Ask Jack #6: Progress Over Perfection! | Jack Canfield

Hey, welcome everybody. It's Jack Canfield. And I'm really excited to be here today answering your questions on how to create more success and fulfillment in your life. This week I'm going to answer questions from two or three people who are in very different situations but who are struggling with the same big problem. They're all feeling stuck in their lives. So let's take a look at today's questions and discuss how focusing on progress over perfection will help them get unstuck and back on track toward your dreams. And if you're in that situation, they'll help you as well. So the first question comes from Charlene, who is asking, how do I free myself from my abuser when I am my biggest abuser? Charlene is a coordinator of a community recreation center. And her breakthrough goal is to let go of the limiting belief she holds about what is possible for her life and her so she can lose weight and achieve her health goals. And she says she has, quote, a huge loud team of voices in my head. An inner critic, a doubter, a worrier, and more that undermine me at every turn. She goes on to say, I realize that I'm in an abusive relationship with myself. I'm able to silence them in the short term, but like an abuser, they apologize and play nice and sneak back in. And then they get even louder and more abusive. I feel paralyzed. Well, here's the deal. The first thing is you have to realize you can't get rid of your inner critic, your inner abusers, et cetera. They're actually on your side. The thing is, they started out trying to help you, to motivate you. You know, often they're saying things like, you're eating too much, you're not exercising, you need to do this, you suck. You know, whatever it might be, they're kind of pounding on you because they wanted you to get something. You know, it might have been your parents voice. They were trying to motivate you, maybe they were trying to protect you, you know, and so whatever it is, that internal voice is a part of you that is not extinguishable. It has to be retrained. Now there's a four step process for doing that. And you can practice this by imagining yourself sitting in an empty chair and talking to yourself. You can talk to yourself in a mirror. You can, you can do this in your imagination by closing your eyes and visualizing talking to yourself. And so normally what this inner voice is doing is it's judging you and it's angry. And so what you want to do is voice the anger. That's okay. And then notice that underneath the anger there's fear. And underneath the fear there's a request that you want to make and then there's love. So this is called the total truth process. And most of us get stuck, stuck in the anger, judgmental, critical side of ourselves that's putting you down, etc. So give you an example. The first step is you would say, I'm really angry at you. You say you're going to exercise, you never exercise, you sit around, you're a big fat slob, you know, and just go at it. And I would do that for at least a minute. Anything that just comes into your head, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and really give your voice to it. And then the second stage is underneath the anger there's fear. Fear, just like if you had a critical parent. Underneath that criticism there was a fear that you weren't going to grow up and do well, that you weren't going to get a good job, you weren't going to do well in school, maybe you would never find a mate, whatever it might be. So the second stage is to say, I'm afraid that if you don't change your habits, if you don't change what you're doing, this is what's going to happen. So in the case of like eating too much and so forth might be, I'm afraid that if you keep up these habits, you are going to get sick and have a heart attack. You're not going to live very long, you're not going to be able to see your grandson graduate from high school. I'm afraid that you're going to have a lot of pain in your old age. So you tell what's the fear underneath that? And then the third step is I want you to, you're making requests. I want you to start eating more vegetables. I want you to exercise for at least an hour every other day. I want you to take a 20 minute walk at night after you eat, I want you to drink more water to get very specific about what the I wants are. And then finally, I love you. Because underneath all of that, which doesn't seem like it when it first starts, this abuse is this love. I love you. I want you to have everything you want. You deserve to live a long life, you deserve to be healthy, you deserve to be flexible and have endurance and be able to breathe easily and you know, all the things that you want, you deserve to have them. So you're going to take yourself through Those four steps. Because what you have to do is transform your inner critic into an inner coach, your inner bully into an inner support system, if you will. And remember, these are actually on your side, although it doesn't feel like it. So it's a transformation rather, because if you try to push it down, if you ever try to push a take a beach ball and hold it underwater, what happens when you let go of it? It comes up again. It's always going to do that. So we want to retrain this so it's supporting us. And if you read chapter 32 in the Success Principles, which is all about transforming your inner critic into inner coach. And also it's on chapter five, page 122. That's again chapter five, page 122 in a book I wrote called Tapping into Ultimate Success, which has to do with tapping, eft tapping. There's a whole protocol to tap and turn your inner critic into an inner coach. So you know, here's the deal. You can't kill off that inner voice. You have to retrain it and it'll come back to sabotage you every time if you don't do it. So think about this. There's something called the law of replacement. You can't just get rid of something without replacing it with something. You can't stop the negativity unless you teach it to say positive things, you know, and it can be as simple as a conversation. I really know you're on my side. It's not working for me. Trying to bully me into doing what you think I need to do. You're trying to put me down so it'll keep me safe from taking risk, whatever it might be. But it's not working for me. And what I want you to do is X, Y and Z. So there's a number of different tools I'm sharing with you. And the last one I want, well, not the last one. The next lesson I want to share with you is cancel. Cancel the idea. When you hear yourself saying something negative to yourself, stop. Either do the four step process I just taught you, anger, fear, I want, I love you, you deserve. Or just replace it with a positive statement. What would be a positive thing to say to yourself? And as I've shared on a number of different videos, there's this technique I've been doing lately with post its where you literally take a post it, maybe take 10 of them, put them around your house. You can put the words cancel, cancel on them or just nothing so you know what they are. Put them in common places Then what happens when you see those stop and say, what are my thoughts right now? Are they self judgmental or are they self nurturing? And if they're not self nurturing, stop and rephrase it. Now you want to practice these self nurturing thoughts as a discipline. And one of the great ways to do that is something we call the mirror exercise in the mirror exercises. Every night before you go to bed, you want to do this for at least 60 days in a row. Stand in front of the mirror, look at yourself in the mirror, make eye contact, call your name, Jack, in my case. And then you're going to thank yourself, appreciate yourself for everything you did that day that you achieved, any disciplines you kept, any temptations you overcame. So it might be, you know, Jack, I want to appreciate you. Today you recorded a bunch of videos for Facebook and for YouTube. You did a great job of doing it. You answered a bunch of questions. You had a good time, you appreciated your staff. After that, you went and you did a wonderful slide show that you're going to do for a presentation you're doing tomorrow. And you know, on and on like that. And then you can say, I want to honor you, Jack, for the fact that you kept some disciplines. You exercised, you meditated, you did your visualizations, your affirmations and your gratitude exercises. Exercise. And then temptations overcome. Say, I want to thank you for you're going to bed right now without staying up really late and playing Words with Friends or, you know, watching tv. You're going to get a good night's sleep and you end with, I love you. You do that every day for about 60 days. What happens is you're now training yourself to build in positive self affirmation. You're strengthening that voice inside of you, that inner coach. All right, question number two comes from Mary. Mary asks, how do I heal my bitterness? Now, Mary is a holistic health practitioner who wants to experience more expansive love for herself and others, but feels like her persistent bitterness is preventing her from residing in a constant state of what she calls love flow. Now, Mary is a holistic health practitioner who wants to experience more expansive love for herself and for others. But she feels like her persistent bitterness is preventing her from residing in what she calls her consistent state of love flow. And she asks, how can I lean in to shift my bitter attitude? I am completely interested in doing the change wherever it may take me. Now, the first question you have to ask is, what are you bitter about? You know, normally it's someone or something that should or should not have Happened something somebody did they shouldn't have done, or something they should have done, they didn't. It might have been a betrayal. Maybe they lied to you, they shamed you, they embarrassed you. Maybe they bullied you or abused you. They might have stolen from you. They might have engaged in some kind of racist behavior toward you. Maybe there was sexism involved or it was an uneven playing field that you had to play on. They passed you over for a well deserved job or a promotion or a bonus or the recognition that you felt you deserved. Or maybe you were even incarcerated for something you didn't do or you felt the sentence was too long, or maybe you had violent behavior toward you, you were abused physically. You know, I've seen it and heard it all in my clients and in my workshop participants. Literally, there's nothing that you could bring up that someone hasn't told me they experienced in their life. And in my own life, I can relate. I've been cheated on, I've been lied to, I've been stolen from. People have plagiarized my work. They falsely accused me of things I didn't do. They sued me or my company for things that we didn't do. They overlooked my contributions. And if I go back to my childhood, I experienced physical abuse from my father and I was bullied at school, and I was physically abused and shamed by a football coach when I was in high school. It seems to be part of the human condition that we're going to experience that stuff somewhere now. I even had a best friend who was black who joined the Black Muslims and came to tell me totally out of the blue that he could never talk to me again or interact with me in any way ever again. So again the victim of what we call reverse racism. So I could have chosen to be bitter about all that. And probably for a while I was, until I learned that bitterness is something I had to give up. And the bitterness came from the belief that something that someone did or something had happened should never have happened. It should have been different than it was. Whether it's something in the present they're doing or something in the past that they did. And what I learned is it's not the circumstance or the other person's behavior that's the problem. It's your belief about it that's causing you the bitterness. And your belief that your belief is absolutely true is what's holding you and holding that bitterness in place. And if you keep believing the same thought over over and over again and reinforcing the bitterness, you're going to keep being bitter. Now, the word resentment, if we feel resentment towards someone, which often comes with bitterness, think about this word. It's resent. You felt this bitterness and you resent it, and you resent it again, and you keep resending it, and over and over it gets reinforced in your nervous system. And so the truth is that whatever happened to you, it happened the way it happened, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't change it. Now, one of the things I learned from Byron, Katie, is this four questions that literally changed my life. And so when you're upset about something and you don't want to be because you're asking, how can I get rid of the bitterness? You have to ask yourself, this thing I'm bitter about, I have a belief about how it should have been or how it shouldn't have been. And you have to ask yourself, is it true that that shouldn't have happened, or Bob shouldn't be that way, or that person shouldn't act that way, or they shouldn't have done that to me, or they should have honored me, or whatever. Now is it true? And it's a yes or no question. And then you have to ask yourself, can I absolutely know beyond any shadow of a doubt that this is true? My belief that it shouldn't have happened? And my answer to that is always, I can't know. I can't know, first of all, that it could have been any different than it was. Perhaps they were conditioned by their pain and their attempt to achieve some goal in their life, meet some basic need they had. It might be karmically something I needed to experience for my own growth. You know, a lot of things have happened to me that I didn't like at the time. And later I look back on them, they forced me to develop qualities like courage, perseverance and patience and so forth. The next question you ask is, who am I? When I believe this thought? And for me, the answer is always, I'm upset, I'm distant, I'm judgmental, I'm unhappy. Then the question is, who would I be without this thought? If I didn't have this thought, didn't have this bitterness, I'd be a happy person. I'd be engaging, I'd be more fun, I'd be enjoying myself. So let me share a story about a client I had. I was doing a seminar and this woman came up to me on a break and she said, I am really upset. You're talking about letting go of your upset and I just can't do it. I said, really? What are you upset about? She said, well, what happened was that my father died and he left my sister twice as much money as he left me. And I said, okay, and you're upset about that? She said, yeah. She said, it's not right. And I said, well, how long ago did this happen? She said, 15 years ago. I said, well, how often do you think about this? She said, every day. Now stop and think about that for a moment. Here's a person who's been upset for 15 years, every day of her life about what happened 15 years ago. And she kept saying, it's just not right. And I said, what would happen if you let go? It was just not right. I said, do you think ever your sister's going to do anything? She's going to give you more? No, but it's just not right. And so I finally was able to get her to see that it was her that was creating her misery by keep thinking this thought that it wasn't right and that she needed to let it go if she wanted to be happy, you know, Byron, Katie, I watched a video of hers once, and she was working with a woman. This is a little challenging story, and hopefully you can let this in. She was working with a woman who'd been raped in New York, in Central park, and she was still holding on to all this resentment and bitterness about it. And so Katie asked her, she said, how long did that rape take? She said, I don't know, about 20 minutes. And she said, and how long have you been raping yourself with the same story over and over and over and over and over? She said, 20 years. And she said, so who's the bigger rapist? You, who's been raping yourself with this memory and this belief and all this feeling it generates every time you think about it shouldn't have happened. Now, I'm not condoning that that rape happened. And that's one of the big things that people think. If I let go of my bitterness, if I let go of my resentment, if I let go of my anger, in some way, I'll be admitting that it was okay. Well, it wasn't okay. It just was. It just was what it was. And in that wasness, it's perfect because it couldn't have been anything else because it's what happened. And so literally you can wish it didn't happen, but it did. And you are responsible for your happiness in the present. So what you want to do is, in the present, focus on is there Someone I need to forgive, if I can forgive them and let him go. And, you know, a lot of times you want someone to admit it, like they abused you as a child. Someone that, you know, maybe sexually abused, like an uncle, and they won't do it. And you have to realize you may never get that. They may never do it. And you may think it's not right, that you need it, you don't need it. What you need to do is to let go of the belief that it shouldn't have happened. And if there's feelings you need to express, then express them. Go take a, you know, tennis racket. You want to hit on the bed and scream for a while and get out of your system, that's fine. Now some people even say there's no need to forgive anyone because in some way it was all perfect, that everything always is happening to you for you, not against you. And, you know, I found it to be true in my own life. I remember when I got divorced, I pretty much lost everything. I got to keep my job, and I lost millions and millions of dollars. My wife got all the bonds, all the stocks, everything, all the cash. And I had to totally rebuild, you know. And at first I was resentful because I seemed like I should have got half of that, but I didn't. But in the process, what I had offered her was half of my income for the rest of my life. So she decided she didn't want to do that, and she wanted to take everything she could get now and be done with it. And I resented it because I didn't have any cash to play with at that point. And so. But when I really let go of it and said, okay, this has got to be perfect. There's got to be some benefit in this. What is it? And I released it. Well, that's when I wrote the Success Principles, which is changed my life, which I probably wouldn't have written because I was getting a little comfortable at the time. Then I started the Transformational Leadership Council out of that. And then the secret I was in that, because I started the Transformational Leadership Council. And then eventually about, I don't know, eight years later, we sold Chicken Soup for the Soul for a lot of money, which I would have had to give her half of, which because I didn't left me off to much better financially than I ever would have had. I gotten what I wanted at the time. And so you never can see it necessarily in the moment, but I want you to realize that something Napoleon Hill said is true. He said Every negative event, every adversity, every heartache contains within it an equal or greater benefit. But you have to look for the seed and to water it. So the main thing is to just let it go. Know that in some way it was perfect. If you can look for that perfection, great. If you can't, just let it go and trust that it's there. And then focus on your daily gratitude exercise. What are you grateful for in the moment? And focus on that rather than be bitter about what did or didn't happen in the past. And just share a couple last things with you on this question. There's a guy named Lester Levinson who was sent home to die. And they gave him a couple months to live. And he decided, you know, I wanted to figure out if I'm going to die, what was life all about. And he started examining his life and going back and looking at everything in his life, especially times when he wasn't happy. What made him happy, what made him unhappy. And he began to realize that when he was most unhappy is when he was not loving people, when he was judging them, and when he was having resentments and bitterness. So he started what he called the love process. And every day he would think of someone that he had felt angry at or maybe had abused him, whatever, and he would send them love. He would send them love. And as a result of that, what happens is he began to move into this great state of love. And guess what? He never died. He went on to live many, many, many, many, many years. Created a bunch of processes that led to something called the Sedona Method, which my friend Harold Dwoskin conducts this day. I wrote the forward for his book on that. And so the love process. Think about sending love rather than the resentment you get to feel the love. Someone sent me a card once and said, the love I send you is secondhand because I felt it first. First. And so basically, love is important. That's what you want to choose. And remember this, everyone in life is always doing the best they can with the limited awareness, knowledge, tools, and skills they have at the time to meet some basic need that's really critical. And that's you, too. That's why you never have to feel guilty. Anything you ever did was the best you could do at the time to meet a basic need that you had as a human being, for attention, for love, for safety, for food, for comfort, whatever it might have been that you had at the time. And as you learn more, you can do better. But don't judge yourself from what you know now about where you were when you didn't know that stuff. I'll end with this. Marcus Aurelius, who lived more than 2,000 years ago, said very little is needed to make a happy life. It's all within yourself in your way of thinking. Well, thank you for watching today and if you have a question you would like us to answer in a future episode, please post it in the comments below. We definitely want to hear from you and make sure we're helping you overcome your challenges so you can get better results in everything that you do. And if you found this video helpful, please make sure you like it. Share with a friend who may need it and subscribe to this channel. For more videos like this one and for some additional tools and videos on how to overcome your obstacles, goals and to thrive in life, check out the resource page on jackcamphill.com there's a ton of great free stuff there. Thanks again for watching and have a great day.