How To Stop Being A Pushover

One of the unfortunate things about living in the world is that when you have goals, there will be obstacles. And those obstacles can often come in the form of other human beings, the doubters, the haters, and sometimes the friends and the family that just don't want you to get hurt or don't want you to change. Which is why in this video, I want to help immunize you against that peer and social pressure so that that doubt doesn't creep in and stop you from achieving your biggest dreams. Now, the first thing to realize is that it's not often the case that the person who is doubting us, the person who is pressuring us, has a really persuasive, amazing argument. What is often the case is that we haven't gotten clear on our own values, and we actually just use them as an excuse for doubting ourselves, which is why it's so, so important to get crystal clear on the things that you think are important. You need to write this down and the best question that I know of to get clear on your values and is this one. Do this at the end of the video. When you're 90 or you're 100 years old and you are looking back at your life and all the amazing things that you did, what do you want to see? When especially you're looking back at this time period in your life, what would you like to say? Would you like to say that that was a time period in my life where I conformed well, I followed what everybody said, I took the safe path and just kind of played it safe? Or do you want to look back and say, no, that was the time period where I struck out and followed my dreams. And whether or not it went perfectly, I found out if that was something that I was capable of doing. I learned a ton. Now, I hope, and I think that you're probably with me and that it's the second one, but when you do this, a lot of things will become clear to you. And I actually did this many years ago, and I was working a normal job as a consultant. And it was very clear to me that I did not want to just work until I was 65. What I wanted to do was to move to Brazil with a bunch of my friends to try to start this online business thing to see if it could work. And when I wrote it down, my day, the way that I wanted to go, waking up in the morning, knocking on my friend's door. We lived in the same apartment. We'd go out to the beach together, we take a stroll we'd be drinking caipirinhas. I wrote the whole thing out. When I got clear on that, it was so motivating that when everybody, anybody would come up to me and say, char, you're crazy. You're going to quit your job. You're going to try to start this online business. It didn't faze me because I didn't value the security of the job in the same way that I valued pursuing this dream because I'd gotten the clear on it. So take this time. This is so, so critical. Not just for this topic, for everything in your life. Write down your values. It's so helpful. The second thing that you're going to need to do is to realize that there isn't a human being that I know that is immune to social pressure. We all are adjusting and reacting based on the people around us. Which is why the answer is not just to say, hey, nobody can influence me. It's to build. That is an ambulance. I'm going to keep going because this is one take though. The answer is to build a mo. The answer is to have this moat surrounding you of really positive influences such that when there's a negative influence, it doesn't break through. Now, the important thing to realize here is that if you're like me and you want to be an entrepreneur, you're not necessarily surrounded by other entrepreneurs. So your first influences inside that moat are going to come from books, audio tapes and video. For me, it was Tim Ferriss. I read the Four Hour Work Week and that really laid out the blueprint for how I was going to travel, how I was going to spend my 20s, the business that I would run. So if you're interested in any of those things, travel, lifestyle, having freedom of time or business, go to the Four Hour Work Week. It's changed probably tens of thousands of people's lives at this point. Amazing book. If you're interested in social stuff, hopefully this channel is helping you to really improve your social skills. If you want more, join our course, Charisma University. I'm gonna throw a link in the description. The important part is you want to refer to this probably daily, right? In Charisma University, we have an action guide that is for 30 days. It tells you exactly what to do. I would reread the Four Hour Work Week. You need that influence in your life day to day because you're getting so many bad ones from everybody else. There's a 2B to this, which is you can't just have your little moat built with authors and dead People, right? It's not gonna work for you or YouTube, people like me who are hopefully, at the time of this filming, still alive. You need to have real live human beings that you can interact with. Which is why what I recommend is when you find that book, share it with your friends. When you find that video, send it to them. Friends that you might want to come on this journey with you. Whatever it is, whether you're trying to stop drinking and be more social, whether you're trying to start a business, whether you're striking out on your own in any way, are going to be resistant to you persuading them. They will, in my experience, be much more open to checking out a piece of content that you give them and then forming their own idea. This is how Ben got me. He didn't tell me, hey man, we're going to start this business. It's going to be great. He gave me the four hour work week and that took it from there. So that's to be, get someone else on your team, start with your current circle and if you can't get that, go to meetup.com, go to Reddit. There's a subreddit and a meetup for literally everything. So the third thing, and I've mentioned this, is that you need to make progress every single day. Like I said, influences are bombarding you from all angles all the time. You have to find a way to schedule into your day. Some sort of reading, some sort of video, some sort of conversation with a person that is going to make you not feel crazy. And Ben, and luckily I lived together when we were starting our business. Every day he'd go into the office and his co workers were telling him he was crazy for quitting his job at the end of just a few months to go with charisma on command. But then he'd come home and we would laugh about how they couldn't see what we saw, that we were going to Brazil, that it was going to be awesome. You have to find a way every single day to refresh yourself against those negative influences or else they will start to seep in. So that is how you inoculate yourself. What I want to teach you now is how to deal with it when inevitably that doubter comes up to you and says, hey, you're doing this wrong, or tries to pressure you. And that may happen for you over the holidays from a well meaning aunt, uncle, mom or dad. In this case, be kind, smile. But there's one phrase that I found just puts an end to this conversation. And it's this. After they've told you the ways in which you change, you say, well, you know, it's a good thing that you get to make decisions for you and I get to make decisions for me. Because if it was the other way around, it sounds like we'd both be really unhappy. And I talked about this in another video, which I'll link to. But what this does is very subtly say, hey, make your own decisions, I'll make mine. That's how it's gonna work. And also, as much as you don't approve of what I'm doing, I also don't want what you have. I'm just not shoving it down your throat. And people get that and they back off very quickly. The last thing that I've realized is that people are always going to tell you, don't do that when you're in the thinking about it mode. When I was thinking about starting this business with Ben, everybody had an opinion. Won't work, can't do it for a hundred reasons. Once I quit my job, once I started, those voices diminished because it was too late. They couldn't save me at this point. So if it's something that isn't dangerous, this is a Tim Ferriss ism, if you will, from Four Hour Workweek. There's very few things in your life that are not recoverable, so just go for it. If you decide that it's a stupid idea, that it was a failure, you can almost always work your way back to the previous position you were with a little bit of time, a little bit of money, and perhaps a little bit of begging for your old job back. But you will not. If you continue your whole life waiting for the perfect opportunity, find it. So just give it a try. That's it for this video. I just want to tell you guys really quick. I've been busy with family stuff, which is kind of what inspired this because my mom and I did not see eye to eye on the way that I was spending money recently. I know she's gonna watch this. I love you, Mom. And I hope that you don't take this any personally or upset by it. But anyways, we're gonna have a video on Star wars coming up after this. And that video is gonna be, I think, two actually. One might be on Han Solo, why we're gonna miss him, Sort of a charisma breakdown on Han. And the other one on family. The other one on why family is so important. Because really, Star wars is this space Western with these weird family ties. It's a family drama, and it's so much more impactful because it is. So I want to talk about the importance of family relations and how they probably drive you more than you may realize. And I actually am very excited for that one because I think it's going to be kind of insightful. So that's it for this video. If you want to see those new videos coming up, Star wars and beyond, hit the subscribe button. Hit that notification bell. If you don't hit the notification bell, I'm finding that fewer and fewer people are seeing our videos on the homepage. So you want to make sure that you see us hit that bell. Hope that you enjoyed this video. Let me know if you have other suggestions in the comments and I'll see you in the next one.