Show Notes

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A Matter of Trust

To step into the unknown is, at its core, an act of profound trust.

• Trust that you can do this.
• Trust that the plan is good enough.
• Trust about the information you’ve gathered for your plan.
• Trust about this being the right path.

Trust is traditionally defined by Oxford Languages as a firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something. I find this definition pretty limiting, although it highlights one crucial aspect: Trust is a firm belief.

So, this is a matter of firmly believing in yourself, your plan, your path and the world. How can we cultivate this foundational trust for ourselves, our plans and the world around us, in order to take action and do what is needed to do?

The Role of Logic: Organizing, Planning and Mapping

If you aim to step into the unknown, especially if you are a person inclined towards analytical thinking (like me), the logical approach emerges as a fairly reasonable choice. When taking this route, you will find yourself doing some of the following:

• Defining a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time based goals, understanding its real-life implications, both material and emotional.
• Reverse-engineering your desired result, milestone by milestone.
• Making a list of all your resources, organizing your time and actions in an effective way.
• Weighing the pros and cons of different approaches.
• Collecting accurate information from various sources, predicting possible problems, and creating contingency plans.

While this approach establishes a solid and well-constructed map, you need to consider its inherent limitations:

1. Prioritization Challenges: Logic isn’t able to prioritize on a deep level, it’s always conditioned by an emotional context and value system.
2. Predicting Unknown Territory: Logic isn’t able to evaluate and predict the vast unknown, as life’s infinite possibilities proves to complex for our limited minds.
3. Innovation and Adaptation: Logic, by nature, tends to preserve existing knowledge and routines, hindering innovative thinking and adaptation to new paradigms.

Logic Limitation #1: Prioritization Challenges

You might be asking… how is it that logic cannot perform deep prioritization?

Logic can’t define what is valuable for you. It will always prioritize from a starting emotional context and system of values. The fact that you have desired goals, is becaue there is an emotion, a liking; something inside you that tells you they are important.

You cannot force yourself logically to value eating healthy if you don’t see the value in the long-term by yourself. You can weigh pros and cons, do all the logical things, but if you are not attracted to the feeling or quality of being healthy, you will not do it.

In an ultimate aspect, there’s no LOGICAL necessity for you to do anything at all in the world. Not even surviving. The world will continue to rotate on its own axis. However, you have inner drives that guide you; first, to survive; and then, to explore and create different experiences in your life.

These drives belong to your reptilian mind, let’s say… a part of your mind that it’s purely emotional, visceral, instinctive. These drives are the ones in charge of setting your priorities on a basic level.

You cannot fake priorities

This means that, even if you create the perfect plan… if the VALUE of following this path isn’t truly experienced inside you… you will not follow it. You cannot fake it. The emotional mind is one layer deeper than the logical mind.

This explains why almost all new year resolution’s fail. They are created from a logical standpoint, because it’s a good practice to do them at that point in time. It’s trendy, it’s what’s expected by friends and family. Starting a new year, having goals, doing them, being successful. You become a good and respectable person. Good job, take a candy 🍬

When you try to prioritize through logic, you are asking yourself “Based on X, Y and Z, what I should do?”, instead of asking “What would I like to experience?“.

When you aren’t used to smart and integrated goal setting, you create logic-based goals, engineered around balancing the status-quo, around people pleasing, around protecting self-image, but not necessarily around addressing your inner yearnings or creative aspirations.

Then, when you need to act the most, you don’t take action, because you never FELT the RELEVANCY of those goals in a deep way. And then after that you may judge yourself, feeling like shit and downward spiralling unnecessarily.

💡 SPOILER ALERT: This is not needed. There are better ways to live, my friend.

Logic Limitation #2: Predicting Unknown Territory

When about to step into the unknown, logic wants to cover all possibilities. This is impossible. When designing anticipation plans we deal with a combinatory explosion of possibilities. Life is too complex. You cannot logically evaluate and sort every cause and effect relationship.

You can create a great masterplan, with plan B, plan C, and plan D layers. But even while doing this, there’s always room for uncertainty. ALWAYS. This is an unescapable truth and you should accept it RIGHT NOW.

Yes, right now. You cannot escape uncertainty through logic. Record this in your mind.

So, overly relying on information and logic is a mistake when you want to diminish the fear to step into the unknown. It can help you, but only to a certain point. There’s a point in which you need to tolerate the fear, and act with discipline in spite of it.

Fear is just an emotion, it’s not necessarily the truth. It’s just a mechanism that we inherited since caveman times that is alerting you about some possible danger in the unknown future. Acting while feeling fear is the only possible way to achieve your dreamed lifestyle.

Logic Limitation #3: Innovation and Adaptation

The third limitation: logic tends to preserve what is known and reasonable. Logic may want things to happen in a way that “makes sense”, creating a prolongation of what’s already true. Sometimes logic is very cliché in its suggestions, which may not feel true for you at a core level.

Let’s suppose you are not exercising. When something is lagging behind, logic will tell you that you have to revamp it to keep it to a standard. But if at the end your emotions tell you that this doesn’t feel OK right now, you will not do it.

Logic tends to think in terms of “SHOULD I do X or Z?”, implying several things, like:

1. That you “should do” something.
2. That there are only two options.
3. There’s only one RIGHT thing to do.
4. That if you do X, you cannot do Y never again.

The way in which you ask the question, from this logic-based approach, speaks about how you are perceiving reality at the present moment, and also reinforces it. You may notice that saying “Should I do X or Y” will give you a sense of anxiety and restriction. It comes packaged with a certain feeling, and a certain way of framing the problem. But what if you ask “What do I want to experience?”. You will notice a difference, asking from a place of power, curiosity and abundance.

The Power of Logic

Even though logic has its limitations, it can be useful to create an integral plan which aids you to move forward in a thoughtful way, being gentle with yourself. You can provide yourself a map or a guide in order to feel safer. You can feed your logical mind the evidence it needs to start building a new set of beliefs, one that helps you to move forward with confidence.

HOWEVER, logic cannot prioritize or value things. You will need to be emotionally attuned to recognize the VALUE of what you are pursuing. If not, you will not be able to DECIDE, nor COMMIT, nor ACT on it.

ALSO, logic will never eradicate uncertainty completely. To step into the unknown, you will need to build-up sense of urgency and act in spite of fear at some point, sooner or later.

After exposing the benefits and limitations of a logic-based approach towards creating trust in our life transformation project, we remain with one problem: how can you know if the path you are taking is right for you?

In order to be able to DECIDE what is right for you, you need to know what is RELEVANT for you right now. What’s truly valuable for you RIGHT NOW? What’s truly valuable for you in YOUR FUTURE? You cannot answer this strictly from your head. You need to experience the VALUE you are pursuing, at least in some sense, in order to be able to define that THIS PATH is important for you.

The Role of Emotion: Assigning Value

Trusting emotions has a bad rep in self-development circles. After all, sometimes blindly trusting in emotions may lead you to binge Netflix while eating infinite amounts of chocolate ice-cream. Even though this may happen, generally speaking we don’t perceive the role of emotions when “good decisions” happen. They don’t necessarily happen only for the sake of your procrastination and binging habits.

Emotions play a big role in your decision-making process, as they are connected to your being in a way DEEPER than logic. Emotions exist before any language ever existed. We normally assume emotions as more truthful than a perfectly logical and articulated statement. If I say “I feel super happy—my life is great!”, while keeping a straight face and a monotonous voice tone, on my way to my 9-5 job, my body and my emotions will communicate something deeper and more truthful than the words I’m expressing.

It doesn’t matter how logical or how data-driven you conceive yourself to be; all your choices are, ultimately, emotional. You can only perceive value through emotion.

You only do things, because you want to feel in a certain way. The trick is that by default we prioritize short-term pleasure (think of little kids—if it were for them, they would be only eating chocolate ice-cream all day long). We need experience, education and emotional intelligence to recognize that this “happiness” has lower quality and is detrimental for our long-term wellbeing.

Even the decision of taking disciplined action and acting in spite of fear and uncertainty, is an emotional one. It’s deeper, in the sense that you are not being guided by an IMMEDIATE emotion, but guided by the expectation that the emotion that will come in the future will be better than the immediate emotion. You are exchanging one low quality emotion (ephemereal pleasure) for a better one (deep satisfaction and fulfillment).

It doesn’t make sense to be disciplined, if what you are pursuing isn’t more valuable than the pain you are overcoming.

Balancing Logic and Emotions

If you are too much into using your emotions as a source of information, you may be limiting yourself unnecessarily by feelings of fear, even when your beliefs and lack of trust are unfounded and are not rooted in reality.

When only using logic as a source of information, you may be limiting yourself unnecessarily by maintaining a status quo that makes you unhappy, or struggling to take action because of an inner dissonance between what you say you want (buying a brand new car), and what you TRULY want (i.e.: not having to drive anymore and move to another country).

In order to create a passion-centered lifestyle and live with a creative purpose, you will need to integrate logic and emotion in a seamless way. You need to create a reasonable plan—gather the necessary resources and learn the necessary skills to do it. But you also need to be in tune with your heart, really listening to what you want, what’s valuable to you in a deep level. In a way more deeper than the truths of social conditioning, way more deeper than your own insecurities, way more deeper than what you currently believe it’s true and achievable.

Bypassing Your Emotions is a Mistake

Yes, you can bypass your emotion, and force your way through but this is a mistake. Even though discipline is an important part of emotional mastery, bypassing your emotions and deep desires is a recipe for disaster, as you will be pursuing what YOU THINK is valuable for you. But remember, you don’t make value judgements out of your logical mind, your values are something that come out of a deeply engrained within your belief system.

This is a classical confusion. You think that you want something, your head is telling you a story about it and how good it is, but at a core, deep emotional level, you feel it’s not truly fulfilling for you. You aren’t truly resonating with it. Maybe you are pursuing it, in an effort to escape an anxiety and a nagging sense of emptiness that you don’t want to look at. This is what happens to all of us, in this capitalistic-materialistic society. We are manipulated by marketing 24/7, being tricked into pursuing low-quality short-term material pleasure. Being tricked into comfort, security and stability. The trap of consumerism.

So, what to do? Deciding by logic is not enough, as it cannot truly make value judgements in its own. And relying only in emotions isn’t a good approach, as emotions sometimes give you false alarms, or may trick you into pursuing short-term variants of happiness.

At the same time you have all this social conditioning that has said to you what’s acceptable and what’s not… you have media wanting to manipulate you, instilling in you fears and desires by pushing your buttons and making you react.

You need a balanced approach that gives you the possibility to take care of yourself and make the most out of your life, an approach that takes in account what you truly desire at a deep level, and not only on a surface logical level. An approach that protects you from the bullshit you will listen from your loved and not loved beings, family, friends, partners, neutral people or whoever that will see you pursuing your dreams and judge you as reckless.

Holistic Approach: Relevance Realization

John Vervaeke, a distinguished cognitive scientist, creator of the Awakening to the Meaning Crisis series in YouTube (which I strongly recommend) speaks about a process called Relevance Realization. This refers to the cognitive process by which individuals, through their minds and bodies, dynamically determine what is relevant in their experience. It plays a crucial role in shaping our perception, decision-making, and understanding of the world.

Relevance Realization is not a static or fixed phenomenon. Instead, it’s a dynamic and ongoing process, involving a continuous interaction between cognitive, emotional, bodily and environmental factors, including values, beliefs, emotions, physical sensations, and the context in which we find ourselves.

Realize What is Important

The values you assign to “things” (a.k.a. beliefs or interpretations) are everchanging. Your emotions, your body and environment too. The relevance and values you assign to things in your life, like your dreams, your family, your material stuff, the foods you eat, they are all subject to change, they are all flowing in the everchanging river of creation.

The modern citizen goes through life assigning values based on a mixture of what everyone expects from him, what he logically think is right and a craving for short-term pleasure.

So, if you want to truly know what is relevant for you on a deeper level, you should aim to embrace this process of relevance realization in a conscious way. Looking to generate situations in which the body-mind can obtain real-time feedback about what is truly important and relevant for you on a deeper level.

We are talking about articulating your logic and emotions, in an open-minded way, and taking action in order to progressively nurture clarity about what is truly important and has great meaning for you. Investing in the creation of this platform will allow you to navigate life with a inner wisdoms pointing you to what is TRULY RELEVANT, knowing that your actions are worth taking, embracing every second of pain and discomfort with flow and ease.

Beware of Cliché Goals

Like “being millionaire”, “having infinite girls and party”. Even though there’s nothing wrong with having those goals, it’s very likely that you are THINKING you want that, but in fact you are using a one-dimensional logic-based approach.

Take the case of Jim Carrey. He dedicated his entire life to “being a successful actor”. And then we he got to that point, he discovered that this goal wasn’t truly fulfilling, that it was empty. This led him to a profound reflection and awakening experience in which he encountered a space of fulfillment without those kind of logic-based goals.

if you get to the point of understanding first emotionally and then logically what’s truly important for you, and knowing that you need to take X, Y and Z steps to get there, even though you know you may encounter challenges, failures and all sorts of obstacles… you will gain a new sense of confidence, a new voice inside you telling you that you are doing the right thing, in the best way you can, and that there’s no other possible way to live, but by following this new found truth.

You will see clearly that “failing” is a child’s game in comparison the meaning and worth of what you are pursuing.

Create a Map of Meaning

This holistic approach will help you to craft your own map, based on first-hand experience. The more consciously you create this map, the more you will trust in it. The amount of trust is proportional to the amount of care you put in reviewing what’s important for you. The creation of this map would imply:

• Exploration
• Self-reflection
• Action
• Letting go
• Reframing
• Helping others.

This trust, will give you the foundation to move forward with confidence and enthusiasm towards a desired outcome.

You inherited a map from your parents, from society, and etc. Even though you may have your own religion, if you got here it’s probably because your map got outdated, so you need to engineer our own way towards deeper levels of meaning, fulfillment and awakening.

The Ultimate Method

• Even though you can create your own map of meaning through a holistic approach based on skillfully applying logical and emotional intelligence…
• Even though you can create a logically based approach to implementing what you feel is right on a deep level…

At the end, what is for sure, is that if you want to learn more about what’s truly important for you at your core, there’s one single priority you should be aiming for: Taking Action.

What You Get by Taking Action

1. Refine your relevance map. You will be exploring, gaining first hand experience about what is truly important for you. This type of experience is invaluable and there’s no expert advice that can replace it.
2. Practice emotional intelligence. Taking action puts you face to face with your fears. You will upgrade your emotional awareness and resilience.
3. Practice your logic-based skills. While taking action you can practice your logic-based skills to strategy, planning, anticipating, organizing.
4. Gain confidence. You will start to see small results and start iterating your process, gaining confidence that you can achieve your goal.
5. Learn self-mastery and discipline. You will learn how to progressively act on things that are fearful to you, and learn to cope with the discomfort and anxiety previous to performance.

Controlled Diving Approach

At the end, the best and most efficient way to learn if you should dive in or not, is by doing controlled diving, testing what happens, and then deciding having more first-hand experience and information.

Progressively take action

You need to explore, you need to embark on journeys that enrich your map, and you need to be actively evaluating with a balanced emotional and logical approach if these experiences are valuable to you. You need to understand what is it that you truly value, what is it that orders your consciousness in a fulfilling way.

Then, you need to progressively take action towards realizing that meaning in the present moment, so you can start iterating and seeing in real time the emotions that pop-up and validate if

You can journal all day, listen to podcasts all day, trying to create the perfect logic-based map, or the perfect relevance map, but if you don’t take action, you will NEVER KNOW if this path is true for you.

Summary

• Explore what is truly important for you. Tune into your emotions. Look for your own deep meaning. Do self reflection. Create vision statements, mission statements, value statements. Explore. Experiment.
• Plan a controlled dive. Compare approaches, look for information, listen to podcasts, write checklists and plans and try to approach the chosen mission in the most smart and small way you can.
• Execute the dive. Even though you may not be 100% clear about what’s truly important for you, or about your planning, start getting into action to create a feedback loop between your reality and your own map-making process. If you have a hunch that some path may be worth taking, start exploring it deliberately to progressively create confidence, answer all the questions you have and eventually making bigger commitments.
• Review. Check what you learned from the process. See if you discovered more things about what’s important for you. What emotions did you feel? What could be improved from a strategical and planning perspective?

Final Words

To dive in or not to dive in… it’s a false dichotomy.

You can explore, doing a controlled diving before diving in (and you should).

However, at some point, you will need to take a leap and execute, while taking refuge in your own sense of meaning, transmuting its energy into courage.

I assure you that if you follow what has been said on this episode, eventually you will get to a point in which:

• Your sharp logic will help you to not die in the process. You will be perfectly fine.
• Your emotional intelligence will help you to recognize long-term value and ditch the short-term cravings and rejections.
• Your conscious action will progressively introduce you towards a path of mastery and self-discipline
• Your new learnings will lean you towards a new level of meaning and a new way of life.
• You will be at peace, pursuing what you truly deserve and knowing you are doing your best.