You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast, soon to be renamed Brainwashed: Exit the Human Lie with Jim Fortin. This episode is titled, You Have Never Met Yourself, Exit the Lie, episode number three. So keep listening if you’d like to exit the human lie.
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.
The question is, what lie? And the lie we’re going to talk about today is this. The lie is your personality is who you are. Now, the person you call me, and I’m speaking to you when I say me, the person you call me was installed. You didn’t choose any of it, and nobody asked you. Just like nobody asked you what you wanted your name to be when you popped out of the womb. Now, at this point in your life, you have free will. And at this point in your life, you can consciously pick and choose, but recognize what you pick and choose is also based upon your prior, earlier life conditioning. And as a child, you certainly didn’t have the opportunity to choose. You simply just inherited. Like you inherited your name, you inherited a great deal of your thinking, not even knowing that you inherited it, and you got it from your family, from culture, and society. Basically, family, culture, and society has molded you into who you are today. Every limitation you have, let me slow down. Every limitation you have is not a limitation that, air quote, you have. You may be holding it, but it’s not a limitation you have. It’s a limitation that has been indoctrinated into you through your past socialization. So today, the person that you call you slash me, meaning the person that you call me, again, I’m referring to you, was built by strangers, and most of them are already dead. Let that sit with you for a moment. A great deal of who you are today was built by other people, and many of those people aren’t even on the planet anymore. So in this episode, what I’m going to do is I’m going to prove to you that a great deal of who you think you are today is simply what you have learned to become.
Okay, first, you heard me mention episode number three in the intro. By the way, I’m still getting settled into my home. I have workers here every week, so I don’t have my, if you’re watching this video, I don’t have my room decorated like I want yet and sound quality and all that. Thank you for your patience. We are getting there. Okay. But this series, you heard me mention episode number three. Now, what I’m doing for 16 weeks, and we’ll finish up in January at some point, is I’m dispelling many of the lies that you have learned to believe, things you’ve learned to believe about yourself that aren’t true, and they’re simply false beliefs that you have inherited. So each and every week, what we’ll do is we’ll cover one lie. When I say lie, these aren’t lies that somebody told you on purpose. It’s not like somebody wanted to intentionally hurt you. They’re simply lies that you have lived inside for most of your life, if not all of your life. And you have lived the lie so long that you believe the lie and it has become your reality. And some of what I’m going to share as you see yourself in this, some of it may make you feel a bit uncomfortable. But that’s great because if anything that I say makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s how you know any place you’re uncomfortable that it actually applies to you and it’s bumping up against one of your old conditioned beliefs.
So the lie this week is that your personality is just who you are. Recognize this. Know this. You never chose who you are. And I talked about that a bit earlier. Let’s start with an easy one, your accent. Now, you guys listening to me, I don’t know if you think that I have a Texas accent. Some people say that I do, or you think that I don’t. It doesn’t matter. But when I listen to people, and you can listen to people all day long, you know, I have family that lives in Boston, and they’ve got the Boston accent. I’ve got friends who live in Chicago, and they’ve got the Chicago. They’ve got that, you know, in their voice when they speak. I have friends who live in Minnesota, and they’ve got that no when they talk. I don’t say no. I say no. But it’s the accent. Your accent and other people’s accents, you didn’t pick your accent. You absorbed your accent. When you were two and three years old, you never stopped to think, ooh, okay, I’m learning an accent right now. You absorbed it before you could even think.
Now, let’s go a little bit deeper. You didn’t pick what scares you. You didn’t pick what you are afraid of. You know, they say that a baby is only born with two fears, a fear of falling and a fear of loud noise. All other fears are learned. That operative word, learned. You learned your fears. You learned what success looks like. You learned what failure looks like. You learned what you think God is. You learned what you think God is not. You learned what you think is polite and proper. You learned what you think is rude. You learned what you think you deserve. You learned what you think you don’t deserve. What if I were to take somebody that was fundamentally Islamic and somebody that was, let’s say, a fundamental Christian, and let’s say that they learned that that is what and who they are, and they learned it as a small child. And I could put them in a room today, and they would swear up and down that they are right and the other person is wrong, not even recognizing that both of them are what they learned. It is simply what they have learned to believe about themselves. And the truth is, you learned all this, and every bit of it came into your life before you were about seven years old. Before you had any analytical filters, which develop about the age of 8, 9, 10, or 11, thereabouts, is when we can start brain-based analyzing. As a small child, we don’t have those filters. And whatever you learn, you have become.
To prove this point, if we were to take three different babies, and we took a baby like myself, and you drop me off in a small Texas farming town, you could take another baby, and you could drop that baby off in Tokyo. And you could take another baby and drop that baby off at a monastery in Tibet. Now, when we did that, we would get three completely different, air quote, me’s. We’d get three different individuals. And each individual would defend their individual reality, and they would say, well, this is just who I am. This is me. I mean, I am me. This is me. But they became the me that they are based upon where they were dropped off on the planet, which means, they are not that me. They have simply learned to believe they are that me.
How about this? Strangers that are now dead. Maybe look at your great-grandmother. Now, maybe you never met your great-grandmother, but your great-grandmother most likely passed down her beliefs about the Great Depression to your grandmother or your mother. And then your mother passed down or your grandmother passed those beliefs down to you. Now, you today may operate from, you know what? We have to save money and money doesn’t grow on trees and there’s never enough money. But we never stop and recognize and never stop and think, wait, is that true? And where did I learn that? And the person who taught it to me, where did they learn that? Maybe you see your grandmother saving twist ties and maybe even reusing tinfoil. I never saw my grandmother doing that, but I have seen people do that. Maybe, and I saw this, you watch your mother as a child, you’d watch your mother get anxious every time she would spend money. Now think about that. As a small child, if you constantly saw your mom getting anxious when she would spend money, what did you learn about money? You learned, well, it’s normal, air quote, normal to be anxious when I spend money. So you may be 30, 40, 50 years old today, and you may be anxious when you spend money, but guess what? It’s simply an illusion. It’s simply a belief that you learned through observation and learned many years ago. And even today, now this doesn’t apply to me, even though I grew up poor and I could relate to what I just said. But maybe today, maybe you feel guilty for buying something nice, even though you’ve never once been poor in your life. Think about that. You may have never been poor. You might have grown up what we call middle class in the U.S. But even today, when you spend money or a certain amount of money on yourself, you may feel guilty about it. And the reality is, there’s nothing to feel guilty about. You simply, are you ready? You simply learned to feel guilty because that guilt isn’t yours. It belongs to the person, maybe your mom. It belongs to a person, again, maybe your mother or before your mother, your great-grandmother, maybe you never met. But if you’re feeling that guilt only as an example, you’re reacting to a world that no longer exists. It simply exists in your mind and doesn’t exist anywhere else.
Okay, so a question for you. How many of your personal feelings come down to a generational chain like I just talked about? Ponder that. That’s really, really profound when you think about it. How many of your limitations today come down to a generational change that you were not even aware existed?
Okay, another point. When you hear that voice in the back of your head, that voice that criticizes you, that voice that talks you down, the question is whose voice is in your head? Notice the tone. Is it your voice? Generally not. It’s generally your mother or your father. Now, what I’m asking you to do, I’ve looked at in my own life, and I know that any of these negative voices I may have had in the past, when I hear the voice and I really look into it, I can identify the voice didn’t come from me. I didn’t create it, meaning I may be speaking it, but it may be the voice of my mother and my father. To give you an example, this day and age, and I can say this with a large degree of certainty, for the most part, I just don’t give a shit what people think about me. And the reason why is that I can’t control what people think. No matter who I am or what I do, people are going to think certain things about me based upon their own model of reality. And I know earlier in life, I used to be very concerned about, was my content good enough? Am I smart enough? Can I do this? And this was many years ago. And the truth is, I look at, okay, based upon what you and I are talking about right now, where did I learn that? And I learned that if I look back when I was a kid, back when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, my mom was constantly consumed with what are other people going to think. So many years ago, if I was ever concerned about, am I good enough? If I really looked at the tone where that voice was coming from, that tone was my mother when I was 8, 9, 10, and 11 saying, What are people going to think? What are people going to think? And most of us think this voice is our own voice, but it’s not. It’s a parent’s voice. It’s a teacher’s voice. It’s a preacher’s voice. It’s a coach’s voice. It’s a TV personality. It’s someone else’s voice, but it’s not our voice.
You know, when you think about your limitations, your biggest limitations, think about one of those right now. Wherever you are in the world, whatever you’re doing, if you’re on the treadmill at the gym, you’re driving, whatever, think about a voice that comes up and this voice that you hear that talks you down a bit. You can’t do that. Who do you think you are? You can’t afford that. Now, can you put an image with that voice? Think about that for a moment. Can you put an image with that voice? Now, many times you’ll find that image, it’s not your image. It’s your mom, your dad, your grandma, a school teacher. As I said many years ago on other episodes, when I was in first grade, my teacher was Mrs. Schilling. We took a math quiz. She graded them, put it down on my desk in front of me. And she looked at me, and I had an F on this paper. And she looked at me with a very, I can recall this, and this was literally 55 years ago. I can tell you exactly what she was wearing, how her hair was styled, and she put a piece of paper down in front of me, my quiz, and it had an F on it, and she said to me, very disapprovingly, she was actually nodding her head side to side, almost as if she was having pity for me. She said, Jimmy, you’re just not good at math.
Now, what my parents and I went through all of my grammar school, all of my middle school, and most of my high school, believing I was not good at math. And my sophomore year in high school, we hosted a Japanese exchange student. I was in geometry that year, and I made the highest grade in the class. Geometry is obviously math. And in that moment, I recognized, see, my parents were always upset with me. They would say, you need to study harder. You need to try harder. What is wrong with you? How come you can make an A in English? How come you can be a straight A student and you’re always struggling in math? Now, I’m slowing down here because this pertains to you even if you think it doesn’t pertain to you. If you’re broke, it pertains to you. If you’re in bad health, most likely it pertains to you. If you go from relationship to relationship to relationship to relationship, it most likely pertains to you. But as a kid, when Mrs. Schilling put that paper down in front of me and said, you’re not good at math, I, the container, owned that. And that became my life experience. So I became, in that moment, brainwashed that I was not good at math. And math has nothing to do with my intelligence. Depending on how much Merlot I’ve had, I’m a relatively bright guy, relatively intelligent. So how come I can learn all these other topics, and I can be a straight-A student, but I’m having challenges in math? Do you see the frame here? But it applies to you as well.
So many times we look at ourself and we judge ourself for a lack of performance. And that lack of performance comes from an inner voice, Mrs. Schilling, or your mom, or your dad, or your grandma, or your grandpa, or maybe some kid on the playground when you were five or six years old, seven years old. And we limit ourself today, but that inner voice is not our inner voice. It could be decades old. And all it is is an old recording. Basically, what we’re hearing is a playback of what someone said to us many years before. So then what happens when we hear that voice? It metaphorically does what I call locking the cage. And it locks us in the cage of that voice. I kid you not. For probably 15 years, I don’t know. I learned when I was six. So up until I was, you know, a sophomore in high school, I would constantly say to myself all day long, no, not all day long, you know what I mean, I think, but anytime I thought about math, I would say, I’m not good at math. I’m not a math person. Math is not easy for me. Every math class that I’ve taken has been a challenge for me. Notice this identity that I created around math. Now, here’s what I also want you to notice. I am not that identity. I am the being, the human being, the spiritual being, holding that identity, and that identity is alien to me because it was taught to me. Let that soak in.
But yours could be, I’m just not good at math. Money, I’m horrible with money. I’m not creative. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been an anxious person. I don’t know, this is just how I am. No matter what I do, I just can’t get ahead, I feel like people don’t like me. No matter what I do, life is just challenging for me. And the harder I try, the more I fall behind. Now, all these that I gave you are not my individual thinking. They don’t pertain to me at this point in my life. But I’m sharing, maybe you could hear yourself somewhere in there. Because again, the point that I’m hammering home, we literally personalize it and then we associate it to the container we’re living in, Eric, or Mary, or Bob, or Sue, or Jim, and then Jim would say, I am not that, when not even recognizing that what Jim is, is the consciousness even having the awareness that I am not that. So we own this false, fake, felonious identity, but it was all handed to us.
So even though we say things like, I’m not good at math, I’m not good at dancing, whatever it might be, that feels like self-knowledge to us. And really, all it is is simply brainwashing. When we say things like, that’s just who I am, that’s the program’s favorite sentence. And the reason why is because when you speak, I’m just not good at math, or that’s just how I am, or I’ve never been able to do blank, notice what we do not do. We simply speak it, we own it, we declare it, and we never question it. And that is the brainwashing that I’m going to keep talking about. That is the brainwashing that we have inherited from other people, not even knowing that we have inherited it.
I want to share a thought with you here, pretty profound. If you can observe and you can watch your anxiety, guess what? You’re not your anxiety. If you can observe your depression, guess what? You are not depression. If you can notice certain things about your personality, guess what? You’re not the personality. You are the observer of the personality, and the personality is simply what was brainwashed into that person. As I’ve said before, you’re not depressed. You’re simply a, as an example, you’re not depressed. You’re simply a human being, a cosmic being, a spiritual being that is currently experiencing depression. Do you see how that subtle shift right there brings your power right back to you? The brainwashing takes your power away, and this subtle shift helps you restore your power.
You know, I’ve said before in different places, you’ve never actually met yourself. You’ve only met, are you ready? You’ve only met your programming. Let that settle in. Let that land. I’ll say it again. You’ve never actually met yourself. You’ve met your idea of you. You’ve met who you think you are. You’ve met who you’ve been programmed to be. You’ve met who other people have told you that you are, but all this is programming, and you’ve only met your programming.
The mystics knew this. Every tradition knew this. In shamanism, they call it soul loss. The mystics, they called it the false self. The Toltecs called it basically, and I heard this a lot from Don Juan. And when I heard it, I thought it was kind of like a weird phrase, but I understand it now. The Toltecs call it domestication. If you have an animal, for example, I mean, I’m a dog, I’m a massive dog lover. And one of my dogs, he is two years old and I still do training with him. He’s an Aussie Shepherd mix. And of course, dogs are domesticated, but I’m training him even though he went to professional training for a month as a puppy. I’m reinforcing a lot of the work that I’ve done with him or has been done with him before. And right now we are focusing on, many of you can relate to this. We’re focusing on when the doorbell rings. The dog sits in one place, does not go crazy, does not bark and go bananas and bark at the door and all that. So we’re practicing that right now and we practice every day and he’s getting better and better. But what am I doing? It’s the same thing as conditioning, brainwashing, domestication in terms of his experience in the house. Well, I know I’m talking about my dog Milo. He’s, again, an Aussie Shepherd mix, very smart. I’m talking about Milo. But you’re no different. You are no different than me actually giving him treats and training him because even as a child, you’re given treats. When you respond in a particular way as a kid, you are given a treat. Now, it could be, and this is one of the reasons or one of the smaller reasons, we live in a world of obesity here in the U.S. As a kid, many kids are rewarded with ice cream. Get an A on your paper and you’re going to get ice cream. Do a good job over here, clean the house, whatever, you’re going to get ice cream. We reward people with food. But the way that many of us are rewarded is we are rewarded with words of affirmation. Good job. I’m proud of you. You’re so smart. So we do what other people want us to do, even if we don’t want to do it. Then we get rewarded with acceptance and love and words of affirmation. That’s the same thing as me giving a dog a treat. Every time I give Milo a treat when he actually goes to his place, and when I say that word, he’s under my feet right now, he’ll run and go to that place, and he gets a reward. Well, the same thing with you. For being who other people want you to be or have wanted you to be, you be that way and you get the, guess what? You get the treat. You get the reward. Then we keep getting the reward, not even recognizing that we’re being trained and conditioned and brainwashed. Then guess what? We spend our entire life seeking that reward and being a particular way, not even recognizing we’re being a particular way.
Okay, so the point to ponder in this episode, the point to ponder and the big question that will hopefully get you to think at a deeper level, if, now again, when I say me, I’m referring to you, not to me, but I’m using that word me, for you to, I’m asking you, I’m prompting you to use that word me. Okay. Actually repeat after me. So we’ll make it simple. If me, if air quote, me was installed, who is underneath it? I’ll ask again. If me was installed, I’ll say it in a different way. If me was conditioned, if me, meaning who you think you are, was brainwashed, who is underneath it? Who is underneath the conditioning? Who is underneath the brainwashing? Ponder that.
Next question is, how do you get out? How do you escape? And the challenge with that for a lot of people that I have seen over the years, and I stand by this 100%, by your conditioning, you have become who and what you are. And then we erroneously think, oh, I’m going to change myself. And that’s a noble thought. And I did that for many years. But the truth is, the very conditioning that created conditions we do not like is the very conditioning trying to recreate new conditions. It rarely ever works. This is why Einstein said we had to go to a higher level than whatever level the problem is. You have to go to a higher level to solve the problem. So many times, people listening, they don’t recognize that through other people, they become conditioned. And then they try to use that very same conditioning to escape the conditioning. It’s virtually impossible. I think back to a coach of mine many years ago. He was a transformational coach. And he said to me, he said, if I put you in a box and you wanted out of the box, and I told you that the instructions were on the outside of the box, how would you get out of the box? Well, the obvious answer is, I’ve got to read the instructions. And the only way to read the instructions is to get outside of the box to be able to read the instructions. Well, you’re in an identity. You are in a conditioned identity, and that conditioned identity keeps you from every single thing you want in life. And the only way to get out of the conditioned identity is to go beyond the conditioned identity. To go to the being, not the conditioned identity that the being is being. Hopefully that made sense to you.
And if you’re anything like me, many years ago, I would try really hard. And I would try harder and harder and harder to change myself. And what I didn’t recognize is trying harder to change myself is the conditioning trying to fix the conditioning. And that’s why it never worked. And that’s why I would make incremental and very small changes in my life, but never dramatic changes until I started really looking at the concept of identity. And for many years, I taught people how to escape their 3D ego identity. Now what I lead people to do and mentor people to do is to escape the human lie, to escape even owning the human identity. And that’s all most of us own anyway, because we’ve become so conditioned to it. But escaping the illusion that we are a fixed human identity because we are not. We are the being behind that fixed illusion identity.
Okay, so a little homework for you this week. We’ll keep it really simple. So your homework this week, before we come back and reconvene again a week from now, is to catch yourself. And every time you say or think, I’m the kind of person who blank. Now, again, anytime you think I’m the kind of person who blank and you can adjust it, maybe you’re always struggling with money. Well, then you would obviously think you’re the kind of person who always struggles with money. Maybe you’re the kind of person that’s always got a health ailment. Well, then what would apply is you’re the kind of person in your mind, even if you haven’t thought about it, who is always dealing with a health ailment. All right. We may think, well, that’s just who or how or what I am. Now, if you find yourself doing that, and you will, I promise, here’s what you do. You simply stop and you ask yourself one question. And now one question is this, who taught me this? Who taught me to be this way? Or who taught me that? And when you start looking at it from that perspective, you’ll recognize that every limitation you have is not because it is you. It is not your identity. It’s not because that’s who you are. It’s because that is who you were taught to be. And as I said earlier, many of the people who taught you to be that are not even on the planet anymore.
And if you really want to think about how conditioned you have become, I’m going to give you a little food for thought here, okay? Every single place that you are stuck in your life is because of conditioning and cultural brainwashing. I’ll say it again. Every single place that you are stuck in life is because of conditioning and cultural brainwashing. But notice how much of it you make it about you. I am blank. I am broke. I am the kind of person that blank. And you’re actually, again, you’re taking the brainwashing and you’re turning it into your identity. And then you’re staying trapped in the identity that somebody else created for you.
So if you’d like to see, because see, we all run a very different version of conditioning. Your conditioning has a different shape than mine, a different smell, so to speak, a different color. Maybe your conditioning is about money or not about money or about love or not about love. I was talking to this young man recently, and he was telling me that he, this is exactly what he said, he goes, I do not know how to be affectionate with people. And my thought was, because see, I had very affectionate parents, especially a mother. So speaking to you from Jim, I know how to be affectionate because I saw it all the time in my household. And he said to me, he goes, my mom and dad were always fighting. I never saw them be affectionate with each other. I don’t even know, you know, from how I grew up, what an affectionate household looks like. And this guy was thinking he wasn’t an affectionate person because he had met this girl and she was telling him he wasn’t very affectionate, even though he’s a really, really nice guy. This girl that he had met was having problems with a lack of affection, physical affection in the relationship. And so he was telling me about the problem. And he said, I don’t even know what affection is. He goes, I never saw it as a kid. So he was literally through just observation, brainwashed, so to speak, to not be affectionate. And he was owning it as his entire identity. Well. This kid is no different than what you are, I am, or the rest of us.
So if you’d like to see how brainwashed you have become, I’ve created a short quiz for you. If you took it before, we have a brand new one now. You simply want to go to jimfortin.com/brainwashed. And it’s simply 12 questions, and it will show you in different areas of your life how you have become brainwashed. Now, in fairness to you also, that will automatically add you to the list, the wait list for the next brainwash program. Maybe you’ll want to attend, maybe you will not. That’s entirely up to you. But we have the next brainwash program starting next January. And if you can, and if you would, take that quiz before our next call. My intention is to get you to start thinking more about this concept of brainwashing and recognizing, again, what I said earlier. Every single limitation you have has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with the conditioning and the indoctrination and the brainwashing that you learned. And we have to actually start dropping every bit of that. So remember, again, go to jimfortin.com/brainwashed and take the quiz.
Okay, hopefully you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please share it with other people. And if you’re so inclined, please go over to iTunes and leave me a five-star review. Anything less than that is not going to help me out. Thank you for listening, and I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye-bye.
