The 3-Word Phrase That Ends Feeling Stuck - Episode 152

So here's the reality. Your brain, my brain, is a prediction-making machine. It takes past experiences, turns them into a blueprint and a story about who you are. If you're not careful, that story becomes what we call our identity. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep-walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock-caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Oh. Make sense. Welcome everybody, great morning. Great morning humans, great morning world. My name is Dr. JC Dornick, otherwise known as the dragon, and I wanna welcome you to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. So today we are gonna talk about the following topic. I call this the three word phrase that ends feeling stuck. How to change your life at this time. It's about arming yourself with the awareness and the awakening of something that already is happening that we very often lose sight. So we're gonna talk about the three words that can instantly change the way that you see yourself, your past, and your future, because the truth is, you may be trapped right now in a lie that you once told yourself about who you are and what you think reality is. So if you think about it, we say things like, I'm not good at that. Think about these statements and just realize that when we make statements about ourself or about reality, we have this tendency of without even knowing it, putting exclamation points, meaning it's this and nothing else. And this is a very interesting challenge that we have because sometimes we have things that we've been brought up to believe are the way that they are. And you know, I love to say that what you see is what you get, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily what actually is. So we say things like, I'm not good at that or I'm always anxious or I've always been that way. This is just who I am. I remember another part of my book when I was confronted in chapter seven by my first mentor and he was asking me what I think people think about me. And I remember I had a pretty strong opinion about that. It was something like, well, half the people like me and the other half don't. And he says, well, what do you think about that? And I said, well, this is who I am, fuck them. So that was one of the awakenings. And in my new book, I'm gonna highlight that a little bit more. But those exclamation points and those statements that we believe are fact, what if they're not? What if the three simple words that I'm gonna share with you today could break you free from that cage, that prison instantly and shift you from a conditional elephant on a chain. Do you guys know what an elephant on a chain is? There's this big, mighty elephant that's in a zoo that has this teeny little chain around one of its feet. And all it would really need to do is just slightly flick its foot and break that chain, but it's been conditioned to believe that that chain is holding it back. So are you an elephant on a chain to that idea of allowing yourself to be open and curious and become a possibility thinker that begins to take note of the abundant opportunities that are available to us all throughout our life. So today we're gonna explore the power of this following phrase. And these are the three most powerful words that I've ever learned and arms myself and put in my toolbox. Those three words are at this time. And by the end of this conversation, what we're gonna do is we're gonna show you how those three words can help you revisit your past. And I know we're taught not to do that. Also release yourself from regret and begin aligning your life with what actually matters most for you when at this time. Let's talk about the lie of permanent identity. So most people, and when I say most people, I'm not referring to others, I'm part of that. Most people unknowingly imprison themselves, so we do it to ourselves with permanent identities. And I can understand why. We're always trying to create some sort of a strong foundation. It's the very nature about why we have political views and religious views and things like that. It's all about creating a strong foundation to stand on. It's very scary to not have an identity. Sometimes we go through what's called an identity crisis. And what I've learned from my life is that's actually a good thing. But we have this tendency of creating these permanent identities. And people believe that their thoughts are facts. So that's a big distinction, is when you assess four of the 40 to 70,000 thoughts that flow through your head and you call them facts, or maybe you look at your emotions and consider them to be the truth. Sometimes we get our thoughts on emotions mixed up with checking with our heart and our gut, and we assess them and we determine that they're the truth. And we also make this assessment that the past is fixed. Well, one of the chapters in our book called the Lifeline, and we'll touch on it today, shows us that if you can learn how to look at your past through the lens that you have now, you're a much more conscious and aware person right now. You have a lot more life experience. And if you're with us today and you're practicing the interface response system, you've also evolved as a person, as a more conscious human being, one that has the ability to kind of step into that open and curious space and look at things differently, maybe look at things from alternative vantage points. So if you go back and you look at your past events and recognize that who you were at that time was the reason why you saw it and reacted that way, and that's fine, right? But you're different now. So here's the reality. Your brain, my brain is a prediction-making machine. It takes past experiences, and what it does is it turns them into a blueprint and a story about who you are. So what that's saying is, is we'll take our past experiences and we'll formulate a blueprint and accept it wholeheartedly as who we are. Now, if you're not careful, that story becomes what we call our identity. So if we're buying into a past story about ourselves, the danger is, is that that very much becomes our identity. And this is why people say things like, I'm just not confident. I'm bad at relationships. Sometimes we say, I'm not a business person. I'm not disciplined. Think about all these words and statements, exclamation points that we say about ourselves. Or how about this one? I always start strong and I never follow through. You know, I'm a health transformation coach and I've been doing that for 20 years and I have my own experience. You know, I lost 80 pounds and I woke up and transformed my life. And what I learned from that is that it's on a healthy body that a healthy mind rests. I also learned how to let go of my story. A lot of the things that I used to say that I was not good at and affirm that I was not good at were based on believing my past story. And the moment that those statements become permanent, what happens in that moment is growth stops. We put limitations on ourselves. But when you add those three words at this time or when you learn to start practicing that, you see, you can't just say, I'm gonna do that from now on because you have a condition programmed, dress response system and it's engineered for survival. So it's like this 200,000 ton oil tanker that's going in one direction, the same direction it always does with its thoughts and its feelings and its perceptions and its reactions. And now all of a sudden you're just gonna tap on the captain that is steering that ship and say, hey, we're gonna go a different way. It's not that easy. So you have to start practicing. In my book, I talk about this concept of fraction, which is a combination of practice and action. And that's just the acknowledgement. When you first start doing something like instilling these three magic words at the end of a sentence, rather than making it a statement, making it therefore temporary, you're gonna have to think about that. So that's why I always invite people to just go, hmm, every time you have an idea or you have a perception or you have this knee jerk reaction or you have this feeling or thought about something, before you react, just say, hmm, as a reminder, that means haven't made up my mind yet. But what it's doing is, is it's putting your knee jerk reaction and your perceptions of things, which are programmed and conditioned and they might still be good, we're just putting them on pause. And we're stepping into this space and that's where you can remind yourself to try something like saying at this time or putting at the end of a sentence. So when you do that, something magical happens. And I like magical things. I'm not confident, turns into, I'm not confident at this time. I'm struggling at this time. I'm really overwhelmed at this time. So suddenly that identity transforms from permanent to temporary. So just park there for a second. The whole concept of saying this too shall pass would be the acknowledgement that everything changes over time. But if you can't say that and you can't believe that, that's because your identity says that something is permanent, maybe about you, about somebody else. That's a big one too, is sometimes I'll make statements with exclamation points about other people that they'll never change. They can never change. But now what I do is I say, at this time, there's somebody that can never change. But that means that it goes from permanent to temporary. I just love that. That tiny little shift creates something powerful and I call it psychological freedom. I love the idea of psychological freedom. And here's why this matters a lot in 2026. So one of the biggest reasons that people feel stuck today is that life and technology and all of the advancements and the decisions made by the higher ups is moving faster than our identity can adapt. That's a big statement right there. That means that my identity does not have the ability to evolve and keep pace with how fast life is changing. So we're all living through massive life transitions all the time that we can't keep up with if we're closed circuit and we don't have the ability to be open and curious. That's why I love to be open and curious because it helps me go along with things and not miss some potential like big, big breakthroughs or distinctions that I can make. So careers change, technology is evolving. Like I said, the digital world is constantly pulling at our attention. If you're focused on any of this crypto and blockchain and AI and virtual reality and all that stuff, you're either closed to that or you can take note that it's happening no matter what and it's moving way faster than we can comprehend. There's no way that you can learn everything every day and keep pace. But what you can do is shift from permanent to temporary. And that's a wonderful relief and feeling. So careers change, technology, the digital world which is why so many people are considering things like a digital detox right now. We very often are saying, I'm gonna do a fast on technology or a fast from a social media. We think about things called mindful productivity right now. I'm gonna take a detox and I'm gonna do something that is productive for my mind and start working on intentional habits. Some of the biggest books out there about habit change require that you stop doing something and you put intention and focus on something else. So this is proof that we see how fast the world is moving. We have to kind of take a step back from it and not care so much about it which is what my next book is about, deciding what to care about. People are kind of seeking and craving rewired wellness now and brain wealth. I love that concept of brain wealth. One of my best friends for 25 years is Jim Quick and he talks a lot about brain health and I always like to insert brain wealth and that's just not survival. That's a whole different thing. People want to actually feel like their life belongs to them again. That's the whole essence of the makes sense ecosystem. And when you read this book, that's what it's about. It's about arming and equipping yourself with the awareness of this stuff and taking some strategic strategies and tools and exercises and implementing them in our lives. And we've been talking a little bit about that and that is to reclaim control of things. As what? As the dominant force and shock caller of your reality and your life. So in order to do that, you have to reclaim control and realize that you get to make choices. But if you don't recognize some of these permanent identities that we have, because we don't know how to just say, well, that's right now and open ourselves up to the temporariness of, but I don't know about the future. I love saying I don't know. Now I can have a pretty good idea and I can have a feeling and a thought about something and I can experience what's called certainty, but I like to even throw a I don't know or maybe something else might be true and that's the art of living like a scientist. And the first step in this process is permitting yourself to take a personal exploration of yourself. Think about what that means. Taking a personal exploration of yourself. This just means asking questions like, who am I now? Who am I now? Because very often who you are right now is different than who you've always been. Who am I now? I like to recognize that I've changed. Sometimes other people have to help me remember how I've changed. Not who you were, not who society told you to be, but who are you now at this time? Can you recognize how much you've evolved and shifted as a person? Totally different, it's miraculous. I wanna insert something from chapter two in my book and this is a powerful chapter that very often people struggle to make sense of. So I'm gonna try to give it to you in a real simple way, but it's an exercise and it's a tool that gives you a different way of looking at life that really, really validates the whole at this time concept. So at this time is a tool to help you understand this and looking at your life on what we call the lifeline is something that works perfectly in partnership with the concept of at this time. So in chapter two of Make Sense, I introduce a technique called the lifeline exercise. Real simple, you could take a piece of paper and do this or you could just imagine it in your head. I want you to just consider drawing a line across a piece of paper or just looking at a line that moves from left to right, okay? Now, to the far left of that line is the day that you were born. And I mean that you actually went online and became conscious. If you're somebody that believes that consciousness begins in the womb, that's fine. You could put that there, but it's birth. And then on the far right of the line, that would be death. Now, for the sake of this explanation, just to give you a numeric thing because I'm gonna show you where to place yourself now. So if birth is on the left and death is on the right, let's use the average current life expectancy combined between men and women. Women have a tendency of living longer than men, but worldwide right now, the average life expectancy is about 73 years old, okay? Now we have some people in here that are older than 73. So congratulations, you're defying the average. Just take note that averages are just silly, but this is just for this exercise. So you could take whatever you believe your life expectancy will be and put it out the far right. Now, I want you to take your current age and identify where it is. So if you're gonna live till 73 hypothetically or whatever you put there and you were born at this time, your current age would be, I mean, you can look at the middle as the 50 yard line and just put your current age there. Once you do that, you begin to mark the major life experiences and events that have happened. So the first thing I want you to do is identify how long you have been alive at this time right now. Remember, one of the questions was who am I now? So this is one element of who you are now. You are somebody that has been alive and experienced life for a certain amount of time in the grand scheme of things. So I'm 54. So I'm 65, 75% of the way there. So I can put my place there and I can identify how long I've been alive. And that gives me the ability now almost like a timeline of sorts to go back and take all events that have transpired in your life. I talk about these events very often in my book, but I had to go through the lifeline exercise to be able to say, my parents got divorced during this time. I started school. I had my first girlfriend at this time. I got married. I got divorced at this time. I, a friend died at this time. Some big, big life events, but I put them on the lifeline and I'll explain why that's important. Your childhood, your teenage years, relationships, careers, moments, traumas, breakthroughs, any moment that shaped you. We typically look at those moments and we say things like, I can't believe that I did that. I should have known better. Oh man, that event, that person ruined me. It ruined everything. They ruined my life. That wasn't fair. So that's the way we typically look at our past, which makes sense. Everybody's taught to just drop their past, right? Cause their past is no longer relevant right now. This is a little bit of a different look at it because the truth is this, we're judging our past selves based on the awareness that you have now. You're different now. So when you look at your past and say, I should never have done that before, only the version of who you are now would have been able to not do that thing. But if you look at who you were at that time on the vectors of this lifeline, and that's the experience and how long you've been alive. If you're an 11 year old kid, you don't have the ability to look at life the way you do now. So that's gonna give you a little bit of empathy for that and say, oh, that makes sense why I reacted. But then also your level of consciousness, remember you've evolved as a person. So that's the other a vector. You're either above or below the line. You're either a radically responsible, open and curious person, or you're a victim of circumstance, you're closed, circuited, you're not open because you have a permanent identity. You're putting exclamation points. So that's one of the keys. The moment that you take a permanent stance on something and you validate that you're standing for something, at the same time, you're closing yourself to growth. You're saying nothing else is allowed in. So those are the vectors that you look at on the line. And this now gives you the ability to look back at something that happened to you and acknowledge first that that happened at that time and you were different at that time. Isn't that fun? So there's the validation of starting to recognize that everything is happening at that time or at this time. That's a power move. That's a very big power move. And when you begin looking at your past through that empathetic understanding lens, which is logical, something amazing happens. Remember, Wayne Dyer says, if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Okay, and I think everybody embraces that, but it's hard to execute on. Once again, that's what the book is for. This book will help you execute on that. But what happens when you start to look at that and acknowledge who you were at that time, who you are at this time? Compassion replaces judgment. You stop judging and you start to have empathy and compassion. Understanding replaces shame. If you're having shame for something that's happened in your life or even blame, understanding is a powerful thing. Very often we'll look at some of the things that we blame our parents or our friends or coworkers or anything like that. And we never take the time to understand what might have been going on in their life at that time. So that gives rise to the ability to forgive. I remember a powerful thing that happened. It just popped into my head. We were doing humanitarian work on the island of St. Vincent and we were asked to go take care of, as chiropractors, we had a couple physicians with us. We were asked to go provide free care because that's what we were there to do, healthcare to prisoners. And some of the prisoners in this, this was a maximum security jail. Some of the prisoners were murderers. I mean, we heard horrifying things, rapists and all these terrible things. And I remember it was a very scary thing. And we were just wondering, is this good that we're taking care of such bad people? And I remember the warden of the prison said, what you guys are doing here is so great. And he said, the reason why is because this is not a prison, it's a correction facility. And he just reminded me that those people were in jail to correct themselves. Not to say that what they did didn't matter anymore, but to correct themselves. I just love that. So that also validates, everything changes. So the philosophy of this too shall pass pops right in right here. So that's an ancient biblical phrase, by the way, that captures this identity or in this ideal perfectly. This too shall pass. When you say this too shall pass, and I think a lot of people probably say that, it's a valuable thing to say. God, we say it every day in our family. What it does is it reminds us that everything in life is temporary. That's what it means when you say this too shall pass. Everything in life is temporary. Success is temporary. Struggle is temporary. Pain and even certainty is temporary. That's an important one. All those things are temporary. Which is why I believe that one of the most powerful ways to live your life is what I call grounded optimism. I love that. I heard something today that really resonated with me this morning. And it was this statement that said that my life shifted when I stopped looking at days as another day. Oh, this is just another day. And I started to realize I was using up my days. So being grounded and optimistic, practicing grounded optimism is a choice. It's a voluntary choice to change the way that you look at things. And I very often talk about the fact that it's true that life sucks and then you die. And what I mean by that is there's some wonderful moments in life, but if you think about it, for the most part, life is hard. Life is more difficult. So if you don't learn how to enjoy the difficult and the suck of life, well, you're not gonna have a good life, you're just gonna have some great moments in life. But for somebody that's truly happy, I'm interviewing in a couple of days, the amazing Tal Ben Shahar, who wrote a book called Happier No Matter What. He's one of the foremost experts out of Harvard. And that's the way he talks. He talks about that. I love that grounded optimism. And that's not blind positivity, by the way, with no denial of hardship. It's just a different way of embracing and looking at hardship at this time. And you can make that decision right now. But the quiet confidence that whatever season you're in is not forever, it's just happening at this time, is a powerful thing to consider. When you start living this way, that's up to you when you wanna start living this way. But when you start living this way, looking at identifying things not as permanent, even your certainty, or your worries, or your concerns, or your ideas about what you can and can't do. When you start living that way, shifting from permanence to temporary, something begins to shift inside of you, and that's something that can stick. You stop clinging to identity, resisting change, and you start falling in love with the process of evolution. That's what I'm in love with. I'm in love with whatever is coming. I'm in love with the good times, the bad times. I'm in love with it all, because I'm in love with evolution. So this is all about living according to what matters most as well. You have to identify the things that you can reference in your life that truly matters most. We live in a world where we're taught to consider what matters most, or what should matter most. But here's where this whole thing becomes extremely practical, because you gotta be able to run, in my book I call it the sorting filter, you have to be able to sort out what matters and what doesn't, what you control and what you don't. But you do that in reference to who you are at this time, what matters most to you in life. Everything in your life is evolving. And remember, we're considering being in love with evolution. And if you acknowledge that, the question becomes this, what matters most to you at this time? It might not be the same thing as last year or even yesterday, but it's a great phase place in the present moment to unwrap the present moment and say what matters most to me at this time. What are your priorities at this time? Most people are what I call seekers of the earth. Everybody wants to be happy earth, healthy earth and wealthy earth. But which one of those is your priority at this time? Maybe right now your focus is on health, because it's the thing that you need and lack the most. It's your fierce urgency of now. Or maybe it's building a business, maybe it's making more money, maybe it's repairing a relationship, or rediscovering yourself. Or maybe your perception right now is it's to step away because you're feeling overwhelmed and you just wanna take a break. It's interesting because a lot of people struggle with following through in life. I struggle with something different, not following through. It's very hard for me to do, to just chill and relax. So we all have something. And by the way, this is not failure acknowledging this stuff. This is called the construction of wisdom. So the key here is learning to build everyday rituals in your life. I talk about my morning routine in my book as well. And intentional habits that align with what matters most to you right now. Which means that you have to allow yourself to let your structure and your morning ritual and your surroundings and the people you hang out with, those are all up for change and modification as well. If you acknowledge what's best for you right now. Not forever, not for the next 20 years, we're talking about right now, which is the only place that life has actually taken place. So this is about allowing yourself to set yourself free to update your life. One of the biggest fears that people have is changing their minds. We're taught to not change their mind. People always worry, well, what will people think if I change my mind? They'll say that I failed. They'll say that I quit. You're allowed to change your mind. This is your life. You're allowed to change your mind. And if society says that you're not supposed to change your mind, or your parents say that you're not allowed to change your mind, that's up to you. That's up to you of how much agency over your life you wanna give to other people or outside forces, like the news or social media. Here's the truth, changing your mind is not failure. We can look at it as an update and a congruent adjustment that's relevant to your awareness of who you are and what you desire and why at this time. You're allowed to make that decision. So life is not a rigid script. You might believe that it is. If you take the time to research that concept, that life is some sort of rigid script, you'll see that it isn't. Most people won't take that time and they just buy into it. It's a continuous draft. It's like a story that's always changing, but you're the story writer, you're the author. So it's a draft that is actually written in pencil. My story is written in pencil. And the most powerful people in the world, by the way, take note of this, are the ones who are willing to say this. That used to matter to me. That used to matter to me at that time, but it doesn't fit my life at this time. In closing, today I wanna leave you with just a simple invitation. And sometimes we need permission and we need an invitation. First, go get my book. If you haven't gotten my book and sign up for the mastermind, make sure that this reality that we're talking about right now really has a chance of locking in. Because remember, we're talking about becoming the shock hauler or dominant force of your life. Then take one current, just take one current belief that you have about yourself. Maybe it's something that you've been saying for years and just start adding, you have nothing to lose. Start adding the three words at the end of it, say at this time. Notice what happens when you say that. Notice the space that opens up, the space and potential and opportunity that opens up. I mean, the possibilities that return back into your eyes. Look into the eyes of a little baby sometime. They don't have any definitive. They're just soaking everything up. So the truth is you're not stuck, you're not broken, you're not defined by your past. You're simply a human being that is evolving through seasons and every season of your life only exists at that time. That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the Make Sense sub-stack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's gonna stay. See you next time. Hmm, Make Sense. Hmm, Make Sense.