BSB 125
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Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley. On today's episode, I'm gonna cover something that I don't think people talk enough about, and that is the dark side of getting exactly what you want. Now, don't misunderstand me when I say dark side.
It doesn't mean that anything was wrong with getting what you want. So this isn't one of those fairy tales where you make a wish, the genie gives you a wish, and something horrible goes wrong with it.
This is not about disaster. This is getting exactly what you wanted almost the way you said you wanted it. And I wanna dive into that today Now, I joke with my clients that my work lives at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and woo, and that is very true.
And if you are also a lover of all of those things, then you know that there's a lot of [00:01:00] crossover. For example, if you're a person that loves manifestation, you're gonna have crossover with productivity because they both involve getting very clear about what you want, writing it out, setting these goals for yourself. Then you're gonna have crossover with neuroscience because the next phase of that is going to tell you, _"Imagine what it's like to have that thing."_
The productivity will say, _"Go put yourself in those rooms. Get yourself in the room where people are doing what you want to do yourself."_ And the manifestation will say that, too, but they'll like, _"Try to condition your nervous system and walk into these places where the ideal you is living."_
So there's a lot of crossover there. The main takeaway get clear, write it down, do your affirmations, track it, put yourself in the right situations or [00:02:00] rooms, and then this is kind of where they leave it. Because it's sort of that, _"Okay, congratulations, you got the thing."_ And fairytales do this with happily ever after.
That's where they all end, but that isn't where they actually end. In reality, you will have some people who get the thing that they have been working for for years or decades, and they find themselves enjoying it at first, but then they just feel average about it,
I'm gonna give you an example on what some of these things are like. If you are an ambitious person, and you have spent years or decades in pursuit of a goal- And you get that goal. It can feel a little empty or hollow because quite possibly your subconscious, your programs, your [00:03:00] pattern, your nervous system got engineered for pursuit and not achievement. You get different dopamine hits for pursuit and achievement.
And it's natural that once you achieve the thing, it gets normalized because then it becomes kind of boring to the brain because there's no constant dopamine hit. The chase is gone. You got it. You caught it. But you weren't prepared to deal with what do you do with it when you catch it
I'll use a friend as an example. For a good chunk of his life, even as a teenager, he dreamed about having a certain type of Porsche. He was the kid that had the Porsche posters on the walls, would get the Porsche calendars with the sexy models and all these things, and he knew exactly what he wanted.
So one day he was able to get that Porsche. He was [00:04:00] thrilled at first, but then reality started to set in and he realized this is a two-seater car . This guy actually had a family. His kids were older, so it's not like he needed a minivan or anything, but he was also a businessman, and whenever he was out with a group of people and they wanted to go someplace else, he could only take one other person.
Or maybe it had a super tiny backseat that you could not fit anything but a child or a purse in, right? But it wasn't what he thought it was going to be, so when he got that thing, he discovered it did not match his lifestyle. Because he fell into the very common trap of wanting the thing, but also not looking at his life and going, _"Does the thing actually match the way I want to _[00:05:00] _live?"_
And the truth was it didn't, so he only kept that Porsche for about two years maybe before he sold it. Because he was also worried about parking it too close to anybody, what if it got dinged. I think maybe he even got a couple of speeding tickets because, I mean, come on, you're in a Porsche . You're gonna do Porsche things.
And so the realities of having it were not realities he had prepared for or enjoyed. So he got rid of it and got a car that actually matched his lifestyle. That is one of the hazards of doing the manifestation, doing the goal tracking, but forgetting to do a life audit which looks at your life realistically and goes,_ "Is this thing a match for what I want to do and how I live my life?"_
Now, in manifestation, they'll tell you you don't get it unless it's a [00:06:00] match. So he was definitely a match for it energetically or vibrationally. He did all the neuroscience things, the woo-woo things. He tracked the Porsches online for sale. He did all of those things right, but he forgot to do the audit piece on does this actually match me, and it didn't.
And I have another client who spent years manifesting a fabulous relationship and got it. She's so thrilled with the relationship, but it puts her in a completely different reality than her old one. Think like Sex and the City. It was single girl in the city, autonomous, like doing your own thing. You're really not responsible for anybody but yourself.
And then you blend in with this other person and this other person's family, and now [00:07:00] suddenly you're not Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City anymore. You have responsibilities that you didn't have before. And we don't think about what happens next after happily ever after because we've been Disney-fied and everybody ends it at you got what you want, congratulations, happily ever after.
But the thing is life doesn't stop life-ing. You don't stop growing just because you succeeded, you achieved the thing. You will continue to evolve.
And I do absolutely believe that quantum leaps can happen. Lottery winners will tell you the same thing, and you've heard the lottery stories about they were struggling, their bank account was in the negative, and they spent their last $5 on the lottery, and that's when they won, like, millions.
But there's also [00:08:00] the lottery curse, quantum leaping also takes away your ability to recalibrate slowly. That is why some people don't recommend quantum leaping. It's the sexy thing in the manifestation world. The productivity world is like, _"Do this hack, get results faster."_
I mean, we all want that. It hits our dopamine. But there is real beauty and real practicality and safety and security with not skipping so many steps that now you're in a new place in life that you have not calibrated for. You got exactly what you wanted, but do you know what to do with it? Because we tend to romanticize, idealize, and fantasize the acquisition of the thing.
Each one of these methods, neuroscience, productivity, or manifestation, they all do [00:09:00] it. They all ask you to really sink in and imagine what it's like to have it. So what do you do? If you're a person that wants to be independently wealthy, and then you imagine something like your investment paying off or you hit the lottery, you're going to imagine ease.
Of course you are. You're going to imagine, the best coffee, the softest robe, staring out from the balcony of your beach house to the calm, serene ocean. What you do not imagine is the hurricane that, causes flooding damage or destroys half your house, or the earthquake, or the fact that, somebody embezzled from you, you trusted the wrong accountant.
We don't imagine these things in our fantasies. Our brain's really good about popping them up in everyday life, but we don't remember to put real life [00:10:00] into the acquisition. And I don't mean pain, and I know these things were disastrous examples. But if you aren't telling yourself that challenges are a part of life, then you're not adequately preparing yourself for holding the thing that you get and trusting yourself to do well with it, because we get swept away in the fantasy.
The once I achieve this, nothing's going to stop me. Once I achieve this, all these other areas of life will start falling into place. Here's a saying that you may have heard. I first heard this in the book by Gay Hendricks. It's called _*The Big Leap,*_ and it's called_ new level, new devil._ So every time you skip steps or you level up or even quantum leap, you will face some new challenge that [00:11:00] will ask you to deep dive into your subconscious and deal with a different facet of what you have not yet dealt with.
That could be your nervous system, your mindset, a wound, a trauma, a subconscious belief. But as you level, your capacity will expand, and then you'll get that test to it. I've also heard a variation of this called _new level, same devil_, and they both make sense.
So just because you get the thing that you want doesn't mean it continues to be a match for you or that you won't experience a growth challenge that comes along with having the thing you want. This is not about be careful what you wish for, not at all. Wishes are free. Wishes are amazing.
Go wish. Go set those goals. Go manifest. But what I don't want [00:12:00] you to do is slip into fantasy, idealism, and disregarding reality to the point where you're like,_ "Nothing bad will happen to me when I have this thing."_ And look, I sincerely hope nothing bad happens, but challenge is a part of growth, and if you don't get challenged or you don't grow, you stagnate.
And expansion, challenge, growth, overcoming obstacles is a part of change, is a part of acquisition. So you've already done it. You've done a lot of those things to get what you wanted.
This is why a huge congratulations is in order because you've conquered a lot. Just don't fall into the trap that says, "I don't have to conquer anything anymore," or, "I must have done something wrong because I got what I wanted, but it doesn't feel like I thought it [00:13:00] would."
There are reasons for that too, and it's quite possible you just grew really quickly between the acquisition and the enjoyment. Or it's quite possible you're in that new level, new devil, state, which is about learning something different about the expression of enjoyment, and it's not about chasing the dopamine hit.
Maybe that's what you need to learn, that you can enjoy things without the constant dopamine rush, without the constant chasing. That might be what you have to re-pattern. It's just all part of the process.
You absolutely deserve to get what you want, to hold what you want, and to enjoy what you want.
It's natural when you move on to these different phases of your life that you emotionally may feel some grief or some tension, anxiety, depression even. This is normal [00:14:00] and part of the process of elevation and leveling up. If you would like someone to help you work through the consequences of success and the dark side of getting exactly what you want, then I would love to be that person for you.
Right now, I only do private one-to-one coaching. It is your space and your place to tell me the things you can't tell anyone else so that you can truly enjoy what you built, what you achieved, what you manifested in the best way possible.
Go to aprildarley.com, and you can schedule a free consultation or just jump right into an appointment. Until next week, goodbye.
