The Long Game Podcast
Why do we make the choices we do? Most progress is stalled not by a lack of effort, but by the invisible scripts and unconscious patterns that drive our decision-making. The Long Game is a space for clear thinking in a noisy world, designed for those who prioritize sustainable growth over manufactured urgency.
I’m Luke Hockborn, and I deconstruct the mechanics of momentum, behavior, and first-principles thinking—specifically for the business of life and work.
We bypass the "hacks" and performative motivation of the hustle economy to focus on cognitive architecture. This isn’t about moving faster; it’s about seeing the board more clearly. If you are building something that matters and you value discipline over hype, this is your sounding board for the long-term perspective.
No shortcuts. No manufactured urgency. Just the mental models required to play the Long Game.
The Long Game Podcast
The Predictive Prison Called Your Mind – Why Your Truth is Killing Your Potential.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most people think they’re seeing the world as it is. They aren’t. They’re seeing a "best-guess" simulation projected by their own brain. Your mind isn’t a camera recording reality; it’s a prediction engine.
In this episode of The Long Game, we explore:
- The 50-Bit Bottleneck: Why you are ignoring 99% of reality every single second.
- The Identity Trap: Why "I'm the kind of person who..." is a self-issued warrant for stagnation.
- Narrator vs. Experiencer: How the story you tell yourself after the fact is ruining your present.
- Belief Utility: Why you need to stop asking if a belief is "true" and start asking if it’s "useful."
We are dismantling the Predictive Prison—the internal architecture that keeps you stagnant. Most people are busy being lawyers for their limitations; this episode is about becoming a scientist for your potential.
Your behavior is downstream of what you think is true. A belief is a tool, not a tattoo. If the tools you’re carrying aren't cutting through the noise anymore, it’s time to put them down and upgrade your software.
Connect with the Show:
- Instagram: @thelonggame_podcast
- Message the Show: Buzzsprout (Send a Text/Question)
Listen On:
- Apple Podcasts: The Long Game Podcast
- Spotify: Listen on Spotify
Well, first things first, sorry I'm late. One thing I've built my life on is not lying. And I'm not trying to validate being twelve hours late to posting this, I promise. Lying is a horrible habit, I think, and I think we can all agree on. And only really causes you more challenges down the line, be it with the person or your own internal conflict you have to handle or battle that will long linger in many a situation after it. And perhaps that's a topic for another day. Anyways, I'd argue the latter is much worse, and therefore I'm not going to try and do the same thing today. So this weekend, what have I been up to? I was very fortunate to be away with work with Paul and the team in Miami for something we call winners' weekend, where we take four of our biggest members from events who have won awards, and then we take them out to Miami for the weekend to celebrate with them. And it's always an absolute pleasure. It's my first time going on that trip, an absolute pleasure to spend time around those guys. And it's just to again to be a spectator in their success and be a part of that. And then the day after I went to Tampa Bay with Sarah for the rest of the weekend, one of the many perks of moving to Orlando, as I recently did over the last couple of weeks, as many of you will know, is having all these places now within a radius that you can jump between. As I said on my own personal Instagram this morning, I literally got into a habit of saying yes, and then you see where it may take you. Mine right now is taking me into these opportunities. Very blessed, but it's a 10-year journey that I've been on. Anyways, here I am now, and sorry I'm late again, but I'll jump right into it. And I've got a fun topic, stroke idea I want to explore, and I think try and pick apart a little bit to help both you and I understand a little bit more about our minds and kind of what's going on from a I suppose from my level of what I see this. So consider this. Your brain isn't a video camera, it's a prediction engine. We don't see the world, we see our best guess of what the world is to us. So let's have that settled for a second when you're considering your day to day. If you're listening to it now, if you're listening to it a week or a month in advance, whatever that looks like, just remember that we don't see the world. What we see is our best guess of how the world is in our minds. You see, right now your senses are being flooded. You receive roughly around about 11 million bits of information every second that are hitting your nervous system, right? But your conscious mind, well, it can actually only handle around about 50 bits of information. So let's just work that number out very quickly, and I'm going to try and say this number. That means you are ignoring 10,999,950 pieces of reality every single second. You see, you aren't seeing the world as it is, you're seeing a best guess simulation. So what your mind does is you have those 50 bits of information that it will retain and it will take on. The rest are just predictive. The rest are just a thought process of how you perceive the world based on a set of stories, experiences, circumstances that have gone on in the past. You're effectively living in a world of predictive processing. Your brain isn't a camera, it's a projector. So if your projector is loaded with what I would say is the wrong slides, and if you believe that you're too tired or too late or just not that kind of person, then you will literally be blind to the opportunities standing right in front of your face. So, welcome to the long game. This is episode 14. We call in this one the predictive prison that is called your mind. So consider your brain as an algorithm that's working on two fundamental axes, right? There's number one, which is the narrating self, and number two is the experiencing self. So I'll break those two down very quickly for you. So the experiencing self, i.e., is the one that's living your life in real time. It's the one that every day when we're going through moments is the one that is experiencing. It feels everything as it happens, it doesn't really judge, it just reacts, and it lives in the present moment. So to give you a bit of a context around that, the example would be you're at dinner, laughing, enjoying that experiencing. Every one of those moments is experiencing it from the hellos, the goodbyes, the how are you, the interesting stories, the the jokes at the table that come from a couple of people talking about certain stories. That is experience, right? And that's the experiencing self. Now the secondary side is the narrating self, and that's the one that is telling the story after the fact. So what does the narrating self do differently? Well, it interprets what things mean, it compares, judges, and labels things, and it lives in the past or the future, never the present. So to give you that, and again, to use the dinner analogy of that one, is that dinner wasn't very good, and I've had better, or I wish I could afford more of this, right? The narrating self uses a model known as something called the peak end model, and it's the story you tell yourself after the fact. So essentially what the peak end model is, is the peak moment of the experience plus how is how did the experience finish. So the peak moment of the experience, and then how did the end of the experience finish. It will use that to determine how we see things. Now the the off the issue, sorry, often lies in how much power we give the narrator, not the experience. You see, your life is lived by the experience and self, but decided by the narrating self. So for many of you might you might know this, you might not know this. I was listening to a podcast who was talking about this exact study, right? So this study isn't allowed today, but actually, for as as as you listen to this, you might think, God, that's awful, right? And the reality is it is, right? The absolute real harsh reality is, but also there was one of those things where from coming from it came a very, very good understanding of something, right? But probably something that isn't understood very well, right? It was once confirmed that you could disconnect two halves of the brain, and that is how we know that these two different experiences and how human beings actually live. So, fast forward to modern day, what does it mean for you and I? So, again, just so I'm clear before we go any further, I do not agree with this study, I do not agree with it being done. However, something good or something, a momentary bit of good actually came from this. So think of it this way: if you lived in the experiencing, you would be far better off. The challenges were consumed by the narrating brain. That's the reality. And that's all of us, by the way. Pretty much all of us are consumed, especially today, by the narrating brain. And the list is endless that we tell ourselves almost daily. I know I beat on social media, I know I beat on Instagram and all these things. I I don't think I actually beat on the platform, and I don't think I'm beating on the the how do I put this? And yeah, I'm not beating on the platform of the thing, I'm beating on how it is being utilized because there is a pure intent behind social media. When Facebook was first invented, it was designed on a way that was this idea that how do we connect people, friends and family, long distance, for special moments so that we can stay in touch? Because prior to that, Facebook, usually all we had was photo albums, and we reminisced when we all got together at Christmas or perhaps birthday parties or for religious events. Those were really the only times that you got to share in the experiences, and you took your digital camera or your you took your what's it called? I I forget disposable camera. There we go, disposable camera, and you printed off the photos when you came back from holiday, and then you went and showed your friends, you showed family, and then they came out years later. Again, you and I all have this experience, no doubt, where you some you meet your partner comes and meets your parents for the first time or the first few times, and what happens? The old kid, the old children photos come out. That was essentially how we did things, and before Facebook, that was kind of the the way that we operated. Then Facebook came along and gave us a way to do those things, and it had a pure intent in it. And again, Twitter had a pure intent behind it, and Instagram has a pure intent behind them. But like anything, once humans get hold of them, they genuinely become from what is a tool for good to actually is something that ends up becoming um something that's quite bad actually, and doesn't really help humanity move forward. So, but it is back to my point, the prime example of experience versus narrating, and it's the it's ultimately what I would call is a narrative enforcement machine. That's what social media is, because we gaslight ourselves almost every day. You and I alike. I'm not keeping myself out of this, by the way. And what we do is we fundamentally take our beliefs, which are just constructed viewpoints, and we treat them like truths. So there's three main factors to this, right, that I want to break down here before we move on. So, what is a truth, right? Truth is objective. So gravity is a truth. It doesn't care if you believe in it, it's a factual reality that it exists, and you cannot deny that. And it works in exactly the same way that gravity was taught to us. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, so if you have truth all the way on the left, on the right hand side, you have something called faith. Faith sits at the other end, it requires no evidence at all. It's very often built upon stories and myths, then that is not to upset anyone of a religious nature because I know that someone listening to that might think that I am having a go at religion, right? In that sense, I'm not. I'm personally not religious, but it's the very descriptive that faith sits on in this in this example. So you've got truth on the left, faith on the right. Belief is in the dangerous middle ground of those things. And most of us are defending our beliefs as if they're an inherited, inherited DNA. They're a part of it, part of our story. They are not indeed truths, but beliefs are just tools. So beliefs effectively are priors, right? So you might call them something called priors. Past experiences, though, that create your current simulation. And if those tools are driving behaviors that limit your growth, it doesn't matter how true they feel, they are costing you a life that you haven't met yet. So today I don't want to get into the right and wrong of is this belief true, right? Because I there's so many nuances and variables to those situations, which means I can't answer that question, and nor would I even try to, right? Because situation to situation, moment to moment are all very different. What I'd prefer to actually ask today is is this belief actually useful to the version of me that I'm trying to become? And if it isn't, then what are we going to do about it? So let's think about the biological reality of this, right? So your behavior is effectively downstream of what you think is true. So remember when I said previous episodes, change the belief, change the behavior as a mentor of mine taught me? It's very similar. So if you believe this won't work for me, or then you won't try fully. If you don't try fully, then you won't see the pivot points available to you. When you fail, your brain essentially will say, See, I told you so. And you've just turned a faulty belief into a fact. So congratulations and welcome to the self-limiting beliefs that control your life. I am gonna let that sit for about 10 seconds right now because I really wanted to all sit and think about that of where you've played out that cat that story arc. This won't work for me. You don't fully try. And if you don't fully try, you won't see the pivot points available to you. When you fail, your brain says, See, I told you so, and you turned a faulty belief into a fact. That right there is the self-limiting beliefs that control everyone's lives. And most of us, by the way, don't do it intentionally. We just got so used to telling that story and that arc, over and over it, it became normality, much like every Marvel movie ever told. Cue the absolute hatred for any fans of Marvel, I'm sorry, but it genuinely, on a rule of thumb, is most of the Marvel movies carry the same arc and you can tell what's going to happen, right? There's almost a the reason it works, by the way, in Marvel movies is because you know the arc and you know what's gonna happen. So you know that there's gonna be the twist and you know that there's gonna be the saving moment, right? Now, to me, the problem with that is is that that arc works in movies because it is a it's not reality, right? It's completely made up. It is built on a way to build tension, to build up adrenaline, to build excitement, knowing that you're gonna get the payoff at the end. So in 90 minutes, two hours, two and a half hours, you're effectively gonna get the payoff that you go in to go and see, which is you get that adrenaline buzz, you get that dopamine hit, and you get that excitement about it, right? So it works in this scenario of movies. The problem is that life isn't a movie, and life is actually reality, and we have to experience it and we have to see what it's about and we have to understand, and it's not always gonna end up nicely. So when we use these kind of beliefs and we keep telling ourselves the same story arc over and over again, then we end up in this product, we end up in this situation where we have all these self-limiting beliefs imposed on a life that is holding you back every day. So let's talk about that 11 million bit bottleneck that we're talking about and why why identity is effectively a script which you've memorized, right? So again, use the movie analogy. Every time you go through life, you give you given yourself the same script, the same arc, and you know exactly how this plays out. The moment that you can try and then break that habit and break that arc, that's when life starts to take place. So let's first and foremost dive into the 50-bit bottleneck, right? So this idea I talked about earlier, we are taking 11 million bits per second, right? And we only ever experience the fit, we only experience sorry 50. So let's break it down into reality, right? You must filter reality to survive, or you'd go insane, right? You absolutely have to. I totally understand that, right? There is so much going on in the world with social media, with exposure and news, with exposure to everything. You have to filter it because otherwise you would simply go insane. But the problem is, is who is the editor of the movie that you're talking about? So if you've been hurt, your editor is gonna look for threats. If you've failed, your editor is gonna be looking for exits. If you're seeing a curated version of the room, but if you see the positive, then imagine the career arc that you could be going on or the life arc you could be going on. So if every time you've been hurt, then the next time you're gonna look at the next human. So let's take that away from my relationships. If one relationship hurts you, then by definition, based on that arc, then the next human being will ultimately hurt you at some point, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. And if you try the task for the first time at work and you fail, then the next time you're always gonna be looking for outs to give it to someone else, because then you know the arc that you're gonna fail again and again and again. And every time that you do, you put less effort in, less less activity, which ultimately then goes, see, I told you it was true, right? You've curated a version of it that doesn't really exist, right? But if you see the positive in it, then you can possibly change it. The reality of that is, by the way, that takes an effort, it takes a controlled effort to be able to think like that. That's again my way. So I'm gonna give you a little story now, right? I was in a meeting three, four years ago, and we talked about some property and some new budgets that were getting put into place, right? Now we just started this company, this property company, and probably been going about nine, twelve months, and we'd had this team of contractors and builders in a room, right? And we were talking about budgets and how they couldn't do what they needed to do with the budgets that were available, right? Fair and reasonable. This is a conversation that happens a lot in businesses, and it'll also happen in personal lives, by the way, when you get people who tell you all the reasons why it won't work. Anyway, I sat and listened for this conversation for around about 30 minutes, and I listened to four people tell me, tell me, tell the other person who was with me every reason why this won't work. And I listened, by the way, I didn't argue, I never once at any point turned around and said, try to challenge anything or try and argue against it. I just listened, right? And then I don't think I realized I was doing this, and I I don't know if I was just, I don't know what was the reason for me doing this, right? I don't really have an explanation at this point. But I listened for 30 minutes, and there was only one defining thought that I could have in my mind at that time, which was this. I left everyone to finish talking and arguing and challenging the what what was happening next. And when they all came to a conclusion and a finish, and I asked, I said, Hey, is that you know, is that everything? Is that everything you guys want to talk about? Is everything you finish? He's going, Yeah. How it great. We're gonna spend the next 15 minutes now talking about how it will work. I said, because you've just spent the last 30 minutes giving me a hundred reasons why it won't work. Now let's talk about the idea of why it will work. Because there is multiple companies who are operating in these systems and these formats with these budgets, who are doing exactly what we wanted to do, that are making it work. The only thing that had to be changed was the perspective on this and the belief that it could work. And when you start working from a position of it can work, you suddenly start coming up with new ideas, new strategies, new ways of formatting it. That's the same in every one of our lives, by the way, every time that we do things. If you constantly ask the question of, okay, and that's not to say, by the way, right, that you don't view the side that says it might not work, but it's to understand it and then change the belief and say, well, how might it work? And if how might it work does that, then great, let's have a little conversation on that. That I think is a great part to think about just on that very moment alone, which is how do we make it? And instead of having self-limiting beliefs, have those positive reaffirming beliefs, right? They tell you it could work, it might actually work. I apologize if anyone just heard that. My ankle just cracked, by the way, just a huge crack that just went in my ankle as I moved. So let's dive a little bit further into this, right? So I talked to something called priors or belief, right? Call them what you want. And I talked about this earlier on about how this idea is the brain is a prediction engine, essentially, right? And it effectively will predict what coffee tastes like before it hits your tongue. So if I said to you, hey, try that coffee, right? Black coffee, the first thing that your brain will tell you is it's bitter. Why? Because there is a predisposition of potentially tasting coffee before, or if you've never tasted coffee before, you have had a coffee flavoring of something, or you've been around people who've told you what coffee tastes like. So immediately before it even hits your tongue, you know what coffee tastes like. Don't know the exact, but you know in a general rule of thumb how that coffee tastes. That same narrative is the same one that predicts how a conversation will go before you open your mouth, right? If your prior is people don't respect me, you'll interpret a neutral glance as an insult. Right? So let's go back, it predicts how a conversation will go before you open your mouth. Now let's put that into action. How many times have you sat somewhere and thought, I need to have a conversation with someone, but you've been afraid of the conversation because of how you perceive or the belief of how that thing is going to go, how that situation will happen. Right? And you'll probably play out the argument that might ensue, the disagreement that will come, they won't respect me, they won't see my point of view, and before you know it, you don't actually have the conversation. Or what ends up happening is you would then have these internal resentments that over time break the relationship, whether that be personal, whether that be your spouse, whatever that looks like. That is effectively what's happening in most people's lives every day, right? Harsh reality, it happens all the time. You predict the conversation of how it's going to go before you've even had the conversation or even given the person the ability to have that. Now, I can hear some people right now sitting in my head going, but Luke, this guy's a X, Y, L Z, right? He doesn't respect me. Why would I even have the conversation? You're right, right? Maybe it doesn't. But that's a different question. Why have you got that person still in your life? I would ask, right? If that is, unless it's at work and you are literally in a paid format, that means you have to be a partners and a thing like that. If that person is still in your life and he's that person is not conducive to what you want to achieve, then the question I don't ask the question of why are you not having the conversation. I ask the question of why is that person still in your life. Because that person is not doing anything to better your life or help you along the way in any which way, shape, or form. That doesn't mean they have to pay for something or buy something or do something. I'm talking actually just about your internal energy and how you feel about these things. So it's simply like this, right? So the negative side of that is the feedback loop of doom, you might want to call this, right? I'm sure someone's probably called it before. If you believe it won't work, you won't try. If you don't try, you fail. Now you have proof it didn't work. So your belief, right, that it won't work, just create a completely new truth. And when you rewire your brain into those truths again, I've said this earlier in the episode. Good luck. Good luck and enjoying life, good luck getting to anywhere you want to be, right? Because you'll constantly go up and you'll see every situation from that negativity rather than how can this situation benefit me? Where can I take the 10-20% lessons from this? And I'm going to upset some people right now with the next thing that I say on this. Think about this identity trap. And think about how many times someone said this. By the way, I used to say this. So again, I'm not taught telling this as if like I'm Mr. Perfect here. I used to say this a lot. I'm the kind of person who is the most dangerous sentence in the English language. It's a self-issued warrant for stagnation. It's a little it's like the barriers that you can put up at Bournemouth, right? Is how I would define this, right? When I was thinking about this, I'm the kind of person who are essentially the barriers that when you go at Bournemouth, for my American counterparts, temp in Bournemouth, right? You're effectively saying I'm not good enough to play this game without these barriers in place. Because if not, my ball will go off the side and I'll lose and I will fail. And perhaps the first time you have them down, you're correct, by the way. Because the first time you do it, you don't have any experience of how to get past this point, how to play this game better. But over time, you actually might just become a competent bowler, then a good one. Soon you're trying to get others to take down their barriers. Imagine that in life, by the way, right? So let's take that ball analogy again, let's break that apart. I'm the kind of person who is the most dangerous sentence in the English language. Why? Because it's like playing ball tempting ball in with the barriers up. You're effectively saying every time I'm not good enough to play this game without those barriers. Every time, by the way, think about when you go ball in, that's the same thing. You are putting the guardrails up immediately before you've even done anything. You haven't even tried yet, and you're Already putting rails up. You're already putting guardrails up to say that I can't do this thing. And the reality is you have to get past the first, second, and third times because I guarantee the first, second, and third times, it will not go your way. It won't go right. The ball will go in the gutter, I believe it's called on the sides, and you'll be like, see, Luke, see, I proved you're right. I told you I'm no good at bowling. But then the next time you go, and the next time you go, you just get that little 10% better every time. Before you know it, you're getting better. Now do that in conversations, do that in life. Every time you are giving a life example or an experience or a situation, how do you get past that moment to take the 10% out of it to use it in the next example and the next example? My personal example of this would be golf. So to give you some context, when I was younger, my grandma and grandpa used to like taking us on caravan holidays in the UK. And my grandpa was a big golfer, right? When he found golf, he abandoned going to choir and the church with my grandma, much to a disagreement, and fell in love with golf. Now, he would take us to go play golf when we went on these trips. There was always a golf course next to the camping grounds that we were on. And my brother, who is older than me, is a natural when it comes to sports, right? So when it comes to hand-eye coordination, that guy's just I don't know what it is. Tennis, cricket, um, squash, football, golf, he's just got a natural ability, right, to be good at it, right? And to be able to connect the dots. Me, on the other hand, not so much. For everything he got in that department, I think he took all of mine in that respect in that respect because I didn't, right? I didn't get any of it, is the reality of it. And I went round hacking the course up. So much so that grandpa, my grandpa actually banned me from playing golf with him because he said I was going to cost him more in green fees to repair the course than I was actually taking him out. By the way, as an older as older I am now, I respect it, completely understand. And as someone who plays golf, I even get it even more. Years later, me and my friend Kieran sat in a bar after work once, and I said, I really want to start golf. I used to love the sport, I used to love playing, but unfortunately, and I like watching it, but yeah, I just never had a bit of time or anything like that to be able to really do it. He said, Well, I've been thinking the same thing, lo and behold. So I we said, let's start playing. Three and a half years later. I mean, let me go back, sorry. We started playing. I wasn't very good again, right? Not very good at the sport, just wasn't, right? And but I kept going back. I went back maybe two or three times every week to a driving range and started playing golf. And then I'd watch YouTube videos and I'd go back again and I'd go again and again and again, and I'd watch the professionals play and I'd go back again. I used to go and play golf two, three times in terms of practicing two or three times a week, to the point that before I left the UK I was playing off around about 13, 14, right? Now, to anyone who's a golfer listening to this, you may have a little bit of concept of what it takes to get to that point, right? And especially for someone who never swung a club for circa 29-30 years. That was a a lot of concerted effort to be able to get to that point. But the reality was I could have sat there and said, I'm not good enough, and I'm the kind of person who isn't very good at this. In actual fact, I said I was like, okay, yeah, you're right, I'm an amateur, I'm I'm worse than an amateur. However, what I can do is I can go and try and I can learn. And I can learn how to grip a club properly, and I can learn how to stand, and I can learn the mechanics of how to balance my feet and where my feet need to sit and how I do the takeaway of a club and where all those things happen, those one things. And I would go and I would hit 50 to 100 balls practicing on one minor detail to the point that three years later, I am good at golf, right? Like the grand scheme of golfers, I'm good at golf. But that was my own part to it. And again, you can sit there and say I'm not very good at it. The same with this podcast. Episode one, I'm not very good at podcasts, I'm not very good at this, so why would I do it? Okay. Now 14, 15 episodes in, right? And I'm still going and loving it, right? Hopefully I'll get to a hundred and two hundred episodes. But the reality is that the episodes I'll probably listen back into now. I I I reckon I could listen back to episode one to right now and see exactly the difference between me as a podcaster or hosting these or talking or thinking about ideas and breaking them down so that you, the listener, can actually take understand what point I'm trying to get across. That was one of the first things that my friends gave me feedback on was to say that sometimes I don't feel like I can understand your point in episodes one, two, and three. Hopefully now that's changed. So let's start looking at this, right? Of the pattern of beliefs, right? So most people are living their life defending opinions that they didn't even choose, right? So the long game requires moving to a high level of processing. So again, I talked about the idea of how do you step back and look at the 10, 20% of a situation that's positive rather than the 80%. By the way, that positivity might be four or five percent sometimes. But this is how it kind of plays out. First step is the reactive belief, right? The inherited, unexamined, and defensive. The I'm too old or I'm not a math person phase. The best example I can give you of this is just catch yourself how you react to when someone says something that you disagree with, right? Or maybe has a little snappy reaction to you. Catch yourself in that moment of how your brain starts to think about that before you've even said anything. That is the reactive belief. Step two is the evidence loop, right? And this is where you start to notice that your beliefs are creating your results. You see a little bit of confirmation bias happen in real time. So again, using the same example of how you react, and then you sit there and go, Well, am I reacting to what they said or how I feel about what they said? Those are two very different things. When you get to phase three, your conviction is open to revision, right? So this is where you get to like the pro level, the elite level of belief, right? Of opinion versus conviction. So you hold your belief strongly enough to act, but you're constantly looking for the better data to upgrade it if it if there are, right? Again, I'm not saying you constantly have to change your belief system. I'm saying you have to be aware enough to know when those belief systems aren't working for you and have started to work against you for where you are trying to get to. Again, not challenging that some beliefs are right and some beliefs are wrong. I'm challenging the idea of do they actually work for you. In this regard, once you get to phase three of this, you start to hold your belief systems strongly enough that they are part of you and they're your personality, absolutely. But you're always looking to understand, are they still helping me in my day-to-day, my week to week, to get me to where I want to be, right? So you're effectively as this, as I mentioned earlier, right, is behavior is downstream, right? Of change of beliefs, change the change of beliefs, change the behaviors, right? And that is really where discipline is what you use when your beliefs are broken, right? So if you believe you're an athlete, then you don't find the discipline to work out. You just go because that's what athletes do in this regard. And if you're struggling to act, stop thinking at your habits and start looking at your priors. Again, go back to this idea, right? My behaviors are what I'm doing right now, but my beliefs are creating my behaviors. So most people, right, will try and try and change the beh the behavior, especially when it comes to diets, right? But everyone knows that you need to stop eating pizza, pizza, right? If you're overweight, stop eating pizza. If you're overweight, stop overeating, right? Or start working out. That's not rocket science, it's easy. I saw a video from someone on Instagram the day talking about calorie and calorie out, right? And this whole ideology, like this whole idea of it, right? And I'm not disagreeing, by the way, because it is, it's a generally simple game of calorie and calorie out for most people. Some nuances and medical issues, but for the most part, calorie and calorie out is literally the easiest thing in the world, right? And usually it comes out of tracking it. But I also sat there thinking, how are we still on this conversation? This conversation started four or five years ago, right? Of calorie and calorie out. And yet somehow, we're still on it today. We're still on that today, right? Because the reality is that we're trying to change the behavior, right, without changing the belief system underneath it, which is great, who are you as a human being and why do you why have you done this to yourself? Why have you why have you put yourself in a situation that does this, right? That's put themselves into a health risk issue that has put you to be potentially overweight or in a deficit for whatever reason of some which shape or form. Why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense as to why you would. You change that, you change the thing in that, which is the eating habits, which is the workout patterns. You change all those things. You change the belief, sorry, you change the behaviors. Simple as that. One of the again, fantastic thing that I was taught by one of my mentors, and again, I love sharing those things. My life isn't my life is nothing but absorbing what other people who I believe are further ahead on their journey and know more than I do, and taking those lessons, applying them to my life, trying to understand how they do, and then hopefully I can share those on. I said this at the start, if I can help one, ten, hundred people, it's been worth it. Same thing today. And last but not least, right, in this, before we wrap up this episode, I want to give you the concept of a two-person room. So two people, and I by the way, I mean the what job that I do right now is I work, we do events, right? And we do events all all you know, and it's very it's the same, by the way. This is the best example you'll get before we wrap this thing up. The two-person the two-person room idea. Two people walk into a networking event, right? One sees a room full of judges, i.e., belief is I'm not good enough, right? The other sees a room full of mentors. The belief is I belong here. The same 11 million bits of information, right, as we talked about earlier, when you walk in that room, two completely different lives. As a business coach, I have watched hundreds of people attend the attend our seminars. Fifty will be guests, 25 will walk away with their lives changed, 25 will go back to doing the exact same thing that brought them to the room. Just let that sink in. Which side of the room are you about to walk on? Right? Are you the one that sees every room full of judges, people who judge you, or are you a room full of scenes full of mentors, people who believe you're sorry, that you belong here and that belief can help you? Two different lives, same room. They both walked in with the same problems, the same challenges, the same wants. They both walked out the room through the same door. The only difference is that one person changed their life and the other person didn't. Usually it comes down to that belief system. And if that belief system is being built up of I can't versus how does this possibly work, watch which one wins. So if you refuse to audit your beliefs, by the way, you're living in a predictive prison and it's called your mind. You'll keep trying to change your results while using the same broken lens that you started with. And it's like trying to drive into a new destination using an old map of a different city. Ever return to a different part of town years later and the roads have all changed. In the UK, that happened in Newcastle to me, where they changed everything to a one-way system, and my mapping system or sat nav did not work at all. Just did not work. And it was taking me down roads that were one-way systems, and I was like, that that is it, by the way, right? Your mind is constantly taking you down one-way systems when or sorry, through open lanes when you think it's a one-way system and it's refusing to go down. So when you feel that friction, the sense of I can't, that isn't a signal of your limitations, by the way. It's the check engine light in the car analogy that is telling you that your current identity has reached some form of capacity or that it's possibly not working for you. And it's time for you to start updating it. Does it mean you have to update it? No. Does it mean that you will update all of it? Probably not. But you'll probably find the 10 to 20% that you do need to slightly adjust to get you to where you want. So look at the truths you've been carrying, right? Think of the priors that have been built. The ones that say you're too fat, too short, too tired, or too lit. Stop asking if those thoughts are actually true. Because of course they feel true, by the way. I'm not saying that you what you feel isn't true in that moment, the experience in self. But you spent a lifetime gathering the evidence to prove it. Start asking, does this belief serve the person I'm becoming tomorrow or next week or next month? And let me leave you with this beliefs are tools, not tattoos. If the tool is blunt and it's no longer cutting through the noise that you have in life, put it down. Pick up a belief that actually works and starts to serve you. Reality is waiting for you to see it.