Change How You FEEL About Yourself, Nix Bad Habits & Develop SELF AWARENESS

your concept of yourself is built out of the narratives that we create out of our experience and so if you want to change how you feel about yourself you have to start peeling back those layers of narrative your income your impact your relationship with creativity productivity in the world it all comes down to your relationship with yourself a simple moment in the morning where you set an intention it impacts your confidence it impacts your mood all day long just that simple moment people's admiration people's gratitude towards you will never fill you up it's your own it's your own inside it's not a matter of changing the environment it's changing myself [Music] how do we begin to establish what we think is good what does it mean to be better and you come to this from an ethical place and i know that you don't want to like direct people too much and say believe this or whatever but what are some jumping off points like is it to go read philosophy you said that you approach life as a buddhist like yeah how can people begin to build that framework for themselves because what what i'm really trying to get to is i feel like you have to have a base belief of some kind upon which things stack but i don't think people think about that yes and even just pointing them in a direction of how to start begin defining that for themselves i think would be super helpful yeah so for me i found that i talk about kant in the book i was very inspired by kant's moral philosophy basically he has this principle called the formula of humanity which is essentially it's so simple but it kind of explains everything he says that always act in such a way that you never merely treat people a person as a means but always as an end and what that means is like don't use people you know like anything you do uh the whole point of what you do what you do like the end goal of what you do should always be a person whether it's yourself or somebody else so like if you're like kind of misleading somebody or just saying something to somebody just to get them to like i don't know give you some money or you know make them like you a little bit um you know under that principle like that's that is not growth that is not success um any basic stuff like lying cheating stealing like all of those are examples of using people as a means to some other end rather than treating the person as an end of themselves um so i i when i came across that principle it just for me it kind of blew me back on just how universal and powerful and useful it was um because in and you know i spent a lot of time writing about dating and relationships and and i i was coming from a place where i you know my philosophy around relationships was always like the thing that screws relationships up is treating people as a means is being transactional in your relationships um and so when i found that con stuff i was like damn this dude gets it how do you advise is probably a better way to ask it how do you advise people to go on that journey like it feels like not the sum total of what you're trying to accomplish because it's pretty clear that you're you're very efficient at alleviating immediate pain but in terms of helping people find that spiritual awakening what does that pursuit look like how do people begin or how do they recognize markers on the path how do they know they're making progress a beginning is who we choose to spend time with there's a simple analogy if you take an iron rod and put it in fire and keep it there a little it becomes red and hot like fire and if if you touch that rod it's the same as touching fire and if you put the same rod in ice and keep it there then it becomes as cold as ice so what we associate with we so much become influenced by that and we see throughout the ages people's spiritual awakening is due to circumstances of life where we feel a need for something deeper something beyond just all the external experiences i'm having there must be something more to life than this in india i'm in villages with very simple poor people and i'm also with millionaires and billionaires and i really don't see too much difference because if a person doesn't find satisfaction in their own hearts and in the purpose of their life they're not going to be happy people whatever they have or whatever they don't have because the real treasure is within ourselves so when we feel that need when we feel that that purpose in our life to find something deeper something beyond then we connect with people who can inspire enlighten us to make that connection the human brain has a phenomenon called transient hypofrontality the neocortex as you know it's the the seed of thinking it's our monkey mind it's all the chattering it's the stuff that says tom you can't do it robin you can't do it what would they think what if i fail what if i get laughed at that's all the neocortex is the crown jewel of brain development not our primitive brain crown jewel but there's no genius in there now here's what i mean when we get away from distraction and we find our menlo park or we go work in a quiet place and we get lost the neocortex actually shuts down and that's why it's called transient typo frontality for a short period of time our thinking shuts down the whole model is in the book and we actually go from brain waves at beta down to alpha down to theta and maybe even delta and we stop thinking we go into flow in other words the advanced minds of the world the great geniuses galileo davinci steve jobs they weren't in the neocortex they got away from the world for bursts of time which allowed them to access the human capability we all have to get into flow state and access insights that they went out in the world and then executed on with a world-class team which totally changed the game i wonder if i can use this 54321 thing to get control of my thought patterns not my behavior patterns my thought patterns yes you can so we're gonna we're gonna build this conversation because i want to start with something we can all uh relate to and that is how do you stop worrying and how do you stop listening to self-doubt this is how you're going to do it so all day long you're going to have moments where your thoughts drift and i use that word on purpose because for me there is a physical sensation when you start to use the five-second rule and you start to wake up not only on time in the morning but you wake up to your life and the opportunities in your life there's your thoughts drift like you'll just be hanging out with your friends and then suddenly you're like i'm not sure that that person likes me anymore you know i haven't heard from my kids lately i wonder if they're dead or you know oh you know as a check like you just start worrying about stuff why because it's a habit because when you're not paying attention your brain shifts from you being a decision maker and paying attention to you just kind of spinning things on autopilot and one of your habits is worrying the second you wake up and you notice holy cow i'm talking some negative garbage to myself right now five four three two one you've just shifted the part of the brain that you're using you've shifted from the basal ganglia which is where your habit loops are spinning and you've awakened your prefrontal cortex you've also interrupted that pattern now what you're going to do because your mind is actually ready to receive a different thought because of the counting now you can put in an anchor thought like if you have a mantra if you've got a vision about the way that your business is going to turn out in five years if you just have a thought that makes you really happy and proud insert that now why does this work it works because of the counting and i'm not kidding we know based on research the positive thinking alone not effective in some instances trying to force yourself to think positive can actually make the worries worse why well the reason why is because it's really hard to just change the channel what we have to do first is basically interrupt it and turn off the tv and then turn it back on with the prefrontal cortex awakened so the counting is essential and so you can start using this today you catch yourself talking garbage to yourself because we all know if i were to put a speaker on your head and broadcast if you would be sitting here in the audience you'd be in an insane asylum because the crap that you say to yourself is insane and the problem is we listen to it you'll be you'll be in a sales meeting and you'll be undermining yourself they're not going to buy oh my gosh i'm in trouble you're not even present 54321 switch it back get back to that vision that you have about toasting your success or this customer being really happy or you being proud of yourself whatever that vision may be you can control your thoughts and this is not just us talking about it this is a tool that you can use you have a relationship with yourself the way that you have with somebody else yeah which is really fascinating tell me about that like what do you mean by that and and then like the whole notion of i forget the exact word you used but you said i approached this like a buddhist the self is an illusion i don't think you said that but it was like it made me feel that way yes yes yes i i said it's an arbitrary construct which yeah illusion i think uh so our relationship with ourselves like essentially what self-esteem is or self-worth is basically let me back up for a second the feeling brain so the thinking brain thinks in terms of like logic cause and effect correlations things like that the feeling brain thinks in terms of importance um it thinks in terms of values so some things are very valuable and worthy of our of being pursued and other things are very very not valuable and they're you they should be avoided um and the feeling brain kind of designates you know almost a value score for everything every experience every potential experience that we we can consider including ourselves so our idea of what our self is is just another idea the same way you know being living in new york is an idea and i there is a certain value i place on that and that that idea has logical connections to all sorts of things that who i am as mark manson is simply a constructed idea in my mind and as a constructed idea my feeling brain has either positive or negative valuations and feelings for for mark manson um when people have a low valuation of themselves when they have when their feeling brain thinks that their identity is not valuable and and have negative emotions about it uh we call that low self-esteem and when our the idea of ourself our feeling brain has a high valuation of it and has positive feelings for it we call that high self-esteem and so a lot of like therapeutic work for many decades was kind of almost obsessed of like just trying to get people people's this relationship between your feeling brain and your conception of your identity to get it to get the needle to move from negative to positive um because there are all sorts of you know positive repercussions of that but ultimately the your your concept of yourself is built out of um the narratives that we create out of our experience so all of the experiences that i've had or all the experiences that you have you know your idea of tom is just this vast collection of uh narratives that you've constructed around your own experiences and it's layer on top of layer on top of layer on top of layer and your feeling brain has a certain you know valence for those experiences and so if you want to change how you feel about yourself you have to start peeling back those layers of narrative and start getting down into the deepest earliest ones because those are often the most impactful and influential hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by our sponsors at betterhelp go to betterhelp.com impact to get 10 off your first month enjoy the episode what would you say are the three if somebody wants to be a truly effective leader what are three traits that they should cultivate in themselves know yourself i mean jack welch of general electric said it really well do um don't lose yourself on the way to the top warren buffett said they'll never be a better you than you so great leaders again it's those four interior empires working on yourself knowing what what you want to stand for knowing what you once said about you on the last hour for your last day knowing your core values your top five core values knowing those knowing your weaknesses knowing your strengths i mean a lot of leadership talk isn't about that but starting with your character and your self-identity that is really important for a leader i'd say the second thing for a leader would be well getting big things done you know you mentioned it in the introduction is like ferocious like a warrior when it comes to execution like great leadership is less talk and more do you know i it doesn't really matter what the chatter i mean it's all about execution implementation and and application so they get things done and we live in a world where you know we pull out the phone people i'm going to get this done and i'm going to get that done we say to people i'll send you a book it doesn't get done even worse it's we lose self respect from the promises we make to ourselves that we break that's where it all starts like it's so you know this it's so important your your income your impact your relationship with creativity productivity in the world it all comes down to your relationship with yourself so that would be the second thing about leadership it's like execution and don't break promises how do you help people not begin to erode their self-confidence and and maybe the right place to start with that is where does self-confidence come from right which is important because there's no relationship between that and eroding your self-confidence in other words self-confidence is really self-trust so the first thing is the people i know that are really happy are very self-aware in fact the best entrepreneurs i know are very self-aware they're aware of their shortcomings right they want to improve them they want to get to the next version of themselves all the time and so for me self-confidence comes because i didn't have it and i think anytime you meet somebody like yourself or myself who might now appear self-confident it's because i really had to find tools and resources because i was so insecure and shy and introverted so i had to find techniques and resources to build that up in me and for me it's very simple it's the promises that i keep to myself if i have a habit over and over beginning to stack one on top of the other of keeping promises i make to me not other people in other words the minute you begin to get external in your life worrying about what other people think about you right you've you've lost all control you and it never fills you up and people's admiration people's gratitude towards you will never fill you up it's your own it's your own inside and so for me self-confidence comes from keeping the promises i make to myself and the other part of it is being aware i'm doing it in other words most people don't give themselves enough credit all the time they're very aware of these 20 things and not aware of the 80 right and that's why the dosage is so important too you've nailed it it should be 80 20 right because people get addicted to this i'm not good at this people don't like this about me i don't feel good instead of focusing on the 80 and stacking up wow i did eat what i said i was going to today i did get up when i said i was going to i made the amount of phone calls i treated people in such a way i promised myself it's not just doing those things it's rewarding it's being aware of it and stacking that up when i work with athletes the successful athletes i work with when they're in a slump it's never that they can't hit a ball anymore or make a shot or swing a golf club they've lost their self-confidence somewhere along the way they've lost the ability to focus on the things they are great at and stacking those promises they make to themselves and the way i get them to break their slump is not correcting their swing or getting them positive it's getting them to acknowledge the small promises showing up to batting practice early hitting that extra bucket of balls beginning to reward themselves for the extra promises they keep to themselves puts them back in a state of self-confidence all of a sudden they're hitting the ball great again it's really an interesting trick of the mind and like you i have this similar sense of i want to be able to want it for people yeah and the one thing in my life that i am very grateful for is that i know how to build desire i know how to go down the process of wanting something what what is that process for you of desire because most what i've found in this book is here's the thing for most people and i'm hoping that your process will attack this what i've discovered that is heartbreaking is the average person cannot celebrate themselves cannot i'm going to ask everybody who's watching this to tomorrow morning stand in front of the mirror we're going to unpack this whole thing and try to high five yourself and most really fast give people the the science behind why that's meaningful so i have this habit of every single morning i stand in front of the mirror and i take a moment and i raise my hand and i give my reflection a high five and there is so much science behind this so instead of seeing yourself right and have having this moment in the mirror you know what the average person does first of all we beat ourselves down so i would look in the mirror for 40 some years and be like oh my god my freaking jowls look like saddle saddlebags on a goddamn horse going in the grand canyon my eyes have a my neck is only striped my boob one boobs hanging lower than the other i look like my gray hair like i start bringing myself down and when you start going down that road with your reflection then your thoughts go to i didn't get to that email i forgot to text lisa back i oh my gosh the dog still needs to be walked i've got nine minutes for my first zoom you're now checking out and that moment in the mirror every morning could be a profound moment where you lift yourself up and you check back in with your intention so the first piece of research and this is recent from harvard business school is that a simple moment in the morning where you set an intention about who you're going to be today impacts productivity how you show up as a leader it impacts your confidence it impacts your mood all day long just that simple moment of setting an intention so that's research number one instead of standing in front of the sink in your bathroom and criticizing your appearance or mindlessly going on autopilot check back in and let's teach you to make it a habit to lift yourself back up you were you were chanting and that you said that it opened something inside of you and you felt connected to that eternal spirit and you said you expected it to fade away but for some reason that one was just it was deeper and more profound than you'd ever had before is there a way to work towards that is it the repetition of the mantras is it belief in the words behind the mantras is it being out in nature like how can people you know really walk that path that you're talking about our spiritual practice is like a foundation it's kind of like charging your cellular phone there's so many functions that a cellular phone has these days but you need to charge it for all of them to be activated so we may have so many functions in our life with our families with our occupation with the world around us with our health but you know in order for them to be spiritually connected we need that connection and that's what our spiritual practice is for and that's what being with enlightening people helps us with and that's prayer meditation in our meditation we chant this beautiful mantra and are you trying to clear your mind when you meditate are you trying to soak in a certain feeling remember that you're connected like if you had to say in one sentence what the purpose of your particular meditation practice is what is the the purpose purification excuse the example of the mind which you just spoke the mind is like a mirror we're the self and we're seeing the world and we're seeing ourselves through the mirror of our mind we all have the experience time that when we're agitated nothing really looks good anymore and when we're in really good mood kind of everything looks good yes when you're in a good mood the trees look so sweet and when you're in a very bad mood you know you just couldn't care less about the trees so we're seeing ourself as a reflection through the mirror of the mind and we're seeing the whole world in a similar way the purpose of a mirror is to see ourself but when the mirror is covered by layers and layers of dust and dirt and debris that's all we see is that dust and dirt and debris what do i need to survive what do i absolutely need because the want changes every hour we want pizza today tomorrow's pasta the next week it's sushi next day it's like we want onions with tomatoes i mean you know like you're driving yourself crazy with this one thing the average person buys a car and six months later i should have gotten a blue one why would i get a different color next time yeah i feel the same i mean now in my life i feel the same thing with houses you get a house you go i don't know school maybe a couple years i mean i've been moving so that want is never quite satisfied because it's a fleeting thought that's going on in your head and you just you know it's also attached to sensationalism which is king and queen of america there's 80 million ads everywhere you turn and look turn on tv radio whatever so you got to be able to turn that noise off to get to what do i need talk to me about that as a process how do people actually do that especially now as it's escalating it's getting worse and this is social media is the king of it yeah it's everywhere it's telling you who you should date who you should marry it tells you everything you should do tom needs to grow like this so how do we turn it down well i think you have to be able to turn off the noise you have to be in a quiet place and you just got to really get into yourself one of my big things in life now people actually have no idea who they are so if you don't know who you are and i mean i know people 80 years old that don't know who they are i know some 80 year old boys that still haven't turned a corner to man so if you don't know who you are how can you know how to navigate your life so one of my other phrases in life that i love now this is your mission tom should you choose you tom nobody else you choose not your parents i didn't you choose to accept it do you know who you are and have you accepted that this is who i am this is what i need most people don't even think about that mental health is a huge priority in my life and i encourage everyone to prioritize it and one of the best ways to follow through on healthy mental health habits is by working with a licensed therapist better help is available for clients worldwide you can log in to your account anytime and send a message to your therapist betterhelp is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change therapists if needed it's more affordable than traditional offline therapy and financial aid is available betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact that's better h-e-l-p and join the over one million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional and with a special offer for our impact theory audience you can get 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com impact again that's betterhelp.com impact take care and be legendary your journey was very movement oriented which i find fascinating and as somebody who thinks in movies there's a moment in forrest gump where he has to put himself to movement in order to sort of clear his mind so in the 60s you're feeling deeply unsettled by what's going on in with the vietnam war and instead of just protesting you you begin to move and you're traveling around you end up in greece you have this tremendous calling i think you said um and you begin your journey to spiritual india like there was there's so much movement in all of that is there something to that or is it just getting out of all the things that create the illusion the second part it's it's passing through all these things that create illusion to a higher goal to a higher purpose which is living an enlightened life and each of us is an individual um my destiny we could say was to hitchhike from london to the himalayas to try to find a deep meaningful purpose in my life a connection with with spirituality with god but i know people who don't go anywhere and they get much more than me [Laughter] it's it's not a matter of where we go it's a matter of how we try to change our own hearts it's not a matter of changing the environment it's changing myself it's just a healthy habit to develop the desire to challenge yourself in every sense physically mentally emotionally um you know one thing i definitely started trying to do um especially recently given like the political climate that's been going on is i seek out articles and news sources that i disagree with um because i i see the the bubbles that everybody's in and the tribal lines that everybody's drawing and i am i'm horrified by it but i also want to try my best to not succumb to that myself and so um yeah i read sources i read books of things i disagree with and and it's and it changes me it it really does it it softens me um sometimes i'll finish the book and i'm like well i still don't agree with them but damn i respect them now like that's a smart person um and so that that's one way i do it intellectually uh but i think it's you know that carries over into all areas of life i mean it's as simple as um you know if you go to the gym it's like challenge yourself to do something new take a class that you know like my wife just at the age of 37 decided she wanted to learn how to swim and she's like mortified of it you know but i'm like hell yeah go do it you know like that's because it's not just about swimming it's it's about just developing that consistent habit of like stepping into your discomfort our parents give us limitation based on their limited psychology and their emotional patterns that they learn from their parents then we go to school and we're taught to live in a box think in a box dress like everyone else don't sing too loudly don't dream too big don't be too passionate and then our peers do the same thing to us and then society says oh genius is the realm of genetics not everyday people which has been dismissed by some very good science you know i mean the ten thousand hour rule that we all know from florida state university professor anders erickson it just confirms so much so i do think we all want i think what's happened is we've as we've left who we truly are we've contracted and now it's all about staying safe in the world versus going out there and letting our brilliant our primal genius shine and a lot of people just have stuff that pain of disappointment and their doubt really deep inside and they just are addicted to distraction and escapes because they don't want to deal with their potential that they've denied let's say something traumatic happens in your childhood that that pain early on in your life causes a lot of negative emotions and one of the things that i talk about is that anytime we feel an emotion it compels us to to do what i call equalizing which is um like if i'm angry at you i'm going to continue to be angry at you until i either get you know retaliate or you apologize like something needs to happen to make that anger go away there needs to be some sort of like equalization between us and if there is no equalization that anger just kind of simmers and sits there forever and one of the reasons why childhood traumas are so debilitating for people is that essentially these extremely painful experiences occur to our feeling brains while our thinking brains are still undeveloped and don't know how to explain or create meaning around that pain so let's say something really painful happened to me now i'd be like oh well you know he meant well and you know happens or whatever but if i'm like a five-year-old my explanation for it only gets as far as like i'm a bad i'm a bad boy i'm a bad person and the world hates me you know like that's and that will stick um because it doesn't get equalized and it'll stick for the rest of my life and the problem is is that we forget that that painful thing happens so we just kind of go through life with this uh feeling of inferiority and pain that lingers that we can't really put an explanation to or explain away and so the process of therapy is basically unraveling a lot of our experiences until we get back to that original experience and with our adult thinking brain we can now put meaning to that pain that is helpful to us essentially