E181: 5 Questions that will make you self-aware | Trauma Healing Podcast

What's up, Unbroken Nation! Hope that you're doing well today. We're going to jump into the show here and give you guys a quick review and of course, say, thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to leave the reviews, it literally means the world to me, and I read them and I know other people can find enlightenment out of them and can find hope out of some of them and like honestly, if you're like me and you go on Amazon and you like buying some shit, like if I don't read the review first like I'm not going to buy stuff, so thank you to everyone who leaves a review and you're not buying anything was in this podcast, but you're listening and I appreciate that.

This review is from MaddieKS

Listen and subscribe. Michael has a way to uplift and inspire and motivate you into believing in yourself and your potential for growth. He's so authentic, relatable, and genuine, and actually gives you attainable next steps to achieve your goals and change your life.

Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for leaving that beautiful review Maddie, it means the world to me.

You know, I think that one of the most important things about everything about Think Unbroken is understanding this truth and I'm going to say something and I don't want you to take it the wrong way, but I want you to understand what I'm about to say.

The reason why I do this, the reason why I make Think Unbroken, the reason why I put all this effort and energy into this show, and into the books and then to the coaching programs, and all of the things is for one reason. Because I know that this shit works, like in, what's so crazy to me is because I'm so self-aware because I understand who I am in such a real way like I understand that in the same way that a review that is positive like the one I just read and all the other ones that I read and all the reviews and the comments and the tweets and the DMS that are empowering, make me feel incredibly, not only like seeing and special and a part of something big, that's a movement but on the same token, every time I get hate mail, every time I get cancelled, every time someone asked me who the fuck do I think I am because I'm talking about these things without a college education, I don't give a fuck like that's the truth about it. Like here's what I want to say about this and this is really, really important like I believe in myself so much like and it's I'm going to win either way, whether you hate me, or you love me and I don't let that dictate whether or not I show up to serve. And I want you to keep this in mind as you go down your journey in life.

It's so easy for us to bend who we are, for other people to satiate their needs, or their desires, or to make them feel like they're winning or too late to hang our hat on the hook of our self-esteem coming from someone else.

Here's what I want you to take from this like really and I know this feels odd, probably to hear if you've never heard me say this before, I do not get my self-esteem from you, I do not get my self-esteem from anyone, except from me through the thing things that I do every single day by showing up in my life and that has given me such a tremendous amount of belief.

And here's the thing to like you guys know this or if this is your first time listening, this was not always the case go back to 27 years old, I had zero self-esteem, did not believe in myself, never showed up for myself, morbidly obese, smoking and drinking myself to death, the whole nine. And then, one day I decided after recognizing I had zero self-esteem, then I was going to do whatever it took to get to where I am today and looking where I am today is not anywhere close to where I want to go. And so people always ask me, well, how do you start to believe in yourself? Well, for me and I really mean this, as much as it will destroy me to see a tweet or a fucking negative comment or somebody sliding in my DMs and tell me to fuck off like as much as that destroys me simultaneously I also don't give a shit because I don't build myself on that but it's the same way that even though I get this amazing sense of joy and love from you who leave these amazing reviews in the positive things like I also do not let that impact who I am as a person because the reason that I do this is very simple ultimately between the good, the bad, the middle, all of it, the reason that I show up and I do this every single day day in and day out is because I know that it works. I know that it works and so because I know that it works and I've decided that I tied, my identity to the effort that I put in every single day, that is how I create who I am and people always ask me; how do you do this? Like, how do you really become you? Guys, you have to understand this. You cannot leverage who you are on the opinions of other people whether they're your biggest fans are your worst enemies you just cannot do that because that means you are not in control, right? And taking back identity and creating your life after trauma, you have to be the one in control of your future and in control of your present moment and in control everything that happens in your life by recognizing that the only way fully that you come to this place of confidence is by in the day in, and day out, showing up for yourself.

And so, when I'm in this position of looking at my life, through the scope of, who am I today? Self-awareness, I'm telling you right now.

Self-awareness is the most fucking important thing that you will do in your life like when you can get crystal clear and have clarity about who you are, you will never lose. I know you hear me talk about this all the time, but that's why when you leave me a good review or a bad review, or you tell me to go fuck myself, it doesn't bother me and it's not going to stop me. And just like this construction right now in real life, I'm not going to stop recording, so I don't know where the hell that's coming from. I hope that you can't hear and if you can, sorry.

But the reality is like, you gotta keep going, you gotta keep showing up for yourself, you got to keep doing you every single day and leveraging your experience of showing up for yourself as the catalyst for how you think about yourself, when you're by yourself. It is the effort like, yes, it hurts when people say that I suck, of course it does but I'm not going to let that stop me, and it's amazing when people say, oh my gosh, you did this and it impacted my life and I love what you talked about. But that's also not going to be the thing that I leverage to determine my value in the world. I hope you guys are seeing what I'm saying.

Especially not on social media because look, I've got into some like, online combat with people where I'm like, let's go, I have on Instagram and talk about this. Let's come on the podcast and have an in-depth discussion and to this day, anyone who's ever combated me refuses to do it. And what I'm trying to get to in that is like (A) I welcome it and anyone who's listening this, if you ever want to have a conversation with me, I do this to have conversations, I don't do this to like, wave a fucking flag that, I'm better than you are I know more than you because that's not true.

And I'm always trying to learn, but it's to say this when people are fucking hating on you it's because of their own inadequacies, it's because they're scared of the reflection of the mirror that they just had, it's because they want to pull you down because there's something that you're doing in your life that makes them uncomfortable, right? Now, also you could just be a dick like I think about that too like I'm not gonna lie, I've had my fucking moments, I will have them again, I do my best to mitigate those but that's the truth of reality and I'm going to keep it real with you guys I'm gonna fuck up, right? And so in that self-awareness and looking at oh my God, I really just fucked up, I made a huge mistake, I did the thing, I said I wasn't going to do and recognizing, like the root of that and where that comes from like that is the real win in this game, right?

I think about that in business, career, relationships, like, when I fuck up because I do, I promise you, like, I always want to go back and figure out the causation and correlation, right? We've heard me talk about this before because when I can identify and see where that comes from, I can make meaning of it, right? I can understand because of this experience in my life and it doesn't necessarily have to be traumatic but because of the experience that I had I can measure that and go, okay, now I see why behave this way. And so when you can get really intrinsic and introspective about who you are, that becomes the anchor for everything that you do, moving forward because I'm telling you right now, if you leverage who you are based on the opinion of other people oh my God, you can't live like that. Like I wish I could explain that in a really concise way, but I think that's like, you can't live, like you are not alive when you're letting other people dictate your worth and value in the world, and that was the greatest discovery that I've had in my life when I was 27 years old and when I tell you guys like the reality is the real truth in crux to healing is by doing the things you say, you're going to do and not doing the things that you don't want to do because ultimately that's how you create confidence in yourself.

And so the greatest thing that you can do in this moment as show up for yourself today, while measuring and understanding all of the circumstances that have brought you to where you are. The best thing you'll ever do, like there's a fucking white board next to me, like it's not probably where it's going to live because I don't like it here and I just unpacked it but you know, there's always been a whiteboard in my life covered and goals, covered and things that I want that, I need that a desire but also understandings keywords, little things that I try to identify with that I can make meaning of throughout the course of my day.

The greatest thing that you will do in this journey as grab a piece of paper and a pen, or a whiteboard, and just put your thoughts there, that help you understand who you are today because that's what it's about, it's about massive amount of self-awareness, then you got to be committed once you have that self-awareness to doing what it takes to have the life that you want to have.

And so, step one, I think here today, when you're listening to this, and you're thinking about what's next in your life is to ask yourself this question. Are other people impacting you in ways that is keeping you stuck? Because if they are, it's really time to address what's going on internally because that is a you problem that is not from them. Like it's kind of what my mentor Grant Cardone, always tells me like, other people who hate you have nothing to do with you, right? Same as other people who love you, like you could love me or hate me that has nothing to do with me like, yes, of course, I want to be of service, and yes, of course, so I want to be an impactful leader, speaker and coach and help people have better life than they ever had before because I believe that's fucking possible, like a truly do, but that's about my mission and my goals and I give this to you not, so I can stand on some buck and pulpit and feel good about it. I'm not trying to be passive in life. I saw the I opportunity in my life to be of service, to make my life better by helping other people and that's why I do it, right? I don't do it so that one day a flag waves and says Michaels the greatest person of all time. I do it very simply for one reason. So that another child doesn't have to have a story like ours and I believe that through healing in these ideas and these concepts and yes, even though some of them may rub you the wrong way like this is me speaking my truth and my reality and understanding what has worked for me. And I know that I won't always be the one that works for you, and that's okay because you'll find the right person.

But the most important thing you'll do, whether you hate me or love me or in between like it, (A) does not impact me and (B) more importantly, when you get super self-aware and you understand what drives you and what brings value to your life like you will find that self-esteem will be built exponentially because the moment you can understand how to answer the question who am I? Everything about your life will change like, it really, really will.

And one of the things here I'm going to pull up the iPad here from a journal note that I made this morning, I do. I try to be very diligent about asking myself questions every day.

And so, here are five questions that I wrote down that, I ask myself every single day that I want to share with you and what I want you to do, is grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down these five questions because if you start asking yourself questions and look, you can change them, you can customize them, make him yours, that's fine but when you start to ask yourself these type of questions because the quality of your questions, determines the quality of your life. When you start asking yourself this quality of question, your life will be different because it's really simple, we can blame the world and go, why is this happening to me, right? There is no self-awareness in that question. I want to be very clear with you, there's no self-awareness in that question, that question is, you're blaming the world. That was my favorite question from Age 4 till 27, why is this happening to me? And then I recognize like, wait a second, what happens if I shift the way I think about the world? And so I'm going to actually share with you something private here.

The five questions that change my life every single day then you can take these, you can use these for yourself or what I would recommend because you are not me so, what do I have to do with you? You see what I'm saying? So what you want to do is go into this and decide, can I wrap my head around these questions in a way that I can change them in a way that impacts my life for the better or you may actually find these are amazing questions in these are what you need. You're going to notice these questions are very concise, they are not open-ended, right? I mean they are, but they aren't, I don't know. I'm going to read them to you. I'll let you decipher this.

Here are five questions that I wrote down that, I ask myself every single day that I want to share with you;

1. How do I need to show up for myself to be an effective leader, a man of character, a voice for the voiceless, and an agent of change?

• I'm always asking myself, how do I need to show up today? What do I need to do to be that? For me first you notice, I'll read it again. How do I need to show up for myself today? Me first. Yes, of course. I want to be a leader and I want to be a voice, I want to be an agent of change but if I don't do those things for me, how am I going to do them for someone else?

2. What do I need to feel today to be present in each moment, focused on my goals, and fulfilled in my choices?

• What do I need to feel? And so if I feel downtrodden, if I feel bummed out, I'm not going to have the energy to be present, I'm not going to show up, I'm not going to focus on my goals, I'm not going to be fulfilled in my choices and that's not to say, I don't have hard days but now it's about, can I have hard hours and I'm really trying to get to the point in my life where I've hard minutes, right? Can I just let those emotions that we get entangled with go and continue to move forward?

3. What are the decisions I must make in order to continue to move towards being who I am capable of being?

• You guys hear me talk about this all the time. Make a decision about your life, that is so important. It's the number one most important thing in this journey. You've got to make fucking decisions if you are on the fence about shit your life is not going to be different decide, right? So everyday I ask my question, I ask myself that question because I know I'm going to have to make decisions.

4. What do I need to learn today to better serve myself, my community, my friend’s, family, partners, relationships and the world? What do I need to learn today?

• I'm always asking myself that question as I told you before, education is everything. And so, I know that I know nothing and so as a learner I have to go and learn every day. Is that an audiobook? Is that a program? Is that a conference? Is that a Podcast? Is that a YouTube video? Every single day for an hour, I know this sounds crazy, but for an hour every day, I am doing personal development work. That's on top of all the other things in some days it's longer right? Today, it's a day where I have coaching and I already did personal development work and I'm going to a conference tonight. So it's kind of like, probably going to be 5 hours of personal development, is that overkill? Yeah, maybe, but I'm also always trying to learn.

5. Who do I need to become to have fulfillment success and happiness?

• I'm going to tell you right now and you guys have heard me say this before I'm 30 years away from everything that I'm trying to create my life, 30 years away, so who do I need to become? So that in 30 years at 66 years old I look back on my life and I go, I did all these things to get to this place. Who do I need to become a better leader, a more effective communicator, I need to take better care of my body of my Mental health of my relationships of my businesses, I need to show up more authentically, I need to continue to say no to the things I need to say no to, I need to continue to invest in the community, I need to read more books, I need to write more books, I need to go to more conferences, I need to get deeper and deeper and deeper into understanding and shaping who I am. Do you see why I asked questions? The way I do, like those five questions they're very pointed, they're very much about creating an outcome on the other side of it, and every day is different and that's what I love about these questions because I'm asking them about today. Who, what, where, why, how, all those things are about today?

And so if you take those five questions, you can implement those into your life, you are more than welcome to or you can just craft five. What are the five most important questions that you need to ask yourself, not questions that are get-out-of-jail-free cards like what do I need to do at the gym today? That's bullshit, that's not going to change your life.

You got to get really specific and create parameters around the question that you're asking, you need to go deeper with yourself than you ever have before because here's the reality, those five questions are going to help you build self awareness and your self-awareness is going to become the key to all the success that is next in your life.

My friends, thank you so much for being with me today.

It means the world to me.

Unbroken Nation, you guys are absolutely amazing.

Please do me a favor, like, share, subscribe, tell a friend.

And Until Next Time.

My friends, Be Unbroken.

I'll see you.