Jameel Rehman – Own Your Story.

Jeffery Wang: Hello and welcome to 10 Lessons Learned, the podcast where we talk to leaders, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things from around the world to uncover lessons that shape their careers, business, and lives. Our goal is simple, to make the world a little wiser, lesson by lesson.
My name is Jeffery Wang, and I’m thrilled to be your host for today’s episode.
I’m the founder of Sydney Professional Development Forum, a basketball tragic, and the proud father of my two gorgeous boys. Before we dive in, a quick message for our listeners. 10 Lessons Learned will always be free for you, but it takes our blood, sweat, and tears to make. So, if you found value in our episodes, please consider supporting the program, whether it be by sharing a show with a friend, leaving us a review, or checking out our affiliate partner, Audible. Every bit helps us continue bringing you the lessons that matters most.
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Now let’s meet our special guest for today, Jameel Rehman Jameel Rehman How are you? Well, you’re a multi-dimensional being, right?
So, this is according to his profile, a conscious technologist, an elite technology salesperson, a sales coach, mentor, comedian, musician, and much more. So, in other words, you can’t put them in a box. So, despite having a stellar career as a tech seller, In Telstra and Cisco, you’ve also built a tech sales academy to try [00:02:00] and fix the global gap in sales education or tech sales education and to pass on your expertise.
Last five years, you’ve gone through a bit of a spiritual Awakening and the Complete Transformation, which I’m sure we’ll get into later. you’ve got tools, systems, insights, on your podcast, The Binge Thinker. I like the sound of that. yeah, so I love how you, incorporate your learnings into the academy and, and, and to share with your community on how to transform their lives for the better.
and build abundant futures for themselves. So, if you want to follow Jameel, you can find him at, the Conscious Tech Sales community at www. skool. com that’s s k double o l. com backslash TechSalesAcademy to get weekly insights or tech sales and personal performance through his 1 percent club newsletter.
So welcome to the show, Jameel.
Jameel Rehman: Jeffery, appreciate it, man. It’s finally, it’s good to finally be here. We’ve been going back and forth [00:03:00] for a bit of time. It’s good to, finally chat with you and chew the fat.
Jeffery Wang: 100%. Look, now for the benefit of the audience, Jamil came to my attention a while back, actually, when, um, a friend of mine sent me this video of somebody who, has left Telstra. in fact, you left under some pretty, tragic circumstances through a, through a redundancy, I believe.
And, um, basically we watched it, and we shared a lot of the, the sentiments that you expressed through that video. I don’t know if you’ve got a bit of background around that, that you want to share with our audience.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah. So, I was at Telstra Enterprise for Telstra my entire career as a technology seller. I was a really high performer there. Over the last few years, they’ve let go of a 10, 000 jobs over the last three or four years. And I was one of them. And, um, whilst I was there, I was, I was, the year I was made redundant.
I was actually a top 1 percent performer. I was looking after a VIP account. I was a bit of a golden child as far as doing things inside the business and was still made [00:04:00] redundant. And I think someone from my background in like just trying to be honest and be forthright with it. As I can, I just shared a lot of my pain, a lot of my frustrations. I’ve got to ask, can we swear in this podcast or not?
Jeffery Wang: No, go for it,
Jameel Rehman: Good. Yeah, because. It devastated me, being made redundant when I thought I was flying high. I thought it was going to be the future of that organization. And when I got made redundant, you know, I was like, fuck this. I never want to work for another corporation again because I never felt more like a cog in the machine and really felt capitalism at its worst.
And by just sharing the pain, the frustration, the anger, on a public broadcast and a public forum like LinkedIn, which, you know, there’s me in tears, you know, saying, fuck Telstra. It really resonated with a lot of people because, you know, there’s been thousands of people that have been made redundant when you go through that process.
And, you know, you’ve been there yourself that Jeff is like, [00:05:00] holy, you, you’re supposed to put on the corporate smile and the facade that everything’s okay. And thanks for the opportunity. But you are herded out like cattle. You never feel any more like a number. And there’s no, no one really helps you process the pain and the abandonment and the what next of your life. And yeah, so I put that out there, you know, my, my career over the last three or four years has been about rebuilding my career, building my own personal freedom, trying to get out of the machine for good. And really just sharing how I really feel. And especially in a platform like LinkedIn, where it’s all corporate facade and wear the mask, although we as a society and a collective are getting past that and are so sick of that. It was a, it felt like a big risk, emotionally, personally, professionally to do that. But it resonated with a lot of people, yourself included mate. And you know, I’ve got dozens of messages of support, um, and go, man, I really feel you [00:06:00] in this one.
And yeah, that’s what resonates is like you, you give genuine human emotions over digital platforms.
That’s the future of the digital economy. If you do it right, it resonates with people at scale. And we end up with conversations and situations like this, where just invite me to the podcast. I’m very grateful for it.
Jeffery Wang: And the reason is because of the authenticity in how much you shared. Um, and the truth. Being told, you know, I think a lot of people are in that boat because we too bought into that corporate bullshit when we first started our careers
thinking that if you were to work hard, put everything in there, that you know, you will somehow be rewarded for your loyalty, for your hard work.
And many of us haven’t even got to the level that you have got to in that, You know, you’re always seen as a top performer, you know, you’re in that 1 percent club, and you know, so when you’re sky high like that, you know, you think that nothing, you know, nothing could touch you, that you’re indispensable to a company when in actual fact you’ve always been a number, and that, that I suppose that they’re [00:07:00] dangling that 1 percent club as a carrot, as a way of controlling your behaviours to make you, you know, essentially work for them.
I guess my learning from the years in the corporate is to never, ever sort of bank your identity
your corporate career. You know, if your sense of self has come from, you know, how much money you can pull in from your sales, then, you know, you’re either forever going to be tied to that and, you know, you’re only as good as last year’s numbers, you know.
Come July 1st, you’re back to zero again, and then you have to go and prove yourself again.
And unfortunately, if that’s the sense of identity that you have, then you know, you’ll be chasing, I suppose, this for a long time, which is rather meaningless. The other thing that really intrigued me about you, and as I watched it, I realized that with your communication skills, you know, you mentioned you’re a comedian, you’re a musician, you’re a [00:08:00] performer there’re multi Dimensions to your being that I’d certainly like to get into to understand what drives you as a person and ultimately where you’re up to in terms of what that, um, what success looks like and mean to you.
Because I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who are very disillusioned with the corporate as you are, as you have been. But they want to see that, you know, there is light at the end of a tunnel. There is still, you know, a greater sense of purpose that you could find. Um, and, and hence the life I’m looking forward to this chat.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, I really appreciate it. But I have to agree though, like one of the, one of the biggest lessons from that experience was I had put so much of my identity. In, in corporate hands and, and in the, and that’s because, you know, I started my career at Telstra. I started in the retail shops. I have no technical background. I had no B2B experience. You know, I came from nothing. I was, a bit of a bum before I joined Telstra. I was just like, yeah, I’m pretty good at talking to [00:09:00] people and I’m good with technology. Let me just get into this. And then you succeed, and the money comes in, you know, I come from a migrant background of, of nothing. To then see big money falling in your pocket. You’re like, I’m doing well at this thing. Yeah, you put your identity into it. It’s a way to define your success, especially when you’re in your twenties and you’re trying to figure out who you are and you’re like, oh yeah, I’m going to be this guy. And then that gets taken away from you and you have to wonder, yeah, who are you really?
What is your identity? It can’t be external, and it can’t be put in the hands of others or else you can’t trust them, or you know, they’ll take it away and then you’re left with nothing.
Jeffery Wang: that’s right. A hundred percent. Alright, well now I love the, I love how you’ve, uh, approached this exercise actually. So, uh, in your typical style, uh, you know, you gave me 10 lessons, but you started with number ten first. So, I’ll, I’ll go from 10 to one.

Lesson 10: The universe is mental.

Jeffery Wang: So just, just, just for a bit of fun, lesson number 10, the universe is mental.
What do you mean by that?
Jameel Rehman: All we have in [00:10:00] life is our mind, and this is something that through a spiritual awakening that I had in 2019 where I was Having a bit of an identity crisis and I’m trying to figure out who I was a bit deep into who I was. I had not really explored myself, who I was, defined my own identity, really knew myself internally. And through a lot of work, you know, physically, spiritually, mentally, I’ve done a lot of research and, really all we have. In our existences is our minds. Like we, our brains, you know, is the physical manifestation of our minds. And really that is, that is the broadcast of our lives, right?
How we perceive the world, how we see everything, from someone as close as your, you know, you said your two boys is knowing them so closely, intimately to as far as, the furthest star in the universe in the night sky that you can perceive. That is [00:11:00] all inside your head.
And the way that you interpret life is based on how your mind perceives things, and realistically, our mind is created through a series of interconnections, neural networks. that have been defined not by us for, anywhere from birth to 20 years, you know, to being an adult, we don’t really mature our brains until 25. And if, yes, if you’re lucky, really, it’s plenty of immature people out there.
So, when it comes to working on yourself, when it comes to changing yourself for the better, changing the way you perceive the world for the better, you have to understand your mind.
You have to change that wiring. You have to unlearn behaviours. You need to relearn positive behaviours because, unfortunately, like we said, there’s this broader disillusionment with society, the way we’ve been raised, you know, our culture, our values. And something that I say to a lot of people is [00:12:00] yesterday’s systems do not guarantee or do not build tomorrow’s abundant future is that we are seeing societal systems crumble, cultural systems crumble.
We’re heading into this unknown AIs, threatening our existential, being here as humans. And, you know, it’s something that’s really challenging to look into. And realistically, one of my missions now in life is to, if I redesigned myself, right, I redesigned my mind through a bunch of tools and processes and learnings and really re architected and reprogrammed myself towards abundance, towards goodwill, towards health, towards optimism. And yeah, we are really just mental engineers of ourselves. When we talk about being more conscious individuals, we are leveraging our conscious minds, our highest potential, our, you know, our dream state for ourselves, what we perceive ourselves to be the best of, and really undoing the subconscious behaviours in our minds, the [00:13:00] previous versions of ourselves that tell us we couldn’t, or, you know, have just been, we’ve been traumatized and the source code hasn’t been installed properly, or we are not even having the right systems and processes installed into our brains.
You know, one of my biggest learnings this year is I suck at managing money. That’s, you know, tracing that back, I did not have any proper financial education from my parents, from the school system. None of us
do, right? So that, yeah, as far as going to the mind, it’s like, all we have is our minds.
All we have is the skill sets we develop and download into ourselves, how we perceive, it’s all in here. It’s one. Big memory bank, and we need to declutter it because a lot of the software and a lot of the programs in there are not ours and they’re not healthy and they’re not correct. And, if we are to get better as a society, we need to get better at the individual level.
And that requires you to understand your mind and most importantly, [00:14:00] make a friend of your mind, right? That’s really all we have in life.
Jeffery Wang: 100%. So, if I could replay back, I mean I think I understand what you’re getting at. I thought when you said universe is mental, it means the universe is crazy. But what you’re really saying is that your reality is essentially created in your mind and, and being aware of the programming in your mind is incredibly important because ultimately some of the software that’s put there, you know, when you’re young by your parents, as you said, you know, and then you, you refer to the migrant culture of which I’m part of it as well.
Uh, essentially a lot of the, the programming in our mind are not our friends. You know, we have all sorts of negative experiences in our lives, and sometimes we take that as confirmation of certain attributes about us. So, for example, you know, we, if we were to, you know, I’m a mad basketball fan.
And, and, you know, through coaching my kids, I’ve learned a few things. Essentially losing a game is not confirmation that you suck at it. [00:15:00] Unfortunately, you know, when we’re growing up, we were told that, you know, when you’re, when you’re not very good at something, it means, you know, you’re not meant for it.
You’re not talented. what we don’t get taught is the growth mindset that, you know, instead of instead of taking the loss, as a confirmation that you suck at it, you know, you should be taking it as motivation that you should be working harder and putting, putting twice as much effort into something, you know, and, and that’s why, I suppose that’s what you call a growth mindset, knowing that, when you can master that, then you master your future.
And 100 percent in terms of the financial education, if you realize you suck at managing money, then it doesn’t mean that you’re always suck. It just means that you need to update it with new software that allows you to make it your friend. So,very good lesson indeed. All right. Lesson number nine, going backwards.

Lesson 9: Discipline is divinity.

Jeffery Wang: Uh, discipline is divinity. What do you mean by that?
Jameel Rehman: Like I said before, I was not built with discipline. I was an only child up until I was 12 years old and I consider myself one of the first of the [00:16:00] screen generation.
And that is, you know, my childhood, you know, as an only child, my didn’t have a lot of, I had friends, but because my parents were busy trying to put a roof over their head, I didn’t really get a lot of time with other kids. Um, I just wasn’t, a bit of a child of neglect, unfortunately. So, these essential skills and programs. I had to learn as an adult and relearn them as an adult and go backwards to go forwards. And one of those fundamental traits and skills is discipline. I was a very undisciplined child. And I had a lot of potential, but I had never had a work ethic put into me. And All of the work that I have done on myself has come from consistent, conscious, deliberate, disciplined actions. So, for example, losing weight and transform myself physically going, you know, I lost like 15 kilos in 16 weeks over the pandemic. And that was because of discipline. That was me just going, I have to do this no matter what happens, [00:17:00] no matter how I feel about the food or the exercise or how much I hate it, I’ve got to do it. And basically, you have to chisel yourself and define a vision for yourself first of who you are, the highest, most ideal self, and that is through divinity, what is the highest form of ourselves at a spiritual level, and you craft yourself that vision. Through discipline, you chip away at yourself, at the parts of yourself that don’t serve you anymore, and the behaviours, the actions. You know, there is a great line that I carry a lot with me, uh, it’s by an old guy called Alexis Carrel, and he says, you know, man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is the marble and the sculptor. And, yeah, everything that you want to do to improve your life, Will suck at first. Everything sucks.
I’ve sucked at so many things over the last five years and been okay with it because that’s what you need to do is just that our minds are so you, uh, you know, our minds, our egos hate the unfamiliar and there [00:18:00] is so much about the world that is unfamiliar.
And realistically, we are getting rid of that fear and getting better at things is just firing and wiring those new neurons together, getting our brain to actually just connect those dots and practice using those things over and over again.
And really discipline is a pushing past of the impulse, the impulse of nature that we are as, as evolved monkeys, right? We’re monkeys with plans. And we’ve, we’ve evolved through impulse and instinct. Instincts, useful. Impulses, not.
Alright, so impulse control, like understanding your emotional triggers as to, for example, why do I like to reach for food?
For comfort eating? These
are the impulses that we have. And yeah, without, you won’t get anywhere when you’re in life without being disciplined. Hard work beats talent every day. You
said you’re a basketball fan. Jeff, you know, the Mamba mentality,
Jeffery Wang: hmm, indeed,
Jameel Rehman: [00:19:00] Kobe would work, outwork everyone. And I, you know, I’m not a big basketball guy, but I do appreciate that mindset.
And even when, you know, when I’m trying to stretch for that, when you’re just stretching for those last Those last things, those last chapters in life, that last bit of work, you know, something that I, he says that’s in my head all the time, he says, Job’s not done,
right, I think he was, I think he was like, what, up a couple of games in the, in the finals, one year and it’s like, you’re comfortably ahead, but yeah, the job’s not done, mate, the job’s not
Jeffery Wang: right,
Jameel Rehman: Uh, it’s done when I’m holding the cup. It’s done when I have the glory in hand. And I think about that a lot, and it drives me to go that extra mile and to really make sure I’m crossing that finish line in life as much as I can. And yeah, you just, you have to be disciplined no matter what you want to achieve in life. Any skill, any perspective, it is consistent, disciplined action, pushing past the ego, which wants to seek familiarity. That’s all it wants.
Jeffery Wang: yep. [00:20:00] It just, wants comfort,
Jameel Rehman: It just wants comfort,
Jeffery Wang: So, I can sort of relate that to, I suppose, stoicism, you know, the idea that, anything, that’s worth something, you know, it’s only worth something if you had to pay a price for it. It’s a suffering that you had to go through for. And I think you’re right about Kobe.
He’s on to something, you know, the fact is he’s got this mentality where the journey is, I suppose that the journey is a reward for him in that he, he understands, um, that it’s going to mean that much more because of what he puts in. And the fact is that he was willing to put in more than anybody else.
And that’s why when he, you know, holds up the cup, it means a lot more. I mean, I guess going back to the sporting analogy, you know, it’s one thing to barrack for a team, you know, my team, Boston Celtics won the championships last year. But, you know, I had, I had exactly zero effort to do with that. So even though, you know, I enjoyed the win, um, I bet you Jason Tatum or Jalen Brown, who led that team, enjoyed a whole lot more than I did [00:21:00] because of all the blood, sweat, and tears he put into, uh, they put into getting into to that result.
And I think if we can focus on that, discipline becomes easier. Understanding that, you know, that discipline is, is the reason that you will enjoy the success of your, efforts.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, absolutely. And you think about it, to go back to the analogy of discipline is divinity. Great people are known for one thing often, right? They’ve often honed themselves into one particular point of mastery that they’re known for. Kobe with basketball, right? You, maybe you see, there’s actually, there’s examples like Schwarzenegger, great guy, multi-dimensional as well, but Albert Einstein, science, right?
All the people that we look up to. If you think about gods, most of the gods that we see in, polytheistic societies are known for one thing, right. So, there is a degree of that greatness that you want is that you have to become significantly obsessed and unbalanced in [00:22:00] one thing, and that’s what you are known for.
And I think there is this broader trend now of the great generalists. Like I said, you know, someone like a Schwarzenegger, but again, that he had a powerful mind and he was one of the most disciplined individuals. And if you’ve watched his Netflix series, great series to watch about how he had an own vision for himself, the incredible discipline it takes to become a physical champion of bodybuilding.
I used to love bodybuilding when I was younger. That’s pure discipline as well. Right. And it’s. That’s what it is, is that you have to take conscious, intentional, deliberate actions in the direction that you want to go in life, and you are going to face resistance, and that’s a natural part of the universe, and the more resistance you face for the right reasons, the more likely you will succeed.
Jeffery Wang: That’s right. Alright, lesson number eight.

Lesson 8: Own your story.

Jeffery Wang: Own your story. clearly, you’ve got a very good story there. Um, but what do you mean by owning your own story?
Jameel Rehman: Well, similar to what the mind is about, we [00:23:00] all have these stories about ourselves, you know, that are true, some of them are untrue, a lot of them are not true at all.
And again, there is a narrative that has been implanted by the ego because of, trauma, a situation that, again, creates a narrative in your head that’s been told in your mind for years without us even consciously being aware of it to say that we can’t. And that’s really important as part of the, there’s two facets of this. The internal knowledge of yourself is to understand the stories and the narratives that you’re telling yourself. And then externally, uh, it’s been a real big lesson for me to own who I am and where I’ve come from, my challenges, my pain, and my victories. And share them with the world. And so, when you talk about, for example, the creator economy now, and that a lot of people are, want that authenticity. They don’t want the big corporate brand on the facade. They really are looking at the individuals that are showing the [00:24:00] struggle, going through the pain, telling you, I’m just like you.
That’s powerful, but one of the big leaps that you have to make when you, for example, myself, in making that leap and telling my story, being on podcasts like this, talking about spirituality and awakening, and again, putting, you know, putting my tears and me crying on LinkedIn, right?
That is ownership of the story and who I am.
And that is scary as hell to do, for anyone because you really are putting yourself in the most vulnerable state of who you are out into the world. And we fear that judgment. Often, we are not, you know, I think Jeff Bezos said this, we are not truth seeking animals. We are, I think it was like compliance seeking animals or socially seeking animals.
We want the acceptance of our, of our peers and our monkey minds, you know, want that acceptance more than anything else. So, it is a huge blow to the ego and a huge amount of resistance to do that initially. [00:25:00] When you put yourself out to the world earnestly and honestly, but what I’ve recognized, the rewards come, you know, I’ve shared my transformation, my struggles openly.
I get messages from people, who resonate with that, resonate with the pain, with the success. It’s, it’s inspiring and that’s beautiful, right? It’s absolutely beautiful stuff. And it motivates me. to go out and talk more and share my story because I know that I’ve done some pretty crazy things in my life, especially in the last five years to be where I am. And that’s really part of the mission is to be able to tell the story of who I am because I know it’ll resonate with a lot of people. Because there are, if I look to the future, there’s going to be this generation, two generations of the screen generation, people that have lost themselves to the screen and the cheap dopamine and being raised in front of a device their entire lives.
And who are wanting to return to themselves and going, what the hell is wrong with me? Just like I did five years ago. So, if I can tell that story and say, hey man, I was you, and this is how I’ve got here. [00:26:00] And I can, this is how I solved the problem of what you’ve currently got. That’s powerful.
And that’s really what I’m banking on.
And the ownership of the story, the highs, the lows. To broadcast that into the world. And it’s really important that anyone that wants to put themselves out there, I know this, you know, this economy is growing.
You have to do it right. You have to own who you are for better or for worse. And the water is fine. What do I mean by that? You take that leap. It sucks. It still sucks every week for me to talk about my life, and you know, things I shouldn’t be saying, but once you get into it, there’s rewards and there is That authenticity in the leap, you’ll be caught by the right people.
Jeffery Wang: Oh, I think you’re onto something here. So, I’m going to pick up on that point. So, when you say, oh, in your story, I completely identify with that because as a, as a migrant as well, you know, all I ever wanted to do as a child was to blend into the background and not be noticed.
I mean, it’s hard enough to look different. The last thing you want is to, to go and admit that you’ve got [00:27:00] a life, you know, that’s completely different to everyone else. But I think underneath it all, the reason why we find it so challenging to own our story is because we don’t accept ourselves as who we were, right?
So, so when you say, put yourself out there, the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to own who you are. You’ve got to accept who you are; you’ve got to first of all accept who you are before you can put it out there.
The second point I’m going to pick up on is around authenticity.
As you said, we’re in the screen generation, the reality is that social media, we put up this curated version of ourselves that’s just, unfortunately just isn’t real.
You think you’re behind everybody else, you think everybody else was doing better than you.
And unfortunately, that sort of leaves everyone feeling like that. When you’re out there and you’re authentic, you’re creating the kind of connections that you would not otherwise have. What I wanted to ask you is whether your relationships in real life have picked up once [00:28:00] you started practicing that authenticity.
I mean, what your What you’re effectively sending out there is a message of who you really are as a person, meaning that, essentially when I think of it as a sales funnel, you’re qualifying very hard to get the right company into your life. Has that actually transpired in that? Have you attracted the right kind of people by being authentic to who you really are
Jameel Rehman: Oh Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think I put this as a lesson. The vibe is the tribe, right? So again, those emotional connections, the, we operate in frequency, we, you know, and that frequency is what we broadcast through our actions, our beliefs, the way we talk. And it does resonate with the right people.
And that’s one of the most beautiful things that has come out of the last 12 months of me being a solopreneur and me talking honestly and earnestly about what I’m doing and why is that, you know, I’m in the early stages of what I’m doing as a, as a business owner, but the people that I’m attracting. [00:29:00] And the, the people that are drawn in are the people that I was hoping to attract in, right?
One, one of the things I said on my, um, to my community is like, the thing that I’m most proud of this year is the people that I’m attracting, because it’s not just the robotic, hey, I want to sell tech sort of people. It is multidimensional individual. They are aspirational. They’re athletes, they’re artists. They have, different aspects of themselves. They’re not just singular people. And that’s really cool, right? And that’s really, really cool. As far as the family side of things or in the personal life, yeah, it does attract a different degree of people for sure. You know, I’ve felt, for better or for worse, I’ve attracted, I’ve gotten to a lot closer to certain parts of my family that are resonating.
You know, I will say I got this, one of the more beautiful things about my family is the generational shift in understanding mind and generational trauma is that, you know, my parents, My parents and my uncles and aunties, [00:30:00] they’re all boomers. And all of us, the kids, we’re all basically millennials or elder millennials or Gen Zs. And the awareness of mental health, the awareness of trauma and how society is, you know, shaping us for the worse, not for the better, we all understand that. And we’re much, much closer as a generational family unit because we’re all, you know, helping each other unpack the bullshit that we’ve been downloading into our brains. And that’s a beautiful thing, right? And the flip side of that, there are certain people in my family that I have repelled because the vibe is off now because I’m at a different frequency. I’m at a higher frequency. They’re not coming along for the journey, and they’re stuck in their ways and that repels. I think it’s when you, when
Jeffery Wang: But that’s a blessing in disguise too though, isn’t
Jameel Rehman: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. That’s part of the level up, right? As we level up in life, we are raising our frequencies. We are raising our emotional and spiritual frequencies and vibrations. [00:31:00] And that means that the people that are out of the range will fall off the bottom. And there is, it’s an important part of life, I think, especially in your, you know, your mid-twenties to early thirties, is that you do prune, you do prune parts of your old life, people that don’t serve you, people that you don’t resonate and vibe with anymore. That’s an important part of your growth. And yeah, you have to do it. And people don’t appreciate that. There is a lonely period when you do make that transition across, but the people that I’ve met through that, coming through the other side of that lonely period of transition, they are the tribe that you want. They are more aligned to your values and your beliefs.
And you do get that new level of psychological safety and people just getting it. And that’s powerful stuff, right?
Jeffery Wang: Hmm.
100%. I think for younger people, it’s the, uh, it’s the insecurity. It’s, you know, you need your tribe as a safety net. But, um, when, when you realize that you’ve outgrown it. It’s often quite difficult for you to, you know, sort of move on and, you know, I can sort of, [00:32:00] I’ll use an example of, you know, the party crowd in your, you know, mid to late twenties and, and, and you realize like, you know, that no longer serves you, that’s no longer who you are, but you’re afraid to lose them.
Uh, and, uh, but yet if you don’t move on, you know, the, the reality is that it’s not going to be good for you. and, your life isn’t just going to be, just isn’t going to be fulfilled and until you move on, you know, I’d argue some of them are probably not ready to meet their other half
Jameel Rehman: No.
Jeffery Wang: and get on with their life, right, the next stage of their life.
So, yeah, really multi-dimensional lesson just there.

Lesson 7: Unlearning is just as important as learning.

Jeffery Wang: Moving on, lesson number seven, unlearning is just as important as learning.
Jameel Rehman: it’s similar to the mind stuff, right? Or an analogy that I like to use is that you have to think of your mind as like an iPhone, right? One of my things that I’m passionate about and exploring is the intersection of spirituality and technology. And I’m actually rereading, um, Steve Jobs biography. Uh, which is over there. Fantastic book. [00:33:00] All right. And Steve was someone that was at that, he is the forefather of the intersection of spirituality and technology. And creativity and technology. And an analogy that I use is that you have to think of yourself as an iPhone, as a device, right?
Because all the components are there and, you know, we have memory, we have our hard drives, we have our RAM, we have applications, which are our skills and our thoughts and our beliefs. And just like you get your iPhone, if you get one fresh out of the box and you’ve never used an iPhone before, there are a lot of apps on there that are pretty useless that you’re never going to use, right?
And you will either delete them, or you’ll put them in a folder and never, and they’re never to be used again. And very much so, when we come out of the box, when we come through the sausage factory of society, we are, defaulted into applications and skills and, learnings that will not serve us at all and are useless. Like I said, I know nothing about, you know, [00:34:00] financial literacy and how to learn the hard way that I don’t know how to manage money. But for some reason, I understand about Burke and Wills and, Ernest Shacklebolt going to Antarctica when, you know, when I was like 14, right?
Jeffery Wang: Yep.
Jameel Rehman: So, as you go through this transformational journey like I have, it’s not just about adding new skills to your repertoire, which is important, just as important is to declutter the mind, remove those skills, those applications, those beliefs that don’t serve you anymore.
That could be a negative way of thinking. That could be a perspective in life. It could be a fear that you haven’t really addressed.
And, a lot of that uninstallation work is just as hard, if not harder, than the learning of new skills and processes. Because, especially when you get, if you go into the core parental stuff, your core traumas, uh, which are often subconscious and have been installed into us before we can even remember, before we’re seven years old,
Jeffery Wang: Yep.
Jameel Rehman: you can’t get rid of that damage. It’s, you can’t uninstall those negative programs. [00:35:00] You actually just have to reduce your triggering, reduce your response to these core traumas and get better at recovering for how they affect you physically, mentally, spiritually.
So, the unlearning and the rediscovery of the self is actually a lot of unpacking those unuseful behaviours, those unuseful applications, those unuseful skills. Um, you know, a great line that, I think about often by Muhammad Ali, and I might be butchering this, but he goes, it’s not the mountain ahead that wears you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.
And that pebble in your shoe is the negative self-talk, is the narratives, the false narratives that say you can’t do it. Based on what? Right? What, what’s telling me that you can’t?
And if you don’t analyse that, if you’re not conscious of that, of those narratives, then they’re going to weigh you down.
And entrepreneurship is a spiritual practice for me because you have no choice, but to [00:36:00] look at yourself in every facet of who you are as an individual. Uh, because your own gaps as a leader, as a visionary for your own thing, for your own, perspective in the future will hurt you, will weigh you down. Going back to that financial management issue that I got, you know, my programming, I have to unlearn my poor financial management skills and how to actually save money and spend effectively, or else I’m going to be in this constant loop of being broken and deep financial shit over and Over
Jeffery Wang: Over and again. Yep.
Look, you, I think, I think you’ve opened up a. Big, huge can of worms here, you know, you’re talking about school and childhood, you know, so a lot of our parents, probably tried their best, they were trying to raise us with the best of intentions, but, um, ultimately, you know, they did the best job with what they had, and, you know, there’s limited understanding of a lot of these things, so, unintentionally they might have taught you stuff or values and practices and beliefs and all that, that didn’t serve, You and same way it didn’t [00:37:00] serve them, but becoming aware of it is probably something that we could do now that we never had the opportunity to in the past.
The other can of worms that you opened up is around the school system. Now, I’d argue that the school system no longer serves this generation of workers, certainly not in the AI generation.
the schools have operated largely the same way, for hundreds of years. But the society is changing so fast.
I mean, you know, the other day I was sort of reflecting back and you realize like, you know, 2007 was when the first iPhones were released.
And, and you realize like that’s less than, you know, 20 years ago. And yet the, the world has already fundamentally changed, and there hasn’t even been one generation.
And so, the, what we get taught at schools might’ve been useful when you needed to get people out of their farms and into a, into a factory for the industrial revolution, which is what I’d argue that the schooling system is designed. And that’s why, you know, we get taught rote learning. But I think fundamentally [00:38:00] what we’re missing now is that next level skills, you know, it’s about meaning making, it’s about critical thinking, it’s about understanding ethics and direction and, and all that, all the higher order skills that the schools aren’t teaching us and aren’t preparing us for, you know, the, the soft skills, navigating with people, relating to people, conflict resolution, all these skills that are absolutely fundamental to a success of a human being, and yet, not even anywhere near a curriculum.
Yeah, so, so this is a very fine point that you’re making. Typically, we also, uh, as part of our 10 lessons, we do throw your curveball around, you know, what have you unlearned out of the 10 lessons? But, uh, given that you’ve already given us this lesson here, uh, it’s, uh, sounds like you’re way ahead of the game.

Lesson 6:  Passion is Free Energy.

Jeffery Wang: Uh, but moving on, uh, lesson number six, passion is free energy. So, what’s wrong with passion?
Jameel Rehman: There’s nothing wrong with passion.
That’s what you should be pursuing in life. One of the fundamentals to the universe that I’ve [00:39:00] understood throughout my own learnings is that Everything starts with energy. Energy is the first dimension of the universe. It’s the fundamental, right? And you know, one of the things that I teach, you’re talking before about soft skills, personal skills, the human skills.
That’s really the crux of what I’m teaching in my academy, right? It’s like, I’m rebuilding a curriculum of not just the skills to be a great tech seller, but the skills to be a great human based on my own learnings. So, I totally agree with what you’re saying about how we, how do we reinvent the skills that are needed to be successful in this new world?
Totally agree with you there. With passion being free energy, when you go through this self-actualization, you’re going within. You’re always going within. And, energetic self-awareness, bodily self-awareness, you will feel energy swill through you. Emotions are a form of energy. And very often when you are on this self-actualization journey and you’re trying to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you define that, what, what [00:40:00] makes you tick and what’s that thing you want to aim for in life and go all in on. That can be a real big challenge for anyone, right?
Is to find that direction. Especially I think men, because the masculine in us is so directional. That is what we are. We want to go in a direction. And to find that direction is one of our biggest spiritual challenges. And I struggled with that a couple of times along the way. First, when I was 18, going into university or going into VCE, and thinking about what I wanted to do in university, I had no idea who I was and what I wanted to do.
And I had a crisis of faith and, you know, a little bit of a, situation there, getting in a few years into my technology sales career, I was really enjoying it, but, again, it wasn’t spiritually fulfilling.
It didn’t fulfill a deeper cause. I was great at it, it was making money, but I craved that depth, in actually doing something impactful in my life. And one of the things that I did, was search for what I’m passionate about. I think when you go through the self-actualization journey, The [00:41:00] energy is breadcrumbs, right?
What you’re passionate about in life is breadcrumbs to purpose. What would you do if money wasn’t an issue? What would you do if you, what do you do with the time disappears, right?
And you get lost in it.
What lights you up in your day? These are the breadcrumbs towards the purposeful work you could do to fill that fulfillment. Because realistically, our fulfillment really does come from an internal feeling of, right? Fulfillment of justification of purpose. That’s really, it’s just an energy inside of us.
Jeffery Wang: Yup.
Jameel Rehman: a lot of people that I do mentor and coaching go and they, you know, they’re looking for that next step past the great tech sales career is what do I really want to do with myself here? And I go, you got to get to get a journal and you got to journal your feelings every day, and I want you to track what do you feel most passionate about, where do you get lit up during the day, what lights you on fire, what drives you, It’s because it’s not, very often it’s not technology sales, and I’ll say it.
I fell into my technology sales [00:42:00] career. Nobody aspires to be an account executive, mate. There are people that are using it, sure, they want to aspire to, but it’s a vehicle for something else, usually financial freedom or just leveling up in life, like I did. that energy, the passions, that is the best trail within yourself to find that purposeful work, that purposeful journey, that, uh, individual, path that we all have within ourselves.
I can’t answer that for other people. I can only teach people how to seek within themselves. And the way that I did it where, you know, finding my own passion for mentoring and development and teaching was by actually coaching and mentoring people and AEs for free for years inside Telstra and in Cisco because I loved it. And I would do it for nothing. And this, you know, Tech Sales Academy, what I’ve got now is monetizing my passions.
That’s really all it is and building the structure around it. And I encourage other people to do the same, right? Wherever you love, whatever you’re passionate about, follow that because that energy will feed [00:43:00] you through the shit eating part of creating your own thing, right.
And that’s what I’ve had to do for these last 12 months. My first 12 months of solopreneurship is do a lot of shit eating and that’s the necessary part and starting something from scratch. But those wins of the things that you’re really, truly passionate about, finding the right people, getting a client on board, people that really resonate with what you’re doing. That’s what’s keeping me pushing through this. And again, I just pass on what I know.
Jeffery Wang: 100%. So, in just reflecting on that, there’s two things that makes me think of, right? One is understanding that you’re not just managing your time, but you’re also managing your energy. When you’re doing something you’re passionate about, you seem to get more energy, you know, sort of free energy as you refer to it, right?
When you’re doing something that you love, and you’re passionate about, you almost have more energy in the day, even though it’s costing you in time. And so, if you manage your energy properly, you will be guided closer towards sort of your life’s [00:44:00] mission because you’ll be doing what you’re passionate about.
And then the other point around the passion is that, Actually, the thing that triggered my thought is how, how I actually came to be aware of it. And it’s about asking yourself the right questions. And in fact, it was this exercise that I once did, which surprised even myself. I was asked, this question.
In fact, I was asked to sort of send out a survey to my closest friends. And in one of the questions in the survey was, what was I doing when I was at my best. And that’s actually a roundabout way of asking exactly this question here around what is your passion. And it surprised me because the answer from one of my real dear friends was that you’re helping others.
And to me, I thought, well, what do you mean when I’m helping others? I was at my best. And then I reflected back on that, and I thought, yeah, you’re right. These are the things that gave me energy. These are the things that, I would do for free. You know, I was happily doing it. And ultimately if I could, as you alluded to, [00:45:00] if I could monetize these passions, then, then ultimately, you know, you, you don’t have to work a day in your life because you’re, you’re pursuing your passion.
So, I think there’s a lot of wisdom to that. Yeah,
Jameel Rehman: this is great fun. There’s a great fundamental psychological framework called the hierarchy of commitment. And basically, it goes, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy on steroids. And it’s really about that self-actualization piece. And it’s what I use it in sales to go what do people actually value more than money. And so, it goes money, time, energy, identity. Okay, so we, you know, money is the lowest move of commitment. You’ll buy something and you’ll never use it. You know, you, right? But you’ll always spend money to save time. Hence convenience stores. Amazon seven 11. On top of that is energy, right? And that is what gives us good energy.
Now, people don’t understand. This is one of the other further lessons, spoiler alert, that you know, emotions are energy and emotions such as love, such as [00:46:00] joy, such as passion. Again, when you are in love with someone, when you’re having a joyous moment, the time flies. You’ll spend the money, right? On your family, a hobby, a concert, an event.
So, we will always, you will give up, you’ll give that up, right? There’s money and time that disappear for good energy. The top of the pyramid is identity. And like we talked about before, we, the ego, what we are self-identified with is so powerful that we will commit time, energy, sorry, time, money, time, energy to our identities. For example, being a great tech seller, you’ll commit your money, you maybe do a course, you know, something like myself, you commit time to learning the skills, you commit to the pushing past the negative energy of failure and setbacks and rejection. All to reinforce the perspective and the identity that was set within ourselves. So, but when it comes to that energy, again, that energy identity link is really, really powerful. And that’s often status.
And how we perceive ourselves and we will commit [00:47:00] to that, but that energy part, the emotional energy again, you know, we will throw money in time to feel good. Right?
Jeffery Wang: right. A hundred percent. That’s, that’s such an insight into people’s motivations. All right.

Lesson 5: Everything you want is outside your comfort zone.

Jeffery Wang: Lesson number five, everything you want is outside your comfort zone. I’ve we’ve heard variations of this one before, but essentially, it’s like, it’s about being in that edge of the, the growth zone, isn’t it?
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, is an adaptive species. We are sponges of information. We respond to negative and positive stimuli in our environments. How do you get bigger muscles? You have to implement negative stimuli and overstress it, so then it, and then it adapts by building more muscle. Same applies to our minds, right? So, if you want to get better at a skill, we have to push our neurons and our muscles and our coordination and our brain [00:48:00] functions. So, you know, into an uncomfortable place where it’s formulating these new neural connections to then optimize and then become a tangible skill or something that we’ve learned, right? So, we have to be uncomfortable constantly to grow, to develop. And like we talked about before, the ego seeks familiarity. It seeks familiarity of what it currently knows. It seeks the known. so, if we want to get into the unknown, into an aspirational sense of ourselves, a higher version of ourselves, that requires pushing past what the ego understands to be the area of comfort. And as we face that edge, the ego as a mechanism will always cast aspersions into our minds and out in front of us to go, people are going to make fun of me. What if I fail? What if it goes wrong? Right. What if I die? Right. It’s all really just variations of death and fear and damage. And [00:49:00] at every level of growth in every dimension of growth of who you are at a physical, mental, spiritual level, every skill that I’ve had to develop, again, coming from a background of having no, you know, no proper sales skills, no, you know, relationship skills, whatever it is, whatever you develop. You have to constantly face the ego. You will always face doubt. You will always face insecurity. And that is, unfortunately, core software, right? That is source code in the human experience that is just there for the rest of our lives until we, you know, hit the earth and, you know, take a dirt nap. That is just it. We have to be constantly fighting that part. And then we talked about, you know, the universe is mental. It’s a constant iteration game of going past that ego for every level, every single level. So yeah, it’s really, that is it. It’s just that if we, again, if we were coming out perfect and ready for this new world and in the default state, we wouldn’t have to aspire for more.
We wouldn’t have [00:50:00] to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions. But if you really want to get somewhere in this rapidly changing life and rapidly changing society, you’re going to have to be uncomfortable and you’re going to be uncomfortable for a long time, right? Because life’s a marathon and I’m sure you get into a nice flow of things in a marathon, but it doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hurt and you’re still not chafing at every step of the journey, right? So yeah, it’s just, Owning the story is one part and then accepting that is the nature of the human experience is another part of that as well.

Lesson 4: Seek help, guidance, and community.

Jeffery Wang: Lesson number four, seek help, guidance, and community.
Jameel Rehman: there’s this false narrative of the self-made man unfortunately Western society favours individualism as opposed to community and realistically, you know, one of the fundamental problems that we have in society is the isolation of community creating the nuclear family. You know, you would understand in Asian cultures that [00:51:00] the family unit’s big, it’s diverse, it’s broad. Um, there’s a lot more communal factors, a lot more shared facilities.
Jeffery Wang:
Jameel Rehman: And one of the, one of the problems of the ego, and maybe this is just my own problem, is that I feel like I have to do everything myself.
I was being an only child and, you know, having to be an adult and become an adult very quickly. I’ve formulated hyper independence, and that means I feel like I have to carry the world on my shoulders to get things done in life. And that is not the right way to go about things. And I’ve burnt out four times in the last four years. You recognize that. I did not know at all, because if I knew it all, I wouldn’t have to ask myself, why am I so fucked up? And it wasn’t until I had those realizations about myself and, you know, had to humble my own perspective of what I thought I could do, that things really changed for me. And, with the start of my transformation in [00:52:00] 2019, it was accepting the fact that I didn’t know how to manage my physical health.
So, I had to outsource that to someone that did, to a fitness coach. And then I realized, you know, I had no idea how to manage my own mental health. And then I went to therapy and started going through that rabbit hole and getting the tools and processes that I need from an expert, from a therapist. And it wasn’t until I started to reach out, accept help.
Recognize that I don’t have all the answers because we don’t.
Did things really start to change? And. what I’ve recognized as well, one of the most powerful things that we can do as a society and as a, as a leader is to create psychological safety and create a space, you know, whether it be a community, whatever it is, of a place where people can be safe to be themselves, can be safe to fail, can be safe to be vulnerable, and you don’t recognize that until you feel safe. Psychologically safe within yourself, right? Um, you know, it’s Christmas time and I’m sure everyone’s having a great time, but you know, there’s always, there’s always lots of problems with [00:53:00] family trauma, right? Like the great Ram Dass says, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family. And psychological safety, that’s what that is. It’s the lack of psychological safety from my childhood traumas. And it wasn’t until I got outside of my own family unit and found my own safety in my own nervous system, and recognized I was out of the flames, and I could rest and recover and recognize, oh, I don’t have this all and had time to reflect because I wasn’t in the war zone. That’s when I recognized I needed help. That’s when I recognized I need to have healthier examples, healthier sources, healthier ecosystems around me. to develop myself up. And outsourcing that, the mental and physical health stuff, was transformative, right? I went, you know, got shredded in 16 weeks during the pandemic, no, no gym.
It was home workouts and a strict diet. When I, you know, transformed myself mentally, I understood that I had PTSD, ADHD, anxiety, trauma. It wasn’t until I had an outsider’s perspective, instead of my ego, [00:54:00] Protecting me and going, no, you don’t need anyone else, you can do this all yourself. Like, you can fix this problem. That change is so important. You have to get outside yourself, and you have to
Jeffery Wang: that’s easier said than done, right? I mean, as sort of proud people, we don’t want to admit that you need, you know, psychological help Like it’s especially harder for men than women, I think, in some respects.
So, for us to go and seek help, how did you convince yourself that it’s okay to ask for help?
Jameel Rehman: Well, it’s like, how many times can I be making the same mistake? Yeah, for example, with my diet, I was overweight to obese the majority of my life for 29 years.
And I had yo-yoed, I had tried diet fads, I had, taken shortcuts, which did not work out, but I knew that I was avoiding consistent disciplined work.
And I knew that I did not know anything about nutrition because my parents didn’t teach me anything about it. My [00:55:00] family, you know, the school system didn’t teach me about it. And I was again, ego driven and looking for shortcuts and looking for the easiest way. So, it’s like, how many more times can I fail and fuck up doing this myself before I have to let the ego die and surrender the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. And same with the therapy, right? I know that these tools are available. I can see other examples of people succeeding, right? When we have this bias that we think, oh, it’ll work for other people, but not for us. Again. The ego, right? The ego seeking comfort, seeking the known, even if it’s not good for us. And yeah, unfortunately, when it came to having these realizations, I was so fucking sick of who I was. And hated who I saw in the mirror and was so frustrated with myself about not achieving the things that I always knew I was capable of, that I had to have that ego death or I had to, you know, really have, [00:56:00] go through a dark hole, go through a dark night of the soul and actually just hit rock bottom to go, are you going to learn this lesson yet or not?
Then start from there. And unfortunately, it’s happened to me. It’ll happen to a lot of people. A lot of people start again when the fear of the unknown isn’t as bad as the pain of staying who you are.
Right?
And when you are suffering within yourself so much, and you know that there’s got to be, you’ve got to be better than this, there’s got to be more to life than who you are, and so there’s constant suffering, but the effort that it takes to become that new person, to, you know, to, to take the leap, everyone’s afraid of that leap, and you’ve Yeah, that usually I have to be prodded from the back with your own frustration, self-loathing, or you know, looking down the barrel of something else to go, okay, I have to do this now.
Jeffery Wang: Yeah, that makes sense. if the pain is, is big enough, then you can then take that action.

Lesson 3: Emotional intelligence is a key to the universe.

Jeffery Wang: So [00:57:00] lesson number three, emotional intelligent is a key to the universe.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah. So, this is one of the things that I’ve probably one of the most important things that I’ve learned as a fundamental to myself and to the world at large. So, it was the great Nikola Tesla. He said, if you want to find one of the secrets of the universe. Just think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. And he was talking about electricity, right? And you know, electricity is energy, it has different frequencies and vibrations, et cetera. I don’t think he understood, at the time that he was talking about emotional energy. And this was me integrating a lesson from Nikola Tesla. And then also, um, the great Dr. Joe Dispenza. Have you ever heard of him or his work?
Jeffery Wang: Now, I, I, I’ve heard of Tesla, I haven’t heard of Dispenza.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, so Dr. Joe Dispenza, he’s, a leading researcher in the neuroscience space, and he’s re he’s got some [00:58:00] really frontier research and results in, alignment of emotional state in meditations to transform the body. And basically, you can transform your inner state through an alignment of emotions and thoughts. I mean, it is a form of manifestation, um, but there is now actual, science backed data that shows evidence of this. Before it was thought of as woo woo, and it’s still, it is still sort of frontier technology and a frontier tool for the human condition. But as we converge, like we said, we’re becoming, you know, we’re heading towards, Singularity? We are realizing that things are more connected, but essentially what I learned from Dr. Joe was about emotional energy and that emotions are the energy that we broadcast, right? And just like energy, they are broadcast in waves, and they have certain frequencies and vibrations, and the different frequencies vibrate at different levels. [00:59:00] And when we talk about our emotional energy, I talk about the vibe, right? When you talk about the vibe of someone, the vibe of the room, the vibe of an event, right? You go to a sporting event, right? Boxing day test.
You’re there. You can feel the pressure. You can feel the excitement. That is emotional energy.
When you walk into a room and two people having a hushed conversation and you know, you can’t hear them, but you know, this is a serious conversation.
That’s emotional energy. Right, so we are broadcasting these things. It is our sixth sense that emotional energy, and it’s our nervous systems that is the um, the organ to say, but it is the master organ of all the other senses. So, we are actually broadcasting this emotional energy, and this is what we pick up on when we say we’re great people persons and we can read people.
Right? The vibe of someone that is not just woo, it’s not just intuition, it is science, and it is a revelation that we’ve had probably the last 20ish years, but it hasn’t hit the mainstream [01:00:00] necessarily.
And a lot of people, myself included, only learn this when you go through the self-actualization journey and you go, what the hell is wrong with me? And you learn about trauma, and you learn about emotional damage. And you learn about the nature of addiction and how this actually influences our nervous systems and what that is. you know, one of the things that I teach in the academy that I don’t think anybody else does is emotional energy, as what we’ve just talked about, and the mastery of that. How can you use your reading skills, your empathetic skills, how to read the vibe, how to sense the room, how to read the room to get a dimension of the customer, the human experience that others do not, especially if you’re in the technical realm, right?
Jeffery Wang: Yep.
Jameel Rehman: So, there is a science to this, there is a structure to this. And, you know, using my multi dimensionality here, I’ve learned to understand, attenuate, and to a degree, master it. Through years of being a performer, being a musician, being a [01:01:00] comedian, coming from a chromatic family background where my nervous system is hyperactive and I’m hyper attuned to people, right?
Unfortunately, most empaths probably come from chromatic family backgrounds, and they have overactive nervous systems, and they are hyper aware of that emotional energy and the senses of other people’s emotional attunement and can attune really quickly to that because they’ve had to, it’s a survival mechanism when they were younger.
Jeffery Wang: but it can sometimes work against you too, right? I mean, you know, it’s almost like being able to hear people’s thoughts.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah,
Jeffery Wang: and, um, sometimes, you know, it actually, makes you less confident than you would otherwise be if you know, if you weren’t paying to necessarily the negative energy that people might have.
I mean, how do you know that you’re How do you know that you’re reading it right? I mean, I agree with you 100%. The vibe is there. The vibe is real. Even though that it’s not something that we necessarily understand. You know, there’s thousands of years of, well, millions of years of evolution of psychology, [01:02:00] or evolution of biology that, have made us really, really attuned to these things.
You know, you can usually tell when someone’s out to harm you.
Um, you know, because we need that. We, we need that to survive and, and I guess you could call that emotional intelligence, um, but at the same time, right, um, sometimes you can misread a room and, and ultimately harming, your understanding of the actual situation.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And that is part of the mastery.
So, there’s two aspects of it, right? There is interoception and exteroception.
So interoception is the sensing of the internal emotional state. So, when you know you’re hungry, when you know you’re anxious, when you know you’re
upset, and exteroception is the feeling of other people’s vibes out to you.
That’s your bullshit sensor, your bullshit detector. And one of the masteries that comes with this practice is knowing when you are reading someone versus when you are projecting your own state and your own ego onto what you think it is.
And [01:03:00] a lot of people, especially when they are stressed and out of the body state, which is where most of our nervous system attunement comes from, and when you’re in the head, for example, when you are stressed out, you lose that sensitivity.
And unfortunately, most of us in society are in our heads more than we are in our bodies. And that’s an essential practice in your emotional self-mastery is to self-regulate. Get out of the monkey mind, get out of the, you know, the beta state and the anxious mind and get into the more intuitive, in tune body.
So yeah, that misreading usually is because you’re nervous or you are here and not in the body. You’re in your head and not in the body. So, you know, a great example of that would be, you’ve been in, you’re in sales as well when, someone just won’t shut the fuck up. And you know, they’re like the sound of their own voice and they’re not reading the room. They are indulging in their own emotional energy of hearing themselves talk or, you know, show value as opposed to reading actually what the customer needs, what the bloom actually needs. Right.
So that, again, it’s a, it’s an entirely new skillset and yeah, [01:04:00] definitely, um, you do need to condition it and understand the difference between both to be really good at it.
Jeffery Wang: All right. Going backwards, lesson number two.

Lesson 2: You are a player in the Universe’s game.

Jeffery Wang: Uh, you are a player in the Universe’s game.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah. Yeah. So, this is one of, this is a really a spiritual lesson, right? you know, I was raised Muslim. But I was very, wasn’t religious, wasn’t raised religious at all. So, I’ve always had this bit of a disconnect to God and, it just didn’t really have a spiritual identity for many years. I mean, I struggled with my own identity because I had the expectations of Islam put upon me without any of the education of what it means.
And then You know, when I went through this transformation, it was a spiritual awakening. And as you go through this journey of self-individuation, Carl Jung, great psychologist or psychiatrist, you know, he talks about synchronicities, and these are breadcrumbs to the universe of your self-individuation journey. And I’ve had so many synchronicities occur in my [01:05:00] life as I go deeper within myself and go on this journey of self-actualization and try and push that out into the world that you not feel like you are, a player in the universe’s game, right? There is intelligent design. There is beauty in all things that you might not be able to see the world, what’s in front of you, but at a 10, 000 mile view, you know, this is where you need to be right now.
And I’m actually feeling that right now through some, through some situations in my life that we’ve kind of talked about. And, again, uh, again, with the integration of technology and individuality, spirituality. I kind of liken it to like, you play a video game, you play like, you know, Grand Theft Auto, a single player game, something like that. And you think about how in that world, that character feels like everything’s real.
But you, on the outside, you’re the one that’s actually controlling the game, right? And you’ve got that outsider’s perspective. But if you walk that guy into a, if you run that guy into a wall, he’s going to feel that. If you run into a car, if you shoot someone, [01:06:00] whatever it is, they’re going to feel it, but it’s not necessarily real. And even to the point where You think about something like, in a video game, every pixel is like an atom, right? And we’re getting to a point now that games are getting so real, and there’s so many more pixels, so much more rendering, that how could, it’s not, you kind of extrapolate that to the real world, right?
Is that we are just comprised of trillions of atoms, intelligently designed together. And how does that work? What is that powerful force behind us and what this perception of consciousness and reality is? There has to be a more intelligent design behind that because ironically, we’ve been, just like we say that God created us in his own image, we are creating things in our own image.
Humanoid robots, video games, first, you know, first player perspectives.
And the universe is cyclical. It’s the end. It’s just and it’s just the beginning repeating again over and over. So, [01:07:00] and also another part with that is like, when you aim for the highest form of self, you have no choice but to put faith in a higher power. Get you where you need to go because you will feel rudderless and directionless, or you are putting a lot of faith in things panning out time after time, time after time.
Jeffery Wang: you have no control over.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m in one of the, you know, building your own business is a gigantic leap of faith.
You can do all the things right, but you’ve really got to hope and pray that, you know, the universe is conspiring to help you, which it is, but you must act in the fundamental laws of nature of the universe for it to help you.
Jeffery Wang: that’s right.
Jameel Rehman: Yeah, you’ve gotten no choice. If you really want to do things great, with integrity, keep your soul intact in the process.
You have no choice but to recognize that you are a player in a bigger game. Yeah.
Jeffery Wang: what you’re getting at. So, it’s almost like you’ve got to have faith. In, you know, obviously you do your bit, but for your [01:08:00] plans, for your aspiration to become real, you need a higher power to conspire with you to make that happen.
I think I know what you’re getting at there and, and I think what I’ll do is I’ll just leave it, for the listeners to decipher for themselves.
But I think you make a, a, you know, a bloody good point. So, last lesson, which I love the way you’ve done it.

Lesson 1: It starts with you.

Jeffery Wang: So, lesson number one, it starts with you.
Jameel Rehman: So, I have this firm belief, and I’m not the only one here, that we have a seed, an authentic seed of ourselves, our intuitive sense of self. This is what the universe gifts upon us. You know, we are a completely unique fingerprint of DNA and a combination of infinite possibility. And we have our own combination inside ourselves. And, really, your life’s journey, your self-individuation journey, is in the word itself, it’s individuation of the self. How can you uniquely unlock talents, the gifts [01:09:00] that you have within yourself and release them to the world. And there’s no one that is responsible for that self-actualization and that journey except for you.
Nobody is going to come do this for you. It starts with your own will, your own self-belief, your own actions to aim and go, right? No one is here to help you. There’s people that help you on the journey, but there’s a supporting crowd around you. Like I said, you never want to be alone in this process, but there is a significant part of the self-growth journey that is lonely, that is individual, that you will be doing hard work on your own with no idea of how it’s actually going to pan out. And, we have to do the work to nurture ourselves. And unfortunately, like we’ve talked about here, like, society has disconnected us from the authentic self. It has disconnected us from the intuitive self. We are all in our heads. We are dopamine addicted, addicted to devices. [01:10:00] You know, we are not listening to that intuition, that emotional intelligence, that deeper knowing.
And that deeper knowledge, the emotional intelligence, is actually one of our first senses that we develop. You know, babies are all about emotional achievement through their parents before they develop sight and sound and smell and all those sorts of things. Right? So, you’ve got to nurture that seed of who you are inside yourself.
And just like a plant, you know, you can’t, a plant will never grow in the right environment. There is a significant amount of, nurture that’s involved to cultivate the nature of who you are. And just like with bad soil, you, if you want that seed to grow, you’ve got to create a supportive environment, the right soil, the right nutrients, the right thoughts, the right beliefs, the right resources to cultivate that inner seed within yourself and develop that sense of self belief that you can be different and get out into the world and be your own person. And that’s a lot of that inner work that we just talked about. And that is all [01:11:00] to re, re download, reprogram yourself from one that is negative self-talk to positive self-talk, to abundance, to possibility, instead of negativity, telling yourself you can instead of you can’t. And that all starts with you because nobody understands your own troubles in here. Nobody understands your unique combination of damage that you’ve got as well.
Jeffery Wang: That’s right.
Jameel Rehman: And so, when we, again, that’s one of the beauties of what we, what I do and what other creators do that are just talking about their journeys is that we get isolated and disconnected from ourselves because we think our problems are uniquely ours.
But when people resonate with me, they resonate with the same problems that I’ve had, the same negative inner talk, the same limiting beliefs, the same situations. They think, oh shit, I thought that was just me. It’s actually someone else as well. And you go, oh shit, the more that we talk about these things, the more we realize we were all connected and we’re all saving, we’re all having the same experience in slightly different ways, but 99. 9 percent of the same experience, but we just [01:12:00] aren’t recognized because we’re not talking about it and sharing it with the world.
if you want to tune yourself to a higher power, when you get, when you want to tune into that frequency of the highest self, that is up to you. That is, this is your life, your abundance, your journey. No one’s going to do it for you. And that’s why it sucks, but it’s worth every step. It’s worth every drop, every bit of pain. You have to do it. It has to be you.
People can help you on the journey, but it must be you first and foremost.
Jeffery Wang: It’s an extremely empowering lesson, I think. Yes, you will get help along the way, if you have faith and all that, in the last lesson. But this lesson is all about that it starts with you. That you have to make that decision. You have to take that first step and clearly, a lot of the work is in that. Yeah, um, more than anything else. So that is an incredibly powerful lesson.
and thank you so much for sharing that lesson. It’s been an absolute [01:13:00] pleasure.
Jameel Rehman: Oh man. Likewise. Great to chat.
Jeffery Wang: Thank you. And that’s all for today’s episode of 10 Lessons Learned. A big thank you to our guest, Jameel Raymond, for sharing his incredible insights and lessons through his life. And thanks, as well to our amazing team, Cody Comeau, our episode editor, Yi Wang, who managed our marketing, social media, and our producer, Robert Hossary.
This podcast is supported by the Professional Development Forum and listeners like you. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s lessons. Drop us a line at podcast at 10lessonslearned. com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you’ll never miss a lesson that could change your life.
Thanks for tuning in to 10 Lessons Learned where we’re making the world a little wiser lesson by lesson. Thank you.

Thanks to our 10 Lessons team that make our show possible: Our Episode Editor Codie Comeau, Marketing and social media managed by Yi Wang, and our Producer Robert Hossary. Sponsored as always by Professional Development Forum. You can find the www.professionaldevelopmentforum.org.

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