DO THIS For 9 Days To STOP NEGATIVE Thoughts & Emotions (You Won’t Be The Same)

how do we go from okay i have this negative emotion it's controlling my life it's got me in this cycle of i think about this emotion which triggers a chemical reaction which trains my body to feel that way which makes it easier more likely i will do it again and so now i'm i'm in this vicious side and unconscious and it's unconscious right and you um you said does your thinking create your environment or does your environment create your thinking which i thought was really really interesting so how do we then go from that like mechanistically to begin this visualization process of something that's empowering it's me in a different state it's my future self is it meditation is it what does that look like if you're not being defined by a vision of the future then you're left with the old memories of the past and you will be predictable in your life and if you wake up in the morning and you're not being defined by a vision in the future as you see the same people and you go to the same places and you do the exact same thing at the exact same time it's no longer that your personality is creating your personal reality now your personal reality is affecting or creating your personality your environment is really controlling how you think and feel unconsciously because every person everything every place every experience has a neurological network in your brain every experience that you have with every person produces an emotion so some people will use their boss to reaffirm their addiction to judgment they'll use their enemy to reaffirm their addiction to hatred they'll use their friends to reaffirm their addiction to suffering so now they need the outer world to feel something so to change then is to be greater than your environment to be greater than the conditions in your world and the environment is that seductive so then why is meditation the tool well let's sit down let's close our eyes let's disconnect from your outer environment so if you're seeing less things there's less stimulation going to your brain if you're playing soft music or you have ear plugs in less sensory information coming to your brain so you're disconnecting from your environment if you can sit your body down and tell it to stay like an animal stay right here i'm going to feed you when we're done you can get up and check your emails you can do all your texts but right now you're going to sit there and obey me so then when you do that properly and you're not eating anything or smelling anything or tasting anything you're not up experiencing and feeling anything you would have to agree with me that you're being defined by a thought right so when the body wants to go back to its emotional past and you become aware that your attention is on that emotion and where you place your attention is where you place your energy you're siphoning your energy out of the present moment into the past and you become aware of that and you settle your body back down in the present moment because it's saying well it's 8 o'clock you normally get upset because you're in traffic around this time and here you are sitting and we're used to feeling anger and you're off schedule oh it's 11 o'clock and usually check your emails and judge everybody well the body's looking for that that predictable chemical state every time you become aware that you're doing that and your body is craving those emotions and you settle it back down into the present moment you're telling the body it's no longer the mind that you're the mind and now your will is getting greater than the program and if you keep doing this over and over again over and over again over and over again just like training a stallion or a dog it's just gonna say i'm going to sit and the moment that happens when the body is no longer the mind when it finally surrenders there's a liberation of energy we go from particle to wave from matter to energy and we free ourselves from the chains of those emotions that keep us in the in the familiar past and we've seen this thousands of times in fact we can actually predict it now on a brain scan yeah i found this so interesting um let's go a little bit harder on metacognition the notion that you don't have to believe everything you think i love the way that you talk about that yeah we have a huge frontal lobe and it's 40 of our entire brain and most people when they have a thought they just think that that's the truth and i think one of my greatest realizations in my own journey was just because you have a thought doesn't necessarily mean it's true so if you think 60 to 70 000 thoughts in one day and we do and ninety percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny your life's not going to change very much because the same thought leads to the same choice the same choice leads to the same behavior the same behavior creates the same experience and the same experience produces the same emotion and so then the act of becoming conscious of this process to to begin to become more aware of how you think how you act and how you feel it's called metacognition and so then why is that important because the more conscious you become of those unconscious states of mind and body the less likely you're going to go unconscious during the day and that thought is not going to slip by your awareness unchecked because you're it means to know thyself and the word meditation means to become familiar with so as you become familiar with the thoughts the behaviors and the emotions of the old self you're retiring that old self as you fire and wire new thoughts and condition the body into a new emotional state if you do that enough times it'll begin to become familiar to you so it's so important uh just like a garden if you're planting a garden you got to get rid of the weeds you got to take the plants from the past year and you got to pull them out the rocks that sift to the top that are like our emotional blocks they have to be removed the soil has to be tenderized and broken down we have to we have to make room to plant a new garden so primarily we learn the most about ourselves and others when we're uncomfortable because the moment you move into that uncomfortable state normally a program jumps in when that program jumps in it's because a person doesn't want to be in the present moment and engage it consciously so when you teach people how to do that with a meditative process it turns out that when they're in their life they're less likely to emotionally react they're less likely to be so rigid and believe the thoughts they were thinking they're more aware of when they go unconscious back into a habit and that is what starts the process of change and so we have to unlearn before we relearn we have to break the habit of the old self before we reinvent the new self we have to prune synaptic connections and sprout new connections we have to unfire and unwire and re-fire and rewire we have to unmemorize emotions that are stored in the body then recondition the body to a new mind into a new motion like deprogram and reprogram that's the act and it's a two-step process yeah i like the way that you call that out as an action there was another thing that you said that i thought was really powerful about how insights themselves are essentially inert they don't do anything what what then do we do with an insight how do we take a breakthrough moment and make sure that it's not just a breakthrough moment like i guarantee people watching right now are having like 100 aha moments for sure that was definitely the case for me as i was researching you and when you said that i was like and that's the danger that you have the aha and then nothing yeah yeah and that's it's a it is a danger because then people will will shrink back into mediocracy and they'll use the insight to excuse them from taking a leap they'll say yeah you know i have a chemical imbalance in my brain you know my father was really overbearing he was a perfectionist that's why i am the way i am you know people they they come up with stuff to to excuse themselves the insight is actually giving them permission to stay limited and it's it's it's an amazing idea because they'll say to you that they really want to get over their anxiety but let's okay let's take your ex-husband let's put him in a straitjacket let's duct tape him and shoot him to the moon now what i mean what are you going to do now you still have to make those changes and so when the person's enemy dies or something shifts in their life and that person's gone they'll find another person to hate this is just how we function as human beings we just slide another reason to feel those emotions so i think i think when people start to understand this you know i think knowledge is power but knowledge about yourself is self-empowerment so how much of this is really learning to to just bifurcate the world into there's negative emotions that have negative neurochemistry associated with and you said that in those states if you're living in a perpetual state of stress hormones and things like that illness is like a step away and then just the other side of that is understanding but there's this whole other side of positive energy which happiness joy empowerment whatever that you know neurochemical cocktail is but that when you're on that side um your immune system is more likely to function well like is that just sort of bringing it down to like a really base level is that sort of one of the biggest things well let's talk about it in terms of survival or creation as i said 70 of the time people live in stress and living in stress is living in survival now all organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress you know a deer gets chased by a pack of coyotes when it outruns the coyotes it goes back to grazing and the event is over and the definition of stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance out of homeostasis the stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to order so you're driving down the road someone cuts you off you jam on the brakes you may you give them the finger and then you settle back down and the event is over and boom now everything's back back to normal but what if it's not a predator that's waiting for you outside the cave but what if it's your co-worker sitting right next to you and all day long you're turning on those chemicals because they're pushing all your emotional buttons when you turn on the stress response and you can't turn it off now you're headed for disease because no organism in nature can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time it's a scientific fact that the hormones of stress down regulate genes and create disease long-term effects human beings because of the size of the neocortex we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone we can think about our problems and turn on those chemicals that means then our thoughts could make us sick so if it's possible that our thoughts could make us sick is it possible then our thoughts can make us well the answer is absolutely yes so then what are the emotions that are connected to survival let's name them anger aggression hostility hatred competition fear anxiety worry pain suffering guilt shame unworthiness envy jealousy those are all created by the hormones of stress and and psychology calls them normal human states of consciousness i call those altered states of consciousness so then we tend to remember those traumatic events more because in survival you better be ready if it happens again that's and and when survival gene is switched on you could have 10 really great things that happened to you in your day and you just have one bad thing that happens and you cannot take your attention off that bad that that unhappy thing because the survival gene is switched on it's really interesting how does epigenetics come into play in all this like what's actually happening you've talked pretty profoundly about um proteins and like really at a deep level how we're signaling to our genetics to create these kinds of changes what does that actually look like well epigenetics epi means above the gene and many years ago after the dna helix was discovered by watson and crick they said the blueprints of life you know all diseases are created from genes it turns out less than five percent more like one percent of people on the planet are born with a genetic condition like type 1 diabetes or tay sachs disease or sickle cell anemia the other 95 to 99 percent are created by lifestyle and by choices you can take two identical twins exact same genome one dies at 51 the other one dies at 85. same gene different environment so all of a sudden they said we lied that was wrong it's not genes that create disease it's the environment that signals the gene that creates disease well okay but that's not the whole truth too because you could have two people working side by side in the same factory one gets cancer after being exposed to a carcinogenic for 25 years both working for 25 years the other one has no cancer at all so there must be some internal order that would cause one person to not get it while another one does so is it possible then if the environment signals the gene and it does and the end product of an experience in the environment is called an emotion can you signal the gene ahead of the environment by embracing an elevated emotion we've done the research on this we measured 7500 different gene expressions in a group of people that came to an advanced event for four days and we had them doing a seated meditation a walking meditation a laying down meditation a standing meditation and at the end of four days just four days the common eight genes that were up regulated two genes to suppress cancer cells and tumor growth two genes for neurogenesis the growth of new neurons in response to novel experiences and learning the gene that signals stem cells to go to damaged areas and repair them the gene for oxidative stress was upregulated we started seeing all these genes that are very very healthy to cause the body to flourish imagine if people were doing that for three months we also measured telomeres the little shoestrings on the end of dna that tell us our biological age we asked people to do the work meditation five out of seven days for 60 days measure their telomeres that determine their biological age 60 days later 74 percent of the people lengthen their telomeres 40 percent significant change 20 percent a very remarkable change that means that they got a little bit of their life back if it lengthened by 10 percent they got 10 of their life back what is up my friend tom bill you here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline right i've just released a class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop from impact theory university until then my friends be legendary peace out so so billy buckner who just passed away recently was an incredible eight-time gold globe a great baseball player for the boston red sox well he made a mistake in sports that would be one of the biggest sport bloopers in history and in 1986 he let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through his legs that ultimately would give the mets the world series now i was just watching an espn e60 jeremy shop story and i saw an interview that was done in 1990 that resurfaced in 1995 where buckner was interviewed 12 days before the world series and he said you know the dreams are to win you know to win the world series and the nightmare would be for me to let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through my legs you know and then ultimately that's exactly what would happen now by saying that out loud what did he do he didn't make it happen but he increased the probability and this is what i want people to understand your internal thoughts are all over the place i want to push on that do you think that he makes it more likely because it's going to subtly influence his behavior or because you're talking to some magical deity that then says well you said it and so i'm gonna make it happen i think that what he did is a subconscious plant by verbalizing it and knowing that it's ten times more powerful he's planting it in his subconscious he's not he doesn't want it to happen but it becomes something that's ultimately on his mind and he gave it more power by verbalizing it and then wasn't there somebody that said i i worry that i'm going to retire and die at 40 of a heart attack right so so pistol pete marovich a basketball player i'll give you two other examples but but he was interviewed at 26 years old and he said you know i don't want to play 10 years of pro basketball and die at the age of 40 of a heart attack well he played 10 years of pro basketball and in pasadena california died of a heart attack at 40. there's another great story that i saw from a magazine called success unlimited in 1973 a guy is hired to fix a refrigerated boxcar in back of a train he goes into the train he panics gets himself locked inside the boxcar so now he's pounding on the door there's nothing to do he starts to panic and thinks he's going to freeze to death he finds a pen he starts writing down tom what's going through his mind and he writes down i'm becoming colder as people one of the things we do to ourselves is observe and report i'm not playing well i'm having a bad day we're having a bad quarter my marriage isn't going well we observant report still colder now he writes nothing to do but wait half asleep i could hardly write finally he says these might be my last words and i'll show you the article they open up the boxcar many hours later and they find him and he's dead but the temperature inside the box car was 56 degrees that's so crazy the freezing apparatus was broken there was plenty of air in the boxcar there was no physical reason for his death the best they could say is somehow he talked himself into dying and as you know the book covers the psychogenic death in and around the korean war when the korean war one third of all american pows died and they said that one of the things that was done in the pow camps was the negativity they manufactured articles about the united states being bombed they withheld all positivity they didn't give them any mail believe it or not there are like regulations for pow camps throughout the world and ultimately they filled up these healthy american soldiers with all this doubt a a priest would end up calling it give up itis and healthy american soldiers over a period of days would walk over to a corner sit down and die of broken hearts so negativity is the most powerful thing we're combating look at our politics today a positive message versus a negative message it's no no no chance have you ever read men's search for meaning i haven't read that guys you're going to love it so man's search for meaning victor frankl in a conference oh yes yes yes yes yes it's actually in multiple if i remember right he was in five different concentration camps yes and ultimately um he says that he you could tell within 72 hours when someone was gonna die because they would give up yep and he said once they gave up then it was a 72-hour clock they no longer knew why they were fighting and and they would just die and he was like but the people that kept a mental image of what they were suffering for like what it was they were gonna do once they got out for their family for whatever he said that they would push through and it just i mean look there's obviously a million and one reasons to die in a concentration camp but the fact that even in the concentration camp they could go i'm 72 hours we can peg it right because we've seen that person give up right like that's just crazy to me well and and i just think when when i think about being seven years old in the tacoma golf and country club and walking off the golf course and my dad you know everybody call mr positive and this and that but in fairness to my dad when he was raised and he was teaching the only thing was positive and negative so if you weren't negative you had to be positive but that just never made sense to me and if we could just learn how to not be negative how to not externalize negative then ultimately that would help them more than ever trying to be told to be positive i love what you say just shut your mouth i thought that was you've said it even more aggressively more aggressively i i think it's super [ __ ] powerful right what do you mean by that why is that so critical well if just if you follow the data and you say stupid [ __ ] out loud ultimately you're predicting and perpetuating exactly what you don't want to have happen and who's always in control of what tom biliu says you're always in control of what you say people say yeah but i can't the thinking everybody's [ __ ] up in the thoughts i've been with people the night before super bowl the night before national championships eight different times where the doubt's there but we're not externalizing it and then i'll have people say well what do you want me to lie i'm not telling you to lie i'm telling you that if you look at the information and you say i don't want to be here today i hate this job god dang they or or you look at muhammad sanew they're down they're up 28 3 in the super bowl playing against tom brady and he looks at his friend and says hey man they still got tom brady on their side there is no lead that's safe well [ __ ] why are you saying that you know and you're almost predicting that that's what's going to happen now ultimately not saying stupid things out loud is you have to create an alternative so i started thinking about a car if a car's going backwards it can't automatically go forward so it has to to shift into neutral and then it stops then at that point you can either go forward by changing your behavior or you can go backwards by doing the same stupid [ __ ] you were just doing neutral is truth-based thinking what's the truth okay in 2010 you're running a a data loss company right you've been doing it for eight years you graduated from ufc film you're that's not what you want to do you're 60 pounds overweight you lose your weight you find two buddies and you say hey man uh we're gonna go into my kitchen we're gonna find a way to create a product that's going to be different than anything anybody knows well i'm educated in this because i partnered with gatorade sports science institute at img and i you know and you created a value proposition that ultimately you know based upon you didn't let your past predict your future you used your past was real but i want to be do something different so you behave this is this is a really interesting part of what you say that the past isn't predictive correct so talk to me more about that because i would say most people would say that the past is definitely predictive right which is great but they'd be wrong right so they would be wrong and the simple fact of the matter is the past is real okay so the only thing that makes it predictive is if my behavior stays the same so i'll give you a great story so we both grew up in tacoma and there used to be a thing called toastmasters i don't know if you remember toastmasters but toastmasters was a local regional and a national speaking group for anybody that wanted to get better at speaking well my dad had gone to a toastmasters early on and heard one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak he comes back and tells me i just had a chance to hear one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak and he said when are you taking your sat i said i'm taking it next year he said well this guy was failing out of high school he was struggling he was raised by a single mom in the midwest but he promised his mother he would take a test called the s.a.t so he takes the sat in may's junior year doesn't expect anything get to score back in june now the s.a.t which i don't know how many your population know but it's it's a standardized test with the math part and a verbal part both are scored out of 800 points well this guy takes it he's bombing he's failing out of school he doesn't expect anything as he's telling the story of toastmasters well he gets a 1480 out of 1600. so he's stunned right that would be for the smart people that listened to your problem yeah right cognitive dissonance i got a 900 on my sats just to give people a friend right and i got a 10 90 and i got a 10 10. right i was just hey four digits it was a miracle right and and but it's a hard test and it you know it's a variety of different things so he gets the score and his mother doing what any mother would do knowing her kid says did you cheat right she knows her son and he said i swear to god i tried to cheat but the way the numbers were and the scantrons and the bubbles you couldn't cheat so she says you mean to tell me you really got that score he said yeah i got the score so he's stunned tom so as my dad telling me the story i'm like okay so he says all right so what he decides is because he realizes he's smart and he's going into his senior year he says i'm going to go to class now he starts to go to class he doesn't hang out with who he did when he didn't go to class all right teacher see him in class and they said hey maybe franklin pierce maybe we missed the boat on this kid so they start to treat him differently well as the guy would tell the story he graduates goes to a community college goes on to wichita state goes under the ivy league and becomes this massively successful magazine entrepreneur so i said okay well the guy was always smart he just needed a standardized test to unlock it my dad said no that's not the story this is what i want you to understand he said 12 years after all this guy's success he gets a letter in the mail from princeton new jersey doesn't think anything about it the next day his wife says you're going to open it he opens it true story turns out the s.a.t board will periodically review their test taking procedures and the policies the year he took the test he was one of 13 people sent the wrong s.a.t score his actual score was a 740 out of 1600. and he said people think my whole life changed when i got to 1480. but what happened my whole life changed when i started acting like a 1480 and what does a 1480 do he goes to class well this is one of the first stories i would share when i had my opportunity at alabama or florida state or georgia so a your language is powerful but number two your behavior is way ahead of your success and so many people let their feelings dictate what they do as opposed to throw your behavior out there russell wilson's 510 he shouldn't be playing pro football but he behaves like the best quarterback in the country and he's done that since before he was at that level and then his feelings and emotions and his skill caught up to that behavior i think the lesson my dad was trying to teach me ultimately was in addition to my language what i do not how i feel about my past is going to determine who i am in the future and that's what i think neutral thinking is i think neutral thinking isn't just thinking i think it's behavior and i think it's language and so your behavior is what's going to change you but you also have to start by asking yourself what do i want and why do i want it why don't i have it you know what am i willing to do to get it and i do think in terms of listening to to one of your earlier podcasts i do think there's value in writing things down but in a really simple way i've learned probably the most things through the best athletes in the world and michael johnson who had the gold shoes i'll never forget drew brees were training for the nfl combine in 2001. there's 18 guys michael just finished winning his fourth gold medal and he comes in and he's just just a badass dude fastest man alive fastest man alive at that point um he had just run uh the 43-18 um you know and then when he ran the 19-3 it was uh 26 miles per hour the fastest the fastest 50 to 150 he ran 9-1 flat so all these athletes were in awe of michael and i think drew at the time says hey man do you set goals he said yeah he said where did you learn so what do you mean what i learned so where where'd you learn like do you learn in college i didn't learn in college you said did you learn like smart goals like what the [ __ ] are smart goals you know and smart goals are specific measurable attainable realistic and with the time frame michael said when i would go into safeway i recognized that if i walked into safeway and i wrote eight things down i would walk into safeway and i'd walk out a safeway in five minutes if i walked into safeway and had nothing written down i would be in there for 20 minutes and i'd find myself on aisle 8 and i'd be anxious and i'd be nervous and i'd be why am i looking at the wind weathens and the ho-ho's when i know i don't need any of those things and he said so because i wrote it down in safeway and it worked i figured why would i be any different about my athletic career and i think that that's the level that we need to educate people i hope it takes what it takes basically is an introduction to self-help that when i look at mindfulness being the brand and and uh headspace being a billion-dollar evaluation and i sit there and think at you know 44 years old and growing up in this my whole life the only time i can meditate is at the end of church it's such a challenging skill and is it important absolutely it's important do our affirmations important absolutely they're important are changing from the inside out important yes but they're not the starting points don't say stupid [ __ ] out loud be mindful of what you consume if i watch three minutes of news it increases my probability by 27 i'm going to say i had a shitty day right when i was going through and you know when i was going through a divorce i had a lawsuit i had some health challenges all these different types of things if i'm listening to jake owen or sam hunt i love new country but new country makes me just want to go run and jump off a cliff you know it makes me think i'm never going to meet another girl ever again in my life which i hope is not true you know and and so what are the things that are in our control what we watch when we get home what we listen to when we're in our car who we talk to when we get on our cell phone and what we say out loud always as we speak and i think that those are the powerful things and ultimately our behavior is what's going to define our success yeah i love that man it really does all come down to behavior and that all of this boils down to what you do on a day-to-day basis which brings me to a concept that you got from your dad about hope and how powerful that is how can people use hope why does it matter how does that fit into this equation yeah i i think my dad's belief was when you become helpless you become hopeless and when i feel like i can control my behavior when i feel like i'm in control of even if i'm going through cancer even if i'm going through a difficult challenge even if i'm going through a reorgan a business you know if i still feel like okay this is not optimal but there's something i can do then i'm helpful to myself and when i'm helpful i'm hopeful and when i'm helpless i'm hopeless so my dad's belief always was to make hope a habit and and that hope was the most powerful medicine that we all have and then i think we have to believe that we can influence our future you know we've got to believe i believe that no matter what i'm facing i can influence my future that just because my first marriage didn't work that doesn't mean my second marriage won't but it's incumbent upon me to be better right and that's where if i'm spending time well she didn't do this she didn't do there's nothing i can do about that right but that's true and that's where you're talking about well the past feels predictive right well i thought you know hey what what are you gonna do to be different going forward but so many people think the self-help industry is about things you do i think one of the things that makes athletes so incredible is what they're willing not to do what they're willing not to say what they're willing not to eat what they're what they're willing not to consume what they're willing not to watch that's what makes think about it's january 2020 what are five things you cannot do right now that will instantly make your life better talk to me about the illusion of choice yeah i think that's so powerful you know it was it was really fascinating so um i was um you know obviously i've worked in the sports world for a long time and i was my first nba team was the memphis grizzlies and guys love college football and vince carter who's 42 now same age as tom brady and still playing in the nba plays for atlanta vince was about 37 at the time and we had just had three players arrested at one of the programs i was headed to in one night like we hit our quota for her like for a night and vince and i were talking he loved college football and he said he said how many of those guys trev want to play in the nba or in the nfl and i said probably seven out of ten and he said and isn't it crazy they think they can do whatever they want and still make it to that level and i said what do you mean he said he said well i'm 37 i'm still playing in the nba you think i can do whatever i want i said what do you mean yeah i do think you can he said no my choices are finite i said what do you mean like choice is an illusion he said choice is absolutely an illusion there's a set of behaviors that i do that allow me to play at 37. i can't slam dunk the ball now yes i can still slam dunk but if i slam dunk it takes its toll on my knees and i can't get back and play defense fast enough so when i get down i lay the ball up more times than not i don't eat fast food after games i lift weight every day of games and i said so choice is an illusion he said yeah and i ended up going at that point he was heading over to the university of alabama and we sort of coined the idea of the illusion of choice there are no choices when you decide when you decided you wanted to build you didn't decide you wanted to build a billion-dollar empire but you decided you wanted to make a different type of uh nutritional bar correct did you start with the bar yeah and so there was there was either going to be a way that you did it or there was going to be other way and there was going to be a way that tasted just like muscle milk or there was going to be a way that was going to be different and you either did it or you didn't correct yeah and you were either going to commit the time and i'm just using you as an example but if i want to have a good relationship i saw a statistic that said the average married couple talks 27 minutes a week i was talking some of my buddies about that and they're like that much what did i find all the time but that's obviously not a good statistic well are you born with the gift to make time for people no it's a behavior so to me the illusion of choice is thinking you can have a good marriage and talk 27 minutes a week so you have to make time in order to talk and maybe you're on the road you travel a lot turning your tv off when you're on the road doing simple better turning the tv off turning the light off and just engaging in a conversation you know if you're engaging with your kids there's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it thinking you have an infinite amount of choices is idiotic and this generation right now generation z and generation y both think they can do whatever the [ __ ] they want to do and and still achieve things you can achieve whatever you want to do in many cases if you're willing to get behind the behaviors that drive that success but it won't be anything pete carroll for the seahawks he'll let you go to bed at five in the morning if you want as long as you can perform to a 9.5 standard when you get there okay well what you're going to figure out is you can't go to bed at five in the morning okay so you're gonna have to adapt your behavior to get in alignment with winning behaviors so the illusion of choice is this fact that there are not an infinite amount of choices there may be options yeah i can get pasta instead of a cheeseburger but even if i want to maintain a diet or maintain optimal health then i have to limit how much calorie intake what type of fluids when i when i first lost weight i i didn't understand that gatorade had 800 calories in it you know when you drink those four gatorades even though all you're eating is lunchables you're actually like driving all these calories and it's just am i doing simple better today we're going to be talking about limiting beliefs how to get out from under them how to move forward if you've struggled with something in the past it is critically important to get your belief structure right to make sure that you don't believe things consciously or subconsciously that are going to throttle your actions the end of the day the only thing that matters are your behaviors but your behaviors are driven entirely by your beliefs get your beliefs right and everything else will line up all right first question what should i do to identify the self-limiting beliefs that are holding me back okay this is one of those things that instead of trying to get in and identify all the different self-limiting beliefs that you have what i would start doing is focusing on building a growth mindset now one read carol dweck's book called mindset it is absolutely the right place to start at the end of that book you will have learned a very simple truth it is what i call the only belief that matters which is that if i put time and energy into getting better at something i will actually get better that is a belief that will align your behaviors because at the end of the day instead of like i said going through and finding all the self-limiting beliefs just start layering on these empowering beliefs so one you can get better at anything at any time so putting time and energy into getting better at something will reward you with actual skill set and skill set has utility now if you believe that and you think of yourself as the learner as you encounter a limiting belief i can never do that i'm not a good dancer i can't sing whatever the thing is you tell yourself then it just becomes a question of well if i know that i can get better at anything the question is do i want to put time into getting better at this thing and if i don't want to spend time getting better at this thing then don't bs myself don't say i'm not oh i'm just not good at that just say i don't care enough about that thing to want to put in the energy to try and get better now another thing that can be very freeing so for instance i really wish i could sing i also really wish i could draw those are two things that i really want but the truth is when i say that i really want them what i mean is that i really wish they came easily to me and once i finally was honest with myself that i wanted to get what i'll call disproportionate returns that when lisa spends time getting better at drawing she gets like 10x return on her time it's insane she's a world-class artist if i put the same amount of time into getting better at drawing i might get a 0.6 return of my time so i'm going to get better but it's like that same unit of energy could be used on many other things and i would get a much better return than i would focus on drawing same with singing there's no doubt i could get a hundred times better at either of them but at what cost it would take so much time and energy so be very thoughtful that you're layering on these empowering beliefs and then being honest about how you want to spend your time once you get that balance right and you realize you can do anything you want but you can't do everything you want and that things have to be put in priority order then it becomes very clarifying that it's not even necessarily that you have a limiting belief it's that you're being honest with yourself about what you do and don't want to pursue so the key is to hold tight to that only belief that matters that you can get good at anything now once you have it just ask yourself how badly do i want that thing next can you explain what initiatives i could take that will help me create the same discipline that you have so that i might have more confidence in what i can accomplish okay so first of all you've got to instill in your mind that the average human is capable of unbelievable improvement that's that's the thing that's my superpower i don't think i'm special i just realized in looking at the science that humans actually are capable of this incredible amount of change it is the strategy that our species took to be able to pass knowledge on through culture rather than having to have everything be instincts and in having that layer where we can drink in the culture and read books and learn from other people and you know even now we're all learning from things that people thought thousands of years ago and wrote down like it's insane it travels through to you and all of that wisdom stored in culture so that as your parents are teaching you things they're actually encapsulating a ton of the wisdom that is endured whether it's endured from religion or books or whatever like you're bathed in a culture that is giving you all of this incredible information and so recognizing how powerful and potent that is is incredibly meaningful but you have to understand that you have to allow yourself to believe that you can learn from that culture in the same way that everybody else can and that's what you're designed to do now for me that completely gave me the confidence and i put confidence in air quotes because not like i believe something specific about myself i just believed that the human animal is capable of this extraordinary change and so now i just needed to point myself in that direction now once this is the key once i realized that i could get better at anything it dawned on me that how i spend my time is a spiritual consideration and i didn't want to die with potential that i failed to turn into skill set that to me that speaks to me how much of my potential can i actually turn into skill set and get good at this stuff and push and grow and improve like that to me is just this incredibly intoxicating loop so for me the discipline the confidence all of that comes from recognizing human the human animal nothing special about me the human animal is capable of extraordinary change i'm going to have to put time and energy into doing it but i'm capable of getting this change therefore i can do anything i set my mind to therefore it really matters what i choose to spend my time on therefore i want to put structure and discipline in my life so that i can move forward on things that excite me that matter to me because i really can't have this big crazy dream that i'm thinking of so my discipline is really born of my desire to have that thing coupled with my belief that i can actually get there desire and belief get those two things right and the discipline will take care of itself right what steps did you take as you navigated challenging your belief systems daily especially in the beginning when you didn't have enough momentum to internalize the new and improved belief okay again a lot of this goes back to the big breakthrough for me was brain science and i'm laying on the floor of my unfurnished apartment i'm in a dark place in my life i'm not happy i don't know how to make my dreams come true i'm very worried that i'm not enough that i'm not smart enough i'm not capable enough this is in my early 20s and i don't remember i think it was something that started in college but i don't remember exactly what made me decide that i was going to read about the brain but i did i decided i was going to read about the brain and in reading about the brain i started coming across this idea of brain plasticity and this is in the late 90s early 2000s it's being hotly debated amongst the smartest people on the planet as to whether or not it's real and i decided one day you know what maybe it's not but i'm going to act as if it's real and in acting as if it's real i ended up finding out that it actually is real because i was getting so much better at things i was like whoa this is incredible and so what i was doing was learning this information on the key insight that i was going to act as if i could get better at something right the thing i called the only belief that matters i was going to act as if that were true by doing that i saw that it really was true and now the belief took care of itself because i saw it empirically in the data and that is the like the big thing for me that i didn't need to believe i was special i just saw that this process works and so now my beliefs began to shift not around like magical thinking they were shifting around what i was actually seeing and what i was reading about in the literature and that to me is it man i don't know what else to tell people it's like we are so capable of improving our skill set and by improving our skill set we are we can fundamentally alter our ability to change the world around us and as you realize whoa building these skills lets me actually change the world around me now all of a sudden it's just sort of one belief after another begins to implant itself in your mind based on what you're able to do and then as you hit a roadblock and you stumble and you fall that's sort of that next thing how do you deal with failure and all of that but as you work through this stuff i ended up compiling 25 beliefs which you can actually download for free just type impact theory belief system and you will see the 25 things that i onboarded into my mind in order to have the kind of success that i have now and what i was trying to onboard is really just the principles of a growth mindset and the things that you need to do and believe in order to constantly be moving towards your goals it's really rudimentary it isn't me making things up it is simply me looking at the nature of the way the human mind works in concert with all these other people and the society that we've created for ourselves and if you act in the following ways if you believe the following things if you create the following rules then you will move forward it just is the physics of the human experience so you can shortcut it by going and reading the 25 beliefs or you can just start with that same core first principle of humans can improve at anything they put the time and energy into improving in and then then it's just like you see it play out in your life also you could go to the gym the gym in fact this is one of the things that i did by changing your body you will realize oh my god if i'm disciplined consistent and i learn about this stuff i can radically transform my body once you see that you can transform your body you really start to believe that you can transform anything the body is an extraordinary way to get to the mind so i would leverage that as well my self-limiting beliefs stem from childhood trauma what suggestions do you have that might help me overcome them okay so this unfortunately is something that comes up a lot and one i just want you to know trust me when i say you were not alone so many people are struggling with childhood trauma and one i want to say that having a professional therapist work with you on this is probably going to be the right answer without knowing exactly what it is you're struggling with becomes very hard to help somebody deal with it but i can tell you that a lot of times what ends up happening is people end up feeling that their self-worth is diminished and they don't believe that they're worth getting rid of the limiting beliefs and they think that they are damaged or um compromised in some way and so one recognizing that that just is not true and that you absolutely are worth it and that the only thing that makes sense is to adopt one of the beliefs that really changed my life which is that the only thing that makes sense is to only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals so even if it were true that you are worth less it doesn't help you get towards your goal to believe that and if we're only going to do that which moves us towards our goals then immediately when we begin thinking that we're worth less we don't have to convince ourselves that it isn't true we only need to realize it doesn't move us towards our goals and since we only do that which moves us towards our goals we're going to pattern interrupt immediately the second we start playing that loop because we've got to break the habit of thinking that about ourselves so we're going to pattern interrupt that we don't allow ourselves to think that anymore it's done it's just not an effective strategy and that was a big deal for me because the thing that i was struggling with was i'm not smart enough to pull this off and by believing that then i didn't try and as long as i didn't try i was never going to fail which of course was the thing i was trying to protect myself from but i was also never going to succeed and so finally what i had to realize was because my behaviors were being dictated by my beliefs i could not allow myself to believe something even if i was convinced it was true i couldn't allow myself to believe it because it would stop me from taking the behaviors that would lead me to learning growing getting better and moving forward and so you it's not that easy childhood trauma is wicked it is so pernicious it gets inside your mind and it won't let go and depending on how early in childhood there is a lot of brain development around that trauma but i'm just saying one of the things that we're going to have to do outside of therapy is begin to pattern interrupt that to not allow yourself to repeat those negative stories about yourself and to only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals so if loving yourself is going to move you towards your goals then we're going to do it even if you don't think that you're worth it if pushing to grow and get better is going to move you towards your goals then we're going to do it even if it doesn't feel like you deserve it you have to let go of that in order to get to your goals and now as long as your goal is exciting and honorable why would you ever want to do something to hold you back if you're doing something to elevate yourself and other people why would you want to stop yourself from doing that even if you deserve to be punished or whatever it is that you think about yourself because of what happened in the past it doesn't make sense free yourself from that allow yourself to contribute to yourself and others contribute as big and aggressively as you want as you possibly can and by continuing to believe that you're not worth it you won't be able to do that you won't be able to turn your potential into skill set you won't be able to get into that passion loop where you're able to learn something and gain mastery and add value to other people's lives and get that positive feedback from them you're so busy living in the past that you forget that there's an entire future waiting for you but you have to let go of the past before you can move forward now i don't want any of that to sound trite again i understand how difficult this is and i highly encourage you to get professional help there is nothing wrong with that in fact it's amazing it's beautiful that you would think enough of yourself to go and put the time and the energy into getting better and you can get better but you're going to have to put in the work all right when you were making your transition into being successful how did you combat the frustration of not being where you wanted to be i'm never where i want to be so i'm not where i want to be now i'm not where i wanted to be when um you know people would have looked at it and said oh my god this is like the height of success it was one i'm very careful to make sure that i'm only invested in the process but because i'm trying to get somewhere that intentionally i'm throwing way beyond where i'm at i'm always thinking about what it's going to take to get to that next level i'm never where i quote-unquote want to be but i don't trick myself into tying my value to achieving it so i'm having fun i'm enjoying the ride i'm in it for the process i'm in it for the learning and i make sure that i'm hand crafting my life to optimize for joy and fulfillment and so knowing that i cannot guarantee the success i cannot guarantee ever that anyone is ever going to be successful but i can guarantee that you're going to struggle guarantee 100 nobody avoids it that's it everybody that ever tries to do anything and even most of the people that don't try to do anything are going to struggle profoundly with moving forward it's just hard like that and so if you know that the struggle is guaranteed then you can't allow yourself to waste time to be tormented by the fact that you're not where you want to be make sure you're having fun in the struggle figuring out how to struggle well that's the answer when i was coming up the question i was told to ask myself was if you knew you couldn't fail what would you do and what i realized is since failure is the most obvious answer that's probably not the right question to ask the right question to ask is what would i do and love every day even if i were failing now failure is never going to be as fun as winning i know that but if you can do something that you believe in enough and that the act of trying to get good at it is fun in and of itself now you're on the right path that's where you want to focus put your time and energy into making sure that you love the process don't worry about the outcome worry about the process getting better and loving that everything else will take care of itself i am really freaked out to my core like how much of who we are as an adult is an echo of things that happened to us when we were a kid and look i get it like neurologically and i'd love to hear you taking this i i have a feeling you're a lot more educated on it than i am but like the the the way that our neurology works such that we are we are so much of a sponge in the early days and it's a great strategy right from a species standpoint you've got a horse sort of comes pre-wired with everything a human gets a drink in culture to be shaped by its environment but when that environment is dysfunctional then you get this dysfunctional adult i've heard very credible psychologists say there are certain things if you don't get locked in by the age of four like good luck unwinding that and that that really scares me and i'd love to know like what that process is of beginning to change that story so this is where sort of the central questions of our lives overlap mine is how do you stop someone's zip code from being the biggest determinant of their future success which has so much to do with how they were raised yeah and and this is key you know as you mentioned the the stories that we tell ourselves these stories are actually functional at a very core level so you know what do you mean by functional well what i mean is that you know sometimes people talk about only think positive thoughts so only have positive emotions okay and and actually we have around 16 000 spoken thoughts every single day we have many many emotional experiences and we have many stories and there is nothing inherently good or bad about any thought you know there's nothing inherently good or bad about any emotion these this is basically your body doing its job which is that your emotions evolved to help you to ward off danger to judge to criticize to understand to pick apart so when you have these difficult thoughts emotions and stories that's often your body your psychology doing its job which is basically trying to help you to be a coherent being in the world and i'll give you an example of what i mean by this you know when i wake up in the morning and i hear my baby cry my story which is that is my child that is crying that needs me is what helps me to tune in that sound relative to the washing machine that's going on in the background so as human beings what we do is we take in all these stimuli we take in all this stuff that's going on in the environment and we make sense of it and making sense of these stories even if they make sense in a way that doesn't serve us is sense making so we all do this what starts to happen is that we could have grown up with a story that might be i'm unlovable i was always told i'm not good enough and i'm unlovable but then you know you reach 30 or 35 or whatever it is and you start recognizing that that story is stopping you from being intimate is stopping you from actually moving in the direction of your values which is that you want to feel close and collaborative and connected and so it's it's not that there's anything inherently good or bad about any story any thought or any emotion that we have the more important question to ask ourselves is is the story that i have right now serving me can you define serving me that that's i think something that will help people yeah yeah is it bringing me closer to being the person the leader the loved one that i most want to be so for instance if i have a story that says um i'm unlovable the example that i gave earlier and that's actually now stopping you from connecting with others and it might even be impacting on your leadership because you are unable to give effective feedback in a way that feels connected or you are really struggling with your team but you are unable to disclose gee we we're having a tough time together and you feel very distant that can get in the way and so what's more helpful is to recognize that our thoughts our emotions and our stories aren't good or bad they just are but sometimes what we do is we hook into them and we start letting them drive us and so what happens is it starts driving the you know that's the bus and the bus is being driven by the story as opposed to recognizing that we are more than our story there's so much more that we can bring to our lives and to any difficulty that we're facing but when we get stuck or in emotional agility terms the language that i use is hooked when we get hooked by a thought and emotional story what it does is it often moves us away from our values and so emotional agility is the opposite it's the process by which we become healthy with ourselves and healthy with these things inside of us so that we can bring other parts of ourselves to the surface so when i think about the things you're talking about and the process of rebuilding if you've had a negative story it's not serving you anymore um and you talk so profoundly about values i think okay well one i don't know that a lot of people define who they want to be like what type of leader they want to be i don't know that people know what their values are um yeah how can people so if if the rebuilding process is partly um recognizing okay your emotions can serve you they're a signal right i've always said that um if if the subconscious can process data faster and faster as they say then the odds are that emotions are essentially the subconscious communicating in a way that's far more um it's faster it's far more visceral than if it were just trying to kick up words into my conscious mind and so my job is to identify okay what is that emotion why do i feel that emotion and then translate it to things i know about myself so how do you advise people if if you think what i'm saying makes sense how do you advise people to solidify that identity of who they want to be identify what their values are so they can know ah this feeling is out of alignment with that like what does that process look like so okay so the first thing is recognize that we live in a culture that tells us that some emotions are bad and what this can often mean is that we then are in an internal struggle with our difficult emotions because i feel sad and i shouldn't feel sad you know often what i talk about in my work is that we have these type one emotions the type one emotion is i'm frustrated i'm angry i'm anxious i'm fearful i'm grieving okay that's a type one emotion a type two emotion is the emotion that you have about the emotion oh i'm anxious but i shouldn't be anxious or you know i should be grateful about this that's going on even though i'm not enjoying it because many people would want to be in my position and so what we start doing is we start having this internal struggle with ourselves so how do we start cleaning that out how do we start really centering on what are my emotions telling me and how can they serve me the first thing that i would say is that when you feel something i often talk about this idea that you know in my work i have often have people saying to me things like you know i just wish the stress would go away or i don't want to feel angry i don't want to feel disappointed and i said to them you know i get it but you know these kind of goals are dead people's goals only dead people never get stressed never feel the disappointment that comes with failure never have their hearts broken you know discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life you don't get to raise a family leave the world a better place or have a meaningful career without stress and discomfort so the first thing that i would say is when you feel a difficult emotion gentle acceptance gentle acceptance what do i mean by that i don't mean passive resignation i don't mean like oh you know i feel bad this is helpless there's no point in me even trying what is gentle acceptance gentle acceptance is the equivalent of you go outside and it's raining and you say gee it's raining okay it's gee it's raining not gentle acceptance is due it's raining and why does it always rain when i want to go outside and i wish this rain okay so the first part of being with our emotions is actually gentle acceptance and this is not something we often talk about in a business-related context because really what i'm talking about is self-compassion self-compassion self-compassion is often thought of as being weak or lazy you're deluding yourself you're lying to yourself but it's not it's the self-soothing that you were talking about earlier it's that ability to feel something and instead of punishing yourself for that feeling instead being able to say this is what i'm feeling like this is tough you know i've had this experience and it's tough and when you do that you create a space for yourself in which you are connected and you kind of love yourself and it's in that space that you then able to take more risks and try out new things because you know that if something goes wrong you'll be there for you so that's the first thing the second thing that i would say is once you've done gentle acceptance understand that your emotions contain signposts to your values we don't feel things about stuff that we don't care about so slow down into what is this emotion that i'm feeling and what is the emotion telling me about my values because we can find out about our values in many different ways but one of the first ways we found out about our values is to recognize that our emotions are often telling us what our values are if we just breathe into it and start saying what is it that this difficult emotion might be telling me it might be i need more support right now it might be that i'm exhausted and i need more self-care but these are really important parts of starting to connect with our values what is up my friend you and i are living in a golden era of self-improvement we have books platforms like youtube courses seminars virtual events workshops the list really is endless the internet has been so good for people like you and me who want to accomplish greater and greater things in life and now my friend it is about to get even better i've been spending most of this year working on the single most entertaining tool that you're ever going to have around self-improvement and it is called project kaizen it's a web 3 based game experience that will be unlike anything else you've ever engaged with in your life partly because the technology is new and it's amazing if you're not familiar with blockchain nfts and all of that kaizen is going to be the perfect introduction for you as it is an excellent intersection of entertainment and learning all backed by the blockchain we're getting closer and closer to launching this project for you every single day we are working our faces to the bone to get this thing out there and my friend i want you to experience it so click the link on your screen and head on over to my discord channel to stay up to date and be one of the first to join me inside of project kaizen which by the way gets its name from the japanese term of never ending improvement all right back to today's episode when you had your clinical practice did you find that people there was a question you could ask them that would help them figure out how to translate that because i've met a lot of people who they can identify i feel bored but they have a hard time going and this translates into i have a value around this like are there simple questions and things that people can ask them or do you have them journal well so most of the work that i actually do is with leaders in organizational context and um there are a couple of questions the first is what is the emotion and what is the emotion telling you you might care about and i want to come back to that because often the emotion we say we feel isn't the emotion we're really feeling and how do people get to that ultimate truth thing we can start saying what is it that i did today that was worthwhile okay not what did i enjoy because you can go to a party and you can get drunk and you can enjoy it it's not the same as worthwhile what did i do today that was worthwhile often when we answer the question you start connecting with it was learning or it was connection or it was i had that really difficult conversation with that person but i felt that there was a sense of both of us being together at the end of it and so asking ourselves over a couple of days you know what is this emotion that i'm feeling what is it signaling what did i do today that was worthwhile um what if i was to choose a day that i was designing for myself what would be some of the things that i would do and it might be things that are around creativity you know the stuff that we close ourselves off from but that starts signaling our values i've also got a quiz that a lot of people use that have got a whole lot of values kind of mapped out in it that i can share with you but they're different ways of starting to explore what our values are and this is really important because the world around us is constantly telling us what our values should be it might be to drive a particular car or to have a particular kind of career and so being able to connect with the heartbeat of our own why who we want to be our internal compass is really important not just because it feels good but it also protects us from this kind of social contagion where we know we can start almost living someone else's life and then you turn around 20 years later and you're like oh my god like i've built this thing but i don't want it so values help to protect us from social contagion but we also know that they are incredibly important for our mental health and well-being and knowing who you are and what you stand for is also protective of um burnout and we got to talk about that quiz then because you you've pointed out something that is a terrifying statistic which is that depression now causes more absence or um oh god i forget the exact phrase but more than cancer time away from work oh god wha what was the exact step so you know the world health organization really points to this statistic which is now widely accepted which is that depression is now the leading cause of disability globally that's crazy ultraman cancer outstripping heart disease and so you know really we are coming into an age it's an age where there is incredible complexity where technology has really outstripped our capacity psychologically to thrive and so more and more these skills of being able to be with oneself in ways that are healthy in ways that are emotionally agile these are fundamental skills for ourselves our families our children you know because what happens is if you think about in organizations all organizations say oh we've got to be agile we've got to be creative we've got to be innovative but in reality when people are faced with huge amounts of information and complexity they tend to do the opposite they shut down there's black and white thinking there's huge amounts of rigidity and emotional agility is the skill that is critical because you don't get agility and flexibility in innovation without opening yourself up to difficult emotions that might come with innovation you know the flip side of that is the innovation doesn't work or success the flip side of that is failure so you know there is a fragility that is interwoven in life we are healthy until we are not we are successful in our work until we are not and so these skills that i'm talking about are the skills that help us to deal with the world as it is not as we wish it to be in some pollyanna reality you know or in pollyanna fiction of just be positive and this singular dimension of success it's about being able to be healthy with ourselves what are some specifics from the quiz because i i want like i'm so intrigued by how you help people map their value system um i'd love to know and i'm sure we can link to it as well so people can really get into it but at like just a quick sort of nutshell version what is a quiz walking people through sure so what the quiz basically does is it takes people through questions around whether they push their emotions aside whether they're agile with their emotions what some of their core values are and some of the skills that can be developed so let me give you a practical example of how we can be with our emotions more effectively and how they can start signaling our values imagine you come home from work and someone says to you how was your day and what do we often do we often use these very big labels to describe how we're feeling so i'm stressed is the most common one i hear um i'm stressed you know every day it's like just a bit stressful but there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stress and that like knowing feeling of i'm in the wrong job or the wrong career so what i found in my work is that when we do something that's actually fairly simple which is to move beyond this big label of unstressed and instead we go into one or two other emotions that we might be feeling um this psychologically is called emotion granularity it's becoming more granular with our difficult emotions it's an incredible experience to do this so you go from i'm stressed into i'm disappointed or i'm exhausted and what we know psychologically is when we label our emotions in a more granular way it immediately helps us to identify what the cause of the emotion is and helps us to start taking active steps so i'm stressed i'm feeling like i need more support here you know i feel unsupported might be really what's going on and that starts to put you in the place of how can i get more support or you know moving away from i'm stressed into actually i think i'm in the wrong job or what it starts to do is it starts to develop out what is called the readiness potential in our brains it's this part of our brains it starts moving us from the space of being in our heads into being in action in our bodies and so you start getting your resume together you start getting your cv together we know that this emotion granularity is critical to our well-being in fact children aged two three four years old who are more able to accurately label their emotions their longitudinal studies showing that over time those children land up doing better because you can imagine a 16 year old who can't label his or her emotions and someone says oh i've got a great idea let's go let the air out of the school principal's tires okay and that kid wants to be part of the group so a child who is more able to accurately label their emotions is a child who says i want to be part of the group but i have a sense of disquiet about what's going on here you know maybe this isn't the right action so we know that just the simple way of being which is to move beyond big emotions and to be more granular with them is extraordinarily powerful in fact i had a client who i was working with in an organization who always used to say um everyone's angry you know he was angry his wife was angry his team was angry with him and we started working on this you know what are two other options what are two other things that the team might be feeling that are not about anger it's about something else and he started to say maybe it's that they don't trust me yet or maybe what's going on is that they feel a bit overwhelmed here and you can see that when you go into a meeting with other teams angry versus they need more trust it's a completely different conversation it's a completely different way of being and months later this guy's wife said to me that it completely changed their relationship because he would say oh oh it looks like you angry with me and she was like i'm not angry i'm just tired oh you know i'm not angry i i just want to be seen more and so labeling emotions can completely shift things there are other practical strategies i can give as well but tell me if you feel that i would love to go into more but first i want to talk about that idea of the emotional granularity i think that's hugely important and once you have the language for something all of a sudden you do start to begin to differentiate between things and i'll say one of the biggest breakthroughs in my own marriage is very similar to what you were just talking about which was the ability to articulate in the moment what i'm feeling and maybe even more importantly why i'm feeling it and so my wife and i say don't argue about the t right we were always at the surface level about what the argument was and once we realized okay wait a second like when you can get into that granularity of this is actually unease it's not anger or this is you're triggering my insecurity and now let me why am i feeling insecure about this is it's surprising even to me and you know then you begin to sort of dig under that and find it but if you don't have the words for it if you don't know what sort of that array of options is to be able to choose the one that fits just right you stay in that you know to every problem to a hammer every problem is a nail scenario yes yes and this is where even starting to connect with um what it feels like in our body because again we so often live our lives you know here in our heads and when we live our lives in our heads you know really our wisdom and our compassion and our courage and our being our authenticity like all of the things that make us thriving human beings are often not the things in our heads you know our minds will walk us off a cliff our minds will you know our minds will persuade us that we are right and another person is wrong even if it means destroying a relationship you know even if it means not speaking to a person because i'm right and they are wrong and i can't remember exactly what this person did all i know is i haven't spoken to them since our minds will walk us off a cliff and really as human beings being effective is often about moving away from our heads into our hearts okay i've heard you say that before i'm gonna pin you down on that one so what is it what does that mean like to be in my head i understand to be in my heart what it means is being in our ability to breathe to be centered in ourselves and are you talking about the victor frankel space that i've heard you mentioned before can you say to breathe yeah it is that i mean you know what is victor frankel who survived the nazi death camps describes this idea between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is our power to choose and it's in that choice that lies our growth and our freedom when we are hooked when we are emotionally inagile there's no space between stimulus and response you know he started in on the finances i left the room um i'm being undermined i'm gonna shut down okay so there's no space between stimulus and response what are we doing to create the space what we need to be doing is firstly do away with this idea that some emotions are loud some are not allowed i feel what i feel gentle acceptance secondly recognize that our emotions are data but they are not directives okay so we want to be able to observe our emotions not get stuck in them but also not push them aside we want to be able to observe them wisely another way that we can start just generating that data not directives space between stimulus and response is to simply notice our thoughts our feelings and our stories for what they are they are thoughts their feelings their stories what do i mean by this if we can instead of saying i am sad we start to say i'm noticing that i'm feeling sad i'm noticing this is my there's no point thought i'm noticing that this is my i'm not good enough story what you're starting to do is you're starting to notice your thoughts your emotions and your stories for what they are their thoughts their emotions their stories they're not facts they're not scripts that you have to live into so when people begin to notice that when they recognize their story do you teach them to rewrite that story well what we often wanted to do is we wanted to say this is my story and who do i want to be right now so you know for example this idea of getting hooked on the story of i am right we've all had that experience okay human beings love being right so i'm right and they are wrong and we've we all know this you know we all know that when you've been in a relationship for any period of time you can have a fight with someone and finally the water's calm and you get into bed and you turn out the light and then something compels you one last time to turn on the light again and tell the person why you are right and they are wrong and all hull breaks loose again you know wars are made and countries are devastated by people being hooked on the idea of being right and so think about this you know the more important question for all of us is i may be right but is this story serving me you know i may be right but is the serving who i want to be in my relationship why do you think it's important to move towards things that scare you because on the other side of that is your growth another side of that is strength even in going through pain like i look at pain as a positive thing i'm not talking about putting yourself through pain on purpose but it's just like working out you know the only way you're going to get strength in your life is if you go through that hard moment that tough moment i wouldn't have a story if it wasn't for the sucky times in my life i wouldn't have a story if it wasn't for me going through my depressed moments so realize this just because it's a chapter it doesn't mean it's your whole story so for me i just understand that it's very important to embrace pain to go through it because i believe the foundation of all strength is pain all right so speaking of chapters i think that one of the most interesting thing that anybody can put themselves through is becoming a professional athlete yeah um and i get that it sort of wrapped up but you talk a lot in the book about a champion's mindset yeah how did you get to the point where you could push yourself as hard as you did to get into the nfl i mean that's that's really extraordinary you have a stat what's the stat about the number of people that actually get into the nfl it's less than one percent it's like point zero zero zero point it's crazy yes and i told my son the other day he's like i'm gonna make it to nfl i was like you better be working hard at 99 percent of the people in the world you know it's very very hard and for me it was all i ever wanted it new it was like no other option for me so that's the powerful thing about tunnel vision is that when you really focus on something you really want it it's very possible but the thing is a lot of people aren't willing to go through the hard times putting the work when nobody's looking i think i tell my son all the time i'm like okay you went to track practice but guess what this is something everybody does what are you going to do that your teammates aren't doing because you don't have to just be the best on your team you got to be the best in your city the best in your state one of the best in the world to be able to make it so it's a whole different level of commitment and that's where that championship mindset it came to me from i want to talk about that so i don't know how much you know about will smith but watching him from afar has been really really intriguing and he talked about on when they were doing the karate kid with his son yeah and his son got hurt like he injured his knee and will was like [ __ ] on him he's like you got to get back out there like you got to push and jaden's response and he was way young like kind of slack but he was like i want mom and like goes over with his mom and people like will why are you pushing him so hard he said i'm teaching my son how to hunt yeah and i thought that gives me the chills now like i thought that [ __ ] was really powerful how do you think about that with your son do you do you worry about pushing too hard you were about not pushing enough like what does that relationship look like so with tristan i push him but i want him to want it i don't want him to want it because daddy wants it for him because to me that's great but if i got to push you to do something i'm there to support you but if i got to push you to do it it means you really don't want to do it so this whole process of he's 10 years old and people thought like you know you see kids playing at five and six and their dad is like you know going super hard on their kids and i get it but at the end of the day i want him to want sports i want him to want football like you want to be a doctor that's fine with me but you got to understand the same mindset to be successful you can take that in any field so you're going to play sports for the simple fact that i know this can build you up for whatever you want to do it teaches you perseverance it teaches you how to handle pressure moments it teaches you how to work hard the ethics of like sports is great but at the end of the day i'm like tristan i can want you to be a superstar but when you really want it like when it's like when you want to when you wake up at 6 a.m without me waking you up when you say hey i want to go work on routes without me telling you that's when you'll be obese and that's when you'll be super successful at it when did you start wanting success in football that badly when i was six wow man would you drove that probably want to be better than my two older brothers but what really helped me was blessed enough i was able to live across the street from a professional football player and it made it very tangible for me seeing like because you know you're growing up you see these sport your heroes as like you know you think they're not human and so i was able to humanize like the dream at that moment in my life i'm like oh this dude is just working hard he's running around the block just like other people and i got around that my uncle he still coaches for the chargers but he was coaching even back then when i was a little kid so i was blessed enough to be around it i got to see jerry rice i got to see t.o and so it made it real for me so i'm like if they can do it they breathe just like i breathe you know they just work hard and they just want it and so at that moment i realized that it's super possible but i knew i had to put in the work to actually make it a reality for me dude i love that i wish i had encountered that when i was young the bad news is i don't know that it would have resonated with me when i was a kid yeah i was not prepared to push myself physically to get good at something when i was young it was always about the easiest path for me and i think about this a lot with people in my community and i know you'll get this because you have such a thriving community yeah but the one thing i come back to all the time is i can't want it for you that's right and so the thing that haunts my dreams is how do you help people create desire and should you what do you think about that like so there's the whole buddhist phrase that all of suffering is born of desire which i actually think is true and yet i think some of the greatest joys are born of desire and so my thing is i've gone all the [ __ ] way in on desire like building desire to want something to need it even though objectively it like there's really nothing to it how do you think about want and desire well the leverage that i use with my supporters is i mean at the end of the day people say trent you changed my life and i'm totally against that like i'm like i didn't change your life i'm not a life changer i just plant seeds like you had to make the decision to actually apply and actually do it but i use the leverage question of when you get to your last day on earth when you're sick are you going to look back and realize that you wasted your whole entire life settling for less not being who you're created to be and even with myself like i don't want to look back on life like that i don't want to go to my grave within completion so i talk to him like that some of you are going to go to your grave site when in completion i don't know who said this quote but they said uh you know the richest place on the world is in the graveyard and it's true because there's so many dreams talents and visions in there that people for whatever reason fear you know just life they never unwrap those gifts and when i talk to them about that i used to actually this might seem weird but i used to actually go to the cemetery really yep and i would bring one of my friends with me and um i would say bro we walked around there it's like this is reality like we're gonna be here and we walked around and we looked at the tombstones and like death has no you know has no age there were people that were three people that were 80. and it's like i'm gonna be here one day and when i'm here i want to have a fulfilled life i don't want people to talk about me at a funeral and make up stuff i wanted to be like trent really served this world and he really used his life not just for himself but to impact other people and so i'm just i know i go back to leverage but i'm big on that and that like flips the switch for me like time is ticking and so you either can waste your day or you can do something with it one of the chapters in your book if i'm not mistaken it was the last chapter is about legacy yeah how do you think about legacy i like personally i don't think a lot about legacy i think a lot about phases of our lives so i i fully resonate with what you're saying about walking around the graveyard which i would [ __ ] love to do you someday that would be real um but how do you conceptualize that do you have markers in your head about what you're striving towards like how deep do you go in sort of the like we're all headed to the grave yeah i don't i don't get to the particular parts of it like you know like how my funeral's gonna be set up that creeps me out so i don't get that end up but i do think about like the question that i ask myself and it's come up a lot more to me you know and i haven't figured out why but i asked myself you know like what really matters and there's a quote by bob goff and i'm probably not gonna get this right but he said basically like his biggest fear was like being successful at the wrong things and the quote is like way more beautiful than that but i'm paraphrasing it's like i used to have a fear of not succeeding but my fear now is succeeding at the wrong things and i think about that a lot like what's really going to matter at the end of my life and i literally prioritize my life around that i heard you say something once you want to talk about i'm going to butcher one of your just insanely eloquent and beautiful quotes but you said uh you're not a success unless you're a success to your family yeah and i thought that was really interesting something because i don't have kids i don't spend a lot of time about but i do think a lot about what my wife thinks of me like that's a far more powerful motivator to me and then you talked about how basically how do you feel about yourself and if you don't feel good about yourself then you've got some fundamental flaw that you need to address how do you help people begin to take stock of where they're at with themselves reality so i have a rehab process and the first r is reality it's facing reality too many people run from it you know my quota is you'll never win your war by running from your battles and so you got to step up and you got to face it i don't care what it is it might be something in your past it might suck to face it for me it was facing that my dream was over my identity so for somebody watching this it might be a relationship it might be a job but i kept running and the thing about it like you can run all you want but reality is going to be right there when you stop and it's going to chase you or even if it doesn't chase you're going to be right there you have to face it so i really let people know that acknowledgement is power people think if i acknow knowledge that i'm hurt or i need help i need help is the most powerful thing that you can say and i realize that with my life because immediately you have people that are going to help you and grow your life exposing yourself like in a positive way obviously but expose yourself we think that we always have to be so sheltered that we have to be so strong especially with the social media world it's like i have to have everything together that's like a silent depression that's gonna happen when you suppress things like that when you smile for the camera but die behind the scenes which i did so well for so long in my life you're never gonna fool the person that you see in the mirror every single day so i got really comfortable with saying i suck at this i need help and literally in my business life and my personal life in the last year it's been the greatest year of my life just by asking for help and exposing my weaknesses in certain areas yeah it's interesting your obsession with authenticity with being really who you are at all times i think is is really cool to see you um get the kind of community that you've gotten around that being vulnerable and opening yourself up but what i find really interesting is you're also the flip side of the coin so as you were talking i was like he's absolutely right but the reason that i'm willing to listen to you about it is because you're also driven you're trying to improve yourself you are trying to be great you are trying to be strong and tough you're just not afraid yeah like how do you do both i just i'm i'm real with myself and i'm honest like we're humans i mean everybody isn't on all the time you know we all have our struggles our silent battles as i like to call them and instead of ignoring those silent vows i let them out but yes i am a person that's will tell you make the world respect your greatness i'm very firm on that i'm a person that believes in myself i'm a person that wants you because i believe that's contagious like even with social media i feel like that's what really grew my platform is people looked at my life not because of my knowledge or whatever it's like trent really believes this like he really does he really lives it he really he doesn't just talk it or type it he lives and that's a big thing for me you know i can tell people a secret right be transparent like in a real way because that creates connection now it's like i can relate to that person you know growing up in the church i'm gonna be real with you tom like i would watch pastors and preachers and i would be like i could never be them because it was always perfection i was like i could never beat them so i just chose a different lifestyle but now when i see people like say you know what i struggle with this i struggle with addiction doesn't mean you're not awesome because you have addictions everybody has addictions everybody has about battles some people just hot there is better so i relate more to that because now it becomes attainable now you become relatable to me and i can be like wow like i can still go through this there's nothing wrong with me i'm a human i'm going to have my insecurities my flaws and i can actually grow from it so i think we need more examples of the world of that and that's what i just try to give people as much as i can you have a great way of like packaging things up in these really memorable phrases one that you said earlier that i want to get back to is you said a lot of people never unwrap their gift yeah and that really hit me what is that look like like how does one unwrap their gift yeah it's it's a process it's the process of i think facing fear i mean and we can talk about fear for like because facing fear is is super important we can talk about like my process with that i think in order to unwrap your gift so i'm not gonna go into my skylife story that'll take forever but i realize like what fear is right and for me fear is creating a known result right from a situation we haven't experienced yet and so when i used to go back to football when i would be scared to go out there and perform i'll be like you know what i'm gonna drop the ball i'm gonna miss the pass and the whole crowd of 80 000 people is gonna be like ah so i'm like i'm scared now stage when i'm on stage before i was speaking what do you think i was thinking i'm gonna freeze up again nobody's gonna care all of these things i realized that i was creating a result before i ever experienced it and so i said hmm if that's the case i need to create something better on the other side of that door something more empowering that's gonna force me to actually go through the door so now when i speak i say you know what i'm going to impact at least one life so go out there and do it you know when it comes to my skydiving of course that thing was the parachute's not going to open you're going to die of course you're not going to jump out of playing but i immediately changed that so this is going to be the most incredible thing and also leverage where now i can use this in every area of my life because i conquered my biggest fear so people out there that are going through fear for moments it's kind of like this you will never step into the ring if you're already telling yourself that you're going to lose before the fight you'll never do that like why would you right so tell yourself you're going to win even if you get knocked down guess what you're never knocked out in life until you actually tap out into your last day so figure out that leverage point with your fear what's going to help you walk through the door and then you have to just give it to the world i never knew speaking was my gift until i actually went out there and failed i actually went out there and embarrassed myself and i realized like wow this is what i was created to do and i knew that because i like to put it like this and i hope they get it that's watching this but i've never had so much like peace in the midst of like fear never had so much confidence in the midst of like my weakness in that moment and so when it comes to gifts think about it like this like when someone gives you a physical gift like christmas and your birthday what do you do you unwrap it you show it to the world you put on instagram you got that same gift inside you that the world needs and you're doing the world of disservice by leaving your gift wrapped up somebody needs your story my mom told me this and i'll never forget he said trent you're a sign to reach people i don't know how many but you're assigned to reach people that nobody else can reach but you she said everybody has that and the more you leave your gift wrapped those people that need your message that need your encouragement whatever it is that needs your talent they're never going to get it and you're not going to leave this world a better place i know people watching right now are thinking one question what is my gift yeah i want to unwrap it all day long yeah how do people identify what their gift is enough to be able to unwrap it this is a this is a good question this is deep so can we talk about purpose for a minute and go into this so this is my way of purpose and i've never heard nobody talk about this and some people might be like that's not right but everybody tells you to find your purpose right and i'm just like where like who has your purpose like the world doubt the world has your purpose the world might have your validation of who you are they might be like oh you're great at this and so they give you that validation talk about this in the book i believe and i realized this like last year and i actually wrote this chapter i went back and i changed it all because i'm like i'm telling to people telling people to search for purpose i believe you are a purpose i believe you our purpose you're created for a purpose like we notice that this is like a zero percent chance of you being you you are that so when you operate from there it gives you that confidence that i am that it's not something i search for you can take your life wherever you want to take it what you're looking for is placement right it's like so for me rehab time is not my purpose it's my placement interesting i can take trent to down the street and go impact lives because i am purpose right football if my mom was right back then i could use that platform to be who i am so you can take your life anywhere and i want people to know that because some people think when you lose a dream or you lose something that it's over but you didn't lose who you are you lost that thing that placement right you so that's what i think about purpose and i would tell people like understand what your magnet is and when it comes to that ask people and so when i look back over my life ever since i was five years old people have been telling me i had this gift but i was so focused on what i wanted to do that i couldn't even hear that yeah that's really interesting to me the notion of the difference between what you want and where you thrive that's definitely using my words not yours but yeah that whole dynamic is interesting another thing that you've said that i'm really drawn to is i you were talking at one point and you said hey if you've got like a garbage party your personality don't pretend that it's not there don't pretend it doesn't need to be improved like address that make the change yeah and that like it's that realism of you've got like the the painting the picture of the dream and the gift and you are purpose and all that but also recognize that you have these really dysfunctional parts of your personality um how can people address a dysfunctional part of their personality yeah i think you have to you just have to face it and deal with it like i think it's just too hard to suppress it it's too hard to ignore it and so you have to be honest with yourself and truthful with yourself and i think a lot of times what it is is for me i was expecting things from people that i wasn't giving to people and so that's very very selfish you know so i had to look at myself and say you know what this part of my personality needs to be changed it needs to be fixed so it's that reality that you have to have with yourself and that that truthfulness and not knowing that it doesn't make you weak by admitting these things it doesn't make you less by admitting these things and i bring it back to social media because just this generation it's the filter life you know like even in real life like everybody wants to put up this filter and they think that's their superpower but your superpower is literally just being real and that's where you grow at like you have to acknowledge that i need help in this area i have faults i have flaws right here let me fix these things and that's going to make you more of a a superhuman you just mentioned suppression you've talked about how suppression leads to depression yeah talk to me about that why does that happen and why does it matter it matters a lot um you know just even for me even to get to that point of understanding that you know my colleague one of my best friends committed suicide and that changed my life like when we talk about going to the graveyard it was right around right after that time when i started thinking about life and what's going on and i realized that he was suppressing so many things he didn't have an outlet and i mean we take from a physical standpoint i mean if you keep suppressing something what's going to happen it's going to explode at one point and so what you don't face are things that you know you don't fix and so for me it's about letting it out you know a lot of my videos people don't realize like therapy is not a weakness especially as for men like go to therapy have somebody you can talk to have a brotherhood a manhood have somebody you can same thing with women you got to have your click of people where you can have open dialogue without being judged to be able to let these emotions out because those if you don't deal with your pain your pain will definitely deal with you it will and i've been there before i've been like i said the person that would say i'm okay when i'm not okay when i was sitting in my mom's room my mom would say trin are you good yeah i'm good when i wasn't good at all and i got to those moments where i don't know if it was suicidal thoughts but i didn't care about living if something happened to me might be better off because my life is over that's the way i felt and so i had to let those things out and my way at that time was music with your mindset how are you dealing with your mom's cancer yeah it's hard it's very hard my mom had cancer and what made it hard was she beat stage for living in breasts and i'm with her at the at her last treatment she rings the bell she's like trent i don't feel and it's on my instagram like she's where she runs the bench this trend i don't feel something don't feel right i'm like mommy you're all right you just in your mind she goes to the doctor that next maybe two days later and they find out after tests that she has brain cancer so at that moment i'm like it's not fair you know and i started questioning my faith and i had to do like a deep search and a deep dive of you know understanding and finding a perspective my perspective was my prison at that point and what what really helped my perspective and i wish it wouldn't have helped but it did um my best friend's mother died in her sleep didn't have anything and so i told my mom i was like mom as much as this sucks you're still here you having to go through treatments means you're still alive that pain means you're still alive and that's the perspective that i'm taking with it now like there's people who wish they could have this pain there's people who wish they could you know be alive to even feel cancer and she's progressing with it though and uh it's hard man i tell people all the time i don't know the exact words to even tell people how to how i'm dealing with it you know i'm just trying my best to be strong for her and try to see the beauty in it wow that's interesting i did not expect you to say that how do you see the beauty in cancer in anything like that well it's for me seeing that she still has an opportunity to overcome it and i think you know is that is that power perspective in that and saying you know what her life might not be how she wants it to be but at least she has life and that's how i look at my life at times and everybody should look at their life yeah life might not be adding up to what you wanted to add up to but at least you have another every single day is a new beginning every day is a new beginning and certain days aren't going to look like you want them to look but at least you have another chance like a hundred i tell us that all the time 150 000 people die every day that's 55 million people a year if you're looking for a blessing put your hand over your heart realize that's your blessing you have another opportunity at life and that's why i'm so intrigued this is like geeky probably but i'm so intrigued with sunrises and sunsets a sunrise lets me know that i have another day and the sunset means i made it through another day and so i'm i love sunrises and sunsets and i thank god for it it's really interesting you just hit me with that because today in particular the i had so much to do self-created i don't ever have to work again if i don't want to but i had so much that i had allowed to be on my plate that the sunrise was almost frustrating for me because it meant that time was going by and i just wanted it to stay dark and i wanted to have more time to work and get something done as you were saying i was like [ __ ] now that's a really powerful perspective shift to like one simple difference of framing of like you know wow i'm here i have the opportunity to have a lot of my plate and to dig through it that's uh just and it was a point like that's funny you said a lot a lot on your plate i don't know where rapper is i think it's lil wayne i think he says like a lot of my plate is now my favorite dish she said that and i think it's a genius line because i'm like that is like that is true because there are times like because i went i go through these moments like i'm flying everywhere and i'm just like gosh i gotta fly here like my book is like this is crazy and i i caught myself i'm like bro like do you realize the life that you have right now there will be times like you dreamed of this you know even of course i thought it would be football but like you dreamed of this you didn't have nothing on your plate and you were you would pray to have anything on it so don't get you know of course what i don't want to overwhelm myself with stuff but don't complain when you have too much on your plate because there's people that have nothing on it and so that those are the perspective shifts that i use like a lot every single day every time i'm complaining i go to that like you're blessed to be able to be in this position like you wanted this this was your dream you know so for sure we are going to be talking all about overcoming negativity this is something that i know a lot of people struggle with and it really is going to be the kind of thing that holds you back but i've got some really powerful tips techniques strategies that are going to help you guys get past that and build the life that you want for yourself now i get asked about this a lot so i've had a lot of questions come in and the first one goes like this how do you learn to love forgive yourself when you've done something in the past you wouldn't forgive someone else for doing i want to do and be better but seem to always come back because i don't think i deserve the things i want to achieve youch okay so here we go i have a very hard and fast rule that i use when it comes to this idea of self-punishment now self-punishment can be very useful but not when it gets to the point where it is diminishing your sense of self like what i see here when you can't even let yourself believe that you are worthy of improving getting better and accomplishing things we're now officially in what i'll call a death spiral so the rule that i put in my life is very simple and it allowed me to let myself off the hook for things that i had done in the past and it goes like this every human being should only ever do and believe that which moves them towards their goal now their goals should be both exciting and honorable meaning it should be exciting for you but it should also not just serve you but it should also serve other people so no matter who you are no matter what you've done pursuing a goal that is honorable that uplifts other people why on earth would you not want yourself to do that so if we can agree that everybody should be pursuing goals that are honorable and everybody should only allow themselves to do and believe the things that propel them down that path to actually achieving that goal now it's not about you it's just about common sense for human society for us as the human animal to get the most out of this experience and to contribute the most then we have to put ourselves in a frame of mind that propels us down that path there were so many times in my life where i really believed that i was stupid or i believed that i was unworthy or i believed i needed to be punished for something that i had done and i would get in these loops of like oh man i'm not good enough i'm never going to achieve this and why am i even bothering and i realized that even though i would ultimately get past it and be like look just do it i would waste so much time in this beating myself up cycle so i created that rule that i was only going to do and believe that which moved me towards my goals so now it's like am i good enough to do this am i worthy enough to do this do i deserve to have something positive happen in my life and the answer is i'm going to believe that yes i am good enough to pull this off yes i am worthy of doing something like this for two reasons one i'm only pursuing things that are honorable in the first place and two such is the nature of the human animal and the human experience that we should all be getting ourselves in a mental frame of reference that propels us forward and so i just let myself off the hook that even if i deserve to be punished it wasn't gonna move me towards my goal it wasn't going to help me contribute to myself which by the way nobody should feel bad about contributing to themselves but it really wasn't going to help me contribute to other people and as long as i felt good about the things that i was trying to do and create it just made sense to let myself off the hook so that i could take the actions that i needed to take in order to help in order to contribute in order to thrive so i use that rule all the time in my life and i hope that you will get as much value out of it as i have all right the next question around overcoming negativity even though i have had lots of learnings from my previous relationships certain toxic ones have given me experiences that override my logic and optimism and affect my current situation how do i use the past as a source of knowledge and use it to my advantage in this case rather than see my current relationship crumble because of my assumptions to all the negative things that can happen lack of trust etc okay this all comes down to what is effective so if thinking about all those negative things is effective then we're going to do it if letting those negative things go and looking at the more optimistic side of what could become what we could build works then we're going to ignore it we're going to move forward now the reality is both of those things are true you want to look at where things went wrong you want to assess what the problem was that caused for that mistake to happen in the first place for the betrayal or whatever may have occurred now the key is when you look at this and say ah there are bad people in the world there are people that want to do me harm then you've taken a neutral incident this person just to make it extreme this person betrayed me okay as shakespeare says there's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so you've made a value judgment on that now one way you could say is i uh people are bad like as a defaults people it is so easy to go to the negative side to cheat on somebody to take what you can get to take advantage of the situation that people are looking to lure me into a sense of um trust and then they're going to abuse that trust and it's just the nature of people well the reality is that does exist in human nature like we know that humans can be incredibly selfish but whatever you look for you're going to find so i want to introduce you to this idea of it doesn't matter what you look at it matters what you see and i'll push that even farther and say it doesn't matter what you look at it matters what you choose to see because the other way to look at that if somebody betrays you is to say oh my god that really sucked that hurt i do not want to put myself in that situation again but i know how hurt people can be how scared how wounded how people can get based on how they were raised and the people that they've been around they can get these toxic patterns where they destroy the good things in their own life like we had an amazing relationship and they ended up getting themselves into uh a situation where they lacked integrity where they couldn't be honest and i know what it's like to be unable to say the hard things i know what it's like to get swept up in you know uh the electricity of the beginning of a relationship or to be too afraid to invest in something for the long term and so with grace and compassion though i'm not going to go back into that relationship i actually understand how they could end up there another way to look at it and this is the one that gets my vote is to say all right this sucked i get it i get that humans do dumb things i get that humans can be hurtful i'm not interested though in what my partner did wrong i'm only interested in what i can do next time to avoid the same mistakes without diminishing the beauty that is a relationship now i have a fundamental belief that the single greatest joy that anybody can have in their life is to share a life with somebody that they love and who loves them that they trust and who trust them so i'm not going to give up on that belief because it went wrong one time two times three times whatever i'm looking at what i can control to make sure that i don't end up back in that situation now all three of these ways of looking at it are reasonable they're rational there is a very strong argument to be made for any of those three right but only one of them empowers you to move forward to take control of your own life to make different choices next time even if it's just to say you know there are issues in the way that i select and do i need to go seek therapy to figure out what it is that draws me to people that are more likely to betray me or to abuse me or whatever the case may be but these ultimately are identifiable problems and solvable problems and given that they are identifiable and solvable problems i want to stay in the driver's seat which means i have to take responsibility for my actions now that doesn't mean that i'm beating myself up and you know playing the blame game it just means i'm retaining control which is extraordinarily powerful so i want to go back to that idea of it doesn't matter what you look at it matters what you see i'm gonna choose to see what i could do differently in order to get a different result and because i believe that one of the the i mean for me the belief is the most beautiful thing that you can ever hope to get in life is to love and be loved to somebody that loves you back that you trust and they trust you and that takes a lot of work but it's amazing and it's worth that effort so i'm gonna retain control all right that's how i would look at it not just that particular example but that's how i look at basically everything in my life all right next question how do you know when something is actually negative or a warning sometimes when you embark on a journey there are so many voices within how do i then learn to separate negativity from fear all right this is amazing this is a question about self-awareness now all of the you know self-improvement talk in the world is useless if you don't learn to become self-aware now here's the great news this is a process now there's certainly some people that take to it a little bit more easily and maybe you really struggle with self-awareness but i'm going to walk you quickly through the process of how to gain some more self-awareness so it goes like this in your body there's this thing called the vagus nerve the vagus nerve is the biggest nerve in your body the vagus nerve runs all over everywhere touches every system goes into your gut down your limbs everything now most people think of the body as the brain telling your body what to do and then a little bit of information from the body if you hurt yourself or whatever you're going to get a pain signal or a pleasure signal but for the most part it's a top down system read lisa feldman barrett's book how emotions are made that book flips all of this on its head and what it explains is that it's basically an extrapolation of the fact that the vagus nerve 80 of the data that it sends is from the body to the brain only 20 from the brain to the body think about that and that emotions start in the body so a big part of self-awareness is getting in your body feeling your body figuring out how a an emotion manifests itself does it do you start to get flush do you feel jittery are you anxious are you angry beginning to identify the sensations in your body because the way emotions are made you get a feeling in your body your body then maps that feeling on to what was happening the last time that you felt that oh the last time you felt like that you were angry the last time you felt like that you were scared the last time you felt like that you were in love whatever and your body tries to map or your brain tries to map that body sensation onto a familiar state and then once it goes ah yeah i know that this is fear boom all the responses that come with fear and you go and so one of the ways that people talk about anxiety at a physiological level anxiety looks very similar to excitement and so one of the loops that a cognitive behavioral therapist for instance would tell you to do is to go oh i know this feeling this is excitement not oh i know this feeling i'm super anxious oh i know this feeling this is excitement and you constantly work to reframe that feeling as excitement now the super weird thing is it works your brain actually believes what you tell it so your brain is quite literally coming up with a backwards compatible story to try to make sense of the feeling but it also allows you to put a conscious reinterpretation on top of that feeling so now you're able to go oh this isn't anxiety this is excitement i feel that what's coming is going to be fun it's going to be exciting and that's why my heart is beating faster that's why my breath is getting more shallow because i'm super excited to go do this thing now when you first start doing it of course it sounds like bs and you're calling yourself out on it but if you repeat it and you go through that process enough it really does begin to come true the next part of the equation is just getting really good at identifying the signal that your body's sending you so instead of mapping it to sort of you know four or five really basic primary emotions fear excitement um joy sadness whatever like those really sort of primary colors of emotion we get into a layer deeper and we start beginning to identify oh i get this is i'm feeling flustered why am i feeling flustered oh they they um they're saying that i'm short and i'm insecure about my height so oh man this isn't me that i dislike them this is that they're tapping into my insecurity and i will just tell you in a marriage like realizing that 90 of the arguments you get into you think they're about a cup of tea or about the kids or um let's stick with the kids money that's another huge one you think you're arguing about money let's say but really what's happening is you're afraid that you can't pay the bills or you're afraid that when they say that they're worried that you're not going to be able to pay the bills that what they're saying is you don't make enough money and that they told you you should have gone in to talk to your boss to ask for a raise or you should be working harder you should have quit that job a long time ago and gone somewhere else and so now you get this flustered feeling because they're triggering an insecurity but what usually happens is people just lash out and you start arguing about the paying the bill but this isn't about paying the bill this is about how you feel about your job and what you think they're judging you about not having a higher paying job people get into those death loops all the time the biggest argument my wife and i ever got into was over a cup of tea over a cup of tea we got into this huge screaming match it almost ended our vacation what little vacation we had at that time and i remember thinking this is crazy like we are legitimately yelling at each other we are about to turn the car around on the freeway and go home and not go to our vacation over a cup of tea and so finally we just said all right hold on hold on what are we really fighting about and that was the beginning of realizing my body sends me a signal it's making me agitated i blanket interpret this as oh i'm angry why am i angry oh because they wasted time having this cup of tea when in reality it was this way deeper thing about respect and i felt like she wasn't understanding how important it was to me to have taken time off to go on this vacation to spend money we were so poor to spend money on a hotel so i wanted to be there the second they would let us into that room to feel like i was getting the most out of my money and for her she's like oh my god i'm finally heard and understood that we're going on vacation he's giving me some of his time and so i'm going to start my day out with a cup of tea and just bask in you know going slow and not you know being hard charging for a minute but we weren't understanding each other and so we had this huge blow up over the t so beginning to identify in real time my body's telling me something i don't want to shove it into this primary basket of emotion i want to figure out what's really going on that some egregious percentage of the time it's somebody's triggered an insecurity about something you're not feeling respected you're not feeling loved you're not feeling smart they make you feel dumb make you feel poor whatever you have your insecurities around and when you can actually talk about those insecurities now things begin to unlock but it begins with that process of i feel something in my body what is it put a name to it make it as nuanced as possible and then articulate it out loud when you start doing that enough all of a sudden you're able to get to that very quickly and that will change the game dear tom many people around me are struggling with negative self-deprecating thoughts and self-narratives and nothing i do or say for them seems to reach them they are so used to being miserable and depressed all the time that they are unconsciously blocking away the good in life so my question is what should i do with people who refuse to let go of their negativity they are close friends and family members so i just can't cut ties with them but being with them is really draining thank you in advance for your brilliant answer and wish you and your team all the best all right the super bummer news that i have for you is while i have the right answer i don't know that it's the super genius answer that you want one of the goals of my life is to get to the point where in 30 seconds or less i can change the course of somebody's life through magic words for lack of a better way to think of it and i'm really trying and it won't give up but as of right now the only solution that i have when you love somebody that is stuck in negativity is what i call just sit if i know i'm going to spend time with them and i can't break them out of their negative ways then i'm just going to sit and be with them and i'm going to love them and i'm going to make sure that they know that i love them and i'll live my life without judgment without needing them to change without trying to preach to them i'm just going to be with them and find things that we can talk about that's fun there's almost always something that even the most negative person loves and if you can find that thing fishing card collecting hawaii whatever somebody's thing is whatever it is that they like to talk about and you get them onto that subject you'll actually have fun it's really surprising my my dad's wife is way into quilting now i can't tell you how not into quilting i am but she's really passionate about it and having a conversation with her about quilting is so interesting because she's so passionate and whenever you can get somebody on to something that they're passionate about whether they're a positive person or a negative person it gets to be a pretty fun place so i just sit i try to find things that they're going to be excited to talk about and my whole goal is to make them feel loved where they're at now i live my life the way i'm going to live it i don't join them in negativity i don't you know go in on those conversations but i don't want them to feel judged i don't want to put distance between us um you know there's nothing worse than making somebody that you love and care about feel judged which of course i was by even though i was just trying to help i didn't want to see them suffer anymore in constantly trying like saying hey you're doing this wrong like there's a better way you'll be happier it just made them feel judged and it was putting tremendous distance between me and somebody that i cared about so it works it will work every time but you have to let go and know that they're going to suffer until they're ready to change you can't want it for them much to my dismay all right next up i previously used negativity as fuel to achieve my goals i.e doing things that others didn't believe i could do although this was a very effective tool i ultimately felt dissatisfied when i reached these goals i am trying now to use passion to fuel my goals but find that it is a less effective driving force have i just not found something that i'm passionate enough about or is negativity truly a powerful tool if so is there a way of reframing the negativity such that i can use it without feeling dissatisfied at the end okay so yes yes there is the dark side and there is the light side of the force and the dark side has its place but you have to be very careful you cannot use them in equilibrium i have found in my own life that it's about 80 20. 80 of my time i spend focused on the beautiful things that i want to create the amazing things the the mission that i'm on how i want to help other people right i talked about goals being exciting to you and honorable so they uplift you and other people and i try to spend as much time as i can there and that's gotten me through a lot of difficult times to think about the people i'm trying to serve to think about the way that i'm going to help people we end every team meeting at impact theory with a connection to our communities whether it's playing a video of somebody who's changed their life or reading a letter that somebody's written us about how the content that we create has moved them forward in some meaningful way and they're beautiful and it's amazing it feels so good but there are times where i'm so fatigued there's a great quote by vince lombardi fatigue makes cowards of us all and there are times where i'm so fatigued all the beautiful things in the world are not enough to keep me going and i'm just done i'm spent i'm in i'm past the day david goggins 40 where he says when you think you're broken and couldn't possibly go another step you're only 40 of the way there okay the beautiful things that get me past that hurdle but when you're actually 80 of the way there 90 of the way there really close to being fully spent the thing that i lean on in that moment is the dark side the people that want me to fail the people that are on my list as i call it there are people that have tried to trip me up that want to see me lose that come at me go behind my back whatever and i put them on a list and i never think about the list more than 20 of the time because that's a dark place to be but when i'm really tired and i'm in danger of cowardice i think about those people and it's an ugly energy but damn is it powerful to say i'm not going to let them win i will as david goggins says take their souls and it's really powerful and it's one of those things that i often get pushed back on because it is ugly to say that i think about these people and i think about destroying them and beating them and outperforming them in every way and dunking in their face and doing better than them in life and watching them just get demolished by my performance but it's motivating and it works now if you spend too much time there you slide into bitterness you slide into anger it's resentment it's all about them but man let me tell you if you get that balance right 80 20 90 10 man it's it's really profoundly powerful there is a reason that evolution has given you anger there's a reason that evolution has given you rage there is a reason that evolution has given you righteous indignation you know you hear these apocryphal stories of a woman lifts a car off her baby and i think the reason that we all believe it whether it's true or not is you know what that energy amplitude is like when you're just enraged with somebody and you refuse to back down and you're right and they're wrong i used to when i first started working out in the gym and i hated every second of it i used to imagine somebody attacking my wife and the rage that inspired in me allowed me to push myself in the gym and i would say the problem isn't that it's a powerful energy the prob it only becomes a problem when you spend too much time there so the the short answer to your question is use it but never more than 20 and if you also have that huge basket of resources to draw on of things you love and people you want to help and you know all the great things that you can bring into the world if you keep pushing you will be fine so don't be afraid to leverage it don't over leverage it i love that question all right six last one i currently study at a prestigious school in my country after i finally finished high school my problem with negativity has to do with this school since the day i got enrolled i'm full of negativity and self-doubt which led me to squandering most of the scholar year my brain somehow finds ways to trick me and keep me unmotivated and negative all the time it's really depressing to be like this and stuck in a rut if you could help me overcome this curse of negativity i truly appreciate it and thanks a million for your efforts all right homie when i say have the silver bullet for this one this this is the magic genius answer that people were looking for on the other one here it goes you do not need to think that you are anything special it is absolutely okay for you to be hopelessly average why to me the most powerful thing that you could believe about yourself is that you're the average human now why i actually think it is less powerful for you to think that you are above average because to think that you are above average means that you are valuing yourself for being better than people it's a super vulnerable position to be in because you will inevitably meet people who are better than you and what do you do with your ego then then it's really crushing you thought you were the man and now you encounter somebody that's better than you they slap you around they outperform you they dunk on you whatever and now whoa like you've got to rebuild and claw your way back versus saying the following the average human is the ultimate adaptation machine as a species humans have chosen to respond to cultural and environmental cues so we do not come pre-programmed like a horse that comes out of the womb 10 minutes later it's ready to rock and roll it's running around doing all the things that a horse can do a human on the other hand has this huge period of development after birth where we cannot take care of ourselves we can't walk can't hold our own head up we [ __ ] in our pants it's crazy but what that does is it allows us to drink in this the environment that we're born into and adapt so the average human is the ultimate adaptation machine therefore being the average human means you're a learner that's it you're not exceptional so you're not putting any of your psychology your self-worth your pride into being better than somebody else it all comes down to valuing yourself for being the learner so hey cool you wasted a bunch of time at school no reason to hide from that it was a waste we're not going to repeat the mistake but we learn so you've got the self-awareness to see that it was a mistake now it's just like what do you want to do what do you want to get great at because if you apply yourself even if you're not good yet you can get good how do i know that because you're the average human and the average human is the ultimate adaptation machine this is all about disciplined focused energy into acquiring a skill set so what i call the only belief that matters when you believe the time and energy directed at something through deliberate practice will actually make you better at that thing now all of a sudden it's like i can get good at anything if i apply myself and now all of a sudden your behaviors align with your belief that's why that belief matters so much because if you don't think you can get better at something then why would you apply any time and energy to it and if you don't apply time and energy to it then you really won't get any better so it becomes this loop of well i believe i can get better therefore i try therefore i actually get better therefore i try harder and you get in this virtuous cycle this is hugely important that is one of those things that will govern the rest of your life you value yourself for learning getting better at something and applying yourself everything else will take care of itself because you just keep applying yourself don't make excuses don't be asked yourself if you wasted time you wasted time don't spend your time beating yourself up over it because we only do and believe that which moves us towards our goals right we talked about that earlier so we're gonna do and believe that which moves us towards our goal and in this case that is the belief that we can get good at anything now there's an incredible quote i love this quote so much you can't make a racehorse out of a pig but you can make a really fast pig your life can be the answer to what does a fast pig look like that is certainly what my life is all the success that i've had in my life is not because i was gifted at any one thing when i left for college my mother quietly assumed i was going to fail my best friend assumed i was going to marshmallow my way through life when i asked my father-in-law for his blessing to marry his daughter he said no and yet i went on to be successful to earn my father-in-law's respect um not because they misidentified me because they didn't they were right but because i developed drive i got the only belief that mattered and i finally realized that humans are meant to grow and get better at something and i just have to apply myself and the same is true for you decide what you want to get good at and go after it with everything you've got and that my friends is how you overcome negativity you're dancing with these electricity and these chemical charges that are bouncing between each other so then the number of brain cells becomes less relevant that's why i just i just think though the future for brain science brain health is going to be even better than what what we've already seen but we have just started to manipulate the mind

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,312,721

Keywords: TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Joe Dispenza, Trevor Moawad, Trent Shelton, Susan David, tombilyeu, Conversations with Tom, Health Theory, mindset, growth mindset, how to be successful, entrepreneur, successful entrepreneur, negative thoughts, control your thoughts, overcome fear, how to deal with anxiety, negative self talk, hack your mind, change your brain, brain hacks

Id: VIBBH-dwzJc

Length: 140min 56sec (8456 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022