Visualize, Identify, Embody - The 3 Steps That Actually Change Your Life

Changing your life doesn’t require years of complicated effort. It requires three specific steps - and most people skip the one in the middle. Here’s what that looked like for our family.

Most people believe changing their life takes years of grinding, complicated effort. I want to show you why that belief keeps people stuck exactly where they are - and the three steps that actually move things forward.

The Belief That Keeps People Waiting to Change

If you’ve wanted something different for your life or your family but haven’t moved yet, you’ve probably landed on one of these:

• This kind of change takes years, so you keep pushing the start date further out.

• Someone else needs to change first, so your own movement stays conditional on theirs.

• I need to feel ready before I begin, so readiness becomes a moving target you never quite reach.

Here’s what I want you to hear clearly: change doesn’t start with feeling ready. It starts with a specific, three-step process - and the step almost everyone skips isn’t the first one or the last one. It’s the one in the middle.

Most people jump straight from “here’s what I want” to “here’s what I’ll do.” They skip the step where they decide who they’d have to become to actually do it.

✦ Step One: Visualize Your Future Self

Paul describes a posture of leaning forward — genuinely picturing what’s ahead, not just wishing for it. This step asks specific questions: who is this future version of you? What does their average Tuesday look like? What have they already figured out that you’re still working on?

✦ Step Two: Identify the Beliefs That Version of You Operates From

This is the step most people skip entirely, and it’s the hinge the whole process turns on. Your future self doesn’t just have different circumstances. They operate from different beliefs - about risk, about their own capability, about what’s actually possible for their family.

Transformation, in this verse, isn’t circumstantial. It’s internal first. Before your circumstances shift, something in how you see yourself has to shift — and naming that shift specifically is what makes it usable instead of vague.

✦ Step Three: Embody the Behaviors Now, Not Later

The final step is the one that actually moves the needle: start behaving like that future version of you today, before the results arrive to justify it. Not in a year. Not once you “make it.” Today.

What This Looked Like for Our Family

When we were deciding whether to pursue our first multi-family property, JP and I sat down one evening with a legal pad and actually ran this process on paper. We wrote out who we’d need to be to comfortably own a property like that - not just financially, but in terms of confidence, systems, and how we talked about our business to other people.

Then we asked the harder question: what does that version of us actually believe, that we don’t quite believe yet? We wrote things down like “we believe we’re capable of managing a bigger team” and “we believe bigger deals are for people like us, not just people who started with more.”

The last step was the strange one. We started acting on those beliefs before the deal closed - speaking about our business differently, reaching out to lenders we’d previously avoided, treating ourselves like the owners of a bigger portfolio before we technically were. By the time the deal actually closed, it didn’t feel like a leap. It felt like catching up to a version of ourselves we’d already started becoming.

What This Means for Your Family

If you’ve been waiting to feel ready before you move, consider that readiness might not be the thing you’re missing. The missing step might be naming, specifically, what your future self believes - and then starting to act from those beliefs today, before the results show up to prove you right.