These are the things I did to CHANGE my life | Mental Health Podcast

Hey! What's on my friends. I hope that you're doing well. I just wanted to first come off and say it's been a while since I gotta do a solo episode. I wanna say thank you for all the incredible support that you've been giving and listening to the amazing compilations that the team has putting together and all these awesome guests who have been on the show.

One of the big reasons that I've not been doing so many so episodes is that they are very time consuming. And also, I'm spending so much of my effort and my energy on Unbroken Conference. So, if you haven't registered for that yet, make sure that you head over to unbrokencon.com and we are well over 600 people registered, which is absolutely incredible. The mission and the goal is 25,000 people. We are a long stretch from that, but it's early. And so, if you didn't know one thing, just a quick note before we get going. We had to adjust the dates for Unbroken Con, and so if you already registered, please note that there was an adjustment. This is the only time that that will happen. We are totally locked in now, and the dates for this are Tuesday, December 13th through 16th 2022, starting at 4:00 PM Mountain Standard time. We have incredible, incredible speakers on Unbroken Conference and including an episode of the podcast, a conversation that's never been aired before with Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing conversation with a lot of other amazing human beings. And so, I won't give you all the details. Now go to go to unbrokencon.com to register, it's totally freed to watch live.

Now, it was my birthday on Saturday and, well, I guess technically Friday, but we celebrated on Saturday. And as I was sitting Friday was writing kind of this list about what were the things for the course of the last 37 years of my life that have played such a pivotal and impactful role in my journey of healing. And I posted that list, the 37 things on thinkunbroken.com. So, on our regular blog page, I'm not going to go through all those with you today because honestly it would be a four-hour conversation. And so, what I wanted to do though, and what we're going to do over the coming weeks is I'm going to drop in and go through these really effectively one by one with you guys because I thought about this for quite a while and the thing that felt most true was as I started adding each one of these elements to my life, these different mindset shifts, these understandings, these ideations about reality, about education. I started to watch my life change. And I'll tell you this, I believe this to be true, going through this journey of personal growth, healing, trauma, all of these things, it's not rocket science.

And so many people make it far more difficult than it has to be because we get all up in our head about everything, which like, yo shit, I get it. But also, I have to remind you like, it's one step at a time, one day at a time, and if you just take action, if you learn something today and you start executing against it today, then the thing that will start to happen is that your life will start to change.

Most people are incredibly studious and they do not go through the execution side of this process. You have to take action is the only way this works. And so, I put together this list of these 37 things, we're gonna go through them as we go throughout the progression of the show. I may or may not tell you if it's on the list. If you wanna see the whole list, just go over to thinkunbroken.com and you can read the blog.

Now that said number one. I'm gonna read this verbatim and some of these as we go, I will read verbatim and some that'll just kind of like ad lib as I do. But I wanna read this one verbatim cuz it's important and I thought, are these in a particular order? No, not necessarily. They're kind of more bunched together. But this one felt to be the most true, even to this day looking at my life, looking how different it is. And again, this is just things that I have done. So, if you are willing to do some of these things as well, you may find that your life is going to be different.

Now these are my firsthand experiences that I've kind of put into an amalgamation to hopefully give you some shifts or tools or understandings. Now, that said, as you go through this, you have to remember, you and I, we are not the same person. We've lived very differently lives. We talk to ourselves differently. We operate in the world differently. We show up differently. We're just not the same. And that's okay because not everything fits. I mean, there mentors that I've had over the course of my life and my career, where it's like, you know, at some point we fit and some points that we don't. And so, this isn't meant to be in any way one of those things where you're like, Oh, I can't do all those things, so I can't get an alignment with this guy. It's about can you take bits and pieces of all of this and see what fits, and then put aside what doesn't? Because even for myself through this journey, some things just have not fit.

1. I had to stop being a victim even though it was totally justifiable. If you play the victim, then your life will reflect that bad things happen to good people. That is just truth. If you don't decide to change the way you think about yourself, then nothing will change. Being the victim is easy. Hell, it's even expected, and let me be clear, you have every right to be the victim, but you have to decide if that truly serves you.

That's one of the most uncomfortable truths that I've ever faced in my life, is sitting in the reality that I was choosing to be a victim. And I know that's a weird thing to hear because so many people will say, how do you choose to get abused? How do you choose to be someone who's heard and to go through mental health issues and suicide attempts and all those things? I didn't choose that. I'll be clear about that. I didn't choose the ramifications of those experiences, but I also didn't choose to go through healing, to be serious in therapy, to get a coach to ask for help.

And for me, playing a victim like was masterful in a sense because I had watched my mother be a victim. And I'd watch her leverage that card in all aspects of our life. I watched my grandmother do that. I watched my uncle do it. I watched my stepfather do, I watched my community do it, and so many people would sit around and blame everybody and that in turn became my narrative. I blamed everybody but myself. I blamed the church. I blamed the school, my parents’, community, the education. I blamed the government. And ultimately what it came down to is, is realizing a really important truth. You're just not culpable. And I've said this so many times, what I always have to come back to it ‘cause I don't think people really like hold onto it. Like you are not culpable for the bad things that happen to you. You're just not. But everything that you do in this moment and every moment forward is about deciding whether or not you want to move towards being the person that you know you're capable of being, or if you want to continue to be what everyone else told you would be. Because when I was in that victim mentality, and again, I've talked about the stuff ad nauseam. But I want to go back through it because I think it's really important and it matters. One to show you like, I get it. You know, I've fucked up a lot in my life. And two, to show you that on the other side, your life can be vastly different. You know, I was 350 pounds, I stuffed myself with food because it was an avoidance thing. If I'm fat, if I'm big, then people will stay away from me. If I'm the biggest person in the room, then I don't have to worry about people ever trying to fight me. Right. But the backside of that is people would make fun of me and laugh at me, and I would always be the fat kid in class. And then when I was an adult, I was always the fat guy. Right. And I fucking hated it. And there's these pictures of me that I've shared online. I mean, you know, growing up in the internet age so much in my life from like 16 is on the fucking internet, like everyone's. And so, you know, you have 21 plus years of documentation of this party lifestyle, of the drugs, of the cigarettes, of the alcohol, of the hookups, of the food.

And so, being in that mode, being this victim, I was like, well, fuck it. I'm already fat, so I'm just gonna keep eating. And then when it came to the drinking and the smoking and the drugs, it was like, wow, fuck it. I might as well, it doesn't matter why take care of myself. When it came to relationships, I was always measuring myself by the number of people that I could sleep with as opposed to the really more important aspect of what I believe is humanity and what I come have come to know to be true is can you have bonded, connected, intimate relationships. And earlier when I'm in my teens and twenties, it wasn't hookup culture like I think that's one of those things that gets perpetrated in the world as this bad thing. And again, you figure out your own life but my point is, for me it was very experiential. Like I was like trying to figure out who I was physically, spiritually, sexually. And so, it was like, I'm just gonna go hook up with a bunch of people now where it turned into the victim mode. And I'm gonna be clear about this was when I was in these places of putting myself in these possibly dangerous situations to hook up with people while having and being in relationships. And that came because what I thought was connection and community and call it even friendship or love was like, Okay, if I hook up with these people, that means they care about me and I came to discover like, that's completely not true. And so, as I'm sabotaging every relationship that I'm in, hurting people, breaking people's hearts, myself included in that, the thing that I came to realize was, oh, okay, wait a second. This is my doing. I put myself in this position and in this really kind of unfortunate experience of dating and relationships and intimacy because I was craving attention from people because I thought that if I could get it from other people, that then I would have my cup full. And as you may know, that is not how the world works. You cannot get fulfillment from other people no matter how much you want it. Now you can have people pour into you, which is amazing, but your cup already has to be starting to be full, and mine wasn't. So, I was like, Okay, cool. I'm gonna go have sex with as many people as humanly possible while I'm getting drunk and eating all this food and not taking care of myself because maybe I will be able to shut down and stuff all the feelings.

And so, now you have this victimhood really starting to formulate, take shape. And in these relationships, what was really fucked up and I think it's because I've come to know something that, I hate to say it, but it's true the more I'm in it is that we attract like, like attracts like, meaning that the likeness of who you are will attract the likeness of someone else. And so, the people that I was dating, not that they were not amazing human beings in their own right, were still people who were hurt, like I was, were people who had not stepped into the journey of healing like I had not. And so, were lying to each other, cheating on each other, hurting each other, or having sex with other people, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you're stuck in this crazy toxic relationship. I will say, luckily those relationships weren't physically violent, but they were mentally and emotionally violent. And that comes when you take two people who come from unbroken backgrounds and you try to stick them together and its fucking chaos.

And so, I play the victim. I'd be like, oh yeah, you don't love me and so I'm gonna go over here and do this and do that. And slowly what I would come to discover is, I did that because I was seeking comfort and love, but in that seeking of comfort and love, I was pushing away the very comfort and love that I had, and that's being a victim to be like, no, I don't deserve this, so I'm gonna sabotage it. No, I shouldn't have this, so I'm gonna destroy it. No, it's not for me, so I'll go find it some else. And it's like the very thing that you want in crave, you push away that is the definition of self-sabotage and playing the victim. And so, what I would caution people to think about and hearing this is it's really easy to look at the world in society and go, well, you know, the more sex and more relationships you have, the better your life is gonna be. Where in fact, the truth is your life is gonna be better if you feel yourself first. And so, then I started getting deeper into it, and I was looking at these other elements of what victim had really looked like in my life and it was financial. And I've, I've gone into this on this show a couple of times, but not in depth. I landed a job with a Fortune 10 when I was 20 years old, that was easy. Anybody can do that. It just took time and like fucking 200 interviews, right? No joke. I'm not even playing. Like that's what it took me to be able to get that job. What happened though, is when I started to get the money, I was not educated. I had not yet learned the importance of making sure that I took care of myself financially. And so, every month it was like I was making all this money, but I was still massively in debt.

There are so many times in my life that I've been massively in debt, not for the right reasons. Let me be clear about that. For me, the right reasons are about the business, about personal education, about my own growth. Maybe it's doctors or medications or any of the healthy food. I mean, fuck, it's so expensive to eat in this country anymore, it's like a salad's $400. And you know, you look at that and you're, Okay, well, where does money really need to? It doesn't need to go to Netflix. It doesn't need to go to a nice phone. It doesn't need to go to a nice car or nice watch or nice clothes or nice anything like whatever you consider nice. Right? Cause it's different for everybody ‘cuz trust me, our opinions are not the same. And so, I would get myself all this money from working at this Fortune 10 company and then it was like, boom. I would go and blow it. I live paycheck to paycheck making multiple six figures a year because I was still in the victim mentality of I don't deserve this. Again, just like the relationships coming back into this self-sabotage thing and what starts to happen in my life is like the spiral begins where suddenly I'm in massive debt, where even though I'm making. I would argue that I made more money than every single person that I knew in my life, in my twenties, people who had doctorates and master's degrees and all that stuff from colleges, people who were successful in business, everyone that I knew my age, no one came close to the amount of money that I had. But I was also massively in debt. Part of it was because I felt a lot of shame about having access to it and coming from a homeless and impoverished background. No one in my neighborhood where I grew up had money like this, they didn't have the cars, I had the clothes, I had the adventures, I had the restaurants and the dinners that I had.

And so, it was like, okay, I'm gonna just stuff it all down and I'm gonna pretend like even though I'm doing this, like it doesn't matter and it doesn't impact. And so, that debt kept piling on and piling on, piling on, and it wasn't like that keeping up with the Jones' kind of debt, which is dangerous in its own right. And that is where, you know, you want to keep up with people, you want to flaunt, you wanna show off, and you're suffering for debt for it. In the excess of my life, I was like, Fuck man, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna spend two grand in a bar at one in a time. I'm gonna take all these trips and go to all these concerts, and I'm going to buy all these shoes and all these fancy clothes and have a fucking almost a hundred thousand dollars car. And it was like, for what? Because I was trying to fill myself up with the external because I kept thinking to myself, Man, if I just keep getting stuff, maybe one day I'll love myself, and it wasn't uncommon for me to go buy a brand-new outfit three times a week like it was crazy how big my closet was. Now I look at that and I'm a minimalist. My closet can fit in a suitcase, a small suitcase. I don't have a fancy car. I don't have fancy watches. I don't have fancy shoes. I have a couple of things that I really value, but as a whole, it's like they're pretty simple. Pretty simple guy. Because I realized like, wait a second. This debt that I'm compiling right now in my life is for the wrong reasons. It's to show off to people. It's to be like I'm important. It's to be like, hey, look at me ‘cause I feel fucking invisible otherwise. And one of the things that started to transpire in my life is as that debt got worse and I was living paycheck to paycheck, making five figures, six, you know, a month, high five figures a month, I was like, there's something wrong here. There's a disconnect. Then I decided, I made a decision. I wanted to go in and I wanted to try something different. I wanted to see what would happen if I started to invest in myself, even though I was in debt. And I've shared the story about investing with Brendon Burchard before.

And so, I was playing this victim in this sense that it was like, I don't deserve to have this money. I don't deserve to have success. I don't deserve all these things because it'd been so embedded and ingrained in me. And so, I'd keep sabotaging and sabotaging and sabotaging and sabotaging. And the more that I did that, the more that that became my reality ‘cuz what you think becomes what you speak. And so, as I got deeper into it, and I ended up starting my own business. At first, I was under charging. I used to be a professional photographer many of you know this I've shared it before, and I was massively under charging in the marketplace. In fact, so much so that I went from this multiple six figures a year job, to start my first business to having to literally borrow money from my girlfriend who lived with me to pay our rent because I was that poor cuz I did not yet have the ability to charge what I believed that I was worth in the market. And one of the things that I think is really powerful about stepping into entrepreneurship is you really have to face your demons. Like, I will tell you this, if you wanna find out who you are, go start a fucking business because you're gonna find out real fast. And that started happening to me so at first it was slow, right? And then it was slowly get better and better and better. And I built this business and I built this company, and I started getting recognition for it, getting in magazines and publications and blogs and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, I started pulling myself out of debt, and it took me a long time because being 50 grand in debt, when you go from making six figures to now making six fucking dollars, that took some effort to get through and I realized in the growth of it all. I had this really interesting intersection in personal development with guys like Gary Vaynerchuk very early on in my journey. And I kept noticing this weird commonality that they had where it was like they all seemed to believe in themselves somehow and they didn't apologize for who they were. And I used to always be the apology guy. I used to always be so terrified that you wouldn't like me, and so I would shut down whatever capacity I had of self. Now we know, because of so many of the conversations we've had on this show and my own experience, I know that’s really that trauma response. And so, I had to work through that and as I worked through that, I started charging more money and as I charged more money, I started to pull myself outta debt, I started getting able to take care of myself. But then there were aspects of my life that still weren't working because I was still on this really volatile relationship with a girlfriend at the time, was out of debt but my brothers were pissed off at me all the time. I was still overweight. So, I made a declaration of myself. Now you guys know about the mirror moment and asking myself, what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have? That became a catalyst on a cornerstone, but then I talk about that four years from 26 to 30, and it was just like, again, one step forward to step backwards. What started to happen in that window as I started to build confidence because the biggest mode of victim that I played was not believing in myself. Like to not believe in yourself is, and I get it, let me be clear, and especially if this is the first time you've ever heard me before, you might be like, this guy's talking out of his ass. At 27 years old, I had no confidence. I did not believe that in myself in any capacity, and so I said to myself, okay, the thing that I need to do is start to build skills around difficult aspects of my life so that I can start to trust myself and I didn't have those exact words then, but it felt like if I can just do this tip toe through it every single day, then it'll start to grow and build, and I'll start to figure out who the fuck I am. And that's exactly what I did. And what happened was it started with fitness because I realized, and I knew that the one thing that had always brought me joy when I was younger was to play sports. And I was in pretty good shape in high school as captain, the wrestling team, I was on the football team, the baseball team, even though I sucked. And so, you know, it was like, I'm gonna go and get back in shape and getting in shape was such a nightmare. Started with yoga and then it moved to hot yoga, then weight lifting, and then bike riding and the whole nine, next thing you know, I lost like 120 something pounds, and then eventually 130, 140, and almost 150, where I went from like three 50 down to two 20 and then, ‘cuz it was fucking overkill, I eventually got back to where I am about now, about 220. And so, the thing that happened in that process is I realized that playing the victim around my body was looking at this thing, and I'm gonna lose some people and I get it and you can cancel me. I don't care. I'm gonna say it. I was allowing this idea of body positivity to be the crutch for being okay with being overweight. I was allowing this idea that it's in my family that we're all fat, that I allowed myself to be fat. I allowed this idea that because I'm not educated in nutrition, that I'm going to allow myself to be fat. So, I'm playing the victim by letting everybody else convince me what I believe is true. Now, what came to transpire in this is I recognize that I could in fact be in great physical shape because I had, in fact been in great physical shape before. So, I had some evidence to prove it possible but I also had seen some major, major transformations.

There's this guy named Arthur. You gotta look up this video on YouTube. It's called Type in DDP Yoga Arthur and this dude has an amazing story where through yoga, he lost like a hundred pounds, got off of crutches, was able to walk, became physically fit. And I felt so fucking inspired by that and watching the CrossFit games that I was like, Okay, cool. Let's do this. Let's change, let's get healthy. Because I realized being unhealthy putting bad food in my body, not taking care of my sleep, drinking all the time, fast food 20 times a week, probably more was a victim that was me playing the victim, my stepdad used to call me fat, my mom called me fat, and so guess what? I was fat. I was living in exactly what they told me I would be. And so, as it goes, I started getting healthy, but the education had to come into play ‘cuz again, I didn't really know how to eat and I didn't really know how to work out. And so, I became a certified nutritionist and personal trainer because that was the thing about pulling myself out. All of this is to say this, you have to take inventory of your life. You have to look at where you actually are. And if you're blaming anyone for any element of your life, you need to sit down and question the authenticity of that. Like, is it real? Because a lot of people are willing to blame those around them without asking the question of is it really their fault or did, I put myself? And if you're anything like me, chances are you put yourself here. And that's a really hard truth to sit in. Most people don't wanna sit in that truth. Most people wanna run from that truth ‘cuz it's uncomfortable, because it hurts, because it's ugly, because it sucks, because it means that you also have to do the fucking work to get yourself out. Most people don't wanna do the work because it's hard and it's grimy and it takes longer than you would ever imagine. It costs more money than you could ever believe, and every single time you start, you're like, am I doing this right? What the fuck's going on? And it feels lonely and ostracizing, but it's not. And in fact, the thing that happens when you start to choose yourself, everything in your life gets better. Everything in your life gets different. Everything in your life starts to take shape into this truth of a reality that you want, a narrative that you want, and I cannot tell you how empowering it is, but you have to recognize and ask yourself the question, am I playing the victim? I'm uneducated. Cool. Well, what am I gonna do about it? I'm overweight. Okay, cool. What am I gonna do about it? In debt. Okay, cool. What am I gonna do about it? I just started looking at my life and saying, what do I have to do? Like, what do I really have to do? Because I don't want this, I don't want the shitty relationships. I don't want the poor body, I don't want the ill health, I don't want the fucking crippling debt, which you guys all know exists. Like, I was like, I don't want those things. And so many people focused on the things that they don't want that they forget that it's possible to have what they do want. And so, I started to change my narrative and I started focusing on only the things that I did want. I said, Okay, what do I want in order to have the life that I want to have? What do I want it to look like? Okay, I want physical health. I want great relationships, great friendships. I wanna fix the relationships with my brothers. I wanna be out of debt. I want to stop smoking and stop drinking. I wanna leave Indiana. I wanna go and travel the world. I wanna actually write the books that I said I was going to write. I wanna have the podcast, I wanna do all these things. And so, what happened is I started to narrow down the, what I could do. I mean, even this summer, my friend Keith did this thing called 75 Hard and it's like she's a working mother who's building a business and I was like making all these excuses why couldn't do it. And then my friend Keith did it and I was like, wait a second, hold on. And what happened is I started to get confirmation bias. Because I was being a victim. I can't do 75 hard. It doesn't matter. Like why would I do it? I'm already in good shape, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I thought to myself, actually, what I need to do is do that shit, because if they can do it, I can. And that's just kind of the thing that I've started to leverage in my life that has actually brought me to where I am. And so, when I think about this, this thing that I wrote to start this off, it was like I was justifying being the victim. We all have the right to play that role. You're allowed to do that, please, by all means. But you have to understand that if you don't start to change, and even though change is hard, and even though transformation is hard, and even though it fucking sucks to do this, if you do not make a decision to start moving forward in your life, nothing in your life is going to be different.

And I would hope when I go and look at my life and call it five years, 10 years, 25 years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, like it's fucking crazy how long we're probably going to live, especially with modern technology and medicine. And I just think to myself, am I doing everything every day within my power to move towards the life that I want to have? I played the victim forever, and so success often alluded me. I thought success was hooking up. I thought success was money. I thought success was all those things, and I'm gonna tell you the secret. If you made it this far, which thank you. I appreciate it. I know I'm like on a fucking tangent today, but I really wanted to dive into this narrative of my story so you could recognize and have the bias, the confirmation bias, a possibility like I just did with Keith and doing 75 Hard is that when you get a lot of clarity about what you want and you move towards it, you can have it. And if you want success, this is my definition of success. If you want success, you have to ask yourself this question. Did I do the things that I said I was going to do today? That doesn't even, that's everything. Everything you promised yourself, that is how you pull yourself out of victim mode. You do the things, you show up, you live life on your terms and you execute the game plan.

All right, my friends, that's number one, 36 more to go. We're gonna just release 'em as we go over the weeks and months to come. If you wanna see the whole list again, go to thinkunbroken.com it's on the blog page. I'm probably not going to be like, oh, says number six in two weeks. Like I just don't want to do it that way. So, pay attention cuz if you go and check out that blog, you'll find out which ones I'm talking about. And I'm not even gonna put 'em in order. I'm just gonna do whichever one I want. And so, check out the blog. Come and join us at thinkunbrokenacademy.com, or you can join the community.

Listen to me, if this has brought any value to you, you have a moral obligation to share this with somebody and the best way to do that is to go on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review for the podcast because when we come together, we're able to hit that algorithm and give this access, this information to more people.

So, I think about this all the time. I always try to share with my friends who are doing amazing things, many of them who come on this podcast and get exposure to tens of thousands of people around the world. But I need your help too, the community needs your help. If you wanna be a part of community, you have to build community, and the only way we're gonna build community is by coming together. So please, take 36 seconds and leave a review of this podcast. And if you're like, I fucking hate it, it's the worst podcast all time, great. Leave the review. I wanna know so I can make it better. If it's the best podcast you've ever heard in your life, perfect, let me know because then we can share that with people and then you can start to get that thing, we were just talking about confirmation bias. And through that we can change the world in a positive way instead of this negative way that's always perpetrating our reality.

So, that said, my friends, thank you so much for being here.

It means to world to me.

And Until Next Time.

Be Unbroken.

I'll see you.