You’re Not Stuck, You’ve Misplaced Your Imagination
Christian Ray Flores here —
The XE Newsletter is for experts and leaders building personal brands that grow both impact and income.
I send it twice a week:
Sunday is free.
Wednesday is for paid subscribers — with private chat access, VIP treatment in monthly deep dives, and our team’s gratitude.
This keeps the same structure but adds that single impact + income benefit hook to make it stick in the reader’s mind.
Pulse of The Week
I take a break from our monthly live deep dive webinars for subscribers in the summer. As I’m looking to the fall, here are a few topics that seem to have hit a nerve. Can you vote for your preferred ones and make sure you claim a spot when I post them?
Opportunities
Our sponsor is Third Drive Media — the team behind every logo, website, social post, and video you’ve seen from me.
They don’t take on many new clients, but when they do, the results turn heads and open doors.
If you want your brand, campaign, or video to actually stand out — now’s the moment.
Click here to check out the work and set up a call before their next slots disappear.
In My Headspace
After you read the post, go back and watch this short Joe Dispenza video that unpacks in more detail why we focus so much on the power of our thoughts, imagination and creativity.
You’re Not Stuck, You’ve Misplaced Your Imagination
As children, we are a volcano of imagination.
By the time we have a career, status and endless responsibilities — that volcano is pretty much dormant. We stop imagining a future in living color and get stuck in the endless execution of the things that are expected of us.
Paraphrasing Joe Dispenza, If you want a shift in your personal reality, you must change your personality. If your life has no room for daily — yes, daily — exercises in imagination, no amount of inspiring podcasts, cold plunges, or supplements will change a thing. If you awaken the volcano — things will start to shift.
Here are three core changes you can and should make to do just that, illustrated by a story:
In high school, I often found myself bored in class, my mind wandering far from the monotony of the Soviet educational system, exacerbated by my ADHD and the boring uniforms we had to wear. It felt like a scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but on steroids.
In my daydreams, I’d scribble in my school notebooks anything but the subject my poor teachers were trying to teach me — logos of Western brands like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Nike, and Sony — icons of a world brimming with opportunity yet blocked by the absurd Iron Curtain. I would also scribble the names and logos of Western bands like Queen, Michael Jackson, ACDC, and Kiss, whose concerts I would probably never see in person.
It’s hard to overstate how distant these symbols and ideas were from my reality. There was no bridge or ladder I could take to them in my reality, and yet…
They sparked a domino effect of small steps that would seem impractical, unrealistic and borderline foolish. In the decades that followed, that domino effect took me to my first career success as a recording artist. I had endorsement deals with Adidas, Guess, and Head & Shoulders. My posters were in Adidas stores, and ads ran across 15 countries. My musical inspiration — Michael Jackson — came to a charity event I was one of the organizers for. In a different career as founder of a production company in the US, I worked and recorded artists with the producer and in the studio of Kiss. In yet another role as a podcaster, I interviewed a top executive of Coca-Cola.
I would have never believed any of this was even possible when I was bored out of my mind in the Soviet classroom.
Today, a big part of my work with the extraordinary people at Xponential is the awakening of the imaginative life. What I hear every day of every week is how hard it is for us to turn our imaginations back on and — I think I have heard this somewhere — “become like little children” (Matthew 18:3).
So what are these 3 shifts?
1. A daily time of imagination — yes, that simple of an idea seems impossible in a productivity-obsessed culture.
2. A daily time of play — ideas are not just thought by children, they are enacted. Same for us — what we imagine must be played with, no matter how distant from a possible reality it is.
3. A group of playmates — people who want to play together. This is precisely why we have cohorts in Xponential. We play every single week, enacting ideas that are not yet a reality.
One of my early heroes, with whom I spent countless imaginative hours virtually, listening either to his music as an artist or as the producer of some of my favorite artists, was George Duke. In a surreal turn of events, we ended up collaborating on a project and I interviewed him. When I asked him for one single personality trait that was common to all the artists he produced who became a global success, he answered:
“They could see themselves succeeding before they were successful.”
Your volcano isn’t dead — it’s dormant. And every day you leave it that way, you’re living a smaller story than you were made for. Wake it up.
Hit reply and tell me how this hit you.