Stop SABOTAGING Yourself and Get UNSTUCK By Doing These 5 Tricks | Tom Bilyeu

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. Today, we're going to be talking all about self-sabotage and how to get unstuck. This is something that comes up a lot in people's lives, and I'm excited to talk about this cuz the great news is, trust me, my friends, no matter where you're at in your life, you can absolutely make a change. I know that sometimes it feels overwhelming, you don't know where to go, you don't know how to orient yourself and move in a new direction, but we're going to cover all of that today. All right, now, let's get straight to the questions. I have lived my life chasing this dream of being a writer. When I speak about writing, I get choked up and overwhelmed with beautiful, intense emotion. This has to mean something. But then, all of time keeps passing by and I'm not writing what I know is lying dormant inside of me. How can I be so passionate and so in love with something and yet so afraid? All right, this is an amazing question around this idea of self-sabotage. For a long time, I really struggled with do people actually self-sabotage themselves? Uh and this is exactly the way that I think people end up getting into that self-sabotage, which then creates that feedback loop where they're feeling incredibly stuck, which is you love this thing and you have this emotion. There's something there, man. I love it. I want to lean into this. Yes. Then, you get into the nitty-gritty of actually doing it. And all of a sudden, you're facing every insecurity and every fear that you have. And now, all of a sudden, that intense emotion that you felt, that wonderful desire to succeed, that feeling of "Whoa, I can do this, man. I've got it." becomes self-sabotage because you suddenly aren't sure that you're actually going to be able to make good on that. And the idea of this thing that you want so badly possibly being out of your reach forever is the thing that makes you just not want to deal with it. So, you get involved up to the point where you're feeling that great emotion. Then, when you feel uh any of that resistance, you back off, you get out of it, you allow yourself to be distracted so that you never have to answer the question of whether you could be good or not. It's always something in the future. Well, it didn't work out today, but I can just write tomorrow. This is why getting married to Lisa ended up being one of the greatest things that I could do for my success. Forget like the love and the joy that she's brought to my life from that angle. Just being successful. I do not know who I would be if I had never met her because when I proposed, her father-in-law did not want me to marry his daughter. He was very concerned that I wasn't going to do anything with my life, and rightly so because at the time I was laying in bed 4 to 5 hours a day every day and was not implementing the drive that I needed to get good at what I was doing. And it's for this very reason that if I put it off until tomorrow, I didn't have to face that maybe I'm not ever going to be good enough. But then being in that position where I proposed, her father's nervous I'm not going to make anything of my life. I remember thinking to myself, "Oh my god, there is now a witness to my crimes. Whereas before, when there was nobody in my life, if I messed up, I only took myself down. And so I could just always oh, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. It'll be fine. Tomorrow I'll do it tomorrow. And now all of a sudden it was like, "Yo, this person was hitching their life to me and we were going to do this together." And so now if I didn't live up to what I was telling her, I was going to drag her down with me. And so all of a sudden it really mattered that I find a way to the other side of this. And by putting it off till tomorrow, I really was sabotaging myself because if you want to get good, you must face all of those problems, all of those fears. You have to be willing to fail. And I'll get more into that later. But you have to be willing to fail. And if you're not willing to fail, if you're not willing to embarrass yourself, then you're really going to struggle. And so having that realization of whoa, I'm actually myself back because I don't want to face the reality that I might not ever be good enough at this thing because I had not yet realized that I actually wasn't good yet. Wasn't good yet. And that if I was willing to put the time and the energy into getting better, then I could. And so it was all about recognizing that I can get better, that brain plasticity is real, and that the more time and energy I put into getting good, I actually will get better. And so you have to push through that. You have to hold on to that you have about how awesome writing is or whatever your dream is. That it really is exciting to you, but now you have to go through this desert of getting good, that it is going to be painful, that it is going to force you to face your inadequacies. But that if you're willing to face them head on, you can actually get better. And that's how you get unstuck ultimately. I mean, that's going to be the punchline here. That's how you get unstuck. That's how you stop self-sabotaging. Is accept that it's okay to not be good enough yet. And that you're going to put in the time and the energy to get good. And it takes a long time. Takes a long time. People peg it at somewhere between 7 to 10 years to get a baseline of mastery. So unless you've been And that's full-time. Unless you've been pouring yourself into something full-time for a decade, you haven't even begun. So that's where it starts. That's how you begin to back out of this self-sabotaging death loop. All right, guys. If you're going to unlock your potential and achieve everything you've ever wanted, you are going to have to constantly be making progress towards your goals. So what do you do when you get stuck? The bad news is getting stuck happens to everyone at some point. It's pretty much unavoidable. But the good news is that if you're willing to take action, there is a framework that you can follow to get back on track. If that sounds familiar or if you're stuck in a rut and not achieving your goals as fast as you want, I've pulled a class out of Impact Theory University that you need to watch right now. It's called Six Steps to getting unstuck, and you can watch it for free at unstuck.impacttheory.com. Inside, I'll teach you about how to use cognitive reframes, my four-level value stack to becoming unstoppable, as well as the single most important thing to start doing today to regain momentum. To watch this free preview for Impact Theory University, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com. I'll see you on the inside, guys. All right, take care, and now back to the episode. Hello, Tom. I get up every day with the exact plan of my day, yet procrastination kills me from taking action. How do you take action towards doing the thing that you know you should be doing to reach your goals, even when your mind is demotivated, lazy, and switches to procrastination mode, and you end up feeling regretful by the end of the day? All right. You need a goal. And that goal needs to be two things. Exciting, meaning you just like it. There is something about it that you find motivational, exciting, whatever. And then the other part is it needs to be honorable. Now, honorable means that it elevates not only yourself, but other people. The reason those two things are the guaranteed one-two punch of success is getting motivated is all about managing your neurochemistry. It's about knowing how you want to feel, figuring out the things that make you feel that way, making sure that that feeling is incredibly elevated, so that you really chase after that feeling. The reason that people do drugs is to modulate their neurochemistry. Now, the great news is that you can modulate your neurochemistry without needing to do drugs, but it requires you to invest emotionally in things that matter to you. Now, the number one problem I see when people are procrastinating is they are not very excited by their goal. You have to take the time, one, to figure out what it is that you like. What are the things that you respond to? Kevin Kelly has a really fascinating idea that he calls not prematurely optimizing. You don't want to prematurely optimize. You don't want to pick a life path until you've explored and understand what the things are that you get a natural response from. Now, it's just going to be some degree of like. I like this thing. It isn't going to be, "Oh my god, the heavens open up and it becomes clear what I should be doing with my life." It is way simpler than that. It is something that gives you more energy than it takes. Now, once you find the thing that gives you more energy than it takes, now we can begin investing in that and we go back to that initial idea of I'm excited by my goal, which is very clear. I know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and it's honorable. Now, when you're doing something that elevates other people, you get in a positive feedback loop cuz what happens is you work hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to move towards this goal that's exciting and honorable. And then you start getting feedback from people because achieving your goal, even pursuing your goal, is helping other people. By helping other people, you get positive feedback. Because you're getting that positive feedback, the next time you want to lay on the couch, you need only think of them and the way that it makes you feel to help people, to elevate, to push yourself to go and get something done. All right, that's the high-level thing. Then, you want to put rules into your life so that you don't end up wasting time, so that you catch yourself. So, for instance, the reason that I don't ever find myself just laying around is because I have a rule. Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. Now, I've been very careful to make sure that the things that I'm working on are moving me towards that goal that's incredibly exciting and honorable. So, I'm getting all the feedback from people by getting good at this thing and adding value to their lives and it was already exciting. I just found it interesting in and of itself. And then, I have invested emotionally over and over and over focusing on the people that I'm trying to help, telling myself I'm trying to help these people, telling other people, embodying the emotion that I want to feel. And then, I've got my rules to fall back on. I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. And those two rules, as deceptively simple as they are, when combined with a goal that excites me, and then the feedback loop of actually being able to help other people, creates a thing where I get so much juice out of it. Now, you're going to have different rules. Maybe for you it isn't that Monday through Friday you're either working or working out. Maybe it's Monday through Friday, if you're awake, you're either spending time with your family or you're working or working out, whatever. Like you're going to make different allowances for the things that matter in your life. But as long as you're doing those things in their order of how you value them in your life, like you might say, "Monday through Friday, if it's between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., I'm working. If it's between the hours of 5:01 and my bedtime, I'm spending it with family." Rad. Now you've optimized your life for the things that matter to you. You don't need to try to match my rules, you just need to know your value system and put it in order, build rules that allow you to actually accomplish that. And then, hold yourself accountable. And if you're still not doing it, at some point we have to only you just don't want it badly enough. And then we have to refocus on desire. Is there something that interests you enough that you can work that loop of creating that emotional connection in your life? And then that's where to start. All right, next. I've been struggling for years with self-confidence. I have so many great ideas and gifts I would love to get out there and expose, but my lack of confidence always catches me somewhere between start and the middle, and I give up because in my mind I'm going to fail anyway. How do I ignore the habitual negative thoughts and push through all the resistance? Okay, you're not going to ignore the negative thoughts because they're going to come for you whether you want them to or not. Here's what you're going to do. You are going to recognize a fact of the human condition. It's part of the physics of being human. There is no way around this. It is for better or worse, the way the world works. And that is failure is the most information-rich data stream that exists. Meaning the very nature of success is that you must fail. And not fail once or twice, but you must fail over and over and over and over and over because it is only in that iterative process that you are able to improve because you need the information. Okay, so the I mean take a child, right? You don't stand up for the first time and just start walking. You have to get up, try something, wobble, fall down, figure out how to balance, hold the couch, fall over, not hold the couch, fall over, get back up, and you start to realize, "Okay, cool. I see how I do this." And by the way, the muscles are forming. So, the muscles that you're going to need in order to be able to hold yourself up will only form if you actually get up and try to walk and fall over and over and get back up. Now, we stop doing that when we're young, but the world doesn't stop working in that way. The very things you need to learn how to do, the mental muscles that you're going to need to develop in order to do the things that you want to do are only going to be developed by doing the thing. So, then you're taking that feedback of the failure and you're refining your process. You're getting stronger. You're getting more nuanced in how you can handle that situation. But it only happens if you're willing to do that thing and necessarily fail. Now, we can talk about hedging the downside, which you want to do. There's no reason to have catastrophic failure that actually injures you um financially or um you're putting yourself in a position where you could really damage your career prospects or something like that. But, the vast majority of the mistakes you're going to make are going to be very small in nature. And what they're really going to do is embarrass you. And you're going to hate that feeling of failing publicly in front of other people. But, if you understand that that failure taught me something, that I must do that over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in order to get better, then you will realize that this is how on a long enough timeline I'm going to win. So, once you believe that that the only way to get better is to be willing to fail and learn in that, and that all of that knowledge stacks into skill set that actually lets me do things that other people can't do. And the only way to get ahead in my life is to do things other people can't do. And so, I must fail in order to become capable of doing what other people can't do. Therefore, I have to look at this on a longer timeline, not worry about my momentary embarrassment, which will happen over and over and over. And that negative voice in your head is trying to protect you from the feeling of that. But, you have to lean into that in order to actually be successful. So, then you get to the point where you It's not like you want to be embarrassed, but you are so hungry for the improvements that the embarrassment temporarily is meaningless. And so, the phrase that I repeat to myself that helps me through this is on a long enough timeline I can beat anyone at anything. Now, it's almost certainly a lie, but it's an empowering lie that gets me to get up and take action and know that that lie is actually based on something incredibly true, which is whoever is willing to fail the most and face the most embarrassment to garner the skill set will ultimately win. Because success is a game of attrition. Most people give up. Most people don't even start because they're so afraid of being embarrassed and that feeling of being a loser or that other people are going to think you're dumb or whatever. They never go and they never get that momentum and because they don't get that momentum, they're never able to achieve the things they want to achieve. So, get really good at facing that embarrassment and you can really propel yourself forward. Emotion should never stop you from achieving your goals. So, if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, low on confidence, you're beating yourself up, or you feel like you're not deserving of the things you want in life, I have something to tell you. Emotions are not facts and you should never let them hold you back. And yet, I find that people do this all the time. They mistake that feeling for objective truth and it sends them in this downward spiral. Reaching greater levels of success in life means knowing how to use your brain. And if you're in a rut right now or if you've been struggling for a while to achieve your goals, then I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University to help you get back on track. It's called six steps to getting unstuck and it's for anyone who wants to know the exact steps to achieving big goals when life puts challenges in your way. If you want to check it out, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com to get access. It's a free preview. All right, guys. I'll see you on the inside. Now, let's get back to today's episode. My snag happens because what I really want is the feeling of freedom and pleasure. I believe having more financially will allow for more freedom and pleasure, but success requires discipline and planning, which inhibits the feelings that I'm after. I feel like I'm missing out in the moment by chasing success. Do I just come to terms with it or break out of this cycle of thinking I feel stuck? Okay. So, the reality is that those who can delay eating the marshmallow the longest do the best because you're right, delaying gratification is an absolute superpower. Now, one of the most extraordinary experiments was done at Stanford University. It's called the marshmallow experiment. There's a whole book written on this, utterly fascinating. They followed the participants in the study for like 25 years. Absolutely incredible. They bring these kids into a room. They give them a marshmallow and they say, "Hey, you can eat the marshmallow now if you want. But, if you wait until I come back, then I'll give you two marshmallows. So, it's basically double your money. It's not going to be that long." Now, what the kid doesn't know is that the researcher isn't coming back and they just want to see how long the kid is going to wait until they eat it. They do eventually come back, but they leave them really to struggle for quite some time. And what they found was the kids that could come up with games, whether singing to themselves, not looking at the marshmallow, whatever, the kids that were able to delay the gratification the longest ended up doing the best. They got the best grades. They got the highest-paying jobs. They had the most successful relationships. Now, the reason that that works is in any one moment, if you're just operating around optimizing for momentary mind states, brain states, neurochemical states, then you're always going to be in short-term thinking. You're always going to get short-term results. If, however, you have this goal that excites you and is honorable, and you're able to push through all the boring stuff and all of that, then what you get is a set of skills that allow you to do things other people can't do. And as we established in the last question, if you can do things other people can't do, that is by its very nature success, and you will be rewarded in a way that other people will not be rewarded because they can't do the things you do. And as long as the things that you do are valued by society, then you are always going to do very well. But, that ultimately is the key. You have to be able to delay gratification. Now, for me, understanding that that was the nature of things, that if I can delay my momentary wishes for something longer term, then I could get these very different results that separated me from other people. And because I'm excited about what I'm pursuing, I use that excitement as my trick to stay focused when things get boring. And I've said many times that boredom kills more entrepreneurs than failure. So, everyone will tell you that fear of failure is what stops people, and that is a huge deal. But, honestly, like I think it's the fact that people don't want the outcome badly enough to fight through all the boring, painful stuff that you have to go through to get to the other side to ultimately be successful. So, make sure that you are hyped up on your goal. If you're not, then you're not going to be willing to go through all the difficult things. All right. Hey Tom, can't tell you enough how much uh you mean to this community. Well, thank you, that's very kind. I am totally hooked on all things Impact Theory, uh but also guilty of self-sabotage. I feel like I am highly self-aware and know I can break through old uh synaptic patterns in my brain of self-limiting behaviors. My question is this, do you employ a version of Mel Robbins' 5-Second Rule, and what can you expand on that approach? Thanks. All right, so anybody that doesn't know Mel Robbins' 5-Second Rule, one, go watch the video that we did together, uh where she talks about how motivation is garbage, and you just need something that propels you forward and gets you going over that initial fear, that initial hesitation. And she walks through the science of something very simple, about counting backwards. So, 5 4 3 2 1, and then you just get up and get going. Um I don't use that at this point in my life, because I've dealt with all the things that I needed to to excitement and making sure that I want to pursue my goals, making sure that I have rules in place, making sure that I want to feel about myself a certain way, and I can only feel about myself that way if I adhere to the rules and achieve the pursuits that I want cuz I don't hold myself accountable to getting something. But it matters to me a lot whether I'm sincerely pursuing that thing. So, sincere pursuit is a big deal in my life. Now, had I discovered Mel Robbins or I should say had Mel Robbins been putting out amazing content like that for me when I was struggling with that, then I have no doubt that I would have found that very useful. Um but unfortunately, the self-help industry was not what it is today. Uh and so that stuff didn't exist uh when I was going through it, at least not in in the quantities that it exists now or the ease of access for that matter. But the things that I've walked through in this episode, those are the things that I use. I think it is incredibly important to be excited about what you're trying to accomplish. I think it's incredibly important to have rules in your life that you adhere to. And then identity is a big part of it. And so one of my secret weapons is that I know that what matters in life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. And that how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself is largely a function of your identity, what you believe to be true about who you are. And I know that it is critically important to earn credibility with yourself. And to earn credibility with yourself, when you say you're going to do something, you must do it. And if you don't, then you won't have credibility with yourself. You won't be able to respect yourself. And unfortunately, you probably won't have a lot of self-worth. One of the keys to developing self-worth is to recognize what you think is worthy and then to do that. And so doing that thing is going to become incredibly important. And that's why I have these rules in my life. That's why I focus on identity. Now, there's a statement I use to understand where my identity is, which is I'm the type of person that I'm the type of person that when I say I'm going to get out of bed in 10 minutes or less, I actually get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Now, that makes me feel good about myself. I'm the type of person that believes so much in what he's building that Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. Right? So, you build these identity statements into your life that when you adhere to them, they make you feel good about who you are. They represent something in your value system that you believe to be true and worthy. And when you do that, and then you adhere to those things, then you're going to feel way better about yourself. And the desire to capture that feeling about who you are over and over and over becomes the very thing that propels you out of bed and gets you going and moving towards your dream. So, I cannot stress the importance of that enough. All right, guys. That's it. I hope that all of those answers give you things you can do right now today to be highly tactical. Speaking of things that are highly tactical, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.