Dear Reader,
Let’s play a 30-second game.
Spend 10 seconds identifying everything around you that is green.
Now find everything that is white for the next 10 seconds.
Finally, identify everything that is blue for the next 10 seconds.
Now pause.
You might notice some objects you had previously overlooked; Perhaps you are starting to see familiar things differently, or noticing subtleties within a colour you hadn’t registered before.
Through the Looking-Glass
We do not perceive reality as it is.
Our unconscious is filtering the “reality” that we see 24/7.
It presets these filters to show us the reality we expect to see based on our past experiences.
These are 2 great resources if you want to go down the rabbit hole
If you grew up hearing “there’s never enough money,” your unconscious will set scarcity as the default filter. This becomes the primary lens through which you view life, where resources feel limited and everything becomes a zero sum game.
If you grew up in a traumatic environment where your unconscious was constantly scanning for danger, your mind will likely remain on high alert. Even when you are no longer in that environment, you might still scan for threats rather than joy and peace.
Similarly, if you have known love as something painful throughout your life, your unconscious will set this as the default filter and effectively block you from experiencing love as anything other than pain.
Like the colour filter game we played earlier, if you have filters for blue, you are more likely to see blue objects and overlook the rest of the world.
If you have filters for scarcity, danger, pain, or problems, you are more likely to see and experience those same things as a result.
Until you reset the filters, you cannot experience reality in any other way.
Why Our Unconscious Filters Keep Us Stuck
The primary job of the unconscious isn’t to make you successful or happy. It’s to keep you safe.
To the unconscious, “safe” means familiar.
This means keeping the filters on so you are protected from ever being hurt the same way again.
Just because a filter kept you safe in the past doesn’t mean it’s serving who you’ve become or who you want to become. It just means it's the only operating system your brain has ever known.
Now, let's go back to the colour filter game for a moment.
Imagine one day you touched something green and it burned you.
Your unconscious made a note: green is dangerous. From that point on, it filtered green out of your reality.
Now you can no longer see the grass, the trees, the garden outside your window. 💚
Entire dimensions of the world simply edited out because something green hurt you once.
Is that really how you want to experience reality?
Wahei Takeda: The billionaire who talks to trees
Before he became the Warren Buffett of Japan, Wahei Takeda talked to trees, birds, and rocks.
He even spoke to the cookies coming off the production line at his confectionery factory.
He played music singing Arigato, the Japanese word for thank you, while the cookies were being produced. Each cookie would have heard a million thank yous before it reached the hand of a child.
In 1943, Wahei was a ten year old boy who had been evacuated from Nagoya to rural Fukui Prefecture.
While there, he was bullied and discriminated against as an outsider.
There was plenty of evidence from his environment growing up that could have preset his filters to see scarcity, cruelty, and the worst in people.
He could have kept those lenses , and most people would have, but he looked at the same evidence and made a different decision.
He decided to see differently.
He chose to see abundance where the world had shown him scarcity, and gratitude where it had offered him grievance.
Wahei has one daily ritual.
Every morning, before breakfast, he said thank you hundreds of times, sometimes reaching as many as one thousand repetitions.
That daily practice, accumulated across a lifetime, made him one of the wealthiest investors in Japanese history.
Wahei did not become grateful because his life was abundant.
His life became abundant because he practised gratitude before there was any obvious reason to feel it.
He reset the filters first. Reality followed.
Paul McKenna, one of the UK’s top hypnotherapists, interviewed hundreds of the richest people globally. Ken Honda, a Japanese author and millionaire, interviewed over 12,000 millionaires and billionaires in Japan and abroad to understand the secrets of financial success and happiness. They both found the same insight:
Not all rich people are happy, and most aren’t.
But the ones who are both rich and happy share one thing in common:
They have an abundance mindset.
They’ve reset their filters to see reality as full of abundance, not just in wealth, but in all areas of life.
They aren’t stuck in a victim mindset, blaming their past, others, or the world for unconsciously presetting their filters.
They made the choice to change their filters, so they could experience reality differently.
They take control of their own reality.
And so can you. But first, you have to see the filters.
What colour have you been filtering out without knowing it?
(Here's one way to find out what yours are)
An Experiment to try for the next 7 days:
Say thank you to 100 things daily, ideally as soon as you wake up.
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