Love yourself by doing the little things | Trauma Healing Coach

Hey! What is up my friends, I hope that you are doing amazing this Tuesday morning. One of the things I wanna talk to you guys about this morning, that I think is super important is kind of looking at and measuring the expectations that we have on the reality that we can create. And I was thinking about this as I was in the gym and wanted to pop right into having this conversation with you this morning and asking you a very important question. Are you rising to the struggle of the reality of the challenges that are in your life? Or are you rising to the limitations of your mindset and of your experiences?

And I'm asking this question because even for myself one of the biggest things that I have struggled with is that. Like, am I actually showing up, am I rising? Am I becoming the person that I know I'm capable of being when faced with new limitations, when faced with uncovering and unlocking new limiting beliefs, when I'm faced with like, is the thing that I said I'm going to do getting executed against, or am I stuck? Right. Cause I get stuck too. Am I stuck in that limitation and those mindsets and all of the limiting beliefs of childhood. Right. That you're not good enough. You're not strong enough. You're not gonna make it. Nobody likes you. You suck. And that's one of the things that's really difficult when you're going through this journey that I've had to discover through actually just putting myself in the most difficult circumstances and situations imaginable to see if I'm able to rise.

One of the things that I probably have struggled with the most in my life is the belief that I can do something. I recognize that from the outside, looking in, especially where I'm at in my life, people go like, how is that possible? You've done all these amazing things. I'm like, yes. And I had to struggle and I had to suffer into building myself into who I am today, but that came with a lot of work, it came with really recognizing one of the most empirical truths about this journey. And that is that our past whether we like it or not, to some extent is shaping who we are. And that's a really uncomfortable truth to have to sit in because for many of us we've done so much work, right. You've probably gone to therapy, read books, done personal development, maybe you've hired a coach like me and yet you're still at this place where you've hit this ceiling where you are here at the ceiling of the limitation of your mind, but you want to be up here at this big giant grandiose dream and idea, and between where you are at and where you want to go is the gap. And in order to fill that gap, the thing that you have to do is you must, and this is what I learned and this was probably one of the things that I think is most beneficial to this journey when you actually learn it.

One of the things that I learned in order to close that gap is you have to actually hold yourself massively accountable to yourself. And what that means, and for me, like, I used to blame everybody for everything. I would blame my family, my mother, my community, my friends, my church, like everything. It was always everybody's fault that my life was a disaster. Now let's be clear. And I've talked about this before. You are not culpable for the bad things that happen in your life. That is not on you. It's not on you, that you were abused. It's not on you, that you were hurt as a kid, but now as an adult, everything that happens in your life is on you. You have to make decisions to hold yourself personally accountable.

The very first thing I teach people when they come into coaching with me is we talk about accountability. We talk about creating values and a mission statement and your goals and what you want your life to look like, because those are the very things that I added to my life that started to transform at and to close that gap because I was always stuck. I mean, if I go back a decade ago, my life was an absolute disaster, 350 pounds smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, stoned all day long, lying to my friends, lying to my family massively in debt like it was wild. And I remember distinctly having these moments of a - being incredibly frustrated at myself and then b - being mad at the world for not giving me the tools to not be incredibly frustrated at myself.

And so, you can kind of see there's this overlapping Venn diagram about these things. And the thing that you have to do is recognize that yes, those people did not give you the tools. That sucks. It's fucking, totally unfair. Our parents, our teachers, our communities, our school, our media, our government should have given us the tools that we needed in order to be successful, sustainable adults, but they didn't. Now you can blame them. And I did that, so let's be very clear. I will never take that away from anyone, but in that victimhood, you are going to fall. You've probably experienced it. I have, you've probably been in that place in your life where you're like, oh my God, really? Again, again, I've done it again. I've ruined the relationship. I've not paid the bill. I've eaten the crap food. I've had someone in my family tell me that you're not showing up. I've gotten drunk. I've gotten high. I've cheated on somebody. Like, again, like I've done all those things. Like I've had those again, moments, time, and time and time again. And then you get to this point where you have to understand that the autonomic response that we have to the stimulus of the idea that it could be different is for the brain to actually retract into all behaviors as a safety and survival mechanism against the unknown.

And so, people will be like, yeah, but I was trying really hard and things were working for five minutes and then I end up doing the same thing that I've always done. Well, the reason that you end up doing the same thing that you always done, the reason why I would start to get in shape, I would lose weight, I would quit smoking for seven days. And then be right back to where I was a week later, two weeks later, a month later, six months later is because I had not yet identified one of the most significant truths in this healing journey that where we focus our attention is exactly what comes to pass. And when you focus your attention in the negativity, in that space, disconnected from goodness, disconnected from self, disconnected from the idea that you do deserve to have the life that you want to have. Well, then now you automatically have been set up for failure because your brain is going to respond to the stimulus of things that are different and say, well, I don't want to be different because different is painful, different is suffering, different is uncomfortable, different is the thing that takes away from me because your brain actually doesn't really understand that you're trying to push yourself into something new instead it looks at these new things as danger because it's looking at these new things as danger, it wants to turn off and it wants to revert to the old behavioral patterns. And so, when you can identify this, creating the space of causation and correlation what happens is when you are in the moments of taking on responsibility and accountability for yourself, but you feel like it's not going to transpire. You can remember that, okay, the reason that in this moment, I feel a pool away from greatness and away from connectedness and away from the potential that I have is because when I was six years old, my mother told me that I was a loser, never going to an amount to anything. That was my truth. That was for real for me. My mother was the most negative human being I've ever known to this day and all of that information that was embedded and ingrained and enmeshed and groomed into me became the baseline in the foundation for who it is that I would become. And when you think about it, if you build a house on top of a volcano, at some point, that house is going to be consumed by that volcano, whether you like it or not, and the way that you stopped that volcano is instead of trying to live in the house, you move, you move, you leave the house and leaving the house is leaving is leaving the idea of you have to be what they told you that you have to be.

And so, as I started to close this gap and really started to figure out, oh my God, this is how you become who you are, it was in the moments and in the spaces of saying to myself, I will not be what they told me and suffering. Let me be very clear. Making that declaration and then being willing to a- be accountable to myself and b - suffer my way into creating who I am. And that's one of the big things that we're gonna talk about at UnbrokenCon.

So, if you have not registered for UnbrokenCon. It's a free event that we're gonna do a trauma transformation event this November. If you go to unbrokencon.com, it'll be myself, multiple speakers, five days, beautiful experience. It's going to change your life. It's absolutely free. If you show up and watch live and then you can get the recordings, all that we'll talk about later. And so, as I started to get into that place of closing that gap and thinking about this idea of moving myself and to some extent that was literal, I had to actually pack up my shit, leave the place that I grew up and make the decision to start over on my terms.

And so, I'm going through this process. I'm looking at my life from 26 to 30, the hardest four years of my life. And in that this idea of struggle, this idea of suffering, which if you look at the definition of suffering means to face discomfort or to be uncomfortable, I made a decision that I was going to suffer my way into success, no matter what, based on what it meant for me to have success in my life for me. That doesn't mean perfect. That doesn't mean having all the things that everybody else has. It means, can I go look at myself in the mirror every single day and know that I'm holding myself accountable to the idea of the narrative of the person that I want to be based on who I choose to be not based on who society, my parents, my community, my family, my friends, the media, the government, the books tell me to be. And in that when you make that decision and that declaration about who you want to be, you have to recognize that it will come to pass on a long enough timeline. People, I cannot express this to you enough when you make a decision to change who you are and to become the person that you're capable and meant to be, you have to understand that time is the only factor that's going to differentiate you from success and failure.

And time is not utilized appropriately in this society because we measure time as this thing that we're running out of. I measure time as this thing that I'm creating more of. And people often say, well, how do you create more time? Well, first and foremost, the most important thing that you can do is recognize what you're doing with your time. Now you hear this all the time. People are like, oh yeah, don't Netflix if you want to change your life, don't play video games, don't waste time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have to get massive clarity about who it is that you want to be. And I'm not going to tell you don't play Netflix. Don't watch video games, flip those. Right? Don't do those things. Not, I will never say that because I have a moment once every two to three months where I'm playing video games all day long period, it's gonna happen. It is the greatest release that I have.

And so, as you go through that, you have to recognize like, is you have to ask yourself this and this is the question that changed my life forever. In the moment before making a decision, whether it's about being accountable, whether it's about creating change in your life, whether it's about showing up as the person you want to be, no matter what it is in that moment, right before an action takes place, ask yourself what do I actually need? And in that pause, of asking yourself, what do I actually need? That is where you're going to have to reconcile your truth. Because the matter of fact, reality that I know to be more true than I know to be anything else is for me and I'm talking about me guys, I don't know you. I don't know your life. I haven't experienced what you've experienced. What I look at in my life in that moment of pause is I simply say to myself is the thing that I just told myself that I need the truth. And can I go look in the mirror and accept that truth as fact in reality, because if the answer is yes, then that means I must do the thing that is there in front of me. If the answer is no, that means I'm not being real with myself and I have to go deeper and ask myself, why am I not being real with myself right now? Because if I'm not being real with myself right now in the moment when I actually ask myself, what do I need then where am I not being real with myself in other aspects of moments of my life?  This is all tied into know thyself, causation and correlation, creating a massive change and shift around your identity in closing the gap of where you are to where you want to be by being truthful and acknowledging the reality of who you are. And if you are willing to do that, and if you are willing to go through the throes, the slings and arrows of building and creating yourself as who you want to be today, while knowing that the human brain stops developing at 25 years old and that building new habits, especially those around accountability are drastically more difficult for people who are adults than who are teens or children, but you are willing to suffer coming back through that word, suffer through building and creating who you want to be because you choose to be that person then on a long enough timeline, you will in fact be that person if you are willing to close the gap. And that is the very thing that people have to understand. It's not that you just make up this decision one day that I'm gonna be accountable and everything in my life is gonna be different and suddenly I'm gonna have this perfect foundationally, beautiful life because it doesn't work that way.

From 26 to 30, I suffered, you know, we're talking about over a decade ago, suffered, you know, and it was one step forward, a million, million fucking steps backwards, every single time I did something good. I did 19 different things back, right? Or this is in my ideation of what those words mean and how they're defined. And so, the thing that I had to do was to continue. You have to just continue. The thing that people really, really miss out on is the fact that when you keep going forward, when you do not stop, when you make a declaration that no matter what you're going to create the life that you want to have, you cannot lose. You only lose if you stop. And it's not that you don't have days where you fall backwards, it's not that you don't have days where you don't fuck up, guys are fuck up all the time. I've ruined relationships. I've been massively in debt. I've been morbidly obese. I've dealt with alcohol and drugs and addictions I cannot even begin to get into because we don't have enough time. I've self-sabotaged. I've hurt people. I've lied to myself. I've been the opposite of everything that I'm talking about right now. So, let me tell you this, this is not me preaching at you, this is me telling you as a peer, as a friend, as someone who is walking this path and this journey with you that I have suffered and I have been through hell and back. I've known my best friends to get murdered. I have been homeless. I have done things that if I even told you, I think I might go to jail still for doing them. Right. And so, I recognize that I understand how difficult this journey is.

When I was four years old and my mother cut off my finger and my stepfather beat me and put me in the hospital and we spent my childhood homeless. The only thing that I knew was that one-day life would be different, but you have to decide, you have to make that declaration. Nobody else is doing this for you. Nobody's coming to rescue you. Nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's gonna knock on your door and say, God, how's that healing journey going. I hope that you really overcome all that childhood trauma and abuse that you had so that you can become the hero of your own story. Nobody's gonna do that, but you, that's why I created Think Unbroken almost five years ago because I recognize if I can give people the same tools that I've used to change my life, we can change the world.

And so, that's why we're doing Unbroken Con for free. So, if you go to unbrokencon.com, you can register, it's gonna be in November. It's a five-day trauma transformation event. We're gonna be announcing speakers soon. We're gonna be announcing exact dates and time soon, we're gonna be announcing all the things very soon. But I want you to know that the most important thing that you can do today, right now in this moment is go look in that damn mirror and ask yourself, what do I need?

And the truth is that when you ask yourself that question, fear is going to come up, the fear response, because what you need is unknown to you. You have not experienced; you have not seen it. You have not felt it. You do not know the unknown. And your body, and brain's biological response to that stressors for you to backtrack, to revert, to old behavior patterns, to self-sabotage, to destroy relationships, career, money, finances, friendships, your body, your mental, your physical health. But in that moment, if you want to close that gap between what do I need and facing the fear and ultimately becoming the person that, you know, you're capable of becoming, you must hold yourself accountable to follow through, despite the fact that it's going to be painful, despite the fact that it's going to suck, despite the fact that it's going to be really, and realistically the hardest thing that you've ever done, because I promise you, I promise. I swear to God, I'm not joking with you on the backside of making the most difficult decision of your life as the most beautiful experience that you will ever have. I'm living proof of that hundreds and thousands of people who've gone through Think Unbroken are living proof of that. Millions of people around the world are living proof of that.

The difference between success and failure in life is holding yourself to the fire and saying, I'm willing to walk through this no matter what.

All right. My friends, I hope that you'll join us at UnbrokenCon this November. If you go to unbrokencon.com, it'll be myself, multiple guest speakers, there's tons of amazing things that are happening.

And so, until then my friends.

Take this information.

Be Unbroken.

I'll see you.