You have probably heard someone say you need to raise your frequency. It sounds good. It is also usually left there, with no explanation of what it means or how you would actually do it.
So here is what I mean when I use the word, why I think it matters more than strategy, and what you can do with it this week.
Two people, same market
Picture two entrepreneurs. Same industry, same offer, same price, same city.
One sees opportunity everywhere. A conversation at a networking event turns into a client. A quiet month is a chance to build something. A no is information.
The other sees reasons. The market is saturated. People are not buying right now. That conversation was a waste of time.
Same world, two completely different experiences of it. And over a few years, two completely different businesses.
The difference between them is what I call frequency.
What frequency actually is
When I talk about your frequency, I mean the state you operate from. It is made of what you believe about yourself, what you expect to happen, how you feel most of the time, and where your attention goes.
The clearest definition I have come across is in Nero Knowledge's book Outsmarting Reality, which describes frequency as a mix of your beliefs, expectations, focus, emotions, perceptions and reactions. I like it because it takes the word out of the clouds. Every part of it is something you can notice in yourself today.
There is a literal frequency in your brain too. Your brain runs on electrical rhythms, which I have written about in The five brainwave states and what each one does. And here is something worth knowing: when people say "higher frequency", they rarely mean faster. In your brain, faster often means more stressed. What changes as you move up is how settled and coherent your state is. Less noise, less tension, more clarity.
The levels you can live from
The way I picture it, there are levels to how you can live. Same person, same skills, same market, operating from completely different states.
Survival. Fear, scarcity and proving. Every decision is about not losing. You take the client you should have turned down because you are scared the next one will not come.
Striving. Effort, force and wanting. You are working hard to get somewhere you believe you are not. It gets results, and it is exhausting, because every result has to be pushed into place.
Certainty. Calm, clear and choosing. You decide from what you know you are worth. You name your price and you are fine with the answer either way.
Creation. Ease and inspired action. Things move because you are no longer in your own way. Ideas arrive, people come to you, and the work feels like an expression of who you are.
Each level has its own frequency: its own mix of beliefs, feelings, expectations and attention. And each one sees a different world.
The version of you who already has it
Somewhere above where you are now is the version of you who already has what you are after. The business. The income. The relationship. The body. The calm.
That version of you is rarely doing more than you. What is different is the level they are operating from. They think differently, expect differently and feel differently, so they notice different opportunities and make different decisions. The results follow from that.
Here is the part that changes everything. You do not get there by grinding your way up from the level below. Effort from the striving level produces more striving. You get there by learning to operate from that level now, before the evidence arrives.
That is what the work in hypnosis is for. You experience that version of you first hand, in detail, and your mind responds to a vividly imagined experience in much the same way it responds to a real one. It gives your mind a blueprint to work towards. I have written more about that in Why understanding your problem doesn't fix it.
Your brain shows you what it is tuned to
So why does the level you live from shape what happens to you? Because it decides what you notice.
Your brain cannot take in everything around you. There is far too much. So it filters, and it filters based on what it already believes matters.
There is a famous experiment that shows this. Researchers asked people to watch a short video of a group passing a basketball and to count the passes. Partway through, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the scene, beats their chest and walks off. Around half of the people watching did not see it.
The gorilla was there the whole time. They were simply not tuned to it.
- Inbox
- Referral
- Late payment
- Team call
- Invoice sent
- Warm lead
- Competitor's launch
- Lunch
- Speaking invite
- School run
- Unread reply
- Gym
- Content plan
- Price objection
- Collaboration idea
- Admin
- Supplier email
- Quiet week
- Repeat client
- Diary check
- Bad review
- Coffee meeting
- Introduction
- Proposal draft
I think of it like your social media feed. The more you engage with something, the more of it you are shown, until it feels like that is all there is. Your brain does the same. Live in survival, and it keeps showing you threats. Live in certainty, and it starts showing you openings that were there all along.
Your brain also works by prediction. It uses what has happened before to predict what will happen next, and then it looks for evidence that it was right. If your past taught you that putting yourself forward ends badly, your brain predicts exactly that, notices every sign that supports it, and quietly skips past the signs that do not.
That is what I mean when I say your external reality is a direct reflection of your internal state. Your state decides what you notice, what you notice drives your decisions, and your decisions build your results.
Energy: people feel your state
Energy is the word people use for something real and very ordinary: the state you bring into a room.
Researchers call part of it emotional contagion. We pick up the emotions of the people around us, often without realising, through their face, their voice and their posture.
You have felt it. The person who walks in and the whole room relaxes. The salesperson whose desperation you can sense before they have said a word.
Your prospects feel yours. If you go into a sales call needing the client, they feel the need. If you go in settled and certain of the value of what you do, they feel that instead. The script can be identical. The result will not be.
Wanting keeps it away
When you want something, you are quietly telling yourself you do not have it. Wanting puts it in the future and keeps you living in the gap.
"I want to be successful" is a statement of lack. "I am successful" is a statement of who you are, and it changes how you decide, how you act and what you expect.
This is why so much of my work happens at the level of identity. You cannot live on the level of someone who already has it while you are still living as the person who is waiting for it.
State first, then action
Hard work matters. But action taken from the wrong state tends to produce more of the same.
Action taken from fear looks like discounting, over-delivering, chasing, and posting because you feel you should. Action taken from certainty looks like naming your price, following up without apologising, and saying no to the wrong client.
On paper they are the same kind of actions. The energy behind them is completely different, and so are the results.
Change the state first, and the right actions become obvious.
Why the old level pulls you back
If changing your state were simply a decision, you would have done it already.
Your old level has years of evidence behind it. It is familiar, and familiar feels safe, even when it is costing you. So when you start to shift, expect it to pull you back. The doubt gets louder just before things change. The old habits suddenly look reasonable again.
That pull is the old identity defending itself. Treat it as a sign the change has started.
Consciousness: the part of you that can notice
Underneath all of this is consciousness, the part of you that is aware.
You can watch a thought arrive. You can notice fear rise in your chest before a call and say to yourself, there it is again. The part of you doing the noticing is separate from the fear it is noticing.
That ability to step back and observe is where every change starts, because you cannot change a level you cannot see. Carl Jung made the same point in his own way, and I wrote about it in Carl Jung's map of the mind.
How to move up a level
Five steps you can use today.
- Catch it. Several times a day, ask yourself: what am I feeling right now, and what am I expecting to happen? Write it down. You are learning to see which level you are on.
- Feel it fully. When something heavy comes up, do not push it away or talk yourself out of it. Let yourself feel it in your body until it settles. From that calmer place, you can choose a different view of what happened.
- Question it. Ask: is this true, or is it a conclusion I drew from old evidence? Then ask: who would I be without it?
- Meet the future you first thing. The first and last minutes of the day are when your mind is most open. Spend a few of them as the version of you who already has it: how they feel, what they expect, what they will do today. That is exactly what the Morning State Protocol is for, and you can get it free with Magnetic to Money.
- Act from there. Pick one thing today that the version of you who already has it would do without hesitation, and do it before the old level has time to argue.
If something heavy comes up while you do this, stop, and speak to someone you trust or a qualified professional.
What this means for you
Your results are not random, and they are not only about effort. They come from the level you operate from, and that level can change.
The version of you who already has it is a state, and states can be learned.
To see how I help people make that shift at the root, go to The Rewire Code.