Episode 37 - When Intellect Blocks The Door To Trust

What if the hardest parts of your day weren’t random at all, but signposts pointing you toward deeper alignment and real peace? We dig into a bold idea: most struggles trace back to three triggers—natural events, other people’s choices, and our own—and the way through is less about control and more about trust. When we live with God in mind before we act, conversations shift, tension eases, and outcomes become clearer, not because life gets easy, but because our motives get clean.

We share a vivid story that flips expectations: taking a first step toward prayer and walking out to find your car towed. Is that failure—or a test that reveals why you started in the first place? We unpack the difference between chasing transactions and building a relationship, and why early resistance often shows up just when you try to do the right thing. Once intention is grounded, the results become more connected to your actions, and the noise dies down. You’ll also hear a candid critique of “being too smart for your own good,” where overanalysis, ego, and academic pride can block the very peace the mind is trying to engineer.

This conversation is practical. You’ll get a simple one-day experiment: pause for five to ten seconds before key moments, acknowledge God, set your intention, and then move. Try it before tough emails, meetings, family talks, or money decisions. Watch how your tone changes, how people respond, and how your inner state steadies. We explore why humility isn’t weakness, how trust lightens the mental load, and why real strength comes from letting go of the need to be right. If you’ve felt stuck in friction at work or at home, this is a grounded way to test a different path—no jargon, just practice.

If this lands, subscribe for more, share with a friend who needs a lift, and leave a review telling us which moment hit you hardest. Your stories help us shape future conversations and help others find the show.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Life’s Three Triggers
• 1:05 People Respond To Your God Focus
• 2:23 Early Tests And Hidden Resistance
• 4:33 Passing Trials And Clear Rewards
• 5:38 Emuna Versus Overactive Intellect
• 9:12 Ego, Humility, And Real Growth
• 11:39 A One-Day Trust Experiment
• 12:14 Closing And Listener Actions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:11

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining. Today's episode continues. We pick up on the heels of what we were discussing yesterday, namely the fact that there are three triggers, there are three catalysts that set us off every single day in every difficult situation, every challenge is whittled down to three sources. And we said that one of them is natural causes, or in our mind, quote unquote natural causes. Natural means God, by the way, such as an illness. Number two is an external force of an individual who has free choice. And number three is our own free choice. Those three elements are what can contribute to making our life difficult. And I just shared with you an amazing story the other day about a good friend of mine who was faced with challenges by coworkers who seemingly have free choice. You would think that if you meet somebody on the street, you have a conversation with them, you can ask from them things and they can decide whether or not to do for you. They can decide whether to do good, bad, or otherwise. But in reality, every single individual will respond to you based on your relationship with your creator. If you have your creator's desires in mind all the time, you're always contemplating God before you do anything, then people around you, whether they even recognize it themselves or not, will respond to you in kind in a similar manner. So if you have people who are giving you static, people at work, people in the family, in the community, wherever, who are giving you a hard time, constantly pushing back on you, family, loved ones who you're having a hard time in relationships with, start to live a godly life. When you live a godly life and you make decisions like my friend made just the other day, you will see unbelievable things happen. And he saw it quickly. Why did he get the merit to see it so quickly? Because in general, the way that our relationship with our creator works is if this is all new for you guys, if going into the office this morning and trying to recognize that there is a God who is on your shoulder, who loves you, who controls absolutely everything around you and wants it all to be for your best, if only you do his will, then you go in with the strongest superpower in the world at your back. You have no fear, you have no hatred, you have no jealousy, you have no sadness, you have none of the negativity because you understand how the world works. We're giving it over to you. If you do that, then you succeed. If you don't do that, then you will be faced with challenges that are seemingly insurmountable. Now, in the beginning, in the early days, when you're doing that, you're going to work and you're starting to try to incorporate him into your life, this thing called the evil inclination steps in. But more than that, more than that, it says it very clearly in the Torah that God is testing you to see what's in your heart. Why are you going to do the things that you're doing? Do you believe them or you just want to test it out? Both of them are perfectly legitimate. You can try to test him out in the early stages to figure out if he's there. But ultimately, he's going to test you to see what's in your heart. So that's why when you're getting this relationship going and you make an effort in a direction that you otherwise wouldn't make, you're faced with serious challenges that go against you. You try to do good. You go to synagogue in the morning to pray for the first time, you come out and your car is towed. That's the challenge. Wait a second. I came to do good, I came to crystallize all of these amazing concepts that I've been learning, and that's my reward? My reward for coming to pray is that my car gets towed and now I'm late for work and I've got to pay hundreds of dollars to get my car out and my day shot? And the answer is yes. Why? Because he wants to know what's in your heart. Why are you doing the things that you're doing? Are you looking to really establish a relationship with him? Or are you trying to take what Jesse's telling you and what other people who care about you are telling you and manipulate the system for your benefit? In other words, are you so steeped in the immorality and corruption of humanity that now you're looking at these ideas or hearing these words and taking them as an opportunity to use them as loopholes to manipulate the system to be able to get even more out of this life? God knows what's in your heart, and that's why he tests you. Now, when you pass the test, when he knows that you're doing things for the right reason and you're on a path of growth just like my friend was the other day, then the rewards or the consequences are much more clear and much more apparent and much more connected to the action because he knows you're in it for the right reason already. He knows that you want to connect to him. Now there's no more games. You're not playing with him, and he's not playing with you. You're not following his edicts because you want to manipulate the system. You're doing it because you really want to have a relationship with him, and he is done testing you to prove to yourself, because he knows what's in your heart, that these tests are really to prove to yourself why you're in this in the first place. Once you've passed that test, my friends, the door opens up. Now, we also talked about the difference between emuna and intellect. Intellect in Hebrew, we have a term for people who are too smart. We call them chokmologs. In other words, that's like their profession is to be smart. There are people in this world, whether they are really that smart or not is besides the point. Most of them are really that smart, but there are many who would like to think that they are. And that intellect not only harms them, but it stops them from getting into this relationship with their creator because they think so highly of themselves. And so as a result of that, they're constantly analyzing life through the lens of the material world, science and math and probabilities and statistics. That's the lens that they see this life through. And that's what they utilize in order to be able to manage their lives. They're always on, they're always thinking, they're always dissecting every situation so that they can understand it better than the next person can. That person we call a chokmolog, he's just too smart for his own good. You know people like this. I know plenty, unfortunately. These are people that are not willing to push the pause button on their brain. These are people who are not willing to say, I got it wrong. These are people who are not willing to resign even for a moment and even when it's for their best, because somehow it takes a strip off of them. Somehow it demotes them. They're not as good. And these people are often the ones who are in trouble. You see this a lot in the world when you see people who are the ones rallying against God in his Torah. These are the people with every degree in the book. These are people oftentimes immersed entirely in the education system. These are the professors, right? And there's no coincidences that they're the professors because they're chomologues. Intellect is their superpower. And so they ride with that their whole life. And therefore, they have to prove not just to themselves, but to the whole world, just how smart they are. And the last thing that they can do, if they're really that smart, is turn off their faculties, right? Because it flies in the face of who they are. It defies their character. These people will always have the most difficulty coming closer to the creator. The more money they have, the more success they have, the more capable they think they are, and the more they think it's all them. They attribute all these successes to themselves. How narrow-minded can one person be? How egotistical can one person be to think that it all starts and stops with me? You see the whole world, people who are just as smart as you, people who are just as capable or more capable than you are, people who are wiser, people who have many more years of experience, more degrees, and yet they can't put two and two together. They can't make ends meet. And you think that somehow you're on the same level, you graduated the same school, the same degrees, you're printing money, and this person can't get two nickels to rub together, and you think it's all you, and I can show you example after example, and the opposite is true. I will show you people who have almost no education, haven't finished high school, certainly not university, post-secondary education, are operating in countries where they can barely speak the native language of the country, and all they can do is print money. All they can do is be successful. Everything that they touch turns to gold. How do you explain that? They don't have your degrees, they don't have your wisdom, they can't even speak the native language. And yet these people are making money hand over fist. If they have anything, they have material wealth and status. That you're chasing. Most of these professors are making peanuts, working in a university, teaching everybody just how smart they are. But in reality, they themselves haven't accomplished much other than the intellect that's in their brain, that they've taken the physicality and perfected the science that's been taught to them. Or they have photographic memory. They were born, brought into this world, like we just said, a natural occurrence. Look at how smart I am. Who gave you that wisdom? Who gave you the ability to dissect, to understand on a whole other level? God gave it to you, and he gave it to you so that you can apply it in his world, not in your world, but instead you took it and applied it to this world, and you applied none of it to his world. He gave you that ability to understand difficult concepts and that photographic memory because he wants you to take his Torah and make this world better than anybody else can with your intellect. And instead, you've taken it and given it to a finite science, a world that is limited by time and space. That's how we operate, my friends, especially if you're too smart for your own good. Sometimes it's good, not just good, but sometimes it's a breath of fresh air. It is a weight off of your chest in a world that can't wait to put more on you, to load more onto your shoulders. The best way to offload so much of that weight is to say, God, I don't get it. I don't know why these people won't talk to me. I don't know why my boss won't give me a raise. I don't know why I keep fighting with X, Y, and Z. But what I know is that I have to look inwards, not outwards. I can't understand everything outside of me. The only thing I can understand is me, who I am, and how to improve the person that I am. If you're willing and able to check your ego so that you can say such a statement that I don't know and I'm willing to learn and I know nothing, if you're able to say those things, to take your ego out of the equation and work on your modesty, then that, my friends, is the trick. That is the key that opens the door to your own perfection, to your own spiritual and emotional well-being. Try it today. Go to work in the car, recognize you've got a God. He knows everything, he controls everything, he runs the show. Remember that. Enlist him in everything that you do. Try it. Try it for a day. Everything I do, God, I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna have a quick five-second conversation with you, 10 seconds, and insert you into the situation. And I want to see how my day ends. And I can guarantee you, my friends, you will be blown away by the difference that a day can have with God versus without. Try it today, my friends. You won't regret it. We'll speak again tomorrow. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.