When life brings you lemons, why don’t you make a lemonade? Dancing with us in this episode is the author of How to Write Reality: Becoming the Author of the Stories in Your Life, Shiraz Baboo, who shares his insights on how to rewrite reality to overcome problems. He cites some examples of editing, deleting, and rewriting your stories in your life to drive yourself towards success. When reality hurts, change your story that’s right for you. Grab your pen, and join Shiraz Baboo in rewriting our realities to change our lives.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Problem Was The Solution With Shiraz Baboo
Hello and welcome to the Dancing with Lemons Summit. My name is Monique McDonald and I will be your MC for this event. I’m known to many as the Magnetic Voice Mentor, and I’m so excited to be sharing in this wonderful event where speakers and authors are getting together and telling their stories.
This one is a personal favorite of mine. Shiraz Baboo is a multi-award-winning author, international speaker, and expert in reality addiction, and also a personal friend of mine. Our next guest, Shiraz, has been helping people hit their success goals for the last decade. He coaches you on how to rise out of your circumstances and, most importantly, stay out.
His book, How to Rewrite Reality, has changed lives across the globe. He’s going to show you how to identify where you’re unknowingly addicted to many of the struggles in your life, how to break free of those addictions, and create success easier and faster than ever before. Please help me welcome Shiraz Baboo.
Hi, Shiraz. How are you?
How to Write Reality: Becoming the Author of the Stories in Your Life
Michelle, I’m doing amazing.
Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
I’ve met you a number of times on media bootcamps. You were the nicest guy. I never knew your story. It wasn’t until your article that you put into Legendary Leader that I, for the first time, knew what your backstory was there. I was genuinely surprised. I had no idea that you had suffered physically from rheumatoid arthritis the way you did and how you overcame it. It’s a long process that I’m asking you to crunch into this much but give us a little snippet.
Thank you again for having me on here. I love what you’re doing with the magazine. It’s always a pleasure when we get to meet in person. My story started when I was 22 years old. I was in university studying to be a doctor in Molecular Genetics. I was a bodybuilder. I was in amazing shape. I had my whole life mapped out. The world was my oyster, except I didn’t get pearls in my life. I have arthritis. It was completely debilitating.
Within a few months, I was lying in bed in pain. There were nights when I sipped my dinner through a straw because my jaw was swollen and painful. I couldn’t chew. I watched my body start to deteriorate. My cartilage was wearing away after about a decade. When I was walking, I was grinding bone on bone. People may not have been through this physical pain, but if you’ve ever been in this situation where you have your whole life story. You know what you’re going to do. You’ve got your mission. Out of nowhere, that whole thing has changed. You’re left scrambling. You can relate to what I was going through.
I struggled with this for several years, trying different ways to get away from arthritis. I tried medication. That didn’t work. Whoever invented childproof caps for people with arthritis should be shot. You can’t get in there. I did diet and supplements. I tried yoga and meditation. Nothing was working until I met this man in India, of all places. I’d flown over there for this program I’d heard about.
After working with him for a couple of weeks, which was just talking, and I thought it was crazy because it’s India, I’m thinking it’s going to be some Reiki or energy healing thing. All he did was talk about me and gather all this information on my life story. He says, “The problem is you believe you’re responsible for everyone.” I’m like, “I’m not responsible for everyone.” He goes, “I know you don’t think you are, but from everything you’ve told me, you’ve created this belief that you need to be responsible for everyone in your life.”
I thought about it and went, “I know I’m a responsible guy. I don’t think I’m responsible for everyone, but what’s that even got to do with arthritis?” He said, “You don’t want to be responsible for everyone.” I’m like, “Yeah.” He said, “If you’re lying in bed in pain, you don’t have to be responsible for anyone. You don’t have to feel guilty about it. If people see you’re struggling to get through the day, they’re not going to ask you to take care of them. Arthritis isn’t the problem. It’s the solution for the problem you’re not looking at.” It’s like a blow.
That’s a different way to think of things.
I processed that for a while. I said, “If what you’re saying is true, all I have to do is say ‘I’m not going to be responsible for anyone but me,’ and my arthritis should go away.” He said, “Yeah.” I’m still not fully getting this. He goes, “If you truly believe deep down that you don’t need to be responsible, you don’t need the arthritis.” I gathered my will and said, “I’m not going to be responsible for anyone but me.”
Do you know what happened right at that moment? Nothing, but I woke up the next morning and there was no pain and inflammation. I had more mobility. I’m freaking out because it’s been several years. I’ve tried everything. This guy says, “Stop being responsible.” It’s gone. That made no sense. When I looked into this, I found out this isn’t about arthritis or illness. This is about everything.
Your mind prioritizes the avoidance of emotional distress over physical circumstances. To avoid the guilt of not being able to take care of everyone, I created arthritis. You can apply this to everything. I found that people who don’t want to have their hearts broken don’t find people to have relationships with. They say, “Why can’t I find the right person?”
You don’t want to because if you find them and they leave you, you feel you’re going to get hurt. In anticipation of that, you keep finding the wrong people. People that can’t make a lot of money have this belief that, “If I have a lot of money, everyone is going to say, ‘Can I have some? Can you invest in my business? Can you take care of this?’” They don’t want to have those conversations. Those are stressful. Your brain says, “If we don’t make the money, we won’t have those conversations. Problem solved.” The lack of money is the solution, not the problem.
I believe mindset is everything. Let’s be fair. There are people who are reading, saying, “I didn’t create cancer in me. I didn’t create this MS or other chronic diseases.” You’re saying that created that rheumatoid arthritis. How do you answer that there are chronic diseases out there that are bonafide physical problems that people can have? What’s your response to that?
The potential for diseases in every single person, whether you turn those genes on or off, depends on your mindset. The potential for arthritis was there. My mom was arthritic. Both my brother and sister have arthritis, but I turned off my gene. The arthritis went away. There’s a new field called epigenetics where they have discovered that your mental state turns off and turns on genes. This is scientifically proven. I remember reading an article. I can’t remember what the exact name of the place was, but it was the region in the world where the people lived the longest.
They call it the Blue Zone.
They did all these studies to try to figure out if it is the food. Is it the air? What is it? They found out it’s because everyone there is happy. That’s what was causing them to live long because they had more reason to live.
If you think about the conversation I had with Michelle Macaluso, it’s what you do with yourself. It’s how you end up in your life. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you sending out positive vibes? Are you being negative? As you age, you’re going to reflect that to a great degree. This is an interesting concept. I’m going to have to dig a little bit deeper. Let me ask you, how do you primarily help others? Is it more from a business and money mindset? You say you’re a reality interventionist. Is it what’s your reality?
It’s the same way someone comes in and does an intervention that says, “You’ve been doing all these drugs. It’s hurting you and people around you.” I’m like, “You’ve been doing this specific reality. It’s hurting you and the people around you. Let’s change that reality.” You are addicted to it. This is what most people don’t understand. It is both a mental and a physical addiction.
When you try to change your life, you go into withdrawal. That’s why a lot of people see the yo-yo results. They start to see success in the loop. They think it’s circumstance, but it’s the withdrawal kicking in and pulling you back to where the addiction feels good. There are addictions for immediate gratification but to avoid bad things from happening. You have to figure out which one each situation is based on.
When you try to change your life, you go into withdrawal. There are addictions for immediate gratification but to avoid bad things from happening. You have to figure out which one each situation is based on. Click To TweetI used to get stopped at the border all the time. I even had people admit, because we check the Black people, “This is all about race.” When I was working with a coach, he’s like, “No, this is a story you have.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? They’ve admitted this is about race.” He says, “Yeah, but you don’t get denied jobs because you’re Black. You don’t get stopped in traffic because you’re black. You only get stopped at borders because you’re Black. That’s not strictly racism. That’s a story in your life. You have to figure out why.”
I said, “There’s no reason. If I’m getting immediate gratification, it’s not happening. It’s only causing me anguish, frustration, and delays in my life.” He looks at me. He goes, “Shiraz, when you tell your border crossing stories to people, you light up and feed off their emotional reaction to your adversity. You have to keep getting stopped at the border. You have fresh material.” I was like, “Oh, my God.”
That’s opening up a whole different way of thinking. Those are some heavy-duty stuff, Shiraz. You’re a smart guy if you’re in med school.
I didn’t graduate. I have to drop off, but this is the thing. You don’t see the problem because it looks like circumstance. You don’t even think to change the addiction because you don’t realize there’s one there. When you get someone to point it out, and you see where that huge problem is a solution, any consistent problem in your life is a solution to an emotional problem you’re not seeing.
When you get that, you’ll stop saying, “Why is this happening to me?” You’ll start saying, “Why do I want this to happen to me? What am I not seeing here?” That’s when the answers can pop up. If they don’t pop up, you go to someone else. You don’t see through your own crap because your subconscious mind tries to hide it from you to keep you safe. Someone else can spot it quickly.
You need your client to be ready and willing to look deep into their reality, expose themselves, and do the hard work of changing habits and lifestyles. That’s a lot of hard work.
It’s a lot of practice. It doesn’t have to be hard work. The thing is, you can get changes right away, but it’s a matter of doing the maintenance so that you don’t fall back into the addictive patterns. I worked with a person once. Something went wrong all the time. Every day, something would go wrong. There’s not a day that goes by when something doesn’t go wrong. We found out he prided himself as a problem solver. What do you have to keep creating in order to feel value when you think I’m a problem solver?
You need to have a problem.
He created a problem every single day so he could feel valuable. When we shifted his belief that problem-solving is something I do, but it’s not my pure source of value, and I have all sorts of other places where I can feel valuable, the problems went away. He was like, “This is amazing.” He called me a week later. He’s like, “I haven’t had a problem all week.” It’s crazy. He called me three weeks later. He says, “I had a problem.”
He sounded happy about it. I said, “Why are you happy that the problems are coming back?” He goes, “The first week was great because I didn’t have any problems. The second week, I was like, ‘Where is it?’ By the third week, I was in anxiety, ‘Where are the problems?’ I’m used to problems.” That was the withdrawal pulling him back. He got the problems. He got it fixed because we hadn’t got them fully out of the addiction yet.
You have a book. Dig a little deeper into all that we’re talking about.
It’s called How to Rewrite Reality.
Folks out there, that’s a way to certainly learn more about this conversation that we’re having because it’s a mind shift, and not everybody is there talking about it. I love your perspective on what you bring, making the lemonade, and dancing with that lemon out there that’s your problem. It’s a solution to that problem. You’ve been great, Shiraz. I love having you as a guest. Thank you so much for joining us. I am going to have to say goodbye for now. How can people get ahold of you?
You can go to EnergeticMagic.com, and all the information’s right there.
I know you’ve got things going on. I believe you’re traveling. Safe travels. Thank you everyone for joining us. We say goodbye for now, and I can’t wait to join you on our next episode.
Thank you so much.
Important Links
- Shiraz Baboo – LinkedIn
- How to Rewrite Reality
- EnergeticMagic.com
About Shiraz Baboo
As a multi-award-winning author, an international speaker, and an expert in reality addiction, Shiraz has been helping people hit their success goals for the last decade. He coaches you on how to rise out of your current circumstances and, most importantly, stay out. His book, How to Rewrite Reality, has changed lives across the globe. He’s going to show you how to identify where you’re unknowingly addicted to many of the struggles in your life, how to break free of those addictions, and then create success easier and faster than ever before.
