You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled, How Your Identity Illusion Keeps You Trapped. Those words, I haven’t used them in the podcast before. You hear me talking a lot about identity, but what you have not heard me talk about is the identity illusion. And in this episode, I want to talk about your identity illusion and how it keeps you trapped. 
 
So if you’d like to learn more about your identity illusion and how to actually stop being crap, keep listening. 
 
Transformational psychology and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible. 
 
for you. I’m glad you’re here. Okay, Identity Illusion. You know, the fact that you’re listening to the podcast, I already know this. I mean, I’ve done this for six years now. We’ve had 376 episodes, millions of downloads. And I know what you guys are dealing with. Many of you, if not all of you, you’re working harder, but you do want more life. But you also find that you keep falling right back into your old patterns and your old traps. 
 
Why? Because like a Venus flycrap, once you start escaping and creating things in life, your identity illusion pulls you right back down into the illusion and keeps you trapped in the illusion. Now we just finished the B2Hab series. I mentioned that extensively here on the podcast. Now the question was, is, did you attend the B2Hab series? Because if you did, 
 
Jim Fortin (02:23.758) 
you understand what the identity illusion is. This is a great time to point out because this will literally broadcast two weeks after the Be To Have series is done. Did you enroll in the transformational coaching program, which I offered you in the Be To Have series? Now, I already know the answer to that. Many of you did not. Even though I explained to you how your identity illusion keeps you trapped, I talked to you about choices. 
 
I talked to you about how your identity illusion keeps you trapped in your choices. You still went right back into your identity illusion and candidly, most likely you’re going to stay trapped out of fear, even though you do not want to stay trapped. Now, I don’t know what you will and you will not do. I’ve done this for 32 years. I’ve seen it. People, can’t get out of the trap. And that’s what I want to talk about. Even if you listen to the B2F series, 
 
If you didn’t, you’re going to learn quite a bit. You’re going to learn why you keep self-sabotaging yourself from an identity perspective. But it’ll be a great opportunity for you to take a step back and look at what you learned a couple of weeks ago and look at, even though I told you the warning signs a couple of weeks ago, you still fell into the identity illusion. Also, I want to point out is my job and I’m becoming more more adamant about this. 
 
Is my job is to not tell you what you want to hear. My job is to tell you the truth with love, care, concern, compassion. But my job is not to tell you what you want to hear because when I tell you what you want to hear, you just keep repeating your old patterns. So let’s talk about you listening to the podcast because I talked about this in the B2H series. If you’re someone 
 
And if you’re like the millions of people who’ve downloaded the episodes, you’ve gotten value. No question about it. We get messages, Instagram comments, all this stuff all the time saying how helpful the podcast has been with people. And in what I share and what I teach, if you stop with the podcast thinking that you’re getting enough and you have enough, that’s like being on the Titanic. It’s already hit the iceberg and it’s going down. 
 
Jim Fortin (04:44.783) 
and you’re running around rearranging chairs on the Titanic thinking you’re going to save the Titanic from sinking. So let’s imagine that the podcast is you’re getting all this information, but if you think this is enough to help you literally transcend, literally to transform your life, it’s not. And it is, but it’s not because you can’t integrate it, which I’ll share with you in just a moment. Until you can integrate 
 
What you’re hearing me say here or watching if you’re watching on YouTube and tell you can get this to become part of your identity. It’s simply information. And candidly, I don’t like saying that about my own podcast, but I’m telling you the truth. So the example that I gave in the B2F series, imagine that you’re wrapped up in a ball of string and I say, okay, you’re wrapped up nice and tight and a ball of string. 
 
Get out. You can’t. You can’t get out. Why? Because you’re wrapped up like this. You can’t see where to start unraveling the ball of string. But if I handed you a ball of string and you could see where the string ended and I said, okay, unravel it. You could pull that into the ravel and it would unravel the entire thing, the entire ball and you would unravel it. But here’s the thing of your life. Like the ball of string, 
 
You’re not taking a meta position and looking at your life from an outside position. You’re trapped in the ball and the ball is your identity illusion. And the thing about the identity illusion, which is what I said in the Be Do Have series, the identity illusion through the process of the identity illusion will keep you trapped in the identity illusion. This is why you never, unless they win the lottery, 
 
you never see somebody going from a hundred thousand a year for the most part to a million a year. You don’t see it. Why? Because their identity illusion has them working from their past. And what they will do is think, okay, I made a hundred thousand this year. Okay. That means I can make a hundred and ten thousand next year. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a really good idea. A hundred and ten. That you’ll hear. That’s my goal. A hundred and ten thousand. Now you may. 
 
Jim Fortin (07:09.242) 
You may not, you’ve got a good chance it’s a 10 % increase. You’ve got a good chance of hitting at least 5 % and maybe 10%. Then what you do is the next year you say, I had 100,000 two years ago, I had 10,000 last year, I’m gonna go for 120. But notice back to what I was saying, you don’t see people going from 100 to 2 million. You don’t see it even though it’s possible. Why? Because your identity illusion keeps them incrementally 
 
trapped at $100,000 per year, and then a little incremental adjustment next year, and a little incremental adjustment the year after. You know, right now, I could tell you that you could make, and you may already, but most of you don’t, statistically speaking, I could tell you that you could make $500,000 this year. And you know what? You can. But if you’ve never made that, you might say, of course I can. Yeah, I believe that. 
 
Well, you believe it analytically, but you don’t believe it subconsciously because if you believe that subconsciously, guess what? You would have already done it. So right now, if I said you can, which by the way, again, you can literally make $500,000 in 2025 or whatever year you’re listening to this. If I said you could do it, most of you are going to say, no, I can’t. Few of you are going to say, oh yeah, yeah, I can though you’ve never done it. 
 
Which if you’ve never done it, no, you can’t because like I just said, if you could, you would have already done it. That’s your prefrontal cortex, analytical brain and mind literally analyzing and saying, yes, I think I can do it. But at the subconscious level, you’re not the kind of person to do it. You’ve got to shift at the subconscious level, which I say over and over and over and over times 1000 over and over and over again. So I’ve said this before, write this down. Remember it. You can never outperform. 
 
your subconscious identity. You can never outperform your subconscious identity. And what you are at the identity level is your illusion. And you cannot, and I’ll dig into this. You cannot escape the illusion from within the illusion. I’ll say it again. How you see yourself right now is 
 
Jim Fortin (09:36.476) 
from the perspective of your subconscious identity. And that is your identity illusion. Let’s call it that. How you see yourself is your, in your mind, broke, the F word, fat, not smart, good dancer, bad dancer, good at math, bad at math. However you see yourself in your illusion, your identity illusion, you will never escape that identity illusion until you bust the illusion. 
 
more on that in a little bit. By the way, again, we talked about all of this in the B2F series. And then it’s kind of like in this series, it’s kind of like telling people, by the way, there’s a pothole. You’re going to walk a hundred feet up and there’s a pothole. And people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Jim, you gave me the directions. It’s not a problem. You said walk 99 feet, take a left, walk around the pothole, keep on walking. I got it. I got it. I got it. No, I don’t need you anymore, Jim. What do they do? They fall right in the pothole. Why? 
 
The identity illusion pulls them right back into the pothole. Now let’s look at this. Einstein said, you cannot fix a problem with the level that was created. You cannot fix a problem at the level that was created or something along those lines. But basically that’s the whole gist. Well, look at your life right now. Look at all the things that are challenging in your life. Let’s just call them for a lack of better words in this moment. 
 
problems, maybe health problems, maybe money problems, maybe relationship problems. Now back to what I said, you cannot fix your problems at the level it was created. So the problems that you have in your life right now, they were created from the level of your subconscious identity you have now. You’re trying to use the same subconscious identity you have now to solve a problem. 
 
that the subconscious identity created. Do you see how that is completely impossible to do? Which is why, again, we did the Be To Have series, and then I offered people the opportunity to work with me personally and to go into coaching with me. And most people, because when there’s money involved, people make money their master and let money control them. People will say, I want to do that. I need to do that, but I’m afraid. 
 
Jim Fortin (11:59.238) 
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to figure it out myself. But again, you can’t figure it out yourself because the identity illusion that created the problem is the same identity illusion trying to figure out the problem. Can’t fucking do it. Now, I’m not criticizing. I was there for decades. Talk about being a hard head. I’ll talk about that in just a couple of minutes. But this is why people keep failing with their goals. 
 
This is why research shows that 92 % of people fail with their goals. Why? Because they set their goals from their current identity. Then they analytically think about what they want to create. But analytically, what they want to create is not consistent with a subconscious identity. And you will always default, always, not sometimes, always, not sometimes, always, not sometimes. You will always default to the subconscious identity, whatever it is. 
 
no matter how much you think you want to create more in life. So to create more in life, you need to go to a higher level of thinking. You need to go beyond the illusion, meaning you need to get out of that ball of string, which is the illusion, and then look at the ball of string from the outside, from a different perspective. But the illusion keeps you trapped in the illusion. Therefore you can’t go to a higher level. 
 
There’s no other way. Well, the only other way, meaning there’s no other way to this other than going to a higher level. That’s what I mean by no other way. And in the Kabbalian, K-Y-B-A-L-I-O-N, an ancient text, it talks about degrees and polarity. And to cancel a lower degree, you have to go to a different degree, a higher frequency. A higher frequency will overrule a lower frequency. So. 
 
A thought from the subconscious mind would be like a higher frequency, metaphorically speaking, it overrules the lower frequency of the analytical thought. So if you’re saying analytically, you can’t make a million a year, that’s lower frequency, but you’ve got to go to a higher frequency reprogramming your subconscious mind to override that thought that you can never make a million dollars a year. Years ago, as I said, I’ll bring this back to me, I was always wondering why I couldn’t get ahead in business. 
 
Jim Fortin (14:21.21) 
I mean, come on, I’m working hard. I watch a lot of videos. I’m not a big, believe it or not, I find it defensible in a good way. I love when I was listening to Cher on Howard Stern a while back and Cher said she is not a big Cher fan. She doesn’t like her music, doesn’t like her voice. And I found that very liberating because a lot of us don’t like our voice. But I look at me and I look at where I was years ago and 
 
I tried so hard guys, literally I worked so hard. I watched so many videos. it’s going to talk about podcasts. Meaning you can listen to all the podcasts in the world. I don’t even listen to my own podcasts where it’s going to go. And I really don’t listen to other people’s podcasts. I’m just not a podcast person. I’d rather watch video, but you can listen to all the podcasts. And here’s what I to kick myself in the head because I don’t mind telling a truth as long as it will help you. 
 
Until you go to a different level and let me take you or help you get to a different level, it’s just information. You’ll gather more information and you’ll have this whole library of information, but nothing will fucking change. I had a guy at an event I did in Dallas about 10 years ago. And I’ll come back to me in just a moment and how I was stuck. But he said, Jim, everything you talked about on stage, I know every bit of that. I just can’t demonstrate it in my own life. 
 
Well, there you go. Analytically left brain, you can gather a lot of information and you can understand it, but it doesn’t mean you know it. until you can be it, be to have, be more to do more, to have more, until you can be more, it doesn’t matter what you think you know, because it’s simply analytical. So for me, many years ago, this is where I was going. 
 
I would listen to many different YouTube videos. I’m a voracious reader. I would read and read and read and read and read and read and read some more, but I couldn’t get unstuck. I would even read books on getting unstuck and I couldn’t make more money. And I didn’t even read books on how to make more money. I exaggerate none. I’ve literally read over 5,000 books in my life and at least a thousand on making money. I could tell you every single way. 
 
Jim Fortin (16:46.034) 
to make money and all the things you had to think and all the things you had to do, but I couldn’t do it myself. And I remember one day when it comes to business, okay, I’m speaking of business only, a good friend of mine and a long time friend, I’ve known him for 25 years, his name is Rich Sheffrin and he’s a massive internet marketer, was hosting a three day event back in 2013, so 12 years ago. It was a transformational weekend. Now, 
 
I was already making multiple six figures per year, but I couldn’t even bother making seven figures per year. And he only had one event, only eight people there. And he showed me a lot of these things. Now what I’ve created over the years has gone eons beyond, sorry Rich, what he did. Because he never mentioned identity in those days that I was with him and all these kinds of things. And I figured it out on my own. And now I helped the amount of people that I help. My point is this. Within, I think it was about a year or so, 
 
I made $1.2 million. The bigger point was he showed me my blind spots. And if you don’t have somebody coaching you through and showing you your blind spots, it doesn’t matter how much information you gather. You’re always going to fall back into that blind spot. Like I talked about falling back into that pothole. No matter if you even say, 
 
I am not going to fall into that pot hole. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it. Plunk. There you go. When you do it, even though you said you’re not going to do it, that is your subconscious identity. That is the identity illusion. And until like the last episode, I had said that I wouldn’t be where I was unless I had the mentorship of Don Javier. We need mentors. But then what many people do is they say, okay, Jim, I need a mentor, but… 
 
I can’t afford a mentor and the identity illusion of money struggle keeps them in the identity illusion of money struggle. They’ll never be able to afford a mentor. Therefore they will never be unstuck, but then they will fool themselves and say, yep, I will be unstuck. Now you won’t look at your patterns. Don’t listen to me. Don’t take my word for it. Look at your patterns because your patterns will tell you everything. Your patterns are your subconscious roadmap. Now I do want to point out 
 
Jim Fortin (19:08.604) 
You’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not a bad person. You’re not lazy. Your subconscious identity is who you learned to be. You learned to be that way in the world. It’s like a computer. It is your programming. Let me share a story here. Many of you have heard it. It’s a classical motivational story, classic motivational story. It was about the baby elephant. You take a baby elephant and they’re actually chained to 
 
a reinforced pole in the ground, like a steel pole cemented, reinforced in the ground. The baby elephant learns that it cannot pull away. And then what happens is later as the baby grows up, you can tie that baby to a bamboo stick and the baby, the grown up elephant won’t try to escape. Why? Because it’s learned when it’s tied and tethered to something, it cannot get away. You’re no different. Whatever you were tied. 
 
and tethered to as a child about health, money, relationships. Every single bit of that is your identity illusion. Now, as I said earlier, your illusion will keep you trapped in your illusion. Ponder that. Your illusion will keep you trapped in your illusion. 
 
It’s like when you were a kid, you’d go to the carnival and you’d go to the house of mirrors. One of my favorite places as a kid, by the way, you go to the house of mirrors and you can’t find your way out because every way you go is a reflection of you. Everything in your life is a reflection of you and you keep reflecting you back to you. So I want to share, and I’ve done this in different places before. 
 
And I did this in the B2Hab series. And if you were in the B2Hab series, listen anyway, okay? Because it’ll be just good, good reaffirmation and hopefully cement this in a little more. So three ways that the illusion keeps you trapped in the illusion. Number one is identity verification. Meaning we at some level want to know what tomorrow is going to look like. Because that’s predictability. I’ll talk about that in the moment. 
 
Jim Fortin (21:32.54) 
So identity verification is as crazy as it sounds, if you’re broke, at least you know what tomorrow is going to look like, which is predictable, which is a survival mechanism. But let me make this a little more tangible. This will be the third time on this podcast out of 300 and something episodes. Let’s say, let’s take a woman, she’s in an abusive relationship and everyone, friends and family is like, she really needs to get out of that relationship. And she gets out of the relationship. 
 
But then what, and everybody’s like, my God, thank God. This is amazing. She’s free. This is hallelujah. I’m happy. She’s not in an abusive relationship anymore. And then what happens about three months later, she says, Hey everybody, I met this new guy again. And by the way, it’s always the same guy, but she met this new guy and she goes into this relationship with this new guy who’s like the old guy, the last guy she was with who abused her. 
 
And people on the outside are thinking, are you kidding me? This guy abused her as badly as Bob did. And John is a different guy, but he’s abusing her as badly as Bob did. Well, what’s going on here is identity verification. Because at a subconscious level, she holds the identity of someone that deserves to be abused, which is why she allows it. So she holds the identity subconsciously 
 
of someone who deserves to be abused. Now, where this gets more complex, and this is research demonstrated, if she holds the identity she needs to be, or she deserves to be abused, she will actually attract an accommodating identity that will abuse her. So let’s just pick male and female. So if she’s a female and she has a belief that she’s not worth much, it’s always her fault. 
 
She deserves to be abused. She deserves to be hit a couple of times here and there because it’s her fault, which is what many people do. They personalize it and make it about them and it’s not about them. But if she believes that she deserves to be, and I’ve heard people say this, smacked around and put in their place. If she believes she deserves that, she will automatically search out a man that will literally, quote, smack her around and put her in her place, which verifies her identity. 
 
Jim Fortin (23:54.003) 
but it also verifies his identity as a person who believes that women need to be smacked around and put in their place. Pretty brutal and now pretty crazy, but that’s the way the subconscious mind works. So you look at your own life, you identity verify over and over and over again. And even though you say you want different things, you bring a lot of the very same things that you don’t want into your life. Why? Because they supplement your identity verification. 
 
Next one, there’s been research done on this. There’s a part of the brain, I mentioned this before, that likes predictability. There’s a part of the brain, the survival reptilian part of the brain, that works from predictability. Why? Many hundreds of thousands of years ago when you left the cage, you wanted to be able to predict how safe it was going to be for you to go out. So predictability was kind of a gauge, like, okay, I can go hunt for food, or if I could predict it’s not going to be that safe, I’m going to stay in the cave. It’s a survival mechanism. 
 
When we keep repeating our patterns over and over and over again, even though we don’t like them and we curse them and we hate them and we say we don’t want them, for many people, they are predictable. And predictability is a survival mechanism. And another is disintegration anxiety. Disintegration anxiety, we move from pain to pleasure. Disintegration anxiety is that 
 
When we think about creating change in life, whether it be a cross-country move or a job or whatever it is, we get anxious. Why? Because we can’t predict what’s going to happen if we quit our job and move across the country. We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. So this anxiety is painful. We move brain-based from pain to pleasure. So what happens is when we think about creating big changes in life, we start getting anxiety about it. 
 
And the thing about the anxiety, the anxiety makes us stop thinking about creating new things because it creates too much anxiety in us. Anxiety is pain. We move from pain to pleasure. Pleasure is no anxiety. Okay. Even though I’m stuck, okay, I can relax. I am not anxious anymore. However, we haven’t gotten what we want. Until you understand this and accept this, and by the way, in the secret podcast, I’ll talk more about escaping. 
 
Jim Fortin (26:19.645) 
disintegration, anxiety, and the things that I just talked about. But until you accept this, and by the way, this could be construed as negative and it’s not negative, it’s observational. I’m telling you the truth. There’s even been books written on this, not by me, but other people, obviously. And here’s the thing, having a desire to change doesn’t create the change. The change happens with the way that you’re being, which is subconscious. So I am in no way wanting to be 
 
And you could say, well, Jim, you’re being negative. I don’t want to hear this. Well, then your options are staying stuck. Wouldn’t you rather somebody tell you the truth so you can figure it out with more advanced information so you can become unstuck rather than somebody telling you what you don’t want to hear. You’re uncomfortable about it because you want to be rah rah cheerleader, but yet you stay stuck when you’re rah rah cheerleader and you keep thinking, think positive, think positive. I think positive all the time. Why am I stuck? 
 
I’m telling you it is parts of your brain. So your change is going to be very slow. If even I’m just going to say that it’s going to be very slow. If not minimal until you recognize you’re trapped in the illusion and nothing will change until you get outside of the illusion. You know, I changed the metaphor, but one of my coaches used to say one time, if I put you in a box and I taped the box shut, 
 
and it was dark in there. And I said, hey, Jim, if you want out of the box, that’s easy. But the label and the instructions to get outside of the box are not inside the box, they’re on the outside of the box, which means I need to bust the box and get on the outside of the box to ostensibly read the directions, which I won’t need anymore because I’ve already busted outside of the box. 
 
I want to slow down with that because I cannot emphasize that one point enough is that you can’t change your life from the same old box because you have the same old blind spots. You’re living from the same old self-sabotaging paradigms, even though you’re saying you want more. I only have one one-to-one client right now because I don’t take one-to-one clients. 
 
Jim Fortin (28:44.031) 
I may, I don’t know, take more. I don’t know at this point, but I do group in the transformational coaching program. And she hired me recently because she goes, Jim, I want to go from seven to eight figures per year. And she obviously makes seven figures per year and she wants to go to eight. She’s paying me the equivalent of us dollars or $45,000 for the coaching. And she said to me her exact words, not mine. I would not be or show a lack of integrity to say something that’s not true. 
 
Her words were this, and I wrote it down, I’m not going to build an eight figure business on free information. 
 
Ponder that. So go back to where this event that I told you about with Rich Sheffrin, that was a $12,000 event. It was not free. And that’s when my life took off. All I’m telling you is in the future is if you’re trying to save your way to more money, that’s a broken strategy for the most part. You need to invest in yourself. 
 
Invest in yourself for people that can help you actually see your blind spots or share new perspectives that will give you epiphanies to get you out of your blind spots. But then here’s the second conundrum is that once you’re out of a blind spot, you’re already in another blind spot, but you don’t know you’re already in another blind spot. Again, I’m not telling you that to be negative. I’m telling you that, okay, there’s some growth that needs to happen. 
 
but you need to transcend the fears that hold you back and the fears are all part of the identity illusion. So on the secret podcast, I want to talk to you and share more about getting out of your identity illusion and some steps you want to take to get out of it. For now, for the general podcast, what I want to share is this. Please listen very carefully is that you want more in life. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. 
 
Jim Fortin (30:46.793) 
But the challenge is you’re trying to create more from within the old identity illusion. And you cannot create more from within the old identity illusion. The way to do it is like the box I gave you. You’ve got to get outside of the box. But if you never get outside of the box, chances are odds are against you ever changing anything. 
 
And again, that’s not negative. It’s just odds, it’s statistics. The odds are against you changing anything at any kind of rapid pace, maybe over a 10 year period, but no rapid pace. Why? Because you’re trapped in the box. So join me on the Secret Podcast and I want to talk more about something very simple about getting out of the identity illusion. And by the way, I’m sure there’ll be ads on the podcast for later, but if you want to join the app where I actually coach people twice per month, is appapp.com. 
 
dot jimforton.com, app, which is app, dot jimforton.com. Join my beat who have insiders and there actually you’ll find the secret podcast addendum to the whole podcast. And I do a live in there every single week and I coach in there twice per month. So whether you’re there or here, know that over there, you’ve got more of my attention and more of my assistance over there in the app. Okay, thanks for listening. I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye bye.