Have you heard of channelling? It’s when someone lets the consciousness of another being move through them — for guidance, for knowledge. People describe it as extraordinary.
Here’s the question I want to put to you: what if you channelled more of yourself, and got the same result?
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I’ve been watching people my whole life
Not by choice at first. It’s a habit you build living alone with your mother, moving thirty-two times, and growing up around a lot of unstable adults.
As a child I was permanently on alert — watching out for myself, my siblings, my mother, and several stepfathers whose moods decided how the evening went. When you live like that you learn to read people fast: patterns, body language, the shift before it happens.
What I noticed, once I had the habit, was this:
Almost everyone is acting like someone other than themselves, almost all of the time.
It’s the default. We do it to blend in and to stay safe, and most of us started so young we no longer notice we’re doing it.
I had four ordinary jobs before I left the nine-to-five for good — stuck in a system I wasn’t part of, with colleagues I couldn’t reach and a manager operating on an entirely different wavelength. Terrible for me. Excellent for observation.
Then at nineteen I started Taekwon-Do, became a black belt instructor early, and spent seventeen years training people. Martial arts strips the performance off someone faster than almost anything else. You see who they actually are within a few sessions.
Seventeen years of that is an education. There just isn’t a school that offers it.
Why we forget in the first place
My view, and you can take it or leave it: the acting starts because we arrive here disconnected.
The body forms, the soul enters, and the awareness of where you came from doesn’t come with it. We forget. So we proceed on the assumption that this is the only life there is, and we spend it trying to survive something we don’t understand.
The useful part: forgetting isn’t permanent. You can remember, and you can rebuild the connection to your higher self deliberately. That’s where things start moving.
An exercise: go and watch people
Observing other people is the fastest route to observing yourself. Try this.
Sit in a café and extend your senses past your own table. Not analysing — feeling. Let the room register in your body rather than your head, which takes a few minutes and feels like nothing until suddenly it doesn’t.
Then watch:
- How does each person seem to feel about the space they’re in?
- In conversation, are they calm and natural — or performing?
- Hands, eye contact, posture. Especially the feet — people manage their faces and forget their feet entirely.
- Who’s using their phone as a shield to avoid being in the room at all?
If you want to get good at the mechanics, Joe Navarro’s What Every BODY is Saying is the best thing I’ve read on it — he spent his career at the FBI reading people for a living.
Then turn it around. Sitting there, watching all that performance — how do you act out your own life? That’s the question the whole exercise exists to produce.
Channelling yourself
Back to where we started.
If channelling is new to you it may sound strange, or unnerving if Hollywood or religion got to you first. Stripped down, it’s someone entering a meditative state and receiving information from a higher being or group of beings.
Channelling is a natural ability every person has, and we’re taught nothing whatsoever about it.
It’s natural because you are more than a mind and a body. You’re a soul — that’s the actual noun. The body is the vessel you operate in order to experience this place, and it comes with a mind attached so you can think and choose.
Which means the same channel runs inward. You can reach your own higher self with the same mechanism, and that’s the version I’d start with.
What changes when you stop acting
Instead of adapting to the world, the world starts adapting to you.
Not by force. The frequency of the whole thing changes, you end up on a different channel, and a different reality comes through it. Energy levels go up — largely because maintaining a performance is exhausting and you’ve stopped paying for it.
Expect relationships to shift. Some people are attached to the character you were playing, and when it goes, so do they. That’s not a failure. It’s the bill arriving, and it’s worth it.
Giving your power away
The saddest thing I watch people do is hand over their power — letting situations, people and surroundings decide who they get to be.
It drains the life out of them, and over years it shows in the body as well as the mood. People living that way carry themselves like an apology. Excuse me for existing.
Going through life with your cards held against your chest is no way to live. Stand up straight and let people see what you actually are — not performed, not louder, just present enough that a room notices when you walk into it.
Jesus had that. So have plenty of others who’ve walked this planet, and plenty who still do.
Where to start
Do the café exercise once this week. Twenty minutes. Then ask yourself the second question honestly — where in your own life are you performing, and who for?
Most people can name it immediately. The naming is most of the work.
Related reading: success without education, and why am I changing — which is often what comes next once you stop acting.
Rise above the norms.
Reconnect with who you actually are
The Reality Shift Template is my free 3-step framework — filter the noise, get clear on who you are underneath the performance, and create on purpose from there. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.