Ten years ago, Benito was just a kid in PR bagging groceries for his neighbors. Now he and his music are a worldwide phenomenon that is giving us so much light during dark times. He didn’t have rich parents or wealthy connections to get him where he is now. He was discovered by chance because he made himself visible. 

Bad Bunny’s journey is truly a testament to how you can manifest anything you want in this life. No dream is too big, and no stage is out of reach. By learning from Benito, we can also learn how to quantum leap and make our wildest dreams a reality.

In this week’s episode, we’re exploring how Bad Bunny manifested becoming a global icon despite coming from humble beginnings. There are three lessons you can learn from his journey, so grab a pencil and a notebook because you’re gonna want to write this down. Tune in for these three manifestation lessons and how to implement them into your daily life! 

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Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello. Hello. Welcome back to this week’s episode of Chingona Revolution Podcast. I was planning to do a sad episode about how upset I am with everything that’s going on in our community, and I still am, but Bad Bunny has given me a new perspective, and I think we need to shift gears a little bit.

So. At the time [00:01:00] of recording this, the Grammys have just passed. Bad Bunny took home three Grammys, including Album of the Year, which is the first time in history that a Latin artist and an all Spanish album wins that award. So history has been made, and not only was it made because Bad Bunny received these Grammys and he’s creating all of this positive change through his art, but.

In his speech, he talked about how we are not animals. We are not savages. We are humans, and we are Americans. And in that he’s speaking of Latinos and he’s speaking of, of humans, right? But specifically Puerto Ricans, because Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and they are in fact Americans. Yet they are treated as if they’re not.

And we don’t even have to get into the conversation about the way that immigrants have been treated. But then he goes on to say that if we want to fight, we have to do it [00:02:00] differently. And the only thing stronger than hate is love. So if we want. To fight. We can’t meet hate with hate. And that sounds like a very wise thing to say, right?

Buthe’s speaking the truth. So when I say the truth, I, I mean like every kind of religion or every priest of wisdom has a lot of similarities. At the core, they’re all saying kind of something similar and. What bad money is alluding to, there is something very spiritual, so we cannot find the solution to our problem from the same level of consciousness that the problem was created.

In other words, if we want to get ahead and overcome the current attacks on immigration, the way to do it is not to meet the violence. With violence. We have to be smarter. We have to. Elevate our consciousness. We have to rise above. We have to rise our vibe and that is how we are going to find solutions.

And I think Bad Bunny is such a good example of that [00:03:00] because he’s not out here with guns being aggressive. He’s literally making so much change through his art. And I attended his residency in Puerto Rico and it was probably the best concert I’ve ever been to. I’ve been a bad bunny fan for a long time, and I do like his music.

I do like his music a fair bit, actually. But I think the reason I like him so much is because of his intelligence, because of his intentionality, his authenticity, and I think there’s so much that we can learn from him when it comes to manifesting our dream lives because it can be so easy to see him on that Grammy stage.

Or by the time this airs, the Super Bowl will have already happened. It’s so easy to see him on those stages and assume that he’s always been there, but that has not been the case. And I shared on my Instagram a carousel post all about how 

It wasn’t luck that got Benito there. It was manifestation and it was aligned action. And there’s so [00:04:00] much that you and I can learn from his journey. So today’s podcast episode is dedicated to what we can learn from Benito, from Bad Bunny to manifest our dream.

Lives. So I hope you’re just as excited as I am. I’m recording this before the Super Bowl, but right now it is just beneath the week. My feed has been his stuff. I feel like he just gave us the win that Latinos needed right now and that Latinos needed because I was feeling depressed. I was feeling.

Very creatively blocked and after his wins and after his speech and getting that little reminder, which I knew, but sometimes you just need that reminder, right? That we can’t meet the hate with hate. It reminded me how important my work is, how important your work is, how important our voices are, and how important we are, and what an impact Latinos have, or else he wouldn’t have won those Grammys or else he wouldn’t be.

 the halftime star performing at the Super Bowl. So [00:05:00] let’s get into a little bit about his journey. And as I talk through this, I am going to share with you different lessons. 10 years ago, in 2016, bad Bunny was working in a supermarket. He was bagging groceries and that was his job. And today he’s one of the biggest artists in the world.

This wasn’t luck, this was manifestation and it was also aligned action. So here is what I want you to learn from his story. He comes from pretty humble beginnings, bagging groceries, as well as studying in Puerto Rico. He doesn’t come from money, he doesn’t come from. a privileged family, but instead of him waiting to be discovered, he made himself visible. He was posting on SoundCloud, he was creating his art. And before I even move on to more of, of his [00:06:00] story or more of the things that, that I think are important from a manifestation perspective, 

A lot of my clients and a lot of people that come my way are frustrated in unfulfilling jobs and they know they want to be doing something else. Maybe they know what they want to do and they’re just working towards getting there. Or maybe they don’t know what they want to do and they are figuring that out.

But overall, they’re frustrated because they no longer wanna be at the job they’re at, and they know they want to be somewhere else. And I just wanna take a moment to highlight bad Bunny’s journey here. He was working bagging groceries. That is not a luxurious job. And one of the things that I tell my clients is if your job is not your purpose, you have to give your job a purpose.

And I think that’s what Benito did. He knew that he was not going to go get a 401k plan from this grocery store and be there. Until he aged. He knew that that was just where he was in that moment. And a lot of times we see people who are successful and we think [00:07:00] that it was glamorous the whole way. But this is a perfect example of somebody working a job that’s not their dream career, so that they can live their purpose and the the purpose he gave this job.

Was, it’s just a job right now. It’s just a job so that I can work on my bigger mission so that I can work on my purpose. And, uh, I’ll kind of just insert a little bit of my story. When I became an entrepreneur and when I left tech, it required me. Well, it didn’t require me, but I made the decision to move out of my Silicon Valley apartment.

That was very expensive, and that would’ve been a big cost month over month when I didn’t have a business that was profitable yet that was fully functioning yet. So I chose to move back into my mom’s house. I did not wanna come back to my mom’s house. I moved out when I was 19 and I hadn’t been at my mom’s house in a little over 10 years.

I never thought I would be moving back and it was part of what I [00:08:00] needed because my goal, my mission was so much bigger than my ego and that is exactly what I think was the case with Benito. Do you think he like wanted to walk up to girls and be like, what’s up mama? I back groceries at the grocery store?

No. That was not the ideal job, but he knew that he had a bigger purpose that he was working towards, so he wasn’t so focused on the right now. He was focused on the vision. In his mind, he was already this artist. In his mind, this had already happened and this was just part of a stepping stone. So the first main lesson is where you are now, doesn’t necessarily determine where you are going to go.

Where you’re at now is just supporting you in getting to where you want to go.

so while Bad Bunny was working at this grocery store bagging groceries, he also started posting songs to SoundCloud and that’s where he ended up being discovered by [00:09:00] DJ Ian. I might be saying that wrong, Lu. And signed him a deal that started his career in 2016. So this is something that people get wrong about manifestation. They assume that things just kind of happened, but what we can learn from bad bunnies experience is that he didn’t wait for permission. He didn’t wait to feel ready. I’m sure there was so many times when the song could have been perfected more, especially with art, right, there’s always improvements you can make to it, but he had to overcome his perfectionism and he didn’t wait for somebody important to choose him before he chose him himself.

He shared his work publicly, not privately. He shared his work publicly on SoundCloud, and he did it consistently, and he did it again before it was perfect. 

had he not posted on SoundCloud,That DJ would’ve never found him or signed him. 

I hope you are enjoying this podcast episode. I just have one quick message for you. The questions I get over and over [00:10:00] are how were you able to leave your tech job? How did you start your business? How are you able to travel so much? Every time I see your stories, you’re traveling somewhere new, and how did you become your own boss and create such a purpose-driven business?

These are the common questions that I get over and over, and as I sat to think about the response to these. The answer. Is that I built my personal brand. None of these things would be possible if I did not begin to build my brand and show up and create content and create impact because of that. That is why I was able to leave my tech job, start my own business.

This is a training that is long overdue. I am teaching you all how I manifested my first 10,000 followers by building my personal brand. This training is happening on Monday, March 9th, FYI. That is daylight savings time, so please add it to your calendar once you sign up. I don’t want you to miss it [00:11:00] because live is always best, but we will be sending out the replay.

So if you sign up and can’t make it, don’t worry. We’ll send you that replay that evening.

This training is for you if you’ve opened up an Instagram account or a TikTok account with all the intention of being super consistent only to completely ghost the account. Maybe you are somebody who gets these great ideas when you’re in the shower or when you’re driving, but you have such a hard time taking action on them because you don’t feel ready.

Maybe you’ve watched people who you know completely blow up and think, damn. That could have been me if I had just started showing up. Maybe you do know the power of a personal brand, but you’re stuck overthinking. You’re maybe afraid about what you should post, how you should post it, or what other people might say or think. Maybe you dream of starting a business and you understand that building a personal brand is one of the first steps to doing that. I am going to be teaching you all the mistakes I made because I had two [00:12:00] failed attempts at building my personal brand before I did it successfully. And then I’m going to share with you the strategies that do work. I can’t wait to see you there again, it’s happening on Monday, March 9th at five o’clock Pacific time.

Sign up using the link down below. Can’t wait to see you there. So manifestation is not wishing. It’s not forcing, it’s not sitting back and just hoping. It’s not only praying, it is having vision, knowing where you wanna go. Allowing yourself to be visible just like he did by posting on SoundCloud and then taking aligned action. What is aligned action? It is when you are taking action that is in alignment with your vision.

It’s action that is supporting you to get to where you want to go. I guarantee you Benito was not applying to all of the. VP positions at banks. He wasn’t trying to go become the manager at the supermarket. He wasn’t [00:13:00] trying to go do all these different things. He knew what the vision was and he took the actions towards it.

He probably would go to the grocery store, go home, write music. Practice his music, record the music, post it on SoundCloud, go back to work. That was probably what was happening. But what I see occur with a lot of my clients and with a lot of people that are in my community who ask for coaching through dms and things like that, it’s that they say they want to go start this business, or they say they want to create content.

But they aren’t posting, they’re not allowing themselves to be visible. What they’re actually doing is they are applying to a bunch of different jobs that are the same as the existing job. They hate thinking that working maybe at a different company, it’s going to be a little bit better. Do you see where I’m going here?

So when we think about aligned action, it’s about taking action towards that vision, and that is exactly what Benito did really well. According to quantum [00:14:00] physics. According to science, there is already a version of you that has everything that you want. There’s a version of you who has the dream job. There’s a version of you that already has. The business, there’s a version of you that has the partner that you dream of, and then there’s also a version of you that has it worsethan you currently have it. And according to, quantum physics, what we put our attention on. Is what we bring into reality. So if you’re so focused on what’s not working and all your thoughts are about this thing that’s not working, and you are taking action like it’s not working, you’re more likely to create the reality that’s not working.

But what Venito did is he moved as if the opportunity already existed because it did, and then that’s when the opportunity came to him. I was actually coaching somebody earlier. On one of, in one of my programs inside of Courage Driven Latina, and she was saying, you know, there’s been so [00:15:00] many changes and I’ve been working a lot on myself, and then suddenly I met this one person and we had this idea, and now we have this.

Huge meeting. Huge meeting with somebody that is part of the government. We have that meeting next week, and now I’m feeling really overwhelmed by it because it happened so quickly. And I said to this client of mine, I was like, that’s because manifestation is not about time. It’s about alignment. And what happened was.

You worked on yourself, you met the right person. You both co-created this opportunity that is going to help a bunch of people that are young, a a lot of the youth in the school systems. And yeah, of course you ended up with this manifested opportunity, but it requires that we are in alignment. So that is what Pat Bunny did so well.

So to recap those lessons, bad Bunny’s journey teaches us that manifestation does not come before vis visibility. It happens when you allow yourself to become visible first. And visibility [00:16:00] without strategy is not enough. You still have to take action. He couldn’t just be, you know, meditating every single day after work about wanting to become this artist. He also needed to go create the music. He also needed to put it out there and let himself be visible. And the other thing that we can really learn from him is that.

Authenticity isn’t optional. It’s actually necessary because when you are authentic, that is when you are in alignment and he is so in alignment, especially with that first release in 2016, and that alignment allowed the manifestation to happen so much faster. Now a lot of objections that come up. Actually, the last podcast episode I talked about how to show up when you don’t wanna come off as conceited. And I think that’s a big thing for our community where we don’t want to go build a brand to become an influencer, quote unquote influencer. We don’t want to be super conceited, especially when our culture is.

Constantly telling us it’s important [00:17:00] to be humble and maybe we did come from really humble beginnings and that all makes so much sense. But what we can learn from Bad Bunny is that when you do have success, it’s important not to shrink. It’s important not to dilute yourself, and it’s important not to play it safe because when you show up big and bold, that is when you get to use your platform in ways that really align with your values.

And we see this with Bad Bunny. He has leveraged his platform for elevating his culture and the awareness around Puerto Rico to unite so many Latinos as well as for social impact. He even, I remember when he had his concerts, over in, in Puerto Rico, not this last time that I went, not for his residency.

He ended up organizing a beach cleanup and has even created a whole documentary for one of his songs to bring awareness to Puerto Rico, Rico, and some of the inequities that were [00:18:00] going on there, or even. I mean the lyrics of his songs, right? It is literally political activism. He’s bringing so much awareness and for this music to reach global.

Ears. It is the first Spanish speaking language album to hit top of charts in China. That’s huge. Right? That is huge. He really has, has shown us that it’s okay for us to take up space because when we take up space, we are not being full of ourselves. We’re not being egotistical, were not being full of ego because.

For him, and this part really matters is that visibility wasn’t just about fame. It really became this vehicle for social positive change. And when you think about becoming visible in that way, because if you’re listening to this podcast, it’s because you care about giving back. I know this for a fact.

And when you allow yourself to be seen without abandoning who you are, that is really when you get to [00:19:00] create the most amount of change. People don’t fail on their goals and dreams because they’re, they’re not talented. People are very talented. They fail because they hide, they wait, or they’re afraid to be seen. And when we hide, we don’t just block opportunities from coming our way. We also block impact. And I want you to think about that.

Who is affected negatively by you not showing up, let’s say that you want to give back to the youth. Think about the youth that’s not experiencing the transformation because you’re not showing up.

I hope you are enjoying this podcast episode as much as I am enjoying recording it. But let’s do a quick recap of all of the different lessons, because I kind of just threw some things at you towards the end. So the first lesson is that he worked where he was not where he wished to be.

He was bagging groceries, but he was still doing his music on the side. And the lesson for us is that your current life is not a limitation for where [00:20:00] you want to go as long as your identity and your intention. are there. So in other words, your current life does not determine what your future looks like.

What determines how your future looks like is your vision as well as your identity, as well as the actions that you are taking. lesson number two, Benito did not wait for permission. He made himself visible. He did not wait to be discovered.he did not wait for somebody to magically discover him. He put his music on SoundCloud, publicly imperfectly, with no agent, no big label,

That is what I call manifestation in action lesson number three, which I don’t think I specifically called out, but I, that’s why I wanted to do these recaps. Bad. Bunny had to build his identity first. He had to become the person who could be on these massive stages. He could. He had to expand his capacity and his identity the way that he saw [00:21:00] himself had to level up or else he would’ve never made it into these rooms.

Because he’s not just making music. He really is building the identity of somebody who belongs on world stages. And the only way you get that far is when you start acting as if your future self already exists. Because guess what? It does. So one of the things I want you to ask yourself is if I was the version of myself who already had the job, I want the partner, I want the money, I want the opportunities, I want the Instagram, the TikTok, I want.

How would I show up and make your decisions based on that? And that could be a great journaling exercise for you all. Take a journal out, ask yourself if I already had, and then insert everything you desire. How would I act? How would I think? What would I do? What would my morning routine be like? What would my outfits be like?

How would I dress? How would I [00:22:00] carry myself? How would I speak about myself? What habits would I do and not do? The next lesson is that he used his platform for purpose, not for ego. So when he achieved success, he didn’t just chase more fame or more money, he expanded his impact. He does this through his musical lyrics. He does this when he was on the Grammy stage where he was calling for love over hate and advocating for the immigrant community. And when he dedicates his historic Grammy win to individuals that left their country in pursuit of their dream. And the big lesson here is that building your influence, allowing yourself to be seen, it can actually be done in such an impactful and beautiful way where you feel so much more purposeful and it doesn’t just mean that you are being conceited or that you’re full of ego. Another lesson that I kind of talked about, but I didn’t. Point this one [00:23:00] out is that he stayed authentic in the face of pressure in the music industry. I can imagine that there’s so much pressure to show up as this person or that person. And early in his career, he actually did talk about trying to be somebody that he wasn’t, but ultimately learned that when he was the most authentic version of himself, that is his superpower and that’s when the most amount of opportunities came his way. And the last lesson here that we can learn from Bad Bunny’s journey when it comes to manifesting our dream life is that manifestation is not just wishing and thinking, and then your reality happens. It’s. Embodying the identity of the person who can receive this manifested life. It is having the vision and then allowing yourself to become visible and it is taking consistent and aligned action.

And that’s when opportunities literally cannot stay away from you. And I’m a testament to this. Obviously I am not as big as bad Bunny, but all of these different lessons as I [00:24:00] look through my journey in my. Own manifestation journey. I’m like, oh yeah, that makes so much sense. This lesson applies to this part of my life.

This lesson applies to this part. So I hope you found this podcast episode super valuable and super helpful. I ask that if you did find it valuable, share it with a friend and I would love to invite you. If you are looking to build your personal brand, become more visible. I am hosting a free training all about how I manifested my first 10,000 followers through building my personal brand

That is happening on Monday, March 9th at five o’clock Pacific time.You can register using the link down below, and I can’t wait to see you there. 

Thank you so much for joining me this week. Make sure to visit the erika cruz.com. That’s Erica with a K where you can subscribe to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. You can help this podcast grow by supporting me with an Apple Podcast rate and review. If you took anything away from this episode, [00:25:00] I invite you to take a screenshot and share it on social media so that your favorite badass Latinas can also check it out.

Be sure to tag me at the Erika Cruz. That’s Erica with a K, because you know I wanna see it. If you’re ready to join the revolution and be a part of the courage driven Latina community, visit courage driven latina.com to get more information and join the wait list. Thanks again, and I’ll see you next week.