Dear Reader,
Happy New Year!
My book is coming together quite slowly, but it seems to be moving in its own timing. I’ve decided to launch all my projects as experiments this year because I have been inspired by the way MSCHF operates. It gives me more creative freedom, and frankly, it feels more fun and honest.
Surreal Experiment #1 is something I designed to help you see the unconscious beliefs in any area of your life where you feel stuck or ready for an upgrade.
All experiments I'm launching this year has one mission: help you make your unconscious conscious and then rewire those patterns so you can live a more fulfilling life (with business growth usually following as a natural byproduct.) How I will actually do that this year depends on whatever inspiration comes to me in the moment, so I do not want to be rigidly defined by things like books, courses, trainings, or apps. Instead, they will simply be experiments.
The Story That Inspired This Experiment/Excerpt From The Book
I used to go to Amsterdam once a year for a “mind pilgrimage.” Just me, a notebook, a small dose of psilocybin, and a list of “high-level business and personal questions that help me identify my bottlenecks and growth ceilings.
In 2023, I brought ten questions about things like scaling my business and finding blind spots in me own and my clients’ marketing campaigns.
By the end of that four hour journey, every question was answered, though it did not happen the way I expected.
Because I had been asking the wrong questions altogether.
The real problem was invisible; it was buried under years of “doing the right thing.”
It was the Meta-problem, the problem behind the problems:
Why did I choose this specific business model?
The Blank Page, digital animation by artist, Jake Fried 2020
As the logic fell away, I wasn’t in Amsterdam anymore. I was fourteen. Alone. Newly arrived in a foreign country with a suitcase full of clothes and an identity not yet formed. The escape was necessary, a flight from years of abuse in a household that was not safe to stay in. I arrived with no family, friends, or acquaintances who knew who I had been before. I did not know the rules. I did not know that smiles were not always invitations, or that friendliness did not mean belonging.
I was never quite seen. So I tried to earn it. I decided to smile more and please more. I had to be useful, and maybe then they would be nice to me.
Beneath that memory of the fourteen-year-old lay a dense, heavy feeling just below my chest. It was the physical sensation of a void that needed to be filled constantly, a cold, bottomless fear of abandonment that had no face and no name. I couldn’t consciously recall it, but I eventually understood through years of talk therapies that it was the dread of a toddler being sent away to a boarding kindergarten at the age of two and a half.
The fourteen-year-old was just trying to manage that fear through people-pleasing. She was reacting to a void that had been there all along, unconsciously believing that “If I have something to offer, people will keep me. If I make myself indispensable, I will finally belong.”
That terror had been the architect of my life and my business.
My unconscious chose the agency and coaching model for me because a scalable digital business does not always physically “need” me.
In an agency, my worth was validated in every call, every crisis solved, and every “thank you, I couldn’t have done this without you.”
And if I’m not needed every hour of every day, how do I know I’m worthy of existing?
I had commercialised my people-pleasing, and I was paying the price for it in energy, health, and time.
Shedding that identity was not easy because the ego wants to cling to what has defined us.
But as I gradually became more conscious of changing these patterns, I was finally able to bypass my growth ceilings.
I shifted to a digital model that allowed me to double my revenue while working much less. I was setting boundaries, attracting respectful clients, and I thought I was finally stepping into my own power.
But I didn’t realise there were even deeper unconscious beliefs influencing how I ran my life.
About a year later, I sat in a workshop with Paul McKenna, one of the UK’s top hypnotherapists. He asked us to finish a sentence without thinking.
“Complete this sentence,” he said. “Don’t censor your thoughts. Just write down whatever comes to your mind first.”
The prompt was simple: Money is ____.
My pen moved before my conscious mind could intervene: Money is emotional debt.
I stared at the words for a long time. I hadn’t realised I’d been carrying this belief my whole life.
Growing up, I watched money move through my family with strings attached. My father was a lawyer and an entrepreneur, and my mother stayed at home.
When she received money, she owed him something in return: attention, compliance, gratitude. Money was never just money; it came with a claim on her soul.
I had carried this belief into my business without knowing it. Every time a client paid me, I felt indebted. Payment was an emotional loan I had to repay by overdelivering and saying yes when I wanted to scream no. It explained why I chronically underpriced my offers.
Paul McKenna gave us a second prompt “To make more money, I need to ______.”
My answer was: to make more money, I need to work harder.
That belief came from my Asian upbringing where hard work was the price of existence. If I didn’t get the grades, I was insulted as “useless” and “worthless.” In childhood, success was measured by grades. In adulthood, it became net worth. Advertising around us unconsciously installed the equation that self-worth equals net worth, and if you can’t afford the Chanel bag or the Ferrari, you aren’t enough.
These two beliefs locked together to form a prison.
If money is emotional debt, being paid creates a burden. If money requires working harder, the only way to alleviate that burden is relentless effort.
The more I earned, the more I felt I owed, so the harder I worked and the more trapped I felt.
I was still optimising a cage.
Surreal Experiment 01: The Unconscious Report
We spend so much time thinking through our problems consciously, but we never look at the unconscious architecture that actually decides our business models, our prices, and the ceilings we inevitably hit.
It is difficult to see outside the box when you are living inside it. The construction of your “box” happened during the first seven years of your life when your brain was in a natural Theta state, a hypnotic frequency where you were effectively hypnotised into a reality you didn’t choose and absorbed the beliefs and fears of the world around you without a filter. And you’ve been running that same software ever since.
This first Surreal Experiment is a diagnostic quiz to help you identify your own “Meta-Problem” in any area of life you want to upgrade.
The truth might be brutal. It will definitely be uncomfortable. Your ego will want to grip the reality you’ve been in for a long time, trying to tell you these beliefs are “facts” rather than limits. That resistance is just a protective mechanism; it is a younger version of you trying to keep your world safe.
If those beliefs were programmed in, they can also be de-programmed. But awareness is the first step: seeing what’s actually driving your decisions.
With love,
Ginny Wan