Lens of the Five

Money: Desire clarifies a number and a reason that makes your soul sit up straight. Decision sets a target and a date. Discernment gets you into conversations that move value, not vanity metrics. Relaxation keeps you from discounting your prices to appease your anxiety. Faith keeps you steady while invoices clear and referrals compound.

Health: Desire names what you want your body to feel like. Decision looks like blocking your calendar for sleep as if it were a board meeting, because it is. Discernment helps you choose the two levers that matter right now instead of 19 biohacks that fracture your attention. Relaxation moves you out of punishment workouts and into training that honors nervous system safety. Faith is the daily choice to keep going when the mirror hasn’t caught up yet.

Relationships: Desire blesses your longing for companionship rich with devotion and play. Decision closes the back door on dynamics that erode you. Discernment hears your body when it whispers no. Relaxation keeps hard conversations from turning into courtroom dramas. Faith says, We’re bigger than this moment, and stays connected while you repair.

Practices That Anchor the Principles

Here are a few practices I use and teach—not as rules, but as anchors:

• Daily Desire Check: Ask, What do I want today? Let the answer be simple and specific. Write it down.
• Decision Rehearsal: Close your eyes for three minutes. Step into the version of you who already has the result. Feel the peace and gratitude in your body. Open your eyes and take one mundane action from that state.
• Discernment Debrief: After a call, campaign, or conversation, ask: What did this just teach me about alignment? Keep a running list.
• Relaxation Reset: Catch the moment you’re gripping. Drop your shoulders. Breathe into the heart for sixty seconds. Choose the next right thing.
• Faith Statement: Speak a sentence that steadies you. Mine is, Nothing is wrong; something is being born, and my job is to midwife it with patience.

The Longer Arc of Creation

Creation is not a trick to get things. It is the way you become someone. The revenue, the house, the team, the book, the stage—those are milestones. The real miracle is the nervous system that can hold joy without sabotage, the marriage that grows in tenderness while both people grow in power, the leadership that can say no without apology and yes without fear. The five principles are not ladders you climb once; they are a spiral you walk for the rest of your life. Each pass deepens you.

When I zoom out on my own story—from a man drowning in addiction and debt to a husband, father, and builder—I don’t see a genius hack. I see desire that kept telling the truth, decisions made before I felt ready, discernment forged through a thousand small experiments, relaxation learned in the hard school of contraction, and faith that refused to give the last word to fear. That’s it. That’s the whole playbook. It’s not glamorous, but it is holy.

Closing Reflection

You are not powerless. You are not behind. You are not asking too much from life when you ask to feel alive. You were designed to create, and you’ve been doing it since your first thought lit the inside of your chest. If you will honor desire, choose decision, practice discernment, relax through contrast, and keep faith with the system that never stops loving you, you will build a life that feels like truth in your bones. And when the echoes of the old reality try one last time to seduce you back into doubt, you’ll smile, keep walking, and let them fade.

Ask yourself now—today, not someday—What do I truly want? Am I willing to decide? Will I let the river teach me the path? Can I stay soft while I’m being made strong? Will I trust the timing that is kinder and wiser than my fear? Live your answers, and watch your imagination turn into memory, one faithful step at a time.