Re-Air | How I Trained Myself to Be Successful | Ep 15
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A lot of people say, well, you want to make sure that you're always running towards something. Screw that. If this works, do it. You know what got me to lose 85 pounds? Not wanting to be skinny in a bikini, but it was being terrified of being 500 pounds. How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build.

Have you ever looked at your life and thought to yourself, "Man, I am so far from where I want to be. How do I get out of this?" Have you ever felt hopeless about improving your life? Have you ever wondered why you continue to spiral in the wrong direction and not understand why you can't stop yourself from going in the wrong direction over and over and over again? Today, I want to teach you how I went from asking myself those same questions to brainwashing myself to succeed.

If that's you, I want you to know that I too was there at one point in my life. When I was 19, I was anxious, I was angry, I was frustrated, and I felt hopeless. I felt like my life was at a dead end. I didn't know where to go and I didn't know what way was up and how to get out of where I put myself. I would go so far as to say that 99% of people in this world feel that way.

I would argue that 99% of people in this world get it wrong. They use their negative thoughts and their negative feelings as reasons as to why they don't succeed rather than reasons to succeed. They use their negative thoughts and emotions as reasons not to do something. I don't feel motivated. I'm too anxious. I'm too upset. I'm too depressed. Right? Think about the amount of times that you've told yourself those things.

If they really knew, if she, Megan, really knew how awful I was, how terrible I was, how much of a piece of shit I was, how much of a deadbeat I was, she wouldn't say this to me. Listen, we've all thought those things. I have too. I know this because I've been there. I've thought those things too. Majority of most of our lives, we've been told that negativity is a bad thing. Having these thoughts and having these feelings, we need to rid ourselves of them. There's something wrong with us, right?

And that if we feel bad feelings and if we think bad thoughts, that we should stop, that it means there's something wrong, that we're going in the wrong direction. I'm here to tell you that the 1% of people in this world that succeed and that have been able to brainwash themselves to success like I have, know it's the exact opposite. They actually use those negative thoughts and emotions as fuel to get what they want. In fact, the top 1% of people have the same negative thoughts and feelings as the 99%.

They just see them as tools to succeed rather than things to fear and avoid. You see, most of us have been brainwashed by society into thinking that these thoughts and feelings are bad, that they are negative, that they mean there's something wrong with us. My whole life, I grew up people telling me that there's something wrong. You're anxious, you're depressed, you're OCD. Every label in the book you can think of, I was called.

And I spent so much time and energy trying to rid myself of these things, thinking there was something wrong with me, that there was something broken, that I was damaged goods, right? Because that's what I was being told by people who were authority figures to me.

In fact, I thought that having those kind of feelings and thoughts meant there was something literally wrong with my brain. And what I'm so grateful for now is that what I have learned along the way, which is that there's nothing wrong with thinking those thoughts, with feeling badly, with feeling negative, with having times in our lives where we're anxious, depressed, right? The problem is condemning it, is labeling it as something wrong, and it telling ourselves that there's something wrong with us when we feel these things.

You see, by the time I was 19, I had gotten myself into such a hole. I was 85 pounds overweight. I was barely scraping by college. I was not making much money at all. I didn't have a boyfriend anymore. I had kind of dead end friends. My life wasn't looking too good.

What I think had happened was the anxious feelings and depressive feelings that I had in my teenage years continued to pile and pile up. And all those thoughts that other people had kind of impressed upon me when I was that age into spiraling into this, I don't know, it was like my whole life was out of control.

And it was like that combined with this new, I would say like feelings of anxiousness around the social situation of being in college and having the pressure of like, what do I want to do with my life? Where am I going to go? Am I going to amount to anything? Like all of that kind of came to a head and I just took it in a way that I just continue to spiral in the wrong direction. You see, I didn't learn how to harness the negativity in my life. And because of that, my life spiraled in the wrong direction with my own consent.

You see, the thing about momentum is that momentum can either work for or against you. Your life either continues to get worse and worse and worse, or it continues to get better and better and better. It just depends on what kind of outlook you have on that energy.

And my life was honestly going wrong in every direction that you could think of. Like I was 85 pounds overweight. I wasn't in a relationship. I was doing drugs and drinking alcohol on a regular basis. I was flunking out of school. I got arrested six times and I had really like no real friends. And so like by all means of success, by all measures that you could put out there, I was failing. In fact, I continued to fail until, oh,

What I would say is like one of the many rock bottom moments I had, which was the sixth time I was arrested. And the cops took me home to my parents' house because I was going to college about 30 minutes away from where my parents' house was, where I grew up. And the cops took me there. I don't remember what happened. I just woke up at my dad's house and I knew that was not good.

So I woke up there and I was expecting my dad to yell at me and to tell me I'm a loser and I'm amounting to nothing in life and all these things that I already knew and I already thought of myself. And instead, my dad told me that he was nervous. He said, Layla, he sat me down. He said, I don't care what you do in life. I don't care if you want to keep doing this or not doing this, but I have to tell you, I do think you're going to kill yourself.

And it was so jarring to hear your own father say that. I said, what do you mean? He said, I think you're going to drink so much, we're going to do drugs, and you're going to die. And what was so tough to hear about that was that I knew he was right. I'm not immune. I'm not invincible. And I think I didn't even know, I didn't know that at the time. But in that moment, I realized that I'm not invincible. And I can't keep doing this to myself because that could happen.

And I remember leaving that conversation and going to the bathroom to take a shower and looking in the mirror and just hating myself. I hated what I saw. I hated how overweight I was. I hated who I was. I hated the fact that I just got arrested for the sixth time and was at my parents' house. And what I saw when I looked in the mirror was this. I saw a victim.

I saw somebody who was letting the negative side of life rule her. I was letting all those thoughts and feelings dominate me, control me, rather than learning how to wield them and use them as tools to build the life that I've always wanted.

And so I went home that night to my apartment and I made a commitment to myself. I remember specifically, I sat down in bed and I was so angry. I was angry, angry at myself, angry at the fact that I had let my life get here. And I made a post on Facebook and that post, basically, I was proclaiming that I was going to change my life, that I was no longer going to be at any parties, that you wouldn't see me, that I was getting off social media and I was just going to go commit myself to bettering my life. I made that post, I cut off my friends and I went to work.

And that was the night everything changed for me. I decided to dedicate myself to becoming the version of myself that I'd always wanted to be, the version of myself that I envisioned when I was a little girl, the version of myself that when you're growing up and people are asking you, what do you want to be when you're in school? You're thinking of this like amazing, successful person. I decided to rededicate myself to that vision. But I knew that in order to do this, I needed to start with my mind because the reason that I was spiraling out of control is that I wasn't managing my mind.

In fact, I needed to undo all the habits that had created present day situation. I need to go in and undo all those so I could create a new reality for myself. In fact, what I really needed to do is undo all the garbage that had been put in my head when I was growing up through society and other authority figures that I knew wasn't right.

So what I want to share with you are the top four things that I have learned since that day, since that day that I decided to change my life, that have helped me change my life, go from spiraling downwards to spiraling upwards, and become the person I am today. Tell me the last time you asked yourself one of these questions. Why am I so fat? Why can't I succeed? Why do I suck at this? Why am I so bad at X, Y, Z? If you ask yourself questions like this on a daily basis, then this tool might help you.

I used to ask myself those questions all the time. In fact, I audited my mind and realized that I was asking myself questions like this on a daily basis. Why are you so fat? Why can't you change? Why can't you stop drinking? Why won't you stop saying yes to drugs? Why won't you get better friends? Why don't guys like you? I was asking myself these questions day in and day out.

The first tool that helped me in changing my life was swapping these dead end questions for better ones, right? And I call this negative visualization. So I started, instead of asking myself questions that were unproductive and led to unproductive answers, I started asking myself productive questions. If I continue to do this and I do not change, what happens five years from now? So every time I had a decision at hand,

Okay, if I don't make this decision, if I don't change this thing about myself, what happens five years from now? Here's an example.

gaining weight. If I don't change, what happens five years from now? I asked myself that question. Well, you've gained 85 pounds in about two and a half years. That's impressive, right? That's what I really thought to myself. Wow. So if I've gained 85 pounds in two and a half years, then that means at that rate, oh my gosh, I would be 500 pounds in five years. And then if I'm 500 pounds, like

I'm going to have health issues. I'm not going to find a mate. I'm probably not going to have as many friends. I'm not going to be able to walk around campus at that point. So that's the first thing that I learned is that oftentimes we're asking ourselves the wrong questions. And what I needed to do to turn my life around is I needed to paint such a worse version of my future if I continued to stay the same, that that version of me staying the same was so terrifying that there was no option but to change.

Not that I wanted to change more, but that I was terrified not to change. A huge component of life is learning how to utilize the negative. A lot of people say, well, you want to make sure that you're always running towards something. Screw that. If this works, do it. You know what got me to lose 85 pounds? Being terrified of being 500 pounds. Not wanting to be skinny in a bikini, but it was being terrified of being 500 pounds.

And so that is the first tool that I've learned is negative visualization, using a more powerful negative future to propel you into the future that you actually want. To understand the second tool, I'm going to ask a series of questions and answer them myself. Why did I eat? Because I didn't want to feel hungry, right? You can say all these different reasons, but end of the day, I couldn't tolerate the hunger. Why did I drink? Because I didn't want to feel anxious. I didn't want to tolerate anxiety. Why did I flunk school?

because I didn't want to tolerate frustration, anger, feeling like I wasn't good at something. Frustration tolerance refers to the ability to withstand difficult situations, events, or feelings. So what I realized when I went on my journey to basically brainwash myself to succeed is that I had very low frustration tolerance.

And if you look at the most successful people in the world, they have very high frustration tolerance. They're able to endure feelings, situations, and events for much longer than the people who aren't. So for somebody who has low frustration tolerance like I did, everyday events, everyday feelings, everyday situations actually provoke a lot of frustration and they tend to stop or quit.

Whereas people who achieve high goals, studies have shown that they have very high frustration tolerance. They are able to tolerate a large amount of undesirable or unwanted thoughts and feelings in order to achieve something.

So I actually learned this by reading, I read all the books by Albert Ellis. He was one of the first psychologists and he talks about frustration tolerance. And he talks a lot about how new goals that we set for ourselves in life require a new level of frustration tolerance. And usually the reason that we're not able to achieve any sort of goal is because we have low frustration tolerance in that area.

So for me, understanding that losing weight, you keep thinking like there's so many different ways out there to lose weight, right? But the reality is, is that the reason most people don't lose weight is they're not able to tolerate the frustration and the hunger that comes with it. And at the end of the day, we can try all the gimmicks in the world, but you've got, typically if you're losing weight, you feel hungry, right? Same goes for social anxiety, right? I was drinking because I had social anxiety. Well, I needed to tolerate the anxiety.

And the thing about feelings and leaning into them and being able to tolerate them is that the more that you step into them,

the more they dissipate because we're showing our brains that they're not so bad after all. And then the thing about humans and the thing about us as humans that's really great is that we habituate to situations. And so when I learned this, I decided, okay, I need to stop drinking in social situations because I'm relying on alcohol so I don't feel anxious. And so I understood that in order to do that, I would feel anxious at first. And I was willing to accept that anxiety to trade it for a more productive future.

So here's what I learned and what I do for myself to build frustration tolerance and what I did to get myself out of the place I was in. There's three steps to it. One is accept the frustration. Oftentimes we spend so much energy in life trying to rid ourselves of it, trying to rid ourselves of anger, anxiety, frustration, sadness, whatever it is, right? We spend all this energy trying to get rid of it. We don't want to feel it, right? Accept it, right? Learn to sit with it. Be okay with it. Welcome it into your life, right?

The second is labeling it. Label it as frustration. I think that often we label feelings, whether it's anxiety, depression, sadness, label it as frustration. I have frustration here, right? Because we are frustrated. When we are frustrated with a feeling, we're trying to resist it, right? And so that's what it creates is that when we are frustrated, we have accepted that we are, we have now labeled it with what it is, it's frustration. It typically means that we're trying to resist a feeling,

And then the third step is creating realistic mental cues around the situation. I think that when I was growing up, I was told to say affirmations to myself. And I think there's nothing wrong with affirmations. If they work for you, that's great. But I actually found this worked better for me.

is that I don't say I am a beautiful, confident, skinny woman, or I am like a beautiful, confident, sexy woman when I was 85 pounds overweight, not confident at all, and pretty much felt like shit about myself. Saying it just felt like I was like a fraud. And so after reading this and understanding, I said, okay, I want to become this person who loses weight. I don't want to become 500 pounds. I want to make sure that I can get my life in order. What can I say to myself?

I may feel anxious, hungry, and alone, but I can become the person I want to be if I work hard enough with enough consistency. Realistic statement.

Right? And so every time I felt a certain way, I just reminded myself of that. And I kept a little note in my phone where it had that written down. I would say it to myself and I would read it. And I was like, that's realistic. If I work hard and I commit, I will still feel anxious. I'll feel hungry. I'll feel alone at times because I'm on this journey alone, but I can do it. Some other mental cues that help me when I'm trying to build my frustration tolerance is if I did it once, I can do it twice.

If we can get ourselves to do something scary, anxiety provoking, anger provoking, we can probably do it again. This is challenging, but it will make me better, right? So it's like when we're approaching a situation that feels challenging, just remember, this is going to make you better. And I bet you it'll even be easier next time. And then the last one that I still continue to use to this day

is future Layla will thank you for this. I tell myself that on a daily basis when I'm making decisions that are hard, that I don't want to do, and that provoke feelings that I don't necessarily want to feel. I say, "Future Layla will thank me for this." If I do this today, and guess what? If I'm going to do it eventually, I might as well do it today because it's only, it's harder with time, not easier. And the third tool that I used to change my life was, I'm going to call it proving my brain wrong.

So I think I went personally most of my life thinking that my thoughts were me, that my thoughts were real, that my thoughts meant something. And I think that caused a lot of frustration for me because I felt like, well, gosh, some of these thoughts are pretty bad. They're pretty dark. They're pretty weird. They're pretty messed up. Like there must be something wrong with me. And through studying, you know, through studying psychology and my own journey to better my life, I realized that that wasn't true at all.

thoughts are not facts and emotions are not commands or directives. Okay, so what does that really mean? Thoughts

are often put in our brain to help us survive, right? That's like a lot of the reason that we have thoughts in our brains. Like if you research what's the purpose of thoughts, there are so many different reasons that people can kind of come up with. But if you really think about it, the one that I've heard that makes the most sense is they are in our brain to survive. So oftentimes that's why people tend to say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't keep thinking about like worst case scenario or like, I think he's going to leave me. I think he's cheating. I think I'm going to lose my job. I think I'm going to die.

Like think about the amount of times that your brain goes to that. Well, it's wired to do that because if your brain can predict worst case scenario, it can prevent you now from going to worst case scenario and dying because that's what it used to mean, right? We were protecting ourselves, making sure that we were going to be able to survive. And on the other side, there's emotions, right? And I think most of our lives growing up were told things like, if you feel it, you should do it. If you feel it in your gut and it feels right, you've got to do it.

Follow your passion. Follow your heart. And there's a lot of times in my life where I think to myself, I don't know how much information my heart or my gut's got because it's kind of like, I'm not sure. Maybe it's just fear, right? I think a lot of times we're told all these things like follow your heart, follow your passion, but it's like, okay, well, my heart, my passion, my emotion, right? Because that's really what it is, is our emotions are telling us to do the opposite of what I actually think would be good for my life.

And so that's when I learned emotions are not things to act on. And emotion is separate from behavior. And we don't need to behave in accordance with our emotions. And what I hadn't been doing for so long was if I felt something, I acted on it. And what I learned is I needed to break the link between feeling and behaving.

Now, I think that what I realized is that, and I continue to examine people in life, is that the stronger the link between feeling and acting, more often the less desirable their life because they're acting on impulse, right? And our impulses, our thoughts, our emotions, et cetera, are not here to help us be successful. They're here to help us survive. And so oftentimes if we act quickly on random thoughts and feelings, then we're not actually making the best decision. We're not actually setting ourself up for success.

What that means is that strong feelings are not strong evidence, right? If you really think about this, right, is that oftentimes we think I feel so strongly that it must mean something. But what if it doesn't mean anything, right? Often strong feelings come through racing irrational thoughts in our minds, not through reality. And on top of this, I used to believe that these negative thoughts and feelings were abnormal or bad or made me like there was something wrong with me.

But the reality is we all have them. Nobody is immune to them. Nobody gets to go through life without experiencing them. And that if we can approach them logically, knowing what they are, knowing what they really mean, and knowing that they're usually not as important as we think, then we can actually improve our lives by investigating them. So the question is, how do you investigate these thoughts and feelings so that you can actually change your life?

The question is, how do we distinguish between reality and cognitive distortion? Cognitive distortion is just cognitive dissonance between reality and what our brains tell us reality is, right? So there's four questions I ask myself when I don't know what to do because I have very strong emotions and racing thoughts. One, is it true? Is the thing, so say the thought is, I'm so fat, I'll never lose weight. Is it true? Well, it feels true, right? But is it true? Maybe not.

Is it absolutely true? Well, I mean, it's not absolutely true because I guess I haven't tried everything on the face of the planet, right? So it can't be absolutely true. Okay, so it's not absolutely true that you can never lose weight. Then the third question is how does this thought make me feel? When I think to myself, I can never lose weight, how do I feel? Discouraged, frustrated, anxious, depressed, sad, right? So is that a productive thought? Probably not.

And then the last question I ask myself is, what would it be like if I didn't believe this thought? What would I do if I didn't believe this thought? Well, if I believed it was possible to lose weight, I might actually try harder. I would actually show up to the gym. I would actually go when my friends asked me to go on a walk. I would actually skip dessert because I wouldn't feel like I was just like a dead end and there was no point of trying, right? And so I

Those are the four questions I use to really break down my thoughts because here's what I've come to realize is that we're told all these things like our feelings are very important, our thoughts are very important, but oftentimes there's only a few that are and many are very large distortions. And a lot of us have been living our life in reaction to distorted thoughts and feelings and our life becomes this accumulation of reactions rather than intentional steps to make our lives better.