Welcome to the conclusion of The Positivity Freeroll, the incredible true story of how a late-night encounter with my intuition led me to what was then my biggest poker tournament win.

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As I fired up the first few tournaments of the day, I felt a type of purpose I had not felt before. Although I had set $10,000 as my profit goal for the day, deep down I could tell that this day was about so much more.

Around the third or fourth hour, when the early stages of the tournaments had passed and each hand began seeming more meaningful, a strange thing happened. Rather than spending the hourly 5-minute tournament break mindlessly scrolling Twitter as I would usually do, my intuition pulled me out of my seat, forcing me to pace around my desk like some sort of maniacal mathematician (or worse).

But it wasn’t formulas or percentages that filled my mind during those precious 300 seconds. Instead, it felt like I had tapped into a layer of myself that I never knew existed. Like the world’s greatest life coach was living right inside my head. It calmed me, it helped me focus, it reminded me hour after hour not to get ahead of the present, not to worry about the good nor the bad, to stay right here in this moment and put all my attention on the action in front of me as well as the feeling of goodness it said I was destined for. With every breath it urged me to pull goodness in and release doubt out. No opponents. No money. No pressure. Breath in, breath out. Goodness in, darkness out.

Here I am, it reminded me, on a rock flying through space and this is how I am choosing to spend my infinitesimally short time on it – so I might as well do it well. I might as well believe.

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Before we continue, let me clarify that I in no way believe that just because you practice good mental hygiene you are destined for success, at least not in the short term. You can think positive all you want, do all the meditations in the world, breathe as deeply and consciously as anyone ever has and still sometimes get punched in the mouth. I know because I’ve taken many such punches, both before and during the experience you’re reading about now as well as many times since. Life – whatever it ultimately turns out to be – teaches us our lessons in all sorts of ways, and those ways don’t always align with the timeline of our intentions.

I say that to stress that, as you’ll see in a moment, although things worked out in my favor this time, there have been many instances where they have not. Is setting an intention and allowing our highest Self to guide us toward it a +EV way to pursue a goal? Absolutely. But just like at the poker table, sometimes you play the hand the right way and still lose. The important thing in those instances, I have come to learn, is to recognize that unprofitable results don’t devalue the experiences we have, at least not unless we allow them to. As the saying goes, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get back up. To that I would only add that much of the value in getting up is in how we do it. What story do we tell ourselves? How do we push not just forward, but upward and to the right?