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8 - Targeting

Awe

Happy Day! 🥳

In May 2015, a study titled “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The conclusion?

Experiencing awe increases altruism, loving-kindness, generosity, and prosocial behavior.

In other words, awe makes us better humans.

The researchers defined awe as:

“That sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”

Read that again.

Something vast.
Something beyond your current framework.
Something that stretches you.

That is exactly what a true Intention should feel like.

When your dream is big enough to create butterflies — real physiological activation — something interesting happens.

The small stuff falls away.

You stop obsessing over incremental upgrades:
a slightly bigger house,
a slightly better car,
minor status markers.

Those things get swept up naturally, like dust in a comet’s tail.

You don’t have to chase them.

They become byproducts of trajectory.

That’s the quiet magic behind thinking big.

When the Intention is vast enough, the details organize themselves.

The fuel?

TQT.
Nature.
Awe.

Marghanita Laski, who studied transcendental experiences, found that the most common triggers for ecstatic states were not luxury or achievement.

They were:

Water.
Mountains.
Trees.
Flowers.
Sunrise.
Dusk.
Spring.
Even dramatic weather.

In other words — nature.

Laski suggested that ecstasy isn’t rare or mystical.

It’s biological.

We are wired for awe.

Which means when you set an Intention large enough to evoke awe, you are not fabricating fantasy.

You are activating built-in circuitry.

Awe shrinks the ego (“the small self”) and expands perception. It aligns you with something bigger than your daily irritations.

That’s why big dreams are not selfish indulgences.

They reorganize you neurologically and emotionally.

They generate generosity.
They increase courage.
They reduce pettiness.

When the dream is large enough, you don’t have to micromanage motivation.

You wake up pulled forward.

That pull is awe.

And awe is one of the most powerful renewable energy sources available to a human being.

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Maslow called them peak experiences:

“Especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe… possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity… as though perceiving the world from an altered and vastly profound perspective.”

Notice the language.

Wonder.
Awe.
Unity.
A shift in perspective.

This isn’t fringe mysticism. It’s foundational human psychology.

Peak experiences are not reserved for monks, billionaires, or mountaintop gurus.

They are egalitarian.

Awe does not care about your income bracket, job title, or follower count.

It is available to anyone willing to pause.

That’s one of the hidden advantages of reconnecting with nature.

Awe cannot be faked.

You can fake confidence.
You can fake gratitude posts on social media.
You cannot fake awe.

It overrides you.

And because awe is wired into our biology, peak experiences are universal. They are part of the human operating system.

Sometimes all it takes is sitting alone under a tree.

No performance.
No technique.
Just stillness.

Feel the scale of it. The age of it. The quiet intelligence of it.

Then, from that state, imagine your dream.

Something powerful happens there.

You don’t strain.
You don’t hustle.
You don’t force.

You align.

As you begin directing your cultivated power toward your dream, your primary task is simple:

Put yourself in awe as often as possible.

In awe, the ego shrinks.
In awe, perspective expands.
In awe, fear loses volume.

And from that expanded state, you can aim at anything.

The bigger the dream, the better.

So now:

You have clarity.
You have awe.

Next, you need momentum.

And momentum begins with a state called flow.

That’s where we’re heading.

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I love this clip.

There are plenty of Jason Silva videos out there, but this one captures something rare — the felt sense of awe.

The pace.
The urgency.
The swelling music.

It mirrors what awe actually does to the nervous system.

But beyond the performance, listen carefully to his words.

He describes awe as:

“Such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it.”

That’s it.

That’s the experience.

When you set a dream that is truly aligned — not practical, not polite, not diluted — and you imagine it arriving now, your mental architecture has to stretch to contain it.

Your previous model of reality is too small.

So it upgrades.

That is exactly what you’ve been doing throughout this Transformation Experience.

You’ve been dismantling outdated models of a world you thought you understood.

You’ve been loosening rigid beliefs.
Questioning assumptions.
Expanding possibility.

Why?

So that when real life begins to deliver the dream — not just the outcome, but the journey, the emotion, the illumination — you are capable of receiving it.

Because the dream is not just an achievement.

It has a texture.
A rhythm.
A temperature.

It has a feeling.

And when you touch that feeling, it fills you with awe.

If you completed the previous exercise and did not feel this — no expansion, no butterflies, no perceptual shift — then you likely have not yet found your real dream.

Or you haven’t been fully honest about your motivation.

That’s not failure.

It’s feedback.

Make another appointment with yourself.

Repeat the exercise.

Keep going until you feel the stretch.

When you do, you will know.

It’s unmistakable.

You will have stepped outside your comfort zone so far that your neurons fire differently.

The self you thought you were becomes slightly scrambled.

And through those cracks, something larger seeps in.

It can feel rhapsodic.

You breathe it in.

You inspire yourself.

In the webinar slide I often use when teaching awe-filled Intentions, there is a simple visual reminder:

Awe must begin at the moment you answer:

What do I really want?
Who do I want to be?
How do I want to feel when I have it?

That’s where the ignition happens.

We’ll return to that slide later.

For now, stay with the feeling.

If the dream doesn’t stretch you, it won’t transform you.

If it stretches you, everything begins to reorganize.

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My first conscious memory of awe?

The first — and only — time my father took me to a football match.

I can still smell it.

Fresh-cut grass hanging in a thin, swirling mist.
That sharp, almost medicinal scent of muscle liniment.
Cold air. Noise rising like thunder.

My father was tall.

But these men?

They were giants.

They were probably in their early twenties, but to me they moved like mythological beings — power, speed, precision. I had never seen adult men move like that.

In my world at the time, men wore cardigans. They smoked. They read books. They sat.

Suddenly I was staring at something primal and electric.

When we got home, my mother asked, “Did you have a good time?”

I shouted, “They were real men, Mum… real men!”

That was awe.

It wasn’t intellectual.

It was visceral.

My chest felt tight.
My eyes watered.
My skin tingled.

I wanted nothing more than to play football every minute of every day after that.

That’s what awe does.

It reorganizes desire.

Your homework is simple: