Who creates the stories we believe in? Who promises us a better life? How do we create our own stories for the life we want?

Brands – created by businesses, institutions, countries, politicians and individuals – are the modern storytellers. A successful brand does not exist without the story it weaves to attract us. These stories take shape through words, images, colours, and emotions, consistently shared until they become ingrained in our consciousness. Eventually, a glance at a logo, a flag, or a celebrity is enough to trigger our neurons, evoking deep, automatic emotions. And just like that, we’re in.

It is time for us to create our own stories for the world we want to see.

We don’t need to appear on a world stage to share our own stories and shape the world we want; we can learn from brands, the supercharged storytellers of our time. Their skills are apparent in their success. A logo, a visual and verbal imprint of a story, allows us to share our own story with our identity and values.

Logos are powerful. At first, we are drawn to the imagery: symbols, faces, flags, colours and words – each triggering emotions that grow stronger with familiarity. Over time, we become hardwired to respond to the values they represent. (Think of your favourite logo – how does it make you feel?) But beyond the physical appearance and the psychological and emotional imprint, there is a deeper level: a shamanic, or quantum energy field that we can all tap into. By using our own imagery, infused with intention and emotion, we can manifest our personal narratives and create profound shifts. Logos, in this sense, are the modern sacred bundles of the shamanic world.

John recounts in one of his books how several executives from a famous brand joined him in the rainforest to learn shapeshifting. This made perfect sense to me – when a person wears or displays a brand logo we perceive them differently based on what the logo represents. The executives grasped this insight but ultimately left the company. That’s the power of storytelling and identity.

Right now, the dominant stories circling the globe are alarming, not only because they are new but because they threaten to dismantle the familiar structures we rely on. Personally, I do my best to remain both physically and mentally disentangled from these narratives. Yet, we can all ‘sense’ the shift happening around us and this is the realm in which shamans operate. John asserts that we are all shamans—those who work with the unformed world of imagination to bring change into the physical realm.

When we shift our attention from the current narratives with uncertain endings, we reclaim our energy and stop feeding the stories that do not serve us. Only then can we begin to create our own stories infused with the intentions for the future we want. By utilising the same tools as brands and tapping into our innate imagination, we select our imagery, we sculpt our words, we invoke our colours, and we blend them into a cohesive image that embodies our personal narrative to form a new story. Ours.

This is what John advocates. It is the shamanic way, deeply aligned with quantum perspectives. As connected individuals, we are far more powerful than we realize.

If you want to know more about John’s work see https://johnperkins.org/economichitmanbook

Learn to create your own intentional logo at https://bit.ly/4enPTPQ

We wear masks often to identify a part of ourselves. Masks form a visible interface between us and the rest of the world so we are seen with our chosen tribe, those aligned with the same future aspirations.

We go to war on a flag, display our loyalty to a sports team that rarely wins, wear our religious symbol in the belief that we are aligned with the chosen one and stroke our egos with logos publicised by our celebrity heroes. We even embellish our nails, face, skin or hair to mask our natural appearance that we find unacceptable (says who?)

After time we begin to believe that we are the mask, but whose mask is it? Each version of the above has been carefully designed and delivered by someone else to create their own success. They can’t do this without followers.

Nowhere has this mask been exploited more than by brands. Logos are bait that tempts us with desires including quality, longevity, happiness, nutrition, beauty, health and success and they do it so effectively, we are hooked.

Soft drinks and fast foods are known to have detrimental on our health, but the logos and ads are such fun, why would we not want to be seen participating in that team?

High end fashion brands make sure we see their logos on their clothing such as sweatshirts, scarves, bags, shoes, hats and so on but the clothes themselves usually don’t last whether due to poor quality or strategic fashion change, and inevitably end up in landfill or building further the giant fabric mountains in Africa.

When we look behind the mask we are often confronted with a version of the Emperor’s new clothes, and see how we have fallen for the temptation to identify with a vision created by someone else. Learn to look behind the masks of the brands you love and design your own using the same effective strategies.

Don’t make your own identifying logo a mask. Build it from the core of your heart and the longing of your soul; express your love, not greed, for the future you want, your better place in a better world. That is how we create the change we need, by changing, identifying and sharing our intention. This is what logos do best.

‘You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.’ Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Learn to create your own intentional logo at  https://bit.ly/4ayC3rv