Does It Feel Right or Does It Feel Familiar?

What Happens When Your Daily Habits Become Your Daily Prison

I recently heard the phrase “Does it feel right or does it feel familiar?” while listening to something from Dr. Joe Dispenza.

I won’t go sideways with Dr. Joe here, but he’s pretty amazing. I don’t remember if I shared a snippet about him and his work here or in my other newsletter, but he’s a neuroscientist with a fantastic story (and apologies if I shared it here and this is a repeat, but it’s worth it).

If you’ve ever wanted proof of the power of the mind, he’s your guy. The TLDR: at 24, he was hit by a truck while riding his bike in a triathlon. Doctors told him the surgery they wanted to do (putting metal rods in his back) gave him a 50/50 chance of ever walking again.

He said no (to which everyone thought he was nuts).

He wanted to try and heal himself with his mind. He committed that if he could heal himself, he’d spend the rest of his life studying the mind/body connection (he was a chiropractor and knew the spine/vertebrae well).

Six weeks later, he walked out of the hospital (he’s in his 60s now).

Dr. Joe (what many people call him) is one of my ‘go-to’s’ for keeping myself aligned.

I have a handful of “teachers” like him who, when in doubt, even if I’m listening to a recording I’ve heard 10 times before, I hear something new that resonates.

This is where “Does it feel right or does it feel familiar?” comes in.

Most people don’t realize that the behaviors and habits we adopt on autopilot are actually hindering our ability to create what we want.

Which feels contrary to consistency and practice (if you’ve been creating online for at least a week, you’ve heard the war cry of “consistency!”).

Stay with me; this will make sense.

The key to whether or not something hinders us is the autopilot piece.

Before I proceed, I want to clarify that this isn’t about creating a new morning routine or productivity plan or finding the right tool to track your life and business goals.

If that’s what you’re looking for, there's enough of that out there.

We need “less” of all of that, not more.

I’m all about simplicity.

And I know that my behaviors and not living on autopilot create simplicity.

O.K., back to feeling right or feeling familiar (and my point with this whole article).

If what you’re doing today is the same as yesterday, and you do it without even thinking (i.e., autopilot), do you think your autopilot behavior will help you create a different outcome/circumstance, or will it create more of the same?

It's not a trick question. 😉

Obviously, we create more of the same.

Creating new behaviors is what creates new beliefs, which create new circumstances.

But here’s the kicker…

We have to practice all of this.

I prefer the word ‘practice’ to consistency (reframe it or reword it in whatever way works for you 😉).

Let me give you a tangible business example that might help illustrate this.

There was a woman I used to know who was in the online marketing space. She was a designer, and most of her business was client work, which was fine, but she wanted to step more into coursework.

She had one successful course that she pre-sold through a Facebook group, but she never really wanted to do marketing outside of her group (many of her members were on her email list).

So she’d hire people to write for her because “she wasn’t a writer.”

*Side note*
I probably sound like a broken record with this, but the best thing you can do for your online business is learn to write. Write content, emails, copy… all of it. You don’t have to become an expert, but the more you do practice it, the better you’ll get.

Telling herself she didn’t write because she wasn’t a writer was familiar.

That doesn’t mean it’s not right (or the truth!).

We’ve all heard the trite (but true) sayings and quotes about “growth happens outside of our comfort zone.”

Just because these sayings and beliefs are overused doesn’t make them any less accurate.

A lot of the advice and suggestions around behavioral change are based on “pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps” and “doing the work” (a phrase I’ve used plenty of times).

The challenge is that we’re trying to motivate ourselves through external ideals instead of rewiring the brain for long-lasting behavioral change.

It’s the age-old adage of “what got you here won’t get you there.”

I felt compelled to share this today because this has felt like a missing piece of the puzzle.

I’m great at taking action and “doing the work,” - but if I haven’t changed my internal beliefs, I won’t create lasting change.

In other words, I end up right back where I started (same story, different day).

There have been plenty of times where I’ve justified that something doesn’t “feel right” when, in truth, there’s a level of discomfort or so much unknown that because it doesn’t feel familiar, I tell myself it doesn’t feel right.

Keeping me in precisely the same place.

Somehow, reframing work that feels uncomfortable or unknown as “practice” removes the pressure I place on myself.

I don’t expect to become a master overnight - and deciding to “practice” doesn’t mean I’ll never get it wrong or skip practicing.

Behavioral change takes time and energy - but that doesn’t mean we wait to change the behavior before we start practicing. They’re synonymous.

And when things start to feel familiar…

Take inventory.

If things truly feel right, keep at it. You’ll know if and when it’s time to do something different, especially if you want something different.

More often than not, I find that it isn’t about changing things up entirely (i.e., you don’t need to burn the boats - although sometimes that’s necessary).

Sometimes, it’s simply going deeper.

Ask yourself, “What if I changed things up by 5%? What would that look like?”

We live in a world that places so much emphasis on what things look like:

• Am I producing enough content?

• Am I showing up?

• When was the last time I made an offer?

• Am I emailing enough?

• Am I on enough platforms?

It’s exhausting.

So next time you’re thinking about learning something new, investing in something (a course/product), or starting a new project/product, ask yourself if you’re doing it because it feels familiar or because it feels right.

Familiarity is often a distraction because of our discomfort with the unknown.

I’ll leave you with one more Dr. Joe phrase:

“You can either live from a record of the past or a map of the future.”

-Dr. Joe Dispenza