Stop Chasing Your Dreams, Start Feeling Them
By Ilan Ferdman
I’ve chased. My entire life I’ve chased.
It started innocently enough. I chased my parent’s attention and love. I chased making the traveling soccer team. I chased trophies and grades, then girls and accolades. And most recently I’ve chased cars, houses, money, and status.
Until that is…I stopped chasing!
Something very profound happened to me in 2018, and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share with you one of the most powerful insights of my life.
An ah-ha so profound it still feels a bit unreal, and dare I say a bit magical.
I’ve been blessed to find personal development at the ripe old age of 21 years old. Since that time I’ve invested nearly a million dollars in my education. I’ve traveled the world seeking mentors, coaches, gurus, and out-of-this-world experiences.
Through the years, I’ve healed relationships, created deeper connections, lost everything and built it all back, got married to my soul mate, been a father to two amazing kids, built 5 different businesses (some monumental failures and some successful), and many other ups and downs.
2018 however would be a pivotal moment, bigger than I could have ever predicted. My brother, Guy, and I have spent the last 7.5 years building our company Satori Prime. It too has pivoted and shifted many times through the years.
Today, however, we focus solely on awakening humans to their fullest potential.
Guiding souls to more love, peace, and abundance than they ever dreamed possible — and all of it achieved through effortless ease and grace. And it's that last part that I want to share about today.
I was born an overachiever. I always excelled at everything I touched. If I didn’t excel at it immediately, I wouldn’t be interested in pursuing it. Now, this obviously led me to an amazing life, with amazing achievements, but I didn’t know at what cost.
If you’re an entrepreneur, then this way of life is probably very familiar to you.
As entrepreneurs, we are always pushing forward. Always looking for what’s next. We have very limited capability to even pause for a moment and celebrate our wins. Everything is driven in our lives by achievement and progress. To us, not progressing isn’t just bad, it can actually feel like dying.
After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs this pattern became abundantly clear and rather than pass it by, I choose to dive in and investigate. Why am I such an overachiever? Why have I been chasing my whole life? Is this the best way to even achieve results? And probably the most important question, have all that chasing and achieving made me any happier?
You see, most of us are in one way or another looking to improve. We want more money, better health, and awesome relationships. However, we rarely ask why do we want these things?
There is a phenomenon I call the “last box syndrome”.
This occurs when a person checks off every box they’ve set out to check in their life. The business/money box. The big house and fancy car box. The family and travel box, etc. When that last box is checked the dark reality sets in. “Why am I still not happy?” and “This was all supposed to make me feel happy and peaceful, and I feel the most miserable I’ve ever felt.”
I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news my friend, but you’ve been chasing the wrong dream.
You’ve been playing the wrong game entirely. Luckily for me, I was fortunate enough to learn this early on, and now I’d like to pass it on to you in the hopes that you don’t throw your life, your health, and your relationships away.
Start by asking yourself why you’re chasing so hard? What are you trying to prove? To yourself, to others, to mom and dad perhaps. Are you trying to prove that you’re not a loser like I was? Or maybe you’re trying to prove that you are good enough, or smart enough, or just plain enough?
You see, you’ve been running around thinking that when you achieve and when you succeed that the feeling of being a loser, or stupid or not enough will go away. Well, it's time for a reality check. Has anything you’ve done so far in your life made that feeling go away? Has any box you’ve checked along the way actually succeeded in making that feeling go away? Or has that sinking feeling in your stomach, or the tightness in your chest, or the sore neck and back always come back?
You, my friend, are fighting a losing battle!
What is it you really want? I’d offer that it’s what we all want.
We want peace. We want to experience love. We want well-being. We want to belong and feel connected. We want to be happy.
So if that’s true and that resonates with you, has all the chasing that you’ve done created any of that for you? I mean in a long-term sense? Or has it all felt quite fleeting?
Well, what I want to offer you right now is to flip the script. What I mean is, stop chasing the accolades, the achievements, and results, and instead start to focus on the feelings. What I realized last year is that the world and your reality will always align with how you’re feeling at the moment.
I’ve never met a human being yet that can feel horrible and create amazing results at the same time.
Have you noticed that when you’re feeling like a dog (you know what) the world responds by giving you more things to get angry, frustrated, and pissed off about? Conversely, when you’re riding high, feeling amazing, magical things seem to just happen and flow by themselves.
Well if you resonate with that, here’s an experiment I’m inviting you to run. Focus not on the goals and results you want to produce, focus instead on how you want to feel every moment of every day.
Let me explain.
When I did some soul searching I realized that the feelings I’m most desire to feel are peace, love, and connection. So for this year, I created a new set of goals, ones that couldn’t be measured or quantified like every book is telling you. I choose to create a feeling of peace, love, and connection every single day.
Now here’s the absolute most incredible part of the story. What do you think the world provided me with when I created the goal? It provided me with experiences and circumstances so that I could continue to grow in peace, love, and connection.
2018 unfolded and unwound in the most magical of ways. Our business exploded. I went on more vacations with my family and friends than I ever have. I’m in the best shape of my life. My relationship with my kids and over 10-year relationship with my wife is at an all-time high. And the best part of it all…it didn’t feel like work…AT ALL! In fact, it all felt effortless and easy in a way that I had never experienced before.
The perfect opportunity or mentor or insight kept seeming to show up and guide me to my next growth opportunity.
And like little stepping stones, I just followed them step after step. I gave up future visions and focused on each step as it came. I gave up control and surrendered to greater wisdom, and it’s led me to more happiness, abundance, love, and peace than I’ve ever experienced before. I know it sounds crazy, right?
Now I realize that for some this might sound woo-woo, and I’m ok with that.
My hope here is that you begin to question and investigate your own life. Ask the big questions. Don’t end up chasing as I did. It will leave you broken, depressed, unhappy, and alone. It’s not worth it.
Just because something has produced results in your life doesn’t mean it’s the best and only way to achieve them. Sometimes it’s the things that have produced our greatest results that are actually holding us back from achieving even greater. I’m inviting you to step out of your comfort zone and into the magic zone. A zone where money, relationships, and health become a by-product of the way that you feel every single day.
So how would you like to feel every day this year?
If you enjoyed this article, you'll love the podcast that my brother and I run called Old Souls & Seekers.
