There Are Three Versions of You

Vegas. 2012. Three in the morning.

I was dying and I only had thirty days left to live. And for some reason I wasn't allowed to tell Kelly or the boys. I had to walk around with this secret, act like everything was fine, knowing I was about to leave them forever.

I was lying in a hotel bed drenched in sweat and my heart was slamming against my ribs like a panic attack. I've had nightmares before, but this one was different. I just sat there in the dark, staring at the wall, thinking about things I'd been running from for years.

Even in a dream, when you only have thirty days left, it forces all the noise to disappear. All the reasons you've been telling yourself about why you do what you do, the things that felt so important yesterday, they're gone. And what's left is so obvious you can't understand how you ever got distracted.

I was at the Palms Casino running one of my mastermind groups. The Seven Mastermind, twenty entrepreneurs, all making six figures, all wanting to hit seven. Smart people, all driven, and all very successful by any normal definition. These were people who'd figured out how to win at the game of life.

I had a whole agenda planned for Saturday morning around business strategy and growth tactics.

I looked at my slides at 9 am and they felt a little empty.

So I told them about my dream instead.

And then I asked them one question: What do you actually want? What are the most important things in your life? What actually matters to you?

The room shifted pretty quickly, I could see that, but nobody really wanted to go first. And then it just sort of opened up. Chris, one of my buddies and a guy I'd known for years, told everyone his wife was leaving him. He'd seen it coming but kept telling himself he had to get to that mythical "next level" first. He thought she would understand. Ironically, she understood perfectly, she understood it was his choice.

Steve could barely talk. His six-year-old daughter kept asking him to play while he was packing for this trip. He said "in a minute" four times. She fell asleep on the couch. He left for the airport the next morning without saying goodbye because he was in a hurry. He had a flight to catch so he could get to Vegas and learn how to make more money.

Don said he'd gained forty pounds in two years and couldn't climb stairs without getting winded. He thought about getting healthy constantly. But thinking about it isn't doing anything about it.

I was staring at twenty people in a room, all of them winning and almost none of them happy.

And I kept asking myself the same question I want to ask you right now: how does this happen? How do smart, driven, capable people end up succeeding at things that don't actually matter to them?

Here's HOW:

There are three versions of you.
And only one of them is real.

YOU is your higher self. This is the real one. The version of you that knows what actually matters and you've probably been suffocating for years. This is the part of you that shows up on quiet walks, late at night when the defenses come down. I love this part of me, he's been such a good friend to get to know, and he knows the answer to every question I've been avoiding.

YOU2 is how other people actually see you. Your wife or husband has a version of you in their head that they built from every interaction and every fight and every tender moment. Your kids have a different one. Your coworkers have another. Honestly, if you know five hundred people, there are five hundred versions of you walking around out there and every single one of them is different. YOU2 is hard to control, but it's not really the problem, it's just reality. Life is about perspective and you'll never really be able to truly get inside people's heads, especially when it comes to you.

The problem is YOU3.

YOU3 is how you think others see you. It's not how they actually see you, it's how you imagine they see you. This is a sneaky little one, because it's your guess about what's going on in all those heads. It's your assumption about what they expect from you.

And it's almost entirely fictional.

You have no idea what people actually think of you. You have guesses and projections and assumptions you made based on a raised eyebrow or a comment from three years ago. The only data you have is your own imagination.

And yet this is the version most people spend their entire lives serving.

YOU3 is constantly running in the background: They probably expect me to… They'll think I'm weak if I… I should do this because that's what people like me do…

None of that is based on what others actually think. It's fiction. It's a story you completely made up and you're making real decisions based on it. You're spending years of your life serving an audience that exists only in your head.

A fictional version of yourself has been making your decisions. And you didn't even know it.

How crazy is this???

If you think I'm exaggerating, if part of you is sitting there thinking "okay I get it but I'm not that bad," let me tell you about this little experiment in 1980, when researchers at Dartmouth College decided to test a "theory."

They brought people into a room and sat them down with a professional makeup artist. The artist applied a realistic facial scar to their right cheek. It was really ugly, disfiguring and impossible to miss. The participants watched in a mirror as the scar was applied. They could see it and it looked so real.

Then right before sending them out, the makeup artist said she needed to apply one more thing, a moisturizer to keep the makeup from cracking. But this was the trick: the moisturizer was just an excuse to remove the scar completely. She wiped it away without them realizing.

They walked out of the room with a completely normal face. But they believed they were disfigured.

The task was simple. Go into the next room and have a conversation with a stranger. Just talk for a few minutes and be yourself.

The craziest thing happened.

The participants reported feeling the other person's discomfort. They said the strangers didn't want to look at them and they felt a tension in the room. They also felt distance and they even said they were patronizing and judging. They experienced every social consequence of being disfigured.

But there was no scar. The stranger saw a completely normal face. There was no discomfort, no avoidance, no judgment, because there was nothing to judge.

Everything they experienced, every ounce of it, was constructed entirely inside their own minds.

That's YOU3 in a laboratory.

So how many scars are you walking around with right now that don't exist? How many decisions have you made because of judgment that wasn't happening? How many years have you spent performing for an audience that wasn't watching?

So how do you stop? How do you let the real you drive?

About ten years ago I was coaching Little League baseball. We started the season on fire, nine straight wins, kids crushing the ball, everybody having fun. And then we hit the wall. Six straight losses heading into one of the biggest tournaments of the year. No one got hurt, these were the same kids but they couldn't get the ball out of the infield.

I called a buddy who used to be a professional scout, hoping he'd give me some cutting-edge hitting technique. Instead he asked me if I'd ever heard the story of the pink elephant.

He told me that in spring training they'd get professional athletes, guys making millions of dollars a year, and sit them in the outfield. They'd close their eyes and imagine they were sitting on their couch at home. And then they told them, "Now whatever you do, do NOT imagine a giant pink elephant walking through your front door and sitting down next to you."

Every single player starts laughing. Because every single one of them imagined pink elephants.

Your brain can't process a negative. When someone says "don't think of a pink elephant" the first thing your brain does is picture a pink elephant. It has to. It has to see the thing before it can try not to see it.

My kids were walking up to the plate thinking don't strike out, don't ground out, don't pop out. And all their brain heard was you're out.

So we just replaced that thought. Hit the ball. Hit the ball. Hit the ball.

From the very first batter of that tournament, everything changed. We won the whole thing. Those kids are in their early twenties now and almost every time I see one of them around town, they bring up the pink elephant. It stuck with them that much.

What you focus on expands.

And it's not more complicated than that.

YOU3 is your pink elephant. It's what you've been creating your life around.

STOP!

Your higher self, the real YOU, is the voice that says hit the ball. It focuses on what you actually want. Build this. Love her. Show up for them. Create something that matters.

It's the same you. The only thing that changes is your focus. And when your focus changes, everything changes.

Those twenty entrepreneurs in that room in Vegas weren't broken. They weren't stupid and they weren't lazy and they didn't make bad decisions. They made excellent decisions, for the wrong version of themselves. They'd been serving YOU3 for so long they forgot it was fiction. And the weight of that was crushing them at 3 am when they couldn't hide from it anymore.

The fix isn't a five-year plan. It's not a complete life overhaul. It's wayyyyyyy simpler than that. It's understanding which version of you has been driving and THEN deciding, right now, to let the real YOU take the wheel.

Peace isn't the absence of problems.
Peace is the presence of clarity.

You don't need fewer problems. You need to know who you are. You need to know what actually matters. And you need to stop fragmenting yourself across a thousand things that don't.

Am I clear? Do I know what actually matters, or am I still serving a scar that was never there?

I am Clear.

(BTW – I can't wait for you to read this chapter in the book!)