How to Deal with Toxic People (Including Yourself) with Robert Greene

You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey, the notion that you're going more and more inward to get self aware. What does someone do if they say, all right, we're doing a meditation or some neurofeedback or plant medicine, whatever the heck their breath work, whatever made them go, aha, I've got, you know, I deceive myself, right? And they become aware of it. How do you recommend someone go about making it right when you realize that you basically told yourself something that wasn't true and then acted on it?

Well, the awareness is almost a value in and of itself. So having the knowledge in your mind that's now kind of rooted in some way that I have this pattern of self deception. So the first thing you have to realize that when you come to terms with the fact that on this one instance you did deceive yourself, you were blaming the other person, but that you were at fault. Understand the basic principle of human nature. Nobody ever does something once, just once, there's going to be a pattern. You have deceived yourself on that front several times. Maybe it's a pattern in your life, maybe you've done it many times. Who knows? First of all, realize that it probably has roots in you. And human behavior in our own lives tend to fall into these patterns. I discussed that. The laws of human nature and explain why that happens and why we're kind of prisoners of fate in some ways. So awareness of your own patterns now gives you the power in the moment that you catch yourself doing it to say, aha, Robert, you're deceiving yourself again. You're focusing on the other person when actually you were the one to blame. And I recently caught myself in that. So I practice these things on myself, kind of like Tim Ferriss does those things on himself. I do it on myself. So the other day I had an interview with somebody and they were. The interview was a little. I'm not going to name names. Please don't look this up. The interview was a little bit sharp. I felt like this person was kind of attacking me, although they were smiling and everything was pleasant. But I felt like they were trying to trip me up and kind of reveal that I contradict myself. I'm going, damn. What is. Why is that? Because this. I thought I was friends with this person. And then I started thinking, no, Robert, maybe you did something that caused it. So I'm aware of my pattern of always externalizing and finding the other person to be wrong. And then I realized that maybe some of my own behavior, some of my own communication with this person was kind of triggering certain emotions that would lead them to now want to, like, upset me in some way, some way that I had perhaps created some envy inadvertently, you know, and that I could have controlled some of my communications better, etc. So simply aware of your own patterns gives you the power to now change them, right? So it's just like the toxic person thing. The key is to recognize them before they happen. The key here is to recognize in the moment that that process is going on, that that is the most power. That is almost enough in and of itself. I think it's also like your reaction is to get emotional when somebody says something, right? To get angry, for instance, get triggered. If you develop the habit in the moment of understanding that you have that propensity, you can now give yourself a little lapse of 10 seconds where you calm down, where you don't react, and then that will allow you to not react. And the next time it'll be 20 seconds. So developing the pattern of being aware of your own patterns is, to me, almost enough.