This is a YouTube video titled "Want a Happy Life? Deal with The Power of Your Mind" published in March 2016 featuring Dr. Mark Hyman (Ask AI Mark) delivering a personal and motivational talk. In this video, Dr. Hyman shares his own struggles with mindset and behavior change, emphasizing the importance of overcoming limiting beliefs, adopting healthier habits like weight training, empowering his team, and improving family relationships through coaching and self-reflection. The content is a monologue aimed at inspiring viewers to rethink their mental patterns for a happier life.
Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. And this week's house call is actually about me. It's about my own challenges and struggles and how I dealt with them and how by talking about them, I hope that might help you. Now, do you believe every stupid thought that you have? It took me a while to break that bad habit. I used to listen to my own mind like it actually had all the right answers. all the time. Now, sometimes it did, and in fact most of the time it does, and I'm grateful for that. I like my mind most of the time. In fact, it's been one of my greatest superpowers when directed at understanding the nature of health and disease and the mysteries of human biology and in translating that into practical approaches to bring functional medicine to hundreds of thousands of people and helping them get healthy. But very often my mind tricks me with thoughts and beliefs that don't align with what's good for me or what's actually true. It kind of pretends to be my friend feeding me information as though it was true when it actually really wasn't. I'm sure you can relate to that, right? Now, I want you to think of an opportunity that you missed that you now regret or any change you made, but it was kind of too late by the time you made it. For me, it took years of suffering in certain areas to change my mind and realized it was me who was in control. Now, there's a whole bunch of personal examples, but I'm gonna start with a simple example. I used to avoid weight lifting and weight training like the plague. Even though, of course, as a doctor, I know it's important, I decided it wasn't for me. I even found it boring and difficult, even painful. Can you hear my inner brat saying, I just don't wanna. But as I got older, I realized that I had to deal with that quote story in my head and that belief that I couldn't do it and that I had to change my mind. Now it took a good friend pushing me a little bit and also learning how to make it something I would do every day by designing it into my day and then I started doing it. I just decided to do pushups and tricep dips in the bathroom before I took a shower every day. I had the motivation, I had a trigger which was a shower and I had the ability to do it. So it made it possible to change my behavior. I also know as a doctor that keeping muscle mass is key to healthy aging. And I both wanted to do that and I needed to do that. So I swallowed it and I accepted it and I knew it would be in pain and I would be uncomfortable at first and I just kept at it. It was pretty simple and I just used my own body weight and now I'm so used to it, I can't imagine going back to my original thinking on the subject or not being as strong. Even yoga and tennis are way better 'cause I've just built up my strength. Now, I have a similar story at work. For years, I told myself, I have to do everything myself. And I was thinking, I was the only one who could do it. You know that thought, right? It made me feel kind of indispensable and it made me feel useful, but often left me overwhelmed and ineffective. And guess what? My team felt disempowered too. There's only so much one person can do. And there's really no point in hiring and paying other people if you're gonna not empower them to accomplish the collective mission. Now, my coach, my life coach and business coach helped me wake up to my leadership capability and I wasn't exercising it. I was just sort of doing everything on my own. I changed my mind in one very important way. I decided my job was to inspire and lead not to do everything and not to complain about it afterwards. I'm sure you can imagine that this changed everything about my business and my feelings about myself and my team's experience of me. And the results have been immeasurable. In my work, I have empowered doctors and my administrators to know that I trusted them and I believed in them, which allowed my practice to grow and develop without my having to do everything. Everyone so much happier. And for my birthday this year, I asked for a coaching session with my kids to clear up any lingering stories or beliefs or things that kept us all from being great together. Now we were already pretty great but I wanted to be awesome and by spending time having real conversations about how we are with each other and how we have been, we were able to heal a lot and to get to new ways of thinking about how to love each other better and be together. It was the best birthday present ever. Now it would be nice if we were all born perfect with nothing to work on. But that's just not how we're designed as humans. We are made with a wonderful goody bag filled with great positive qualities, but also some not so helpful qualities and behaviors and ways of thinking. All of us get stuck in thought patterns that if we don't deal with them, can cause a very unhappy life and unhappy circumstances. So I encourage myself and all of us to kind of have a sense of humor about this. to lighten up about it, realize that everyone's dealing with some areas of life where their thinking just doesn't line up with what they most want or what they wish or believed. Now a coach showed me how to reckon with this and to talk back to the voice in my head with the voice of my vision and my dreams and what I really want for my life. It took some courage, but each time I did it, the results were immediate. I wish I could tell you I was done with my journey, but I know enough now to know better and that I'm not done. The better I get at changing my mind and fixing my thinking and attracting more of what I want, the bigger I get to dream. I wish the same for you. I'm going to keep you posted on my discoveries and I'd love to hear your stories and how you've dealt with tough issues and shifting your thinking in a way that made you happier. I encourage you to share this video if you liked it with your friends and family on Facebook. I encourage you to comment below and tell us your stories. And I encourage you to submit your questions at DrHyman.com so maybe next week I may make a house call to you.
