CTC Podcast S0106 - a story about stories v1.1.mp3
Gareth: [00:00:00] When you place an order with a factory in order for the factory to deliver on what it is that you're ordering, you need to pay for your orders. And the way that you pay for your orders with the reality factory is only one. There's only one currency that's accepted for your orders. And that's belief. It's the belief that you can call whatever it is that you want into your life. The recognition that we are creating our own reality. We are choosing the stories, we are making the decisions to do the small things that make a difference and show up in our life. And so you pay for your orders with the reality factory using the only acceptable currency of belief. And as a way to support increasing your belief in order to pay for your orders, we've broken belief down into gratitude, patience, inspired action, self love and fun. When you spend more time in any of those states exercising those particular feelings and emotions, you are increasing your belief that's paying for your orders with the factory. Welcome to the podcast. For men who are ready to lead their most expansive and courageous lives.
Matt: [00:01:10] Thank you for joining us on this adventure where we'll be questioning old paradigms and architecting new ways to live, laugh and love. I'm Gareth Pickering, and I'm Matt D'Arcy. We believe that your story could contain the key that unlocks someone else's healing. So we connect with humans from all walks of life as they share their journeys from chaos to courage.
Gareth: [00:01:34] So if you're ready to experience the ease and flows that come from living an expansive and well crafted life, you're in the right place. This is the Call to Courage podcast. This is a story about the power of stories. As I have spent time. Studying and deep diving into. The Law of attraction specifically, but ultimately all the spiritual laws and vibrational, more subtle laws that for a long time I didn't even consider because they were described as the 12 spiritual laws. And that story didn't have a place in my reality. And so it kept me completely. It's a blind spot is just no ways for me to be able to understand how I was creating my reality. By using the power of stories. If I didn't give myself permission to look at these more subtle laws of which the Law of Attraction is one. So it turns out that words have vibrations and. Those vibrations carry a frequency out into the world around you and. In a world that's made up of energy, we're all connected to one another. And so. The words that we use. Basically form stories in our in our minds that we tell ourselves and those stories when told. Enough times start to carry more and more weight that eventually manifest into the three dimensional world in which we live. As soon as I understood that, it became really, really clear to me that. If I don't like what I'm seeing in the world around me, my reality, it's because it's being created by dense stories.
Gareth: [00:03:51] And those stories are made up of words. And if I wanted to change the world that I saw around me, let's use an example like money. I would need to change the words that crafted the story that I choose to tell about many. And so. That's great. That's really amazing. Well done. You've worked out that your stories can shape your reality and if you track your words, you can track your stories and you can change your reality. But what happens when you don't realize the stories that you're telling? How do you how do you catch yourself? And for me, this has really been the basis of understanding lifestyle design. Or a new term reality hacking that. Many of us, me included. Somehow pissed off with things in our life. We're not quite happy with the things in our life. But we haven't really taken the time to define exactly what an ideal version of that particular area of our life would look like using words and stories. So what I mean by that is I hate my job. What would you rather do? I'm not sure. Well, it's kind of hard. You sort of have to have an idea of what something else could even look like before you can expect that to manifest into your reality. So the idea of having a plan for your life using the My Perfect Day exercise is something that we're going to share with you in the next few voice notes. And what that'll do is give you a clear direction of where you want your life to be going.
Gareth: [00:05:31] In the eight categories of your life, the eight important areas of your life, money happens to be one of them. Work and purpose is another. Your love and intimate relationships is another. So taking a look at those areas of your life and choosing to write the best possible story that you can about those important areas of your life because stories are important. And then. As I recognized that the stories that I'm telling in my head are. For me, 99.9% of the time on autopilot. They're just flowing without me even being aware of them. My emotional body lets me know when something's not aligned. And so when I start to feel uncomfortable, anxious, stressed, impatient. It's normally because I'm telling myself some story that things are not happening quickly enough. There's not not enough resources, not enough time, some scarcity narrative running my experience. The meditation practice gives me the awareness to feel that emotion and be like, Okay, I'm feeling stressed. What is the story that I'm telling myself at the moment and recognizing that I'm not vibing with the story of having to rush and having to hustle. And so it feels like the more time I spend meditating, the better it is for me to be able to catch my stories earlier so that I can shift those stories and eventually shift my reality around the things that I want them to look like. And those are the empowered stories that we're choosing to write when we write a new story for money or for relationships or for how we want the world to look.
Gareth: [00:07:16] Before I pressed record on this voice note, I was telling myself a story that sounded like. Oh, you've been smoking weed. You can't go on the Cult of Courage group now and share the story with everybody. Because and I'm telling myself a story that when I'm stoned, I'm super creative and I love being in that space, but I sometimes feel like I'm not as clear and articulate as I am when I'm sober. So if I'm going to be on a podcast or I'm going to press the record button, I need to make sure that I'm. Not stoned. And then I'm like, That's not me at this moment. I want to share this story with you. And I happen to be stoned, and if it comes out a little bit sideways, then then that's what it is. But today's story about stories is. So fundamental to the work that we're doing. That's in the next audio notes, we're going to share some of the stories and languages that we've created. To understand these lifestyle design tools that we have created, things like order boards, the perfect day exercise that we spoke about now, various tools that use words and stories to be able to help you craft exactly what it is that you want your reality to look like. So. That is the end of this story.
Matt: [00:08:45] All right, Jack. So the audio you just heard was an audio note that Gareth put in the call to courage conversation and we decided that it should be the kickoff to this episode of the podcast, which is designed around stories, obviously, and also the tools and languages that we use here at the Cult of Courage podcast in our conversation that we want you to understand, we want you to be a part of. And. Yeah. This is stuff that Gareth and I throw around all the time. And a buddy of mine, actually, who was listening to the podcast said, Matt, you guys throw around a lot of words that we don't understand. Like he was listening to it with a buddy to give me feedback, and that was one of the pieces of feedback. And it occurred to us, Wow, we really need to have an episode that that talks about the stuff that we talk about and puts clarity to these words. Gareth picked me up here.
Speaker1: [00:09:36] Thanks, bro. I love doing that. That downloaded voice note because. Yeah. Because I was stoned and I did feel anxious and butterflies in my stomach when I was creating it. And then it came out relatively smoothly. And as I was doing it, I'm like, Fuck, you're doing it. And I was telling myself a story. And so, yeah, what I want to get into today is some of the actual language thing that we've been very intentional about creating inside our community. Because if you listen to the intro to this podcast, the stories matter. And so the language that we use matters. And one of the reasons that we focus so much on language is because there was a time when some of the language being specifically around the Law of Attraction didn't fight with me. I didn't get it, and it kept me stuck. And that when I realized that this powerful law was creating my reality in every moment, I wanted to learn about it. And I felt it was hard to learn. And so that's why we changed some of these stories. And we're going to share some of those terms and phrases and tools that we've used and created here inside this episode so that it acts almost like an index card, the opportunity for you to come back to this episode at any time. We'll also put the timestamps in the show notes so you can just click directly to each individual phrase and check out exactly what each of these phrases mean and. Maybe you want to start, Matt. What do you want to kick off with?
Speaker2: [00:10:59] Did. One of the words we throw around a lot is lifestyle design and lifestyle designer. And if you remember, Gareth, that was the word that we came up with years ago when we first started this, because what are we really doing? We are teaching people how to install habits and routines and systems into your life that allow you to create the life that you want so that your life is done by design instead of by default.
Speaker1: [00:11:27] Yep. That is a good place for me to share what a reality hack is. And a reality hack is someone that explores the underlying reality of existence and learns the tools and processes, much like stories are, that shape our reality in a way that ordinary users may not be aware of. So some of the the words that we use as as these tools that I'm referring to are actually called my life OEs. And we've been intentional about creating a system of tools that run like the operating system for your life. So you'll hear us word use words like my laugh OS, which is being intentional about the tools that we choose to create, the stories that shape our reality. You sometimes hear us talk about the word scaffolding. These lifestyle designs tools are. Used to support you as you grow in the same way that scaffolding supports a building as it grows. And every time we create a tool, we use three core principles and we call them the three S's. The first is system. So what is the actual system that you're installing or the tool that you're installing? The second is is for self inquiry, and that is really the way for you to be able to gauge how you are in relation to your plan. And then the third is is support, and that is what you do if you get stuck. So you're not moving towards what it is that you want to achieve in your life. That's the that's those are the three assets that make up our lifestyle design tools.
Speaker2: [00:12:58] Yeah. And my life was like this. We all really have our own life os. Right. Like. Like what you're doing right now, the way that you wake up in the morning, the way that you keep track of your calendar and prioritize your day like this is this is stuff that we do anyway. What we're doing called a courage is we are bringing awareness to that and saying, if you can dial in these systems, these self inquiry tools, these these support mechanisms that we have in our life, you can then become a lifestyle designer and hack your reality and create the life that you want. And really the core piece of all of this is the name of this podcast, which is what's known as a call to courage. And a call to courage is that moments that you consciously take a step in the direction of a better version of you, and you do so by facing the fear of something that you really know that you need to change in your life. And there have been stories just like you were talking about earlier, Gareth, these stories that we tell ourselves that hold you back from really taking that step and you procrastinate. I procrastinate and not take that step and like shit, man, call to courage. We say that shit all the time and I want people to understand what it is. Gareth built upon that for me. What's it called? A courage to you?
Speaker1: [00:14:25] It's I think it is what you describe there. I think what it is is recognizing that sometimes in order for us to expand, we need to step into a difficult decision. And mostly that comes from not knowing what the outcome is. If we continually do what we've always done, it eventually starts to get stale and we stop expanding. The whole purpose of stepping into an answering, a call to courage is to step into something that you don't know, to let go of an old relationship or to step into a new project. And there's that uncertainty that requires you to be courageous as you answer these calls to courage. So a call to courage is a really powerful term, and it's actually a theme that runs through this podcast. When we talk to our level up partners, a level of partner is the name of an expert that we bring onto our shows. And yeah, a level up partner is best in class in a specific area and we want to have an interview with them and learn from them. And we are going to be asking them a call to courage in their life, because part of the human experience is we all get challenged at some point in our life. And a call to courage is that moments of consciously recognizing that you're going to change something, to do something different and see something different in your life.
Speaker2: [00:15:34] You mentioned level up partners there and yeah that's that's these experts that we bring in and we really bring them in according to something that we call the eight lifestyle design pillars. And essentially what we've done is taken all the different areas of one's life and categorize them into eight pieces. How you work. Health, body and vitality. Number three is social life. For his money. Five is the physical environment that you have around you. Six is spirituality. Seven is fun and joy. An eight is love and relating. And Gareth, I think we need to find an acronym for that for real. But essentially these eight pillars make up the. The essence of life style design that when you look at an area of your life or looking at to answer a particular call to courage, the way that you can level up and step up your game is is seeing where you're at in each of these eight areas of your life and consciously tuning the ones that need to be tuned so that you can be sharper, so that you can be more bold with your steps.
Gareth: [00:16:51] The next word that we use is called the My Perfect Day script. And I want you to think about this like the plans for a building you wouldn't start creating or putting a building up without consciously creating a plan that's checked by an architect that is considered the eight important pillars that make up the important areas of your life. And the My Perfect Day script is the foundation for us and our work around lifestyle design. It's the true north that you use to help you script exactly how you want these eight important areas of your life and then used practically as a tool to shape your decision making daily to answer questions like, I've got to take this new job in a new city. Does this get me closer to or further away from my perfect day and using it as a map to guide your life? Because now you have a direction of how you want your life to look. And so the My Perfect Day script is really like the the overarching theme that you'll use for your life. The next tool that supports that is a story that we've created called The Reality Factory. And this comes up because we battle to understand manifestation when we started diving into. Learning about the law of Attraction. And what seemed to make more sense was this story about a factory that's creating our reality in every single moment. And. We've come up with this concept and we're going to break it down into a couple of components so that it makes sense. So perhaps, Matt, you want to start with the idea of placing orders. So it's the conscious process of actually calling something in.
Matt: [00:18:27] Yeah. Placing an order is really. It's bringing awareness to the thing or the experiences that you want to have in your life by writing them down and describing them in detail so that, you know, when they arrive and it's like placing orders with a factory. That's why it's called the reality factory. So if I place an order for the perfect partner to arrive in my life, I would write down her characteristics, what it feels like to be with her. And essentially what I would be doing in that process of of assessing is placing an order with the factory and calling in those things into my life.
Gareth: [00:19:08] And when you place an order with a factory in order for the factory to deliver on what it is that you're ordering, you need to pay for your orders. And the way that you pay for your orders with the reality factory is only one. There's only one currency that's accepted for your orders. And that's belief. It's the belief that you can call whatever it is that you want into your life. The recognition that we are creating our own reality. We are choosing the stories, we are making the decisions to do the small things that make a difference and show up in our life. And so you pay for your orders with the reality factory using the only acceptable currency of belief. And as a way to support increasing your belief in order to pay for your orders, we've broken belief down into gratitude, patience, inspired action, self love and fun. When you spend more time in any of those states exercising those particular feelings and emotions, you are increasing your belief that's paying for your orders with the factory.
Matt: [00:20:13] Yeah. I remember when we first started getting into building my first order board and that was yeah, this idea of an order board is the collection of orders that you have with the factory, all the things that you're trying to call into your life. And back when I read The Secret, there was this concept explained there called a vision board, where you essentially take clips of newspaper and magazines and you put together this collage of all the things you want to come to your life. Well, what we've done is created a digital order board, which is essentially the same thing, except it sits on your phone and it is a collection of all these rad things that you're calling into your life so that you can keep them on the front of your mind. So you might hear Gareth and I say, Man, that's super cool, that whatever it is, I'm going to add that to my order board. Maybe it's a camper van. We're both calling in really sick camper vans into our world. And whenever I see one, I snap a photo of it and add it to my order board so that I can keep these orders organized.
Matt: [00:21:42] And yeah, it's awesome. The next part of this analogy of the reality factory and placing orders with the factory are things called order confirmations. Some people may look at things as synchronistic or coincidence, and I think it's Einstein. That said, you can live life as though nothing's magic or you can live your life as though everything is magic. And that's a choice that we get to hold in every single moment that says when we are. Let me share an example of what an oral confirmation is for me. I'm in Oaxaca City, Mexico. Matt and I have probably been friends for two months. It's a Saturday afternoon. He's doing something else. I decide to smoke a joint and put on some headphones and walk through the city listening to some music with no way specific to go except just enjoy the energy of the city while also being in my own world and doing something that I love to do in cities which is get stoned and walk. And I'm listening to an amazing track, and one of the orders that I'm calling into my life is this boat party. And I'm listening to this track and the song is called Me and My Guitar. And as I'm listening to the song, I'm thinking, Fuck, this is such a cool song.
Gareth: [00:22:54] I'm going to add it to my Spotify playlist to the boat party that when I'm deejaying on the boat party, which is the order that I'm calling into my life, I'm going to play this song. And in that moment I walk around a street corner and I look up and in front of me there's a store that has got guitars hanging from the windows outside on the walls. It's only guitars at the same time. I'm listening to a track called Me and My Guitar, and I'm in alignment with what it is that I'm calling into my reality. That for me was an order confirmation. And so there are little synchronicities that show up in your experience, that let you know that you're on the right track. It happens often with nature, fireflies or other confirmations. For me, at times when I'm thinking about something, I'll often see something from from nature. That bird right there that you heard might be another confirmation of the work that we're doing. Yeah. Living as though everything is magic. And so do you have anything to tie on to confirmations before I share the delivered mat?
Matt: [00:23:50] Now keep going. You're doing great.
Gareth: [00:23:54] The final part of this process of the reality factory is called an order delivered. It's the spectacular moment when what was once just an idea in your mind now stands in front of you in physical reality. You've manifested the very thing that a few months, a few days, a few hours or a few years ago was just an idea. And. It's a powerful moment to recognize the role that you're playing in that creation process. And part of the order board that Matt was talking about, this next level digital vision board. We have a list of all the things that have been orders delivered so that when you're having a shit day, you go and have a look at your order board and you look at the order delivered column and you see, Oh my God, I manifested my perfect partner. I manifested this amount of money, I manifested a boat party and on and on and on it goes. And you recognize that? Okay, just be more patient, find some flow, take a breath. But in order to live, it is really the the final piece of the of the whole show with what you've been calling in shows up and the emotion that we connect with that is the emotion of celebration, just to just to celebrate how magnificent the entire process is and your role in the creation process.
Matt: [00:25:11] And when you keep things like an order board, like a digital order board in your routine like routines, are it you all it's these it comes back to the my life OS and how you run your life on a day in and day and day out basis. And one of the key things that we talk about is this idea of doing a pre game before you do anything. And a pre game is a word we use to describe this moment where you either drop in with a pen and paper and it's a writing exercise or it can be just a quick little 30 seconds self reflection moment before you walk into a meeting, before you do a travel day, before you go out on a date where you sit down and write what you're grateful for and name the orders that you want to call in for the substantial event that's about to happen. That's, that's a pre game. Gareth, I know you have more to add to this.
Gareth: [00:26:10] I'm going to leave it there. It's a perfect description of a pre-game. I'll just say that a pre-game can be, as Matt said, the breath that you take in before you speak to your kid when you're triggered. It could be the two hour writing exercise that you choose to do alone in a coffee shop as you plan the next decade of your life. A pre-game can be done for any phase, and really, as Matt said, it's just bringing the awareness to the fact that every single one of these moments are important. And the daily pre-game is the 5 minutes that I do on my iPhone every single morning. I don't miss a pre-game while I'm taking a shit. That's my that's how I start my day. I don't miss it. It's too important not to spend the time writing down what I want to have in my day. One of them was a smooth recording of episode number six with Matt today. That was an order that I placed today. I can feel it in my body. It's going to be an order delivered. Boom. The post game is another tool that we use in a similar way where much like you take the opportunity and bring consciousness to the setup of a specific event like your day, you take a couple of minutes at the end of your day to do a post game, and the format for that is, again, gratitude. What can you be grateful for? Because gratitude is also paying for your orders.
Gareth: [00:27:24] You get the opportunity to reflect on your day. So you read your your pre game from the morning and you're like, whoa, everything that I wrote down here has been an order delivered. Maybe one or two things weren't in order delivered. That's cool. That's that's the nature of this creation. But the more time you spend reflecting, first of all, on the things that are delivered, you realize more and more that you're creating that reality. And the reflection piece is also to take a look back and go, okay, today I was a little bit shitty in the traffic or I was a little bit short with my partner. And you have the opportunity in that moment to rewrite that story into something more empowering. The next time the kid puts their hands on the wall, I'm going to take a breath and I'm going to celebrate that. I've got a kid, whatever. Like you get the chance to rewrite it and it's just an opportunity to reflect on the exact same thing. It could be a reflection on the last moment, so it could be a reflection on your day, or it could be a reflection on the last decade of your life. Every year I have a birthday month coming up. I do a post game of the year before and a game for the the upcoming year so that I can see where I've grown and I can see how I want my life to expand in the next year.
Matt: [00:28:32] Yeah. The idea of a pregame especially is this concept of of bringing awareness to what is about to happen. And a deeper version of that is another term we use called a future state or a future state exercise or doing future stating and. When you do a future state, it's a meditation where you imagine a moment or an event in your future. And you. Think about how it feels when you're doing that thing, when you're experiencing that order delivered, when you are having that joyful experience in your life and. Like one of the orders on my order board, for example, is travel business class around the world. And when I am looking at that order board, I'll drop into a future state exercise. Well, I'll imagine what it feels like to have my Bose headsets on being called first in the line of 200 people waiting to get on the plane, walking down the jetway with some tunes cranking, hitting the plane and going left to business class instead of right to coach and walking through each of those steps in that sort of. And that that fantasy of this order that I'm calling into my world, that is a future state.
Gareth: [00:30:00] And the expansion of the future state is an embodiment exercise called Future State Walking. I want to mention why future states are important with the future state that Matt is talking about now, where you embody or start to think about the future version of yourself as well as the exercise of future state walking, future self walking that I'm going to talk about now is that when you do these things, you're developing the belief that that reality is possible. And belief, as we spoke about, is the currency that you use to pay for your orders. And so a future self walking exercise is an exercise where you choose to go for a walk as the future version of yourself, the version of you that is the healthiest that you've ever been, that's the most abundant that you've ever been, that's fucking bossing it as a parent, as a leader, as a partner, whatever it is, you take the time to feel what that person would feel like and walk that truth. Now the future self is walking now and you start to embody that version of yourself. You create an energetic imprint that starts to develop the belief that that's a possibility in your future. So future self walking is really an embodiment exercise that you can use to develop the belief that helps to pay for your orders.
Gareth: [00:31:15] So those are just some of the tools and stories and phrases that we have created inside this community to support us, to be able to create our lives by design. And I want to share this episode and this language thing that we're creating with a caveat. And that caveat is that this is your story and this is your life, and this is not some sort of cult where everybody has to do the same stuff. This is really taking the tools and systems that we've already created and adapting them to write your own possible story, to give yourself the permission to dream and live the most amazing human experience that you can create. And so take these tools, use them, jump inside the courts, encourage conversation to get a little bit more detail. And I want to share a story about a really interesting order delivered based on a housesitting gig that I did when I was in Mexico. Matt and I had just finished our first round of creating of at the time it was called The Immaculate Factory, then it became the Reality Factory much later. Thank you for the rebrand or the terrible name The Immaculate Factory. But we had just started talking about this lifestyle design stuff and I went down to Mexico and I was housesitting a place in the desert in the Baja Peninsula.
Gareth: [00:32:38] And I said to the couple that I was housesitting. I was like, Hey, can we go for a walk at the backyard? Looks like there's amazing mountains behind the house where I was staying and they were like, You can, but you should be really careful. There's a lot of rattlesnakes back there. The couple next door saw a rattlesnake the other day and you needed all they would. They were almost living in fear of the land around them because they thought there were so many rattlesnakes there. So I spent the first week not really going back there and eventually I just got honest with myself and I said, Well, I do want to see a rattlesnake and I definitely want to get out and experience this nature. So I'm just going to go for a run. And at the time I was filming a vlog, so I had my GoPro with me and I went for a run. I got all the way to the top of the hill and I got to a dead end where I couldn't, I couldn't get any further. I was trying to get to the top of the mountain, but it had a fence going across and I couldn't get to the top. And so I turned around and I started running back towards the house and I'd been telling myself a story that there's rattlesnakes in these hills since the couple had told me about it.
Speaker1: [00:33:33] And on the way back down the hill, it was almost, I don't know, I could feel it coming. That's the only other way to describe it. As I came around this one corner, lying across the path was this big, fat rattlesnake. And I just approached slowly. One of the orders that I had placed was I wanted to see a rattlesnake, but I wanted to see it in a safe way that I could appreciate it. And he was like maybe two meters away from me right across the road. And it was like I knew he was going to be there. It was so, so crazy. I get goosebumps just telling the story, but I move a little bit closer to him. I'll get my phone out, I'll drop my phone or my GoPro because I was so nervous. And as I pick it up again, the snake starts to rattle and eventually just moves off the path. And it was just this beautiful, yeah. Opportunity to, to be in proximity to nature and to recognize how our stories make a difference. And it's not just something that you plan and go through the process. There's, there's some magic happening about the way that our reality is unfolding around us.
Matt: [00:34:33] I remember you being on that rattlesnake journey and you were saying, man, I'm going to see a rattlesnake and I'm going to see it safely the day before you saw it. And then I remember when you you sent me that GoPro video. Yeah, man. Anyway, I think that's going to wrap up this conversation, y'all. This episode was really about bringing you in and showing you this this language thing that we throw around so often, expecting everybody to know what we're talking about, and sometimes you don't. And so the invite is to come on into the call to encourage conversation where we're diving into this stuff a little bit deeper. If you have questions, if you don't know what the heck we're talking about, drop comments into that chat and we'll be able to answer it and and yeah, continue being a part of shaping this conversation.
Gareth: [00:35:26] Much appreciated, brother. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time here today. And for those of you listening, we're looking forward to seeing you inside the quarter carriage conversation. Much love, Matt.
Matt: [00:35:38] Cheers, Gareth.
