Have you ever thought about buying a car - a specific make, a specific colour - and then suddenly seen it everywhere? Same model, same shade, sometimes the same trim. You would swear there were more of them on the road than there were last week.

There aren't. They were always there. You just weren't looking.

There is a part of your brain called the reticular activating system. It sounds complicated.The job it does is very simple. Every second of every day, your senses are taking in millions of pieces of information - sounds, sights, sensations, data of every kind. Your brain cannot process all of it. So it makes a decision about what matters and what doesn't. It lets through
the things that are relevant to you and filters out the rest.

The car you've been thinking about? Relevant. Every other car on the same road? Not relevant. Gone. If you want to test this, try it today. Pick a make and model - any one you like. A red Mini. A white Tesla. A silver Volvo. Spend a few seconds picturing it. Then go about your day. I would be surprised if you didn't start seeing it on every journey. Not because more of them appeared overnight. Because your brain now knows to let them through. This is useful. Without this filter you'd be overwhelmed before you got to the end of the street. And yet it means something important: your brain is not showing you reality. It is showing you a version of reality. A filtered version, shaped by what it has decided matters
to you.

And here is the thing. You are the one who decides what matters. Not always consciously. We absorb our filters from the world around us. From what we were told growing up. From what we experienced. From the stories we have told ourselves so many times they stopped feeling like stories and started feeling like facts.

For a lot of people, the filter around money is set to scarcity. To difficulty. To evidence that getting ahead is hard and staying ahead is harder. And so that is what they see. Not because it is the only truth available - there is often evidence on both sides - but because that is what the brain has been told to find.

They notice the bill that arrived but not the month they paid everything on time. They see the price that went up but not the raise that came through. The filter is efficient. It finds exactly what it was instructed to find.

I see this regularly in my work. Two people in genuinely similar financial situations can feel completely differently about where they stand. One sees problems. The other sees possibilities. The numbers are not that different. The filter is.

We say, about most things in life: I'll believe it when I see it.

What if it works the other way?

What if you see it when you believe it?

This is not wishful thinking. This is how the brain actually functions. You change the filter, you change what you notice. You change what you notice, and gradually you change what you act on - the opportunities you spot, the conversations you start, the options you try. Not because the world changed. Because you started seeing a different version of it.

The person who is convinced there is never enough will find evidence for that everywhere. Their reticular activating system is brilliant at its job. The person who genuinely believes that money flows, that things can shift, that there are often options - they are running a different filter through the same world.

This doesn't mean pretending things are fine when they're not. It doesn't mean ignoring real problems. It means asking an honest question: what has my brain been told to look for? And is that actually serving me?

Because if you are only filtering for proof that things are hard, you will keep seeing proof that things are hard. That is the filter doing exactly what you trained it to do.

The red cars are already out there. The question is whether your brain is letting them through.