Do I have a juicy episode for YOU!

For this one I recommend you both listen to the podcast itself and read this article – and maybe twice for each! It’s THAT important and valuable. Plus, I share some things on one and not the other, and vice-versa.

Let’s do this!

If you find yourself in a position where you feel like you are going around and around in circles – whether it’s with your diet or your life – or both! – this is for you.

Today I have a simple but profound 5-step process to help you change literally anything in your life, working from the place that makes all the difference: YOU!

Step 1: Recognise that your reality is not fixed. It can be turned into literally anything you want, but in order for that to happen something inside YOU has to change, because you, your thoughts and your subsequent behaviours are what’s keeping you where you are.

Step 2: Clarify what you want instead. You will hear me say this over and over again as it’s Coaching 101, however, without knowing what you want instead, how do you know where you’re going?

Step 3: Commit to that new reality – the one you want instead. The reality you seek is as possible as any other, so don’t fall into the trap of telling yourself all the reasons why you cannot have it. The moment you do that, they become the reasons why you cannot have it! Just know that when you focus on something long enough, that thing has no choice but to become your reality.

Step 4: Clarify what about you needs to change. Remember, all of this transformation begins and ends with you. So recognise that the thoughts you think, the actions you take, the habits you adopt… all of these things create your reality. So reverse engineer and consider what thoughts, actions and habits you will need to adopt in order to put you firmly and squarely in alignment with the reality you want to enjoy instead.

Step 5: Do the things!

To really lock this in for you and to show you how this can work in real life, I want to share more with you about the role of identity.

In the 5-step process I just shared, you’ll see that ultimately what’s at the heart of a transformation is a shift in identity – essentially who you see yourself as being and how you act in accordance with that.

When people consider changing identity, often it can freak them out. They fall into the trap of thinking that their current identity is who they are at the deepest, truest level and that if they lose or change their identity they lose themselves.

The truth is that identity is actually malleable. It’s the way that your human self shows up and interacts with the world, but it can easily change and indeed has already changed many times over your life so far with the passing of time and various rites of passage. For example, you have been through babyhood, toddlerhood, childhood, becoming a parent or spouse or taking on different jobs or roles.

Whatever character you present or have already presented to the world – consciously or unconsciously – has or will lead to certain opportunities, realities and outcomes, based on how you show up and how that is interpreted by others.

However, what is fixed (but ever-evolving) is your soul. And ironically your soul’s growth is stunted when you hold onto your identity beyond its usefulness, because your identity becomes the impediment to being all that you can be and diving deeper into the layers of who you really are.

I want to now share the most fascinating single piece I ever read about identity. This came in the unlikely form of an advert on Facebook, but makes for VERY interesting reading and I think will help you tremendously with this work:

“FORGETTING WHO YOU ARE”

Today I got interviewed by a journalist for a Forbes article and one of the questions was: “Should we always strive to change our ways to accommodate the demands of our professional aspirations? After all, we shouldn’t lose ourselves in pursuit of success, correct?”

This was my response:

“I love your final question. “We shouldn’t lose ourselves in the pursuit of success?“. The western world has similar terms like “Be yourself”. “Stick to your roots”. “Don’t forget where you came from”. Have you ever stopped to think about who you really are? Where is this thing you call the self? The self doesn’t exist, it’s merely your clinging to an identity built up of stories about the past.

Every person in the world wants to improve and grow, that’s impossible when you don’t want to lose yourself. It’s been my observation that the only way to achieve success is to become the person who deserves it. When we become this new person we are no longer ourselves. You see this is the issue with western philosophy, we believe we are something when we aren’t anything. The only question that’s important is who are we becoming?”

This rattles people a bit…

People love their stories about the past. These stories define who they are as a character and a person. Losing a story about the past is like losing your identity and your ID. You don’t want to let go of them because it feels like you’ll disappear and become a nobody.

My whole life I thought success was for people who were outgoing, networked, popular, social, smooth talking, intelligent or just plain lucky. I wasn’t any of these so therefore I was destined to be mediocre. That was the story I told myself and it defined who I was as a character and a person.

I played the role of a mediocre character for most of my life and then one day I just couldn’t take it any longer. I had enough. I wanted to do something big with my life. No longer could I sit in the shadows jealous of everybody who had the courage to try become something bigger than themselves.

I decided to quit my job, drop out of college and start my own business. I had no degree, below average grades, blue collar family for as long as the family tree could go. Nobody I knew had worked in an office or wore a suit let alone started their own business.

Everybody I knew said things like: “A business owner? That’s not you.” “You failed accounting, how will you start a business?“.

Society dawned over me like a dark cloud reminding me of who I was just so they could remain convinced of who they were too.

By far the biggest challenge I had to face was losing myself, my character and my identity of who I was. I was shy, awkward, clueless, poor, horrible at managing money and had no idea how the world worked. Society told me to “be myself” but what sort of an existence was that? Especially when I knew I could become something greater.

I felt like a fraud, an imposter, a faker and you damn well bet I was inauthentic. I told everybody that I was going to start a business and I had no idea what I was doing. I told people I was going to succeed and I had never succeeded before in my life. I felt like I was doing something so wrong and so deceitful because the stories of my past were screaming at me to stop, throw in the towel and return to just being “me”.

I persisted, did the work and believed in my ability to figure things out along the way despite what history said about me. Before I knew it I had broken through the first barrier and something was different… I felt like a new person. People started saying things like: “Wow, you’ve changed”. That’s when I realized that I had become a new person. The old me was gone.

Fast-forward to this current day and I’m so different now compared to who I was back then. It’s incomprehensible. I truly don’t think there’s a cell in my physical body or a single synapse in my mind that exists the way it used to. And the identity crisis issue? It still happens today… Whenever I want to outgrow myself, even now, I face the same issues. I have to forget who I am all over again.

Why am I saying all of this?

I’m telling this to you because I know that this is the biggest battle you will face as an entrepreneur and somebody who wants to grow and become something bigger than who you are right now. You will question yourself, others will question you and your emotions will run riot in your body as your self image digs in its nails and tries to stay alive by keeping you as yourself.

Slaughter it.

You playing small will not do any good for anybody and if others question who you’re becoming just know that you’re threatening their self image by proving that it doesn’t exist. As an entrepreneur who keeps smashing limits you’re public enemy number one to your self image. Your sheer presence sets of chaos within.

Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret…

I usually keep these strategies and methods reserved for my clients but I’ll share this one with you today.

Whenever somebody is facing issues in their business and coming up against plateaus and resistance I do something that’s totally counter-intuitive: I change something that defines who they are as a person.

Andrew Argue started working with me in January 2016. When he first met me he was skinny, vegan, extremely tight with money, nervous of germs, didn’t like cat hair, stressed out, nervous of failure and living in a cheap apartment without a couch to sit on just to save money.

Andrew thought he was here to learn Facebook ads, sales strategies and funnels. From the very moment we met I knew those tactical things would only account for 10-20% of his success and the big wins were stacked on me getting him to forget who he was to become something bigger.

He was a generalist – I made him become a specialist. He had never sold on the first call – I made him only sell on the 1st call.

He was scared of credit cards – I made him get the biggest credit card the bank would give him.

He didn’t want to spend money on a couch – I made him move into a luxury apartment and hire an interior designer to fit it out custom.

He hated germs – I told him to deliberately drop food on the floor then eat it.

He hated all the cat hair that was in my apartment and said he had allergies – I made him get a cat and told him his allergies were made up.

He hadn’t talked to specific people since he was a kid – I made him call them up and say hello.

He went to bed at 9.30 every night – I made him stay up till 4am.

During the time we’ve worked together I’ve taught him business strategies and tactics but most of the work I’ve been hiding behind the business stuff is the destruction of his old self to create room for a new one.

Andrew started January 5th 2016 when he was struggling as a generalist business owner. By December 2016 he was making $300,000 /month and by July 2017 he was making $900,000 /month.

Andrew struggled to break past the $300,000 /month barrier for months and he got extremely frustrated. We tried all the tactical stuff and none of it worked. I told him: “You know what’s gotta go now don’t you?”

I made him give up being vegan after 7 years and start eating bacon and steaks. I’m not joking you here… The month he gave up being “vegan” he smashed through to $400,000 /month. He is no longer vegan.

If you want to know how I have been able to go from nothing to more than $20 million it’s probably 20% tactics and 80% continuous destruction of my perceived self.

If you want to know how Andrew went from $17,000 /month last January to more than $900,000 /month it’s probably 20% tactics and 80% continuous destruction of his perceived self.

If you met Andrew back then and then met him now you wouldn’t believe the change. This isn’t the same person… This is a completely different being in every way, shape and form. And for the better.

Looong post!

So how can you apply this to your life right now to become something greater than what you are and to become who you truly want to be?

Well here’s a list of six things to do starting now:

1. Understand that you are not anybody, who you think you are is an illusion built up from stories you tell yourself about the past.

2. Understand that the real question is not “Who am I?” but “Who am I becoming?”

3. Understand that transformation, growth, improvement and change is 20% tactics like FB ads, sales etc. and 80% forgetting who you are to make way for who you can become.

4. The fastest way to slaughter who you are is to do something that you definitely wouldn’t do. The more extreme the belief you shatter the more profound the change to yourself will be. Think about a 7-year fully fledged vegan eating a steak…

5. If you feel like an imposter, a fraud and totally uncomfortable in your own skin because this doesn’t align with your beliefs and the history of who you are – Good. Do more of it and push harder.

6. Do something bold. Move house, move countries, change your style, listen to different music, change your hair, quit your job.

I hope this helps you on your journey!

And now back to me!

• As you can see, the moral of this story is… whether we realise it or not, we make ourselves up! We tend to piggyback off of our upbringing – as this is where the seeds were planted – and unless we break away from the pack and shake things up of our own accord or life forces our hand, we will tend to become a slightly different version of our parent/s or primary caregiver/s.
• So the good news is, the way you currently eat, relate to food and live your life is NOT fixed. You can literally reconfigure anything about yourself and your life to be whatever you want and need it to be to get the results that you want.
• Understanding this is key to recognising that anyone can do this, regardless of what they are currently doing. But you have to be prepared to lose old habits and yes, old identities around food to get what you want.

While this was a long explanation I hope it really helped you to really get it and take from this whatever you can in regards to what it takes to create different results. And of course the more of a shift you want, the more things about yourself you are going to have to change.

In short: to get a different result you are going to have to do things differently.

But my goodness, to get what you want, it will be oh so worth it.

Want help with this? Reach out to me via support@karenknowler.com and let’s chat.

Courtesy reminder: “Go Raw with Karen” is still open for enrolment. Doors close Monday 6th February 2023. This is the last live run of the program. After that it will be available as a homestudy.

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