My Honest Advice to Anyone Feeling Behind in Life

I wanted to make a video for anyone who is currently feeling behind in their life. This is one of the most common things in the world. And I come across it all the time, especially in people's love lives. People looking at other people and saying they have what I want. You know, I thought I'd be married by now. I thought I'd have a family by now. I at least thought I'd have met the love of my life by now. And I still haven't. And I look around and my friends have all found people, they're all married or they're on their second child. I have to see these things posted constantly on social media. And it just makes me feel awful. And this feeling can be particularly pronounced at a time when we're going through a breakup, when something that we thought had potential falls through. All of a sudden we go back to feeling so behind, so hopeless and really afraid that we're at this age and my life isn't where I thought it would be. And of course, this also plays out with people who are looking at other people's careers and how far other people have got in aspect of life or their finances or their health. We have to find a way to reground ourselves in those moments where we are beating ourselves up because we're telling ourselves a story that we are behind. And today I want to go through some ways that you can re ground yourself if you're feeling this. So the first thing I want to say is that when we're comparing ourselves to other people and telling ourselves that we are behind, we are usually comparing ourselves to people's results. But what we're not doing is looking at the backstory to those results and how someone else's backstory differs from our backstory. We look at somebody else and we say, look at them. They're in a healthy, happy relationship. They've been married for 20 years. I have gone from one bad relationship to another. Or, you know, I spent 10 years with a narcissist who destroyed my life and I've been picking up the pieces ever since. Look how terrible I am. Look how crappy my life is compared to theirs. And of course, when we're telling ourselves our own life is bad, usually that is the precursor to self hatred. My life is bad and it's because of all the ways that I've screwed it up. It's because of all of the ways I haven't helped myself or all of the bad decisions I've made. But what we rarely do is look at our life and go, what was happening in my life that led to that bad decision of mine? You know, where did that come from? Maybe I went through some things in childhood that left me with an imprint about what love is that was really unhealthy. And I didn't choose that imprint. I didn't choose to have a nervous system that responded to the wrong behavior. And that led me to give attention to someone that I shouldn't. Because I had a bad model for what love was or how I should be treated. And that led me into a relationship that I then didn't know how to get out of. I was scared to get out of it. Maybe because I had an abandonment wound, maybe because I was taught that I couldn't be alone or I couldn't do things on my own, that I wasn't capable, that I needed somebody else to save me. And all of that meant that I got into this long term relationship and spent all of this time in something that really damaged me or really eroded my confidence. And by the time I came out of that, I had all of this work to do to get myself just to a place where I felt okay again. And maybe I'm still in that process. It's important that we take account of these things. Because while we shouldn't necessarily go into comparing our backstory with other people's backstories because that can just turn into another act of comparison, we do need to take proper account of our own backstory. And people we're comparing ourselves to had a different backstory than us. And even if they had a similar backstory, they have a different brain, different DNA that is responding differently to that situation. So that comparison makes no sense, because they are them and we are us. They have their history and we have ours. And when we're comparing ourselves to other people's external results, we rarely take proper accounts of the things that we have been through that led to the decisions that we have made in our life, decisions that we might have made differently had we had a different origin story, had we experienced different things, had we not experienced certain traumas or setbacks. And while we're at it, let's remember that because of everything I've just said, progress should be defined differently for different people. And the obvious example of this is someone who's in an accident. That means they lose the use of their legs temporarily if they start doing physio and they're able to sweat out an inch of movement over two months. That is incredible. We wouldn't compare that inch of movement to someone who is an athletic runner and what looks like progress for them in training for a marathon, they're completely different things. For the person who's been through the accident, that inch of movement can be a miracle. And the same is true on an emotional level. On a psychological level, the effects of that are no less pronounced. But just because we can't see it, we look at ourselves and compare ourselves to other people, and we go, look how easy it is for them. Or, you know, I've never been able to do that, or I've not got that far in my career, or I'm not in the relationship that they're in, not realizing that for us, an inch of progress emotionally or psychologically can be a miracle, depending on what we've been through. If you've led a life where you have suffered terrible betrayals, then for you, trusting is going to be a more difficult process than for someone who hasn't experienced that. And your difficulty in trusting may hinder your ability to get into relationships. It may hinder your ability to form connections. For you, learning to trust in small ways might be a miracle. That inch of progress should be something that's celebrated, even if it means, for now, all you can do is start to improve certain friendships. You can't even get into a romantic relationship easily. That should be celebrated. But if you're simply comparing the fact that you haven't found love to the fact that other people in your life have, then you're going to feel terrible. Even though your personal progress that is personal to you and your journey should be celebrated, the next thing that can help us with feeling behind and the ways that we beat ourselves up for not being further ahead by now is by recognizing that we have always been doing our best. Now, that doesn't mean that our best has always been good enough. Our best may have been terrible in certain cases. Our best may have even been incredibly destructive. Sometimes in life, our best hurts people, including ourselves. But our best is what we've been doing. I define our best by what we did. If we could have done better, we would have done better, right? Saying, oh, I wish I'd have made that decision instead of the one I made. I wish I'd never got into that relationship. I wish I'd never given that person the time of day. I wish I could have done something different. Science fiction. If we were going to do something different, we would have done something different. We did exactly the best that we were capable of doing at that time and no more. I always remind myself whenever I'm beating Myself up for the past and I go, oh, you know, I just wish I'd have done that instead. It's like wishing to have been a different person. Science fiction. I always tell myself, anytime I'm saying that I wish I'd have done something different, I say, yeah, go write a science fiction novel about it. You did exactly the best you could do in that moment. Anything else is science fiction. Maybe a Matthew in a parallel universe made a different decision, but not the one in this universe. So you have been doing exactly the best you could, the best you were capable of doing at every moment in your life. Now, that doesn't mean that your best today can't be better than before. It can be your best today can be different because we can have new thoughts, we get new inputs, new mentors, new influences. This video you're watching right now is a new input. And that input can change your way of thinking. It can knock the train off its regular tracks and onto a different set of tracks. And all of a sudden your trajectory shifts a little bit to a different life, a different future. So it's. This isn't me saying you're only capable of what you've done in the past. What you're capable of today is different than yesterday. And that means that the present and the future can be different from the life you've already lived. But you can't even experience that. You can't actually lean into that if you're constantly beating yourself up because your life didn't play out the way it does in that science fiction novel in your head. Remember, your best is what you've been doing all along. But today your best can be better. While we're on that subject, if you want the ultimate new input into your life this year that can take your best to a whole new level, I am running a brand new first ever version of my live retreat this October where we are going to two days instead of six. Historically, lots of people couldn't come to the retreat because it was a six day event and it was tough logistically. But we now have a two day event that is much easier for people to plan into their year. And financially it's a much more accessible program for so many people. So if you've always wanted to come and do an immersive live in person experience with me and you've never gotten to come, check this out. It's at mhretreat.com Tickets are available right now and for a little bit longer, but for not much longer, we have an early bird special that means that you can get the cheapest tickets that will be available this year before they go up. So go check that out@mhretreat.com it's happening in Miami. It's a two day event, it's an iconic venue. And I cannot wait to share these two days with you to help you level up in your confidence, break your patterns, heal from the past and be the best you can be in your life. Here's the next way you can feel better. If you're feeling behind in your life, don't devalue what you have been learning on your path while someone you're comparing yourself to has been on theirs. So for example, we may have been watching someone else who's in a happy marriage, a friend who is having a family and think, I'm so far behind. Look at them. What they've been doing over the last 10 years has been really worthwhile. They've been building this amazing foundation, they've been having this great relationship, they're now having a family. Like the last 10 years for them has all mattered. Whereas for me, I was in a five year situationship with someone who never even committed, that finally ended in nothing, that person just leaving or ghosting me or going to be with somebody else, or I was in a marriage that fell apart with someone who treated me badly and now I'm starting all over again. That counted for nothing. Whereas for them, they've been putting credits in the account for the last 10 years. Life doesn't work like that unless we have a very overly simplistic view of what experiences matter and what ones don't. You going through a divorce could be one of the most valuable experiences of your entire life. To get the learnings from that, to build the resilience that one has to build to get through something like that, to be able to learn to find your feet again or to build your life again, to rediscover your independence, to show yourself what you're capable of overcoming. Those things might turn out to be some of the greatest gifts of your life and they might prove to be some of the most valuable experiences of your life because of what they teach you or what you have to become in order to get through them. We're so quick to look at what other people have achieved on the surface and to devalue the experience we've had and to write it off as just tragic or just a complete car crash in our lives without realizing that there is an inherent value to our experiences that we've gained along the way. And that nowhere is it written that the experiences you have had, the lessons you have learned and the things you've overcome are inherently less valuable than the experiences of someone who seems to be achieving certain things that you want on the surface. Next. When we're feeling behind in life, as I've already said, one of the biggest tendencies is to compare ourselves to somebody else, to what they've achieved, to what they've gained in their life. It's really important to remember, and I heard this once, I think Tim Ferriss was the person I heard say it, but it had come from somewhere else, that when you're comparing yourself to somebody else, you can't compare the one part of your life that you're not happy with to the part of their life that you wish you had. You don't get to just take one part of someone's life, you have to take it all. If you're going to be jealous of something, you can't be jealous of one part, you have to take it all. And this is a really valuable way of looking at it because it's so easy to go to the buffet of life and all different things that people have achieved and are and go, I really wish I had that thing that that person has. But you can't do that if you're going to run that experiment. You have to take everything. Would you take their brain? Would you take their mental health? Would you take their family? Would you take their everyday life? Would you take their internal struggles? Would you take their childhood? Would you take everything? And if you wouldn't, then it makes no sense to just take this ala carte approach to cherry picking the one thing that you want about somebody else's life and where it is today. You can look at people who are where you'd like to be financially and go, okay, but let me look at the sacrifices they've made. Let me look at what they gave up in order to do that. Do I want to have given up the experiences I have had, the ways that I have enriched my life, or the things that I learned along the way when I was doing that? Because they had a completely different life over the last 20 years in order to get there. By the way, none of us know what anyone's life is behind closed doors anyway. So you might say, yes, I like their whole life, right? I see their life. I want all of it. Do you even know what all of it is? Do you have any idea what their life is actually like? Both their relationship behind the scenes, not the pictures they put on social media and their mental health, because whatever they're portraying to the world, we have no idea the struggles they go through. We have no idea whether they're a tortured person. We don't know whether they're someone who constantly beats themselves up. We don't even know if they enjoy the things about what they do that we think we would enjoy. They might be sitting in their life going, you know, there's so much I need to change, or there's somewhere I want to be because I'm not happy where I am, or I don't want to be in this relationship anymore because I'm not happy in this relationship. You don't know what that person is actually experiencing, what their experience of all of it is. When we're comparing ourselves to people, we're never seeing the whole picture. So it becomes almost this abstract exercise of comparing what I think I would feel if I was them to what I think they are experiencing as them. And yet we actually have no idea what their experience of life is, and we have no idea of the full context of their life and whether we would truly want every part of it. And it's also interesting to note that whenever we do make these comparisons, we usually always make them kind of looking up at where other people are that we think are ahead of us or we think have more than us. We very rarely make the same comparisons looking in the other direction at people who are are suffering from things we're not. You know, I always say to people, look at the complaints you don't have. Rarely do we think about the complaints we don't have because they're tragedy or grief or pain or suffering that has never visited us. Sam Harris said, if you think your life can't get any worse, that is just a failure of imagination. Which is both a morbid thought, but also in many ways an encouraging one because it makes us realize there is so much about our lives already that we will inevitably be taking for granted. Now, before I get onto the final point of this video, which is in many ways the most important point of this video for you personally, I want to let you know that my biggest live event ever, casual to committed is available once again. This free event is where I show you how to show up in a way that gets commitment today, even in a time where it feels like no one is committing because that's how so many people feel, is one of the reasons I feel behind is because I'm out there dating and no one's actually willing to commit. So while my friends are in relationships. I'm out here stuck in this awful time to date where people just seem to be unwilling to be in a real world relationship. If you relate to that, I give you my best insights in this training and it is available for you to watch right now. You don't have to wait@getcommitment.com the stuff I'm going to talk to you about in this training are some of my best insights for anyone who's looking for a real relationship today and doesn't want to spend any more time stuck in the casual phase with people. So if that's you, go check it out. It's available now. I'm super proud of it and I know it's going to help. The last thing I want to say is we have to decide, you and me, what is right for us next. That requires us to shut off from all of the noise on the outside, from the pressures we feel from other people in our life, from the pressure that we put on ourselves when we compare ourselves to other people and where they are in life and what they're doing. And we have to ask ourselves that very simple question. What's right for me right now? What's right for me right now? If we spend too much time looking at the lives of other people, we will fall into what is called the mimetic trap of simply wanting something because everyone else wants it, or thinking that we should be somewhere by now simply because that's where everyone else is. Again, people with very different lives than you, people who have not had the same past as you. So there is no I should be where other people are. Our life is our own. It's unique. So we have to ask ourselves, what's right for me right now? Your friend might be getting married to someone that they've been with for the last five years. For you, the right decision might be to leave someone you've been with for the last five years thinking they're getting married so I should get married is a complete non sequitur. We have to say what's right for me, what represents progress for me. For some people, that's going into a period of being on their own, even though they feel uncomfortable being on their own or they feel like, but one day I really want to meet someone. That might still mean that for the next three months you need to be on your own so that you can work through some things or learn how to be on your own. That might be what's right for you right now. For somebody else, what's right for them right now might be I need to get out there and date because I've been playing it safe for far too long now, and I need to actually start pushing myself to take some risks and to potentially get rejected. But I need to be out there again. We have to decide what's right for us, so feel free to leave me a comment and let me know in the comments if you feel like you want to be vulnerable and share what's right for you right now. But at the very least, take out a pen and paper and write down what you think this chapter of your life should be about. And by the way, this subject that we've been talking about, the feeling of being behind, is often responsible for us going into dating in a very anxious way. And when we meet someone we like in that state, we can get very obsessed very quickly. So if you enjoyed this video, I want to encourage you to go watch this one next, where I talk about how to get out of the trap of getting too obsessed too quickly. It's a great pairing with this video, so go check it out. And thank you as always, for watching.