BIZ Experiencess Often Embrace "Woo-Woo" Mystical Ideas. Here's Why. TikTok star Kat Norton (aka Miss Excel) says "energy transmissions" are to thank for her success. She's hardly alone in talking like that - and science is starting to reveal good reasons why.

The lie of BIZ Experiencesship is that it will change your fortune. The truth of BIZ Experiencesship is that it will change you — and in ways that far exceed your balance sheet.

This happened to me. It happened to Kat Norton. It's why she wants to talk about "energy transmissions."

We're on Zoom, discussing something that may seem decidedly low-energy, outright boring even: Microsoft Excel. But that's only to the uninitiated. Kat Norton is an Excel ninja. During demos, her proficiency with the application literally leaves managing directors speechless. Her love of Excel has made her, of all things, an influencer: dancing on TikTok and Instagram while highlighting Excel functions under the name Miss Excel. Millions love the videos; roughly 1.4 million people follow her across both platforms. It shocks Norton herself, a 29-year-old who once saw her geeky crush on the old-school application as a somewhat shameful secret. "Like, I would never go to a bar and say, "Oh, man. I love Excel.'"

Related: How to Become a Positive Thinker

A lot used to shame Norton. She lived in unholy terror of how she might screw up while walking down the streets of New York. She sat silently in meetings at the consulting firm that employed her. She refused to speak up "unless I was so sure I knew the answer," she says. "Just uncomfortable in my own skin."

Almost two years later, she's dancing alone to Top 40 and hip-hop tracks while performing Excel functions. In her videos, she wears an infectious smile on her inviting face, her blond hair whipping from side to side, having quit that consulting job to make up to $100,000 a day — yes, a day — from the Excel webinars she offers.

What explains all this?

Energy transmissions.

First, you should know that Norton is not alone in her mystical theory of success: Studies routinely find that BIZ Experiencess are drawn to "magical thinking" at a higher rate than the general population. Second, you should know that what's coming next will sound a little woo-woo. Norton herself calls it "woo-woo," which is both reassuring — how crazy can she be if she acknowledges how crazy she sounds? — and intriguing. The woo-woo of the energy transmissions and the "quantum field" she now believes in have transformed her from who she was at her consulting gig — living with her parents, anxious, occasionally bawling — into who she is today: smiling, confident, rich, and, at the time we chat, renting an Airbnb in Arizona to be near the famed energy vortexes in Sedona.

So what are these energy transmissions? Well, Norton has come to believe that the positive energy you put out into the world is what you get back, compounded. If you project positive energy, people are attracted to it. They move closer to you when you truly believe in that positive energy, because you act on it: you stand taller because you feel taller, you smile wider because you're happier, you go confidently in the direction of your dreams instead of following your fears. Norton says if you can put yourself into such a highly aligned state, where thoughts and actions are one, thrumming with optimistic energy, you can actually live in your future, live as large a life as you want, and watch as your reality catches up.

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"So these days I get my [energy] frequency really, really high," she says. As Norton sees it, her social posts have millions of followers and her Miss Excel webinars bring in millions of dollars because she tries to live in this "high vibrational place." She believes in these fields of energy so completely—the energy within her and outside of her, watching her, moving closer to her — that when it comes time to publish her dancing videos, "I, like, do not post if I'm in a bad mood, which is pretty rare nowadays. But if I'm ever, like" — and here she makes a funny growling noise — "you don't post, because that energy just goes into the video, into the phone, and gets sent out to people."

She says this with a straight face. She knows how it sounds. She doesn't care. That in itself — her willingness to state what she believes and not care what you think of it — testifies to how thoroughly Kat Norton's life has changed in the past two years.

Three things explain that change. The first is Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Joe Dispenza, which Norton read at the start of 2020. It's a book that argues your thoughts have consequences so great they create your reality. If you can change your thoughts, you can change your reality and your future. To do this, you need to rewire your brain at a subconscious level. Norton was so taken by the book that she not only recommended it to friends, but also created a study guide for it.

Norton then bought the self-hypnosis course, To Be Magnetic, from Lacy Phillips, the millennial manifesting guru who believes in unblocking subconscious beliefs of unworthiness. Norton says To Be Magnetic helped to rewire her brain circuitry. "You essentially get all these visions of, like, things that happened to you from your childhood," Norton says. "And then they come up and you essentially show your subconscious there could have been another way from a triggering memory." This other path "neutralizes the electromagnetic charge of the memory. So it's no longer triggering for you." This was at the beginning of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020 — a good time to quarantine and take the course, she says, particularly because she was a crying wreck when she emerged from the sessions. She stared down some "dark shit," she says. Lifelong feelings of unworthiness, of unnecessary fear, of shame.

She then got serious about Kundalini yoga, one of the form's more spiritual practices. In Sanskrit, kundalini means "coiled snake." In certain early Eastern religions, it's believed that divine energy lives at the base of the spine. Kundalini yoga tries to "uncoil the snake" and free the energy within us.

These three things — the book, the course, the yoga — all deal in some way with turning your positive thoughts into positive outcomes. This insight by itself may sound pedestrian: Our thoughts do shape our emotional reactions, which is why sexual thoughts often lead to sexual arousal, or why brooding over a colleague's slight could lead you to lash out against him or her. The more you're aware of a link between thoughts and emotions, Norton says, the more you can distance yourself from your thoughts and treat them objectively. Treating them objectively allows you to redirect negative thoughts and engage with more positive ones. This redirection in turn influences emotions. And (now we're going to get to the "woo-woo") because emotions are, at the subatomic quantum field, waves of energy — well, when our thoughts and emotions align and thrum with positivity, Norton has come to believe we can affect other people's fields of energy. We can get them to respond in positive ways toward us.

Related: Positive Thoughts + Positive Actions = Positive Results

So the energy with which Kat Norton glows in her dancing viral videos is the same energy that draws customers to her Excel courses' sales page. These days, because Norton feels she can manifest positive outcomes whenever she wants — because her thoughts and emotions are aligned and also because her business is a 24/7 ATM (again, she's a one-woman shop who can make $100,000 a day) — well, "At this point right now?" she says, "What I've been researching is, like, how to get my energy field big enough to be able to hold all of the things that have been coming through."

Like what?

"I own a billion-dollar company."

She doesn't — not yet. But she's already manifested it. Reality just needs to catch up.

Yes, it still sounds woo-woo, if not arrogant. But the energy transmissions of Kat Norton are only a slightly different, well, manifestation of a common BIZ Experiencesial quest: How to transcend your inadequate surroundings, or, in today's Instagram-speak, how to level up. The energy transmissions of Kat Norton are similar to the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) of Tony Robbins, which he wrote about 30 years ago in Awaken the Giant Within. NLP is a technique that focuses on how to redirect your thoughts — and with them your actions. You may scoff at a self-improvement guru like Tony Robbins, but know that Robbins' core idea was linked to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a form of peer-reviewed and self-reliant psychotherapy that emerged in the 1960s, which found that changing your self-harming thoughts into beneficial ones altered your actions and then your trajectory in life.

This practice would have made sense to the 19th century's oft-quoted and widely accepted philosopher of BIZ Experiencesship, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote, "Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny," which was itself an idea that stretched back to ancient Rome, and that era's ultimate BIZ Experiences, emperor Marcus Aurelius. He wrote in his journal, "The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts," which was itself an idea that appeared roughly 100 years before Aurelius, from the man who built Christianity, St. Paul, and his letter to the Philippians: "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things." Which was itself an idea that predated the Bible and flourished in Nepal in the fifth century B.C.E., championed by another iconoclast who shaped the world, Buddha: "We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves." Which was itself a notion that predated the Buddha and existed in Vedic texts in early Sanskrit, some 3,000 years ago, where you find lines like: "Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions..." that served as the inspiration for Kundalini meditations, which, as a form of yoga, Kat Norton practices today.

The point of tracing the lineage of an idea like this isn't necessarily to legitimize energy transmissions but to show that like many before her, Kat Norton needed the ancient armor of positive thinking when she went out on her own. Every BIZ Experiences needs this. I needed this. I've been on my own as a writer and BIZ Experiences for 18 months, around the same amount of time as Norton, and I can trace the origins of the idea above because I collect anecdotes like these. I have notebooks filled with them. I need the armor of positive thinking, too.

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All BIZ Experiencess do. We know the stats: Fifty percent of new businesses fail within five years. Seventy-five percent fail within 10. We forge ahead anyway, and in that forging ahead we suffer: Seventy-two percent of BIZ Experiencess have mental health concerns, according to seminal research by Dr. Michael A. Freeman at the University of California, San Francisco. "The BIZ Experiencess were significantly more likely to report a lifetime history of depression (30%), ADHD (29%), substance use conditions (12%), and bipolar diagnosis (11%) than were comparison participants," Freeman and his colleagues wrote in a 2015 paper. The long hours, the problems with vendors, with employees, the stress, stress, stress: I've literally gone months without sleeping more than two hours a night because of the pressures of BIZ Experiencesship. On another occasion, my anxiety got so bad I thought I was having an aneurysm and had to be rushed to the emergency room. And I'm a lucky one. Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Aaron Swartz: There's a long line of famous and often quite successful BIZ Experiencess who died by suicide.

BIZ Experiencesship is like "staring into the abyss and eating glass," Elon Musk has said.

Elon Musk said that.

That level of courage did not come naturally to Kat Norton. She had diagnosed panic attacks so crippling that "I, like, missed most of middle school," she tells me. "I was in the guidance office every day, crying to my mom and begging her to take me home." Norton had separation anxiety, a fear of being away from her mother, Marylee. The fear was irrational. But even as she worked with a therapist to reduce it, the panic rose in other ways. Well into high school, she would turn bright red, her body shaking, at the idea of having to make any presentation in class. "I would beg my teachers to get out of it," she says. "I'd be like, "Can I just present to you after school?' I was so uncomfortable in my skin."

What accentuated this discomfort was, ironically, her ambition. She was a straight-A student who ached to see her ideas play out in the world. In kindergarten, she sold paper fortune tellers in the cafeteria; in third grade, she helped to create a newspaper that she then sold door-to-door in her Long Island neighborhood; by high school, even with her fear of public speaking, she helped launch a student-run radio show where she and friends recapped the TV series they were watching. "She was constantly applying herself," Marylee wrote to me in an email. If she could tamp down the anxiety, "she would really be her creative, happy self."

This became Kat Norton's struggle: the life she wanted to lead against the behaviors that kept her from leading it. She enrolled at Binghamton University for its business school but then felt trapped there, because she didn't want to major in finance or accounting, which left…leadership. "I was like, "I don't have any options,'" she says. Still, she came to like her leadership classes, and even learned to present her ideas to other students. But when she took a job at the New York City office of Protiviti, the global consulting agency, her best work friend, Anna Tansley, noticed above all how anxious she was. "I remember specifically one day sitting in a conference room," Tansley tells me, "and she was explaining this new kind of [systems] process we're working on, and the whole time I'm thinking to myself, Wow, this girl is brilliant." And yet Norton would constantly interrupt her own presentation to ask, "Did I explain that right?"

"There was no confidence around it," Tansley says.

Norton could be quite adventurous. In 2019, she and Tansley decided to go to a surf and yoga retreat in Morocco administered by a former colleague, where Norton learned to surf — though she could barely swim. Both women did Kundalini yoga for the first time and saw the retreat as a "life-altering" experience. And yet back in the office, when Tansley confided she was thinking of quitting Protiviti to go out on her own, Tansley would never forget how Norton responded: "I don't know how I could make that happen for myself."

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She said this even as she was enterprising in the office. On her own, because she loved Excel, Norton set up a training program at Protiviti that taught other employees how to better utilize the application. Her superiors were so impressed they sent her out on the road to teach other Protiviti employees the same thing. Norton was promoted, and then promoted again to manager. Yet around her boyfriend, Mike Golub, she didn't see where her ambition or enterprising spirit would lead her. "I remember her sitting on a yoga ball in my living room bawling her eyes out," Golub tells me. ""In three to five years I'm probably going to have kids anyway,'" she told Golub. ""And then am I even going to want to start over?'" Golub at the time worked at Enterprise, a rising star in sales who oversaw the Hamptons' office's exotic-cars business. "And she was like, "It might be best for you to focus on your sales and me to just…have kids.'"

During the pandemic, Norton lived in her parents' home on Long Island. There, around her mom and dad and the childhood bedroom she had never wanted to leave as a middle schooler, she took stock of life. She had to choose, she realized: She could either be defined by her ambitions or her self-imposed limitations.

So she picked up Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, which used nothing less than quantum physics and Einstein's Theory of Relativity to show how the world is, at base, fields of energy that you can embody. When she finished it, she asked Golub to take the To Be Magnetic self-hypnosis course with her, and they both saw how their unconscious minds had kept them trapped in certain closed loops of action, and by changing these self-limiting thoughts they could in fact lead limitless lives. This approach to life existed within the practice of Kundalini yoga, too, which Tansley was now teaching. And when Norton incorporated that into her routine — well, one night she had a vision.

She turned to her mother, sitting next to her in the living room.

"Mom," she said. "I'm going to be rich and famous soon. And I need you to prepare your nervous system for that."

A few days later she made a video of her dancing while Excel functions played out above her.

She posted it to TikTok.

NEARLY Two years later, Norton is a self-employed influencer with more money than she ever dreamed of, talking about her life to people like me — people who can make her more famous still. "There's so many different ways it can happen now," she says, the it being her future and the billion-dollar company she'll own. "And I just trust — like, every part of me knows that's where it's going."

She sells Miss Excel courses primarily through webinars these days. Before one of them she'll have a "dance party" to get "amped up," she says. Sometimes she's alone, sometimes with Golub. She'll do Kundalini meditations — "I do, like, my prosperity one" — and her positive frame of mind becomes the positive emotions she feels and then the positive energy she emits in the webinar. The infectiousness spreads. Norton routinely has between 5,000 and 7,000 people across the world sign up for a single webinar. She sometimes does two in one day. She sells the Miss Excel coursework in bundles ranging from $497 to $997.

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"The proof is in the pudding," she says. None of this would have happened without "rewiring" her brain, without believing that positive thoughts become positive actions and that those actions emit energy, without choosing to live in the future of her limitless life until her reality catches up. She still hears from people who think she's crazy, or at least super new age-y, but peer-reviewed science moves a bit closer toward her worldview every day.

The thoughts we entertain become the stories we tell and the lives we lead, says Dr. Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. In Wilson's book Redirect, he shows 10 chapters' worth of examples of how changing the story about yourself — "story editing," as he puts it — changes your circumstances in profound, quantitative, peer-reviewed ways. After a single half-hour story-editing session, for example, the college freshmen at risk of flunking out not only remain in school, but years later, as upperclassmen, carry B averages or even make the Dean's List. All this from a single story-editing session. It's how internal narratives become external actions, where the changes of life are "compounded," Wilson writes. Changing the story you tell yourself may sound "like magic," but it "can address a wide array of personal and social problems."

In the same way, living in your future may sound like magic, but Hal Hershfield at UCLA has demonstrated its benefits. He's at the forefront of a burgeoning field of psychological research that concerns what he and other academics call your "future self." Hershfield's studies argue that the more you can imagine your future self and visualize a person into whom you are evolving, the better you'll live now and the greater the likelihood that you'll become that future self. He's shown that among study subjects who are concerned about their health, those who write letters to their future selves exercise more than the control group who didn't write the letters. He's published a 10-year longitudinal study that finds that the more people envision their future selves at the outset of the decade, the happier and more satisfied they are at the close of it. For Hershfield, it's about envisioning that future self so completely that you take action now to become it. "When [the future self] is viewed in vivid and realistic terms, and when it is seen in a positive light, people are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come," Hershfield writes in one study.

These books and research get at what Norton embodies: What happens when you choose to believe you're worthy of your dreams. That choice isn't always easy. No worldview solves all your worldly problems. Norton isn't suggesting that, and neither am I. In one Zoom call with Norton, though, I tell her that in the month I spent reporting this piece, I've been happier and more energized. That wasn't always the case. At the outset of my BIZ Experiencesship, just after I was laid off from my media job in November 2020, I saw the life ahead as worthwhile but difficult. I knew the time would come when I myself would be, like Musk, eating glass and staring into the abyss. I soldiered through those days and obsessed over the disappointments: the business deals that didn't close; the magazine assignments that didn't pay out on time; the digital course I created that didn't bring in as much as I needed. I saw BIZ Experiencesship as heavy, the burden you must carry on your way to the future you want.

Norton says it doesn't have to be that way. You can choose to view your days with positivity. They can be "light," she says. You can exist in "flow states" because you know it will not only work out but you will thrive, as soon as your thoughts align with your actions. "I'm just going to energetically align myself and the business," Norton says. "Like, I don't want to eat glass."

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Neither do I, not anymore. I tell her that talking to her has given me new tools for my own career. I don't see it as a coincidence that since I began trying to live my days with more positive intention, a major vendor has agreed to license my course on writing and two Hollywood producers optioned an original screenplay I wrote. For having met Norton, "I just feel better," I say. "Inspired."

She beams at that. "That's what's really inspiring me," she says, and notes that she gets DMs and emails "all the time" about how her story moved people to own their own futures. One recent morning at the gym, thinking about these people, it came to her: a new suite of courses. Not about Excel but how to grow a business, how to build a social following, how to rewire your brain so that you live in your future until your reality catches up. Eight courses in all. "I just want to tell people, like, "You got this!'" Norton says.

These new courses, she says, will get her that much closer to her billion-dollar business, but they'll also reveal something even more valuable about owning your future: "what you end up learning along the way," she says.