I’d never seen one. White, black, sometimes red, but silver? Never. Until someone mentioned it in passing, and I thought: huh, do those even exist?
The next morning there was one in front of me at the traffic light. That afternoon another in the car park. The day after, four. By now I see them everywhere, as if half the country bought one this week.
Those cars were on the road all along, of course. I just didn’t see them. My brain had decided they didn’t matter and filtered them out, until the moment I found them interesting. Only then did it let them in.
And it’s exactly that invisible filter, the one that decides what you do and don’t see, that steers far more than which cars you notice. It colours how you experience your day, what you believe is possible, and who you think you are.
You live your paradigm as if it’s the truth
Bob Proctor calls that filter your paradigm: the whole set of beliefs and rules that was put into you early on. By your environment, your upbringing, the assumptions you picked up before you were old enough to weigh them. As a child your brain was a sponge; you took in the rules about how life works without question, as truth.
The insidious part: you don’t notice your paradigm. You experience it as reality itself. “That’s just how I am.” “That’s how it works for people like me.” Just like those silver Teslas: you don’t see what you don’t believe is there.
There are two layers in that. Your picture of how the world works, and your picture of who you are within it. This blog is about the second. About your self-image. Because that’s where you gain the most.
Why understanding isn’t enough
You’ve probably experienced it: a book that moves you, a conversation that opens something, a real aha moment. And a week later you do exactly the same as before.
That’s not on you. Your self-image and your habits live in an older, more sensitive part of your brain, and your willpower struggles to reach it. That’s why positive thinking on its own changes so little. You change that deeper part with images, repetition and emotion. That’s the language it understands. Something you feel often enough slowly becomes your new normal.
Sometimes the old breaks first
A new version of yourself rarely arrives neatly. Often the old one breaks first. Something falls away, a relationship, a role, a certainty, and there you stand with the question “who am I now, actually?”.
That empty feeling feels like loss. And yet it’s space: the place where something new can grow, precisely because the old no longer fills everything. I’ve stopped patching that emptiness up straight away. Because so much of who we think we are was once just a survival strategy. The rescuer. The people-pleaser. The one who’s “too much”. Cleverly devised, back then, to keep you safe. But a strategy is something other than an identity. You are more than your role, and more than what happened to you.
And here’s where scent comes in
This is the part I find the most beautiful myself. How do you change something in that older, inaccessible part of your brain? Through the fastest entrance you have: your nose.
Smell is the only sense with a direct line to that older brain. What you see and hear first passes a relay station before you become aware of it. Smell skips that and goes straight to the areas where emotion, memory and habits come together. Exactly the area you’re trying to reprogramme.
And here I like to be very precise. An oil works here like a keyring. You link a scent to an inner state, by using it the moment you call up and feel that state. Later, when you need that calm or that courage but you don’t quite feel it, just before that nerve-wracking conversation, that presentation, that step, the scent gives you back the entrance to the state you hung on it yourself.
So you are the source. The scent is the keyring of your new identity, and that identity is the key that opens the doors to new paths and possibilities.
The ritual: become it, before you feel it
This is how you build that key. Three steps, a few minutes a day.
Visualise. Close your eyes and be, just for a moment, the version of yourself you’re becoming. How does she walk, how does she talk, how does she breathe? Be her now, as if it’s already so.
Write. Take pen and paper and write in the present tense: “I’m someone who…” Pay attention to your everyday language too. “Maybe I could” is a different person than “I want”. Taking back your direct voice is embodying a different self.
Anchor. Choose one scent that works for YOU, the oil or blend you genuinely feel something with. That’s different for everyone, and that’s exactly why it’s yours. Put it on your wrists and your heart area and breathe it in deeply while you’re in that state. Every day at the same moment. That’s how that scent becomes your personal keyring, the one that opens that door for you alone.
And if you’re looking for something small to start with, do this: ask yourself one question every evening. What was the best part of today? It seems like nothing, but you train your brain to look for what’s good, and that slowly shifts your whole outlook. And with it, who you are.
My own keyring
For me that’s the Adaptiv Touch roll-on. Every day I link that scent to the version of myself I’m becoming. And that version is very concrete:
- I guard my calm and consciously plan time for myself, with attention to my de-stress moments.
- In my work I follow what’s truly mine. I choose the people I work with, and from that choice the right people come onto my path of their own accord.
- I move every day with pleasure and joy, and I eat what nourishes me.
- And with everything I ask myself one thing: does this give me energy, or does it cost me energy?
My morning starts with a ritual that does for my body what the scent does for my head. A green drink with which I tell my cells: there is abundance for me, no scarcity.
My morning shake
- 1 serving of VMG+ (the green superfood drink)
- 1 sachet of EO Mega+ stirred through
- a scoop of whey protein
- top up with water or plant-based milk and mix well
Every morning I repeat the same message this way, with scent, food and attention: this is who I am now.
Back to the Tesla
Remember those silver cars? The moment you decide who you’re becoming, exactly the same thing happens. You start to see the evidence that was always there: the chances, the people, the small moments that fit your new self. Your filter changes, and with it what you let in. And an idea only becomes an identity when you let that evidence count, until it sinks from “something I’m trying” to “just who I am”.
It goes in waves, at its own pace. Sometimes something shifts because you feel seen, sometimes because you wait until it becomes clear. That patience is part of who you’re becoming.
This is your turning point
Your paradigm has brought you this far. And it doesn’t have to steer you for the rest of your life. Your old self may break, you may let go of your role, and your new self you may embody daily, in small repeated steps. With a scent as an anchor, a pen, and one honest question each evening.
That dot in GOOD. is exactly this moment. Stop hoping that you’ll change. Start being who you want to be. Today.
Love, Tanja