How To Turn Your Failures Into Strengths

The thing that gets in most people's way of achieving their hopes and goals and dreams more than anything else in their entire life is paradoxically, themselves. And the problem is that they can't see how they're doing it because they lack self awareness. Now, this is a question that I wish I got more often. How do I be more self aware? Because without self awareness, you can't see your own failures, your shortcomings, and you have no way to catch your own blind spots. Which means that in certain areas of your life, you're going to run in circles, giving rationalizations and excuses for why you're stuck and missing the real point. Which is why in this video, I want to give you some mindsets and exercises to increase your level of self awareness and get out of your own way. The first mindset that is absolutely essential is to recognize that in your life, the person who is most likely to lie to you beyond anyone else is yourself. We have some very, very complicated booby traps up here. We have ego defense mechanisms that want to keep us, A safe from a survival perspective, but B, safe from a self image perspective. So if we get evidence, if we behave in a way that doesn't suit our self image and we don't like the story that it creates about us, we tend to discount that evidence. So, for instance, if you're in a relationship, as I was at one point, that isn't working out, but you're afraid to end it, you are unlikely to admit to yourself that you're a person who acts based on fear. What you will instead do is discount all the reasons that the relationship might not work and create rationalizations for why those don't matter for you. This is why your friends can often see flaws in the way that you behave and vice versa, much more easily than you can see them yourself. So step one, recognize that in all sorts of emotionally charged areas of your life, you're likely lying to yourself. The second thing to help us get past that initial fact that we have to accept is to put honesty before integrity. Now, this sounds counterintuitive because integrity is important. I talk about it on the channel. If you have a value, you really do want to work on living it. The problem is that there's a couple of emotionally charged areas in your life right now and in my life, and that we are incapable right now of emotionally breaking through. And what that does is because we have these ego defense mechanisms, for instance, that won't let us leave this job or leave this relationship or give ourselves the real reason why we're not approaching the person that we would really like to start a relationship with, whatever it is, rather than be integrous with that and do the hard thing, because we're incapable of that. Our brains save us, and they come out and they say, no, no, no, no. All that evidence as to why I'm not approaching that person is bogus. The real issue is this thing, and we ourselves from ever being able to be honest in the first place, because we feel so much pressure to immediately act with integrity. The way to deal with this, weirdly enough, is to give yourself permission to live in paradox, to admit that you really should do something and then go, you know what? But I'm not going to. And for me, for instance, this was something that was true. I felt morally obligated for probably years to stop eating meat. And I went for years without doing that. And it took me up until last year when I actually stopped eating meat, red meat and poultry and all that kind of stuff. I still eat fish. Not the point of the video. The point is that I had to live in paradox for a long time before I was able emotionally of making that leap to doing what I felt was morally right for me. And the same is going to be true of you. So give yourself permission to be first honest and to live for a period of time without putting that into action. So now that we've done that, what I would like you to do after this video, you can even start right now, is to make a list. And you're going to call this list self image. And on this list, you're going to write, in this order, things that you are. I am a good friend, I am a good son, I am smart, I am shy, I am nervous. In groups, whatever it is, go ahead and write out all the things that you are. If you do that for five minutes, you have a pretty good image of what your conscious self image of yourself is, which is great. Then what I want you to do is even more important because after you've written out everything that you are, I want you to create another list and I want you to describe yourself without using any form of the verb to be. So that means you can't say I am a good friend. You would have to say, instead, I call my friends three times a week and they regularly return my calls. Instead of saying that you're a good son, you could say, I bought my mom this amazing present for her birthday last week. Whatever it is, you have to use actions and the responses of people to describe who you are. When you do this, you might see some disparities. For instance, you might write that you're an extremely moral person. But as you go through and you look at your list, there's not too many examples of you behaving in a highly moral way. In fact, there might be examples of you behaving out of line with your morality. And you want to explore all different kinds of relationships here. The point is, on the one hand, when we describe what we are, we tap heavily into our own identity, the way we would like to see ourselves. But when we describe what we do, we are driving down to more of how we spend our time. In fact, that's a great thing to write there. I spend my time doing X and write out the things you do in your day that is a better example of who you are than the way that you see yourself. Unfortunately, once you've done that, another way to get in some, some perspective on yourself is to actually go to people who know you well because they are not under the same delusions that you are. They don't buy all the stories that you tell yourself about yourself. So I've created a list of questions. I'll list a couple of here in the description, in the sidebar as I'm talking. But you go to a friend or a group of them, a family member, a co worker, somebody who knows you well, and you say, look, I'm trying to get some perspective on myself. More than anything here. I want to grow, I want to improve and I want to learn about myself. So I'm going to ask you some questions and you might have some seemingly harsh feedback that maybe you've told me before, maybe you haven't. For the purpose of this exercise, I would like you to tell me the bald faced truth as best you can. And if I ask you questions, I promise it won't be out of defensiveness, it's going to be out of a desire to understand more. And you're going to ask them, for instance, compared to other people, that, you know, what is something that I struggle with or in what ways am I hypocritical? And I'll list a number of these questions. But these are tough questions for them to answer because they don't want to offend you. And they're tough questions to hear the answers. And you'll know that you're doing this right. If you've created a safe enough space for them to give you answers that make your heart race, that make you uncomfortable, that is a sign that your self image is being disrupted, attacked, A little bit what they're saying isn't necessarily 100% true, but it absolutely does give you something to work with. So that's the second thing you can do. The third thing is a habit. Because the truth is self awareness isn't something that you're going to get just from two simple exercises. You need to begin to make a practice of viewing the the truth behind your desires, your motivations and your feelings. And in order to do that on a daily basis, it is my opinion strongly that you need at least 10 minutes of space. Now, space can be any number of different things. Space can be meditation. Space can be taking a walk, it can be surfing, it can be talking to a therapist or a counselor. Space can be something that I do all the time, which is I find the cheapest massage parlor I can go. It's usually some kind of a foot reflexology place. And I go for an hour, not for the massage, but because I know I will just have to sit there for an hour and with my live with my thoughts, think, reflect. And that has led to some of the biggest business breakthroughs that we've had, as well as some really, really big breakthroughs in the area of self awareness. But you need every single day at least 10 minutes of this if you care at all about self awareness. I'm going to talk about meditation in a future video. But one thing that I think that is worth calling out that you can get on your calendar once a week would be therapy or counseling. And to do that, I want to thank our sponsor for this video, BetterHelp. Now, BetterHelp is something that I've used. They have licensed counselors that you can talk to from your home in order to work through some of the issues, the problems that you may have. And in talking to the counselor that I had, I realized that I am not really as close to my family as I would like to be. And I started reaching out more often. We're talking about setting up potential family trips and that sorts of thing. But it gives you that space that I just referenced. And it gives you an impartial third party who's going to reflect back to you the things that you are saying and hopefully catch you in the areas where you are being less than and honest with yourself. In addition, I've done this sort of thing with therapy and counseling previous in my life. It led to what I think is the most valuable video that I've ever made on this channel. Why you don't feel good enough. If you haven't checked that out Go ahead. But that was a direct result of a therapy session that I had after a rough breakup. So if you are someone that has been considering therapy or could use someone to talk to, but the idea of getting up, going into their office has just been daunting, you didn't want to see other people. You don't want to clear your schedule. In order to do that, consider checking out BetterHelp. You can do it from your home. You're talking to a licensed therapist and it's an excellent way to create the space that I mentioned for self awareness. So in order to do that, go ahead, click the link below www.betterhelp.com Charisma and you can go to start your therapy sessions now. I hope that you have enjoyed this video. Let me know if you have any questions. Because self awareness is something that I have been increasingly interested in. I've been blown away by the ways in which I lack it, the ways in which I have the capacity for self deception, and it is still something that I am personally working to better. So if there's any sort of conversation you want to start in the comments, I'll be keeping a special eye on this video. I hope that you guys enjoyed this. Click subscribe if you have not yet and hit that notification bell and I will see you in the next video. Sam.