How I turned my life around in my 20s

hello and welcome to the forest today i thought i'd talk about something quite vulnerable so i've gathered all of my plants around me to help me through this journey but basically a lot has changed in my life recently and i've realized that i had been thinking of myself and thinking of my life in the wrong way i found this one exercise which really really helped me gain this clarity and i thought what the hell let's make a video out of it because hopefully if you see your life or existence in the way that i do it might also be very very helpful i wish i had seen this sooner so if this sounds like that kind of thing you are into let's get straight into it but basically not just now but for a while i've been wondering if my life has been going in the right direction and because so much has changed i've started to question things and am i reaching for the right things and doing the right thing and even though i absolutely do not have any answers to what i'm supposed to be doing i've done something which has helped me so much be comfortable with what i actually am doing and who i am and i thought it was just too good to not share the most important thing that this exercise has given me is the realization that most of my sadness in life actually has been coming from things for which i do not care about at all and they've just been kind of like vestiges of who i used to be as a person in the past i never actually realized how much i changed and now that i've done that in a few minutes i honestly could let go of so many sources of pain and sadness and it has been like absolutely nothing else that i've done in my life so i will be linking the exercise in one of my free notion pages in the description below but if you feel like you want to hear how i've used it and what it has done for me you can't stick around so basically for a bit of context what prompted me to start this whole thing was the fact that uh very recently i made the decision to kind of leave medical school which has been kind of the center of my whole adult life has been training to become a doctor and the fact that my health was quite bad so i had to basically make the decision to drop off for a while kind of threw me into this sort of crisis and for full context of course it is not the end of the world that one kind of steps away from their education for a while or potentially forever for me it actually did have a huge emotional effects on my life it affected my own identity as a person and who i potentially was it was something difficult that i had to say to my parents it had effects on my kind of safe future that i'd imagined for myself and been working for toward working towards for so long and also it potentially affected my career on this youtube channel and my brand in general so i think it was mainly that initial thing that identity crisis of oh my god what if i don't become a doctor or why am i so attached to this thing that left me on the path of trying to discover in a bit more detail who i actually am and who i think that i am and those two were different things so the exercise that i did was a values exercise and it might seem quite lame at first glance but please please please i challenge you to take it seriously and do it in the proper way because i can almost guarantee that it will change your life completely so basically what it is it is a whole list of values and the first thing i will say is please do this on your own and don't show this to anyone unless you actually want to because you want to be completely honest with yourself all of these values are positive things such as acceptance from other people or acceptance by yourself or having money or having fame or being safe or being secure or having like financial stability so all of these things are positive things and i guess in an ideal world we would actually tick all these boxes and have all of these things but what you want to do for this exercise is list them into things that are important for you and things that are not that important for you and the way that i did it was actually taking it a step further and focusing more on the things that were surprisingly important to me and things were which were surprisingly unimportant for me so i'll use some examples the first thing on the list is acceptance so for me to be accepted the way i am and even though when i was younger this was a huge huge value of mine i realized that now i don't really care about this almost at all i don't care to be accepted the way i am by other people because i'm actually comfortable with the way i am and as long as i don't harm others which i rarely do and i apologize when i do i don't care to be liked so this is not important to me at all the next one is accuracy to be accurate in my opinions and beliefs again couldn't care about it less i am very very often wrong i'm very open about my opinions and beliefs and when they are wrong i'm happy to have my mind changed i know that they change all the time so it's not a strong value of mine so i went down this whole list and identified things that were important and unimportant and then i narrowed it down once more seeing the things that were surprisingly important or surprisingly unimportant for me and this was the part that was absolutely shocking even though i thought i kind of knew myself i realized that the things that were surprisingly unimportant to me were the things that were bringing the main source of stress and concern to my life because i was living under the assumption that i cared about these things because i had cared about them at some point in the past but the fact was i actually never did and i could let go of this dress so so fast for example uh relating to my medical thing one of my concerns with leaving medicine was around safety and security for example because i know that there have been many times in my life where either me by myself or me and my family have had very little money and it always has been a strong value of mine to have a stable and secure life to be able to you know pay rent and make the basic and have the basic necessities of life however i realize that this is no longer a value of mine and i don't really care for it as much and on the other hand i care about things such as experiencing as many things as possible in life having a huge variety in the things that i do and kind of being pushed about in life in a positive way because i realize that the main times that i've grown as a person have actually been from experiences that are quite you know emotionally mild if i can say so so basically i realized that safety and security was no longer on that list and that concern that had been brewing for a very long time with me potentially you know risking my medical career essentially disappeared because i realized i don't care about this anymore i love the phrase that we don't want to go to our death beds or graves with a kind of pristine well put together body but we kind of want to be beat around by life and have a lot of positive and negative experiences and this is something that i subscribe to as an adult i just have to say caveat to this because this is not a word of advice to anyone else this is not even advice i would give myself five years ago this is not for 16 year olds or 18 year olds or 27 year olds who are in different conditions i say this knowing that i have quite a bit of training and that i can go back to medical school and i can do many other different like careers so i know that i will be able to afford my necessities so this is why i can take this sort of risk in my case but this is not advice to anyone else this is not me telling anyone to kind of um subscribe to one way or another this is a risk that i take knowing that i am safe and secure in my finances if that makes sense so just had to say that to add to that things like being flexible to new conditions in life and me accepting myself the way i am were very high on the things that were surprisingly valuable to me and this is not the way that i had lived in the past so for example i was quite um shy to accept how nerdy i am or how much into books i am or how much into note-taking i am and now i realized i don't actually care what other people think about this and i find this thing very fun no matter how nerdy it is so i know this sounds really really small but being able to accept this being able to say that i want to be the kind of person who can flexibly adapt to having to take a break for something or change into another career or be open about how they feel about things online to thousands of people is something that i value and the kind of person i want to be and therefore it gave me this kind of permission and it gave me another layer of acceptance and being able to do things like this for example so i've realized quite a lot with this exercise it is surprisingly unimportant to me to be a master in what i do or to be very successful in what i do and this was very surprising because when i was younger this was one of my main core values but i feel now as an adult looking back on those times i realized that i was excellent at what i did when i was a child or a teenager but that did not bring me joy i'm not happier right now without caring about those things and they might happen or they might not happen but i genuinely couldn't care so i feel as though that has been very very liberating but something that i only realized while doing this exercise to have a purpose in life is something surprisingly unimportant to me because i've searched for that purpose for a long time and i haven't found it and i don't think it is something attainable and realizing how much i've changed means that my purpose will also continuously change so i think it's something that i don't really focus on as much anymore and on the other hand things that are surprisingly important to me are taking risks and accepting myself and having new experiences and having intense friendships and having different things happen in my life so therefore i think through doing this exercise i have got to know myself a lot better i came to realize i had been working with the same frameworks with the same ways of thinking with the same values that i had carried on from my childhood despite me now becoming a different person i'm more confident in ways that i had never been before i'm more accepting of myself in ways i had never been before i care a lot less about what people think something which i had never done before and therefore this has completely shaped the way that i view my life and the way that i view the world and not only this but there's also been some other benefits with doing this values exercise now i have this list of two separate things so when i get an opportunity or a decision to make in life and i know that my gut instinct may still come from that kind of pattern of thinking which i've carried on for all of my life but i can actually compare it to my values and say hmm it's not it's kind of against those that i want to have or those that i currently have and therefore it will not work or therefore it will work in general i don't use this on a day-to-day basis to choose what i had for lunch when it comes to huge decisions like going on a holiday or not going on a holiday or filming a risky video or not filming a risky video it actually does help a lot next thing that has helped me do is see things in a different light risks or loss are no longer a tragedy but just a part of my constantly evolving life i realize now that i'm a lot less dramatic as an adult than i used to be as a child and all of these bad things or terrible things are actually quite interesting if they are seen in a different light and quite educational rather than something to kind of be depressed and sad and miserable about and the last thing which is quite a big thing is realizing that there's no single purpose to my life or not one single value that i have but actually this is a constantly evolving thing and in a way i'm just kind of like keeping up with my changing self rather than setting this one certain goal and aiming towards it because chances are the goals that i would have had at the age of 16 would be so different to the goals that i want to have today and therefore there is no purpose striving for one like just one singular goal for the rest of my life because even if i get there i might find that i have completely changed again and i am completely miserable that's not to say that i don't strive or don't want things because i definitely do but the way that i approach these things the anxieties that i attach to them the amount of desire that i want for these things is massively different to the way that i used to view them in the past so in the end of the day i have realized that i value having a messy hectic life quite a bit i value having some level of financial stability but beyond that i value life keeping me on my toes and challenging me in many different ways and not having a stable singular kind of path from point a to point b i value embracing nerdy things that i genuinely enjoy i value not attaching my value to my career what i achieve or what i do i value playing around with my own mind what i think and how it changes and i value trying to keep up with it i think that all of these are likely to change in the future and i genuinely don't mind if they do i'm actually curious to see what kind of person i become so i think i might be doing this exercise maybe twice a year or maybe once a year but definitely once a year just to check in and see how i feel about things because generally the clarity it has given me is like nothing else one value that i'm actually fairly confident will stick with me for the rest of my life is that of lifelong education and on that note i want to give a huge huge thank you to curiositystream for sponsoring me on this video josie stream is the place where i like to guiltlessly relax with nature documentaries which are so so calm i remind myself of phil from modern family just putting my headphones on just listening to nature's sounds and nature documentaries but what i'm currently watching are these episodes on redesign my brain i'm currently on episode one which is making you smarter which reminds me of that movie i don't know what it's called where this guy takes a pill and then he becomes ridiculously intelligent this is more like the scientifically literate version of that movie but yes curiosity stream is actually incredibly reasonably priced and beyond that you also get access to nebula which is where other creators and myself will post our youtube videos where you can watch them for an ad free experience and if you want access to both of these i have a great discount link in my description but yes that was everything i had to say in this quite rambly video about values in general i have quite a few different frameworks that i've used to redesign the way that i think about myself and i go back to them again and again so there is more where this came from if this made any sort of sense to you please let me know i would love to chat about things like this some more and my notion page will be linked in the description let me know if you find it helpful and otherwise if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind yourself and others and everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 188,014

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Id: UfbxIBNqGW8

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021