How To Overcome Your Childhood

Today I'm going to share with you an embarrassing breakthrough that I had in the last couple of weeks. And I do it not so that I can cut myself open in front of an audience, but because this has been something that has been very profound in the way that I behave. And I think that realizing this and moving through it has made me a better person. And if that's the case with me, I know that many of you out there will have similar reactions if you can relate it back to your own life. So I want to tell you my story in the hopes that you get as much out of it as I did. I just want to say before I begin, normally in these videos, I have a lot of points that I want to hit. In this video, I just want to talk, I want to tell you the story. It's very fresh on my mind. And that means I could ramble at times. If that's the case, I apologize. But here we are. So this story is about last month and I spent March traveling. Right now I'm in Rio, by the way, in my beautiful Airbnb, which is not so beautiful, but I spent March in Las Vegas, where I used to live. And I went and I visited my ex girlfriend. I visited my younger brother who still lives there. And I did a personal development program called Choice Center. And this program is intense. It's a total of eight days throughout the month and each day is about 12 hours long. The idea being that we all have patterns. And what they want to do is put you in kind of stressful situations to see those patterns so that you recognize them. Because when I say pattern, what I mean is that angry people tend to get angry, meaning that they could be at a food store in line or waiting in traffic, or their sports team could lose. And the go to reaction for them when there is stress in their life is anger. And the same is true of sad people. People who put on a smiley face and are really dying inside. Whatever that go to reaction is tends to be the same when stress is introduced into their life. So what they do is they keep you in this room for a long period of time, have you do these extreme experiential exercises, which are quite difficult, and you get to see firsthand how you react in stress. The idea being that the way that you behave there is the way that you behave when tough things happen in life. And these patterns, while we often think this is just who I am, there's nothing I can do to change it. The whole idea is that we form these patterns when we're very young. Something happens when we're children. We don't know how to deal with it. And so we try getting angry, right? Mom won't pay attention, so we throw a tantrum. And if that works, if mom comes over and gives us what we need, we have started to create a pattern that can run for the rest of our life. So that angry person, in many cases, is just someone who learned from a young age that tantrums get them the love and the attention that they're desiring. And then 30 years later, when they're alienating people in their life and they're getting fired from jobs and they're pissing off friends, they still go to anger because they learned at a young age that it works. And they don't remember where they learned it. It's just built into them. They think it's who they are. They. So the whole idea of this program is find these patterns, and if they're not working for you, change them. One of the things you have to do to do that is you go to your primary caretakers, who for most people are mom and dad or grandma and grandpa, whoever plays that role for you, and you think about your early experiences with them. So I'm going into this exercise, and I should say that right now, I kind of sense that something is going to come of it, because I. I have wonderful relationships in my life and I love my mom and dad. But the truth is, as good as many of my friendships are, I do not have the most amazing relationship with my dad. In fact, when I go home and I visit, I find that I can only stay three to five days because we argue so much that I need to leave. I come, and typically the first thing that happens is he goes in on me about how I need to run charisma on command, different, what we're doing wrong, I'm leaving money on the table, blah, blah, blah. And then it's politics and then something else. And then it's that I need to come to dinner as soon as he says, and I can't eat the other room. And we just argue about everything. Now, most of the time, it's simple bickering. We don't scream at each other, but there's this combative nature between my dad and I that I feel like has always been there. So that's background. So we go through this exercise, and we're thinking of our early relationships with our parents. I do my mom very similar to the mom that I know today. Caretaker, loving, really supportive. Made me feel like I could do anything. And is a huge reason that charisma on command exists because she gave me that foundation of just unconditional love to feel like I could go take a risk and fail and it would be okay. So love you, mom. You're instrumental in everything that I do. My dad was more complicated. As I thought back on my dad, it wasn't this combative guy that I know today that just argues with me about everything. In fact, when I thought about him when I was a kid, he was my hero. I was shy, I was introverted, I was weird, I was video game obsessed. And my dad was charismatic, athletic, musical, best storyteller I'd ever met in my entire life. I remember just marveling at the way that people gravitated towards him in any room. And I had such admiration for him. I wanted to be like him and I wasn't. And that was simultaneous. He was my blueprint for who I wanted to be, and I fell short. And that was hard for me as a kid because then I had a little brother again, who I love, who was more like my dad in many ways. And then I fought with my little brother. So I'm reflecting on this and I'm realizing, holy cow, this relationship of fighting with my dad isn't how it always was. In fact, I wanted to be like him. I was just not for a long time. I couldn't have been more opposite. Whereas he was outgoing. I remember he literally paid me $100 on a summer day to go outside and get away from my D video games for 15 minutes. So I took his money, I went outside for 15 minutes, counted to the end of 15 minutes on the dot, came back in, and then immediately went out and bought two more video games. That's how different from him I was. And I remember resisting him. He wanted me to play basketball, and he forced me. He was the coach of the team, and I quit as soon as I could. He wanted me to play piano and he forced me to take lessons. And I remember screaming and cricking and quitting piano. He wanted me to be the things that he was, and I wanted to be the things that he was. But I felt like I couldn't or didn't want to or I just fell short. So that's coming to me now. And I'm realizing as we're going through this that I really admire my dad. And that's not an experience of him that I get a lot today. It's mostly like, God, please stop. Please stop arguing with me. So that's Weird for me, we go through and we do another exercise, which is you think of the things that you resent your parents for. And immediately I go to dinner. Because I think back, we always used to have family dinners, which was really good as we grew up. But one of the things that happened was that my dad would pick an argument with somebody at the table, usually with my mom, but it could be with my brother, my sister, me. And he would just steamroll them because nobody at the dinner table was as loud or charismatic or just brute force would run you over like my dad could. And I remember getting so mad about this and wanting to stop him, because even as a kid, I knew that he wasn't making any sense. He was just bullying people and telling them, no, you can't do it this way. You have to do it my way. You gotta see it my way. So as a kid, I couldn't stop him from doing that. He was clearly much bigger than I was. What I learned to do at about six or seven years old was to argue. And I got really, really good at arguing, not just arguing to win a point. What I considered a victory at that age, and still to this day with my dad, was riling him up, was not just arguing to get to an agreement or to prove my point or to have him consider things my way and in turn consider things his way. It was to upset him, piss him off, and get him to storm away from the dinner table if I. And if he grounded me and screamed at me, even better. Victory. And that was what happened for many dinners, is that that would be the dynamic that played out with varying degrees of upsetting my dad and then getting in trouble myself. And I've always felt that when people tell me, they say, you're so much like your dad, you can be so stubborn sometimes that that makes me so angry because I don't want to be like that. I hate that so much. I go, that's not true. And then again, now I'm arguing with them about how I'm not argumentative. But these two exercises combine, and a lot of the things that I've done in my life begin to come into focus. If you look around, you see there's a piano in here. I picked up piano after fighting and resisting it as a kid. Basketball. Once I got away from it, I picked it back up in high school. Charisma, right? My dad was this charismatic guy. Didn't want to do it, didn't want to go outside. And now I run a company that teaches people how to be More charismatic, confident and extroverted. I had this very complicated relationship with my dad. Or maybe not so complicated. Maybe it's more common. And you're relating to this in that he was my blueprint for what a man was, for what I wanted to be. And I couldn't be like that, so I fought against it. But subconsciously I've been driving at being like him my whole life. And what that has meant is I picked up a lot of the good things, but I picked up the bad too. I can be argumentative, and I absolutely have been with him. So I go through all of this, and this is the embarrassing part is accepting and admitting for me that I am like my dad 2.0 from a little kid. I just wanted to be like him and set an autopilot there that I didn't realize and in many ways have become him in the extreme. So that's strange for me because I've resisted go through these exercises. What I want to cover now is after you realize these kinds of things, maybe you are having similar realizations about ways in which you are like or unlike your mom or your dad. That's kind of my hope in telling you this story. Because your parents or whoever raises you has an indelible effect on who you are. You often can't remember necessarily the specific times, if you can, if you try very hard. But they really do shape your concept of what success is, of what love is, of what you should be driving for in life. And if you don't realize that, you often find yourself being guided towards things and you wonder, how did I get here? Why did I sabotage that relationship? And if you go back far enough, it's often from a pattern that you picked up at a very young age from your mom or your dad. So that's why I share this with you. What I want to cover now is how you can begin to change this. If you're finding that it's not serving you as in my case, it really wasn't. In some ways, the first thing you got to do is accept it. And that's the whole story that I just told you. Typically, it's difficult to accept. It's something that people might have told you about yourself in the past, that you've just gone, that is not true. I can't believe they would think that about me. It's something that's going to embarrass you. Like this embarrasses me. Because if it didn't embarrass you, you wouldn't fight it. You wouldn't pretend that it wasn't the case. So you've sometimes got to go to programs like this. I would say. If you're not finding it now, sign up for our email list. I'm going to be creating more videos on this, either on YouTube or in one of our paid courses. I'm not sure yet, but there will be more on this. So join our email list. And I will definitely be writing more because I find this to be fundamental for self awareness and for success, for goal achievement in your life because this can really derail you. So go ahead and join the email list if that's something you're interested in. That's the first step is being honest about what your pattern is. For me, it's I copied my dad. The second thing is doing something immediately that is way out of your comfort zone and that gets someone else involved that is going to commit you forward to change. And for me, that was. It's often calling this person. For me, that was calling my dad and telling him everything. I told you and I told him, I said, dad, I didn't realize it. You. I admire you so much. I've admired you since I was a little kid. I wanted to be like you. I didn't even realize it. I've got all these instruments lying around. I've been trying like you've. You've. At our house, there was always instruments. You always tried to make me play. As soon as I left, I bought a bunch of instruments and did it. I've wanted to be like you my whole life and I didn't even realize it. And quite frankly, I'm proud of the ways that I've wound up like you. And there's some ways that I'm not proud of that I gotta work on. But I wanted you to know that and that I love you. So have that conversation. Which is very different from the typical arguments that he and I have. And he's taken aback and just says, oh, thanks. Love you too. And that's that. The third thing is that at some point you do that. You have your epiphany. What often happens with people is that life comes back into play and you have this big breakthrough moment, you're ready to commit, everything's gonna be different. And then when the rubber hits the road, you guys go back to your same old patterns. So you need to be very, very careful, especially for the first time, that there's friction between you and. With me and my dad. This happened as soon as I saw him, which was just last week. I was Coming home from Las Vegas and I mentioned I was visiting with my ex girlfriend, One of the things that we decided was that we were not gonna continue to stay in touch. And that was hard for me because even after we broke up, we stayed in touch. We continued to see each other. In many ways, we were still dating. And we decided just a week ago that we were going to stop that. For what? For both of us. That was hard for me. It was very hard for me. So I got on a red eye plane, fresh out of a breakup, basically flew home to visit my mom and dad. Got there at 8am and my dad picked me up. And I told him, I said what had happened and he immediately went in on me. What did you expect? I mean, this was obvious. You guys broke up last year. This is going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For five minutes, just in and in and in. And I sat there and I started to prepare my case to just argumentatively destroy him, to take him apart and win this argument. But I caught myself, thank God. And instead I said, dad, I just want you to consider this. I just got off a red eye flight that I didn't sleep on because right before I got on that red eye flight, I basically broke up with someone that I love. And now I'm not going to be talking to them. And I feel really not good about all of that. So you can say whatever you want to say to me, but I ask that you just consider that that's how I'm feeling right now. That was it. And he took a deep breath and said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say it like that. What I was. And then the conversation, the whole tone shifted from him, here, me here, boom, boom, boom, boom, to he was now trying to guide me in a kinder way. And I realized my pattern was my dad take a firm stance, I take the opposite firm stance. Or I take a firm stance, my dad takes the opposite stance. And we just see who's tougher. And this was the first time in my life that I did the opposite. He took a firm stance and I said, I'm hurting. This doesn't feel good. I need help. And what do you know? My dad helped me. So I say all of this because you might have this pattern, in which case the answer, if you're always the tough fighter, you might have to be vulnerable like I did. It's not going to feel good. You might have a different pattern, though. You might be someone who just gets steamrolled all the time and your Parents tell you who you're going to date, where you're going to go, how things are going to be, and you accept, accept, accept. You might have to stand up for yourself. You might have to say, mom, I love you, but you cannot tell me who I'm going to be dating in the future. I love this person and this is who I'm going to see. And I need you to accept that whatever it is, you're going to have to do the opposite and it's going to feel hard. And you need to pay special attention to that first moment of conflict because that's going to set the pace going forward in your relationship. So those are the three steps to changing it. One, I hope my story helped you to start to reflect and realize what kinds of blind spot patterns you might have that come from your mom and your dad or your early childhood if you haven't yet. Like I said, more videos Join our email list. The second piece is Committing Forward as soon as you realize that. So text someone, call someone right now, you know who that person is and just tell them what you've realized. And the third is that when you get back to normal life, be on the lookout and be ready to do the opposite of your instinct and it's gonna feel very strange. Sometimes it feels like you're exposing your most vulnerable parts. Right? Didn't feel good for me, but the relationship. I spent five days with him and it was the best five days that we've had in a very, very long time. So I hope that you've enjoyed this video. If you have, make sure to subscribe to the channel. We'll have more like this. But actually next up, we have a charisma breakdown on Louis CK coming next week. Week I'll be back to the weekly videos now that I'm back in Brazil and hunting for a studio so that I have a better place than this goofy Airbnb to shoot these for you guys. If you want to know more about this topic, like I said, definitely going to be doing more on it. Probably not so freestyle like this one, but more guided exercises. And some of those will be on YouTube. Some of them we might put in Charisma University. Either way, join the email list and you'll learn about wherever those wind up. I hope that you've enjoyed this video and of course I will see you in the next one.