Estimated read time: 5 min

Hey there,

Happy Sunday ☀️

This time last year, I had just finished nearly 50 hours of travel, from Penida to Bali, through Hong Kong and Chicago and on to Orlando, to collect awards at the Global Gurus Summit for the fourth year running.

This week the journey was a lot shorter. In actual fact, I didn't have to move at all. The group for the 8th Quantum Alignment Mastery Retreat came to me, and spent the week living with me and the most advanced work I teach: the mechanics of reality creation, heart-brain coherence, synchronicity, and using energy as a navigation system

A big part of it happens away from the table, because direct experience teaches what no slide ever can. This week included time out on the water, sitting in front of sea caves carved into the cliffs, and spotting some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet: dolphins.

What Season Is Inside You? 🍂

Every one of the roughly 50 trillion cells in your body has a receptor site, that interfaces with its chemical environment. And just like the skin on your arms, it adapts to whatever climate it lives in.

When you think happy, grateful, expansive thoughts consistently, your body produces dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Your internal environment becomes summer, and over time your cells adapt to it. I like to say they put on their speedos and sunglasses 😎 🩲🌊

When you think fearful, anxious, contracted thoughts consistently, your body produces cortisol and adrenaline, and it blocks the serotonin. Your internal environment becomes winter. Your cells adapt to that too: hats, scarves and gloves.

Here is the piece that matters. Cells will always take the path of least resistance. Say you have spent 20 years in winter. Then you go to a seminar, or read a book, or have a moment of real clarity, and you decide something is going to change. For a few days you feel wonderful. Then all 50 trillion cells face a choice. They can change their entire wardrobe, or they can send a chemical signal up to the one person doing the thinking and convince him to go back to winter. The second option is far easier, so that is what they try first. It shows up as self-doubt, negative self-talk, and a very reasonable-sounding argument for going back to the old habit, just this once. That is why most seminar highs do not last, and why the resistance is loudest right before a change, not after it.

The good news is that the same law works in your favour once you have done the work. Hold your ground for three or four weeks and the wardrobe changes. And once your cells have been in summer long enough, the moment you start thinking a negative thought they do exactly the same thing in reverse: they send a signal up to tell you to stop. Your own biology starts pushing you back towards the sunshine. That is why positive psychology holds, once you have been consistent long enough for it to hold.

So do not mistake the discomfort of the change for a sign that something is wrong. Anxiety is the emotion of growth, providing it's not resisted.

The seasons outside you will change whether you like it or not. The season inside you is a decision. And that is where I want to take you next, because deciding is a lot easier than most people make it.

The Hills I Will Die On ⛰️

Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, once said: "It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are."

I think he was right. When you know what matters most to you, and in what order, a decision arrives, you hold it up against what you value, and the answer is usually already there. When your values are vague, every opinion in the room gets a vote, and the loudest one tends to win.

I know "die" is a dramatic word. What I am really talking about is certainty.

Certainty is one of the six human needs I teach (i.e. certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth and contribution), and most people spend their lives swinging between them depending on the day.

Certainty matters, but be careful where you put it. Put it in the wrong places, like what other people think of you, a job title, a bank balance or one more qualification, and life will shake it loose sooner or later. Skills do not give you certainty. They give you skills.

Certainty is internal, skills are external, and you will never replace an internal need for certainty with external skills. Put your certainty in a small number of things that no circumstance can take from you, and you can afford to live with a lot more uncertainty everywhere else.

For everything else, learn to live in the space of a question rather than give in to an addiction to certainty.

Here are the few places where I apply certainty without apology:

Feel great now. Not when the money arrives, not when the relationship is fixed, now. (You may spot it on my T-shirt in the photos.)

You feel your emotions. You are not them.

You don't have a money problem. You have a story about money problem.

Let go of the how. It is none of your business.

Ask me about any of those and you will get a quick answer, because none of them needs thinking about anymore. An interviewer once opened a conversation with me by firing half-finished sentences at me to complete, like "Success is…", "Failure is…" and "My favourite place in the world is…". I said home, and when I was asked where home was, I said wherever I'm at. There was no time to think, and there did not need to be. That is what clear values give you: speed, and peace.