You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled The Illusion of Control: Why Managing Your Life is Exhausting You. If you’ve listened for any amount of time, you’ve heard me from time to time talk about control, the issue of control, and you’ve heard me say that when we try to control things, we are getting into the illusion of control and we are being controlled by the illusion of control. And most of us don’t think of it this way, but getting into the illusion of control is one of our biggest limitations. So in this episode, what I’m going to do is I’m going to dig deeper into the issue and we’re going to talk about control. But more than that, we’re going to talk about why so many of us feel like we’ve got to constantly work to keep our life afloat. And many of us feel like we’re in quicksand. To some degree, and I’ve been there before, and I know many people of you, you know, many of you are there, is we feel like we’re on a bicycle and we have to constantly, constantly, constantly control and manage the bicycle and pedal faster or we’re going to fall behind in life. So if you feel like you have to constantly hustle to keep up with all the moving pieces of life and you have to pedal the bike of life before your life flips upside down, then this episode is for you. Keep listening.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, 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.

Pedaling the air quote bike of life. And many of you listening are probably exhausted with, so to speak, pedaling just to keep your bicycle up and moving, meaning your life. And for many of us, and I’ve been there before, which is why I’m doing this episode, is we live under this illusion and from this illusion that we have to constantly, constantly manage our life and we have to improve our life and we’ve got to paddle that boat or pedal that bike or whatever it is, because if we don’t do that, our life is going to become unmanageable and it’s going to flip upside down and we’re going to lose money. And then how are we going to pay our rent and all these kinds of things? Well, I want to start dispelling that myth in this particular episode.
So where I want to start is let’s start with what I call the invisible contract. And I’ve been here before and many of you listening have been here, which is why I recognize the contract. And as I’m talking about it, many of you will recognize it as well. And the invisible contract applies to pretty much every high achiever, every successful entrepreneur, and even more so to unsuccessful entrepreneurs and most professionals in any walk of life and people who are serious about creating more in life. Now, it goes something like this. This is the unconscious self-talk that most people have. And that air quote talk, self-talk sounds something like this: If I don’t stay on top of everything, if I stop monitoring my emotional state and paying attention to how I feel and managing my anger and managing my thoughts and managing all these kind of things and checking into my body and checking my progress and doing my list and managing my life, if I don’t do all of this, well, then nothing is going to happen or things are going to flip upside down and everything will fall apart. Meaning if I don’t manage and I don’t control all the aspects of my life, my life is going to go to hell in a handbasket and I’m going to be totally screwed.
Well, I’ve been there before and you’re listening right now, you can probably relate because I know I have a large degree or a high degree of entrepreneurs listening, spiritually oriented entrepreneurs. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, when I lived from that place, it got very exhausting. I always felt that I had to go through my days and my days basically turned into checklists. There was one time, I don’t anymore and I have no desire, literally just my full-time team here at the company, my full-time team, we had 15 people on payroll. And that meant payroll and 401k and paid vacation. And we literally, I shared literally health insurance costs with the team and all these things taking care of the team, which by the way, I love taking care of the team. They take care of me. But after a while, it just became exhausting to have that many people here at the company on payroll for the work that I do, the programs, the transformational coaching program that I do, now brainwashed, and the podcast and all these kind of things. Now, of course, this was all before AI, and we don’t really use AI for any corporate function or any, you know, function here in the company, and I’m looking into a bit of that. But the whole point is, I know that you can relate. It’s exhausting.
And we have to recognize, because this is what I recognized one day, is that most of us treat our lives like a fragile experience. And this fragile experience in existence, I believe, required my constant oversight, and I had to manage everything. And I did this just to keep, because the company was doing so well for so many years, I thought the only way to keep the company doing well is if I literally had constant oversight of all of it. Now, I do want to point out, I had a director of operations for many years, and I could literally put it on autopilot and let the team take care of it, and I would check in on a daily basis for a few minutes. I wasn’t a control freak where I had to do everything and I had to have my fingers in everything, but it was more than anything like this constant just hovering above me of all these things that need to happen, and a lot of things that only I could take care of, whether it be with the tax attorneys or the trademark attorneys or this or that or this or that.
And I used to scan my days, which was part of my subconscious identity, I used to scan my days early in the morning after I did my morning routine. And I was kind of like what I call an unpaid mechanic or an unpaid repairman in that I was constantly looking for, okay, what is the next internal or external problem that I have to solve? What is it that I’ve got to take care of this week? What team member’s on vacation and who’s going to manage this with the podcast and who’s going to manage that? Oh, and this new program we have coming up and who’s going to do that? And what about the new CRM and all? It was just a constant, constant, constant hustle. And I kind of used to live from, because this happened a lot in business and it will to many of you, to a small degree, I lived from when is the next shoe going to drop? And then if it does drop, how am I going to manage that crap? And what do I got to do to manage it? And all these kind of things.
So as I say this, I know it’s a bit melodramatic. I definitely understand that. Now, in fairness to me, I did let go of a lot of things. I mean, there were certain directors of operations that I had where I had zero concerns. I trust the team and I always have, and I had zero concerns about what happened in the business, who did what, when this happened, employee challenges, I didn’t worry about any of it. And I picked that word intentionally because many of us worry. I didn’t have to worry about anything, but I would have to check in every couple of days just to make sure that everything is kosher and everything’s okay. And I remember many years ago thinking, well, okay, I guess this is the life of running a business that does the amount of revenue that we do and the amount of volume that we do, this just comes with the territory.
Now, again, I want to repeat, I have never been, actually, I probably got too far to the opposite direction, my team often didn’t have enough direction for me because I’m not a control freak. But I recognized in this whole process with me that all the years that I did live from being an air quote control freak, this literally was just exhausting. And there was even one day back, in I don’t know, the year 2000 or so, I even said, with all this money that I’m making and the impact that I’m making, is it really worth it for everything that I have to put up with?
So in life, what most of us do, and I’ve had it very, very, I’ve been very, very fortunate, especially with what people call success and money. And I mean, literally like the top 1% successful and I’m very grateful for that. But I know most people are there and they have to aggressively manage life. And then they believe, here’s the thing though that I want to start dispelling in this episode, many of us feel that if we don’t manage life, as I said earlier, then, you know, then, not then, but then bad things are going to happen. And even in our everyday lives, we manage our blood sugar, which doesn’t pertain to me, but I’m just tossing that in for some people, we manage our diets, we manage our blood pressure, we manage our moods, we manage our emotions, we manage our productivity, we manage our to-do list, and we even manage our own spirituality. And I’ve seen this. People are thinking, which they’re thinking, am I growing enough? Mainly because they’re comparing to other people. Other people, I see them growing and having ahas and breakthroughs, but I don’t seem to be growing like those people. Okay, what do I do? What do I do to facilitate this and manage this?
And I think part of for me, because I think this probably pertains to a lot of you guys, I grew up on a farm, and I know that that does not pertain to a lot of you guys, but I grew up with my parents, and their parents grew up in the Great Depression. I grew up with the foundational belief, basically, that if I want to create in life, and I have created in life, and I did create in life, in terms of the 3D material world, I had the belief that I’ve got to basically work my ass off. For many, many years, I carried that belief. And I know that many of you have also been convinced that you have to hustle, you have to work really hard, you have to struggle, and if you take your foot off the gas pedal, then absolute chaos is going to overtake your life. So we have to recognize that we’ve been raised that way. We’ve all been raised in what I call, for the most part, the hustle culture, and that basically means, obviously, what it sounds like. We have to hustle to get more, to keep what we have, and to get ahead.
And then what we do, because then we accept that we live in that culture, and I’ve learned over the years it’s absolutely backwards to live from that culture, and I’ve talked about this over the years when I’ve talked about the be-do-have model, you must be before you can do before you can have, but living in the hustle culture, we’ve learned that we have to work our butts off and work our butts into the ground, then we can have the material things and then we can be successful. But what I want to share in this episode, there’s a different way, there’s a different way and we have to escape the trap.
So first and foremost, realize this. When I got this, it was a big aha for me. And that aha is this: Your effort to control your life is the exact cause of the life exhaustion that you are trying to escape. Basically, what I just said there is that your effort to control your life, because you believe if you don’t control your life, it’s going to go to hell in a handbasket, this is what’s causing your exhaustion. And by the way, a lot of these things do cause exhaustion. I’m going to segue on a point here, don’t worry, it’s not an ad or any of that, but fortunately, this is the last episode I will be doing in this venue. I’m staying on a rental right now while my home is being renovated. I was there today, I get to move in on Saturday, today is Thursday, so I’m very excited about moving out of this location. Unfortunately, the angel wings behind me have to stay here, they belong to the rental, and they’re probably not all that appropriate for me anyway. But the reason I bring all this up is you may hear some road traffic based upon where I’m staying right now, and if you are, I apologize for that, but that will all be gone the next episode.
So you have to recognize this. I think back to a channeling that I was in with Don Juan Matus. My brother-in-law, Don Javier, being a medium and a sorcerer and a shaman and a babalawo and a nagual, he used to channel Don Juan Matus. And Don Juan said one time in a channeling, he said, and I don’t know who he said it to, but I recall very well what he said, he said to someone that was in the channeling, he said, you’re not exhausting me, you’re not exhausting the world, you are exhausting yourself. And that’s what many of us do, we exhaust ourselves by trying to control life. But recognize this: You’re not tired, you’re not exhausted because life is heavy, you’re exhausted because you are running a continuous, low-grade background operation to govern an outcome and create a life that was never yours to direct and manage in the first place. What am I telling you? This whole life, this illusion that you think you’re managing and controlling and directing, it’s not your place to manage and control and direct it.
I know that sounds crazy, right? But stick with me because let’s unpack this. And this is what I call the trap. The trap is simple: You aren’t managing and controlling reality, you are micromanaging a fictional story. I’ll say that again. Because you think that you are managing and you are controlling at least your reality. So you aren’t managing and controlling reality, you are micromanaging a fictional story that you created. And to demonstrate part of that is ask yourself a simple question: What are you actually controlling? Who and what do you actually have control of in your life? And many times people will say, I’m going to outsmart Jim, I have control of my own thinking, I have control of my own mind. Well, that’s nonsense, because if you could actually control your own thinking, then you would never have thoughts that you did not want to have. And think about all the negative thoughts that you have that you do not want to have, which demonstrates you can’t even control your own thinking.
Now, can you control the US economy? Can you control the US Senate? Can you control the weather? Can you control food prices? Can you control when your car engine starts and when it does not, which happened to me yesterday basically at the gym. The battery had died in my key fob on my Porsche and I walk out to get on my car and it’s like, shit, my car won’t start. So I couldn’t control that. But the thing is this, no, you cannot control and you do not control any of life. Let me bring this home to your body and let’s bring it home to your life. Are you managing the beat of your own heart right now? Are you managing your hair growing or falling out right now? Are you managing all the people around you that you don’t even know, but are you managing them? Are you managing your fingernails growing? Are you managing one foot in front of the other when you’re walking? And are you orchestrating and directing the thousands of cellular processes keeping your body alive right this microsecond? Another question: Did you manually direct the sun to rise today or force the planet Earth that we’re on to keep spinning and to stay in orbit? So you’re recognizing that, no, I don’t manage any of that.
And hopefully it’s starting to sink in, you do not control your life, you’re simply living your life. Now, stay with me here, okay, because you may or may not have started to recognize this yet, but there’s profound wisdom in what I’m sharing with you right now, and the gravity of it, because once you get this, it’ll start changing your life. And what I would request and desire that you get is that life force, divine consciousness, spirit, source, the nagual, and even if you wish, God, has been running the entire unmanifest and physical universe without your permission, without your opinion, without your analytical calculations. And guess what? This was all done before you were born, it’s done while you’re incarnated on the planet, and it’s going to continue to happen long after this physical container that you identify as you is gone and is no longer on this planet.
And you know, notice what we do. We all do this, and I did it for many years, I do not do it anymore, but when you wake up in the morning, your eyes pop open, boing, you’re awake, and ponder this, despite the fact that these entities, these energies that I mentioned earlier, by whatever definition you choose, life force, divine consciousness, spirit, the nagual, and God, even if you wish, these, however you define them, they kept you alive all night long while you were physically unconscious and your physical body was sleeping. And the funny thing is what many of us do is we wake up in the morning, it’s almost ludicrous, I’m laughing here because what we do is we wake up, the eyes pop open, and then almost metaphorically what we say is, oh, okay, you know, life, God, life force, whatever you want to call it, thank you for the oxygen, thank you for keeping me alive all night long while I was unconscious, but you know what? I got it from here, no worries, I got a lot of crap to do today, and I’m going to manage it all to keep it all going. And we don’t even recognize that we manage nothing, we manage nothing while we were, air quote, asleep. And that is the absurdity of the human container, the human identity, we’re under this illusion that we manage everything in life, and the truth is, we manage nothing in life. It’s just an illusion of control making us feel like or think that we have control in our life when we actually have none, we have choice, but we do not control.
So what we really do is we take this pure, unconditioned, infinite presence, awareness, life force, God, and then we shrink all that down into this tiny little nervous system middle manager called the body, who believes that all their personal worry is what holds their reality together. And I don’t know, but for me, that’s pretty crazy. So what we do is we fall into the trap and the failure of what I call mind management. And for me to even say this, for me, it’s a bit alien this day and age, because for many years, I worked in the mental and the mind and the mind power and all these kind of things. And I didn’t even recognize 15, 20 years ago when I was doing all this, when I was teaching people how to manage their mind and how to work with their subconscious mind and all these kind of things, I was basically teaching them, I was teaching them how to manage their life without even recognizing what I’m sharing with you right now. None of us manages anything, we need to take a back seat and let, which I’ll talk more about in this episode, let a different, another energy manage and direct what we call our life.
And the reason why is when we live from the position of, air quote, the manager, two destructive things happen. Number one, I’m going to use the metaphor of passing weather. Let’s say you’ve got a passing storm that’s coming over, and many times in our life, we have a passing storm, meaning things that will happen in our lives, things that will negatively impact what we consider to be our life. And then what we do is we hook into that and we make that our identity. Many of us, what we do is we interpret all the negative things moving through that space as things, meaning the storm, we interpret that as things that we have to fix or manage or control because it is happening in our space. And because you are in manager mode, you immediately start managing the bad weather, you analyze it and you think, okay, I need to fix this right now, got bad weather outside and it’s my job to fix it. The truth is, the moment you try to fix the weather, you validate the illusion that you are broken. Ponder that. The moment you try to fix the bad weather, now whatever that bad weather might be in your own life, your bills, your money, your relationships, whatever it might be, the moment you attempt to fix that bad weather, you validate the illusion that you are somehow broken. And that’s not a healthy place to work from.
So then what a lot of people do, and especially a lot of people listening to the podcast, what we do is we create spirituality like a utility app on our phone. We literally, we start using spiritual practices, and, you know, even just in the regular world, look at this, you see it everywhere, when things go sideways in life, the first thing that most people do is call to God. God, help me. God, this. God, that. God, I need money. God, I need a partner. God, I need a plate, whatever. Many people run, but they’re running in fear using spiritual practices like meditation and the concepts of non-duality and all these kind of things, and we’ll even sit in silence and all this kind of stuff, but we’re still noisy in our mind. And many people will, as I said, try to sit in silence, but they’re trying to sit in silence why? Because they want something and they’re trying to negotiate a better outcome with the universe and a better outcome in their 3D physical life. And even when we do that, that’s not an epiphany, that’s not realization, that’s just the ego, the human ego and identity wearing some high-class spiritual costume thinking, oh, we’re doing something because now we’re engaged in our spirituality.
And I think back to many years ago, a very wise person once said to me, the human mind cannot govern life, it can only entertain a false concept of it. I’ll say it again: The human mind cannot govern life, it can only entertain a false concept of it. I had that written down in some notes somewhere, I even looked it up, and I think it’s Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that, but I’m not sure. So we have to recognize this. When you stop trying to control your life, when you realize that life doesn’t need you to control it, life doesn’t need you as a low-level manager, and when we recognize life lives us instead of us living life, everything starts to change.
Now, I want to give you a 24-hour experiment and something to actually start experiencing this for yourself. My intention is to help you get out of the trap, to break the trap of actually trying to control everything in your life. Now, you don’t break that illusion by trying to control everything in your life with a brand new technique, you break through it with something you’ve heard before, but many of us literally, we might dabble with it, but we don’t really get it. You break through it with total surrender. So I have a 24-hour assignment for you, and this is something you can play with and you can do the next 24 hours and see what kind of epiphany or ahas it brings to you. All right, like Sprite, how Sprite is the Uncola, let’s do, I’m just laughing here, I had to make something up, let’s do what I call the unmanaged life experiment. So for the rest of the day, starting right now, and for the next 24 hours, set down the project of managing your life, set down the need to optimize anything, and here’s the big one, set down the need or desire to protect the human identity and the human character.
And the way that we do that is when a negative thought and maybe even anger pops up, don’t reframe it, do not react to it, just let it sit here, let it sit like it’s just random news on the TV in the background that you don’t even care to watch. Basically in Buddhism, and I’m not a Buddhist, but this is what they call being the observer, you’re just observing all these things that are spewing out of this human identity that’s trying to control things. Next, when a bodily sensation, something literally hits the body, maybe it’s a pain in the elbow, the arm, whatever, and again, if you need medical care, get your butt to the ER, but maybe there’s something going on in your body or your life, do not try to solve it, basically, step back, observe, and let the body do what the body does. And by the way, I’m going to tell you this from personal experience, when you step back and you observe the body and you get quiet in mind, the body, believe it or not, don’t care because I’m telling you a fact, when you observe the body, instead of trying to control the body, the body automatically goes into healing mode and starts to heal itself.
Now, hopefully this is not an inappropriate example, I saw something yesterday about the avalanche and the flood that happened in Nepal, and in my opinion, well, let me put it this way, I don’t live there, so there are things that I cannot do physically to assist as if I did live there, and I recognized when I saw this yesterday, I was observing it. Now, what I did or how I did or how I responded is completely a whole different matter, but the reality is I saw it, whether it be Venezuela or I believe, what was it, Colombia last week or a couple of weeks ago or now Nepal, when we air quotes see these things happening, we are observing them. Well, we have to start observing our own life because we have all this chaos in our own life, and then we’re in there digging into the ditches and doing all these kind of things trying to manage life when we do not have to manage life.
So the thought I want to leave with you, and if you’re driving, then write this down later, and if you’re not driving, write it down, is this one thought: I am not the manager of this moment. That one line alone is profound. I am not the manager of this moment, which basically means I don’t control this moment. And then ask yourself, who or what is the silent presence, awareness, or observer watching the human character try so hard to stay in control? Now, in this moment, what you’re doing is you’re stepping out of the middle management role and you’re basically allowing the universe to do what it does, is to operate perfectly and fine as it’s always done before your anxiety shows up and then your anxiety gets in the middle of all of it trying to fix all of it. Now, the universe will take care of running your day. Now, you can do what you normally do to create things, but what I’m talking about is separating how you manage it emotionally and mentally and how you’re trying to control things.
The easiest way to get things done, because we all, air quote, have to get things done, the easiest way to get things done, recognizing that we don’t control anything, is not trying to control any bit of it, doing what we do and allowing the outcomes to happen, but allowing the universe to take care of the rest of it, and it doesn’t need our permission to do that. So the final phrase that I want to leave you with, and this is something that I’ve been working with people on Brainwash quite a bit, a new program, is the concept of being and just be. That’s all there is to it. When we learn to live from just be, in that moment, we’re working in tandem with the energies and the universe. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye-bye.