How to Master Your Negative Thoughts and Use Them for Good

I hope you guys enjoy this episode, brought to you by our sponsors at Athletic Greens. To receive a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase, visit athleticgreens.com/impacttheory. Enjoy the episode. Everybody, what's up? I'm Tom Bilyeu, and today 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. Yikes. 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 going to 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 it 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 default, 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. 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 going to 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 going to 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 are 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 a 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 manifest itself. Does it Do you start to get flushed? 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 uh 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 to 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 is 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 into 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, 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 tea. 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. Let's talk about Athletic Greens, the all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. With so many stressors in life, it's difficult to maintain effective nutritional habits and give our bodies the nutrients it needs to thrive. Busy schedules, poor sleep, exercise, stress, or simply not eating enough of the foods that your body needs. 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Again, that's athleticgreens.com/impacttheory and get your free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs today. All right, guys, give it a shot. Take care and be legendary. Next. 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 I 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 um trying to preach to them. I'm just going to be with them and find things that we can talk about that's fun. Um 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. And 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 community. So, 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 and 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 will 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. They're 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 cuz 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 pro 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 that 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 I have the silver bullet for this one. This This is the magic genius answer the people were looking for in 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 were above average. Because to think that you were 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. Like 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're 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 you're not putting any of your psychology, your um 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. It's what I call the only belief that matters. When you believe that time and energy directed at something through deliberate practice will actually make you better at that thing, now all of the sudden it's like, I can get good at anything if I apply myself. And now all of the 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 beat yourself up. 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 going to 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. All right, guys. Do not let negativity hold you back. You are in complete control. Victor Frankl was in a concentration camp. He said, "Between stimulus and response, there is a gap. You choose how to respond in that gap." The negativity will arise, almost certainly, forever. But when that negative voice presents itself, how you respond is up to you. All right, guys. That's it. Go out, kill it, make your life what you want it to be. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. If you haven't already, be sure to smash that subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you never miss a thing. Till next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.