The Inner Wealth Podcast

Ep217. The Expectation Gap — The Real Reason You’re Not Getting What You Want.

• Mike Kitko

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In this episode, Mike breaks down one of the most important — and misunderstood — principles of manifestation: you don’t get what you want… you get what you expect. He dives deep into how expectations are wired into your nervous system, why your ego, subconscious, and body are the same thing, and how negative expectations sabotage success even when you’re doing everything “right.” This is a masterclass in energetic alignment and internal reprogramming — straight from the front lines of personal evolution.

Key Takeaways

  1. You Don’t Get What You Want — You Get What You Expect
    Until your nervous system believes it’s safe to receive, it will sabotage anything that doesn’t feel familiar.
  2. Your Nervous System, Ego, and Subconscious Are All the Same Thing
    They're just different words for the same internal wiring — the filter through which you create reality.
  3. Your Nervous System Was Formed Before You Could Choose
    Childhood beliefs and family patterns shaped your expectations — and they still run the show.
  4. Self-Sabotage Is Just Expectation Misalignment
    If you want more than you expect to receive, you’ll subconsciously push it away when it shows up.
  5. The Work Is in the Body
    Shadow work, meditation, future embodiment — these aren’t mindset tools, they’re nervous system tools.

Notable Quotes

  • “You can't have whatever you want, because you get what you expect.”
  • “Your nervous system, your ego, and your subconscious are all the same things.”
  • “If you're used to struggling financially, your nervous system literally wants to keep you there because it knows how to operate there.”
  • “What I haven't done a great job of is, what do you want? And then dig a layer deeper and say, listen — what do you really expect to have?”
  • “In the battle between your wants and your expectations, your expectations will win every time.”

Call to Action

📘 Inner World, Outer World is available now on Amazon —
This book is the map. Your nervous system is the terrain.
👉 Order Now

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This is where the dream becomes real.

Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

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Mike Kitko is an executive self-mastery coach, speaker and author. He found external success through powerful titles, incomes, and material possessions. He ultimately fell into depression, toxic abuse of alcohol, and the near collapse of his family before he began a journey of internal happiness and success.

Speaker 1:

Do you ever wake up feeling like there's something missing in your life? Do you ever feel the need to escape your business? Are you running your life or is your life running you? I'm Mike Kitko and I'll help you design and create a life so authentic and aligned with who you really are you'll get excited just to wake up. I'll help you create real wealth, success and freedom from the inside out. Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day, ever since the I guess, the collapse of my circumstances in my life back in 2016,.

Speaker 1:

Life back in 2016. It's been a um, the. You know what? What is that? Nine years coming up on a decade? Um, the? That was. That's the process.

Speaker 1:

The nine years I've been exploring the process of creating higher, higher level circumstances in my life and and expanding, you know, my, my health and my wealth and my success and my love and my relationship, and and it's been. It's been a complete reboot. It's been everything in my life has changed. I've lost a shit ton of weight. I've rebuilt my marriage. I've rebuilt my health. I've built a business. I uh, instead of going back to corporate, I've built a business and I have a pretty significant impact in this world. So, uh, like, like this, this podcast, you know, the the inner wealth podcast has been listened to on six continents, 103 countries around the world, almost 1600 cities, and I feel that that's pretty significant and a lot of those countries and a lot of those cities they're they're repeat listeners. It's like they're coming back for more and that's pretty cool to know that. You know to wake up and know that there's people all around the world listening to your voice and that's pretty cool. That's a you know, when, 10 years ago, I would, I just released the next book for, you know, for the business and for my life, and it's called, it's called Inner World, outer World, and it released, it launched on August 19th 2025. And that just happened to be my birthday and I get feedback from people that that are getting benefit and getting value out of that book.

Speaker 1:

And and people are feeding me back some of the content and, and you know, even in my mastermind, when we have the interwealth mastermind, you know, people are quoting certain chapters and talk about the, the impact of certain chapters you're having on their life. Like, like in the um in today, on our our mastermind call, we talked about, uh, about one of the one of the members mentioned that the chapter on beliefs create your reality. What she said was the way I explained how that's so. The way I explained how beliefs create reality, because I didn't make up that concept, but the way I explained it really had a profound impact on her life and it just she's heard it before but it never really sunk in and and it has sunk in at a deeper level and now she can operate from that awareness, now that this stuff comes at me all the time and I love that. I love that and it feels really good I'm going to be honest. It feels good to walk into a room and have people recognize you and you know, know the work that you're doing and you know I had the last meetup that I was at here in the local St Louis area. I actually had a fella come up and bring his family Joe you know who you are bring his family up to introduce him to me and then explain who I was and what I did. And they mentioned that they bought copies of the book and everybody in the family they were going to read it together and they were going to, and that's really cool that those things happen and I really feels good to to bring something to the world and to impact the world and to make a mark and to have people affirm that the work that I'm doing and the air that I'm breathing is valuable and and that is valuable and that I'm a benefit to society. It feels really good. 10 years ago, there was one intention that I had, and that was just to make more money for myself, and now I do certainly make good money and my family does very, very well, but really it's the impact. The money comes because of the impact, and as the impact increases, so does the wealth and so does the accumulation, so does the prosperity we enjoy.

Speaker 1:

Now, one thing I've learned on this journey is and I've said, you know I'm going to do a dramatic pause and then I'm going to anchor this thought and this concept into a higher level understanding. But what I've shared is you can't have what you want Dramatic pause but you get what you expect. You can't have whatever you want Because you get what you expect, and it's only when what you want and what you expect are equal that that will come into your life, when your wants and your expectations are equal, but you can't have whatever you want. Because if you want something but you expect not to have it, but you can't have whatever you want, because if you, if you, want something but you expect not to have it, you won't. Okay, I'm going to spend the rest of this episode unpacking this concept and helping you understand from my understanding, from, from my experience. I'm going to help you understand where all of this lives and how to. How to rearrange what, what you expect in this world, because until you rearrange what you expect, then you're not going to get what you want, and that's what we're all after.

Speaker 1:

The Inner Wealth Podcast is not just about finding higher levels of peace inside. It's about finding higher levels of prosperity in the world and enjoying both, both a rich inner life and a rich external life. Okay, so you can't have anything you want, but you'll always get what you expect. But when your wants and your expectations, when they match, you'll get what you expect and what you want, because they're the same. Now here's what I've learned.

Speaker 1:

Okay, your beliefs, your expectations, the stories that you tell yourself, your worries, your doubts, your fears all of this stuff resides in your nervous system. Okay, in your nervous system, in you know you've got. You've got this brain, you've got this spinal column, you've got these nor uh um paths that that contain all the neurons in your body and the tentacles that that bring, bring electrical charges to the body, to the arms and the legs, and this comprises your nervous system. Now, I'm not a nervous system expert, I'm not a scientist, but it's pretty simple, but not easy, right to understand. So I'm talking to the simplicity of the nervous system and I know it's rudimentary and I know it's elementary, but just stick with me, because you've got this basic nervous system and inside of this nervous system, inside of your nervous system, are all of your perspectives, your preferences, your beliefs, your expectations, your worries, doubts, fears, your anxieties. All of it is contained within your nervous system. All right, and we live the internal. Our internal life is basically living as the nervous system and we can change that and rearrange the nervous system anytime we want, and I've done a bunch of podcast episodes about that. In fact, the last one, the last podcast episode, was all about four meditations that'll rearrange the nervous system.

Speaker 1:

All right, now, when we are young and even when we come into this world, our expectations are formed, our beliefs are formed, our nervous system is formed. Now we go through our most impressionable ages are zero to seven and in those ages, whatever we're exposed to, the environment that we live in, whatever the people that we love teach us, they get lodged as beliefs in our body because we don't have a way to discern truth from falsehood. So if your parents say that life is hard, then it's almost like a little kid says I love you so much, mom and dad, that I want to believe that. True, and I'm going to build a nervous system and I'm going to build a personality around that. And where life isn't hard, I'm going to make it hard because I want you to be right. And we do this with a lot of things Marriage Marriage is hard.

Speaker 1:

If you grew up watching your mom and dad fight, if you grew up with people telling you that marriage is hard, if you grow up with people saying you've got to work hard for your marriage, then you're going to make that true, lodged as a belief or as a story or as an expectation in your body. And when it does, you're going to set out to make it true, because your nervous system is built to only live in that truth and the absence of that is going to feel off-putting, it's not going to feel correct, because your nervous system is literally wired to only experience that as truth or as correct, all right. This is why sometimes people get into relationships and it feels too easy and they exit it because it's unfamiliar and it feels it doesn't feel aligned with the nervous system and the nervous system is looking to find some sense of familiarity system and a nervous system is looking to find some sense of familiarity. Now, the nervous system, it has one, one mission in mind. It has one purpose for being and that's to keep you alive.

Speaker 1:

And the way it keeps you alive is by keeping you in familiar circumstances. That's its ambition to keep you alive, by keeping you in familiar circumstances and keeping you in familiar habits and cycles and patterns. And so if you're, if you're used to struggling financially, your nervous system literally wants to keep you there because it knows how to operate there. You're used to having a struggle-licious relationship with your bride or with your husband, then you're going to, and when there's not, it's going to feel weird, it's not going to feel correct, because your nervous system is going to try to get you back into the familiarity of a struggle-licious relationship, because it knows how to operate there. If your nervous system is built around being invisible and trying to hide, then when you are seen it's going to feel dangerous because your nervous system, it's used to being invisible and being unseen. So it's going to feel unsafe there. So it's going to try to get you back into familiar circumstances. So your nervous system, it exists to keep you alive. It does that by keeping you familiar, because it knows how to keep you alive. In the familiarity of those circumstances, regardless if they're wealth or poverty, success or failure, loved or rejected, whatever's familiar, your nervous system is trying to get you back into All right. Your nervous system is trying to get you back into All right. Now I want to.

Speaker 1:

I want to throw a new concept that I've been chewing on lately that feels really, really true for me is that your nervous system, your ego and your subconscious are all the same things. Your nervous system, your ego and your subconscious are all the same things. Your nervous system we just call that the physiology that's in the body, the wiring that's in the body that creates emotion, that creates thoughts, that stores your beliefs, that stores your expectations, that creates your fear, that creates your anxieties, that creates joy. All the nervous system is just we call it the physiological part of our body that just feels and experiences an internal, or gives us the experience of internal, quality of life. This also includes your fight, flight or freeze responses, all right, so we call that your nervous system. But there's also this thing in the spiritual world and in the world like Jungian psychology, where we call it.

Speaker 1:

We talk about the ego, and the ego is that, like that character we play. Okay, the ego is the character, it's the, it's the fear-based part of us that's always trying to be in control, that's trying to control things, that's trying not to be judged, that's trying to be accepted, that's trying to be seen as successful, that's trying to be seen as wealthy right, all of these things are ego, right, they're just nervous system responses, that's all they are. So the ego is basically the nervous system. They're equal. The ego is an adaptation of the nervous system. It's just a way of living and choices and decisions that we make and ways of showing up that are derived from the arrangement of the nervous system.

Speaker 1:

And now, when we talk about the subconscious and I've done episodes where I talk about the conscious mind is about 5% of our processing, but 95% of everything that we think, say, believe, act, behave, 95% is all subconscious and all that is is because of the nervous system wiring. That's all it is. The subconscious part of us is just the unconscious part that's attached to the nervous system that creates muscle memory, that creates reactions, that creates this reaction, this response that just feels familiar, that just feels normal, like when you're driving, when you leave your home and you're driving to the grocery store and when you get there you don't even remember getting there. That's because your nervous system took over. That's your subconscious, the subconscious part of you. Your nervous system took over. You don your subconscious, the subconscious part of you. Your nervous system took over. You don't even need to freaking, you don't even need to think about it, you just get there and you can't even remember driving. It's the automatic functioning, it's the automatic parts and that comes from nervous system wiring and what's familiar and what feels normal and what feels natural. So we've got, we've got the nervous system, the ego and the subconscious. When we talk about those work to all, we're talking all about the same things.

Speaker 1:

All right, now, deeply embedded in that nervous system, in your nervous system, in your ego, in your subconscious, are your expectations. So when, when you are raised let's let's take someone who's raised in a really empowered environment, when they're a child and they are, you know their parents talk very empowering you can have whatever you want. Whatever you want you can, it will happen for you. Life is supportive, life is your ally. Life is always trying to bring you what you want, what you need. You are valuable, you are worthy, you deserve it because you breathe. Let's say you're raised in that environment. Then guess what your nervous system is going to be programmed and conditioned to expect? Your nervous system is going to be programmed and conditioned to expect goodness to flow into your life, to expect people to accept you, to expect people to embrace you, to love you, for life to bring you what you want, that's what you're going to be built to accept.

Speaker 1:

But now I remember when I was unconscious and my daughter, my daughter Katie, would you know? She was little, maybe she was four or five, and she said Dad, I want X, y, z and I'd sing the Rolling Stones song. You can't always get what you want and you know what. She heard that song so many times. I guarantee you that there's an expectation built in her nervous system that just because she wants it, she can't have it. And she's living out of that expectation because I gifted that to her. And now she's conditioned and programmed with that belief, with that expectation, and it's partially ruling her life because her nervous system or ego, and her subconscious are all the same thing and she's operating as if that's true. And if I would have raised her differently, with a different belief, she'd expect and believe different things. Inside of your nervous system are your expectations. Now let's advance this, okay.

Speaker 1:

So I work around a lot of entrepreneurs and I ask them the question a lot. I ask the question what do you want? What do you really want in this world? What are you after? What do you really want? And they'll tell me I want, you know, a million dollars and I want financial freedom and I want success and I want whatever. And you know a million dollars and I want financial freedom and I want success and I want whatever. And you know whatever they want. I want to travel the world. I want, you know, I want rental properties all over the place, I want Airbnbs. They'll tell me a whole litany of things which I encourage everybody to want, whatever they want. Right, wanting and achieving is a lot of fun in this world. It's part of the material human experience that we get to really enjoy and embrace. But what I haven't done a great job of is what do you want? And then dig a deep, a layer deeper and say listen, what do you really expect to have happen? Because sometimes somebody can say and I've experienced this they can say they want XYZ, but they expect to not experience and get XYZ.

Speaker 1:

Deeply buried in their nervous system in their subconscious is an expectation of pessimism that they can't always get what they want. And in the battle between what you want and what you expect, what you expect will always win. See here's when I release podcast episodes and when I released my book Inner World, outer World. When I released my first book, the Impostor in Charge, I want everybody around the world to experience my work. When I launch a workshop, I want to sell out the workshop. When I host a lecture or when I speak or when I launch a mastermind, I want to sell out. I want everybody to want what I have to offer. I want everybody to buy what I have to offer, to enjoy what I have to offer, to benefit from what I have to offer. That's what I want.

Speaker 1:

But there's this, there's this still this little, little voice of pessimism buried in my nervous system that says not everybody, not everybody, can see you or wants to see you. Not everybody wants you, not everybody, not everybody wants what you have to offer. In fact, let me take it a step farther Few people see you, few people want you, few people want what you have to offer. In fact, let me take it a step farther Few people see you, few people want you, few people want what you have to offer. And this is the partially partial reason why I don't get the traction in books and podcasts and workshops and my mastermind that I expect or that I want, because somewhere deeply buried in my nervous system is this expectation that, no matter the quality of the content, it still won't be appreciated by the masses.

Speaker 1:

Now, I'm telling you this because there's a difference between a guru and a guide, and I'm not a guru. A guru will teach you from a place that they have it all figured out, and I'm a guide. I'll tell you, and I constantly talk to my mastermind and my community about what I'm working on and what I'm processing and what resistance I'm meeting and what resistance I'm working on clearing. And that's the difference between a guru and a guide. A guru will teach you from a place of mastery, but a guide will teach you from a place of messiness and journey the journey with you. Instead of acting like they're at the destination, screaming for you to help get you to the destination, they're side by side. A guide is side by side, walking towards the destination with you.

Speaker 1:

Now I've recognized this little voice of pessimism and this is why, when I've in my life, my business, whenever I've wanted something, there's times where I've wanted and it and it hasn't taken shape, it hasn't taken root. And that's because of that little pessimistic voice inside of my, inside of my, my mind, or inside of my subconscious, or inside of my nervous system, in my ego, that says you can't always get what you want. Which is why I taught my daughter that, because I was taught that and that it's buried in there and now it's time to kind of exhume it, exhume that, rearrange the nervous system and in my, my mastermind. The other day when, when I was teaching this and I talked about, in a battle between your wants and your expectations, your expectations will win every time, one of my students said well, mike, what's the work? And I said you got it.

Speaker 1:

Shadow work, future embodiment work, gratitude, letting go, the drill method, the Sedona method, eft, the emotional frequencies technique or emotional freedom technique these are all release mechanisms to let go of the resistance that's in the nervous system, including negative expectations that would get in the way of your wants becoming material. If there's resistance, if there's pessimism, if there's doubt, if there's this pessimism, if there's this belief, if there's this expectation that what you want you can't have, then you can't have it. And actually let me talk about that a little more. Sometimes you want something, you expect not to have it and if it shows up you find a way to get rid of it quickly so that you can get back into expectation alignment. And that's happened to me over and over. That's called self-sabotage and, in a nutshell, pessimism. A negative expectation based in our nervous system is a form of self-sabotage. And until we rearrange the nervous system, rearrange the, the noise that's in our body, eliminate, let go, release the noise, release the resistance and shift that expectation from it's not available to it is available. To rearrange that expectation to. Nobody sees me to. Everybody sees me. Nobody wants me to everybody wants me. Nobody appreciates me to. Everybody appreciates me. Nobody wants what I have to offer to. Everybody wants what I have to offer. Until we rearrange that expectation, then what we don't want will happen. Okay, I hope this is making sense.

Speaker 1:

This has been a work in progress for me. It's been a work in process and I hope it's benefiting you. And this is the same work that I teach in the choose your destiny live Intensive that's coming up on November 14th and 15th. This is the same exact work that I'm going to be teaching in Monkify, your Money Game starting October 13th. This is the same exact work I do inside the Inner Wealth Mastermind. We just got back from an awesome retreat in Park City, utah.

Speaker 1:

The meditative work, the somatic work, this goes deeper than mindset. This is inside the body, it's inside the nervous system. Your want might be a mental want, it might be a thought, but until that thought matches the internal expectation, the internal belief buried in your nervous system, slash the ego, slash the subconscious. Until your want and expectations are in match, then the expectation is always going to win. And you've heard over and over become a frequency match in the spiritual world. Become a frequency match for what you want. And when you become a frequency match for what you want, and when you become a frequency match for what you want, it'll show up. All that is saying is when your want matches, your expectation boom it'll materialize.

Speaker 1:

Guys, I hope this is making sense. I hope this is valuable. If I can help in any way, shape or form, this is the work that I'm doing. Over the past month or two, the Inner Wealth Mastermind has started growing again, started selling some tickets for Choose your Destiny Live Intensive, started selling some seats for Monkify your Money Game. So for me, the evidence that this is working is there, because my business is growing again and as my nervous system lets go of this pessimism, let's go with these negative expectations, then what I want is starting to show up more and more. So I'm asking you to take inventory of what you want. Then I'm also asking you to take inventory of what you expect and let's get to work making them a match. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to wwwinnerwealthglobalcom for more tools and resources.