Are You Living A Life That You Love?

John Assaraf explains how fear and self-image stop you from living the life you want. Your brain's fear responses are learned patterns you can retrain. He walks through common fears like failure and judgment, then asks you to write down your top three fears, trace where they came from, and reframe failure as a skill to build.
Chapters
If you want to be truthful with yourself, be truthful, take responsibility. No more skirting around the issue. Okay? You have emotions. You are not your emotions. You have beliefs. You are not your beliefs. You have feelings. You're not your feelings. Are you living the life you love? That's the question of the day. Are you living the life you love? I'm going to answer questions right here today based on this topic. A lot of people are not living the life they love. They have a life that they want to love. But are you living the life you love and what's holding you back? Every Tuesday we talk about a different topic. Today is living a life you love. I believe that everybody should have amazing health and wealth, a relationship and career and business and fun and experiences and charity. A life that you're proud of and a life that you love. So the question is, are you living a life you love? That's number one type in Yes, I am. Almost. Maybe not. And then what is holding you back from living a life that you're proud of, a life that you're excited about, a life that is fulfilling and what is holding you back? So I'm going to be answering questions today. So as opposed to me teaching, which I will always do, right? So many of you know that, you know, in my first book, having it all right up there, it was all about, you know, designing the life that I love and writing down my goals for health, wealth relations, career, business, fund experiences, charity, fun and experiences, etc. And then building, you know, the plan, the inner game and the outer game. So what is your life like right now? What is holding you back? Like, what do you think is the number one reason that's holding you back? Maybe we can start off with here's what's holding me back. One thing that's holding you back. Does anybody have any idea how many different types of fear there are? Does anybody know how many different types of fear there are in our brains that hold us back? Your amygdala, the emotional response center of the brain. But there are 50 different types of fear, 50 different types of fear that hold people back. And so when you think about it, what is fear? Right? It's just an automatic trigger in our, is it in our conscious brain or subconscious brain? Where does fear get triggered? Anybody know? Where does fear get triggered? Is there a place in the brain that it gets triggered? Is there a circuit that lights up? There are 50 different types of fears. So what kind of fears do you think hold you back? Alright, right, so 50 different types of fears that hold people back. Fears are programmed in our subconscious, right? So fight, flight, freeze mode. The amygdala response, Right? Or the amygdala automatic reaction. So some are rational, some are irrational. Why do you think we have such a highly sensitive fear response in our brain? Frankenstein Part of the brain. Yeah. Fear of failure is one of them, Right? So fear of failure. So is it really the failure that we're afraid of or is it the meaning that we give the failure? So if I fail, what does it mean or say about me? I want you to go deeper than the surface, right? So if I fail, what does it mean about me? Think about the meaning that we give things. Are there people that know that failure leads to learning, learning needs to success. Are there people that feel that failure leads to learning, learning leads to success, therefore they want to fail forward, Right? Is it possible? Yes or yes? Fear of criticism. So when somebody criticizes me, what does that mean? Does it mean you're not good enough? Does it mean you're not smart enough? Does it mean you're not worthy? What does it mean if somebody criticizes you? Right. So what does it mean? Right, so somebody criticizes you or what you do. So if you care about what somebody thinks of you, doesn't that mean that your self image doesn't think enough about you? So what they think about you overrides or meets what you think about? You think beneath the surface of the ordinary, right? So fear of judgment. So if you judge me, then what does it mean? What does it mean? I want you to say, oh, it means I'm not good enough. Therefore, if somebody says something to you, they judge you, then you feel you're not good enough, which means it's a self esteem issue, what has to happen? Or for you to feel good enough so that you don't give a shit what somebody else says about you. One of the things I want you to be considering is how do you level up your own self worth, self esteem, so that it really doesn't matter what somebody else says about you, criticizes you, judges you, blames you, tries to shame you? What if you had a high enough self worth, self esteem, self image, the way you see yourself so that an external input doesn't really matter to you, right? So if you think about why is it that you have a low self image of yourself, why is it that you have a low self worth? Or why is it you have low self esteem or lower than you'd like? Right? Like why? Let's go beneath the surface. See, listen if you don't deal with the real problem head on, the problem just gets worse, right? If you don't deal with fear of judgment, fear of being criticized, if you don't deal with how, how you're automatically reacting to it, or why you move away from it, do you think it's ever going to go away? Yes or no? I think you know the answer to that, right? It's never going to go away. You're just going to reinforce a pattern that disempowers you, right? You're just going to reinforce a pattern that disempowers you, right? So ask yourself a question. How did you develop and when did you develop a self image or self worth or self esteem or lack thereof over your life? Was it your teachers, your parents, your grandparents, your brothers, your sisters, right? How did you develop that pattern in your brain? I want to always come back to the neuroscience and neuropsychology of this right? How many of you, by the way, have my newest book, the New Science to unlock your brain's hidden power? Just curious, do you have my new book? Amazon best seller. It's all about understanding your brain better and using it better for your success. But what happens is, were you born with a self image or self worth or self esteem? So were you born in your brain? You had 100 billion brain cells when you were born, right? There weren't too many that were connected. Were you born with any self image? Were you born with a self image or self esteem or self worth? No. That means that there was a pattern that was developed in your brain. And any pattern in your brain that gets reinforced moves from an automatic pattern or from a, from a conscious pattern that you're gaining to an automatic pattern and it becomes part of what we call is automaticity. Do you know what automaticity is? Automaticity is your brain's automatic default mode network just reacting to stuff without you thinking about it. So when you have this structure in your brain, this pattern in your brain where somebody criticizes you, somebody blames you, somebody tries to shame you, you feel like you might be embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed or judged. Four of the other fears that are there, then your brain's automatically going to trigger, okay, that fear response where you fight, flight or freeze, that's an automatic trigger that somehow you developed over your lifetime, right? So the question then becomes, if this fear is holding you back, right? What are you doing or going to do to eliminate the fear? What are you going to do to let it go? So here's a question for all of you. All right, here's a question. When you're in a state of fear, okay? And let me give you an example. Fear of failure, you want to do something, but you're afraid of failing, so you don't. When you're in a state where you feel you're going to be embarrassed or ashamed or ridiculed or judged or blamed, etc. Or you have a fear of disappointment, what is your natural reaction? Do you try to fight it? Do you run away? Okay. Or do you freeze and not do anything? Which one do you do? Which one is your natural reaction? There's also a fourth one, which is fainting, right? So a lot of people have my book in our inner sizing, which is great, but which one are you? There isn't a right or wrong one. The reaction is automatic, right? And so which one are you? Do you agree that if you don't learn to recognize the fear trigger, learn how to release it, and retrain your brain, chances are you're going to reinforce it and even expand, make bigger the amygdala part of your brain and make it more sensitive? The answer is yeah. Our brain is consistently looking for patterns that we repeat over and over and over again. And the patterns that we repeat over and over and over again, yet reinforce whether they're good, whether they're not, whether they're constructive, destructive, empowering you or disempowering you. Our brain doesn't really care, especially the subconscious, doesn't really care what the pattern is. It just reinforces whatever pattern you reinforce or allow to happen. So here's a little the of work I'd like you to do. I want you to take a sheet of paper out and write down your three biggest fears. Not ten. Just write out my three biggest fears are. My three biggest fears are. I want you to ask yourself, where or when did I develop these fears? And then, are these fears real or imagined? Are these fears real or imagined? Am I imagining, okay, a negative outcome as a result of this behavior that I want to take or this thing that I want to achieve? Am I imagining in my mind something unpleasant happening? Now? Why do I share this with you? Because whenever we're running an automatic pattern, our brain has already played out this pattern into a negative consequence. Whether the consequence is real or imagined, does that make sense? Our brain is operating on a few different levels, the conscious and the unconscious or subconscious. And our subconscious is working at billions of times faster than our conscious mind is. And so our brain is playing out scenarios and predicting what's Going to possibly not. What's going to happen? What's gonna possibly happen if I do this or don't do this? And you know what it's using as its reference point? Your memory bank. Everything you've read, experienced, heard, listened to, etc. So it goes into the memory bank and seeing. Is there anything that could possibly cause me to feel unloved, to lose money, to lose time, to be hurt emotionally, mentally, physically, physically, financially or spiritually? So our brain is posting or predicting in advance, okay, what might happen. So we have to interrupt the pattern. And the only way to interrupt the pattern is to be aware of the pattern. Does that make sense so far? Can you do that? Can you write down a piece of paper on a piece of paper? Here are my three different fears, my top fears. Here's where I believe I got them, and then what can I do to eliminate the fear? But I want you to understand there's nothing wrong with your fear signal. Imagine you're driving your car and everything's going great and a light pops up on your dash. A light pops up on your dash, right? What does the light represent? Think about this. What does the light represent if it's on your dash in your car? Your car has got sensors that's connected to the whole car. So what does the light represent? All right, what does the light represent if a light pops up on your car dash? Yes. It's your alert system. It's the be aware system. Right. Now what if every time you're sensoring your car, okay, sense something, the brakes went on automatically and the car came to a screeching halt? Wouldn't you think something is wrong? Well, of course you would. The light, the signal of fear, is nothing more than a be aware there's real or potential danger. Your job and my job when that signal is activated is to pay attention to it, to see, hey, why am I trying to fight this? Why am I trying to run away? Why am I freezing? Like, what's causing this trigger? Is it something from my childhood? From my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my parents, my teachers, from something I read, from something I experienced? So our job, when the fear circuit goes on, is to be aware. Some people have overactive fear signals that manifest in too much anxiety. I agree with you. But what do you do to manage your anxiety? Anxiety is an effect. So the anxiety is not the problem. Anxiety is an effect. Fear is an effect. If you don't have the skills to manage the fear, the anxiety, the stress, the uncertainty, the doubt, then it's not a problem around anxiety, stress, fear. The problem is you don't have the skill of how to deal with it and how to manage it. Can you understand that? Fear is an effect. Anxiety is an effect. Stress is an effect. Stress. The definition of stress is when capacity or demand what you need, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, when demand exceeds your capacity right now, when demand exceeds your capacity right now, that means that you have to get better at your capacity to deal with uncertainty, to deal with a lack of blank or the emotions. Emotions are triggered in the subconscious mind. And if you don't understand how to manage your emotions, then it's not a fear problem, it's a skill problem. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Like let's call a spade a spade. Let's call it the way it really is. So you're either going to be responsible, which means you're going to learn how to respond, or you're going to play the victim and you're going to keep repeating patterns that reinforce themselves that are disengaging you from having the life you love. All right? Does that make sense? If you want to be truthful with yourself, be truthful, take responsibility. No more skirting around the issue, okay? You have emotions, you are not your emotions. You have beliefs, you are not your beliefs. You have feelings, you're not your feelings. These are all things. There's cause and then there's effect. If you focus on cause, the effect will take care of itself. So if you don't have the skill, when would now be a good time to learn the skill? Right? When would now, right now be the time to learn the skill? So stop waiting. All right? So this is just, you know, a little bit of the work. And everything I like to do is like, what's happening in there? What's happening in the noggin? You have the most power. How much do you think it would cost to create a brain, a human brain? We haven't been able to do it for a billion dollars. Okay, how much do you think it would cost just to recreate brain? Any idea? Give me an idea. Give me a number. Give me a number. Right? Give me a number. I mean, just the most incredible bio computer organism. How much would it cost? A billion and a half? 2 billion? 10 billion? 5 billion? A hundred billion? A trillion dollars? Every brain pretty much works the same way. Every brain pretty much works the same way. So that my brain, your brain, Einstein's brain, all works the same way, right? I betcha that we couldn't make this for a trillion dollars. So you own one. You already own one. Our creator gave one to you. If you have disempowering meanings, you're going to have disempowering feelings. If you have disempowering feelings, you are going to not take action, right? So failure. There's nothing wrong with failure. You failed, okay? When you started to walk, you failed in trying to brush your teeth, you failed at trying to learn how to eat. You failed at the Alphabet, but you weren't a failure. It was a process that you needed to go through, and you could learn how to do the right things in the right order at the right time. Right? So reframe failure, reframe the meaning that you give things is one of the greatest techniques that you can learn and can you use, okay. The latest in neuroscience to be able to help yourself achieve success faster. Hey, this is John, and if you like that video, watch the next video because it is packed with things that you can do right now to achieve success way faster than ever before.
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