Ramit Sethi breaks down how negative self-talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and offers two fixes: reframe uncertain statements into action-focused commitments, and only take criticism seriously from people who deserve your attention. He uses his own past excuses about body image and race to show how self-defeating talk keeps you stuck.
Hey guys, Ramit Sethi here from I Will Teach youh Be Rich. Happy New Year. As you know, this is the year of Unapologetic mastery and yesterday I announced the theme of what we're going to be covering for the next 12 months. Well, what's interesting is in the comments I noticed so many negative self loathing comments that I actually changed today's post and I'm recording this video right now because I want to highlight some of these posts and and talk about what I did to overcome these things and how we can all overcome our feelings of guilt. So take a look at these comments that people left. Remember I asked you if you have any critics in your life. Maybe it's your family, could be your friends, could be yourself. Tell me what they might say to kind of be skeptical and hold you down. Look at these comments. Alex says, I'd love to do a ramit course in 2014, but I just don't know how applicable it is to me in Sweden. Okay, Kim said, I realized as I was thinking about who's naysaying that it's me. I started making jewelry in November and I made a third of my investment back already. Still, I'm continually surprised when people buy things or tell me they like what I made. After all, what the hell do I know about jewelry? Where do I get off thinking that I can be successful at this? I don't know shit about anything. And this one comes from Diana who said it all comes down to me saying I don't have enough experience. So what makes you think you can pull this off? My answer was this. In the words of Selena Su, you don't need more experience, you need more courage. Skeptics will say, what are your credentials? What makes you think you can pull this off? Just like I do in my head. So yesterday's post is full of hundreds of comments like that. And it really struck me because I used to do exactly the same thing. And I think we all struggle with this. As you know, I used to be 40 pounds lighter. I was 5116ft 127 pounds. I had the body of a supermodel, a female supermodel. So I would literally say to myself, I can't be as big as those white guys. I'm just not built like that. I mean, I literally used race to justify me being skinny. Now, had I carefully considered different diets and different workout plans? Had I gotten a friend to help me change the way I eat or the way I think about, you know, lifting? No, I just looked at Other guys. I went to the gym, did a half assed job because I didn't even take the time to read one good book. And then I concluded that it was me and my genetics that would never allow me to gain weight. All that makes no sense. Okay, and now you may not be trying to gain weight, you may be trying to lose weight, whatever the case may be. But how many of us do this exact same thing? We say, oh, I could never look like that or I could never get that job. I'm just not built like that, I don't have that kind of ambition. And what I realized was, was we're all guilty of this negative self talk and it's so deep that we don't even notice we're doing it. Like I actually turned it into a joke. People would laugh, hahaha, it was so funny how skinny I was. But actually looking back, it wasn't funny. It's like one of my friends who said oh, I'm not going to buy that because I'm just a cheap Asian. And I carefully corrected him. I said stop saying that because it seems like a haha joke, but actually you're creating a self fulfilling prophecy. So one thing that I might recommend is to subtly shift the way you think about your self talk. So instead of saying I don't know if this course would work for me because I live in Sweden, a different way to approach it would be to say I'm going to try, try this course and see how I can make it work for me. Subtle shift. But instead of saying I don't know if and then letting the issue just die there, actually saying I'm going to take action, I'm going to do this and I'm going to see how I can make it work for me. So it's a subtle way to shift your own self talk from guilt to, to action. That's number one. Number two, be careful who you listen to. So we have a lot of people who are critics of us and they can do it in very direct ways, like you don't have enough experience. Or they can do it in very subtle ways like concern trolling. You know, I'm just concerned about you, I just want you to be safe and secure. I remember I was hiring someone to help me redesign something in my apartment and I had like five different people come and audition and this one lady came and at the end she saw my books on my windowsill and she said, oh, so you're an author. What kind of stuff do you write? And I said business Books. And she said, oh, so personal finance, huh? What are your credentials? And I said, well, you know, I have a lot of readers and they have found a lot of success and negotiated salaries and blah, blah, blah. And she said, yeah, but what about your credentials? Do you have any actual credentials? And I'm thinking to myself, what, I'm going to pay you ten grand to redecorate my apartment and you're questioning my credentials? What is going on here? And I actually just said, no, not really. Do I have credentials? Yes, I have credentials. Do those credentials really matter for the business that I'm running? My credentials are the proof that my stuff works. If you're reading this and you're watching this, chances are maybe you negotiated a $25,000 raise or you got a side job or you have an online business or whatever. That's my proof. You're my proof. So at that point I was like, why am I arguing? Who is this lady? I'm never going to see her again. She definitely doesn't get the job. I don't need to use my limited cognition and limited willpower and energy trying to appease everyone. Now, if I had someone interviewing me to do a profile in the New York Times, or, you know, someone very close to me who I care about, of course I'm going to engage in that. And for that I want to be prepared and I want to have some great answers, right? I may not need to say, yes, I really do have credentials. Look, but I can say, you know, one thing that I noticed is in my experience, people, you know, the credentials matter, but they also want to see that something works for them. So when you see a product like P90X, you know, you don't really ask about this guy's athletic credentials. You know, you might just say, wow, he has 5,000 satisfied customers. That's enough for me. Okay, so I might have an answer ready like that. But the larger point is don't give everyone the same attention. Some people deserve your limited and valuable attention. And others, no. No, I guess not. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming by. Goodbye. Very simple. So I want to cover more of this in my post. If you're watching this on YouTube, click through and you're going to see the rest of this post. But I hope this was helpful as two simple frameworks you can use for changing this negative self talk and going from guilt to action. Thanks for following along. I have a whole bunch more for you at I will teach you to be rich.
