E42: Here's How To Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy

The Diary of a CEO podcast has kept me extremely level-headed, it's kept me from being self-destructive and it has maintained my self-awareness; and these points are exactly what I wanted to discuss in this week's episode. I additionally relay the impor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Steven Bartlett?

  I really have always been happy, always. This podcast has maintained my happiness, but it's also allowed me to identify things very, very quickly that posed a risk to any unhappiness in any part of my life. And most importantly, it's given me more self-awareness. Self-awareness as to who I am, what I want, and why I want it. This week, that's exactly what we're going to talk about. Why we do those illogical, self-destructive things, those self-limiting things that we all do, why we feel we can't stop doing them, and how we can. As always, expect honesty.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  For this episode, it's no different. For this episode, it's just me, sat here in my home studio at 3am in a cold, wintery New York City, and it's you, sat there, stood there, laying there, listening to my diary. So without further ado, this is the Diary of a CEO, and I'm Steven Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  So the first point in my diary this week is about your why. And Simon Sinek made this topic famous with his book, Start With Why. But I'm taking a completely different perspective on the topic of your why. For me, I'm talking about your motivations. I'm not talking about your brand story or anything like that. I'm talking about your central motivations for everything you say you want in your life. In my diary this week, I've just written, "It's so important to know why you want it." Knowing the reason why you want it is the most important thing. You know, we all say we want to be a millionaire. We want sports cars. We want a boyfriend or a girlfriend. We want to be a public speaker. We want to be an entrepreneur. We want to be famous.

• 2:17Steven Bartlett?

  We want a million followers. We say we want to change the world, but 99% of the time, the reason people want to do it, the reason people want to change the world, for example, isn't because there's one thing they desperately need to change. There isn't a social cause they need to defeat. They don't want to change the world. The truth is, and the uncomfortable truth is, but the important truth is, they just want to be seen as a person that changed the world. They want the admiration that they would get from such an accomplishment. Their ego needs that. Their self-esteem and their self-worth needs the applause. I think 99.9% of us have no clue why we want what we say we want.

• 3:01Steven Bartlett?

  The genuine, underlying reason why we actually want the thing we say we want. People say they want to be an entrepreneur because they admire entrepreneurs. And so I think, deep down, they think if they become one, they will admire themselves. Again, that's just insecurity. It's your ego, your lack of self-worth needing that reinforcement. Misunderstanding your own genuine motivations is not only dangerous for other reasons, but it's also the number one reason you'll never achieve that goal. If I take public speaking as an example, if you want to be a public speaker, but subconsciously, deep down, you really, really just want the appreciation and the confidence that you

• 3:44Steven Bartlett?

  think public speakers have, you'll never be a great public speaker. Because public speakers, you know, they tell their great stories. They share their great knowledge. I don't know one great public speaker, and I know a lot, that set out to be a public speaker. The truth is, they set out to do great things. And in the process, they created a unique story. They learnt valuable information and now thousands of people want to pay them to listen to that story. I mean, who the fuck sets out to be a public speaker? I mean, presumably. The majority of people that are doing that are doing it for the wrong reasons. And because they're doing it for the wrong reasons, they've tried to circumnavigate the process that great public speakers go on. If we're talking great public speakers, I'm

• 4:27Steven Bartlett?

  talking Martin Luther King, I'm talking Winston Churchill, you know, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In our modern times, people like Tony Robbins, these are all people that built tremendous personal and life experience first before taking to the stage. Had they taken to the stage first because they just wanted to be a public speaker because of their insecurities and because of their desire to be validated by crowds of people, then I'm sure, I'm convinced that none of these people would have been great public speakers because they just wouldn't have had the story to tell. And that's why, in one example, using public speaking as the example, knowing the reasons why you want it is the most important thing. And misunderstanding your own genuine motivations as to why you're

• 5:12Steven Bartlett?

  striving for something, I genuinely believe could be the number one reason why you'll never actually achieve it. And the truth is, if you want it for your own internal reasons, you'll do it like a hobby and therefore you'll master it like a great. If you want it for someone else's reasons, for external reasons, you'll do it like a chore and you'll fail like a fraud. You see, people say they want a boyfriend, we all do. We say, we want a boyfriend, a girlfriend. We don't. We want to feel loved. And in some cases, in particularly deeper cases, what we really want is to feel the sense of security that the negative experiences and the feelings of abandonment from our childhood robbed us off. So we rush

• 5:55Steven Bartlett?

  into relationships broken, hoping, you know, this person will fix us. But our unhealed trauma leads to insecure, toxic behaviour, the relationship fails and the self-esteem decays even further. If we'd just only known what we actually wanted, we might not have gone down in a ball of fire and failed so badly. And this is why, I'll say it again, knowing the reason why you want it is the most important thing. If you want it to please other people's opinions or to impress people in the hope that you'll receive some kind of external recognition or validation that will fix some unhealed issue inside you, not only will you struggle to ever get it, as I've said above, because your motivations aren't aligned with the steps it takes to get it, but even

• 6:39Steven Bartlett?

  if you do get it, even if you do get it, and I've seen this in my closest, dearest friends, even if you do get that thing that you think you want for the reasons you think you want it, you'll realise that it wasn't actually what you were looking for anyway. And as I've said on this podcast a number of times, some of my closest friends strive to build super successful businesses and admiration and fame in the public eye for many, many years. And on my mother's life, on my dog's life, I promise you, in almost 100% of occasions where I knew my friend wanted something for the wrong reasons, when they got it, they were miserable. They were absolutely miserable. And in my own life,

• 7:22Steven Bartlett?

  I am so scared of my own goals because history tells me that I've not always known why I was striving for something. As I've discussed at length on this podcast, many of the goals I had when I was 18 years old weren't for intrinsic reasons. They weren't because I was seeking fulfillment. I was seeking to impress because I thought that would give me fulfillment. I had it all wrong. I didn't understand what fulfillment was and I did not know why, deeply down, why I wanted the things I wanted. I'm going to say that again. Even if you get it, even if you do end up getting that thing that you secretly, deep down, subconsciously, maybe without knowing, don't actually want for the right

• 8:05Steven Bartlett?

  reasons, even if you do get it, you'll realise that it wasn't actually what you were looking for anyway. What you were looking for was self-worth, but what you got was lots of followers. What you were looking for was happiness, like I was at eighteen years old, but what you got was a bunch of material things. What you were looking for was the feeling of security that your childhood robbed you of, but what you got was another toxic relationship with a manipulative partner. You've got to look at everything you're striving for in your life and you've got to ask yourself, honestly, why do I want this? Why? You've got to make sure those reasons are genuine. You've got to make sure they are for you, for your family, for your loved

• 8:50Steven Bartlett?

  ones, for your fulfillment, because knowing the reason why you want it is the most important thing.

• 8:59Steven Bartlett?

  The next point in my diary is about taking responsibility of your own bullshit. I'm guilty of this. You know, the most common reason why people don't get what they want out of life, in my opinion, why people never reach their full potential and why they don't make the progress they could make in all areas of their life is because they never, ever have the guts, have the self-awareness and have the honesty to take responsibility for their own bullshit, for their own faults, for their own mistakes, for their own toxic traits and for their own behaviour, right? And I've done this just as much as a lot

• 9:39Steven Bartlett?

  of people have. Blame is easier and it doesn't require us to assess ourselves and potentially harm our own ego and our own sense of righteousness. And when we're in a conflict or a situation where we feel vulnerable because, you know, we might have made a mistake or there's an emotional arousal, the safest way out of conflict for a very fragile ego is to find someone or something to blame. It's certainly not to take responsibility. It takes a certain level of maturity to take responsibility. And when we blame, Of course, our ego seems to get out safely, unscathed. But the issue that caused the conflict goes unresolved. And so it's only a matter of time before that conflict comes back around again. And we see that in our colleagues.

• 10:24Steven Bartlett?

  We see that in our relationships. We see that in our personal organisation. I've seen that in my personal organisation, right? I've always blamed external factors for the fact that I am horribly, horribly unorganised. I've always done that. I've said, oh, I'm busy, so I can't clean up my fucking house or my room. I can't clean up my kitchen. I'm the reason I'm unorganised. I'm the reason I'm out of shape, right? And I'm not saying that I am, but this is me just going through a mental exercise. I'm the reason why I can't hold a job. I am the reason I constantly get into conflicts. I am the reason why the patterns I see in my life keep repeating themselves time and time again. That's the bravery of taking responsibility.

• 11:08Steven Bartlett?

  And the importance of it outweighs the sense or need to be brave. And if you feel attacked, when I say the following, that you are responsible for the bullshit in your life, right? That you are responsible. And that's important for you to start admitting to some of these missteps or mistakes that you're making in your life, that you're constantly blaming everyone else for. If you feel attacked when I say that, then that's probably your ego desperately trying to play self-defence. You know, the way that we overcome bullshit is by owning it. And I think Instagram and pop culture, especially from the perspective that I've had,

• 11:48Steven Bartlett?

  where I post a lot of relatable stuff and people take my stuff and they share it with their following. They put it on their story, they put my quotes on their story. What they're often doing with my quotes is using it as an indirect to point at someone and say, see, you were wrong. But very, very fucking rarely does anybody share one of my quotes and say, oh my God, this is me. I need to stop being this toxic person. I need to stop exhibiting these toxic behaviours. And so many people will never make progress because their fragile self-defending ego has them trapped in a cycle where their own toxic trait, and we all have toxic traits, you do, you have lots of them. I have lots of them. Let's just, let's use this podcast

• 12:30Steven Bartlett?

  as a safe space just to, you know, like let out our toxic traits. I'm gonna start. I'm incredibly unorganised generally, specifically as it relates to my personal life. I'm a little bit more organised in a business context, but my personal life is tremendously unorganised. I have a tendency to seek perfection. Sometimes I can be quite contradictory in my pursuit of perfectionism. I am emotional at times about things that I shouldn't be emotional about. I genuinely, and this is me just being completely honest, I think I'm like better than 99% of people at like controlling my emotions generally. However, I still wanna perfect that 1% and I still find

• 13:11Steven Bartlett?

  myself reacting more than I respond in really sort of high emotionally arousing situations. There are some of my toxic traits, right? So here's a little challenge for anybody listening to this podcast. I just shared three of my toxic traits. I want you to pause this podcast right now, right? I'm not going anywhere. Podcasts are still gonna be here. And I want you to go to the notes section in your phone, or say out loud, or say in your head, or write it down, whatever you wanna do, just please do this right now, three of your most toxic traits. And this is really important for us to continue. I'm gonna stop for a second and I want you to pause me and write it down. Go. Okay, I hope you did that, but if you didn't, I forgive you.

• 13:53Steven Bartlett?

  But here's the thing, until you start caring more about your future, about progress, about self-development than you do about defending your ego all the time, you'll keep blaming the world and you'll keep being unhappy with your results and you'll keep being frustrated by your own lack of progress. This shit is nobody's problem but your own. Right? And this is the life that you have to live. So you might as well make it more pleasant to live by confronting these issues. I had to make the radical changes to my own perspective to realise this about myself. As I said, I'd labelled myself unorganised and I'd blamed my lifestyle. And because I blamed, nothing changed. The truth was, it was my fault. I had bad habits and I didn't want to address them.

• 14:38Steven Bartlett?

  Addressing them meant short-term hard work and being uncomfortable. And in many cases, being vulnerable. And because addressing our bad habits and toxic traits requires short-term hard work and discomfort, we put it off. And as my podcast guest next week's going to tell you, we are comfort-avoiding creatures by nature. But in putting it off, in doing so, we accept the long-term, harder work and longer-term discomfort that this unaddressed, toxic trait and bad habit will afflict upon our life, our relationships, our professional pursuits forever. It's time to admit your own bullshit. It's time to address your own toxic traits and to take responsibility and to break the cycle.

• 15:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so the next point in my diary, I've just written 2020 is going to be just like 2019 for you, unless you do something about it. We're getting to that time of year, ladies and gentlemen, where we're starting to see the 2020 personal campaigns begin, where everybody takes to social media and tries to convince the world that they're going to change next year. And there's nothing wrong with seeking to change. There's nothing wrong with that at all. But there is something which is unhelpful and unuseful use of your energy about more talk and not enough action, right? We are creatures, this is so important to know, if you do genuinely want to change. We are creatures of intense, deeply-wired habit.

• 16:11Steven Bartlett?

  And to think that an Instagram story or writing it down is going to change your life is quite honestly deluded. As they say, I think it's in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And if your actions are locked into the deep cycles of habit that all of our actions are, and we have those cycles because it creates routine, which creates safety and all these things. The truth is, if you genuinely are like 25 years old, 35 years old, 45 years old, and you want to make fundamental changes to your life next year, you have to perform radical change within your routines, within your habit cycles, to create that change and to change your trajectory. Writing it down in New Year's

• 16:54Steven Bartlett?

  resolutions aren't things that I inherently believe in unless they are coupled with radical, radical, behavioural, habit-shattering change. So this could mean hiring a personal trainer, if you want to go to the gym and start working out, not just writing it in your diary, because as creatures of habits, we are likely to return to our discomfort-avoiding state of not going to the gym. And so my advice to everybody as we approach this 2020 planning, you know, like, online rhetoric moment, which usually takes place after Christmas, because we lead up to Christmas and then we start immediately at that time, start thinking about our New Year's resolutions, is to couple every single one of your New Year's resolutions with the

• 17:39Steven Bartlett?

  radical change, the radical steps, the radical things you're going to put in place to make sure that that change happens. Because 2020 is going to be exactly like 2019 for you, unless there is radical change. And I'm really excited to go into December with this podcast and tell you some of the goals that I have for 2020, but also the radical measures I'm putting in place in my life to achieve those goals. And we'll talk about that soon in much more detail. And hopefully, I can talk you through how I'm setting my goals for 2020. And just by tweeting me and DMing me and all those things, you can tell me how you're setting yours.

• 18:20Steven Bartlett?

  So the next point in my diary is about self-awareness. I've written, how do you become more self-aware? This is something that I've hunted for. I've spent years hunting for the answer to this question. I know that self-improvement is impossible without self-awareness. Self-awareness has become a bit of a buzzword amongst the entrepreneurial self-help guru community, but for good reasons. Self-awareness, sometimes also referred to as sort of self-knowledge or introspection, is about understanding your own needs, your own desires, your own failings, your own habits and everything else that makes you tick. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting yourself, the better you are at making changes based on

• 19:02Steven Bartlett?

  new feedback and new information. And of course, self-awareness is a big part of both therapy and also if we go back to the times of Socrates, it's also a big part of philosophy. One of his favourite sayings, which was know thyself. Essentially, the more you pay attention to your emotions and how they work, the better you'll understand why you do the things that you do. The more you know about your own habits, the easier it is to improve on those habits. And in some cases, this makes a little bit of experimentation so incredibly important. There is this one self-awareness method called the double-loop learning theory. And in this method, you're continually encouraged to always question every aspect of your approach,

• 19:44Steven Bartlett?

  including your methodology as to why you're doing things, your internal biases about people and the world and your deeply held assumptions that are at play in every aspect of your life. This more psychological nuanced self-examination requires more than just honesty. It requires you to summon up the courage to act on that information once you get it. And the hope is that this may lead to fresh new ways of thinking about your life and your goals. But honestly, you can read every productivity tip out there. You can adopt the routines of the greatest people to ever live. And you can eat up every piece of self-help advice that comes across Instagram. But it's completely pointless if you don't know.

• 20:29Steven Bartlett?

  Know yourself well enough to put the correct advice or the correct steps into practice. And this is why I always say, one of my favorite quotes, probably my favorite quote that I've I've ever written in my own diary and I've posted online is. You can read as much books as you like, but if you're unable to read yourself, you'll never learn a thing. This this quote meant so much to me because I spent years of seeing people so close to me. Not realize the impact that the toxic traits in their personality were having on their lives. So I've I've seen my best friends be held back because of these toxic things they continue to do. And some of these friends are people that read the most books. They're into self-development and self-help more than anybody.

• 21:11Steven Bartlett?

  So how could someone be so into self-development, so into bettering themselves? Yet be the person that I consider to be on a Ferris wheel of making the same mistakes time and time again. It's easy to fall for the idea that if you know yourself well enough, just by reading books. Then you'll be able to fix all your problems, but psychology has proven that that's just not how it works. It is step one, but it's not how it works. There is a step two. Our minds are feeble and ripe with biases and they color our decision making every single day. So even if we know something, it doesn't mean we're going to act on it.

• 21:50Steven Bartlett?

  In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, the the main researcher in that book says that even though he spent years studying biases and basic human decision making. He still had all the same faults as before. Another factor that prevents self-awareness, according to all research, is memory. And research shows that the way we remember events and how they took place is always somewhat inaccurate. The reason we got fired from our job, the way we recount it to ourselves and glamorize it to ourselves to protect our egos and. Tell our friends and the bullshit we say, which we start believing is heavily inaccurate. So even if you spend a lot of time assessing yourself and your past, you'll still walk away with a slightly skewed vision of that past.

• 22:35Steven Bartlett?

  And here's the most important thing. Here's what I really, really want to say and leave with you. The number one thing that I've seen hold my friends and my colleagues back from being more self-aware and making the changes that they need to make to achieve what they want to achieve is their own deeply held insecurities. Let me tell you a story. One of my friends became the CEO of a very big company, probably wrongly so. It just so happened that someone was removed and he was asked to take on that position before he was really capable or experienced to do so. And he's always had deeply held insecurities. He's told me that he's always felt like he wasn't enough. He's told me about the abandonment from his childhood, from his parents leaving at a very young age.

• 23:18Steven Bartlett?

  And because of this, he's always felt like he had something to prove to the world. He's always felt like he was not enough. Because of that, when he became the CEO of this company, he became an insecure CEO, continually needing to remind his team that he was in charge, belittling people, blurting out his job title all the time, whenever and wherever he could, always taking credit, always shouting out, I'm the CEO. He never really learnt his own industry because his insecurities didn't allow him to admit that he had anything to learn. Doing so would require him to be vulnerable to himself. And when we're playing defence, we're incapable of taking on new information that might make us vulnerable or expose us further.

• 24:03Steven Bartlett?

  So instead, instead of actually learning about himself, instead of having the humility to admit he had something to learn about himself or about his industry, he used bravado and talking and control to try and overcompensate for his lack of knowledge. And this was totally see-through to everybody around him. I remember telling him, I said, John, not his name, I said, John, you need to stop shouting out your job title to everyone. You need to stop bragging, name dropping. It's really putting people off. And I explained why. And he took what I said on board and he agreed. He understood why I said it, but within months, he was back to his old ways. And this is when I learnt that the biggest risk to anyone's self-awareness is their

• 24:47Steven Bartlett?

  own insecurities and their own feelings of vulnerability that have them trapped in self-defense. And this feeling to defend shuts them down and their ability to take on new information and adapt accordingly. To be self-aware, to move forward, once again, we have to attack our own bullshit, attack our own trauma, attack our own issues, attack the things that happened to us. Because we cannot move forward while we're playing defence, we have to learn how to look at ourselves objectively. This is much easier said than done, but one way you can do that, one way that I do that is by keeping a diary, by starting a podcast, look like, just like this one, where I study

• 25:29Steven Bartlett?

  myself and I praise and I criticize all aspects of myself, my decisions throughout the week, where I could have done better, the impact my decisions had, and the behaviour that I am proud and not so proud of. Decide who you want to be, what type of person you want to be, write your own little mental or physical manifesto, so when you do assess yourself, this manifesto acts as that benchmark of your values and you can use it to decide whether you succeeded or failed. I know the type of person I want to be. You'll repeatedly hear me saying, in real life and on podcasts and online, I did X and that's not the type of person that I want to be. I've talked at length on this podcast about my mistakes historically, and I've said often

• 26:13Steven Bartlett?

  as a conclusion, that's not the person I want to be, because I'm crystal, crystal clear on who I want to be, and that's integral to self-awareness. You have to know what you're aiming at. And honestly, maybe the most important point, especially as it relates to love and professional endeavours and ambitions, honestly, seek truly objective feedback. You have to create a safe space for agenda-free feedback. This is incredibly hard to do, for me, for you, for all of us, you know, because many of us would rather be ignorant to our faults than to be aware of them and therefore feel less than, including me, including me.

• 26:57Steven Bartlett?

  But imagine how much more success we would have had in our relationships at work. If we continually sought out honest feedback. How many of you are asking for feedback from your partner? How many of you are asking for feedback from your manager, from your colleagues, from your team? For the love of God, when you get feedback, when you find someone that is willing to give you honest, agenda free feedback, you have to listen to learn, not listen to justify. This is the mistake I continually find myself making sometimes when someone's giving me feedback. I'll try and explain to them why I did that or why I thought that. But that's not how feedback should work.

• 27:38Steven Bartlett?

  What I'm doing is I'm intimidating the witness. Someone has spotted something, they're giving me feedback on it. And what we do is we try and jump to justify that, to try and prove ourselves. And in doing so, we're suppressing the true nature of that feedback. And what will happen when we do that, when the person sees that their feedback has elicited an emotional response, is the person giving the feedback will slightly change the feedback. They'll soften it because, you know, our ego or whatever couldn't deal with it. Just shut the fuck up and listen. And I'm saying this to myself, just shut the fuck up and listen. If someone has some feedback to give you without interjecting to justify, just fucking listen.

• 28:21Steven Bartlett?

  I remember very vividly one particular moment a couple of years ago. And I was sat with a manager and he was giving feedback to a member of his team, a very important feedback, and the person that was receiving the feedback just went, nope. Literally just went, nope. And what happened is that manager no longer felt comfortable giving that person feedback because they weren't listening to learn, they were listening to justify or to rebuttal or to argue. So they didn't get any more feedback and unfortunately that person ended up being fired. It's so important. If you care more about your future, about the success in your career, about having healthy, loving relationships, and you care more about that than your ego and playing self-defense, then you'll be someone that can succeed at this.

• 29:05Steven Bartlett?

  And it's something I definitely want to get better at because I feel myself jumping to justify whenever I get really critical feedback. I'm going to keep you updated on this one because I think it's so important.

• 29:17Steven Bartlett?

  You don't have to play games to find love. When I was younger, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, I used to continually play games with any girl that showed any interest in me whatsoever. I would time the amount of time I spent not responding to them. I would sometimes not respond because I thought it would make them want me more. I played all of these fucking childish games and tried to create an image of myself and all of these things because I thought that that would make them want me. And I've got very clear case studies, as I'm sure we all have in our friendship groups, of people that literally lie about the true nature of themselves to get people to like them. They lie about their level of success. They try and put a false foot forward in the pursuit of attracting a partner.

• 30:02Steven Bartlett?

  Game playing in love and in relationships is just a form of manipulation. And if you're going to go the distance with someone, manipulation as a love strategy is not sustainable. You can't manipulate someone for forty or fifty years. Manipulation isn't love. It's hurtful. And for you and for them, it's tremendously exhausting. We often play games because we're insecure. We're insecure that our true, you know, needy ass, insecure, imperfect selves might not be compelling enough for a partner. So we think that we're gonna have to pretend we're someone we're not. We're gonna have to play games. We're gonna have to manipulate them to persuade them to like us. When you play games, you're presenting a version of you to someone that is not you.

• 30:47Steven Bartlett?

  That means that if you do succeed in attracting someone to this fake version of you, ultimately they're attracted to an inauthentic fake version of you. Therefore, it means by definition that they are not attracted to you. It means by definition that they are with you for the wrong reasons. Because the only possible right reason someone could be with you is for you, for who you are. And it's impossible to be consistent in keeping up an act of being someone you're not. And the inconsistency your partner will experience if you play games in and of itself is highly unattractive and dare I say it, unlovable.

• 31:27Steven Bartlett?

  Sustainable, long-term, healthy love is a thing that grows in safe, secure environments, in the home, in the family. Toxic, unhealthy, unsustainable, dependency-driven love grows in insecure spaces and in manipulative, abusive environments. This is why the most sustainable, realistic, and dare I say it, the only option you have is to avoid games in love matters. Prioritize honesty. Honesty with them, but also honesty with yourself. Honesty with who you actually are. And if you are your true self and it doesn't work out, that doesn't mean you weren't enough. It means you weren't compatible. This is one of the absurdities of rejection. We tell ourselves that we weren't enough. Fuck me.

• 32:12Steven Bartlett?

  Could you imagine doing a jigsaw puzzle and one piece doesn't fit somewhere? You don't look at that piece and think this piece wasn't enough. It wasn't valuable enough. It wasn't pretty enough. It isn't worthy. You think, ah, this piece is in the wrong place. It doesn't belong here. It's not compatible with this other piece. I'll try it somewhere else soon. Why can't we bring that logic to rejection? The damage of the stories we tell ourselves about rejection, as I've said time and time again, is the most significant risk of the rejection. It's the self-harm that does all the damage, not the rejection itself. However, if you are aware of emotional toxicity within yourself, if you're aware of your

• 32:51Steven Bartlett?

  own issues that are making you harder to love and form relationships, let's get that sorted. Let's get that resolved. Let's get it addressed. Let's confront it. Instead of trying to play games to disguise its presence, let's sort it out. These short-term games in life beget short-term results. And that's not just a rule for love. That's a rule for everything. That's a rule for life, success, and everything in between. In my life, I had to do exactly that. Before I could become lovable and get into a relationship, I had to look back at my childhood and pinpoint the things that were preventing me from wanting to attach myself to anybody. And those were things that, as I've said in this podcast, related to my

• 33:31Steven Bartlett?

  parents and their marriage and how toxic that was at times. So as a kid that had instilled in me that love and relationships was bad news, it was prison. And so I grew up as that kid, believing that, moving into my adult life with those narratives and those stories. And until I confronted that, it was going to continue to hold me back. You have to confront those issues. And as you'll probably start to see throughout this podcast, we've talked about the same themes. It's the same stories. It all starts with our own insecurities. It all starts at times with our inability to address them. And until we do, we can't move forward.

• 34:07Steven Bartlett?

  The last point in my diary this week just says, the three most selfish things you can do for other people. And again, that's a paradox. So I want to run that back. The three most selfish things you can do for others is, one, forgiveness, two, gratitude, and three, giving. We were all led to believe that forgiving someone is a gift you give to someone else. We're all led to believe that being grateful, saying please, thank you, just being grateful, is a gift you're giving to someone else. And we're all led to believe that giving, being generous, is because of the receiver, that they're getting the value. But if there's anything that I've learned as the years of my life have ticked

• 34:51Steven Bartlett?

  on and on and on, if there's anything I've learned as I've become more successful and had more resources at my disposal, it's that forgiveness is for me. One of my favorite all time quotes is this, forgiveness is letting a prisoner go. And in doing so, realizing that you were the prisoner the whole time. Because it just speaks to the delusion around the idea of forgiveness. We think forgiveness is letting a prisoner go. But then we realize that we've actually been the one in prison the whole time. We've let ourselves go. I've talked about this at length. Forgiveness is a burden you have to carry through life with you. And so therefore, forgiveness is actually something you do for yourself. Gratitude, gratitude. We always think of gratitude, being grateful, being grateful

• 35:36Steven Bartlett?

  to and for others as a thing that we're giving to others. But it's been scientifically proven time and time and time and time again that having a grateful mindset does wonders for you. I would argue that on these first two points, forgiveness and gratitude, that the the net positive impact on you is much, much greater, a multiple of 10 greater for you than it is for the person you're forgiving than it is for the person you're expressing gratitude for. And lastly, giving, as I've got more sort of financial resources, I I've just come to notice this like interesting phenomenon in my life, which I'm guessing all philanthropic people, all philanthropists, all billionaires that have given away 99%

• 36:17Steven Bartlett?

  of their wealth realise, which is that if I was to spend £200 on myself for something, I would get a certain amount of joy and fulfilment out of that. If I was to spend that £200 on someone else, specifically someone more in need, I would get even more joy from seeing them get it and from the feeling that they would enjoy that thing and from the act of giving than I would from giving that thing to myself. And this, again, this is something that I've only learned in the last couple of months about myself. I've always enjoyed giving. I think everybody that knows me will say I'm generous. I think that's something that everybody, everybody that knows me would say. But I've

• 36:59Steven Bartlett?

  never really understood why I was generous. And and up until more recent times where I've had more things to be generous with, I've trawled through studies this week about giving to try and understand this a bit better. I've been reading Medium articles and reading Psychology Today, et cetera, et cetera. And it's so clear that on numerous occasions, the giver receives more from giving than the receiver. If you want to live a miserable life, don't forgive anybody, don't be grateful, and don't be generous. That seems to be the most surefire way of living a miserable, unhappy, unfulfilled life.

• 37:36Steven Bartlett?

  But if you do want to be happy, if you do want to be fulfilled, then prioritize forgiveness, even when someone or something hurt you. And don't just forgive people, forgive situations, forgive for yourself. Some of my closest, dearest friends, I've sat and watched witness, hold on to something that happened to them, somebody that wronged them, a situation in life that hurt them. And they've held that for two decades. And I've watched that inner resentment spill out on new opportunities, new relationships and new people. And I just have longed for them for the longest time to just forgive. The three most selfish things I do for other people is I

• 38:17Steven Bartlett?

  forgive, I'm grateful, and I'm giving. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast this week. I really sincerely hope you've enjoyed it. Please do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. If you're on Apple Podcasts, if you listen on Apple, please do that now. Hit the follow button if you're part of the Spotify crowd. We are only 18 five star reviews away from hitting 1,000 five star reviews in the Apple Podcast Store. And if we hit 1,000 this week, on Thursday, I'm going to release a podcast with a world renowned author slash psychologist slash genius that genuinely changed my life. And I recorded this conversation this week in New York City. And since then, I've been implementing radical changes in my life because

• 38:59Steven Bartlett?

  he finally made me realize why sometimes I struggle to do what I want to do. Something that I think we're all plagued by. We all have goals and ambitions, but then we procrastinate, and we avoid them, and we choose to clean our house instead of confronting that big project. He finally, finally made it all make sense to me. And if we hit the subscribe and the follower cap this week, then that podcast comes out on Thursday. As a big thank you to all of you. My manager, my team have listened to it, and they said it's great. So I cannot wait to get it out there and to discuss it with all of you online and in our private groups and in DMs and all that. So listen, thank you again for listening. If you've gotten this far in the podcast, do me a favor to show you have because I'm never sure how many people listen to the end. Take a screenshot of the podcast, put

• 39:43Steven Bartlett?

  it on your story. As you know, I see 100% of your stories because you'll probably always see my little face as the icon looking in. Tag me, leave your public review by putting it on your story and telling people and hopefully we can grow this to be in for even bigger. And my, my dream for this podcast, I guess is something I've never really touched on. So let me just speak on what I'm hoping for for the future. I would love in the future to have this podcast come out twice a week and I'd love to have a better setup, a better studio to record it. I'd love to be able to bring in even more interesting guests. I do not care about big guests. I want people that know shit that can help me change my life for the better and that can help me confront some of the bullshit that's within me, that's within my diary that I talk to you guys about. And I really want to invest

• 40:28Steven Bartlett?

  more in this podcast and to help it grow. And all of that happens just by you listening. Honestly, that's like all you can do. I'll never, ever ask you for money, ever. Obviously, you know, it's not something that I, that I particularly need, but all I, I do need is you to keep tuning in and keep shouting about the podcast. Honestly, it fills my heart with such a huge amount of joy when I get good feedback on the podcast and the feedback has been so good. Your feedback is the reason this has continued. Honestly, I'm, I'm running a company now that has over 700 global team members. And of course, as a, all companies do, we have lots of things we're working on, lots of challenges. So for me to carve out about two hours to record this podcast isn't always very easy. And

• 41:10Steven Bartlett?

  that's why, you know, now it's 4am, 10 past 4am here in New York City. That's why I do it this time. But the reason I do it is because you guys give me such amazing, quite honestly staggering, mind blowing feedback at times about the impact it has on you or how much it means to you or where it fits in your life. And as long as I'm getting that feedback, this show's never going to stop ever, ever, ever, ever. And I'm, you lovely men and women that have been on this journey with me from when I first started recording this podcast a couple of years ago to where I am now. I hope you're going to stay with me on that journey to where I go, whatever that means in my life. I'm so like exploratory and so philosophical and so concerned with depth and meaning that I think this story is going to end in a pretty interesting way, however it ends. So I'm

• 41:54Steven Bartlett?

  glad that all of you are here for that ride. I'll see you again next week.