What You Want Is Inside of You with Hal Elrod

**Hal Elrod** (0:02)
Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.
What if everything you need to be the happiest, most at peace and most fulfilled you've ever been is already inside of you, available right now in this exact moment and every moment of your life, not after the promotion, not once the relationship improves or the debt disappears or the problems are resolved or the kids finally listen, not when the world calms down or the news gets better because, spoiler, it won't. But right now, as you are with everything in your life exactly as it is. Now, I know you might be thinking, yeah, that sounds nice, Hal, but you don't know what my life is like. You don't know what I'm going through or what I've been through. That's fair. And you're right. I don't know what your life is like. And I would probably be skeptical if I were you listening to this too. We live in an age that I think has made skepticism almost mandatory between the economic uncertainty, the AI revolution, which we talked about last week with Jeff Woods, all of that quietly dismantling entire industries and a social media feed that seems specifically engineered to make you feel behind, anxious and vaguely inadequate by 8 AM or whenever you check your feed. It takes a certain audacity to suggest that what you've been searching for isn't somewhere out there that it is in here. When I say it in here, I'm pointing at my chest right now, but that's exactly what I'm telling you. I'm not saying it because it sounds good, and it's fluffy, feel good, motivational stuff. I'm saying it because I've lived the alternative, and I'd argue it nearly killed me, literally. There's a period of my life where I had built everything that I thought I needed to be happy. The career was working beyond where I'd imagined, the family was beautiful. By most measures, I was winning, and then within the span of a few years, you probably know my story, cancer showed up uninvited, my body stopped cooperating, and I found myself lying in a hospital bed wondering what really mattered. And the external circumstances that I had worked so hard to arrange into something resembling a good life had been rearranged without my permission, and in a way I had never expected. And what I discovered in that hospital bed and the painful clarifying years that followed is that the one thing no circumstance can touch, that no diagnosis can take, and no economy can crash, is who you are on the inside.
Think about that. The peace, the joy, the love, the sense of purpose that we spend our entire lives chasing in the external world. Those things were never out there to begin with. They were always inside of us. We just forgot. Life got hard. People hurt us in school and relationships and on and on and on. And we failed and we got rejected and we got embarrassed and we got scared. And over time, we literally were born as these innocent beings, these human slash spiritual beings. And then life kind of beat us up along the way. And most of us have been running a search in the wrong location for a long time. And this episode is about finding your way back to that place inside of you. And you probably are tired of hearing this. I've been working on a book for many, many years, like six years. And I've got 190 pages written of a book that I still don't fully like there's anyway, I don't want to burden you with my challenges. Actually you probably would relate. You're like, yeah, I'm not sure the exact direction to go sometimes in my life, whatever. But anyway, that's another story for another time. The point is, one of the working titles for the book is The Miracle Within. Another one is The Miracle Life, and then there's some that don't have the word miracle at all. Part of what I'm struggling with here is finalizing that. But the point is, The Miracle Within is about finding that place inside of you that I just described, right? That place that you were born in a state of pure consciousness, peace, love, joy, limitless possibilities, that place exists inside of us always. And the problem is that we have been conditioned to believe that everything that we're searching for is outside of us. And one of my favorite authors, arguably my favorite author in the entire world, Kyle Cease, who has become a good friend. He lives like 20 minutes away. But Kyle, it was one of his books or maybe it was one of his talks. I think it was an audio book of his, but he said, imagine that you got a phone call today. Just imagine this. So let's say you're having a bad day, average day, whatever, get a phone call and you find out that you won $10 million in the lottery. Imagine that. You won $10 million in the lottery.