#435 - The Key to Changing Your Life's Destiny — How to Get Unstuck, Take Control of Your Life, and Find Joy
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Do you ever feel stuck? Like you're not sure how you arrived at this point, but you just feel that your life could be better? Well, if this is your case, then a powerful solution is beginning with the end in mind. In other words, visualizing clearly the life you want in the future and then working your way backwards. And an essential part of this, which we'll discuss today, is having

clear values that guide your actions. So I thought it would be a good idea to invite Ethan for a conversation about it and ask him about how he uses values to live his best life. Also, stick around until the end because we're going to tell you about the most common pronunciation mistake that English learners make and how you can stop making it.

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All right, Ethan. So we're talking today all about personal values. And to start, I want to just ask a very honest question because I know that most people I know, friends, family, they haven't done this. They haven't really clarified what are their personal values. But the question is, why do you think it's harder to succeed without setting personal values? So I think, first of all, Izzy, it's important to recognize that

All of us have values, whether or not we sit down and do the work to actually figure out what they are or to be deliberate about the values that we want to follow. So by default, you have them. And maybe some of them aren't actually the values that you would like to live your best life by. Right. So I think that a really nice metaphor is.

Is that values are like a compass, like that thing that if you're lost in the woods, you would use to find which direction you're heading. So it's like a compass for your behavior, for the direction that you want to go in your life, for the life that you want to lead. So actually doing the work to sit down and think about, okay, what values are important to me? What values do I want to live my life by then?

It helps to, you know, it's no guarantee, but I think it helps to get you on the right track towards the life that you want to live. You're using the phrase like to live by, to live by values, the life that you want to live by. What does that mean? That phrase to live by something. So if you live your life by something, it's that that thing guides you or it's showing that that's

something that you consider essential or super important to you. So some people live their life by a religion or a philosophy, right? Sometimes we hear a very powerful quote and then the response sometimes is like words to live by. Oh, nice. Yeah. Right. So I want to hear about one, like something that you live by. I wanted to talk about one that's been more recent for me, actually, like in the last, let's say six to nine months.

And so much so that I actually got it tattooed kind of recently. I don't know if you guys can see that. If not, I can show a picture. But I have a tattoo that says Track Joy. That's one of my core values that I follow now. And actually, because I have to translate this sometimes when people ask me here, to cut on our Spanish, right? And it's something that makes a lot more sense in English. And I'll tell the story behind it. But track in the sense is that you're trying to find something.

And this comes from, I believe you're familiar with him, Boyd Vardy. So it kind of came out of a podcast. I listened to him, um,

probably two years ago now. And I've listened to that podcast a couple of times. It's amazing. We can definitely link it in the show notes. And I read his book. He's written several books, but he has a book called The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. And he is a tracker, meaning a person who helps to find animals. And this is something that people used to do for hunting. And nowadays it's more for tourism in the country that he lives in, in South Africa. And

And there's a quote from the book when I read it a couple years ago that really impacted me. I think it's just been in the last months that I have really embraced this as something that I want to have as a personal guiding value is track joy. So I have actually the quote to I got it like a poster made and I printed it out and it's like I'm looking at it right now. It's right here behind my computer. So it says track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life.

Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it. There's a really nice word here that people probably don't know. Lousy. What does that mean? If something makes you feel lousy. It makes you feel miserable or bad. Like you don't feel like emotionally so well or mentally. But lousy more literally, it's like messy. Like dirty, right? Another really nice word for this that's very colloquial is crummy. Like you feel crummy. So...

That's very simple, easier said than done. Like track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it. And he actually has this philosophy that's called path of not here. Because oftentimes we have this restlessness or aimlessness in our lives. And I think that was kind of the case for me several months ago. And it's something I'm recuperating from in some sense that I was...

on what he calls the path of not here, meaning that it's the sense that something is off, something isn't right in my life. And I know that, but I don't know how to get back to the path of here, you know, the right path, the path that I'm meant to be on in my life. And coincidentally or not, at this point, I discovered a woman named Martha Beck, who's a life coach, very famous in the

And she actually, I just found this out later. It's kind of interesting how these things happen. But she was Boyd Vardy's or is Boyd Vardy's life coach. So he's learned a lot from her. And it just like got the connection much later after I had discovered her. You said the word restlessness? Is that it?

That's a very long word. But could you break that down? Because I feel there's like three parts in that word, right? There's a word formation there, you could say. Nice. So rest, if you rest, you sleep or you recuperate energy. When we add that suffix less to something, it means you're without that thing. So you're without rest. And then when you add ness, it usually just turns a like restless an adjective into a noun. So it's like restlessness is the state of being without rest.

And that's just a fancy way of saying that you're like feeling an anxiety or you're feeling maybe I would describe this as like a buzzing energy, like you have bees inside of you or something, you know, that it's just like this feeling like I have to do something like something isn't right. I have to take some action. And when you're not sure why that is, you're not sure what the action you have to take is or what the solution is that you're looking for. Then it's like a really miserable feeling. Right. I was going to ask exactly that, because.

It feels like you have experienced in your life this to the point that when you discovered this value in you, you're like, this is it. This is what I needed to shed light on. What does that mean to shed light on something? To make it clear, to make it apparent and visible and something that you're aware of. Right. It's like literally just like to turn light on and you can make it visible. Right. But anyway, yeah.

What would you say would be a situation in your life that you were feeling on the path of not here? And then suddenly, now that you have this value more clarified to you, you feel like, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to stop doing this. Yeah, so that's the hard thing is that I don't think it was just one thing. It wasn't just one change I need to make and then everything was all right. I was kind of stuck in a rut. And I think it was maybe because my life had kind of gone into autopilot. Like I was just...

Going through the motions. I'm using a lot of expressions here, by the way. And of course you can study the vocabulary flashcards and learn these, but I was on autopilot going through the motions and. You know, I realized like, okay, this isn't working for me anymore. The way that I'm going about doing things isn't working anymore. And I had several transformative experiences over the last months and it's something I'm still figuring out. Maybe one part of this was just being less in touch with

My spiritual side, like it was something when I was younger that, uh, out of outside of when I got out of university, I got really into like meditation and more spiritual practices and so on. And I think in the last years I just felt too busy for that. And, and I was ignoring that part. And, um,

I wanted to come back to Martha Beck that I was mentioning because discovering her, it was sort of this turning point for me because it helped me to realize this. I listened to a podcast with her on Huberman. We can link this in the show notes. And then I listened to another one with Tim Ferriss and something when I was listening to her, it just like pointed to something in me that I was like, oh my God, like, this is so true. This is just like exactly what I needed to hear.

and i read a book by her called the way of integrity and i actually bought brought some small clips from interviews with her that i wanted to share with you all and that kind of talk a little bit about some of her philosophy but she's brilliant anything i listen to with her i'm always just like nodding my head like oh yes yes yes like that's the stuff really resonate with it right exactly what does that mean if you resonate with something

It's just that, like, you feel it inside of you. Like, it's something that's outside of you that inside of you also feels, like, true. So it's resonating. I wanted to point out before I play the clips just a few things that I think will help with understanding better. So...

One thing that she says is seek a certain type of success. So she's talking about how society, how the culture that we live in, how it pressures us to seek a certain type of success. What does it mean if we use seek in this way? It's to search, right? To try and find something.

so something else it's not exactly an expression but it's a saying that she brings up in the video that might be kind of difficult to understand and it's that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master so a servant is someone that serves someone else sometimes back in the day it might have actually been like someone who is a slave but nowadays

it's probably not the word that we would use as much for a servant, right? It's someone who might be paid by someone who's wealthy to do different things for them, especially around the house and so on. And a master is like the person who gives orders, right? So it's kind of saying that like your mind can do wonderful things for you kind of when you're in control of it.

But if you let your mind control you, especially just like the thoughts that are buzzing around in our mind all the time, then in general, it's not going to put you in a good place. You'll probably be feeling anxious and you'll be overthinking things. And yeah, you won't be in control of your life. I think most people don't know that they are not their minds, right? That their minds could actually be more like a tool that you control it. Most definitely. The final thing is a nail. She's talking about a metaphor of you're standing on a nail.

So what's a nail in this sense? Well, an actual nail is the thing that you hammer on a wall, the metal thingy. So you can hang like a painting, for example, right? But...

In this case, if you stand on a nail, that's just uncomfortable. Right? Yes. Or painful. Even. Painful. Yeah. So let's go ahead and watch those couple clips. And integrity doesn't mean what most people think it does, at least not here. It comes from the word integer, which means one thing. And being in integrity is being whole and undivided.

So there's no part of you that's divided from your true self. So when people get, when they're socialized to do something like seek a certain type of success, if that's not according to your true nature and your culture pulls you toward it, you leave your nature to serve your culture. And what that does is it splits you in two. So you're no longer in integrity. You're in duplicity.

but you don't actually even know it with the conscious mind. You feel it in the heart, you feel it in the body and the soul, but the mind is clueless because it's a cultural tool. That's why I love the saying that the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. So when we go to serve our cultural ideas of what joy is, we leave our true nature and always, but always that causes suffering, which is a huge gift,

Because suffering is the only thing that will get our attention enough to say, wait, I need to change my life. So if it weren't suffering, we would not pay attention to it. And we would never find the path of our right self, our true self, our one individual path that no one else can ever have. But one addiction specialist I know says it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain. But that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail. You need to take the nail out.

And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way. Amazing. It really feels like this could be a more universal value for people in general because it's kind of meta. It's kind of like about values themselves. Yeah.

It's true.

In other words, you're not you don't have these two parts of yourselves, like the part that's trying to conform to society, to your culture and the part of you that actually is that unique inner self that sort of knows what it wants and that you need to be aligned with in order to make your unique impact on the world. Right. And I think that it's really interesting what you said about suffering.

So a lot of times people think suffering is the same as pain, but they're actually two different things because pain is something that usually is not optional.

Right. Like if you step on a nail or if you, you know, fall down a hill or something like that, you'll be in pain. It's a natural human reaction. But whether or not you want to suffer from that pain is optional. And suffering is caused by this. It's caused by our mind. Like, you know, that's when your mind is the master of you. Then you're just like in this state.

Loop about the suffering about like the story that you're telling yourself about why the pain is bad and you need it to end and it needs to go away and that can be physical pain or it can be emotional pain a lot of times I think nowadays most of us are just suffering from so much emotional pain like all the time We don't need to suffer from it. We can get on a path to not be suffering from it and I think that's what she's pushing us and just a final note on that is the second clip is basically what she's saying right is that's kind of like you're standing on a nail and

And you're taking drugs. It could be figuratively speaking, you're taking drugs. So, you know, it might be that you're doing things like you're scrolling through Instagram. You're like on the death scroll of Instagram to try to distract yourself away from your life, you know, from the things that you really need to deal with, from that duplicity of doing things that are out of integrity with your inner values because you feel like it's what you need to do based on societal pressures. And you need to stop doing

Observe your life, you know kind of become the observer figure out what is about your life that you're not liking and take the nail out Like stop the thing that's making you suffer. It's got to be very deliberate, right? You won't you will not happen if you don't Really take action and you use an expression that

A few minutes ago that it was stuck in a rut. So like when you're feeling like you're stuck in a rut, that is your life isn't going anywhere or you're not making progress with something. Then a turning point, another expression you used would be to realize this and to realize that another quote that I like this one is from psychologist Viktor Frankl is that between stimulus and response, there's got to be consciousness.

You've got to be aware of what's happening. Otherwise, you just react. You feel pain and you suffer. But you should know that what makes us human, one of the things that makes us human, he discovered, is that we have the power to choose.

the ability to choose and he suffered a lot i mean he went through a lot of pain that's for sure right but he realized that other people didn't actually have control over his thoughts they had control over everything else right he was a prisoner in a war but and basically they did awful things to him but he realized that you know what

They can do whatever they want with me, but they cannot control my thoughts and the way I respond to these things. But Ethan, what would you say is an important next action if somebody wants to live by these ideas? You know, if they're feeling like they're stuck in a rut, their life isn't going anywhere and they're just not feeling that joy.

How they can track joy, start doing that. Well, I can recommend both these books I mentioned were hugely impactful on me. So the line trackers guide to life and the way of integrity. And also we can put the podcast and the show notes, right? That we mentioned that that's a really great place to start because it's maybe an hour and a half for each podcast. You can listen to it and get a taste. And if it resonates with you, like it resonated with me, then you can move on to the books.

I did bring today an exercise from Martha Beck's book, The Way of Integrity, that I wanted to walk you through, Izzy, and walk you guys through. So if you have a piece of paper there, you can take notes. I highly recommend you guys, if you have a note, if you're watching this on your phone, maybe you have a notepad, or if you have a pen and a paper, that'll help for it. So amazing. Let me just share an introduction that she gives to this exercise. So the exercise is called Meeting Your Inner Teacher. And

and this is what another way that she calls kind of like getting in touch with that inner truth that inner guide you know that's beyond just your anxiety filled thoughts so she says maybe you've never had an experience of pure sweet integrity maybe you're remembering an experience of feeling briefly but totally aligned with your own truth do you want that feeling back here's a way you can access your inner teacher right now step one

take a moment to think of a few things you consistently make yourself do even though you don't really want to do them. So let me give some examples. It could be like a house tour, it could be maybe at work having to participate in a bunch of Zoom meetings, anything. Just take a moment to think of that and take note of it.

Alright, so step two. With that activity in mind, say to yourself, "I'm meant to do this thing." So say that the activity is take out the garbage. Maybe you have a partner and your partner's always getting on you like, "Take out the garbage," you know? But it's something that you just really hate to do or you just dislike it. You feel like, "Eh," every time you have to do it, right? So what I want you to do is

just in your head, mentally repeat to yourself, "I'm meant to take out the garbage," or "I'm meant to do this thing that I feel like I'm supposed to do." As you repeat, "I'm meant to take out the garbage,"

Notice any physical sensations. So try to scan your body. If you've never done this before, if you're not in touch with your bodily sensations, this for me is something I've been just getting to know in the last years of doing therapy. But just try to kind of like scan the sensations in your body and noticing anything in your muscles, in your joints. You might go from top to bottom, like maybe in your head, in your throat, in your chest, in your stomach, in your skin.

and write down anything you notice as you're repeating this thought in your head, "I'm meant to take out the garbage" or "I'm meant to do this thing." Feel free to pause if you need a few more seconds to write down or to feel those sensations. And now turn your attention to your emotions. So continue repeating in your head this phrase. What emotional reactions arise? Do you feel anxiety? Maybe bliss? Apathy?

And if you're like me, again, that maybe you weren't trained when you were young to really feel your emotions depending on what country you come from, what culture you come out of, your gender and everything, you might not have a lot of experience with this. You can look up something that's really helpful as an emotion wheel. If you look this up on Google Images or we can show here on the screen, that can help too for you to get more in touch with more specific emotions. So write down those emotions you feel as you repeat those in your head. All right. And then answer this question, yes or no.

as you mentally repeat i am meant to take out the garbage or whatever the thing you feel like you're supposed to do as you mentally repeat that do you feel free write down yes or no all right now let go of the thought i'm meant to take out the garbage i'm meant to do this thing i feel like i should and instead mentally repeat this sentence i'm meant to live in peace you don't have to actually believe it right now but just repeat in your mind over and over i'm meant to live in peace as you repeat i'm meant to live in peace again notice your physical sensations

scan your whole body with attention and write down what you're feeling physically as you repeat that in your head and then continuing to repeat that in your head notice any emotions that arise and write down what those emotions are finally the last step answer this question yes or no as you mentally repeat i'm meant to live in peace do you feel free write down yes or no no easy i don't know maybe you've done this

Very quickly, I don't know if you've gotten like the full benefit of feeling it. Hopefully you guys, you paused and kind of took the time to really feel in your body to really see what emotions come up. But here's what she says is the point of this exercise. So she says that the takeaway from this exercise is simple. The voice of your inner teacher, so that inner truth, is not the one that tells you that the meaning of your life is to do something that you think you're supposed to do. It's a sensation that you get when you state that you are meant to live in peace. Amazing. Like this is, this is...

It really frees you from, it really frees you from, like, I'd say limiting beliefs even. Right? What is limiting belief, by the way? It's a belief that limits you. It's a belief that, like she's saying, that it's something that you feel like you're supposed to do, that you can't do certain things. And...

Oftentimes, when we say that we can't do something, usually it's because we're limiting ourselves. We're putting up a barrier for ourselves. It's not usually because that is actually true, as long as it doesn't harm any other person, right? But, you know, I think language has a lot to do with this. Because when you say something, you're manifesting that. And there's a study that we were talking about, you and I were talking about this week, I think, that people just tend to feel more depressed sometimes.

When they say that they have to do something. Right. It's not, they're not choosing. You don't have the power to choose. They have to, they must. Right. So when you, when you say it, that totally impacts your energy and also your sense of self. You start to identify as a person that's more like helpless, powerless, and that's not a good thing. Right. Yeah. You have the power to change your circumstances and that's,

Hopefully if you guys took time with that the first time I did this exercise, it was really impactful on me so much so that I whipped out a sticky note and I wrote down I meant to live in peace and I have it like here on my computer. And it's really powerful too because so the value, right, that I shared at the beginning is track joy. So again, like this quote from Boyd Vardy we shared at the beginning, track what makes you feel good. I'm reading it up here. Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.

And sometimes we don't actually realize that something makes us feel lousy, but our body is telling us this. Like our mind, we logically will tell ourselves like, oh, I need to do this or something, you know, I have to do this. And so we logically are telling ourselves that we're supposed to do this thing, but

But then our body kind of has its own wisdom, right? And it rebels against this. And so it's going to, it'll, depending on what you felt in that, when you're telling yourself, I'm meant to take out the garbage or I'm meant to do this thing that I don't want to do. You can get more in touch with what are those body signals that are telling you like this thing's bad. And then you can pay attention to those in different moments. You know, maybe when you're spending time with a certain person that it's like, you're like, I don't actually feel good when I spend time with this person. It's like, maybe I need to start distancing myself more from this person.

And the final thing I would just say is like, okay, you can't just let the garbage pile up, obviously in your house, like there are certain things, but at least, you know, when you're doing something that makes you feel bad and you're not telling yourself, I have to do this thing or I'm supposed to do it. And you can maybe reframe that in your mind and hopefully spend more time doing the things

Spend more time with the people that help you to feel joy. It's good that you have something like this on the wall, like a quote. I'd say this is another next action that if you find a quote that inspires you, don't lose that. Don't just...

Don't lose track of that. Or even a sticky note. It's not the most beautiful thing, but it's a reminder, right? Serves its purpose. And just to close, one last thing that you reminded me about when you shared this is from a book that we read together, 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, that one of the commitments of a conscious leader is that you must feel your feelings all the way through completion.

You know, as soon as you start feeling something, give it space, you know, and give yourself time and energy to just go through it, to just understand what it is, because that tells you a lot. It's like you said, like your body is already telling you so much that we're not paying attention to. So this could be even another value. You know, I'm the kind of person who feels my feelings.

So if you just have that one idea and you maybe have a sticky note or something with those words, you'd be reminding yourself not to ignore or disregard your feelings and emotions.

So Izzy and you guys from our dear audience, it's been a lot of fun getting to talk to you about some philosophy, about values. This is stuff that Izzy and I, we just eat up this kind of self-development stuff. So if you guys want more lessons like this one, let us know because we would love to create them. And I wanted to leave you guys with some final words of wisdom from Martha Beck. If you haven't already been confused, convinced to check out more of her work, then I recommend

highly recommend it but this is one short paragraph from her book that when I read it it's just like I had to stop like I kind of got emotional and everything and hopefully it will resonate with you as well so Martha says you are infinitely worthy you are infinitely precious you have always been enough you will always be enough there's no place you don't belong you are lovable you are loved you are love

Nice words to live by. All right, Ethan, thank you so much for sharing all of this with me. This matters. I think that we have to search constantly for exactly what you're saying, track joy. And just talking about it brings me joy already, right?

So thank you so much for that. All right, guys. Now, if you are interested in watching or listening to the full episode, including this next part about the difference between can or can't, you want to head over to the real life app right now. Just click the link in the description below and you'll be taken straight to this lesson on the app.

And on there, you also get to practice with the advanced words that you learned today. We give you an interactive transcript where you can tap on the words. It really is the best way that you can learn with our lessons and become more fluent, more natural confident when you speak English. So come and join me right now on a RealLife app. And as we always say here at RealLife, no matter what divides us, that which unites us is far greater. One, two, three. Aww yeah!

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