Speaker A [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. S 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 episode seven of the Aim From the Heart podcast. I hope you are doing well.
Speaker A [00:00:41]:
I am here. We're actually gearing up to do day three of your dream come true. This has been this three day live experience where we have been going deep into how to actually make your dreams happen. Like, how do we shift from creating more of the same results that we've had in the past to actually creating something that we've never had before? And that's the nature of our dreams. We're going after some sort of result that we have never had before. So the feedback from this experience has been phenomenal. So many people have written to me personally and said, diane, this is just incredible. And I'm feeling such huge shifts and it's getting me all fired up, and I'm suddenly seeing why I'm not there yet and all the things.
Speaker A [00:01:24]:
And just a reminder, if you want to still join us, there's time. The replays of this will be available until October 20 eigth. So if it's within that time frame, you can go to Dianebell.com dream and sign up and get in there and you can catch the replays. And what you're going to learn is the three main reasons people don't get to their dreams. You're going to be guided through two processes the internal alchemy process and future self activation so that you can actually start to embody your dream self now and really magnetize those results. This was an incredibly in depth session. It's a two hour session, nearly, so it's really going to be a great one for you today. Because of that, I've been thinking a lot about the future self and how most of us live from our pasts and look to our past to decide what we're capable of and what we can do and what we should do in the present.
Speaker A [00:02:23]:
And the thing to always remember is the only time that we actually have any power over is the present moment. This is our PowerPoint. The present, the past is actually gone. The future doesn't yet exist, and there are many different ways that it could unfold. So here we are in that nexus, in that space, in the middle of that, and it's in this present moment that we get to determine which path we're going down for the future. Now, the problem for so many of us is that we're so fixated on the past. And we're allowing the past to inform our identity and our idea of who we are. And what that means is that in the present, we are just replaying what we have done in the past and we're replaying it and we're expecting a different future.
Speaker A [00:03:12]:
We're replaying exactly what we did and somehow expecting that it's going to turn out differently. This is kind of like a situation where you're baking the same recipe all the time. You're going, it's not really very good, it's not really very good, it's not very good. But you keep baking the same darn recipe and you're not changing it. So if you want something different in the future, you're going to have to do something in the present. Now, the challenge about this for many of us is that what we are doing in the present is largely determined by our habits and by our identity. And I want to talk a little bit about our identity today and where that comes from and how we can shift it. Because the issue for so many of us is that we have built an identity that doesn't necessarily serve us and it's completely linked up with the past.
Speaker A [00:04:05]:
So what do I mean by this? Most of us have an idea of the type of person we are. If I asked you, describe yourself to me, you're going to be like, I'm the kind of person who right. And we could ask this about many different areas of your life and you would say, I am really good with money, or I'm terrible with money. The minute I get money, I just spend it. I've always been like that. I'm just bad with money. I am bad with money. And this is where we're making that our identity.
Speaker A [00:04:36]:
So another example of this would be I am always overeating. I am somebody who just struggles with my weight. I struggle with my weight. I am challenged in that area, right? I am bad with relationships. I'm just terrible with men. I'm great with other things in my life, but when it comes to choosing a good relationship, I'm terrible at it. I'm the sort of person who now anything that we're saying about ourselves like this is actually us talking about our past. And we talk about it as though somehow it's written in the sky like Diane Bell, I am not good with money.
Speaker A [00:05:13]:
But all I am saying if I say I'm not good with money is I have not been good with money up until this moment in my life. I have made some bad choices in the past with money, but it's not like I am bad with money. I just have been in the past. Can you see the distinction? But we get so fixed into and entrenched in our identity of who we are that it starts to determine our future results. When something has been internalized on the subconscious level, on the identity level, for you, it's very hard to shift out of it. So, for instance, if you on the identity level are like, I am a smoker. I am a smoker. If I offer you a cigarette, you're going to take one.
Speaker A [00:06:02]:
You're not even going to think about it. You're just going to reach out and take it. Now, if you're not a smoker, if you're like, I am not a smoker, then you won't take the cigarette. And it's really like, that's our identity. Our identity is informing our choices, whether we're aware of it or not. If I think I'm bad with money and I've decided, like, that's part of who I am, then I guarantee you I'm going to continue to act out and create circumstances that will actually repeat that and give me proof that it is my truth. And this is really how our brains work. It's called the reticulate activating system thing, the ras that scientists have discovered.
Speaker A [00:06:44]:
And basically, this is a system in our brain whereby our brain looks for proof of what's already happened, right? Our brain looks for proof of what we already believe. So if we believe we're bad with money, we keep looking for proof of that. We do this on a deep subconscious level. You're looking for in your conscious mind, you're like, I want to change this story. I want to be great with money. But if at a deep level, you believe that you're bad with it, you're going to keep looking for proof, evidence that what you believe is true, and this is just your brain's way to be efficient. It's not a bad thing. It's just what it is, right? In order for us to shift into a new future and not just keep repeating the patterns of the past, we have to be willing to shift our identity.
Speaker A [00:07:28]:
We have to be willing to actually, instead of referring to the past for who we are, look to the future for who we could be, and start living from that instead. So if I want the result that I am financially free, and up till this moment in my life, I've always struggled with money, and I've made it my story that I am bad with money. I'm just terrible with money. I just don't like money. I'm just not good with money. And that's my identity. But what I really crave is financial freedom. What I really crave is to earn so much money that I just don't even know what to do with it.
Speaker A [00:08:05]:
Then what I'm going to have to do is instead of acting from my past, acting from my identity, I'm going to have to attune myself to my vision of the future and discover who my future self is, who is good with money, who is financially free, who is earning so much money they don't even know what to do with it. And when I can connect with that and start living from that, start making choices in the present that align with that. Can you see the difference? It's like, now I'm going to start to make moves towards that future. Now I'm going to actually start building the future that I want. And so the first question, really, with this always is, what do I want in the future? And if you've never done this work before, it's a really great thing to actually sit down and say, okay, one year from now, where would I like to be? Five years from now, where would I like to be? Ten years, where would I like to be? You may even push it out to 20 years. And let me tell you, when you do the 20 year one, you get a really powerful perspective on your life. 20 years from now, I will be 70 years old. My eleven year old son will be 31.
Speaker A [00:09:19]:
Oh, my gosh. My six year old will be 26. What do I want for my life at that point? What do you want for your life? What's your vision for it? And when you start to just gently, with compassion, explore truly, what do I want my life to be? Who do I want to be? What results do I want to create in my life? What experiences do I want to have at the age of 70? What memories do I want to have created? What do I want my health to be like? What do I want each day of my life to be like? How do I want to be living? It is shocking that so few of us actually do this work. We're just bumbling on our lives, hoping that things work out for the best, hoping that things work out beautifully, but without actually taking the time to really visualize what it is that we want for our lives. Not what other people want, not what we've been told we should want, not what we've been told we can have. But actually, what do you want? What do you want for your life? And when you start to just hone in on this and what I'd invite you to do, if you've never done this work before, start out with, like, ten years from now. Start with ten years from now, ten years from now, where would I like to be? Write down what your age is. Write down the age of everyone who's close to you, who you love, who you still want to be part of your life ten years from now.
Speaker A [00:10:46]:
And then start to really visualize, what would my dream be if everything could go well from this point on, where would I be ten years from now? Where would I be living? What car would I be driving? Where would I be going on vacation? How would I be spending my days? What kind of impact would I be having on the world? How much money would I have in the bank? How much money would I be earning? How would I be eating? How would I be exercising? How would I feel in my body? How would my health be? You can get so deep into this work. I mean, really take the time to explore who you are ten years from now. If everything went fantastically well, if everything was, like, beyond your wildest dream, what do you want? And when you start to get this, you start to know what you need to plug into, because the next question is that version of me. What do they believe? How do they act? What would they think of my present circumstances? What would they tell me? And you can write on all of these things if you're listening to this. You can go to the show notes and you'll see the transcripts, and you can write these down and get these as journal prompts. And I promise you, it is so worth your time to do this, to write these things down, to explore this. Now, I imagine sometimes that it's really like an actor preparing for a role. And many of you will know that I've worked as a film director and I've worked with a lot of actors.
Speaker A [00:12:15]:
And actors love to know everything about the character they're going to play. Not all actors. Some don't, but a lot do. And so they want to know, how often does my character go get their haircut? And it's like, what toothpaste do they buy? What shops do they go to? What labels are they wearing? What are they having for lunch? And it's not in the movie. But they want to know it all, because that's how they make the character into a real, 3D, rich, deep character. So you can apply this to your future self study. Because if you think of yourself ten years now, this version of you who has made all your big dreams come true, like, they have rocked it beyond. Now, study them.
Speaker A [00:12:59]:
Like, just as if you're an actor who's going to play that role. What is that person wearing? How do they eat? What do they eat? How do they treat their body? How are they exercising? Do they meditate? Do they practice yoga? How do they manage stress? And if you can start to see who they are in that deep way, you can start to embody them now, because let me tell you, you don't have to wait to achieve your dreams to actually become that person. And the faster that you become that person on the inside, the faster you will actually attract that outcome on the outside. And so you're getting these clues as you do this journaling on your future self. Could I start doing that now? Could I explore that now? Could I start being that a little bit more now? Could I try that now? Many of us have this idea that somehow when our dreams come true, then we'll suddenly be different. A friend of mine said recently to me, a friend who moved into her dream home, and she said, you know, I always thought that when I lived in a home like this, I would be doing yoga every day. And she said, And I suddenly realized I've been living here for nearly two years and I'm still not doing yoga. And it's that thing we think that somehow if we change our outside world, we will change on the inside.
Speaker A [00:14:13]:
It's not true. It's the inner changes that will create the outer changes. And if we want to embody that person, we've got to start now. So future self work, I think, is some of the most powerful work we can do to let our dreams come true. And this is not just also on a personal level. I mean, you can absolutely just focus on your personal stuff, and it's great and it's powerful. And honestly, when you start to embody that person now, you're going to create massive shifts in your life. It's incredible.
Speaker A [00:14:43]:
But you can also do it in that bigger way. And I encourage everyone in the world right now to start visualizing the future that we desire for our planet, for our societies, for our communities, instead of us just blindly looking to the past and being like, oh, well, it's always been like this, so therefore it's always going to be like this. Can we actually start to envisage something better, something with more social justice, more peace, more equality, all those things, and really focus our energy into that vision rather than into the past? Because I think it's by focusing on where we're going that we're going to create a different future rather than always focusing on the past. Now, one other note about the future self work. Some of you might be like, I don't know, Diane, it feels a little fake to me to start pretending to be somebody else. Like, I am who I am. I've had people say for know, if I imagine this future self person, they seem kind of highfalutin in a way, and it's not really me, and it's not really authentic. I need to be me.
Speaker A [00:15:50]:
But I just want to remind you that whoever you are today is completely just who you have been in the past. It's the sum of all your past until this moment. Now, we can put more weight into the past and decide that the past bears more credibility in some way than the future. But I actually don't think that's true. The way that I imagine this is that in the quantum field of everything that exists, there are all the possible pasts and there are all the possible futures. And here I am in that center point in between the two, and deciding that the past has more weight or has more importance or has more authenticity than the future feels to me, actually not true at all. Why should I determine who I am and decide that my identity is based on my past experiences rather than deciding that it could be based on who I'm becoming. Do you see the difference? It's so fascinating to me.
Speaker A [00:16:47]:
So, for instance, I had a story in my life where I believed, and this was an identity thing, that I was stiff. And I've told this story a few times, but it's just for me, it changed my life. Experiencing this totally changed my life. Like, all my childhood, I was stiff. And what I mean by this is I couldn't touch my toes, I couldn't do the splits, I couldn't do all the bendy things that most kids can do. I was just like, really inflexible. My body was not flexible at all. And at a very early age, my mother reinforced that to me.
Speaker A [00:17:19]:
She was like, oh, you're stiff just like me. I've always been stiff. You're stiff too. And I just internalized that where I was like, this is who I am, right? Like, this is a part of me. This is my identity. I am stiff. Some people are flexible. I am not.
Speaker A [00:17:35]:
I am stiff. Well, cut to when I was like 24, 25 years old and I started practicing yoga. Yoga really called to me. I'd been practicing meditation for quite a while at that point, and for some reason, Buddhist meditation had always called to me. So I was doing that. But I found the meditation really difficult because my mind just wandered. I was so active in my brain. And so when I first went to my yoga class, the first yoga class I went to, I was just like, wow, this is amazing.
Speaker A [00:18:02]:
This is like pure meditation. Because I don't think about anything. It's so freaking hard. I'm 100% just focused on actually breathing. And that's meditation, like, I don't think about anything. It's magic. So even though it was really hard for me and really hard for my ego, I started going to yoga all the time. And very quickly, I started going six days a week to practice a shtanga yoga.
Speaker A [00:18:26]:
So every morning, and I was very lucky. I had a teacher who said, you can just come and practice in the shala with me, in the yoga studio with me. So I would go to a class, one class per week in the evening, but then other than that, I would just go in the morning and practice in the shala. And in that time, I slowly started to become more flexible. And when I started the practice of yoga, I mean, I was always the most stiff, least flexible person in the room. And it was often very embarrassing to me. There I was like 25 years old and there'd be people in the room who were 65, and they were like a thousand times more flexible than me. And I just felt humiliated all the time and ashamed of myself and all those things.
Speaker A [00:19:08]:
But I kept breathing and I kept showing up and I kept breathing, and I kept leaning into the discomfort, and slowly it started to change. And then one day, not that long later I mean, it was less than a year. I think it was about between, I don't know, six and eight months later. I could do the splits. I kid you not. I mean, this is a true story. And I was like, what is happening? I am stiff. Wait, that's not true anymore.
Speaker A [00:19:36]:
I am flexible. But how can that be true? Because this was something that had been so internalized as part of who I was. Now, this is that thing about our authenticity, because we latch onto these things about our personality, about who we are. Well, I am shy. I've had this many times people saying to me, I really want to succeed, and I want to do well, but I'm shy. I'm not good at public speaking. I'm not good with people. And I'm always like, okay, what you're saying is that up until this point in your life, you have been shy.
Speaker A [00:20:07]:
Right up until this point, that's been your pattern. But is that the totality of who you are? Is that the ultimate truth of who you are? Is it possible that you could imagine a version of yourself where you're not shy, where you are confident with people? What would that look like? What would that feel like? Is it possible that this is a skill that you can develop? Is this something that you could change? And let me tell you, I think most of the things about ourselves we actually can, just like me going from stiff to flexible, and that was something that was so physical, so palpable. It was like, oh, my God, if that is not true about me, like, not ultimately true, if I'm not ultimately stiff, then what else do I believe about myself that is really not true? That is really, actually changeable. Like, all these things that I'm the kind of person who I had another thing that I'm not a morning person. Oh, I'm terrible with mornings. I like staying up late at night again, that was dismantled by yoga, because my teacher said, you can come in and practice with me in the morning at 06:00 a.m.. Well, suddenly, I found I loved getting up in the morning. And this story that I told myself all these years wasn't, in fact, true.
Speaker A [00:21:13]:
I'm not a morning person. I was a morning person. I could always become one. So the question really, when we get into the future self work is, who do you want to become? In your essence, you're limitless. In your essence, there's so much that you could be. So really, the question is, who do you want to become? What would you wish was true for you? And then anchor into that vision and start living from it now and then? I promise you, you're on the path to making it your truth. Now, if you've enjoyed this session at all. A couple of things.
Speaker A [00:21:54]:
First of all, I want to offer you a free meditation that you can use to connect with your future self. And if you've never done this kind of meditation visualization activation, you're going to love it. It's one thing to sort of theoretically connect with our future self. It's one thing to write about it and journal about it and think about it in this logical, rational way. It's quite another to viscerally somatically organically cellularly connect with the future self. And that's what you will do in this free meditation. So if you would like to get this free meditation, go to Dianebell.com future and you'll be able to access it. Another thing, if you would like to join us in your dream come true and explore this even more, then go to Dianebell.com dream and sign up.
Speaker A [00:22:49]:
That is only until October 20, eigth 2023. After that, it's going to be done. And finally, if you get value from this podcast, please can I ask you a massive favor? Can you either rate it and that means if you're listening to itunes or Spotify, hit the five stars, leave a review. Those help it reach more people. And otherwise, would you be so kind as to actually just screenshot it and share on your social media? If you've enjoyed it at all, chances are someone else you know would enjoy it too. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I know there's so many podcasts you could listen to and I'm so grateful you chose to spend time with me. I love you so much.
Speaker A [00:23:31]:
Take care and have fun connecting with your future self. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast 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. Thanks so much. I love you and I'll see you soon. Bye.
