Of course, you may be the kind of person who prefers to observe life from the sidelines, in which case I honor your choices. But if you’re rather the type to be interested in playing this game of life to the absolute fullest, splashing around with glorious abandon in the highs and lows, if you want to live a life full of adventure, sunshine, celebration, meaning and poetry, you’re going to need to stop fetishizing authenticity.

My name is Anna Bellissima. I am an extremely powerful magician, as of course are you, and I have spent the last two decades performing cruel and unusual experiments upon myself in search of an answer to the question, why does life have to be so fucking painful? The pursuit of that understanding very nearly killed me, and I’m about to share one of the most important ideas I ever discovered and which certainly saved my life.

But first, if you’re an extremely intelligent person who envies goldfish their focus set the speed of this video to one point two five or even one point five speed and wonder at how much easier it is to digest. I strongly advise using the pause button on this video, complete the lessons as they relate to your life, make notes if you choose. And then today, this hour, this moment could be the moment your life changes beyond recognition, which is exactly what happened to me.

Life as a human being is full of struggles. Yes, we have many wonderful tools for personal development at our disposal, but nevertheless we will all always experience some difficulties and pressure. So what would you say if I were to offer to share with you a hack, a mind game, if you will, that will enable you to take on fearsomely challenging tasks and situations without ever falling prey to the doubts and misgivings that sometimes paralyze us. After all, as we have previously discussed, if you’re a person who believes in themselves enough, at least some of the time, to know that they could create a big impact on the world, I am your greatest cheerleader.

The world urgently needs your magic and in return promises everything you desire. And so it is extremely important that you grow your capacity to take on phenomenal challenges without boiling over, losing your cool, flipping your lid or any other idiom that describes having reached your capacity for self-regulation. And the solution for this universal and timeless problem is the alter ego.

Or to translate it from the Latin, the other eye. This is a concept first articulated by Cicero in the first century anno Domini, and it describes a distinct, separate personality which you create and which lives within you, an innner friend, another version of ourselves who is better equipped with the characteristics that will help you succeed in whatever challenge you face, whether that is holding your nerve in high level international arms deals, or balancing the career you love with a competing value of yours, to spend plenty of time active and outdoors with your family. When you become more intentional about which characteristics are important for this level in the game of life, the immersive experience in which we are all earnestly engaged, we activate a creative engine that propels a new level of performance.

So how do you create one of these magical partners who can enter the arena and go out to bat on your behalf unhindered by your personal demons? How demons? Before I go on, you may have noticed, but mind bending, path altering, destiny creating lessons here that if studied and absorbed, will change the course of your life. If you haven’t already done so, please pause now to subscribe to this channel. And back to the subject at hand: a couple of weeks ago, we spoke about the benefits of the personification of problems as demons, and I will link that video below.

Now, let’s imagine we live with a particularly tenacious demon who thrives on our lack of self-confidence, fear of judgment and aversion to risk. They are fed by hidden forces, forces like not taking yourself or your own power seriously, or your individual history of trauma, or the narratives we perceive as being approved by our peers. The first step is to be extremely clear on the ways in which your demon is not helping you, exactly what negative traits they hold and give them a name. Naming your demon creates a compelling distinction between the two aspects of yourself the heroic self, the self who is whole and unhindered, and the demon trying to trap you in despair. Now we will go one step further and develop the alter ego.

The alter ego is a blend of all the characteristics that will absorb the blows or worries directed at you by your demon. Say, for example, your demon loves to whisper that you can’t be successful in your business, until one hundred pieces fall into place, including repairing your relationship with your mother and miraculously curing the things about you that you believe make you destined to fail. In that case, your alter ego needs to be someone who oozes self-confidence, is ridiculously approving of your quirks and differences, and in fact, loves you all the more for them, and knows that they are the source of your genius.

And then we need to imagine how our alter ego will behave in any of the moments when your demons typically undermine you. To give another example, imagine you have a demon who thrives on you keeping your business really small by making you feel like it would be too difficult or painful to regularly make videos. Meanwhile, you really want to make videos because you think it will be fun and an engaging means of delivering your valuable magic to the world. So you develop your alter ego.

Name them and then imagine in great detail how your alter ego will act, behave, think, speak, feel and perform when the idea of creating a video or whatever it is you are struggling with is presented to them. Let’s develop an alter ego together right now. What characteristics do you need? What people, historical, real, fictional or imagined embody those characteristics? Write them all down.

What or who else do you admire and why? And how can you incorporate those aspects too. How does this new person behave? How do they move, carry themselves, gesture and speak? How do they dress? What energy do they bring into a room? What does your alter ego believe about themselves? What do they know? What do they think and what do they never think? What happened to them in their past to make them the force of nature they are today? And what do they care deeply about? Now, allow your alter ego to inhabit you.

Notice what it feels like to be them, and give yourself a moment or two to notice and strengthen their responses to the barbs you typically level at yourself. Things like this is too hard, or who do you think you are? Or you just don’t have what it takes. The final step in this process is, of course, to make use of the alter ego. We are all guilty of having excellent solutions to problems which we simply do not deploy because our shadow takes over.

Here, I recommend a totem or amulet, some symbol or object that you can imbue with the meaning of your new best friend and partner as a reminder to let them take the reins frequently and not only during times of crisis. Just as we learned to name and personify the difficulties in life, so here we’re naming and personifying our strength and talents to honor and respect and love them and give them plenty of time at the steering wheel. Your alter ego can take you forward in pursuit of your dreams at an accelerating rate.

You have no more excuses as to why this is impossible for you, unless you feel like being beholden to an artificial construct based, as I mentioned at the outset of this class, on the fetishization, the moral judgment of an indefinable concept called authenticity. I have little patience for it. And if you are determined to remain a victim of your perceived circumstances, I respect your position. On the other hand, I am positively giggling with excitement and on tenterhooks, waiting for you to share with me how you stormed through the blocks you set up to protect yourself from success with the energy of a stampede.

I know you can do this. Your alter ego, which is, in case you haven’t guessed yet, the most noble and heroic part of you writ large, knows you can do it. Even your demons know and that’s why they’re fighting so hard. I am dedicated to your success. Please let me know what you’d like me to support you with next time. Thank you for being here. I love you and I will see you here again soon.