I love when people ask me questions about how to get ahead in their business or to create some kind of disruption in their life. A lot of people feel that because I am a presenter and my consultancy rates are really high that they can’t just ask me a question and get some free advice. Honestly I love it. I love helping people and I love seeing people break through and get amazing results.
So today’s blog is really exciting for me because it comes from a question from my ‘Your Future Now’ community and it’s a really big one.
The question was: How do you create your future?
It’s a great question and one I’m really switched on and passionate about. One of my companies the actual name is ‘Your Future Now’. It’s all about creating the future you want RIGHT NOW, because this is where the magic happens, right here in the NOW moment, in the decisions your make in the next ten minutes, that’s you deciding your future.
How that came to be was because I noticed something about myself. I had this lifelong pattern through my school years of putting everyone else first and not asking for what I want and really not making decisions for myself. This played out from childhood and it basically started with getting bullied. And when I say bullied I don’t just mean name-calling and taunting, which is horrible enough, I mean severely bullied in a violent and physical way by groups of older boys, some of which didn’t even know me or even go to my school.
Because of that bullying I wanted to be safe and in order to make myself safe I started to look for ways I could make people happy. My thinking was if I could make them happy, even if it came at great cost to myself, then maybe they wouldn’t bully me and I would be okay.
And it’s interesting, these little decisions that we make at childhood can often play out into bigger patterns as time progresses. And so this particular pattern of mine, of pleasing others and putting myself last played out in different businesses that I didn’t even want to be involved in, or different projects that I hated and careers I followed because I wanted to please someone in my family or find acceptance in the circle I was in.
One of those career choices was IT. I jumped into that when I was about 18 or 19 and the only reason I did that was because my mum said to me, this is what you should do. She said that because IT was a new industry then and being highly skilled in computing and coding meant you could get great money and find jobs in any industry. So the idea here was that I should get into IT to have a future for myself and that’s probably a really important thing to look at is the ‘shoulds’, because often we should on ourselves and we should on other people and that’s where we jump off our own future path and get on someone else’s.
I often find that the people who should on others the most are the ones who are currently not doing what they love and are not on their own future plan. That feeling of not being satisfied or not being happy with their own choices can be projected out onto other people.
So I was in IT and doing really well at it but not liking where it would take me. I was a partner of a big organisation as well and working really hard to give everything I had to the other people there and I lost it all, in this really horrible act of betrayal the partner I was working with just took the whole company and left.
And so the decision came for me to snap out of that pattern then, when I actually lost everything, almost overnight. It’s often that crisis point that forces you to wake up and shakes up what you think is safe so you get real.
That was it for me. I lost a big, big organization, I lost a serious romantic relationship in that as well and it was one of those crisis moments that shake you up so much that you examine everything. So I examined my external life and I looked at every area of my life and I started to ask questions about how did I actually create this?
So I fell back on my training, and this is what I had learned in my Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) studies, that we are either in response mode, where we are just living to survive, or we are in create mode where we create our own path and get the results we actually want. Using the principle of cause versus effect, we can take full responsibility for who we are and how we got there.
The challenges we face is that most of these decisions we make and patterns we form are all on an unconscious level, so we are not even aware that we are taking these actions to be safe or significant or getting variety in our lives.
We are so used to them by the time we are adults that we just ignore them and let them run on autopilot, because as I said, these unconscious decisions have often started through the ages of 0 to 7 and then they get more cemented in from 7 to 14, and they pick up speed and become more convincing as we go through life.
So what I did when I reached that crisis point was run an internal audit on myself and, let me tell you, it’s very, very hard to do that alone. To really do it well you need support so I brought in a team to help coach me and advise me and ask questions that would wake me up. With that support, I started to examine every single belief system and limiting decision and negative emotion that showed up and really took a good hard look at it.
Previously I had been automatically looking at all these things internally from the effect side of the equation, where I am the victim and the world is against me. This time I started to flip it over to cause, to see how I had created this and also how I could create a way out. And most of that was just about looking for the positives and being so totally, totally grateful for everything life had thrown at me because it had shaped who I was, and I was someone about to become very powerful.
This is what I say at Live It Now: Our wounds, when healed, become our superpowers.
And that was what was happening to me through this evaluation process, I was becoming like superman as I started taking responsibility and looking at ways I could heal and get stronger.
One of the challenges here is knowing who is making the decisions, is it you or your wounds that have shaped your decision and beliefs and your patterns so far?
And that’s why you really need support for this because it can be really hard to tell what is you and what is something you have picked up along the way because our self-identity can get so tangled up in some of these beliefs, so you need someone there to challenge you on them.
If your wounds are the things that are unconsciously making your daily decisions, then they are going to play out big time and cause a massive crisis in your life.
So the first thing that I did during this audit was start to really attack these wounds, instead of running away from them, I started to face them and when I did the work I was able to start to change the stories that created them. Many of these stories we play out day to day and hold onto quite tightly as part of our identity and make us powerless, and I think that’s a really, really important thing to look at is that when we start to change the stories, we start to change our life.
And for me, if I had kept holding onto my own stories and those old wounds then my life today would have played out very differently. I could have said, ‘I can’t have the life I want because I was bullied’, or, ‘I can’t trust people because this terrible thing happened around relationships’, or, ‘I can’t launch another business because the last time I was in business, my business partner screwed me over and it’s just going to happen again.’
If I had of continued to hold onto those stories the most likely scenario would have been that I was going to recreate that negative stuff over and over in my life going forward or I was going to stay stationary and just go with the flow and not have any impact on my own life.
And so this is it, this is the choice we all have to make for our future. Do we decide to create our own future, face our wounds, be thankful and activate our superhero powers, or do we keep living out the feelings of being beaten down and given the raw end of the stick and let everyone and everything else shape our future?
So what did I start to do? Instead of saying to myself, ‘Oh, I can’t trust another person.’ I deliberately started to look at this and I changed it to go, ‘Well, now I know things that I previously didn’t know. Because of that I’m going to see these things coming before they happen again,’ and from that I started to look at and think, well, it could’ve been so much worse and isn’t this a great opportunity to get a lesson in terms of the University of life, because we are all in the University of life by the way. We attend class and get to hear from key speakers every day, it’s just a matter of if you are in that class daydreaming, or sleeping or talking to the person next to you, or if you are taking notes and writing things down and doing your homework.
So I started to show up to the University of Life, and the minute I started to change those stories from being at the effect side of the equation to me being ‘at cause’ of the problem and a creator for the solution, clarity started to unfold and I started to get new ideas and one of the ideas was, well how do I turn these wounds into my superpowers?
Then I came up with the concept of ‘Your Future Now’ because up to this point I’d been on everyone else’s goal plan. I’d been trying to make everyone happy, and while doing that I’d lost myself. I had no idea who I was. I have no clarity in terms of what I want. I was always thinking about the worst-case scenario.
I figured there’s probably a lot of people out there that are on other people’s agendas who feel like this, that they are lost and don’t know themselves or what they want because they have been living other people’s lives for so long.
And so I decided, ‘Well maybe my lesson here, or my purpose from all this, was to face that wound and to flip that wound and then to create something for others to grow on’. That’s how Your Future Now was born.
Within moments I’d launched this company, I think it was within three months, and that was three months from taking that huge hit by the way. I let myself feel lousy about everything I’d lost for two or maybe three days and then I said, ‘Enough, time to find a way to flip this’.
So three months after losing everything I went national with this business.
Your Future Now has many uses and benefits and one of the concepts for me was to help people create freedom in life and in business. So in order to do that, I needed to do it myself and live it myself otherwise I can’t show anybody anything.
And that’s what I did, by the time I was in my early thirties, I’d semi-retired, travelled around the world, hung out with some of the best gurus on the planet, firstly because I love it, but I really wanted to be a living example of this experience and this lifestyle in order to be able to help other people do the same.
And so it’s all about taking another look and I launched a program called Live It Now as a symbol to my dad, and Live It Now came out as a way to help people face their wounds.
I create a safe and supportive environment where I bring in a fantastic team to help everyone get back on track. In this space they can get clear about the future they want to create for themselves. I help people wake up in a good way instead of waiting for the crisis, shaking them up and examining and auditing their belief systems and turning their wounds into superpowers. It only takes one weekend and it’s also a lot of fun.
Live it Now has now started to become a global movement. We’ve raised almost a million dollars for charity, and life just keeps getting better.
I started to realize the wounds that we have are really important, and instead of them being your jailer, what we want to do is look at them in a different way and change the stories. The minute we start to change these stories we get new ideas and these ideas are amazing ones because often they are connected to our authenticity or our purpose.
So without even trying you just instantly find yourself and your future path opens up in front of you. It’s such an amazing transformation to see people realise that it’s always been there, locked inside them. Once you release and let go of the muck that is holding you back you feel an instant connection because it’s you, the old you, the you that you were before all the shit happened and it’s such an incredible and powerful and rewarding feeling.
The thing that most people need to realise is that ALL CHANGE IS INSTANT. Once you can see the patterns you don’t have to do 30 days of habits or read a daily mantra, your brain will instantly switch over to a new and improved system when it notices one available.
All you have to do after that is have a support system in place to help you follow through and take action.
And the thing is, when you can ignite that passion inside of you then it has so much meaning to you, much more than a ‘should’ feeling and your neurology starts to head in that direction as well. So for the first time in maybe years, people feel like they aren’t having to fight themselves all the time, suddenly they have more energy and more drive so they can get where they want to be quickly and with confidence.
And just like how those negative beliefs and victim mentalities pick up speed as we use them more, so do the positive and creative ones. So the more ongoing work you do on having self-awareness and doing the audits and questioning the wounds, the positive effects just pick up speed and become autopilot responses.
If you were to imagine a sailing boat, a big beautiful boat that you own, but if you don’t get it on the right course or if you don’t get that sailboat aligned, the sails will flap uselessly and it’ll be a terrible experience. But once you find that wind, once you find that flow, you start to sail, and it starts to become really, really easy.
The more you start to understand yourself and the more you go through challenges, when you align yourself, suddenly everything starts to flow. And that flow comes in the form of almost manifestation, where you meet the right people, the right opportunities pop up and, almost without effort, sales start to come into your business from all of these random locations and you start to move to this position where life has so much meaning and it’s synchronistic.
The key is being able to experience it, which is why I run Live It Now, basically free to the community, because I think we all need to do a bit of an audit, especially if you haven’t looked at that stuff or you’re still running those patterns from childhood.
It’s an opportunity to wake up and we can ask different questions, we can look at the world in a different way and start living differently, without having to go through a massive crisis and reach breaking point first.
Live It Now is such a wonderful starting point to be able to look at all of those things, and so if you’re interested in Live It Now, check it out liveitnow.com.au we’d love to see you at that event. Have a bit of fun, meet some amazing people. In fact, they’ll probably turn into lifelong friends.
And please, keep asking me questions, drop an email or ask me on Facebook. I just want to give you as much information as I possibly can, so tell me what you need to break through, because I would love to see you get there.
The answers are inside, and often not externally, and let’s look at all of these unconscious patterns. Let’s do an audit on it, and let’s challenge these wounds and let’s turn them into your superpowers.
Kindest regards,
Matt Catling
