Diane Bell [00:00:01]:
Hello gorgeous soul. I'm Diane Bell, and this is the aim from the Heart Podcast. Your weekly dose of tips, techniques, strategies and inspiration to help you live a life beyond your wildest dreams. If you're ready to use the art of intentional manifestation to create more freedom, more joy, more abundance and more bliss in your life, you are in the right place. Grab a cup of tea, pull up a chair and let's have some fun. I am so glad you're here today. Let's do this. Hello gorgeous soul and welcome to the very first ever episode of the Aim from the Heart podcast.
Diane Bell [00:00:40]:
I am Diane Bell and I am so excited to be here with you today. I have been thinking about starting this podcast for quite a long time now and I've been dreaming about it and I've been imagining it and somehow though, I haven't been actually turning the microphone on and recording it. Now I want to introduce myself in this episode and also just give you an idea of what to expect from this new podcast of mine. The first thing I'm going to say some of you might know me from my previous podcast, Shoot from the Heart. And Shoot from the Heart was very much focused on screenwriting and filmmaking as well as how to live the creative life of your dreams. And my journey in life has really been I knew from an early age I wanted to be an artist more than anything. And in my early twenty s I started to focus in on film because I loved movies so much and I wanted to write a film so badly. Many of you all know my story that I wanted to do it and I couldn't do it.
Diane Bell [00:01:40]:
I was so blocked, I had no faith that I could ever do it. I didn't think that I was good enough. I thought even if I did it, I would never get anywhere. Eventually I did the inner work to actually have the courage to write my screenplay. I wrote it. I started writing it when I was 30 and finished when I was 33 and that took me on a journey to selling scripts, writing more scripts. I ended up actually directing three movies, including one that won two awards at Sundance Film Festival. And I went on this whole journey of making films.
Diane Bell [00:02:13]:
But the truth is I don't think that my true passion or purpose in life ultimately is about films. And this brings me to where I am now. Some of you will know that a few years ago I started an online business teaching screenwriting and filmmaking. I had already been teaching IRL in real life and it seemed natural, a natural progression to start making courses online. And as I did that, I started to have a lot of students and I've taught literally thousands of people screenwriting and filmmaking. But after a couple of years of doing this nonstop, I noticed something. And what I noticed is that very few people were getting the results that I felt they should. I mean, here I was literally laying it out.
Diane Bell [00:03:01]:
This is what you need to do. Here's step one, step two, step three. If you do these things, you're going to make a movie. Here's how you write a script. Step one, step two. And yet, so few people were actually getting it done. And that made me reflect on my own journey and my own journey of writing screenplays and making films and the extraordinary successes that I had, achieving things that people would say are impossible. For instance, selling my first screenplay or getting my first movie into Sundance, or getting hired by the director of Diehard to rewrite a script for him.
Diane Bell [00:03:34]:
I mean, these things people will tell you just don't happen, but they happen to me. And when I really reflected on it, like, why? And how did those things happen, I realized that the real key to it all, the key to making our impossible dreams come true, is not in what we do. It's in who we're being. And at that point on my journey, I started to teach more programs. And if you've been in my world for a while, you'll know, I started to teach more programs on who we're being and on our mindset and on the energetics. Because really the equation is this. According to the 80 20 rule, 20% of our efforts get 80% of the results, right? And I think in this case, though, it's kind of the reverse. It's 80% of who we're being gets our results.
Diane Bell [00:04:24]:
20% is what we do, and 80% is who we're being. And if we can flick the switch on who we're being, and this is not just on the conscious level, but actually the subconscious, more on that later. We will create incredible results. Because when I look back at my own life and I look back at how I created those things, I realized that it was all to do with my attitude, my energy, my beliefs, my inner work. That's what was creating the magic, not how to write a script or how to make a movie. And so I started to teach those things, and I started to realize that this is my real purpose. This is why I'm here. I am absolutely passionate about helping people break through their inner conditioning so that they can create the life of their dreams.
Diane Bell [00:05:15]:
This is why I live. This is why I breathe and I feel. This is why this podcast exists. This podcast is not going to be about screenwriting and filmmaking. We will sometimes touch on those things because they'll always be a part of my life. I spent decades of my life devoted to them, and so it's always going to be part of the conversation on some level. I love to talk about creativity. I love to talk about artists and how we break through our own limiting beliefs and how we break through our societal conditioning to think that we're not worthy or that we can't do it, or that it's impossible for us, or that it's never going to work.
Diane Bell [00:05:50]:
So I will always be here for artists. But I also want to expand the conversation. To talk to you as a woman, to talk to you as a business owner, to talk to you as an entrepreneur, to talk to you as a visionary, as a healer, as a leader, and to give you the tools so that you can create the life of your dreams, whatever that means to you. In the last five years, I have gone on the most extraordinary personal journey and I want to tell you a little bit about that today, and that will sort of set the tone for what's going to come in this podcast. So five years ago, I was living in Denver, Colorado, and we had recently moved there from Los Angeles. We wanted somewhere different for my son to grow up and we had moved there. And not long after that, I got pregnant with my second child. And it was unexpected.
Diane Bell [00:06:42]:
And I suddenly had this moment where I thought, what am I doing in my life? And I looked at where my life was and I was not happy with it. Yes, I'd had some incredible creative successes, but big. But here, I'd never had any financial security in my life, which felt like I had just made a deal. And that was the deal. Diane, if you want to be free and freedom has always been my highest value, if you want to live a free life, you sacrifice having financial security. And I'd kind of accepted that as the deal. I was so conditioned into the starving artist paradigm. As artists, we just don't have money.
Diane Bell [00:07:25]:
It's normal. And so my experience in my adult life with money up until that point was basically it would come and go, feast and famine. Many artists will know this routine. We learn how to live very elegant lives with very little money. We're the real bohemians, and when money comes in, we have fun with it and it's great and it's wonderful, but it goes pretty fast. And it's back to sort of trying to figure out how we're going to pay the rent that month. And that's really how I'd lived my entire adult life. The only problem was that when I became pregnant for the second time and I was now 45 years old, it just didn't feel fun and bohemian and free anymore to not have any money.
Diane Bell [00:08:05]:
It didn't feel fun and bohemian and free to be living in a house that I really didn't love, a rented house that had this creepy basement. That's the best way I can say it had this weird energy in the basement and one bathroom and the bath was horrible and I really love taking baths, but I didn't take a bath the whole time I lived there because the bath was just it didn't feel good. So it wasn't a very nice house, really. I mean, it was nice too, in other ways, and we made it as lovely as we could, as we always did and always do. But it wasn't great. It wasn't where I wanted to be. Besides that, I felt like I'd made some really bad choices in my career, and consequently my career felt stagnant and I felt blocked as a writer for the first time in a long time. I was writing a script at the time, an adaptation novel to the script, and I was just struggling with it because my heart wasn't in it.
Diane Bell [00:08:59]:
And I was really questioning what I was doing and why I was doing it and where I was going. I was also, of course, coming up for my 50th, right, I'd hit 45. I have this idea that every decade it's sort of like you're going uphill until you hit the number in the middle, the 35, or in this case, the 45. And then it's like downhill to the next decade. And I'd hit that point where it's like, I am heading now to 50. And I didn't like where I was, and I didn't really like where I felt like I was heading at that point. I wanted more from my life. I wanted more ease, more joy, more security.
Diane Bell [00:09:40]:
I wanted more prosperity, more abundance. I wanted to be able to buy what I wanted for my kids without really worrying about it. And I'm not talking about extravagant, weird things, but like organic food and to have good health insurance for them and to be able to make choices for them and not feel like I was just choosing what I could because it was the only thing I could afford. So there I was, 45, and I decided, I'm going to change, I am going to figure this out because I'm not happy in my life. And I just decided when I turn 50, I want to be more healthy, more happy, more wealthy, and more wise than I have ever been in my entire life up until that point. I want to get to 50 and be like, I've turned this around and I'm on a trajectory now that I love, that I'm so excited about, that lights me up. And I decided I was going to do whatever it took to make that happen. And I knew immediately that this was an inner game.
Diane Bell [00:10:45]:
The reason that I knew this was because when I decided that I wanted to write screenplays back in my late twenty s, I knew the struggle for me then was not about, as I said before, it wasn't about how do I write a screenplay? It was about, oh my gosh, I am crippled with self doubt. I am crippled with fear. I am crippled with this sense that I cannot do this. Like, who am I to do this? And my work completely was to change my inner state. And I knew that then in my late twenty s. And it took me three years, mind you, to really do it. I worked so hard on my mindset, on my belief system, all those things. Now what's interesting is I didn't do it then around money, right? And it's so fascinating because for me, at that point, I was just like, I just want to be an artist.
Diane Bell [00:11:39]:
I want to express myself, I want to write things. And I applied everything to doing that. And I worked affirmations and subconscious reprogramming and meditating every day and visualization and all the things, and I used everything. And you know what? It freaking worked, right? Because after I finally finished my first screenplay, it took me three years to write it. Three years of doing that work, doing the daily inner work. Well, after three years, though, would you believe it, within a year I sold that script and very shortly was hired to rewrite a script. And everything just took off. So when I was 45 and I was like, I am not happy with my life, I looked back at that time and I was like, you know what, Diane? Let's see if there's any patterns that you can discern.
Diane Bell [00:12:25]:
What were you doing? Who were you being? What were you thinking? How were you living when you created miracles in your life? And on the flip side, what was going on when you've ended up with less than stellar results? And it was really easy to immediately see the patterns. And this is one of the benefits of being a little bit older, right? You've got enough life experience to look back and you can see the patterns in hindsight. And it became very clear to me what was happening and how I was being and what I was doing that created miracles in my life. And it was also clear the patterns that created the not so great results. So I decided I was going to apply everything that I had to changing my life, and in particular to changing my financial situation and my living situation. And I did it. I just went all in. I started off by basically being willing to see things differently.
Diane Bell [00:13:22]:
I had so many deep ingrained ideas about money, about artists, about how money works, and about how money would flow to me and how it would leave me and what it meant. And I knew that I had to be willing to see things differently. I knew that if I continued to think the same thoughts, do the same things, I would continue to get the same results. I had to be willing to let go of some of my most cherished, most long held beliefs about the world. And so I started that process by opening myself up to books and podcasts and being willing to look at things to read, books that I would previously have shunned. I would have gone, I'm not looking at that. For instance, a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Now, previously in my life, I would have been know, I hate money.
Diane Bell [00:14:08]:
I hate people who want to grow rich. They're disgusting. That's so funny. I don't know if you heard my phone just doing a cha ching. Like, I have no interest in money. I don't read books like that. Only shallow people read books like that. That's how I was.
Diane Bell [00:14:23]:
So I just decided I'm going to see things differently. I am going to read the books. I'm going to read all the books I can get my hands on about money, money, mindset, all the things. I'm going to open my mind about it. I started to listen to podcasts, too, and I started to do the inner work. I started to do the subconscious reprogramming. I started to think about ways that I could actually take actions that would support me. And that was when I started my online business.
Diane Bell [00:14:48]:
I had so many nudges at that time of things to do that I didn't want to do. I'm going to be honest and I'm going to say to you straight up, when we talk about creating new lives for ourselves and we talk about creating new results, it will demand us to be uncomfortable. It will demand us to do things that we don't want to do. An easy example I could give you is that first summer where I was really getting serious about this. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to change my life. I heard this little voice inside me saying, diane, you're going to have to stop drinking alcohol. And I was like, no, I'll do anything, but I won't do that.
Diane Bell [00:15:28]:
I like my glass of wine in the evening. But I kept hearing that little voice just saying to me, diane, if you're really serious about this, if you really want to change your life, this is something you're going to have to let go of. I could just feel it with like a little intuition, a little whisper in my soul. Well, it was on my 46th birthday. The day after my 46th birthday, I woke up with a hangover and I said, okay, that's it. I'm done. I will quit for three months. And I'll see we'll decide how we're going to do it after that.
Diane Bell [00:15:56]:
It's now nearly five years since I quit. I didn't look back. I realized the benefits, the huge benefits. And I knew that for me to step into this new version of myself, into this new level of being, this was something that was non negotiable. I had to stop drinking. And I say I didn't want to stop, but I did it. So I just committed. And in these last five years, I have completely changed my life.
Diane Bell [00:16:27]:
I want this podcast to be my opportunity to give to you the tools that I have used to make that happen so that you can do the same for your life, whatever it is that you desire to do. Now, it might be that you're coming to this and listening to this and you're actually in a really good place in your life. And if you are, I'm so freaking happy for you. And yay. Let's celebrate you and let's also just agree that we can always aim higher. And that's where I am in my life right now, aiming higher for me. And this is why I call it aim from the heart. Aim has a couple of different meanings to me.
Diane Bell [00:17:01]:
First of all, it is the art of intentional manifestation. And this is going to be one of our big subjects in this podcast is talking about how do we create magical results in our life, not through hard work and hustle and sacrifice, but through the art of intentional manifestation. And I'm going to be giving you the lowdown on that, giving you everything I got on how to manifest your results rather than hard work and hustle them. Now, aiming high, though, for me, is also just this thing that the higher we aim, the better our lives are going to be. And so many of us have been taught to not aim too high because then we won't be disappointed. But I think the key to living an absolutely delicious, incredible, juicy, beautiful life is to aim so freaking high, you can't even believe you're aiming that high. And to go for it. And even if you don't make it, it's okay because it's really not actually about getting there.
Diane Bell [00:17:54]:
It's about the journey we go on. And that sounds like such a cliche, except it's completely true. So if your life is fantastic right now, let's aim higher. And that doesn't necessarily mean, like, we want more stuff for ourselves. For me, right now in my life, aiming higher means I want to. And I just feel this is my mission. I want to help 1 million people break through their conditioning and live the life of their dreams, whatever that means to them. That is my mission.
Diane Bell [00:18:26]:
That is me aiming higher in my life. And previously, it was about many of my goals were just about me and what I wanted. And it wasn't about how do I help more people now because my needs and my dreams have come true to such a crazy extent that there's nothing that I really necessarily desire. There's things that I still desire for myself, my family, trips I want to make and things I want to do absolutely. But also aiming higher for me now, is about helping more people. So if your life is going great, fantastic, I'm still glad you're here. And I know that together we rise and we'll rise higher and higher, and there are no limits to how high we can go together. If, though, on the other hand, you know there's an area of your life that you're not thrilled with, and it might be your relationships, it might be your finances, it might be your career, you feel like you're not living your purpose, that you're not doing what you were born to do.
Diane Bell [00:19:22]:
Whatever it is that you feel like it might be your health, your well being, whatever it is in your life that you feel like, I am not living, like my fullest potential in this area. I invite you right now to decide that you are going to aim higher in that area. And I want you to know right from the outset on this podcast that whatever you dream of is possible. So I am recording this in my home in Spain. I live in a town called Sitches, and this is how far and how much your life can change in a very brief time when you really decide to go all in. So five years ago, as I said, I was living in a rented house that wasn't very nice, the creepy basement, and I had no money at all. I was completely financially broke and really not in a great place. I didn't know what my purpose was.
Diane Bell [00:20:10]:
I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. In a sense, I was feeling depleted. I was definitely suffering from anxiety. I was not in a great place. Well, last year, I turned 50 in November. My birthday is in November, and I can honestly say I achieved my goal. When I turned 50, I celebrated so hard because I was like, it's happened. I am happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser than I've ever been in my entire life.
Diane Bell [00:20:37]:
Like, my experiment worked. My five year experiment of, if I go all in on this, can I make this happen? The answer was a resounding yes. I'm recording this to you in my home. We bought a home here. I moved to Spain with my family last year, and that was such a big dream of mine. We live in a house now that we bought. That's like a dream house with a beautiful saltwater swimming pool and epic views of the Mediterranean. Yes, you heard me right.
Diane Bell [00:21:05]:
We bought this house, and we actually managed to buy a house in Denver. I mean, the way this has all happened is magical manifesting. It's insane. And when I say manifesting, it's not like there's some sort of magic wand. It's not like I sit on the couch and pray. I have taken massive action again and again and again. I've built a business. I've failed a thousand times.
Diane Bell [00:21:28]:
I've made tons of mistakes. I've grown, I've evolved. I've learned more. And I am just here sitting with you now, though, really full of this utter knowledge that whatever you dream of is possible for you. The first step is you have to believe it. You've got to believe that it's possible and then you've got to take action as if it's possible. And if you keep doing that, there's nothing that you cannot be, do and have. So I'm so happy you're here.
Diane Bell [00:22:00]:
This podcast, my intention is that there will be a new episode every single week and it's going to be a mix. Sometimes it's just going to be me sharing techniques, tools, hacks, ideas, anything that I feel is going to help you break through to your next level. That's my promise. That's what I'm here for, is to give you the tools, the techniques, the knowledge, the inspiration to create the life of your dreams. Now, beyond that, though, I'm going to be inviting so many incredible guests to have chats with too. The topic here is always how do we live our best lives? By living in alignment with our souls? Aim from the heart. Aim high and aim from the heart. This is not about creating wealth or creating our dream life by selling out, by living out of integrity, by working too hard so that we're exhausted and frazzled and burnt out.
Diane Bell [00:22:56]:
This is the opposite of what this is about. Aim from the heart is manifesting our dream lives by being completely in alignment with our soul's purpose. And I believe that when we do this, we don't only create the most beautiful lives for ourselves, but also for the world. So I have got a whole bunch of incredible guests lined up for you. You're going to love, love the conversations I've already been having. I've already recorded some of them and I cannot wait to share them. So this is going to be your go to podcast for inspiration, for lifting you up, for giving you tools. It's just a place that I want you to be able to come and feel inspired, uplifted, motivated, empowered.
Diane Bell [00:23:40]:
Like, girl, I feel on fire and I can make anything happen when I listen to this podcast. Thank you so much for being here at the very first episode. I'm so grateful to you for listening. I am going to ask you a massive favor. If you do get value out of this podcast and go ahead and listen some more episodes, please share it. Please leave a review as well. Tell me what you think of it. Let the world know about it and let your friends know about it.
Diane Bell [00:24:08]:
Share it on your social media. It will mean the world to me. I'm starting this from scratch and I really want to help 1 million people break through their conditioning and live the life of their dreams. What do you dream of, friend? Aim high, aim higher, and you know that you're going to achieve it. I love you so much and I'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast us today. If you enjoyed it, could you do me a favor? Please leave it a little review wherever you're listening to it or screenshot it and share it on your social media and tag me so I can see it. I would be so appreciative.
Diane Bell [00:24:47]:
Thanks so much. I love you and I'll see you soon. Bye.
