You cannot buy their lifestyle.

Anyone who is selling you their personal lifestyle is unlikely to have sold you something of lasting impact and value.

Someone's personal lifestyle achievement is less about them having discovered some kind of deep, rare secret that no one else has discovered yet, and much more about:

- Fate patterns and karmic patterns which are generally misunderstood or ignored by the modern Western mind
- The mechanics of their particular body and personality and how it interacts with others around them
- Luck (also part of fate patterns): where they were born, who they were born to, the resources and freedoms available in their society
- Intersections of their identity and presentation that afford them more or less opportunity (such as race, sex, gender, etc.)
- Health status and where they are at any given time on the spectrum of able/disabled

.... and a lot of other things.

This doesn't mean they didn't work hard or put in a lot of effort and intention into achieving their current circumstances. It also doesn't mean they don't have anything of value to share or teach. It just means that their arrival at such a point does not automatically equip them to transfer ANY of that to you.

Because, you are not them. They are not you. You are two completely different people. You are not being touched, guided, conditioned or influenced by the same forces.

A practitioner who can help you in a way that is much more likely to last is someone who is seeing YOU, not projecting themselves and their own life onto you. A practitioner who can see you clearly is not thinking about themselves when they look at you. Their self falls away into the background. They can guide you through authentic choices and shifts that are best for you personally that have nothing to do with what the practitioners' life looks like.

When I was being trained a community organizer to deeply connect with community members in one-to-one meetings, my mentors described that doing this correctly would feel like an "out of body experience."

A fallacy has been perpetuated and echoed throughout the personal development world that "you cannot coach someone past a point that you have not been yourself." This maxim has truth to it in the sense that you cannot impart spiritual maturity or integrity onto someone else if you have not cultivated it for yourself. But do you have to have done/experienced/have a life similar to your client in order to guide them through what they need to do? Not at all.

In Human Design terms specifically, this is part of the magic of being a projector.