by Tommy Baker
I’m not here to tell you it’s going to take the same hardship for your leap. But being able to release the pressure and understand there are things happening for you, and not to you, can make all the difference in the world.
#NotesFromTheLeap
Tara Mackey, CEO, The Organic Life
#1 Bestselling Author, Singer-Songwriter, Activist
What’s the boldest leap you’ve ever taken and why was this important to you?
In 2011, I attempted to take my own life. This was after a series of tragedies: a tumultuous childhood being raised by a single mother who was a drug addict, and then being taken in by my grandparents. By the time I was 13, I was put on my first drug and by 24, I was on 14. After my best friend’s suicide in January of 2011, I was at my wits’ end. Working a job I hated in a city I felt unsafe in, with friends and a relationship that was terrible for me. I didn’t see another way out. But when my attempt failed, I knew in that instant it had failed for a reason. That I had made a ton of mistakes in my life, but I was not those mistakes. I was divine, and as long as I made better choices next time, I could have a better life. Better choices would turn into better actions. Better actions would turn into better habits. And better habits would turn into a brand-new life.
What did you feel as you made this leap, and what happened after?
I felt excited. I went from feeling defeated mentally and feeling exhausted by the next moment, to feeling energized and excited by the next moment. Every moment became an opportunity.
Looking back, what would you tell someone else in a similar circumstance knowing what you now know?
Don’t give up. You’re not broken. The world has a powerful place for you. The journey is in the hard moments. That’s what makes you who you truly are.
Vision Boards Don’t Work, or Do They?
Vision boards don’t work, life coaches are a scam, and Tony Robbins is simply stealing people’s money with a combination of feel good energy and a big upsell. If you believe this, then, guess what? It’s true.
Every December, my fiancée Taylor and I make a big trip to Office Max and stock up on paperboard, tape, and scissors. We create a vision board experience together, putting up pictures and printouts of the life we’d love to create. We’ve done this since we started dating, and now create an individual vision board and one as a couple.
It’s almost chilling to see how much of the vision board has come to life: a fairytale engagement, a trip to the beautiful northern coast of Spain, a brand-new dream home, a publishing deal, the growth of our businesses, speaking opportunities and much more.
No, I’m not here to brag; I’m making a point. All of these tools work, if you work them. Your beliefs will shape the effectiveness of any tool. The reason why the vision board works is because of our belief in it, not the other way around.
In the following section, I’ll expand on this concept, but before we get started, I’m going to ask you to wipe your slate clean.
You’re going to let go of any beliefs about creating a vision that has held you back. Either a belief that thinking too big is bad, or the reminder that last time you did this, it didn’t work out. Either way, you’ll be right. And I want you to be right in the most powerful way that leads to a transformation during your leap.
Crafting the vision for your leap will involve five essential pillars to ensure it all comes to life for you, in ways that leave you in complete and utter awe.
Vision Pillar 1: Relentless Clarity
The first pillar of your leap’s vision is to seek clarity and be relentless with your pursuit of it. Lack of clarity is responsible for keeping people stuck. If you don’t have clarity, then what’s the point in getting started—right?
Wrong. The paradox is, if you sit around and wait for clarity, you’ll have less as time passes. On the flipside, if all you do is act aimlessly without any end goal, you can find yourself spinning your wheels with no direction. Like anything, there’s a sweet spot in the middle.
Clarity grows as you grow. Earlier this year, I spent an entire day at my office planning out the year and all the parts of my business and life. I had an entire whiteboard filled with where I was, where I was headed, and the specifics on closing the gap.
I remember taking a moment and realizing if someone had shown me all of this a couple years earlier, I’d be beyond overwhelmed. I wouldn’t have done anything. Now that I had grown myself and my business, it made sense. In other words, I had earned my clarity.
To maximize your clarity with your leap, here’s what you’re going to need:
Clarity around your leap’s vision. You must be able to take yourself to that place where your leap has happened by asking:
What does your leap look like? Go deep into the specifics: create a clear picture of every part of your life.
Clarity around your leap’s feelings. We don’t chase dreams for the sake of dreams, it’s about how they make us feel.
What does your leap feel like? Take yourself to the other side of the leap, and the feelings it brings to you.
Clarity around your leap’s reason. Dig deep and identify why your leap is something you can’t not do.
Why is your leap so important to you? Why is not taking the leap no longer an option?
Clarity around the cost of not doing it. Identify the tangible and intangible costs of not choosing your leap.
What does not take your leap really cost you? Why is right now the time to bring it to life?
I use the world relentless for a reason: clarity never truly ends. It’s a constant pursuit on your path. This allows you to take the pressure off figuring everything out today and instead, start now.
But you can also have all the clarity the world has to offer, and it won’t matter if you don’t cultivate a belief so deep it courses through your veins.
Vision Pillar 2: Undeniable Belief
Tyler Perry’s story earlier was an example of a deep, undeniable belief even when all the external circumstances were saying it was over. So was Lisa Nichols, and the stories we’ve detailed to this point, and in the #NotesFromTheLeap.
You will have to cultivate a level of belief that others will deem insane, crazy, or downright out-of-your-mind. That’s okay. Take that feedback as proof you’re on the right path. The second crucial ingredient required to not only bring your vision to life, but to also ensure it happens fast. It all starts with believing in yourself—believing you are not only worthy, but also capable of bringing your dreams to life. Tyler Perry’s story is an example of undeniable belief. He expands:
You have to know it beyond knowing it. It’s a feeling inside of you that will not allow you to let go. It will keep you going when you can’t keep yourself going. There comes a time in your life when your dream takes on the belief for you, because you can’t do it by yourself.
Remember, belief is binary. You either believe with every part of who you are, or you don’t. And much like clarity, you’ll develop a practice to cement your belief. There’s no better way to do so than to collapse reality and take action now.
Vision Pillar 3: Consistent Action (Collapse Reality)
There’s a version of me that’s 40 pounds overweight. He wakes up sluggish, tired, and hating what he sees in the mirror. He lives in New York City and has been divorced. He’s disconnected spiritually and lives in a state of frustration, seeking happiness through alcohol and gambling. He’s broke but in ways that transcend paying the bills. He feels a lot like John from Reddit.
This is a real possibility. If I had only made a certain sequence of choices, I could be living that life right now. At any moment, there are infinite possibilities you and I could be living, all based on the actions we take, or don’t.
Think about it this way: there are endless train tracks you and I can choose to get on, and they all lead to vastly different places. Now, today’s decisions may not seem like much, but you look out the window of the train and you’re in the same spot as the other one—nothing’s chan
ged, right?
Wrong, because as time passes, there’s a fork in the tracks and everything has changed. Much like my earlier example, there’s a reality right now where you’ve achieved everything you’ve ever wanted and are living the life of your dreams.
Action, then, becomes the third pillar for bringing your vision to life based on the decisions you make today. However, the conventional wisdom around action is based solely on increasing input, with the expectation outputs will increase. Here, we’re about something much more powerful: intentional action, rooted in clarity, and belief. When you operate from this place, you collapse the time it takes to bring your leap’s vision to life.
Act as If (Your Future Self)
What would the future you do—the one who made the bold decision, took the leap, and brought their vision to life?
This question is one I use every day for myself, for clients, and for my platforms. Because the truth is, the amateur makes decisions today based on who he or she has been, which creates a predictable future (rooted in the past.) In that place, the best-case scenario is incremental results, a percentage here or there. Often, this leads to a feeling of stagnation.
The professional operates with a different framework. Using the question just posed, they make decisions today based on who they’re becoming.This breaks the A + B = C linear model and introduces the A = C model of reality. Figure 8.1 illustrates how this works.
Figure 8.1 Framework for making decisions about your future.
This is where 99% of affirmations, manifestations, dream-of-the-million-dollar-check-and-it-will-come mentality fail. Not only does it fail, but it also leaves people hoping and wishing for handouts that never come. And the reason is simple: they’re out of alignment, and the universe knows it. Deep down, they know it, too.
If your clarity and belief are pointing in one direction and your behaviors aren’t, you’re only going to get so far. Often, that place is one where we believe a little, but because the results don’t come (and our actions don’t collapse reality), we quit. We blame everyone except ourselves, only sending more negative energy toward what we said we wanted.
This cycle repeats itself, until it’s over. It didn’t work, everything’s a scam and you spend the rest of your life analyzing YouTube videos by Tucker in Idaho who’s convinced the government chose his patch of land to conduct alien experiments leading to the end of the world and zombie apocalypse.
Okay, I’ll admit: I got a little carried away there. Collapsing reality and becoming the future self now is a decision you get to make today. If you sustain long enough, you too will wake up one day and realize you’re a completely different person. You walk differently, and you see the world with a fresh set of eyes.
But again, I could be 40 pounds overweight, hating my life. It works both ways.
Vision Pillar 4: Intense Focus
The greatest currency in 2018 isn’t cash. It’s not followers. It’s not Bitcoin either. (Sorry to burst your bubble.) It’s one thing and one thing only: focus. In a hyper-distracted world, focus is rare. And what’re rare is valuable. According to a study on attention spans and focus by Microsoft in 2017, the human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.2
Sitting 9 seconds ahead of us are goldfish. Yes, we’re now less focused and able to keep focused than your niece’s little friend, Nemo. This finding is damning, and it’s only going to get worse as technologies invest billions in finding new ways to steal our focus.
I’ve spent a lot of time inside seminar rooms where people proclaim a massive vision or business idea, and in the moment, they’re full of clarity, belief, and even aligned behaviors. But there’s one thing missing: intense focus that stands the test of time. Not for a month, not for a quarter, but focus that endures.
Leap Tip: Airplane Mode
Make your ability to focus nonnegotiable. Every day, start your day on Airplane Mode with your smartphone. Get used to starting your day with space and focus on the one action that would mean you’ve won the day, even if nothing else got done.
During this time, you’re focusing on you. Because what most people do is wake up and tend to everyone else’s needs and wonder why they don’t have any energy left. To build the habit, start with your first 45 minutes of your day and expand from there.
So, how do you bring this focus to your life? The good news is that you’re doing most of the work. A lack of focus is usually a result of having minimal clarity on one’s path. Because of this, distraction becomes a way to soothe the pain of lacking priorities in our lives.
Vision Pillar 5: Cultivating Patience
If focus is rare, patience has become obsolete in a want-it-now world. People expect results yesterday and give up the moment they don’t come fast enough. This is good news for the right people, those who are committed to play the long game. Consider patience your competitive advantage.
You may be wondering how long this is all going to take. The reality is no one can provide that answer, but you can control key ingredients: clarity, belief, action, focus, and patience toward your leap and vision.
Growth in any endeavor is never predictable. It’s not linear, and some days you’re going to feel you’ve got a rocket launcher strapped to your back and other days you’ll wonder if it’s ever going to work out for you.
What matters is what you do on the days when you feel things aren’t working. Often, people let these days become weeks, then months, until they give up. The great tragedy of it all is that they may bow out just before the moment of their big breakthrough. Life has a funny way of testing us one last time before we get to harvest.
Stay in the game long enough, and you’ll reap the rewards of your patience.
Vision Pillar 6: Total Surrender [–$137.67 Available]
I’d accomplished my leap and made the bold decision to move to a place where I knew no one, a place where I felt called for the opportunity to build a life from scratch on my own terms. Even getting to this place had seemed impossible, and yet here I was, living the vision I’d created in my mind on that 13-degree, last-day-of-December night.
Still, the dull screen on my smartphone was painting a vastly different picture. I’d pulled over to the side of the road with the fuel marker beyond empty. I needed gas bad and was 25 miles from home.
CARD DECLINED. Must be a mistake, it has to be.
CARD DECLINED. Okay, well . . . you know, technology is sometimes erratic, so one more time.
CARD DECLINED. Shit, this is real.
What is happening!? As I pulled up to the banking app, I felt a sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach.
Current Available Balance: -$137.67.
Here I was: exposed, without the ability to put any gas in my car and an empty fridge at home.
For a few minutes, I sat there trying to come up with a solution. Finally, I had a moment of clarity. I felt alive with a mix of empowering hopelessness and complete surrender. I started laughing and soaked in the moment. I vividly remember telling myself, “This is nothing, and one day you’ll be writing about this moment.”
Now I am. With no options besides asking people for spare change, I put my favorite tune on and kept driving. The car rattled as every last drop of fuel was used, and that’s when I heard the unmistakable clinking sound of a PayPal deposit: “You’ve received $797.00.”
Exhale. I smiled as I pulled off the freeway and found the closest gas station in a state of bliss: I’d made it one more day. Call me crazy, but I didn’t believe, out of all the possibilities for when I’d get paid by this particular client, it would happen less than 11 minutes after I’d smiled in a state of complete and utter surrender. There was a beauty to all of it, and you too will have to harness the power of surrender during your leap.
Hopefully, your circumstances will be a little less dire.
Your Vison Is Your Compass
Just like I did on that ice-cold New Year’s Eve, you’ve detailed a vision for your leap. At this point, you should
have specifics on what it looks like, what it feels like, and why you can’t not do it. If you haven’t, read this chapter again and make sure you’re clear. If you’re vague and unspecific with your vision, you can expect vague and scattered results.
If you’re feeling nervous, good. Often, we lose the power of our visions when we start to focus on the how. We tap back into our heads and start to find all the reasons why we’re not capable.
Catch yourself. Every time you do, go back and remind yourself of the vividness of the vision. When I woke up on New Year’s Day after creating my vision, all I needed to do was to check my phone to see a powerful reminder—a picture encompassing the vision I’d created the night prior.
Armed with your vision, you’ll now have a stable foundation as you reach the threshold point of your leap’s moment.
Chapter 8 Key Takeaways
Your leap’s vision becomes your compass. Without a powerful vision, you’ll succumb to the outside (and internal) voices telling you to stop.
Clarity and belief grow as you do. These are not one-time deals; these must be practiced, cultivated, and repeated daily. As you grow, they will too.
Embrace the five vision pillars. Clarity, belief, patience, focus, and surrender are the crucial ingredients designed to bring your leap to life.