[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. This is Lisa Lewis, your host. My guest today is Barry Nicolaou. He is the expert on the science of how thoughts become things. His ability to locate and define his true purpose in assisting others began in 2015. The inspiration Barry absorbed one fateful day at his cemetery led him to write and publish a number one bestselling book on Amazon. His book, the 11 Master Secrets to Business Success and Personal Fulfillment, outlines the 11 areas that intersect economic Freedom with personal fulfillment. His forte is deconstructing the layers beneath cognitive fear, indecision, subconscious paradigms, inherited thinking, habitual thinking, and their intimate relationship to real world expectations and experiences. Woo. Welcome to the show, Barry. [BARRY NICOLAOU] Oh, Lisa, thank you so much for having me. That introduction was amazing. Thank you [LISA] Yes, it is amazing. Wow. I can’t wait to dive into all of this to just hear your story and how you work with people. So before we get started on that, I like to ask all my guests that come on the show, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not and if so, can you just share a story about that? [BARRY] Absolutely. The short answer is yes. The quick story that I have is I, as highly sensitive people know you absorb energy really easily. Like you tend to be in a crowd of people. Whether you’re a highly sensitive, extroverted person or you’re a highly sensitive, introverted person, you tend to, absorb is probably one word to put it, but you also, you take in other people’s energy. What I’ve found with myself is that I’ve needed just around myself with individuals that assist me, and I assist them in lifting and raising their physical vibration and their mental vibration to get to a level where we start to look at that things are actually not as bad as what they seem or give me some, or for me anyway, and offer me some perspective on, on my own experiences. So for me I had my epiphany, or that highly sensitive moment for me was actually at a graveyard. It was truly, truly surreal. I used to be embarrassed to talk about it because I didn’t want to be judged. I think that’s another trait of being sensitive, is that you are afraid of being judged by other people. Just as a segue, I’ve learned to stop judging myself and for me, that’s become a bit of an escape, a bit of a freedom, something to actually work towards. So I had this epiphany. I was in the shoe industry at the time and I was early for an appointment and my customer rang me and said, “Actually, Barry, can you delay me an hour?” So my cast did itself, Lisa, that’s the best way to describe it. Sometimes subconsciously you are driving and you don’t realize how you get to the next suburb. You’re like, how did I get here? It was that moment. I started to drive into this beautiful cemetery in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney, Australia and I drive down these beautiful big wide-open roads and canopy of trees, blue sky day, just gorgeous, gorgeous day. I get out of my car and I just start walking amongst these gravestones, don’t know anyone that’s buried there, like, I’ve got no connection to this place. I’m doing the Maths in between the years where people were born and people passed away, and you start going, wow you come to a realization that people just don’t die in their eighties and nineties. there were 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds in this cemetery. At the time, I was 35 and I was thinking this is pretty wild and I got into this realization that I wasn’t fulfilled. I wasn’t happy with what I was doing. I had, I felt these three words on a subconscious level that totally changed my life. I don’t know if it was the place I was at, or if I was just ready and I was in a place of surrender, but I heard the words “live your life.” From that everything for me changed. I believe that if I wasn’t sensitive to energy and if I wasn’t sensitive to getting to a position where I was totally vulnerable and totally open and totally just ready for the next move in my life that I wouldn’t have felt that epiphany for me. Then from that, a book, as you mentioned, an online course and now helping corporations in the wellbeing space, so it’s pretty cool. [LISA] That is cool. Woo, all from that day. Wow, that’s amazing. [BARRY] It’s a scary feeling. It’s a scary feeling because you know I truly believe this, sorry if I’m rambling, but it’s really important that this comes across when you are ready, like everyone gets ready at different stages of their lives for very many occasions and circumstances and situations. Like we all are ready at different times. We can’t all be ready when we think we should be. Sometimes it takes more time. I was frustrated and I was very I guess in, I had this tumultuous internal environment in me that was just really unhappy. I was really unfulfilled. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this lesser or if anyone listening, if you felt this, but there was a yearning in me to do something, or to be somewhere else, or to, there was this thing and I couldn’t really identify it. It was just, I just, currently I’m putting my hand in my no, towards my chest. It was just this thing in me that I couldn’t. It’s interesting because when you are ready, when life sees that you are now ready for the next understanding that the right people, the right circumstances, the right situations are there to get you there. But you’ve got to be, I found for myself, I had to put be in a place of surrender. I had to be in a place of vulnerability. I couldn’t let the ego pretend that everything’s okay, because it wasn’t. I was pretending that it was. I guess if you have a moment of clarity like that and if you’re listening, and Lisa, I’m not sure if you’ve had this in your life, but if you do have those epiphanies and those moments of clarity, take the next right step from that fuel, from that inspiration. Don’t just leave that and then just go and have a sandwich, like you’ve got, like, you’ve been given a moment to see a potential future, a different future that you actually might want for yourself. Take that and take it with both hands, and then just ask yourself, what would the next right move be like in that direction from here? It might be a phone call, it might be calling Lisa, it might be listening to a podcast. It might be eating healthier, it might be getting eight hours of sleep at night or whatever that looks like for you. Just please take that next right move. Then all of a sudden, the next right move shows itself from that standpoint. So all of a sudden you end up having this staircase and you’re climbing one step at a time, and it feels good because you are being true. You’re finally being true to who you are. [LISA] Well, I am just on like cloud nine. You just described exactly what I’m going through right now in my life and something I’ve been going through since January. I’m not going to share it because I’m still in the process of this journey, but you described it to a t. I just want to thank you for putting the words to it because I feel like just going through it so it doesn’t always make sense. It’s like, what’s going on here? What’s going on here? But hearing someone actually reflect it back in your own experience of it’s like, okay, yes, I get it now. I see like there is an endpoint to this or there’s something that’s leading me to something else. Thank you for that. [BARRY] Very welcome. [LISA] I want to ask you, so you said there’s like fear, there’s also fear, what is that? What can you share about the fear that you experienced? [BARRY] I think fear ends up being, it ends up being sneaky. Fear sometimes masquerades itself as righteousness. It sometimes masks itself. It cloaks itself under different scenarios in life. The best way to describe it for me and everyone would be different but for me if I’m not operating from a place of joy and appreciation and gratitude, gratitude’s a biggie, like I can do a whole episode here, Lisa, on gratitude. It’s like there is so much science now and there is so many people with personal experiences that match the science, that gratitude is just huge, huge, huge. I cannot, I’ve got my next book coming out in November, I’ve dedicated a chapter to the power of gratitude. Like it is huge. So if I’m not operating from a space of love and fear, and if I try to control something, I’m letting you know that for me and the clients that I work with, and even the corporations in Sydney now that I’m speaking with, if you continually are the type of person that tries to control a situation, I’m letting you know that fear somewhere along the line has snuck in and is forcing you to act a certain way to try and keep things especially uncontrollable situations. Like I’ve got this saying here, which is control the controllables. It’s a really lovely way to consider that if something is within your sphere of control, you control it. You try your best because it’s in within your grasp to change. But if you are looking at any external environment, and some of that could be what your neighbor’s up to or what your family is saying behind your back or to your face, or what your friends are up to, and situations that the news are showing you and what Covid is doing and what Russia’s doing and all of these things and all these things that we get bombarded with from the external environments that we have, especially on our phones and our screens, that we have no control over that. So what tends to happen is because the brain says, well, we’ve got no control while we default to fear, and all of a sudden we are harboring this fear inside our consciousness, it’s affecting our joy based decisions. It’s affecting who we are as people and it’s affecting the decisions we’re making about our future. So we can’t control it. Well, then we come to a realization that, well, what are we even trying for? We can’t control that situation. Life just ends up being one random event after the other. I’ve put that thinking aside and I’m like, right, it is what it is. Move on. What are the controllables and where is the fear coming from? Can I control it? Yes, I can control these three or four things that are happening in my life. Are the outcomes going to be exactly the way I think they should be? Probably sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’m okay to roll with that and the lessons will be there for me to pick up. The joy-based moments will be the same. I’ll absorb those as well, so it’ll feel good. But I’m not letting fear take the driver’s seat of my car because you know what, Lisa, it is not worth it. It is not worth taking on that someone else’s understanding of the world, absorbing that as your reality, and then trying to live a truth-based existence from that standpoint. You cannot do it. If you do, you’re going to be doing yourself at the biggest disservice in the world. Like, you’ve got to get to a level where you, and this is a very big word that I’m about to use, but you’ve got to try and absorb the higher understanding of this. There has to be a trust, a trust-based understanding that life knows what it’s doing with you. So you get to a level in your life where you trust the next right tailored experience that is coming into your life. That trust-based authority in my life has been a higher power. I’ve become a little bit in tune with listening to that whisper from the darkness and just hearing it when I’m on my own and just, and feeling that love-based energy. Whenever I’ve defaulted to that higher understanding to that higher truth the next right person, the next right move, the next right podcast, the next right word in my book or whatever it is tends to enter my experience. This is what happens when we try to stop controlling things, like we end up just being receptive to the tailored lessons that life is trying to teach us and going, okay, I get it. I see it. Okay, this feels like a challenge, or this feels like the next right move. I’m going to just edge forward. I’m going to just see where this goes. When you’re in a position to do that, amazing things happen. Huge things happen. So you just have to, as best you can, control what you can, but then let the rest go to an aerial view of your life. This is a really good segue to consider this because for all of us that have been up in an airplane and we look down at the ground and what we see is we can see cars that are 10 miles apart, the drivers of those cars obviously can’t see each other, but because we have the aerial view of life from an airplane we can see that there are certain situations that are happening on the ground that not everyone’s privy to. We can see almost the beginning of a city and the end of the city, they’re on the ground and you can see the road and the traffic light ahead of you. o for me, it ends up being a very trust-based energy that I relinquish myself to and say you know what you’re doing. It’s trusting in the very power that created us. Wayne Dyer was like the catalyst for me. I don’t know if you know Dr. Wayne Dyer who passed away, Lisa in 2015. I’ll honor Wayne until I die, he’s just such a beautiful, he’s a beautiful person and is a catalyst for me. He used to talk about this consistently. It’s about trusting in the power that created you, that you are going through certain moments in life to get you to a higher understanding of love and what love actually means for you and how you can use love as something that you can direct inwards, not just to your external environment. [LISA] Beautiful. I’m just taking that in. So I have a question about this, so there’s the trust and what happens, like, okay, if you’re being directed in an area and a way and a direction that you never thought of considered. Will there be some fear in that? Is it okay to have some fear and trust at the same time? Or does the fear just have to be absolutely non-existent? [BARRY] I think, and this is a personal opinion, okay, because everyone will be different, I feel that if you are stepping forward into trust, I think you have already relinquished some fear. You’ve already done it. If you look at, for the scientists or for the mathematical minded, if you look at fear as having 51% of your decision-making process and you go, oh, feer is just a little bit ahead and it’s controlling because it’s at 51%, if you’re moving forward in trust, I would dare say that you would fee would be at 47 %or 48% of your experience and trust is now at 51, 52 and you’re moving forward. Because if, and yes, and the answer to your question would be yes, because then you would be moving forward with trust and fear simultaneously. But as you move forward and discover new areas that you are now exploring and it feels right and it feels good, and opportunities are opening up for you to express yourself and to start a business or to get back together with your partner or to beat cancer or whatever it is. Fear starts to take a lower percentage. Now, you’ll never get rid of fear completely. For me if you look at again, the percentage scenario, and it’s really horrible to think about it in this way, but it’s good for the left brain to process it this way. But if fear is floating around 20% and your joy and your trust and your understanding of the nature of human beings, which is love, and this is something that I talk about, I was on a podcast in New York last week and we spoke about this and it’s really important that this is understood. You get to a situation in your life where love ends up being a base emotion of your experiences. So let’s consider that you’re building a house and you’re putting a concrete base in this house so you can put framework up. Everyone understands that. So the base, God in my opinion, has given us the base. The base is pure love. Anything we add to that, let’s add frustration to love and let’s add years of abuse to love, it becomes something different. So you look at what anger is. Isn’t anger just disapp lted? Love? Like, if you think of the emotion of anger, it is love that has been frustrated and disappointed and hurt and trodden on and pierced in the side and done everything to it and love has now become something different. You’ve added something to the water. You’ve dropped some things into a clean glass of water and now that water, you cannot drink it anymore. You’ve got to throw it out and have a new glass of water there. So it’s important to realize that I think, and I believe that God has put us here to understand that you can, you guys can play around, you can do whatever you want. You can understand what hate is and what love is and what frustration is and what negative is and what sensitivity is and all that. But every experience gets us back to understanding the core attribute of that concrete base, which is pure love, pure love for humanity and pure love for ourselves. Now, because of our various experiences and our various understandings and our various people treating us a certain way and what the psychology is behind social media and the psychology behind news cycles would end up having these beautiful parts of ourselves become mixed up and it isn’t what it used to be. So for me, trust ends up cutting through all of that framework back to that base of that house and going, right, what is this made of? For me, it is always made. I believe that we have a creator. We have a creator that is love-based, like we have a God that is love based. It is not a hurtful, vengeful, angry God. We have a love-based God. That’s what I believe in my heart and the way that I know that to be true is that we are love-based beings that have horrible circumstances, sometimes thrusted upon us, that changes the nature of what love means. But God says, I’ll get you back to the core attribute of what I intended in the first place, which is you need to circle life for 80 years to realize that it’s always and always going to be about love. When I say love, not necessarily love for everyone, it’s love for self. It’s like you’ve got to be able to get to a situation in your life where the love you have for you supersedes any other consideration. Because if you’ve got it to give away, Lisa, then you’ve got it to give away. But if I ask you for five oranges and you don’t have five oranges to give me, well how on earth can you give it away? How can you give me five oranges? So this is continually what I sit down with people here and talk about is, hey, you’ve got to really love yourself here because if you don’t, I’m letting you know you are going to love other people and you’re going to deplete yourself down to nothing. They’re going to feel great and you are going to feel empty. Yes, let me know how that goes for you because I know it’s not going to go well. So it’s coming back to a level that you love who you are, you love your experiences because your experiences are getting you to a higher understanding. This is what, as I said before, we’re getting back to the great spiritual masters of the last two and a half thousand years, this is exactly what they taught. They taught that higher human awareness is about gratitude for all of it, not just the pleasure, but the pain as well. It gratitude for all of it. I know that’s really hard to consider because who would be grateful for pain and who would be grateful for sensitivity and who would be grateful for people hurting us and like, who would be grateful for that sort of stuff. But that the lesson that we’re all on. It’s like some of us never get it. Some of us get it when we’re 20. Some of us don’t get it when we’re 80. So that’s the lesson. If you can pick that up as a lesson to be grateful for your challenges as well as for your joys, then all of a sudden, you’re getting into higher human awareness. You’re getting into those esoteric God inspired levels that I think is the fuel of his intention for us to just come into that circumstance and just have love for self. [LISA] Wow. Beautiful. I just want to say like, all men, the best. [BARRY] Absolutely. [LISA] Just the way you said it, and I like when I’m working with clients when they come in like with their issues and it’s like, this thing I’m going through, it’s awful. I don’t know if I can survive this, how do I get through this? It’s just, it’s so uncomfortable and uncomfortableness and it’s like, okay, I know you’re going to get through this. I know it and I know it. It’s uncomfortable, it sucks, you can scream and yell and kick and this experience, you may not understand it right now at this moment, but you will understand at some point in your life why you went through this experience. [BARRY] I a hundred percent agree. I think when we don’t understand hey, I’m guilty of this so much. Like when we’re in the crux of our pain and our frustration, and you know what, let’s be open here, if we see our world falling apart and the people that we love are no longer there and our jobs are gone and someone’s gotten rid of us, or our partners in life say, I don’t love you anymore, I just don’t want to do this anymore, or whatever it is, let’s say that life really tears you apart. It’s really difficult to think from a higher perspective because everything you’ve worked for and worked towards your whole life is now feeling that it’s crumbling, it’s feeling that it’s falling down. To those people listening I want you to know that I get it. Like, I get it. I’ve been through circumstances myself that like my father was just, I won’t go on, that’s a whole other podcast, but my father was very selfish and he had literally millions of dollars go through his hands and he’s currently living in his car. I get it. There is situations that hurt us and that can almost deconstruct who we are and it feels horrible and it’s okay to sit in that energy for a while and to contemplate what’s just happened. I just need you to understand that you can’t live there forever. It’s a place that you go to heal, to find the right people to build things back up. I also believe this with my whole heart, that after you just get to the next stage of life’s going to be okay. I don’t know how it’s going to be okay, but I do know that it is because people have come back from this sort of situation before that the right people and the right circumstances. When you’re in that space of vulnerability and love the right circumstances and situations, Lisa, that we cannot fathom from our current standing. Like, life has a million ways to get you what you want and human beings, we sit there and say, well, if it doesn’t happen the way I think it should, then it’s not going to happen. We all know that out of the blue could come a phone call, out of the blue could come and email, out of the blue, a stranger on the street could help you, out of the blue, you could, someone could reach out that you’ve never heard of that has just saying, hey, if you need anything, I’m here. Situations that we cannot fathom come into our experience to get us to that higher understanding and to that love-based energy that we came from. So I guess being in the anger and being in the pain is human nature. But I would say just have that thing in your mind where you go, I need to be in this space right now and I don’t know when I’m going to get out of it, but I know that I’m not going to stay there forever. If you at least voice that to yourself, then you’ve created a bit of an exit strategy from the pain. Yes, you’re going to have hard days ahead and yes, it’s going to test you and challenge you and it’s going to frustrate the hell out of you but there is also the flip side of wonderful experiences, more love-based understandings, new books, new podcasts, new therapists, new people on Instagram, Facebook, whoever you can reach out to, and just being their zone and slowly, slowly the pieces will come back together. That’s, isn’t that the point that the pieces do come back together and we start climbing that mountain again and you end up becoming a wiser, more love-based person, hopefully because of those challenges that you’ve been through. [LISA] I also hear it as a humbling experience. [BARRY] Yes, yes, yes, yes, it’s a very humbling experience for sure. It’s interesting, like I do a lot of work with understanding creative visualization. People say, “Well, Barry, I want to creatively visualize the future that I want.” I make people jump through a few hoops, Lisa, before they work with me because there are a lot of people that are interested in healing but not committed to it. The committed people get there. The interested people will, they’ll dabble in it and they’ll go and have a sandwich and they’ll dabble in it. But if you are truly interested in getting something or a desired outcome, you will get there, a hundred percent. So for me, when I sit down with creative visualization and we start considering the future that we want to rebuild or build for ourselves, I say, “Before we even get to that, there’s a question that you’ve got to answer.” Einstein was the one that postulated this question so it comes from a trusted scientific authority. It’s not just woo-woo. Einstein turned around and he said, one of his quotes were the most important decision every human being must make on the planet, like you must make this decision, is whether they believe they live in a hostile universe or whether they believe they live in a friendly universe. Every time I ask this question of people, there’s always like a 10-sentence answer. It’s not like hostile or friendly. And this is what I need you to understand. It’s what people need to understand. You have to answer that question of Einstein, is the world friendly or hostile for you? You have to answer it with one word. You can’t answer it with, well, Barry, there’s hostility in the world and there’s friendliness in the world. I can show you examples of both. No, I need to know where you are sitting mentally, I need to know where you’re at. So if they turn, if you turn around, for example, okay, we, Lisa, you and I are out to dinner and we have a dinner party. There’s six people on the left and six people on the right and there’s six people on the left say, “Well, I believe the world’s a hostile place, Barry, and let me tell you why.” They go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. They list seven areas that are happening within their lives and in the world that demonstrate with evidence that the world is hostile. Then you look at the people on the right side of the table and the people on the right side are talking about friendly, and they’re talking about babies being born or baby marriages that are getting back together and people that are overcoming their traumas and people that are moving forward in their life and governments that are helping people and gurus on the planet right now that are helping millions that no one’s talking about. There’s all these good scenarios, people feeding people, refugees being taken in by strange families that don’t even know them. There’s so many good scenarios that are happening. Then you ask yourself who’s right and who’s wrong? You come to your realization that they’re both correct and they’re both right, but they are going to experience situations, circumstances, and people in their life that match that belief. The subconscious mind will say, you believe the world is toxic, and yes, I’m buying the evidence that you’ve just solved me. I’m buying it because it’s true. So therefore, my perspective when I get out of bed in the morning is to expect hostility and life will reward me with examples that match that vibration. The next person will get out of bed and be grateful for their lives despite their challenges. They’ll go I’ve got a lot of crap going on in my life right now, but there’s some good stuff and you know what, I’m going to focus on that. All of a sudden, they find that car park, all of a sudden you get that friend that wants to help out in business, all of a sudden you get, I don’t know, they find opportunities in life that just gravitate towards them. Then you go, how did you do that? How did you find that situation come to you? It’s really simple because you get back to thought and you get back to Einstein question. I believe the world is inherently a friendly place. I believe that there are situations that can take us into toxicity and into a horrible mindset. I think that’s true as well but I don’t live there. I don’t absorb that. I know it’s true, but friendliness way over overcompensates for the toxicity. The only reason that we think that toxicity exists of fear exists is because it shouts louder. Now, I don’t know about you, but something that feels, but it has to shout louder. I think it’s suffering from an inferiority complex. If you are coming from a place of love and understanding, God’s — [LISA] That could be another podcast in itself. [BARRY] Yes, absolutely, God’s one trues voice is silence. He doesn’t need to consistently come down and say, you’re loved, you’re loved, you’re loved because he knows he’s left that in us. He’s left, well, we’re a spark of the all, we are a spark of divinity. That’s why we can create from thought. We are a spark of him. Now, anything that we see in the world that contradicts that spark is man trying to control a situation or a set of circumstances or is trying to benefit from his own greed. That’s the scenarios that fear stems from. Now, I don’t know about you Lisa, but I want to be a voice for love even if that voice, even if I’m by myself, even if I’m not singing in a chorus, I don’t care. I’ll be out there in the wilderness till I die going I want to spread more kindness and more love and more understanding and more joy and more gratitude. That’s what I want to be known for. I’ve got two girls. I’ve got a five-year-old and a two-year-old and every night before we go to bed, the five year old now is really exciting, Grace is just beautiful, we do a thank you Jesus moment before we go to bed. It’s just like, I want her to get into the understanding of gratitude. So she sits there in bed and she closes her eyes and I say, what are we thankful for tonight? Thankful for our house. She’s five years old, so she looks around her and she’s like, thank you for the painting on the wall and thank you for the window. Thank you for the wall. It’s all basic stuff. [LISA] Yes. [BARRY] But it’s beautiful because what happens then? She becomes an adult and then she will be thankful for the joy. She will default to that as a state of mind rather than letting any fear-based energy infiltrate our mindset and thinking that that’s the way the world is. Because Lisa, it’s not, we’ve got to come and podcasts like this really ferret it out because it’s about knowing that you can get past your fear. It is not real. Danger is real. Like danger is so real. Like you got to be careful about how you drive your car and what you’re doing with your life, but fear, I’m letting 90% of the fears that we have don’t even eventuate. So we are harboring that horrible ugly energy on the prediction of what can happen. Most of those things don’t happen anyway so that energy is being spent, I don’t know, doing what. It’s being spent rather than loving another human being or forgiving yourself or forgiving someone else, it’s being spent thinking about a possible worst-case scenario. You know what? I consider them, but I don’t live there. I’m like, okay, if it happens, it happens. I’ll deal with it. If it doesn’t happen, my energy’s being better spent over here and loving this person or loving me. [LISA] Yes. Woo, wow. [BARRY] Sorry I put your ear off. [LISA] Well, no, this is all great. I love it. Those thoughts that come up and I know that maybe this is where we were going to head in our, in the podcast episode and we went in a different direction, was totally okay. [BARRY] Sorry, Lisa, I apologize. [LISA] Oh, no, not at all. Those thoughts that come up, maybe the ones that are not so helpful or may take us in a spiral direction is that just, yes, let them come up, look at them, surface them, and let them just go move on. You don’t have to attach to them. Sometimes it’s acknowledging them out loud to yourself, helps say, oh, okay, I’m saying it out loud. Even having to reflect back to you going, wow, that doesn’t sound so good. Or is that what I’m really thinking? Wow, maybe I want to change that for myself so it doesn’t sound or I don’t feel so negative or so absolutely horrible. [BARRY] Absolutely. The best analogy to consider nature is the greatest teacher. Sometimes the greatest lessons for us are right underneath our noses and we don’t realize because as human beings we think it must be more complicated than that. It’s really interesting, you can lie down in a park and just look at the sky. We all love blue sky days, like a beautiful, beautiful temperature and just sitting there and just appreciating life. You consider yourself now lying on a blank hip in the middle of a beautiful green field, and you’re looking up at the sky and without much notice, a few clouds start to roll in and you’re looking at like, oh, okay, well they’re okay. They can still see some blue up there and that’s still beautiful and the trees are swaying and the birds are chirping and this still feels good. All of a sudden, a few more clouds come around and you think, okay, the more than 70% of my field now is like gray. It’s not blue anymore. You think, okay, I’m still okay with it, sort of, but I’m just going to, and all of a sudden the blue goes completely and you are looking at a sky full of clouds. Now they’re not necessarily all dark and stormy clouds, they’re just white clouds but it’s obstructed the blueness of what you were appreciating. Then you look at the clouds and you pay attention to one of them and you notice something, you notice that they’re moving and you notice that they are all moving. All of a sudden you look to the right and you see a snippet of blue again and you’re going, this is is pretty cool. Like, I’m wondering if I stay here for the next 10 minutes, I wonder what’s going to happen. The clouds just keep going and keep going. All of a sudden, you’ve got 20% of your blue sky back. You’re looking up and all of a sudden, a bit more comes back and half an hour later you are looking up blue sky again. You realize something, you realize that the clouds of our lives are moving. They’re not necessarily stagnant, they’re not staying there forever, they are moving on. Right now, if you are going through a situation that you feel is cloudy or if you feel it’s taken away your blue sky just know that the default atmosphere of the earth is blue. It is not clouds. Again, God has given us an analogy that we can either pay attention to or we can just ignore. This is a really cool consideration. Like if you are in a situation where you’re going through hell right now, go and do this, go and run through this exercise and just consider that these clouds are continually moving on. You know what, you are the observer. You are observing it all. If you can do that and just appreciate that the clouds are going to roll in and the clouds are going to go, and yes, there’s going to be the occasional thunderstorm, but the thunderstorm will again roll on. It won’t, no thunderstorm lasts forever. If that was the case, there’d be no land on the earth, it would all be water. So there is a lot of land and there’s a lot of blue sky so just come to that realization as well internally. It gives you a little bit of an understanding that please don’t think that your current situation is forever. Like there is so much blue sky, so much blue sky. It’s just the clouds are moving and sometimes we pay attention to them because the sky’s not moving but the clouds are. [LISA] Barry, what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [BARRY] Identify the next right move. When you’re in a place of despair or if you’re in a place of joy right now, and I hope you’re in a place of joy, identify what the next right move for more joy or more value. Value is the big word. How do you add value to your life and to others? What would the next right move look like in that direction? That would be my take away. [LISA] I love that. Where can listeners get in touch with you? [BARRY] You can go to, so I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can go to LinkedIn, just type in my name, you’ll see my professional profile there for my corporate. But Instagram is the other place. Just type my first initial and my surname into Instagram. But you can go to my website, it’s just barrynicolaou.com and you’ll see almost everything about me there. You’ll see the title of the new book which is coming out in November and that’s all about resetting intention so that’s going to be super, super cool. But yes, so you’ll contact me if you need to reach out, reach out, I’ll be of value as best I can. [LISA] Thank you so much. All of that information will be in the show notes too. And thank you so much for coming on the show today, Barry. I just loved having you on and just listening to your message and what you have to offer. Your message to the world, it’s so powerful and so much needed. [BARRY] Thank you so much, Lisa. It’s so beautiful to share this space with you. Thank you for what you are doing as well because you are lifting lives up. We might not see it sometimes because we have the ground view, but the aerial view of what you are doing, Lisa, is just incredible. [LISA] Oh, thank you for that. [BARRY] No problem. [LISA] Thank you, listeners, for listening today. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please go to my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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