The Secret Map to Your Life: Why Nothing is Random - E164

And you don't have to do certain things because something happened to you or, and this is a choice, or you could look at it and say, what was that preparing me for?

What did that get me ready for?

“What happened in my life after that as a result of it?”

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 sleepwalking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Makes sense with Dr. JC Podcast.

This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shot 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.”

Great morning, great morning world, great morning humans. This is Dr. JC Dornick, otherwise known as the Dragon, and come into you on a Tuesday typically we do these on Mondays at 8am, but I'm here in Cancun, Mexico, and I'm sure you've heard the stories, but it happened to me. Or it happened for me, but I got food poisoning and didn't sleep much and did a bunch of other things all night before the Mondays. So we had to reschedule, so we are here on a Tuesday, and this episode. So today is going to be something that I'm going to share that comes from my book that we're calling this, the secret map to your life, why nothing is random.

And remember, in the make sense ecosystem, we're never like preaching and teaching.

You'll notice that it's never my intention to tell people what is or what people should do. It's more about pointing something out that I find interesting, something that was useful for me that I'm paying forward. My hat says it all, it says mm, mm, mm, which stands for haven't made up my mind about anything. So for me, I just revel in uncertainty and in a world that demands certainty and demands us to know things. I just love the idea of not knowing and not feeling that I need to know so fast.

“I don't think that that's a cop out or some sort of a weakness. I think it's one of the wisest decisions that I've ever made was allowing myself to not have to know at least so fast and not have to be certain.”

Because I find that anytime I'm certain about something and I put an exclamation point behind it, rather than a question mark, I've just closed myself off to growth. So what I'm going to share with you today is something that comes right from my book that's in the book and that's the makes sense book that came out recently. And that is this concept of the crazy wall and you'll notice that in the book in the beginning there's a QR code that you can download assets from and one of those assets is this exercise.

So if you like this exercise, you can do it on your own, but if you have the book or you grab the book on Amazon that's makes sense how to rewire your mind and transform your life by me. You can get the actual exercise. So let's begin.

I've never looked at your life and wondered, I'm sure you have, but why does this keep happening to me?

I mean, I've been in that situation before or does any of this actually mean anything. I question that all the time and is everything in some sort of mysterious way is everything connected. If you ever get in that sense where you're just wondering if everything's connected and does everything mean something because we're constantly looking at that stuff on this show. So most people feel like they're just bouncing from one random event to the next. Stuck in a story that they didn't even write themselves. We talk a lot about that on the show. We recognize that the story that's going on our head. It's not necessarily been written by us trying to make sense of something that doesn't really seem to make sense.

If you really step back from life, you'll notice that life doesn't necessarily really make sense. So the whole concept of the make sense ecosystem is I teach people a way of making sense of things, but very often I find that it's a nice power move to just not to make sense of things because you recognize that not everything makes sense in life. I don't know what your thoughts are on that feel free to chime in. But what we're going to do today is we're going to entertain. That's what we do. We entertain the idea that nothing in our lives is random. Now that's not me saying that nothing in our lives is random. What I'm saying is we're going to entertain that idea. We're going to go play in that sandbox.

So I'm going to show you a concept that a tool from my new book like I said, and that's makes sense, and that is called the crazy wall just something really fascinating that came to me while I was writing the book and something that is dramatically changed my life and helped me and and continues to.

When finally understand our life story, if that's interesting to you and you are in the right place, just want to give a shout out to the folks that are joining us from our Dragonfly flight Academy as a podcaster, I've got to the point where I'm a full time podcaster, which is why I still broadcast even if I'm in King Koon from my hotel room because it's a full time gig now, I've learned how to monetize and make a full time living out of podcasting. That is just a wide open space and there's so much opportunity, there's 4 million podcasts out there and like less than 1% of people are doing it right, growing it, making it impactful and also making money.

I started something called the Dragonfly flight Academy or Dragonfly podcast Academy and some of those people are here with us on the YouTube channel. If you've ever been podcast curious or you have a podcast, you know,

some people have podcasts that have hundreds of episodes, but they've never made a dollar, they've never grown it, we're teaching people how to do that and that's on the school platform.

I'm interested in that, reach out to me through any of my makes sense ecosystem, you can typically find us on all social media platforms at Dr. JC Dornick and ask some questions about that. Would love have you join us people are getting extraordinary results and we're building a great community. By the end of this episode, you won't just understand your past, you'll start seeing the blueprint for your future.

“It's an interesting way of looking at life is we're not just looking to understand our past, but we're going to create a system and have a tool that is going to lay the foundation of the blueprint for our future.”

So we're going to connect the dots today.

So one of the biggest challenges that we face is humans is trying to understand our life while standing inside of it. This is a cool concept, and I think we do this without even knowing it. So we ask questions like, why did this happen to me? Why do I keep repeating the same patterns? Why do I think this way? How do I find my purpose or how do I get unstuck in life? I can't tell you how many people come to me and claim that they're stuck. It's an interesting thing to say that you're stuck. I mean, where are you stuck? Is somebody holding you down?

I've been trapped in some sort of quicksand or are you stuck inside your mind. So one of the answers that I typically give when people claim that they're stuck is interesting and I just allow that person to think about it. Many of those questions that I just mentioned is a deeper desire for clarity. In our ecosystem and the makes sense academy and our dragonfly academy and all the work that I do. We always say that we seek clarity before action. You see, we don't believe that people are actually stuck for the reasons that they think they are.

That people don't understand the power of perception and how they've been programmed and conditioned in life. And it's skewed the way that they look at life. You know, Wayne Dyer always said, if you change away, look at things that things you look at change.

So underneath all of those questions is a deeper desire for mental clarity. Once we have mental clarity, it's like we're clear for take up.

“So to understand our life story and know that it means something, I think we're all trying to do that. But here's the truth that I have uncovered and I'm here to share that with you today.”

There's a pattern to all of it, but you can't see it when you're standing inside of it. It's like trying to read the label from the inside of a bottle. You can't see it. So what does that mean? If you're standing inside of an unconscious programmed mind that you're unaware of and you're looking at things, it's very, very difficult. I think it was Winston Churchill that says that you can't reason with a lion when your head is in its mouth. So we're going to learn today to kind of step back and look at things from a different vantage point.

That's a great deal of the work that I do in my book and in the whole makes sense ecosystem is I allow myself to hold on for a second, the power of that pause and step back and obtain alternative perspectives.

“Different vantage points of things. That's why we always say, "Hmm, interesting. Let me see what I think about that." Now you're going to have to fight the forces that are demanding certainty and rapid response from you in the world.”

I don't want to wait for you to think about what they said to you. They want to response. There's a bit of a challenge there, but so let me introduce you to this concept called the crazy wall. Now remember, this is an exercise and you can kind of play with it, but what you're really going to want to do is in the book, if you have the book, make sense, how to rewire your mind, transform your life by me. The book on the inside, there's a QR code and then you can download the whole. We're going to just touch on the crazy wall today because I'm just going to point it out to you. Think about it. I don't know if you know what a crazy wall is.

They're very often in the movies called them investigation boards and they have photos, push pins, red string connecting all the things together. Sometimes you see this in when they're trying to catch a killer and things like that.

At first glance, all of that looks like chaos, but to the person that's building it, it's a system of connecting the dots and understanding how everything relates.

“So in the movies, this system is usually used to catch the bad guy, the killer, or to solve a crime, connecting all the dots. So very often that's how they do it. They kind of put it all up on the wall. And that's why we call it a crazy wall.”

And they try to connect the dots using the red string and that's very often how detectives crack the case. Now imagine how it applies to your life, your own life. But it becomes kind of like the personal growth framework that helps you step outside of your story and becomes something most people never become. And that would be an open curious non-judgmental detective of your own life. So park there for a second. What we're saying is in a non-judgmental way, in a non labeling and a non forced to give meaning to everything way, putting everything up on the wall from your life, all these events. And we'll talk a little bit more about that.

And just stepping back and allowing yourself to just be open and curious, which means you don't know, right?

Interesting. Let me look at this not only as I see it, but from multiple vantage points, big part of my book and be non-judgmental and we can just become a detective, a detective of our own life.

I just think that's a power move right there is to just allow yourself to become a detective of your own life. It doesn't mean that you're a victim or a judge or even a hero of your life, but a detective because detectives don't assume they observe and then they connect. If you're going to be a detective of your own life, it means you're going to stop assuming. And most of the time that we assume, we don't understand that that is just something that comes automatic. And we're just going to start connecting the dots, right? We're looking for evidence.

And that's a big move for you. So you get curious. And instead of asking, why me, you start asking questions like this. What did this shape in me? What belief came from this? What strength was built here? And what was this preparing me for? This is a fascinating thing to do. Go back to one of your biggest traumas. And I'm sorry to do that for you because I know a lot of you have some pretty heavy ones.

But go back to these big events that happen in their traumas or they could have been exciting things. Or you could go back and remember a time that you're very excited to move into a phase of your life and then found out that it was like a shitstorm at some other part. What a cool question to say, what was that preparing me for? So that would be how you connect dots. So if that's up on your wall, that would be how you would put a push pin in a big event.

“And you would use that red yard to connect it to something else. So that's how you create the connection.”

So now you're not reacting to your life. You're starting to make sense of your life story. So there's a quote from Steve Jobs. This is a very, very cool concept that very much relates to this. So Steve Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward only backwards. Now, like I said, we're very often conditioned to think that the past is the past. The future is mysterious. The present is a gift, right? So we're taught about that.

But we're actually looking back at the past right now because we're recognizing that the only way we could make sense of the present is by connecting the dots. And the only place that the dots exist are in the past and the present, not in the future.

“So that's important because most people hear that, but they don't live it.”

Most people are still trying to control the future instead of understanding the past. And one of the things that we speak about a lot on this show is that if you're constantly living in the future,

it's robbing you from existing in the only place that life exists, and that's the present moment. So we always talk about unwrapping the present moment.

You are the result of every experience that you've ever had right now. Now, we don't have to dwell on the past, but there's a lot of information that we can give from the past. You are the result of every experience that you've ever had. And that's every relationship, every win, loss, and every moment of overcoming past trauma, even every breakthrough. All of it has converged into what you are right now. And here's the part that changes everything. The dot.

Remember, Steve Jobs says you can only connect dots from the past, not in the future. And now we understand why, but the dot that you are today is influencing every dot that will come next.

Imagine, go back to a time and imagine if you, and this is a big part of the interface response system that we teach in the book. If you were to go back to a time in your life.

“With the knowledge and look at it through the lens that you have now, you could have responded differently, in fact, rather than react to respond to it.”

And that would change your whole life. Well, you can go back now and resolve some of that, talk about resolving childhood trauma. If you go back to a traumatic event in your life. This is why it's so cool to have it all up there and we have an exercise for it. And I'll go over to a little bit. But you look at that event through your lens right now. You could probably resolve it and probably look at a different way of responding to it, which could therefore potentially change your reality right now.

The dot that you are today is very important dot because it is going to facilitate and attract the dots that are coming. So I love to work on the present moment. So if you don't understand this dot that you are today, you can't consciously begin to shape your future. What we're offering you right now is this idea of just really acknowledging that the power of now, like a cartoli says, and the dot that you are now, because once you acknowledge that you can start having a lot of influence on your future dots.

“So now this is where people resist though, because when you look at our past, you'll notice that there are things there that didn't feel good. Why would we want to acknowledge things that didn't feel good?”

Things like pain, loss, confusion, and moments that we wish never happened. Are there any moments in your past that you wish never happened?

Who exercises like this one, the crazy wall, I've learned to practice radical acceptance of everything. Now that might be tough for some people because how could you radically accept something that was just terrible in your life, right? Very often people say, "Hey, Dragon, how are you doing?" And I'm honored. My answer to that is, it's all good. Now when I say it's all good, I'm not saying that, and here's the distinction, I'm not saying that everything felt good. I'm saying that everything's served to me. Do you see the difference? By saying it's all good, I'm not saying everything was actually good. I'm saying it all served to me.

Warring, Dragonfly Paghask Academy is amazing, so there's jam session with Tina, okay, cool. I'm standing on the other side of that detective work.

The vulnerability and humility of looking in the past contributed to the healing and made her a confident woman that she is today. That's a profound statement, Tina, and I just want to chat with you on this a little bit. So she's saying that she's standing now, she's recognizing now, this is a highly conscious person. She's recognizing, she's done the work, right? And there's a lot more work to do, but the vulnerability and humility of looking in the past contributed to the healing. She's recognizing that that hard work, the vulnerability, the humility of looking into the past has contributed to the healing that she's experienced and made her a confident woman.

“So that's present moment thinking. That's what I refer to, Tina, as unrapping the present. Unrapping the present moment is not just acknowledging that you exist here right now.”

In fact, it's the only place that you exist. It's also acknowledging like you're doing right now with gratitude, how you got here, how this came about and that is a very, very powerful thing to do. I love that. So unspoken thoughts says, tell us about traumas. Well, what do you want to know about traumas? I can't tell you about traumas. I can tell you about my traumas. I think you're probably asking in some way to make sense of traumas. I think that's probably what you're asking. What if we were to ask that question, you know, if you were to pick a trauma and ask that question of what was this preparing me for?

I mean, I could take any trauma that I'd been through, whether it was loss or some sort of emotional trauma or abandonment or anything like that. And if I look at it and just experience what it was like, you know, I'm going to have confusion and victimization and all that stuff, you know, I call that negotiating with my circumstances at the time. But if I don't negotiate with my circumstances and I ask a question like, what was this preparing me for? It's pretty plain to see that's something that I love to do.

So that's all I would say about traumas because you guys all have your own traumas and you've all painted them in a certain way as things that happened to you. But either way you look at it, you can't change what happens, so you should be able to start asking questions of what was this preparing me for?

But ask how it served you. Now, if you haven't figured that out yet because you're still dwelling in it and you're still feeling like because that happened you're at a deficit in life, you're at a disadvantage.

“Well, then you've got some work to do, right? Because if you want to move forward, you have to reframe if you change the way you look at things the things you look at change.”

This is where I'd move over to a board, right? So let's let's play with this idea. Remember, I have a whole exercise in the book.

But you can either move over ideally would be a court board. I don't know if everybody has a court board there, but maybe one day you'll get one. Or you can even use a piece of paper or you could use, you know, a dry erase board or something like that. So the first thing that I would recommend another exercise from chapter two in the book is called the life line. I would draw online. This is how you build your crazy wall. Ideally, like I said, you would have the materials. You'd have a big court board, okay? You'd have the ability to have, you know, some pictures and some scissors and some post it notes and things like that. You'd have some push pins and some red yard.

That's ideal. Here's what I want you to do on a piece of paper, because you probably don't have all those things right now.

You're going to draw online from left to right in the middle of the piece of paper and I would use a paper and landscape form.

“The left side of the paper represents your birth when things started, okay?”

And then all the way on the right side of the paper would represent the inevitability of your death. And I want you just for the sake, if you're older than 75 years old, well, then you're cracking the code and you're breaking the odds. So good for you. But the average living man or a woman on average is probably like 73, 74. So I'm going to give you 75. So 75 is the number on the other side and you're going to draw a line across it. So left is birth, right is death. So estimate on that line. This is important to face place yourself when you build your crazy wall, because you're going to find where you are, because that the whole crazy wall is about you.

On that line, you're going to estimate, you know, so if the 50 yard line between zero and 75 is in the middle, find out where you are, approximate. And that's where you would put the word me or you would put a picture of yourself and tack it up there on the wall. So a lot of fun to do it on the wall, because that it really becomes a crazy wall. When the reason why we call it crazy is because until you gain clarity, it's chaos. It seems crazy. Find out where you are and that's where you are today. So then you start placing key moments around it at approximately the time that they happened.

“That's important because if something happened when you were a kid, you need to look at it now through your lens that acknowledged that you were just a kid at that time.”

And it'll help you embrace and understand why it appeared to be the way it did. You had very little life experience and very little coping mechanisms. You had very little sense making skills. You just basically did what your mother father teacher, evolution and society conditioned you to do. You just reacted. That's why you'd want to face place the events. So take all the events and the big events, you know, the traumas, the victories, the turning points, the relationships, etc. They don't have to all be traumatic, by the way. It can also be big life changing events. So there's your crazy wall. You're starting to build it.

You're putting it on and you're just putting it relative to where you are. Now, another fun thing and the reason why you draw the line is not just from left to right in the book. The Lifeline has an above and below it as well. So the reason why I want you to consider whether or not to put it above or below is because above would represent open and curious and conscious at that time that the event happened. This is a big part of the crazy wall. If you were to put it below, it would be because at that time you didn't know what you didn't know. You were unconscious, sleepwalking per se.

So not only are you putting these things in the timeline sense, but you're also indicating whether or not they were above or below the line. So once again, above is open, curious and conscious. So a lot of things that happened in my life at the time that I thought they happened to me. To me, I was unconscious. So I would put that below and then conscious of put them above. So then you start connecting them. This is the exercise. If you have a quirk board or some sort of a mechanism that you could push pin or honor a wall, you could even use a wall that'd be careful that somebody might get upset with you putting holes in the walls.

Because that's sometimes the way it's done in the movies. Otherwise, you know, you can use a different colored pencils and pens and things like that. So you'll start to see when you start to connect things. First of all, it's fun to just even acknowledge how they're connected.

Oh, because of this, this happened. I never would have met this person, had I not had this happen.

And I could recognize that had that not happened. I would not have met my wife. I would not have my daughter right now. I would not have lived in this place and because I lived in this place, this happened, right? So we start to make sense of things and we start to connect the dots.

“You start to see things like, oh, that's where this came from. That's why I react that way.”

That's where I built that strength. I obtained that talent. That's where I gained an obtained that opportunity, which wouldn't have happened if not for that. We very often don't make those connections. That's what shaped this belief that I have right now. Interesting. You have a choice. You can either look at trauma as something that happened to you and kind of feel like you get a hall pass, you know, and you don't have to do certain things because something happened to you. Or, and this is a choice, or you could look at it and say, what was that preparing me for? What did that get me ready for? What happened in my life after that as a result of it?

So we can always find that. And it's not about getting to this place where everything is hunky, dory and perfect. It's just about making sense of it.

Because what you'll find is that the whole exercise is about getting to this place right now when we unwrap the present moment and say everything is pretty freaking cool. Now, you'll start to notice that what felt random starts to kind of reveal patterns in your life. It's really interesting when you start to notice that there's a pattern to your life. And those life patterns often become the answer to the question that a lot of us ask which is how do I find my purpose? A lot of people say, how do I find my purpose? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life?

And the reason why this exercise helps that is because what I've found through this work is that your purpose is not something that you go find. But it's something that you uncover. So very often people when they're thinking about what's my purpose in life. They're looking for it in the not now.

But when you go through this exercise, very often it will say, oh, that's my purpose. I always had a hunch about that. Interesting. What did I forget that? How did I forget that?

So it's not something that we go find is something that we uncover and that happens when you understand what has been shaping you all along. So Alexey, the trauma for those of you listening just to this podcast, we have this is a live broadcast right now and some folks are chiming in and asking us questions. And trauma is this a big one, Alexey. That's part of your crazy wall. That's part of your life line. And you start to say, how did that shape me? How did that strengthen me? What belief did that give me? And is it time to let go of that belief? Just about making sense of things.

Very much like forgiveness. When I forgive someone, I'm not saying what they did was okay, what I'm doing is is I'm saying, I understand what it was now.

“And I understand that it doesn't serve me and I'm letting it go. So that's why I'm forgiving you. Is it no longer has any power over me? That's a decision.”

People often ask me, let's say, dragon, how do I know if I'm on the right track? Well, first of all, is it really important to know that we're on the right track?

If we spend our lives trying to make sure we're on the right track, I think we're going to needlessly suffer from that. But they're very often say, how do I know that I'm on the right track? What I tell them is that this is where the interface response system comes in. When you ask a question like that, like, how do I know if I'm on the right track? You have to be able to look at your track. Look at the things that are going on in your life from a different vantage point. That's why I built the interface response system, which is that four steps system in my book.

So here's a simple version of it. I like to look at life like it's a mirror. If we look at life like it's a mirror, most people get mad at the mirror that they're looking in when they don't like what they see. So the interface response system puts you in the habit of looking at that mirror differently and saying, okay, what do I need to change about me to get a different reflection to get a different outcome, a different response? That's it. From Substack, Bathrobe Guy, and in parentheses, it says robes, go check him out, says suffering is a feeling of discontent and it's brought about by our ego's desire for a situation to be different than it is. I love that.

“So if you look at your ego's desire to have something be different, that's like trying to drink water with a fork, right? You know, it is what it is, but the only thing we can do Bathrobe Guy is change the way we look at it.”

So just like Wayne Dyer says, and this is one of the tenets of the makes sense of academy. By the way, if you like this stuff and you really want to do the work, we've got our podcast academy, that's called the Dragonfly Podcast Academy, but we also have our makes sense of academy, which is on the school platform, shout out to all of you that are in that, and that's a place where we mastermind almost daily, and we really, really take these topics and do the work, and we really entrench and learn about the interface response system. For those of you that have my book, I also offer a free mastermind once a month.

So success is not about everything in our lives going perfectly. It's really about collaboration. Every setback, every frustration is just life giving you feedback.

I love that. I also like to look at the idea that the thoughts in my head are just suggestions that my head is putting in the suggestion box.

“So success is about calibration. It's not about everything going perfectly. And it's just about giving us feedback. Oh, that was interesting feedback. What do I want to do with it?”

And that becomes the signal, and that's a chance for us to reframe and adjust. What that's saying is, is that if we tap into the signal and we look at what's being provided for us and we ask the right questions, you'll start to notice the pattern. And you'll start to realize that that chaotic, crazy wall actually makes a lot of sense, but we have to connect the dots. So if you're staying curious, instead of getting frustrated, and that's a choice, how could I just become open and curious, listen, your stress response system is going to respond like it is. That's programmed and conditioned. You can't change that and it happens without asking you. You know, your stress response system doesn't ask you for permission to show up. But when it does, you can get open and curious and you can become that detective.

Instead of getting frustrated from it like a victim and just realize you're not lost, you're actually exactly where you need to be and these things could be useful. But here's what I want to leave you with today. Your life is not a series of random events. It's a connected system of meaning and that's just entertaining that idea. I'm not saying that it is because I don't know. At this time, that's the way I'm looking at life is that it's not a series of random events. It's a connected system of meaning. And I like to look at it that way. I choose to look at that way.

Meaning is not something that you go out and find. It's something that you unveil and discover and see when you start connecting the dots. It already exists. Like the answer to a mathematics question already exists, but sometimes you have to add things up together and subtract things. That's the same way I look at life. And most people never see it because they never step back far enough and take the time in this crazy world to have a good look at it. So change the way you look at things. So let me ask you this. What if what you're going through right now and we can call it confusion, the uncertainty, the frustration. What if this is just another dot, not the end of your story, not the exclamation point, the defining end of your story, but just a piece of your crazy wall that hasn't been connected yet.

“Maybe the goal today, if you want to set a goal today, just a shift. I'm going to give you something to put in your big pile of shift. Maybe the goal today is to simply get curious and stop asking, why is this happening to me?”

And instead ask a better question, like, what is this preparing before? That's what I love. So remember, if you learn something today, give it away. That's the way it's going to stay. The highest form of self actualization is when you take something that you learned that you grabbed and you go teach it to somebody else to teach us to learn twice. It's when you give it away when you serve humanity that your life goes to the highest. So I hope that you'll share this around. 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 when you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time.”

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