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Most investors focus only on external strategies for wealth, but ignore 
the powerful inner game that actually drives success. Discover the “psychological upgrade” the ultra-wealthy use to break through plateaus and unlock lasting passive income, freedom, and fulfillment.
Ani Manian, known as the “Mind Whisperer,” has coached everyone from multi six-figure entrepreneurs to top-tier billionaires, helping them decode the subconscious drivers behind their wealth-building decisions. Drawing from his own journey rising from extreme scarcity, Animan shares strategies on wealth strategy, passive income, and financial freedom that even the most experienced investors may overlook.
In This Episode
- Why early childhood beliefs quietly set the ceiling for your wealth and investing results
- How to identify and overcome your internal “identity ceiling”—the hidden limit to your business, relationships, and health
- Ways to create true wealth—how the ultra-wealthy align money, time, relationships, and health for maximum cash flow and happiness
- A practical, holistic framework to achieve financial freedom and mental wealth in your entrepreneurial journey
Every system is perfectly designed for the exact outcomes that it produces. So if we don’t like the outcomes, it’s not a fault of the system. We just change how the system is designed. And this is true for business, it’s true for marriage, it’s true for pretty much any system that there is.
Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today we have a special episode. Our guest is Ani Manian, and this episode was recorded live at the annual Pantheon Mastermind retreat. Ani Manian is one of the most powerful thinkers I’ve ever met on the inner architecture of wealth. Many people call him the “Mind Whisperer,” and after one conversation with him, you’ll understand why. Ani has worked with founders across the spectrum, from multi-six-figure entrepreneurs to billionaires. What makes him rare is that he doesn’t just teach mindset; he sees the source code behind how you make decisions—not just your investing decisions, your time decisions, your relationship decisions, your identity decisions. And if we’re being honest, those are the decisions that quietly determine your entire life.
Ani’s story is also a big part of why his work lands so deeply. He didn’t grow up with comfort or certainty. He grew up in extreme scarcity, instability, and early life pressure that forced him to see the world differently. That path is what led him into a lifelong pursuit of understanding what people are really chasing when they say they want more. Because the truth is, most people don’t want more money. They want what they believe the money will finally let them feel.
And Ani has a way of naming that with precision. In our podcast conversation, he offered one of the most profound definitions of wealth I’ve ever heard: Wealth is the ability to be fully at ease and fully alive in the present moment. Not someday, not after the liquidity event, not once the number is big enough—now. That is the foundation of holistic wealth. Because if you can’t access ease, presence, and aliveness today, no portfolio will fix it. If you’re building externally while internally misaligned, you will eventually feel it in your health, your relationships, your leadership, and your sense of fulfillment.
That’s why Ani is leading multiple sessions with us. This isn’t surface-level motivation. This is the work that changes your time horizon, your identity, and the way you operate. It helps you see what’s driving you, what’s distracting you, what you’re outsourcing to the future, and what it would look like to build wealth from a place of internal alignment instead of internal pressure. The mastermind at Pantheon is about plugging into extraordinary people—the kind of people who challenge the status quo and help you expand what you think is possible. Ani embodies that. Hope you enjoy the show.
How’s it going, everyone? Welcome back to another episode on Wealth Strategy Secrets. I’m your host, Dave Wolcott. Today, live at the Pantheon Mastermind annual event, I am joined by Ani Manian, who will be joining us as a guest. We have the guests joining us as well, who are going to interact with some live Q&A. As we start the continuation of yesterday’s discussion, really talking about how to scale with psychology and how important that is—not only in investing but entrepreneurship, life, health, and all these dimensions of capital that are so important—I think a lot of us have been really pondering some of those questions and thinking about: How do we block those things where we’re sabotaging ourselves? How do we push past those things to get what we really want and really live the best life that we’re looking for?
Ani, the first question I want to cover with you is this concept you talk about around the “identity ceiling.” Usually, you say that the strategy isn’t the bottleneck—the identity is. So what identity shift is required from someone who’s moving into building wealth, becoming this “wealth architect” as you like to call it, and making a shift into eight figures or potentially nine or ten figures? What is that identity ceiling?
To define what an identity is before we get into the ceilings, our psychology and our psychological identity are basically the central organizing principle of our self. It’s this collection of thoughts, beliefs, habits, and patterns that we’ve accumulated that basically form our sense of self. For most of us, during the first seven years of our life, we’re in this very suggestible state. Our brain is basically in a state of hypnosis. The dominant brain wave pattern is the theta wave. So, we’re basically imprinting every single thing from our environment, from our caregivers, and the people around us, and we’re internalizing a lot of stuff—even things that aren’t necessarily directly saying anything about us.
Imagine a little baby. The baby is crying, and mom’s in the other room. Maybe there’s some noise and mom doesn’t hear the baby. The baby doesn’t get picked up. The baby at that point starts to internalize that they are not enough because mom didn’t come. If this happens over time, that starts to develop the baby’s sense of self. As the baby starts to develop a self-concept around age three or four, they start creating these stories about who they are. That person grows up 15 or 25 years later and develops a sense of not feeling enough, or not feeling wanted, or not getting the approval or validation that they long for.
The adult self basically becomes the hero that the child needed. This baby grows up, becomes an entrepreneur, and basically tries to get the validation, the recognition, and the approval that they needed as a child from the world. Our identity develops reflexively, generally around the impingements that we experience growing up. In a way, that becomes our ceiling.
We all have these core needs. We have the need for approval, the need for control, the need for safety or security, the need for belonging—we want to feel like we’re a part of something; we are tribal beings—and we have the need for feeling special and unique. These needs, in a healthy psychological self, are sourced first from the outside because when we’re kids, we’re very helpless. We’re dependent on our caregivers for all of these needs to be met. Eventually, hopefully, we learn to source these needs from the inside.
What happens is that since almost no one has perfect parenting, we don’t actually learn to source all of these needs from the inside. When these needs are being sourced from the outside, we project that need onto things outside of us, like money.
Consequently, our relationship to these things—like money, business, employees, or a partner or spouse—gets warped, and we start sourcing these needs from these external things. When we’re on this journey to build more wealth, the needs that we didn’t learn to source from the inside become the impediments for us to get to the next level.
Yesterday we talked about the patterns of control, the patterns of avoidance, and the patterns of seeking thrill. For each level of the game, one or more of these core patterns become the ceiling to get to the next level. It requires us to shift our identity and learn to source those needs internally rather than externally. If we’re placing our safety on money, then our ability to make more money is going to depend on our ability to actually source that need internally rather than from money. Those patterns show up in business, they show up in money, and they show up in relationships—literally everywhere.
Yeah, I think this is really one of the core issues that is systemically holding people back from realizing that next level of growth in their lives. Whether that be money, freedom, or your business, we all kind of hit these ceilings—these plateaus that just come up along the way. Then you’re trying to figure out, how do you actually get to the next level?
So, what are some of the ways that people can actually work through identifying some of those issues that are holding them back? Because, obviously, it’s very deep-seated in our consciousness. Do you have an approach, a framework, or some tools that we can use to actually push through to that next level?
Yeah, I think the most obvious place that we see constraints is when we’re unable to get the things that we want in life. I heard intelligence defined as our ability to get the things we want. Generally, we use money as a proxy for other things. We want a greater amount of assets under our control because we want to feel safe, or because we want to lower our anxiety. For some people, the accumulation of assets is a proxy for getting the love that they want in life. Most people have something that they want, but no matter what they do, they’re unable to actually get that thing. Generally, for most people, that comes down to certain ways that they want to feel on the inside.
It kind of comes back to those core needs. We want to feel approved of—like our existence matters. We want to feel in control. We want to feel safe. We want to feel connected—like we belong. We want to feel special, like there is something unique about us. This shows up in pretty much every area of life.
So, we generally see an identity ceiling or a constraint in our life based on something that we’re repeatedly trying to get, but no matter what we do, we can’t have. This shows up in business when, let’s say, the business is doing a million dollars a year, and someone’s trying really hard to grow it to $10 million a year. But no matter how much they work, how much they spend, or what they do to grow the business, there seems to be this invisible ceiling that they can’t break.
This shows up in love and relationships. Someone sees the same pattern repeating in every relationship that they have, and they just can’t get the feeling that they want—or the same pattern follows in the same relationship year after year. It shows up with health. Someone is doing everything they can in terms of eating right and eating clean, and we saw Tracy explain so beautifully how, no matter how much effort some people put in, they still don’t get the results that they want.
Generally, what I find is that when someone has exhausted the knowledge function—as in, they’ve learned everything about the thing that they can—and they’ve exhausted the effort function—they’ve done everything they can, they’ve really tried every single thing possible—but they’re still not getting the result they want in that area, it’s generally a psychological constraint. There is some part of them that is actually resisting the thing that they want.
Why do we act in opposition to our best interests? Why do people do things that are sabotaging to their health, to their wealth, to their relationships, and to their well-being? It’s probably generally accepted that there are a few things that, if we eat them, are probably not good for us. Or smoking cigarettes, or drinking excessively, or certain drugs and substances that are clearly harmful. Yet, there are hundreds of millions of people—billions of people—who engage in those behaviors despite knowing that they are not good for them.
Human beings seem to have this feature in us that makes us act in a certain way that’s against our best interests, that’s self-harming. We see this push and pull. We desire things, but there’s another part of us that’s actually pushing them away. There’s this internal polarity that exists in all of us. We want to make more money and build more wealth, but there’s a part of us that spends recklessly, makes impulsive decisions, or maybe acts in ways that take on more risk, directly opposing the desire to have more wealth. We see this in love, relationships, and health. That is the part of us that is actually keeping us at that current level.
For us to go to the next level, it’s generally not a function of trying harder, working more, efforting more, or learning more. It’s actually about integrating the part of us that’s opposing the thing that we say we want—because our actions, behaviors, and habits demonstrate that we’re not fully integrated and aligned in that desire.
That is just so spot on. I think that is really just the core of what we’re all trying to get to. But even like you say, the more knowledge we have, we know what we want, we have more clarity on our goals and what we’re doing to try to get there, but there’s just something innate in us that holds us back and stops us. A lot of people talk about it as a “wealth thermostat” or a ceiling—a ceiling that you just hit, and you’re like, “How do I break through this plateau?“
Ironically, there are even multiple levels to this, too. You might be able to push through some things, but then not get to others. Then you see people who have spent a thousand hours on Tony Robbins, but yet they’re not actually implementing it, and they haven’t fully integrated those concepts into what they’re doing. So, I guess it really lends itself to what you’re saying, where a lot of these things are just innate within you and were formed at a very early stage, and now they’re built into your subconscious.
What are some techniques or things we can use to identify these behaviors and maybe put some habits in place to re-correct them?
Yeah. A good example of what you’re just talking about is the stories of lottery winners. People who don’t have a lot of money win the lottery, and overnight they are millionaires, deca-millionaires, sometimes even more. They follow these people and have seen that, in almost all cases, within a couple of years, they’re back at their old level of wealth—or lack thereof. We see this with people who lose weight really fast; they gain it back. We see this with 67% of companies on the Inc. 500—one of the lists of the fastest-growing companies in the world—which within two years have either shrunk or gone out of business. Generally, the faster the growth, the faster the shrinking as well, because there is this baseline that we all have.
We have this zone of comfort, zone of safety, and zone of familiarity that, if we leave it, our system basically freaks out. To the nervous system, familiarity is safety. This is the result of millions of years of evolution. We find comfort, familiarity, and safety in the environments and geographies that we know, with the people we know, and with the habits and patterns that we know.
The nervous system actually has a very slow rate of change. It can learn only one thing at a time. How many people here have kids? You’ve seen your kids grow, and in those first few years, you can see how the acquisition of a skill is achieved one by one. The nervous system is actually very slow at its rate of learning.
But the intellect—the mind, the prefrontal cortex—is much, much faster. That’s why people can go to a thousand Tony Robbins seminars, watch a whole bunch of YouTube videos, and have the head knowledge of something. But unless that information is fully embodied and integrated into their nervous system, they’re actually not capable of holding that change in a sustainable way without effort. As soon as the effort is taken off, they go right back. It’s like a stretched rubber band; if no energy or force is applied, it defaults right back to its original mean position because that’s the place where it naturally rests.
Normally, we can see this when we think about willpower. If someone is using a lot of willpower to do something—let’s say go to the gym, save, invest, or stay attuned to investment opportunities and track them with discipline—if it requires willpower and discipline to do, it’s actually not sustainable. That’s how we know that a certain habit or pattern has not been integrated and embodied at the identity and nervous system level; the system is going to go right back to homeostasis or its baseline.
When we see this pattern—when there is something that we want that, no matter what we do, we can’t have, or it requires a lot of energy, discipline, and willpower to sustain—then the most intelligent thing that I find to do is actually to see the parts of ourselves that are opposing that or that are in conflict with it. When we think about integration and alignment, imagine you’re in a boat with five people, and they’re all rowing in the same direction. Is that boat going to go really fast in that direction? Yes, because there’s alignment; everyone agrees that we’re going over there, and they’re all rowing in the same direction.
Now, imagine if everyone is thinking of going in a different direction, and they’re all rowing in that specific direction. What do you think is going to happen to the boat? It’s definitely not going to go in one direction really fast. It’s probably going to go in circles, and it’s going to be a mess.
And that’s how most people are living, right? Because we think we are oneself, but we’re actually a combination. We’re a multiplicity of selves and we’re a combination of all the ages we’ve ever been. So there is a six month old in us, there’s a one year old in us, there’s a two year old and so on. Each of these parts of ourselves were developed at that age and their orientation where they Want to row is a function of what they experienced and the things that they internalized. So there is a part of us that wants to be healthy, but there’s a part of us that wants to eat ice cream at midnight. There’s a part of us that wants to make sure we get good sleep, but there’s a part of us that wants to watch Netflix till 2:00am and you know, eat late meals, knowing that that’s gonna not be helpful the next day. So for us to actually have all parts of ourselves acting in alignment towards our goals, whether it’s making more money, whether it’s having more intimacy, whether it’s having great health, you know, even simple things like staying in touch with family and friends and having a sense of community, we have to understand, isolate these parts of us that are acting in opposition and connect to them. Because it’s generally a younger part, it’s an older part, it’s a part that didn’t get their needs met and therefore internalized certain things about themselves.
And this act of sabotage, though it looks like a bad thing, it’s actually an act of self preservation and it’s an act of self protection. So all sabotage, even though it appears like a bad thing, it’s a way, it’s the only way that that part of us can take care of ourselves, can create safety. So all sabotage is an act, is an attempt to find more safety. This is true for all forms of sabotage. The overspending, the entrepreneur who makes more money in the business and then immediately goes on a hiring spree. The person who they, you know, buy some Tesla stock and they make an absolute killing on it and then suddenly that money disappears because their spending goes up. It’s true with food. Someone loses a bunch of weight and then the next couple of weeks they go out and they’re able to justify internally why they should, you know, eat not healthy food and their caloric intake goes up.
Every one of these things, even though it’s horribly inconvenient relative to our goals, it is a part of us that is trying to create safety. And so the antidote for all forms of self sabotage is actually for us to attune back to ourselves, to connect to us, to connect to that part of us, understand at what age that was created, what it needs and how it’s trying to source safety through sabotage and actually meet its needs. Because when the needs of that part are met, then it comes down and then we can have that experience of all the people in our boat are rowing in the same direction. And that direction is the direction of our vision of our values, where we want to go in life. The wealth we want to create, the relationships we want to have, the health we want to experience, the mental wealth, the joy, the peace, the freedom, like all the things that we want, it’s available to us, but it requires coming into this deep sense of attunement to ourselves and creating safety and creating intimacy and creating that connection with all the parts of ourselves so that we can all row in the same direction.
Yeah, absolutely. Love that. And that’s really the definition of holistic wealth. Right. What we’re trying to get through. So.
Because it happens at every level, right?
Yeah.
Because even in a marriage, in a business, if we’re not approaching in a holistic way, if we’re not lining everyone up to move in the same direction, it’s really inefficient. It’s a waste of energy.
Right.
So it’s like someone, you know, really controlling the calories and killing it at the gym, but acting in other ways that oppose that. And so the system’s very inefficient. It’s like in a business, if four employees are moving in this direction, two employees moving in that direction, it wastes energy.
Sure.
And so even in terms of wealth, if we can align all these dimensions of wealth and we can act in concert in that way, it’s not only the most efficient way to live, but it also maximizes the chances that we get what we want out of life.
Yeah, 100% now. And yesterday we had the opportunity to work through that wealth, vision, mind map. Right. Which we did. All our six forms of capital. So as you go and start to execute that, if you find any areas of dissonance in that, with relationships or physical capital or things like that, that could be the great way to identify those areas. Right. And then start to try to give yourself what you need, identify that. And then once everything can kind of work together, it’s really like the orchestra. Right. Everything is kind of working harmoniously together.
I have a great story about this. So I’ve been obsessed with this idea of resonance and dissonance because a part of me just hates trade offs. I don’t want to choose between my health and my marriage. I don’t want to choose between my marriage and my business. And I’ve been obsessed for the longest time, like, how do we have it all? And this came about because, you know, growing up, I saw a lot of financial scarcity and scarcity in other forms. And my father, he worked three Jobs growing up. And he. I saw him trade his health for safety and then, you know, make so, so many trades that ultimately cost him his life.
And I had a client who was. The business was stuck at, like, $5 million a year, and they’d been stuck there for eight quarters. And he was really beating himself up. And, you know, he had a big team, and he was questioning himself, because no matter what he did, he just couldn’t get the business to grow beyond that. They would oscillate at, like, between 4 and 6, averaging about 5 million a year. And when we got really deep into how it wasn’t just his business, but how his life system was architected, he shared that. So this is what tech is, a tech company. And they, you know, had clients all around the world.
He would sleep with his phone on next to his bed, on the nightstand with the ringer on, and throughout the night, his slack would be going off. And this had been happening for so many years that it had put a huge strain on his marriage. And his wife had basically started talking about divorce because he was never present, he was never around. And, you know, their sleep was affected. Their relationship was basically just interrupted constantly with these notifications. And it had put a massive stress on their marriage. And he was aware of this, and he knew subconsciously that if the business grew any more, he would just not be able to handle it. And so his subconscious was actually constraining the growth of the business, because the business growing and succeeding to the next level would jeopardize his family, his marriage, his relationships, and all the other things that were also a big value.
And so this, to me, is a great example of why dissonance is something that we have to get really good at, not just uncovering, but realigning our systems. Not just the business system, but where does a business fit inside our life system? Because if everything can be in resonance, as in one thing getting better, the business getting better can make the marriage better, if the marriage getting better can make health better, if health getting better makes you more money, if we can line all these things up so that they feed each other. And so the better it gets, the better it gets versus the better one thing gets, something else suffers. That’s the only way for us to mathematically live a perfect life. Because I think what we all want is to flourish and thrive in all areas, not play this whack a mole where, you know, this year trying to make more money, and then two years from now, oh, my health is in the toilet. I got to fix that, and then that means I take my eye off the business and then the business shrinks and we’re just playing whack a mole and it’s just not sustainable.
And so this, to me, is an architectural and a design problem that’s very solvable rather than an effort or knowledge or any of the other levers that most people are obsessing over pulling. Because it’s so much easier to get pigeonholed and try to optimize locally one aspect of the system than be holistic, which is, I think, such a perfect word. Zoom out and see the whole picture and say, okay, what do I want? And if, if I measure my intelligence as my ability to get what I want out of life, and if I have decided that these are my values, this is my vision, these are my non negotiables, then I can solve for the whole thing. And that’s the only way to truly have it all.
So refreshing to hear that most people just talk about balance all the time and trying to achieve balance, and it’s just not, you know, the harmony, the holistic approach to it is just so much more, you know, 360 degrees, you know, fully encompassing.
Yeah, love that. I think balance is. It’s like those surfers, you know, you see them and they’re surfing these crazy waves and from far away it looks like they’re completely still, but they’re actually making these thousands of micro movements. And so I love harmony as a much more realistic and intelligent and achievable way. Because to me, harmony requires a lot less effort. Balance requires a lot of constant balancing. And there’s no real state of sustainable static balance. But harmony is an architectural and a design thing.
And if we set these things up to reinforce each other versus cancel each other out, just like music, right? You can have a bunch of people playing a bunch of instruments and if they’re in harmony together, the sound feels beautiful. We’re drawn to it, we want to listen to it, we feel good. But if they’re not really in sync, if they’re not really in tune, it feels like noise and it feels almost offensive to hear. And we want to push away from it. And so, you know, when we were doing breathwork, when we were talking about all these things, we are a symphony. We are a symphony of these different parts of us. These parts of us have a certain frequency. Every thought, you know, the state of our mind, it’s operating at a certain frequency.
So have you guys ever felt anxious? How many people here have felt anxious? Do you notice that when you feel anxious, the thoughts are coming faster? Do you notice that your breath is faster? Everything is speeding up. So that’s a higher frequency. Have you ever been on vacation, chilling on the beach, staring at the ocean? Do you notice how chill everything feels? It’s almost like nothing’s happening. That’s a slower frequency and that matches the rate of our heartbeat. It matches our breathing. It matches. Basically our nervous system is the clock speed, the frequency at which we’re operating. When these parts of us are operating at the right frequency and they’re operating in harmony, we are producing a beautiful symphony.
Have you ever met someone and you really are feeling drawn to them because you like their energy? Yes. Have you met, also met people where you’re like, ah, I don’t want to interact with this person because the vibes are off. So we feel this intuitively all the time. Right. We feel this with other people. Like when you, when you meet someone, you enjoy their energy, you enjoy their vibe, you feel drawn to them, you feel like this connection with them, you feel like getting to know them. We experience that with ourselves. And if we can set up our life structurally to produce a beautiful harmonious symphony, then we don’t have to effort so much on a day to day basis to compensate for this fundamental architectural design misalignment.
And I think that’s one of the things that you talk about so much on the wealth side, but also in a holistic way. You know, if your body’s operating optimally, if your hormones are optimal, if your state is good, you have the right financial team that’s structurally set up all these things where you’re tax efficient, you know, you’re taking advantage of all of these opportunities. If your system is structurally clean and well built, then on a day to day basis there’s a lot less effort and there’s a lot less work.
And I think that’s the huge opportunity we have because our attention, our energy is all finite, time is finite, and there’s an infinite amount of options we have to allocate this finite amount of time, energy and attention. So the allocation decision we make, not just with our financial wealth, but with our mental, emotional wealth, determines the quality of our life.
If you’ve ever wondered how the wealthy use energy investments to reduce their tax bill while generating cash flow, we just answer to every question on camera. Go to pantheoninvest.com energy to find out.
Yeah, and I love that concept of energy levels. Right. Because the more you have less dissonance in any area of your Life, I mean, money just starts to flow to you and you stop chasing it, right? But we live in this world where we’re constantly in this, you know, there’s this grind, right? I’ve got to do more. I’ve got to, you know, chase and grind and push and everything. Like, like Gary Vee and all these guys out there really kind of pushing. But I find that the more congruence you have in all these different areas, it’s interesting because it can actually just flow to you, right? And then I love this concept of just having harmony and having everything because we really deserve to have everything. We deserve to have world class relationships, we deserve to have health, to be around for the next generations and live our best life.
You know, that’s actually a really interesting thing when we think about the energy of money because money is a spiritual currency, right? Money is, we can think of it in a mechanical way. It’s this thing in my pocket that I can, you know, give to someone and they will give me something else in return, maybe a cup of coffee or a, you know, plate of food. But money is spiritual and money has an energy. And you know, when we think about currency, currency is a current of energy. And the thing about energy is that energy has a flow. Energy wants to flow, money wants to flow. And so when we think if we want to make, if we want to have more wealth, what that means is I have more energy in my life. What people are doing is they’re trading their life force energy for this currency.
The game everyone’s playing is can I trade the things that I value to get this thing that we all collectively as a consensus value, which is money, which is currency. If we understand the directionality in the flow of money, that is actually, I think the glitch in the matrix and the cheat code to get rich and become wealthy. Money flows towards safety, money flows towards regulation, money flows towards harmony. You know, if someone has a gambling issue, right, I, there’s a couple of clients that I won’t name, but one of the things that they were dealing with, they had this, this part of themselves that was addicted to the thrill. And this gambling thing showed up in a bunch of places. What they experienced, money would come, money would go, money would come, money would go. And they had to increasingly find a way to generate more and more money to compensate for the money that was leaving. That system is not harmonious, that system doesn’t have the integrity and therefore money will find a way to, to leave.
In any high volatility market environment, we See money change hands. So in the. In the crypto space, there’s. There are these terms diamond hands and paper hands. Right. Money is flowing from paper hands to diamond hands because the paper hands, they don’t have the internal safety, the internal regulation, the internal integrity to stay calm and grounded when there is volatility. So money finds a way to leave them and move to the people who do. And I think this is the inner game of money.
That’s the outer game, where we can start a business, work harder, hire people, and all that is important. But I think when we have the inner game really dialed, then it makes the outer game so much easier and so much more fun.
Yeah, 100%. I’d like to take a question from the audience now, please.
Lee, you mentioned the client that would wake up in the middle of the night with these slack notifications, and you helped him become aware of his subconscious ceiling. What was the ultimate result of that? And how did he go from that being his reality to something else? What were the tactical things put in place to help him shift? Yeah. So all ceilings we experience are a function of an internal conflict in values. So when there is an internal values conflict, we will experience some sort of ceiling. So in this case, he had a value around his marriage, and he had a value around his business. Those values were oppositional and in conflict. And when we have two core values that are in conflict, neither of those areas can truly thrive because there is something else that’s opposing it. So anytime we.
We have a goal, we have a dream, we have a desire, we have a vision for something we’re doing a lot, but we’re still not reaching it. And it feels like there is some. It’s like a rubber band that keeps pulling us back that is keeping us, or an invisible wall that’s keeping us from that level. One of the most useful things is to understand what are the values, conflicts underneath. So in this case, we had to resolve and integrate that values conflict. So we had to set his life system up so that his business was not in conflict with his marriage. And to make that possible, we had to create. And generally not always, but one of the things that really helps is boundaries.
So we needed to. Because if you think about it, if these walls disappeared and we were just in. You know, imagine we’re on the ground floor and these walls are gone, and anyone can just walk right through. Cars can just drive right through. We wouldn’t feel at ease. Right. We’d be kind of on edge. Imagine you’re sitting in your living room, you’re watching Netflix and random people can just walk right through.
We wouldn’t. We wouldn’t feel safe, we wouldn’t feel regulated, we wouldn’t feel at ease. So boundaries create safety and integrity. So generally for someone, when there’s an absence of boundaries, and the gambling example, also an absence of boundaries. So when there is an absence of internal boundaries, we don’t feel safe. When we don’t feel safe, it distorts and warps the system. And he didn’t have clear boundaries in terms of when he was available and when he wasn’t. That was also a reflection of how he’d hired and how he’d staffed the team.
So by hiring the right people and actually helping him transfer responsibility and trust and ownership, he was actually able to make sure that his standard for that area was met, but it didn’t need to be met by him. So once we did that, he didn’t have to actually be on slack through the night because he wasn’t paranoid and on edge. If something went wrong for a client, that allowed him to actually disconnect, it allowed his marriage and his business to not be oppositional, and it actually allowed his business to handle more clients concurrently. And turns out that that was actually the bottleneck. It wasn’t their ability to generate more demand and client acquisition. It was actually that they had a ceiling on how many clients that they thought that they could support because of how the system was set up. So another principle of mine is that every system is perfectly designed for the exact outcomes that it produces. So if we don’t like the outcomes, it’s not a fault of the system.
We just change how the system’s designed. And this is true for a business, it’s true for a marriage. It’s true for pretty much any system that there is.
If you could give this room just one psychological upgrade that would compound their wealth, what would it be?
Every single thing that we want, every desire, every dream, every vision is available. But it requires a us to be a little more intimate with ourselves. So our next level, in almost every area, requires the next level of intimacy with ourselves. More self awareness, more self compassion. Finding a way to meet our core needs, basically come into greater harmony with ourselves. And that is the key to more money, better health, better relationships, pretty much every outcome that we want. And it’s always an inside job. And that’s kind of the, I think, the best part of life.
Because if we operate this way, then it’s no longer a game of how much can I sacrifice myself, how much can I separate myself? How much can I squeeze out of myself to get what I want in life? It’s actually how much closer can I come to myself, how much more can I know myself, how much deeper can I love myself and can I support myself? Because that’s the key to everything that I want.
Speaker C: Awesome. Ani, can’t thank you enough for your time and valuable insights and wisdom today. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
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