Understanding Inner Conflict

Stress happens when your mind resists what is… The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds

Super successful people argue that the way to achieve the life of your dreams isn’t to start with your behaviors and try to manifest them into achievements, but start with the achievement, and then break down what you would need to do each day, week, month and year to get there.

You only have so much energy to expend in your life, your clarity should inform you what it’s worth spending on.

“The breakdown is often just the tipping point that precedes the breakthrough, the moment a star implodes before it becomes a supernova.”

“Likewise, our ability to feel the depth and beauty of life is capable of expanding forever inward if we are willing to take our problems and see them as catalysts.”

“Your mountain is the block between you and the life you want to live. Facing it is also the only path to your freedom and becoming. You are here because a trigger showed you to your wound, and your wound will show you to your path, and your path will show you to your destin”

“You must release your old self into the fire of your vision and be willing to think in a way you have never even tried before. You must mourn the loss of your younger self, the person who has gotten you this far but who is no longer equipped to carry you onward. You must envision and become one with your future self, the hero of your life that is going to lead you from here. The task in front of you is silent, simple, and monumental. It is a feat most do not ever get to the point of attempting. You must now learn agility, resilience, and self-understanding. You must change completely, never to be the same again.”

big moments that just came to mind

• Stepping on the lego building when I was upset and wanted attention
• TJ/MIT rejection, one and the same
• Anna in college
• That moment at the IAD arrivals, crying
• Angry at Fuad and not feeling like i'm enough
• watching way too much porn and fapping far too much

Ch1. The Mountain Is You

Self-Sabotague is not always obvious at the onset

Carl Jung who hit his head, though, "maybe I won't have to go back to school now"

“Shortly after his accident, Jung began experiencing sporadic and uncontrollable fainting spells. He unconsciously developed what he would call a “neurosis” and ultimately came to realize that all neuroses are “substitute[s] for legitimate suffering.”

In Jung’s case, he made an unconscious association between fainting and getting out of school. He came to believe that the fainting spells were a manifestation of his unconscious desire to get out of class, where he felt uncomfortable and unhappy.

Likewise, for many people, their fears and attachments are very often just symptoms of deeper issues for which they do not have any better way to cope.”

Self-Sabotague is a Coping Mechanism

“THERE IS NOTHING HOLDING you back in life more than yourself.”

“He unconsciously developed what he would call a “neurosis” and ultimately came to realize that all neuroses are “substitute[s] for legitimate suffering.”

• Self-sabotague is a coping mechanism: “Self-sabotage is what happens when we refuse to consciously meet our innermost needs, often because we do not believe we are capable of handling them.”

“In the end, self-sabotage is very often just a maladaptive coping mechanism, a way we give ourselves what we need without having to actually address what that need is.

But like any coping mechanism, it is just that — a way to cope. It’s not an answer, it’s not a solution, and it does not ever truly solve the problem. We are merely numbing our desires, and giving ourselves a little taste of temporary relief.”

Self-Sabotage Comes from Irrational Fear

“Sometimes, our most sabotaging behaviors are really the result of long-held and unexamined fears we have about the world and ourselves.”

“For most people, the abstract fear is really a representation of a legitimate fear. Because it would be too scary to actually dwell on the real fear, we project those feelings onto issues or circumstances that are less likely to occur.

If the situation has an extremely low likelihood of becoming reality, it therefore becomes a “safe” thing to worry about, because subconsciously, we already know it isn’t going to happen. Therefore, we have an avenue to express our feelings without actually endangering ourselves.”

For example, if you are someone who is deeply afraid of being a passenger in a car, maybe your real fear is the loss of control or the idea that someone or something else is controlling your life. Perhaps the fear is of “moving forward,” and the moving car is simply a representation of that.

If you were aware of the real issue, you could begin working to resolve it, perhaps by identifying the ways you are giving up your power or being too passive. However, if you aren’t aware of the real problem, you’ll continue to spend your time trying to convince yourself to not be triggered and anxious while riding in the car and find that it only gets worse.

“If you try to fix the problem on the surface, you will always come up against a wall. This is because you’re trying to rip off a Band-Aid before you have a strategy to heal the wound.”

Self-Sabotage Comes From Unconscious, Negative Associations

“Self-sabotage is also one of the first signs that your inner narrative is outdated, limiting, or simply incorrect.”

“When we self-sabotage, it is often because we have a negative association between achieving the goal we aspire to and being the kind of person who has or does that thing.”

Example: Financial Stability

If your issue is that you want to be financially stable, and yet you keep ruining every effort you make to get there, you have to go back to your first concept of money.

How did your parents manage their finances? More importantly, what did they tell you about people who had it and people who didn’t?

Many people who struggle financially will justify their place in life by disavowing money as a whole. They will say that all rich people are terrible. If you grew up with people who told you your entire life that people who have money are this way, guess what you’re going to resist having?

Examples of Behaviors → Masked Desire

• Maybe you associate being healthy with being vulnerable, because you had a parent who was perfectly healthy when they suddenly fell ill.
• Maybe you aren’t writing your magnum opus because you don’t really want to write; you just want to be seen as “successful” because that will get you praise, which is typically what people revert to when they want acceptance but haven’t gotten it.
• Maybe you keep eating the wrong foods because they soothe you, but you haven’t stopped to ask what they have to keep soothing you from.
• Maybe you aren’t really a pessimist but don’t know how to connect with the people in your life other than by complaining to them.”

“Your anxiety around the issue that you’re self-sabotaging is usually a reflection of your limiting belief.”

“Once you begin to really question and observe these preexisting beliefs, you begin to see how warped and illogical they were all along—not to mention distinctly holding you back from your ultimate potential.”

“We are programmed to seek what we’ve known. Even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most used to.”

Fear that I'll just revert to whereever I am. great, doing all this reading, i'm gona forget it in a couple of days. Rational solution: change is possible.

Self Sabotague comes from belief systems

What you bvelieve about your life is what you will make true about your life.

“In other cases, your limiting beliefs might come from wanting to keep yourself safe.
Maybe that’s why you prefer the comfort of what you’ve known to the vulnerability of what you don’t, why you prefer apathy to excitement, think that suffering makes you more worthy, or believe that for every good thing in life, there must also be an accompanying “bad.”

To truly heal, you are going to have to change the way you think. You are going to have to become very conscious of negative and false beliefs and start shifting to a mindset that actually serves you.”

How to Exit Denial

• You are going to have to stop being in denial about your personal state of affirs. You're going to have to get real with yourself. You are going to have to decide that you love yourself too much to stop settling for less than what you really deserve.

“If you think that you could be doing better in life, you might be right.
If you think that there is more that you are here to accomplish, you might be right.
If you think that you are not being your authentic self, you might be right.
It does not serve us to use endless affirmations to placate our true feelings about where we are in our journey. When we do this, we start dissociating and get stuck.”

The first step in healing anything is taking full accountability.

It is no longer being in denial about the honest truth of your life and yourself.

“The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with. It is to be able to state the problem plainly and in a straightforward manner.”

“We reach a breaking point when we finally accept that the problem isn’t how the world is; it is how we are. This is a beautiful reckoning to have. Ayodeji Awosika describes his own like this: “You must find the purest, purest, purest form of being fed up. ”

Have to let go of it to make room for what's new.

Chapter 2

There's No Such Thing as Self-Sabotage

• When you habituate yourself to do things that move your life forward, you call them skills.
• When they hold your life back, you call them self-sabotage.

“Overcoming self-sabotage is not about trying to figure out how to override your impulses; it is first determining why those impulses exist in the first place.”

self-sabotague is a way we protect ourselves.

“Self-sabotage is when you have two conflicting desires. One is conscious, one is unconscious. You know how you want to move your life forward, and yet you are still, for some reason, stuck.
When you have big, ongoing, insurmountable issues in your life—especially when the solutions seem so simple, so easy, and yet so impossible to stick with—what you have are not big problems but big attachments.”

“Regardless of the potential consequences, human nature has revealed itself to be incredibly self-serving. People have an almost superhuman way of doing whatever they feel compelled to do, regardless of whom it could hurt, what wars it could spawn, or what future would be put at risk. When you consider this, you begin to realize that if you’re keeping something in your life, there has to be a reason you want it there. The only question is why.”

“Some people can’t figure out why they keep choosing the “wrong” relationships, people whose patterns of rejection, abuse, or refusal to commit seem to be consistent. Perhaps they don’t realize that they are actually re-creating the relationship dynamics they experienced when they were young because they associate love with loss or abandonment. Perhaps they want to re-create family relationships in which they felt helpless, but to live them again as an adult where they can help the addict, the liar, or the broken person.”

“When it comes to self-sabotaging behaviors, you have to understand that sometimes, it’s easy to get attached to having problems.
Being successful can make you less liked.
Finding love can make you more vulnerable.
Making yourself less attractive can guard you.
Playing small allows you to avoid scrutiny.
Procrastinating puts you back in a place of comfort.
All the ways in which you are self-sabotaging are actually ways that you are feeding a need you probably do not even realize you have. Overcoming it is not only a matter of learning to understand yourself better, but realizing that your problems are not problems; they are symptoms.
You cannot get rid of the coping mechanisms and think you’ve solved the problem.”

What Does Self Sabotage Look Like?

Resistance

What is it?

• Resistance is what happens when we have a new project that we need to work on and simply can’t bring ourselves to do it. It’s when we get into a great new relationship and then keep bailing on plans. It’s when we get an amazing idea for our business and then feel tension and anger when it comes time to sit down and actually get to work.
• We often feel resistance in the face of what’s going right in our lives, not what’s going wrong.
• When we have a problem to solve, resistance is usually nowhere to be found. But when we have something to enjoy, create, or build, we are tapping into a part of ourselves that is trying to thrive instead of just survive, and the unfamiliarity can be daunting.”

How to Resolve

• Resistance is your way of slowing down and making sure that it’s safe to get attached to something new and important. In other cases, it can also be a warning sign that something isn’t quite right, and you might need to step back and regroup.
• Resistance is not the same thing as procrastination or indifference and shouldn’t be treated as such. When we are experiencing resistance, there is always a reason, and we have to pay attention. If we try to force ourselves to perform in the face of resistance, it usually intensifies the feeling, as we are strengthening the internal conflict and triggering the fear that’s holding us back in the first place.
• Instead, releasing resistance requires us to refocus. We have to get clear on what we want as well as when and why we want it. We have to identify unconscious beliefs that are preventing us from showing up, and then we have to step back into the work when we feel inspired. Wanting is the entryway to showing up after resistance.”

Hitting Your Upper Limit

• “Your upper limit is essentially the amount of “good” that you’re comfortable having in your life. It is your tolerance and threshold for having positive feelings or experiencing positive events.
• When you begin to surpass your upper limit, you start to unconsciously sabotage what’s happening in order to bring yourself back to what’s comfortable and familiar. For some people, this manifests physically, often as aches, pains, headaches, or physical tension. For others, it manifests emotionally as resistance, anger, guilt, or fear.
• It might seem totally counterintuitive, but we are not really wired to be happy; we are wired to be comfortable, and anything that is outside of that realm of comfort feels threatening or scary until we are familiar with it.”

How to Resolve

• Congratulate yourself becuase you're surpassing new levels of your life. You resolve it by slowly acclimating yourself to your new normal.
• “Instead of shocking yourself into big changes, allow yourself to slowly adjust and adapt. By taking it slow, you are allowing yourself to gradually reinstate a new comfort zone around what you want your life to be. Over time, you gradually shift your baseline to a new standard.”

Uprooting

• “Uprooting happens when someone finds themselves jumping from relationship to relationship or changing their business website again and again, when they really need to focus on confronting relationship issues when they arise or taking care of clients they already have. In uprooting, you are not allowing yourself to blossom; you are only comfortable with the process of sprouting.
• It might be constantly needing a “fresh start,” which is often the result of not having healthy ways to deal with stress or struggling with conflict resolution. Uprooting can be a way of diverting attention from the actual problems in your life, as your attention must go toward reestablishing oneself at a new job or in a new town.
• Ultimately, uprooting means you are always just beginning your new chapter but never really finishing it. Despite your efforts to keep moving on, you end up more stuck than ever before.”

How to Resolve?

• First, recognize the pattern.
• One of the primary symptoms of uprooting is not realizing that one is doing it. Therefore, the most important step is to become aware of what’s happening.

  • Trace back your steps over the past few years: How many places have you moved or worked? Then figure out what is driving you away from each new thing you find.
• Next, you need to get clear on what you really want. Sometimes, uprooting occurs because we step too quickly toward what we think we want, only to find that we didn’t think it through and don’t really want that thing very much. Clarity is key, because you’re thinking long-term now.

  • What would it look like to choose one place to live, then build connections there?
  • What would it look like to work at the same place and move up in your position or build your business?
• Remember that healing from an uprooting pattern is not about settling for something you don’t want, nor is it about staying in an unsafe or unhealthy situation because you don’t want to move again. It’s about getting clear and determined on what’s the right path for you and then making a plan for how you can thrive, not just survive.
• When the moment comes that you would typically flee, confront the discomfort and stay where you are. Figure out why you are uncomfortable getting attached to one thing or another, and determine what a healthy attachment would look like for you.

Perfectionism

• “Perfectionism isn’t actually wanting everything to be right. It’s not a good thing. In fact, it is a hindering thing, because it sets up unrealistic expectations about what we are capable of or what the outcomes of our lives could be.
• Perfectionism holds us back from showing up and trying, or really doing the important work of our lives. This happens because when we are afraid of failing, or feeling vulnerable, or not being as good as we want others to think we are, we end up avoiding the work that is required to actually become that good. We sabotage ourselves because it is the willingness to show up and simply do it, again and again and again, that ultimately brings us to a place of mastery.”

How to Resolve

• “Don’t worry about doing it well; just do it.
• Don’t worry about writing a bestseller, just write. Don’t worry about making a Grammy-winning hit, just make music. Don’t worry about failing, just keep showing up and trying. At first, all that matters is that you do what you really want to do. From there, you can learn from your mistakes and over time get to the place where you really want to be.
• The truth is that we actually do not accomplish great feats when we are anxious about whether or not what we do will indeed be something impressive and world-changing. We accomplish these sorts of things when we simply show up and allow ourselves to create something meaningful and important to us.
• Instead of perfection, focus on progress. Instead of having something done perfectly, focus on just getting it done. From there, you can edit, build, grow, and develop it to exactly what your vision is. But if you don’t get started, you’ll never arrive.”

Limited Emotional Processing Skills

“When you are only able to process half of your emotions, you stunt yourself. You start going out of your way to avoid any possible situation that could bring up something frustrating or uncomfortable, because you have no tools to be able to handle that feeling. This means that you start avoiding the very risks and actions that would ultimately change your life for the better.”

“In addition, an inability to process your emotions means you get stuck with them. You sit and dwell on your anger and sadness because you don’t know how to make them go away. When we can only process half of our emotions, we ultimately only live half of the life we really want to.”

How to Resolve

• Get clear on what happened: First, you need to understand why you’re upset or the reason why something is bothering you so much. Without clarity on this, you’ll continue to waste your time mulling over the details without really understanding what’s hurting you so much.
• Validate your feelings: “Next, you have to validate how you feel. Recognize that you are not alone; anyone in your situation would probably feel similarly (and does) and that what you feel is absolutely okay. In doing this, you can allow yourself a physical release such as crying, shaking, journaling about what you feel, or talking to a trusted friend.”
• Determine a Course correction: Once you are clear on what’s wrong and have allowed yourself to fully express the extent of your emotions, you can determine how you will change your behavior or thought process so that you get an outcome that you really want in the future.”

Justification

“Your life is ultimately measured by your outcomes, not your intentions. It is not about what you wanted to do or would have done but didn’t have the time. It’s not about why you thought you couldn’t; it’s just whether or not you eventually did. When you’re in a pattern of self-sabotaging behavior, you’re often treating those excuses the same way you would treat measurable outcomes: You’re using them to make yourself feel momentarily satisfied, using them as a replacement for the accomplishment itself.”

“When we have a goal, dream, or plan, there is no measure of intent. It is only whether you did it or did not. Any other reason you offer for not showing up and doing the work is simply you stating that you prioritize that reason over your ultimate ambition, which means that it will always take precedence in your life.
You may also be using excuses to help navigate away from uncomfortable feelings that are ultimately necessary for your growth.”

How to Resolve

• “Start measuring your outcomes and focusing on at least doing one productive thing each day. It’s no longer about how many days you really wanted to go to the gym; it’s about how many days you did. It’s no longer about wanting to show up for your friends; it’s whether or not you did. It’s no longer about the great ideas you had about how to change your business; it’s about whether or not you did.
• Stop accepting your own excuses. Stop being complacent with your own justifications. Start quantifying your days by how many healthy, positive things you accomplished, and you will see how quickly you begin to make progress.”

Disorganization

• Being disorganized actually has an unconscious purpose: a clean, organized space is essential for thriving. Without cleanliness, we create fewer opportunities for ourselves.
• “That uneasy feeling is what we are trying to avoid, because it is the recognition that now that everything is in order, we must get to work on doing what we need to do or who we want to become.”

Attachment to what you don't really want

“Sometimes, we fight endlessly to try to force ourselves to want something that we do not really want, and it always leaves us empty, because it isn’t a genuine desire. This is different than lacking motivation or experiencing resistance. Our inability to perform is not based in fear or lack of skill, it is based in an inherent knowing that this is not what we want for our lives, and perhaps we’re feeling lost or unable to change our path.”

“When you find yourself struggling with something, you have to ask yourself: Do I actually want to do this? Do you want the job, or do you just like how the title sounds? Are you in love with the person, or do you like the idea of the relationship? Are you still holding an outdated idea of what your greatest success will be, and if so, what would it look like to let that go?”

“At the end of the day, self-sabotage sometimes functions to show us that we aren’t quite on the right path yet, and that we need to reevaluate to determine what would feel best for our lives, even if that means we disappoint some people or even our younger selves.

We do not have to live the rest of our lives trying to achieve some measure of success we thought was ideal when we were too young to understand who we even were. Our only responsibility is to make decisions for the person we have become.”

How To Resolve

“When we let go of what isn’t right for us, we create space to discover what is. However, doing so requires the tremendous courage to put our pride aside and see things for what they really are.”

Judging Others

“If we feel bad about not being as successful as another person, we might try to find something negative about them to make ourselves feel better. If we do that every time we come across a person who is more successful than we are, we begin to associate that level of success with being disliked. When it comes time for us to take action to move our lives forward, we’re going to resist doing it, because becoming more successful will create a breach in our self-concept.”

“When we set up judgments for others, they become rules that we have to play by, too. By judging others for what we don’t have or because we envy them, we sabotage our own lives far more than we ever really hurt anybody else.”

How to Resolve: Instead of reaching a conclusion about a person based on the limited information you have about them, consider that you’re not seeing the whole picture and don’t know the whole story.”

Pride

• making decisions based on how we imagine people view our lives, not how they actually are.

How to Resolve

• “Instead of thinking that we need to prove to everyone around us how perfect and flawless we are, we can imagine ourselves more realistically: as people who, despite our weaknesses, are trying our best. In the end, it looks far worse to hold onto what’s wrong because you care about what others think than it is to let go because that’s what’s right for you. People will respect you far more if you can acknowledge that you are an imperfect person—like everyone else—learning, adapting, and trying your best.”
• “In reaching this mindset, you also open yourself up to learning. By not assuming you know everything or that you need to seem perfect, you can admit when you’re wrong, ask for assistance, and lean on others sometimes. Basically, you open yourself back up to growth, and your life is better for it over the long term.”

Guilt of Succeeding

You feel guilty, as if you don't deserve to "have it"

“This feeling often comes up when we start to earn more money or have nicer things. Often, people will sabotage their higher incomes with reckless discretionary spending or by being less vigilant about their clientele or workload, because they are not quite comfortable having more than the basic necessities, and so they put themselves back into a comfortable feeling of lack.”

How to Resolve

• “Please realize that most extremely successful people have no guilt whatsoever. In fact, this feeling usually only comes up when you’re stepping between not having enough and finally having enough.
• What you have to realize is that money and success are tools. They buy you back time and offer you the opportunity to help, employ, influence, and change the lives of others. Instead of looking at your success as a status differentiator—which will always make you feel bad and uncomfortable—see it instead as a tool with which you can do important and positive things in the world and your own life.”

Fear of Failing

Downplaying

“When we downplay our successes in life, we are either trying to make ourselves seem less impressive so others do not feel threatened and therefore like us more, or we are trying to avoid the sense that we have “made it,” because we are afraid of peaking.”

“If we acknowledge that we’ve arrived, what goals remain? It is a feeling akin to death, so we instead find another measure to work toward.”

How to Resolve

• “We can all acknowledge and appreciate other people’s diverse accomplishments and talents while still being happy about our own. Instead of shrugging off a copliment, we can respond by saying: “Thank you, I worked very hard, and I’m happy to be here.”
• “Instead, we can acknowledge that when one part of our life improves, it radiates out to everything else. When we achieve one thing, we are better equipped for the future. Life tends to gradually get better as we keep working on it; it only gets worse if we accomplish something then shut down because we are intimidated by our own power.”

Unhealthy Habits

Maintaining habits that are actively keeping them away from their goals.

“At the core of all these behaviors is the fact that one part of our psyche understands that we should be evolving and moving forward with our lives and another part is intimidated by the potential discomfort it would bring. Usually, this culminates in so much inner tension and frustration that a breaking point is reached, and changes are made from there.

However, the goal is to not have to get to a crisis point in your life before you can become aware of the ways you’re holding yourself back from living peacefully and comfortably.”

How to Resolve

• Define health on your own terms. Figure out what makes you feel best.

Being Busy

• Distracting themselves to the point of being completely phased out of their lives. Nobody is busy unless the ywant to be busy, and you will know that because so many people with hectic schedules would never describe themselves that way. "being busy" is a virtue signal but actually shows to others that you do not know how to manage your time or tasks.

How to Resolv

“You might also need to confront the sense of “protection” that being busy gives you. Does it make you feel more important than others? Does it give you an excuse to say “no” to plans or to avoid some people? You need to find healthier and more productive ways to cope with these feelings, such as finding genuine self-confidence in what you do by creating something you’re proud of, or getting better at calmly but clearly stating your boundaries and needs in relationships.”

Spending Time with the Wrong People

“If you find yourself preoccupied with a certain friendship or relationship that is making you feel almost addicted to the feeling of being “less than” or “jealous of,” you need to gradually phase out of it. You don’t need to be mean, rude, or even cut anyone out of your life.
You do, however, need to understand that the people you spend the most time with will shape your future irrevocably, and so you must choose them wisely.”

How to Resolve This

“Work on building a circle of people who support and inspire you, who have similar goals and enjoy spending time with you. You should leave a get-together feeling energized and inspired, not exhausted and angry.
It takes time to find your group of friends, and you may not discover that all at once. It could start with offering to take someone you admire out for coffee, or reaching out to do something with a person with whom you’d like to reconnect. Slowly but genuinely rebuild your connections, and then foster and care for them as much as you can.”

Worrying about Irrational Fears

How to tell if you're in a self-sabotague cycle

• You're more aware of what you don't wnat than what you do
• You spend more time trying to impress people who don't like you than you spend time with people who love you for who you are.
• You're putting your head in the sand.
• You care more about convincing other people you're okay than actulaly being okay.
• Your main priority is to be liked
• You're more afraid of your feelings than anything else
• You're blindly chasing goals without asking yourself why you want those things: If you are doing “everything you are supposed to be doing” and yet you feel empty and depressed at the end of the day, the issue is probably that you’re not really doing what you want to be doing; you’ve just adopted someone else’s script for happiness.”
• You're treating your coping mechanisms as the problem: Instead of trying to incite war on yourself to overcome your overeating, spending, drinking, sexing—whatever it is you know you need to improve—ask yourself what emotional need that thing is filling. Until you do, you will battle it forever.”
• You value your doubt more than your potential.
• You are trying to care about everything.
• You are waiting for someone else to open adoor, offer approval, or hand you the life you have been waiting for.

  • “We grow up with the illusion that success is what’s handed to people who are most deserving, talented, or privileged. When we arrive, however, we realize it is constructed by those who find an intersection of their interests, passions, skills, and a market gap. Sprinkle on a little bit of persistence, and the only way to fail is to give up.”

Identify your subconscious commitments

“But the most important thing to understand is that your core commitments are actually a cover-up for core needs. Your core need is the opposite of your core commitment. Your core need is also another way to identify your purpose. For example, if your subconscious core commitment is to be in control, your core need is trust. If your subconscious core commitment is to be needed, your core need is to know you are wanted. If your subconscious core commitment is to be loved by others, your need is self-love.”

“The less that you feed your core need, the “louder” your core commitment symptoms will be.”

“Once you understand what a person really wants, you will be able to explain the intricacies of their habits and behaviors. You will be able to predict down to the detail what they will do in any given situation. More importantly, once you start asking yourself what you really want, you’ll be able to stop battling the symptoms and start addressing the only issue that has ever really existed in your life, which is living out of alignment with your core needs and, therefore, your core purpose.”

“By using logic and vision to guide ourselves, we are able to identify a different and better life experience. When we imagine this, we feel peaceful and inspired. To rise up to meet this version of our lives, we must overcome our resistance and discomfort. We will not feel happy initially, no matter how “right” for us those actions are.”

Chapter 3: Your Triggers are the guides to your freedom

“On the surface, it seems as though the thing that triggers our emotional response is the problem. It is not. The problem is that we don’t know what to do with how we feel and therefore do not have all of the emotional processing skills that we need.
When we can identify why something is triggering us, we can use the experience as a catalyst for a release and positive life change.”

• Anger: mobilizes us. Influx of motivation that helps us change what we need to change.
• Sadness: normal and correct response to the loss of something you love.

  • “This is an emotion that often comes up in the aftermath of a disappointment. This could be the loss of a relationship, a job, or just a general idea of what you thought your life would be. Sadness only becomes problematic when we do not allow ourselves to go through the natural phases of grief. Sadness does not release itself all at once. In fact, we often find that it happens in waves, some of which strike us at unexpected times.”
• Guilt
• Embarassment
• Jealousy

  • “If you want to know what you truly want out of life, look at the people who you are jealous of. No, you may not want exactly what they have, but the feeling that you are experiencing is anger that they are allowing themselves to pursue it while you are not.”
  • “When we use our jealousy to judge other people’s accomplishments, we are siding into its shadow function. When we use our jealousy to show us what we would like to accomplish, we begin to recognize the self-sabotaging behavior and get ready to commit to what we actually desire.”
  • “You can think of it this way: When we see someone who has something we really want but we are suppressing our willingness to pursue it, we must also condemn it in them so we can justify our own course of action. Instead of this, we can see what we’d also like to create.”

• Regret

  • “Didn’t travel when you were young? Regret is showing you that you should do it now. Didn’t look as nice as you wanted to? Regret is showing you that you should try harder. Made choices that didn’t reflect your best self? Regret is showing you that you should make different ones now. Didn’t love someone while you had them? Regret is showing you that you should appreciate people now.”
  • “THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Not doing the work you know would help move your career forward. WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You might not be as clear as you think you are on what you want to be doing. If it isn’t flowing, there is a reason. Instead of trying to push through and continually hitting the same wall over and over again, take a step back. Maybe it’s time to regroup, restrategize, or seriously think about why you’re trying to take the steps you are. Something needs to change, and it’s probably not just your motivation.”

  “THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Overworking.
  WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You do not have to prove your value. You do, however, have to stop running from the discomfort of being alone with your feelings, which is very often the reason that people overwork. There is a difference between being passionately committed to something and feeling obligated to outperform everyone else. One is healthy; the other is not.”

  “THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Not promoting your work in a way that would help move you forward.
  WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You’re not creating the best possible work you can, and you sense it. The reason why you’re holding back is a fear of judgment, but that wouldn’t exist if you weren’t already judging yourself. You have to create things you are proud to share, and when sharing them in a positive way that helps grow your business or career feels natural and authentic, you will know that you are doing the work that is at the best of your ability or potential.”

  “THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Mindlessly scrolling through social media as a way to pass the time.
  WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: This is one of the easiest ways to numb yourself, because it is so accessible and addictive. There is a world-altering difference between using social media in a healthy way versus as a coping mechanism. Mostly, it has to do with how you feel after you’re finished. If you don’t put the phone down feeling inspired or relaxed, you’re probably trying to avoid some kind of discomfort within yourself—the very discomfort that just might be telling you that you need to change.”

Chapter 4: Building Emotional Intelligence

Self-sabotague is ultimately just a product of low emotional intelligence.

“This is what’s going on when people push others away or give up on their big dreams the moment something challenging comes up. When we are so scared that we are going to lose something, we tend to push it away from ourselves first as a means of self-preservation.

“Positive life events can actually trigger depressive episodes. This happens for a few reasons: First, a spike and then decline in mood or attitude can exacerbate stress. Second, the expectation that a positive event will eliminate all stress and bring unprecedented happiness is a destructive one, because the event rarely does that. This is why weddings, childbirth, or a new job can be so incredibly stressful. On top of being a massive life change, there’s also the silent assumption that this should be a wholly positive thing, and anxiety and tension should be eliminated.”

Awareness of Biases

Confirmation

Extrapolation

“This moment is not my life. It is a moment in my life.”

“Extrapolation makes us think that we are the sum of our past or current experiences, that whatever stressors or anxieties we are currently experiencing are ones that we will grapple with for the rest of our lives. Unable to see through the problem at hand, we assume it will never resolve itself. Unfortunately, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we are so easily defeated and exhausted by the idea that we will never get over our problems, then we make it more likely that we will hang onto them instead of logically trying to resolve them, for a lot more time than is necessary.”

Spotlighting

Logical Lapses are Giving You Profound Anxiety

• “Most of the anxiety you experience in life is the result in inefficient critical-thinking skills. You might assume that because you are anxious, you are an overthinker, someone who obsesses about unlikely and scary outcomes more than is reasonable.
• The reality is that you are an under-thinker. You’re missing a part of your reasoning process.”
• “Let’s start at the beginning. Anxiety is a normal emotion that every person experiences at some point in their lives, typically when circumstances are stressful, tense, or scary. When anxiety is chronic and begins to interfere with day-to-day functioning, it becomes a clinical disorder.
• We understand the importance of speaking about mental health with the same degree of legitimacy as physical health. However, in the same way that we’d question what someone keeps tripping over if they repeatedly sprain their ankle, a lot of anxiety is similarly circumstantial, as many illnesses are. Specifically, anxiety tends to be the result of an inability to process acutely stressful and ongoing circumstances.”
• If we want to heal, we have to learn to process.
• One of the hallmarks of anxiety is rapid thinking. Because you are focusing on some issue so deeply and for so much time, you assume that you are also thinking through the issue thoroughly and arriving at the most likely conclusion. However, the opposite is happening.
• You’re experiencing a logical lapse. You’re jumping to the worst-case scenario because you aren’t thinking clearly, and then you are engaging your fight-or-flight response because the worst-case scenario makes you feel threatened. This is why you obsess about that one, terrifying idea. Your body is responding as though it’s an immediate threat, and until you “defeat” or overcome it, your body will do its job, which is to keep you in defense mode, which is really a heightened state of awareness to the “enemy.”

Faulty Inferences are Holding you back from success

“Highly intelligent people have a psychological function others do not, which is the ability to infer. They can extract meaning and understanding from things that others simply take at face value. This is why people who have extremely high IQs often struggle with basic things such as social skills or driving a car. Where others see the world as one-dimensional, the highly intelligent see it as three-dimensional. They think more deeply than is often necessary. This gives them their ability to create, understand, strategize, and invent.
In the same way that the endomorph’s excellent metabolism can work against them, so too can a highly intelligent person’s brain. This is because at times, they make something called “faulty inferences,” which are when fallacies, biases, and incorrect assumptions are made from valid evidence.”

Chapter 5: Releasing the Past

Recovering from self-sabotage always necessitates a process of letting go.

“You start to let go at the moment you realize that this is the impetus, this is the catalyst, this is that moment the movies are made about and the books are written around and songs are inspired by.
This is the moment you realize that you will never find peace standing in the ruins of what you used to be.
You can only move on if you start building something new.”

“We mentally become trapped in these places from which we still crave an experience. What we don’t realize is that we have to sort of free ourselves from it so that we can go forth and create it in real time.”

“You’ll remember a time, place, or experience. Sometimes, the memory is fresh enough that you don’t need to do this, and you can simply reenter the memory by imagining that you are back where it all began.
Now what you have to do is to superimpose a narrative to your younger self. You need to imagine that you, your healed and happy older self, is imparting some wisdom.
Imagine sitting next to your younger self as they got their heart broken and giving them very specific instructions about why this is absolutely for the best and although they cannot know it yet, there is another relationship out there that is far, far better.”

“Most importantly, imagine telling your younger self that absolutely everything—yes, everything—is going to be okay. That their fears are largely unfounded, that good things are coming, and that life will turn out well in the end.
You have to do this to release the old attachment and allow that part of yourself to reattach to the present moment and what exists within it.
Though you cannot change what happened in the past, by shifting your perspective of it, you can change how you are right now. You can change the story, and you can change your life. You can stop holding onto the old life in which you were required to be someone you inherently are not.”

“The truth is that when we are unhealthily attached to something in the past, our perspective of it is often distorted. We aren’t seeing reality for what it was, and we need to assist ourselves in being able to broaden our mindset and open up to the truth. Instead of longing for what we didn’t get then, we have to release ourselves from the past and start putting our energy into building that experience right now.
”

“You can leave the country, get remarried, build a whole new career, date 12 other people, find an entirely new friend group, feel happier and more fulfilled than ever, and still grieve for what your younger self went through.”

“You were a healthy person who went through something traumatic and responded accordingly.
You are someone who moved on because they had to, but who wasn’t sick enough to disassociate entirely from the past.”

“The fact that you can still recall what happened is a signal that you’re healthier than you think, more willing to heal than you realize, and more forgiving than you ever imagined you could be. Everything that’s haunted you is rising in your consciousness so you can see it and bow out with grace.
You are not the person you were, even if all those pieces are still very much a part of you.
You are not broken for being in pain; you’re seeing yourself out of it.”

“The truth is that you do not change your life when you fix every piece and call that healing.
You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to. You change your life when you are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, and when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000.
You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are.”

“When you start showing up as exactly who you are, you start radically changing your life.
You start receiving authentic love. You start doing your best and most profitable and effortless work. You start laughing; you start enjoying things again. You start realizing that you just needed anything to project all this fear onto, so you chose the most vulnerable and common issues in life.
When you start showing up exactly as you are, you cut the bullshit.
You declare to the world that you will not only love yourself when it sees you as worthy.
You will not only have values when you have everything you could ever need.”

“You will not only be principled once you get where you want to be.
You will not only be happy once someone loves you.
When you show up as you are, you disrupt this pattern.
The goodness of life is no longer reserved for some version of you that you’ll probably never be.
This was always a game for you to explain to yourself why it is you didn’t feel good naturally, before you knew how to start showing up and allowing your feelings. When you still lived in the darkness, you had to suppress that and project it onto other issues. No longer.”

“You are showing up as you are today and taking what’s yours, not what belongs to some imaginary version of yourself. Not what you think the world thinks you’re worthy of. You, here, now.
That is the true healing.
In fact, the universe does not allow perfection. Without breaks and gaps, there would be no growth. Nature depends on imperfection. Fault lines make mountains, star implosions become supernovas, and the death of one season creates the rebirth of the next.
You are not here to live up to the exact expectation that you’ve mustered up in your head. You are not here to do everything precisely right and precisely on time. To do so would require stripping your life of spontaneity, curiosity, and awe.”

We proces traumatic events in three parts of the brain:

• Amygdala
• Hippocampus
• Prefrontal Cortex

“Centuries ago, when we were at the lower rung of actualization, or the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy,14 what concerned us most was physical survival. Today, our focus is primarily on self-actualization and meaningfulness and trying to feel “safe” through social acceptance, money, or mental acuity.”

“What most people try to do is overcompensate in an area of life that is not the real problem. For example, if they struggled in relationships, they hoard money to keep themselves feeling “safe.” Of course, this is always futile, because the problem never gets solved.
Your trauma is not “in your head”; it is literally a changed state in your brain, and the only way you will help your body to return to its actual state is by recreating the feeling of safety that allows you to “turn off” survival mode and return to normal life.”

Releasing Emotional Backlog

“Your emotional backlog is like your email inbox.
It might be a simple analogy, but it’s an effective one. When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting little messages from your body stacking up one at a time. If you don’t ever open them, you end up 1,000+ notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information and important insights that you need to move your life forward. At the same time, you can’t sit around all day and respond to every message just as it comes up; you’d never get anything done.”

Moving Forward Isn't about Getting Revenge

“A real glow up is authentic. It is lifting off all the cover-up bullshit and addressing the real problems. It is healing. It is changing, for good. It is, for the first time, prioritizing your heart over someone else’s eyes.”

“Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves.
They are reading themselves.
This isn’t sad; it’s freeing. This should be the crux of your ultimate liberation.
The truth is that you have nobody to prove wrong but yourself. The people from your past probably didn’t disapprove of you nearly as much as you feared they did.”

Chapter 6 - Building a New Future

“One of the most common pitfalls of people who try but do not succeed in releasing their past is that their focus remains on just that—the past. The work now is to envision who you want to be, connect with the most powerful version of yourself, design your life through your daily routine, and uncover your true purpose for being.”

Meeting your highest potential future self

“A popular tool in psychotherapy is something called inner child work15, or the process of imagining and reconnecting with your younger self. In this process, you can offer yourself guidance, even going back to certain traumatizing events and readdressing them with the wisdom you have now.
But more often, the process of reconnecting with your inner child is to let them communicate with you. It is how you can rediscover your inherent desires, passions, fears, and feelings.”

1. Face the fear first. CLose your eyes and meditate.

“Imagine sitting down at a comfortable table in a well-lit room, somewhere that you are happy and feel at peace.
Then, invite your future self to come sit with you and talk. You can request that they are a certain age, but usually the age will just come to you when you see them.”

“Specifically ask for the highest possible version of yourself to sit down. If you see anything scary at first, know that it is your fear of what could happen manifesting in your mind, not the truth of what will happen.
Once you get past that, you can start receiving advice.”

1. Notice how your future self looks

“Aside from what you imagine this version of yourself telling you, pay attention to what they look like, how they behave, and what their facial expressions communicate.
The point of doing future self work is so that you can merge with this aspect of yourself. You want to clearly envision the most ideal version of yourself so that you know how your own life needs to grow, shift, and change.
See what they wear, how they feel, what they do each day. These will be the keys to your own becoming.”

1. Ask for Guidance

“If you go into this process with a laundry list of scary, huge questions for your future self to answer, you’re probably going to end up bound by panic rather than being open to receiving powerful guidance.
Instead, keep yourself open to whatever this person wants to share with you. The messages should be positive, uplifting, affirming, and helpful. Even if they communicate something to you such as, you need to let go of this relationship, it should be done in a way that is so calming and reaffirming that you are confident and at peace with it.”

1. Imagine them handing you the keys to your new life

“Imagine sitting down in a space you used to frequent or inhabit. What you’re going to do now is hand them the pieces of your current life and all of the information they will need to go from who they are then to who you are now.”

Moving Past Traumatic Experiences

“Trauma is the experience of disconnecting with a fundamental source of safety. It happens most severely when our attachment to our primary caretakers is compromised. But there is truly an infinite number of ways the world can traumatize you, and to varying degrees.”

“No matter where it came from, if you have some kind of lingering trauma, you will know, because you will feel it. You will feel it physically in your body. You will feel anxiety, tension, fear, terror, sadness, or guilt. It will be displaced. It will not have a clear, direct cause. You will overreact to certain things and even when a problem is solved, you will still panic. This is the mark of trauma.”

Trauma is not in your head. It is in your body.

1. First, identify hwat caused it. Where is your body tense? Like physically, where are you tense?
2. Reinstate a sense of safety

   1. “You are traumatized because something scared you and you are convinced that it is still “out to get you.” This is what happens when we don’t face or overcome something difficult—we assume the threat lingers indefinitely.
   2. The psychological aspect of trauma healing is that you have to literally restore the connection that was severed in the exact same way that it was broken.”
   3. “If you are traumatized about relationships, you need to build healthy relationships. If you are traumatized about money, you need to get really good with money. If you are traumatized about traveling, you need to travel again.”
3. Stop taking thoughts and feelings at face value

“This proves to be profoundly healing for people, mostly because we do not evolve past our former selves; we simply grow upon them.
However, this practice can work the opposite way as well. You can also visualize and connect with your future self—the version of you that you are growing into, or the person you know you are meant to be.”

What would my most powerful self do today?

“Your most powerful self needs to be the CEO of your life. It is the person making managerial decisions, governing everything else. This is the editor-in-chief, the matriarch or patriarch. You are working for your most powerful self.
Once you have a clearer image of what your most powerful self is like, you then need to evaluate what habits, traits, and behaviors are actively holding you back from fully embodying that person.”

“How often do we just need a partner to stop trying to strategize and just say, that must really suck?
How much of a weight is lifted off our shoulders when we think: Yes, I really am stressed right now, and I deserve to be?
How light do we feel when we see another person’s story splayed out across a screen, one that we can relate to, and understand, no matter how devastating it is?
How much better do we feel when we simply allow ourselves to be aggrieved and pissed-off and irrationally mad?
”

“When we let ourselves have it—the feeling, that is—something incredible happens. We no longer have to take it out on other people, because we are no longer relying on their validation to get us through it.”

“We know this because when we stop resisting feeling sad and just let ourselves be sad, we realize that it will not last forever. We see that sometimes, the biggest problem isn’t that we are devastated, but that in refusing to accept what is in front of us, we create so much more suffering than we would if we had just had a cry when we needed to have a really good cry.”

“Validating other people teaches us how to validate ourselves. And when we learn how to validate ourselves, we become stronger. We see that our emotions are no longer threats, but informants. They show us what we care about, what we want to savor, and what we want to protect. They remind us that life is fleeting, and challenging, and gorgeous. When we are willing to accept the darkness, it is only then that we find the light.”

“You can be just as unhappy in your ideal job, with your perfect hours, at your most desired pay rate, if you don’t know how to ration your time, relate to others in your workplace, or move your career forward. People who are “living their dreams” and “following their passion” can be just as unhappy as people who are not.
If you don’t have principles, your life is not going to get better. Problems are only going to follow you and get bigger as your life does.”

Chapter 7: From Self-Sabotage to Self-Mastery

“The idea is simple in theory and complex in practice: By both exploring our understanding of the mind and training it to behave in a certain way, we sort of purify ourselves to experience the essential nature of what we are, which is, as they believe, joy.”

“The answer is that when you’re in traffic, or in an argument, or dealing with a difficult coworker, you should be aware of how you feel but still in control of how you respond. Emotions are temporary, but behaviors are permanent. You are always responsible for how you choose to act.”

“Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

“This is difficult for most people, and often, people will continue to create stress, problems, and drama for themselves because their egos are still very much attached to thinking they need something external to make them feel good. This is the quintessential sign of someone who has not yet found their inner peace: They are searching, often frantically, for a sense of satisfaction, belonging, or worthiness outside of themselves.”

“If we are not instructed from a young age to connect with our inner sense of peace, we will instinctively begin to trust the voice in our head. This is where we really get lost, because the thoughts that we have on any given day are largely the product of what the Buddhists would call the “monkey mind,” or as a neurologist could explain it, the process of different receptors firing off and making associations with things that may or may not have anything to do with reality.”

“In a number of decades, you will be gone. Your home will be sold to a new family. Your job will be taken by someone else. Your kids will be adults. Your work will be done. This isn’t supposed to depress you; it is supposed to liberate you.”

“Focusing on what happened disproportionately to what’s happening now, or what you want to happen in the future, is what keeps you completely stuck. If you feel as though you truly failed yourself in some profound way, it becomes even more crucial that you move on and create the experience you desire now. Your life is not over. You did not fail indefinitely, but you will if you never let go and try again.

“There’s a saying that if you’re anxious, it’s because you’re living in the future, and if you’re depressed, it’s because you’re living in the past. When you’re living in the present moment, you realize that both the past and future are just current illusions in the infinite, eternal “now” and that they are actually ways in which you can avoid being in your body.”

“To become a master of oneself is first to take radical and complete responsibility for your life. This includes even that which is beyond your control. A true master knows that it is not what happens, but the way one responds, that determines the outcome.
Not everybody gets there. Most people live barely realizing that they are creating most of the waves in their lives and that it is also their job to learn to ride them. Most people spend their days lost in a fog of their own thoughts and feelings, having little ability to sort through them.”

“You must claim it. You must create it. Your own healing process will create an invisible ripple effect on the collective. If we want to change the world, we change ourselves. If we want to change our lives, we change ourselves. If we want to scale the greatest mountains before us, we change how we arrive at the path.
When you reach the peak of it all—whatever that may be for you—you will look back and know that every step was worth it. More than anything, you will be overwhelmingly grateful for the pain that led you to begin your journey, because really, it wasn’t trying to hurt you as much as it was trying to show you that something was wrong. That something was the risk of your potential remaining untapped, your life spent with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and wondering why you never felt quite right.”

“When you reach the peak of it all—whatever that may be for you—you will look back and know that every step was worth it. More than anything, you will be overwhelmingly grateful for the pain that led you to begin your journey, because really, it wasn’t trying to hurt you as much as it was trying to show you that something was wrong. That something was the risk of your potential remaining untapped, your life spent with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and wondering why you never felt quite right.
Your life is just beginning.
One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.
That is the point of the mountain.”