A (6:55)
Probably. Probably. It's a good thing because most people, I think, are looking for excuses to not hustle and not work. And obviously on this show we talk a lot about, you know, figuring out ways to make extra money and figuring out ways to increase your skill set. And all that's going to require more work and it's going to require you to hustle and it's going to require some seasons of a grind. But it's not really necessarily the work that's the point. It's not. It's not even necessarily the result. That's the point. The external result, that's the point. I should say the point is self respect. Because the more you work towards something, the more you actively choose something difficult instead of something easy, the more respect you're going to gain for yourself. And it's a fairly simple equation. If you don't have any self respect, ask yourself, what do I respect others for having done? Is it, is it they're in good shape that you know that person has a six pack or that person goes to the gym, or wow, that person ran a marathon, or wow, that person built a big business, or that person, you know, has a great relationship with their kids? Whatever it is, you have this, this thing in your mind that makes you respect other people. So if you don't have any self respect, then maybe try to go do the actions of somebody who you would respect and you might find that that self respect starts to climb a little bit. But there's a couple of things that we're going to talk about on today's episode that I think are really helpful in this, in this process. The first thing is effort builds identity before it gets results. So before you will get the desired results of the effort. The first good thing that happens is that that effort reinforces a new identity, that you are somebody who does the work or you are somebody who does what you say you're going to do. The identity takes place a lot of times before the identity shift takes place, a lot of times before the results take place. And the identity itself is what allows you to be able to start working on that relationship with you. And then you build a good relationship with you. It's gotta bleed into your relationship with others. Meaning that if you don't have any respect for yourself, you can't help but have that come across in your interpersonal relationships. It's going to bleed into your relationship with other people. You're going to start the way that you talk about yourself, the way that you show up, the way that you know, if you're 100 pounds overweight and your car is full of fast food trash and your apartment is filthy and you haven't washed dishes in a month and you're wearing the same clothes that you wore for the last four days and they've never been washed and they smell bad. And like you present yourself like that, you're actively telling other people what they should think about you. You're actively telling other people that you are not somebody that's worthy of respect because you don't even have the ability to respect yourself enough to take care of yourself. So effort will build the identity before it's going to get the result, which is arguably more important than the result, even long term. So second thing here, keeping promises to yourself is the foundation of confidence. And confidence is sort of the foundation for everything else, you know, having. Especially when we're talking about connections with other people. Especially we're talking about charisma, we're talking about leadership, we're talking about sales, talking about marketing, we're talking about creating outside success for yourself. Confidence is at the very foundation of that. And the number one, the fastest way to start building more confidence is to simply keep the promises that you make to yourself. I. People will. If people would treat themselves the way that they treat other people, they would probably help, they would probably fix their confidence and self respect issues almost overnight. Because the, the, the, what we tolerate in other relationships is so much less than we tolerate with our relationship with us. Meaning that if, if a friend of yours, you know, think, think about the last time you were throwing a pity party. The last time you were telling yourself all these negative things about yourself. Think back to that time. Think about all the terrible things that you told yourself. Think about somebody close to you in your life saying those same things that you've said to yourself that you've allowed yourself to internalize. Think about them saying those things to you and how quickly you would cut that off, how quickly you would let go of that relationship or at least retaliate or retort with something, or say something back, you know, or, or defend yourself to a certain degree to, to think about the things that you've done well and be like, but I'm not all those. I'm, I'm. I also do this and I also do that. Yet you allow yourself to do it every night before you go to sleep. And then you wonder why you have no self respect. It's because you talk to yourself like you don't respect yourself. And if you don't respect yourself, maybe you're not giving yourself enough reasons to respect yourself. So the very first place that I would always start is just keep the promises that you make to yourself. Start small, guys. You do not have to start with this massive, huge change in your life. And tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be a brand new me. And then you paint this picture of what the ideal version of you looks like. And you, and then you expect that tomorrow everything's going to change and you're going to Be able to live up to that expectation every single day for the rest of your life. And it's just not reality. So start with something small. In the light of. In the light of thinking about your relationship with yourself in the context of your relationship with other people, this would be another thing that you would not allow yourself to do. If you told somebody really close to you that you were going to do this thing for them and there was somebody you genuinely loved and cared about, you would probably do that thing. And you would. Even if there were excuses, even if there were reasons, even if there were some things that might prevent you from being willing to do it, you'd probably still find a way to make it work. Because you. Because there's stakes to not keeping your word with that person there. You're going to lose trust. You're going to lose the relationship, you're going to lose the friendship, you're going to lose the marriage. You're probably going to put effort into following through on the things that you said that you would do for other people. So why don't you do that with yourself? You. You. You. Just because you didn't say it out loud to somebody else does not mean that you don't remember that you said it to yourself. So if you say you're gonna get up early, then get up early. If you say you're gonna go to the gym, go to the gym. If you say you're gonna read that book, then pick up the damn book. The problem is that we over commit. You're wildly over committing to things. And this goes for people outside of your life, and this goes for your relationship with yourself. Again, you tell yourself, tomorrow's gonna be different, I'm gonna change all these things. And you give yourself a list of 20 things that you're gonna commit to. And then of course you're not gonna do all of those things because there's way too many things to go from zero to a hundred like that. You can't do it. It's, it's, it's your, your act. I shouldn't say you can't do it. You can do it, but it's just way more difficult. You're creating this massive psychological barrier between who you are now and who you wanna be when. If you just started with something small, man, like, I don't. Again, I don't care what it is. If it's just, I'm gonna drink double the amount of water that I usually drink in a day because I think that's good for me or I'M gonna put my head on the pillow at this time because I've noticed that if I get X amount of sleep that I can perform better. Great. Just do that thing. Be impeccable with yourself. Just stop committing to too many things. And this goes for the other relationships in your life. You know, like maybe instead of committing to be at all of your kids practices and games, maybe just commit to the games. Say I might miss a few practices or maybe just say I'll be there for the big games. I might miss a game or two here and there but I'm going to be there for all the big things. Like just stop over committing to everything because you're setting yourself up to lose. Shooting yourself in the foot to see if you can walk and it's just like. Or you could just walk. You don't have to shoot yourself in the foot first. That might be an idea. Why don't we try that? What a novel concept. What if we just started walking and without a bullet hole in our foot that's bleeding out that we have to address. Like stop making life more difficult by over committing to everything. And especially, especially, especially, especially when it comes to your relationship with you. Because what happens is you over commit to everybody, you over commit to yourself and you over commit to everybody else. And then the, the, your primary goal because you don't want to be separated from the tribe, right? Your, your, your, your feeling brain is going to tell you that, well, I can't cancel all these other obligations, all the others, all these other people because I don't want to lose trust with those people. So I don't have the time or capacity to be able to say, to do all the things that I committed to for everybody else. Therefore it makes more sense to not do the things that I told myself that I was going to do because nobody else knows that I told myself I was going to do them except for me. So I can just internalize those things and I can make sure I keep my commitments to everybody else. And this is how you end up being in that. I'm lonely yet surrounded by people because you're doing everything for everybody else but you're not doing anything for yourself. You're not, you're not following through on the commitments that you made to yourself. So start small, start light again. You don't have to change everything about yourself in a 24 hour period of time and if you try to do that it's going to be less effective. So just don't, don't do it like that. Make Smaller, more easily attainable commitments and that that confidence will start to compound. You'll start looking at the next thing and be like, okay, well I figured out how to get myself out of bed or I figured out how to walk a half a mile every day. I figured out how to drink more water. Maybe I could figure out this other thing. And then you commit to the next thing and then you figure out that thing and then it's another win, it's another notch in the confidence belt. It's another deposit in the confidence bank account that you can make to say, I am somebody that does the things that I say I'm going to do. You make that deposit, you make those deposit, make that deposit. You look at that over enough time and now you've built a massive bank account full of confidence. And this is what enables you to be able to withstand the rejection that life is inevitably going to throw your way. The reason that people quit too early, the reason that rejection prevents people from reaching their goals is not to do with the rejection itself is because they don't have enough, they don't have enough of a balance in their confidence bank account to withstand the rejection. Because every time a rejection is made, a bit of the confidence goes away. It's a withdrawal from the confidence bank account. So if you want a healthy account balance, you have to make more deposits than you make withdrawals, just like your actual bank account. Rejection is not the culprit, it's the lack of confidence. It's, it's the fact that you don't have a great relationship with you. So you don't have a big tolerance for rejection because your confidence account is overdrawn because you haven't made enough deposits on a daily basis to, to maintain that level of confidence over time. So keep the promises that you make to yourself because it's the foundation of confidence and that will obviously help with your self respect. And then last kind of thought about this is discipline is better than motivation. Motivation comes and goes. It's not sticky. It is largely emotionally driven. There's some things that you can do to try to motivate yourself, right, and put on some pump up music or listen your favorite speaker or you know, watch your favorite Kobe Bryant YouTube video montage, whatever it is that you like to do to pump yourself up. But ultimately it's fleeting and you are, you are at the whim of your own emotional state and that will decide whether or not you're going to get anything accomplished. And if you allow that to happen in your life, then you Are inevitably going to start having an overdrawn bank account of confidence because it's not going to work out for you long term. So value the discipline that it takes to keep the promises that you make to yourself. Value the discipline that it takes to keep the promises you make to other people and stop over committing. Because the discipline that the system is better than the motivation. It's like what James Clear says, the author of Atomic habits, is that you, you will not rise to the level of your goals, you will fall to the level of your systems. And your systems are built through the discipline that you have every single day. So if you want better relationships, you want a better network, you want closer friendships, you want a better marriage, you, better relationships with kids, and you want to avoid loneliness, which is something that affects over 50% of U.S. adults, then it is going to come from the relationship that you have with you that is the foundation for all of the other relationships that you have. If you have a bad relationship with you, it's going to bleed into your relationship with others. If you have a good relationship with you, it's going to bleed into your relationship with others. So treat your relationship with yourself as the primary number one relationship that you have to make as good as you can first. And that's where people, I think, get wrong. They, they assume that they can leave themselves in the dust for the pursuit of other people, when in reality, you will become a much more attractive, magnetic, charismatic person if you're somebody who has a good relationship with you. So let's start there. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
