How To OVERCOME Self-Doubt & Find INNER PEACE In 17 Minutes | Lewis Howes

This episode was sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Big thanks to Hasu Joe, licensed therapist and head of clinical operations at BetterHelp. Hasu Joe is not my actual therapist and we are not in a therapist-client relationship. Also, just because you might hear something on the show that sounds similar to what you're experiencing, beware of self-diagnosis. You'll want to find a qualified professional to assess and explore diagnosis. if that's important to you. Welcome, everyone, to this special episode. We have an inspiring guest, Hesu Joe in the House from BetterHelp. And, I wanted to break down this episode to talk about different topics around mental health, emotional well-being, and really getting clear on how to optimize your whole body, connecting your thoughts, your emotions, and your body, and integrating your life with authentic alignment. When we are out of alignment with our thoughts and our emotions and we store memories from the past that hold trauma inside of us, it holds us back. It makes us feel more fearful. It makes us doubt ourselves. It makes us feel overwhelmed or stressed or anxious in times where maybe we don't need to feel those things. There's different times when, you know, stress and overwhelm is a good signal to get you to relax and calm down, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a threat in your life. And sometimes we we live with this fear inside of us, this ongoing anxiety inside of us that makes it feel like fight or flight constantly happening in our lives. And that doesn't allow us to get into a relaxed state of being, a beautiful state of being that allows for creativity, abundance, flow, prosperity, and the ability to feel and receive love. And I think a lot of us, including myself, have struggled with some of these things over our lifetime. because we've never been taught the tools. We've never been given the training and we haven't understood the science or the research behind how we can optimize things to flourish better in our inner world and also in our outer world. And our life is really made up of moments of memories and people. And when we have moments that stress us out or we have memories that cause us to feel anxious, then typically our relationships don't go as well as we'd like them to go. And so our intention and our goal and my intention for you is to really reevaluate the memories that might have caused you pain or trauma or overwhelm or stress and anxiety and allow you to reinterpret those, create new meaning behind these memories that have caused your nervous system to be stressful in the present. so that you can have more beautiful moments right now. Right now is all we have is these moments and start interpreting and creating more joy and freedom and love within these moments so that the relationships we interact with, whether it be in your career, your family, your work, and your intimate relationships, they can thrive. That's what we want for everyone, everyone listening, everyone watching. I want you to feel joyful. I want you to feel healthy. I want you to have a healed life. And I want you to feel free. But we must learn the skills on how to do that. And I'm so excited that you are here, Jesu, to support us with this. In my book, the Greatness Mindset, I really talked about going deep in the moments along my own personal journey because I was extremely on the outside successful in creating results and accomplishing and working hard. But on the inside, I was struggling in life. I was struggling in relationships and I was creating breakdown after breakdown, even though on the outside, things seemed to be good. And it wasn't until the last couple of years when I really dove into intentional conscious therapy and coaching that allowed me to go back into the memories, create new meaning and rewrite the story of my life so that I have more peace in the present moment to give me more clarity about my future as well. And it hasn't been easy, Jesu, it's been really challenging actually. It's really scary to go back and face the parts of myself. that I'm ashamed of, that I'm insecure about, that I feel like I don't want anyone to know about. It's probably the hardest work I've ever done in my life. And I was a professional athlete and training and physically, but the emotional and mental work that we do, I believe is some of the hardest if we have certain pains and things that we don't love and accept about ourselves from our past. And so, In my book, the Greatness Mindset, I talked about this journey. And I wanted to break this down with you as a licensed therapist with BetterHelp, someone who's been there for six years at the company and with the brand, and really seeing the evolution of society's dealings with mental health struggles. And as a licensed therapist again with BetterHelp, how important is it taking ownership of your mental health in order to live happy, fulfilling, and balanced lives? What would you say, Hasu?

How important on a scale of 0 to 10? 10 being the most important?

Yes.

11. 11. I don't think anyone should ever be blamed or seen as the person at fault for being the victim of trauma, being a survivor of abuse. However, I think we all have a personal responsibility to ourselves to take ownership. of mental health, to live a happy, fulfilling, balanced life. That also looks like the acceptance that we're not going to be happy all the time. But, you know, I think we've all kind of seen and experienced this in our lives. If I don't take care of myself, sure other people can provide me with support. People can do things that are helpful to me, create a system of support around me. But ultimately, I have to be the one to take charge, to get myself out of a hole, to get unstuck from a rut. Because if it's not me, then it's not as meaningful, it's not as impactful, it's not as powerful.

So no one's coming to save us? No one's gonna just do it for us, is what you're saying?

I mean, you know, if a bunch of people were coming to save us, but we don't even want to be saved, Everyone's going to have a hard time there. Ooh. Yeah.

And I also think that we've got to own these things. We can't, you know, there's so many people that I've tried to help, people close to my life, friends, family that I see struggling. And I want to go in there and give them some feedback, give them some coaching, give them some tools, give them some exercises, you know, a seven day program to just get started. And if people aren't willing to dive in and do the work and be consistent with it, it doesn't matter how many people are trying to help them also. What we can do is really be the example, be an inspiration, be encouraging and supportive, but each one of us has to take ownership of these things. And that's why I think it's so important to have some type of therapy. And obviously BetterHelp does an amazing job of doing that. I'm curious, one of my favorite chapters in my book, the Greatest Mindset, is about developing and cultivating a meaningful mission. It's about getting clear on the path and direction that you want to take your personal life. It can be for personal life, for your career, for health and things like that. But what am I about? What am I up to? What am I creating in this world? And it can be for the next six months or the next six years. It doesn't have to be, what am I going to do the rest of my life? But what season am I in and how can I get very clear on the direction I want to go in? I'm a believer that when we aren't clear on the direction we have less purpose and meaning and we're more stressed out and just kind of anxious and not sure. I'm not saying having a clear path forward is going to answer all your problems, but not having a meaningful mission is going to cause more stress and anxiety. I'm curious, how can BetterHelp online therapy help listeners and viewers really clarify the purpose for their season of their life they're in right now and really figure out how to get to the next season and the next season. What can online therapy with BetterHelp do to guide people to getting that clarity?

Big question. And before I try to answer that, I do want to let folks know that BetterHelp online therapy is an option. But there's so many different ways to find therapy. There's so many different venues. So I want folks to know that even if BetterHelp is not the right fit for you, that doesn't mean that there's no other option. And so I really encourage folks to explore, to find what works best for them. But once you've decided that you want to seek some clarity, you want to try to define some kind of purpose in your life, I think the ways that therapy can help with this is to help you start uncovering, unpacking, processing, exploring a lot of stuff that many of us have pushed away. We've done these things like repress memories or create things that some folks will call defense mechanisms to protect our feelings, to protect ourselves from very painful things of the past. We become avoidant of things that might be triggering to us. In a therapy journey, you kind of already alluded to a lot of this. It's about finding alignment. It's about finding authenticity so that the outward presentation of who you are, how you walk through this world and connect with other people, it matches your insides. That's where a lot of dissonance comes for us, is that our insides are not matching what we're doing outside in everyday life. So in therapy, we're aiming to integrate these things so we feel good about what we're putting out there into the universe.

I'm curious as to, if we don't go back and create congruency in alignment with our past memories that have essentially made up our life of who we are today, if we don't do that, but we say, okay, I'm clear on what I want to create in the next couple of years of my life and I've got a direction, can we have a fulfilling, peaceful, harmonious life without going back and creating that congruency from where we were to where we are now. If we just say, okay, I'm clear on my goals and my mission, is it possible to have peace still? Or do you really think, as a licensed therapist, that you've got to create congruency with all the parts of your past to where you are today in order to have more harmony in your life moving forward?

As a licensed therapist, I've learned to avoid any absolutes. I do think it's possible. I think it's possible for plenty of people. to achieve what you're talking about without going into the past and finding this congruency.

But can you find peace when you achieve?

I imagine there's some people that may be able to, but it's gonna be a different flavor, a different iteration. I think true harmony piece, if you're asking me, which is just my personal thoughts and other folks may think differently, Let me start, like, if you, listener, are thinking about the folks in your life that seem the most well-adjusted, the most balanced, the most, you know, able to navigate and tackle life's challenges without freaking out or without losing it, chances are those folks are at peace, like you're describing. Those folks have gone and reconciled something about that's happened to them or the way people have treated them. and they've turned it into something that's meaningful and understandable instead of running away or hiding from avoiding things that have been painful.

I mean, I'm trying to set you up because for most of my life, I was running from and avoiding the pain of the past, the memories of the past, and I was accomplishing. I was very clear on what I wanted to create, and I was good at organizing my time and being disciplined, and, you know, all those things and accomplishing goals. But I still didn't feel peaceful inside. I still felt overwhelmed and anxious and stressed out and worried about what people think about me and judging myself and putting myself down if I wasn't perfect. And all those things stemmed from a lack of Harmony from my past. When I was able to really dive in over the last few years and assess it, like you said, with online therapy is like doing an assessment. Recalling things, healing, creating a process of healing. And it's hard to heal if you're not willing to face the things that cause you the most hurt. That's why I think it's important to have a coach, some type of support in online therapy. For a long time, I was really fearful of self-doubt. And I'm a big believer that self-doubt is the killer of all of our dreams. It's what holds us back. We can have all the skill and the talent and the accolades, But if we don't believe we're good enough to take action courageously on the things we want to create in our life or in the relationships that are meaningful to us, then it doesn't matter how talented we are. We hold ourselves back when we doubt self because we lack the courage to act. It's one of the things I talk about in my book about these kind of three, the three main fears of self-doubt, fear of failure, success and judgment. For me, judgment was one that I was most afraid of and it held me back from being the most authentic, loving person I could be. How can therapy be used as a tool to overcome someone's greatest fears, insecurities and self-doubt?

There's many different kinds of therapy. So depending on which kind of therapist you find and what approach they take, how they conceptualize people, You might tackle this particular puzzle in different ways. Overall, I do think therapy can be used to overcome a lot of fears by exploring where these fears come from. You've been mentioning this combination of therapy and coaching, and that's something that I think is a great combination for people to think about. And I know you didn't ask this, but for folks that are unsure of what the difference is, why are there two different things? What are these things about? Through my own experiences going through coaching too, and therapy of course. Therapy really focuses on a lot of whys. A lot of why do I feel this way? Why do I connect like this or not connect like this? Why do I behave when this kind of thing happens? Coaching very much focuses on how. How am I gonna get from here to there? How will I achieve this next step? How will I structure my plan? and my vision and how am I gonna do whatever it needs to get there. So using both or just therapy, just coaching even to overcome fears, it's about, you know, process. It's about understanding these things so that you can think about them differently because then you can start thinking about yourself differently. You know, we come from or behave from this place of fear because like you said, there's different things that we could be fearful of. Often it's fear of being rejected by something, somebody, the world, ourselves. And if we can figure out where it comes from and try to explain it, then we can create a new narrative and we can break free from this skit that's playing over and over and over. And we're trying to reenact, trying to correct without even understanding what it is we're trying to make better.

I hear you saying it's important to have both. It's having some type of coaching. And you could also get that within therapy. A therapist could give you coaching actionable steps as well. But if you're just taking action and creating and creating and you're not understanding why you're feeling something, then you're kind of masking it without doing the deeper work as well. That's why I think you want to have both, which is really powerful, I think. So again, if you're looking for a clearer direction in your life, if you're looking for some healing, if you're looking for just more joy and freedom and peace of mind, then I encourage you to go to betterhelp.com/lewis. Again, you get 10% off the first month when you do that, so you can try it for a month and explore it. Check it out. You can find a therapist and you can switch, I believe, at any time. So if you're feeling like, yeah, maybe this isn't working for me, let me try someone different. You can do that as well over at BetterHelp. They've got, again, online support. So if you have any questions, you can ask them questions right on the website. Again, BetterHelp. help.com/Lewis. So it's really important to find the right person that you can trust and feel comfortable with, right?

Absolutely. You want to feel like they get you, you can be yourself, that they understand you, that you're working towards goals together and that they're in your corner. And a big part of developing that solid, trusting relationship is taking your preferences into account. So for some people, it's really important that they're talking to a woman therapist. For some, it's critical that they speak with a man. We have many people that want a therapist of color. So all of these preferences are really important to us and finding you the best match is really important to us because we know how critical it is when it comes to effective and quality care.