Break Your Negative Thinking - WAKE UP POSITIVE with Powerful Motivation
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Rules and restrictions may apply. Negative thinking is a major problem because you've got to get control of this. You actually can control what this does. It's not a magic trick, man. If you want to be successful, you have to get control of this.

You can eradicate negative thinking from your life. Now, it's not gonna say you're not gonna ever have a negative thought. I have them, but I don't have them nowhere near as frequent as I used to because I learned what they are. I get rid of them. I don't have time for you. I'm on a positive track. I got things I'm trying to accomplish. I'm trying to be successful and I'm trying to be happy. If you're trying to be successful or happy, you have no room for negativity. There were behaviors and thoughts you've had in the past

that were needed to produce the results you currently have. But you need to stop what's no longer needed. Maybe you're continuing a thought or a worry that at one time was needed but no longer is. It could be something to protect yourself from fear, to protect yourself from harm. But if we're not conscious of dropping a thought or a behavior that's no longer needed, we take old thoughts, old version of ourselves into trying to become the new version of ourselves.

If you're stuck, you're stuck in a story. There's a story you're telling yourself that doesn't serve you anymore. But what you need to do is you need to alter your associations. You need to do something in a short window of time. You definitely need to evaluate what is no longer needed. There's all kinds of stories we tell ourselves that don't serve us anymore. Maybe it's a story about your past, a story about your parents, a story about a success you used to have. You keep talking about, if I can be real with you,

Whatever you've achieved up to this point that story you keep talking about every second you spend in that old story about what you've achieved your degree Every time you live in that story you're stripping time and focus from the new story You can't have a new identity without a new story. What's the old story? You keep reading. Maybe it's not a success maybe it's a failure that you've had a mistake you made a

and you're repeating this story to yourself simultaneously trying to create a new identity. One of the things we have to do to create a new identity is to begin to tell a new story. Who are you now? What are you all about now? Where are you going now? See, here's what's amazing. At any point in your life, you can just decide to write a new script. The leading character in the story of your life is you. And guess what? You and God control the script.

Listen to me, at any time you want, you can simply decide to be a new character. Stop telling the old story. Here's the truth, nobody cares. No one cares if you've had a setback, no one cares if you had a victory. And that old character you keep playing is the very thing that will prevent you from becoming this new version of you. Nothing will ever turn out as we expect.

And so no matter how much we prepare for one turn of fate, something will sneak up from the blind side. When that time comes, as it will, the people who survive and even triumph over the unanticipated will be people who are ready to adapt. They will step out of the path of the charging bull. They will step back and let something else bear the brunt of impact.

It's always been important to be flexible and farsighted, and when we can't anticipate being prepared for all possibilities.

In life, you will always be faced with a series of God-ordained opportunities, brilliantly disguised as problems and challenges. If you've lost your job, don't say that I've been laid off. Just say I've been given an opportunity by the universe to find my life worth. Now you're taking it from a different perspective. Now you become an active force in your life. Now you are the one, rather than running from things as they begin to change, you become a change driver.

Because you know that you've got the power within you to make the difference. This force, this power, this energy that you have, that's more powerful than anything that can ever happen. You're more powerful than your circumstances or anything that you can experience right now.

I want to go back to what you were talking about with character. Are there particular things that you believe every person should have?

to build a strong or, I'm not sure what the right word would be, meaningful character? I think character mainly is developed out of adversity. I know in my life, it's been in my failures that I've discovered myself.

And it's been in my failures. I've discovered things that I really probably do well. But it's also been in my failures, things that I've discovered about myself that I thought... Is it just discovery, though? Or is it, like, can you build your character? Oh, I think you build it off of it. But I think you have to discover first. I think awareness is always on the front end. You can't grow yourself if you don't know yourself. So I think awareness is huge. You have to be aware of yourself.

strengths, weaknesses, you know, the whole deal. And once you're aware of yourself, then you have to take your giftedness and maximize your strengths, and then you have to make the right choices. But awareness is on the front end, and we don't hear a lot about awareness. How can you develop awareness? Well, first of all, I think you need other people's help.

I hear people all the time say, well, I think I'm very self-aware and I always get amused with that because we're not. We all have blind spots. I have blind spots. So if there's any self-awareness for me, it's because I've had somebody speak into my life. And one more thing on character, okay? I was having an interview with a major CEO of a large, large software company. And so I asked him, I said, talk to me about your failures like I do in my learning lunches.

This was on an executive circle call where I was on the phone and other executives were listening. So I said, talk to me about your failures. I said, what would you like to go in your life and do over? You know, get the do over. So what's your top do over? And he said something very interesting to me. He said, well, he said, I've made, I've had failures and I've had a lot of mistakes, made some wrong decisions, but I don't think I want to do any of them over. I said, you mean if you could go back and correct a failure, a mistake,

You wouldn't want to go back and correct it. He said, no. He said, the lessons I learned out of my failures probably are a lot more valuable than if I had just made a successful decision and moved on. He said, who I am today is based upon not having do-overs and learning out of my adversity and difficulty and struggles and darkness. And I thought it was a fantastic question.

It really talked to me a lot. And I thought to myself, I think that's a perfect example of leaders building character out of their failure and out of their adversity.

There's another side of the stress response. So what would that stress be called? What's that type of stress? So unfortunately, there's no name for this. This is one of the important things. Maybe we'll figure it out today. Maybe your audience will figure it out. They're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too. So unfortunately, there isn't a word for this. But unfortunately,

This is one type of stress. This is one type of stress, which is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated, and you want to be less alert, less activated, and less agitated. The alert stress. That's right. We could call it the alert stress. Hyper alert stress. Hyper alert stress. Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. Yeah. There's another side of stress, which is when...

There are a lot of things happening in the world. Pandemics, you can't work because there's another shutdown or there's strife in your life or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough. And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people.

that what I call the whole process is one of limbic friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain. Limbic literally means edge. They're near the edge of the brain. And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions. And then we've got our forebrain, our...

prefrontal cortex for the aficionados and when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and Rational manner when we can control our body in our mind. It's called top-down processing We're we're controlling ourselves, but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices, huh? so when there's this friction we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion and

You can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. And in fact, as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive. When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing, they just do that.

And so there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say, calm down, don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you shouldn't do.

Then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried We're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated. We need more energy. We need more energy We need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed. What's that called? Well, we should come up with a name now, so that would be exhaustion stress or overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress or Now a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndrome

which sometimes they are, but they'll say things like adrenal burnout, which actually doesn't exist. Adrenal fatigue. Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline. But most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes.

So the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so over-activated, they're in this alertness, hyper-alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over-fatigue stress. So one turns into the other one. Right. So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress, and then we'll talk about trauma,

is to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up? Or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down? Because the solutions to those are often quite different.

So on the previous time we met, we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly, which is this double inhale, long exhale. Typically the inhales are done through the nose, the exhale through the mouth. So the physiological sigh, which was discovered by scientists in the 30s, and then Jack Feldman's group at UCLA has really identified the underlying brain circuits. And then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting. That double inhale, followed by an exhale.

we know is the fastest real-time tool for taking one's state of alertness down. The hyper alert stress. Right. You're not going to crash into sleep, but you're going from hype. You're not feeling good. You're too agitated. You want to calm down. And

What's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. So when you're stressed, just telling yourself, don't stress, don't stress, don't stress, calm down, calm down, rarely works. It also rarely works to tell someone else to calm down.

To relax. Hey, relax. Yeah. Usually it has the opposite effect. Don't tell me to relax. And it can be damaging for relationships. If you've ever, you know, someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax, sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't feel supported. What should they do in that moment? They should look to the body. The nervous system includes the brain, but also all the connections to the body and back again. And so when you can't control your mind, you want to do something purely mechanical, like the physiological side.

Because that, you know, once you take control of the body in that way, then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top-down control again. Top-down control is what children and puppies don't have.

Impulsive. Yeah, I've got a 10-year-old bulldog. His name's Costello. He barely does anything now because he's Costello. But when he was a puppy, everything was a stimulus. He would walk over, pick up a cord and chew on it. Then he'd drop it and he'd pivot to something else. And it's because they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system. They don't have this suppression. So there's no friction. The limbic system just does whatever it wants. And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia...

And in certain people who have front temporal brain damage, they become very impulsive. Who are you going to be? How you plan to live your life every day? How are you going to respond when you don't get that job you had your heart set on? For all of you who are going to be teachers, what are you going to do if the students in your class next year just don't respond to your lessons? For all of you going into business, how will you react when your boss gives you a goal that feels way too high?

See, these are the moments that define us. What is your purpose? What are you here for? What do you want to do? And I said, I'd like to understand God realization. I'd like to be able to understand and live from that place where God is within me and I know it.

The importance of meditation, I can't stress it enough. You have to go to the silence. You have to go to the place within that can't be divided. Think about it. Silence is the only place where you can go that you can't divide it. You cut it up and you still got more silence and more silence. And it is in that silence, in that meditation. Once you're in that state of God realization, you'll understand things like your intuition. And being honest with yourself is hard. Being your biggest critic, do you know how delusional?

Do you know how hard, like my friends, we are so good at casting judgment on everybody else. We're unstoppable at that. Keyboard warriors on Twitter, everyone. We're not doing that to ourselves. Now, do not confuse that with you're grinding and the company hasn't turned yet and now you're gonna bail too soon. Everything is about balance. Here's my bigger question.

If you're in year six of your company after this little rant and it's not crushing, but you're happy as fuck, you won. I was willing to inconvenience my entire life, my entire life. I was willing to disrupt my entire life to buy my future, to buy my possibility, to give my dream a chance. See, we're not supposed to tuck our dreams in on the pillow when we get up in the morning. We're not supposed to leave them at home.

We can go and fulfill somebody else's dream. We're not supposed to do that. That's not what we're wired to do. That's not who we are. What do you want to create? It's not keeping score. Your brain is keeping score because your brain is designed to keep you safe. What was hard for me is deciding to work hard, deciding to...

use my gifts in certain ways to challenge myself to do things that I didn't think I could do to put myself in uncomfortable situations. You can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure. Which one of those when you're 90 years old are you going to be more proud of?

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