How To Master Your Emotions w/ This 90-Second Trick EP 1338

Joan Rosenberg, PhD, psychologist, is a best selling author, corporate wellness consultant, and media expert who is known globally as an acclaimed speaker and trainer on communication, confidence, resilience, authenticity and grief. Dr. Rosenberg is a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. Be sure to check out her latest book: 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience and Authenticity. In this episode you will learn,The five keys to building unwavering confidence. The eight unpleasant feelings that hold us back from feeling whole. To sharpen your skills of communicating and expressing your feelings. How to make sense of our past experiences and extract the good. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1338Your Fresh Start Begins By Becoming Emotionally Stable [MASTERCLASS] : https://link.chtbl.com/1322-podJoe Dispenza on Breaking Free Of The Addiction To Negative Thoughts: https://link.chtbl.com/1309-podSusan David on Why Emotional Agility Is The Most Important Skill You Need To Know: https://link.chtbl.com/1297-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We have this idea that the purpose of speaking up is actually to get what we want. You know, I want the ice cream now, whatever, it doesn't matter what it is. What dawned on me is that that's the benefit of speaking up. The real purpose of speaking up is to...

• 0:17Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:41Lewis Howes?

  Why do people run away from their emotions? Why do they hide? Or why do they react with their emotions so much? As opposed to learn how to be curious about them and master them? Why do you think that is?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  I would say two things right off the bat. One is their previous life, their early life experiences. So that it depends on the kind of experiences they had growing up.

• 1:05Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  And the kinds of things they learned by being in those situations. So if they experienced a family where feelings were shut down, if they experienced a home environment where it was explosive or rageful, or there was trauma, or abuse, or chaos, all those kinds of things lead people to start to behave in certain ways in response to what they're experiencing.

• 1:30Lewis Howes?

  But I feel like that's 98% of the world. No one has the perfect childhood, right?

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:35Lewis Howes?

  Or there might be little traumas.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:38Lewis Howes?

  That build up. Maybe it wasn't this explosive parents, but they neglected, or they said a few comments that like stuck.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:46Lewis Howes?

  That were maybe, looked as negative, right? Or neglecting, or abandoning. And it wasn't even like that bad of a childhood, but it still connects with people and affects them, right?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. So that's kind of one piece of it. But the one piece that I actually talk about more than kind of our previous life experience is that the way we experience feeling is actually part of the reason I think people shut down on feeling.

• 2:12Lewis Howes?

  The way we experience it?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  The way we experience feeling.

• 2:14Lewis Howes?

  How do most people experience feelings?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Most of us come to know what we experience through bodily sensation.

• 2:22Lewis Howes?

  Through how it feels.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  How it literally feels in our body.

• 2:25Lewis Howes?

  It's vibrating, it's numbing, it's tight.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  It feels heavy.

• 2:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Alright, so think about disappointment or sadness. And, and for many people, it's not everybody, but for many people, it's an experience kind of in the chest.

• 2:37Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Right, and then this heaviness. And, and it's like, or an experience of helplessness. That maybe it feels like a gut punch or something else. Anger, where you, it's like raging through, surging through your body, raging through your body, and you can't stop the sensation. Right, or embarrassment, where you might see the redness, I feel the heat.

• 2:58Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  That, that what I came to understand is that it's not that we didn't want to feel the whole range of what we felt. It's that we didn't want to feel the bodily sensation that helped us know what we felt.

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  Why do we not want to feel the bodily sensation, because it's painful?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And uncomfortable.

• 3:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  And we can't be in charge of it.

• 3:18Lewis Howes?

  We're not in control.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  We're not in control, we're not in control that we feel it, we're not in control of what we're feeling. And, and not until it's in our conscious awareness, not until we, it's like, oh, wait, you know, I can feel the heat in my face. Oh, I'm embarrassed. Then, then that's the point at which I can go, oh, I can take a deep breath and kind of calmness. Right, so it's when it's in our conscious awareness that we can kind of tamp it down, or that's when we can regulate it.

• 3:45Lewis Howes?

  So we don't want to feel the sensations in our body when we have the emotion of sadness, or anger, or disappointment, right?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:54Lewis Howes?

  Or shame.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:54Lewis Howes?

  It's that we don't want to feel the pain in the body.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 3:58Lewis Howes?

  Why do we not want to feel the pain? Why do we resist that? Because it's just uncomfortable, or is it?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Mostly, that's really mostly what I look at. I think it's uncomfortable, it's unsettling, it's unpleasant, it's un-something.

• 4:10Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Right?

• 4:11Lewis Howes?

  It's not fun.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  It's not fun. So where, where the pleasurable emotions literally gets experienced in a great way in our body. Right, so we move towards those, and we want to move away from the stuff that's uncomfortable.

• 4:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, okay. So what do people usually do in that situation, when they feel the pain?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Disconnect or distract. So, I mean, and that list is pretty endless.

• 4:33Lewis Howes?

  Right, that's where addiction comes in, the numbing sensations, the distractions.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Right, so, so it might be screens, right? In any form, social media, TV, etc. It might be substance use. So, there, that might be food, it might be sex, it might be porn.

• 4:52Lewis Howes?

  Workaholic, you know, being a workaholic.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Exactly, anything to kind of check out.

• 4:57Lewis Howes?

  Anything that avoids it.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:58Lewis Howes?

  Avoids the feelings.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 5:01Lewis Howes?

  But it's like, we look for the positive feelings, but we avoid the painful feelings, right? But what are the painful feelings signaling to us? What is it telling us?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  As others have spoken, it, they're, they're really, they're information. And the way I look at that, all of our feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, is that it's information for us. Particularly the unpleasant ones, but it would be true for pleasant as well, is that we can make use of those feelings. Once we have awareness of them, we can make use of those feelings to make decisions.

• 5:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  To express ourselves, or to take action. And, and so, part of it is also understanding that our feelings are there, can be there for a purpose, and to help us evolve and to help us grow, and they can be used for specific things.

• 5:51Lewis Howes?

  Right. I believe Susan David said that these, these feelings and emotions are data, not direction.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  Right? It's not something we should be reacting to with a direction. We should be having, this is data, it's information, how do I respond based on this information?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Right? Not, how do I quickly react or quickly numb the feeling? But what's missing inside of me that's having this feeling?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:16Lewis Howes?

  And how can we process this in a healthy way, right?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  So, it just seems like so many people in the world, including myself for many years, were making decisions based on avoiding pain. And numbing the pain, and not wanting to face the pain. What happens when we face it?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  I think we become more whole, W H O L E, more whole, authentic human beings.

• 6:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  And as a result, again, you talk a lot about becoming our best selves, right? So then we're more authentic, more, more genuine, and more of us is available for relationship.

• 6:57Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Or more of us is available for pursuing whatever it is that we want to pursue in life.

• 7:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  So that, so that, think of when we allow ourselves to experience the fullness, the full range of what we experience, then all of us is available for anything we want to put it towards in life, whether it's self-exploration, whether it's building relationship, or whether it's, I've got this big dream and goal, and I'm gonna use it in the pursuit of that.

• 7:26Lewis Howes?

  Right. How many people in the world, what's the percentage you think are not whole, in terms of they're not able to face their emotions in a healthy way? How many people do you think are struggling with this?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  A lot.

• 7:39Lewis Howes?

  Percentage-wise, what do you think? Fifty percent, eighty percent?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  No, I'd probably, I'd probably be inclined at least to put it at seventy or eighty.

• 7:48Lewis Howes?

  Of the world is not willing to face?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's high.

• 7:52Lewis Howes?

  It's high.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. We wouldn't see the level of addiction if that weren't true, in, in any form, right? And we wouldn't see the level of checking out, we wouldn't see the level of violence.

• 8:04Lewis Howes?

  Right. Because why would you need to be angry and react and cause war and fight and hit people?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  There's no reason for it.

• 8:09Lewis Howes?

  You wouldn't need to scream?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:11Lewis Howes?

  If you were whole?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:13Lewis Howes?

  Right?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:14Lewis Howes?

  Because you could manage the conflict in a more peaceful way.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 8:19Lewis Howes?

  And not a reactive way, not based on this pain hurts me, let me react.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  And let me, let me splash it all over you, right? Or dump it all over you, right?

• 8:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Disown it. And, and more people disown their experience, or check out from their experience, and, and as a result, then, then that's where the hurt occurs for others as well.

• 8:39Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean, disown, like not take responsibility, or?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Not recognize it and, and not take responsibility.

• 8:44Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Right? So, so let's say I'm, I'm really angry about some, oh, no, I'm disappointed about something, but the only way I allow it to come through me is through anger.

• 8:54Lewis Howes?

  Right. That's what a lot of people do.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:56Lewis Howes?

  Typically, I mean, the way I grew up, I felt like as a, as a man growing up, you weren't able to express. Without it, I mean, it was either anger or don't say anything. You know, there wasn't an ability to be sad or vulnerable or, you know, tap into a different element of an emotion. It was like be angry, mad, or like stoic and don't say anything.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 9:16Lewis Howes?

  That was kind of what I was, felt like I was allowed to express, which created more anger inside of me because I couldn't express.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:22Lewis Howes?

  A range.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Right, and for me, that's also another way to disconnect and distract. That you allow a, just a default with some, instead of having the whole range of what you're experiencing and expressing that whole range. So if you were disappointed and it became anger, now you're, now you're using a default feeling. And, and that's the only way of showing up to someone else. And that's, that's disowning what you're experiencing.

• 9:46Lewis Howes?

  So you think, again, this is just your opinion, seventy percent plus might be, you know, disconnected in the world from their emotions, right?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  So now you're inviting me into a guess, so let's just leave it at that.

• 9:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes, you're guessing, yes, you're guessing. But based on your experience of the people you work with and what you see happening in the world, and I, I, I think that's a good guess, I'd probably say the same thing.

• 10:09Lewis Howes?

  How easy is it for people to get to a place of wholeness? Is it really challenging? Should it take years? Or is it possible for the, for them to get whole and master their emotions faster?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  I don't think it takes years. I think the deeper, if, if you want to move to a much deeper understanding of yourself, then that might be a journey that takes years. But if you want to be able to manage your emotional state and have greater access to the whole range of what you feel and then be able to use it in everyday experiences, that's something that can actually, I would say, I would say it happened more quickly than people would realize.

• 10:51Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:52Lewis Howes?

  Because you've worked with thousands of people in this.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:54Lewis Howes?

  How, how fast can it be? What's like a?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So the beauty of, and we're talking briefly before, but one of the things I, I've recognized is the way that I've approached some of this material around feelings is that once you have the knowledge, once you have the concept or the idea or the awareness, you can actually experiment with it right away. And, and what I have found, especially with this idea of experiencing feeling as opposed to disconnecting from it. Even in the earliest experimentation of it. So, so let's say, I've been somebody that's, that's like, I've checked out for a long time. And then I go, alright, I'm gonna just try this. Right, I'm gonna be curious about it, just try it.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  And, and I do, what starts to end up happening is that there's a natural, organic lift up, and a greater sense of you being more true to yourself.

• 11:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Because you're owning the whole range of what your real experience is. As opposed to dismissing it, or trying to disconnect from it.

• 11:59Lewis Howes?

  Why are people so afraid to express their emotions, though? Why is it? Is it the fear of what other people are gonna say about them? Is it embarrassment? Is it shame?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  No, I bring it, I bring it back down. I talk about one's difficulty with eight unpleasant feelings in the book. Okay? So, the focus of this body of work is centered on our difficulty experiencing and expressing eight unpleasant feelings.

• 12:27Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  So, the, the feelings are sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration.

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  So, the feelings are feeling states. Some of them are kinda combined with thinking a little bit, but... So, what I found is that as much as our thinking can get in the way,

• 12:57Speaker 00

  and, and cause us to, you know, pull back from lots of things that are important to us, I actually found that our difficulty experiencing and expressing these feelings actually was more of an obstacle and more of a roadblock.

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  So, so for me, these eight became really central. And, and again, most people go, well, like, anxiety's not there, fear's not there. They're not there for, to me, important reasons. The reason that I chose these eight, and again, it was over time. There was five and there were seven. It's like, eventually I landed on eight. And the reason I, for these is because they're the most common everyday spontaneous reactions to things not turning out the way we want, or the way we believe they need to be turning out. And so, it's the everydainess of these feelings. On any given day, any given week, every, any given month, you're gonna move through a variety of these feelings.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  So it's the everydainess of them. Right? So if I get to your question then about what makes it so hard for people to express themselves or speak up, for me, it goes back to these eight feelings. It's not, it's not about how somebody's gonna respond, not, not directly. But if you stop and think about it, difficulty speaking up is not a speaking problem.

• 14:21Lewis Howes?

  What is it?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  It's a difficulty with unpleasant feeling problem.

• 14:25Lewis Howes?

  So, so people lack the ability to speak up to who?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  To whomever.

• 14:31Lewis Howes?

  About what?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly. It doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter what. It can be as simple as an exchange at a retail store.

• 14:42Lewis Howes?

  Feeling uncomfortable about like, ah, this is, you know, I bought this thing, but I need to return it, but I feel uncomfortable returning it. Or a restaurant or something.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Exactly. Could be a close friend that just flaked on you.

• 14:54Lewis Howes?

  Tell them how you feel about, you know, the situation. I feel disappointed, I feel let down, or whatever it might be.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Right. And, and the same is true for an intimate partner or a boss. It doesn't matter who.

• 15:06Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when we don't speak up about how we feel?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I think the effect is, is actually profound. I, I don't think, so a couple of different things here, Louis. This is massive for me because, so if, if you'll let me wander a little bit around this.

• 15:21Lewis Howes?

  Go for it.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  So again, the first thing is to understand is that difficulty speaking up actually is not a speaking problem. It's a difficulty with unpleasant feeling problem. So the reason I won't speak up first is because I'm not willing to handle my own unpleasant feelings.

• 15:38Lewis Howes?

  Cause you know that there will be an unpleasant feeling with speaking up. And you don't wanna, you don't wanna deal with it.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Right. So let's say I'm disappointed and I don't wanna have to tell you that something, some exchange occurred between us where I'm disappointed. I don't like the experience of myself, I don't do it. But in order to speak to you about it, which is actually gonna remove the obstacle between us. Because if I don't speak, now there's a, now there's a distance.

• 16:04Lewis Howes?

  It's a barrier.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Right, right? So, so I've got to, in order, if I, if I want that barrier to go and I want us to remain close, I gotta deal with it. And if I, so think then that in order to have a conversation, not only do I have to deal with the discomfort of my own emotional discomfort, I have to deal with the discomfort of your emotional discomfort.

• 16:25Lewis Howes?

  I might upset you, or frustrate you, or let you down, or whatever.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  You might get angry in response, whatever it is. Now I gotta deal with your eight unpleasant feelings.

• 16:34Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Simultaneously with my eight unpleasant feelings. And, and as a result, it's like, I'm gonna back off.

• 16:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  So, the reason we don't speak up is because we don't wanna deal with the unpleasant feelings that are involved, no matter what.

• 16:48Lewis Howes?

  With ourselves and with others.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  With others. And that's true for, let's go the positive route. I wanna tell you how much I like you, or admire you, or wanna be close to you, right? Or I love you. That's gonna involve vulnerability. And it might be disappointment, because you might look back at me and go, "I'm not feeling the same thing."

• 17:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  So it's-

• 17:10Lewis Howes?

  You'll be let down if you don't get the response. So putting yourself out there in the positive ways emotionally, expression, you still might get let down. You might have an unpleasant feeling.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 17:21Lewis Howes?

  So, the uncomfortable expression, or the positive expression, still could respond with eight unpleasant feelings.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Right, so in order then to be able to speak comfortably, you have to be willing to accept that the experience of unpleasant feelings may be part of that journey.

• 17:40Lewis Howes?

  I feel like people should use this as an experiment, and say, "Okay, what are the things that I haven't been saying lately to the people closest to my life, or to, you know, acquaintances, maybe?"

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:51Lewis Howes?

  And allow myself to say the things in maybe the, you know, not as pleasant conversations, and also the pleasant conversations.

• 18:01Lewis Howes?

  And see how it feels.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:02Lewis Howes?

  See what opens up in the space of the response.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:06Lewis Howes?

  And how can I manage the feelings, pleasant and unpleasant afterwards, right?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:12Lewis Howes?

  Most people are afraid to say, I care about you, I love you, or here's how you mean to me, because they're not sure what they're gonna receive in response.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:21Lewis Howes?

  And you let me down, I was disappointed when you flaked on me. You know, can we create an agreement moving forward or something like that?

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:29Lewis Howes?

  So people just don't speak up at all is what you're saying.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So, but, but here's again, a couple of interesting things about this. First, my caveat around speaking up is that it needs to be positive, kind, and well-intentioned.

• 18:42Lewis Howes?

  Conscious.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Conscious. But the two most important, kind.

• 18:47Lewis Howes?

  Positive, kind, and well-intentioned.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  And well-intentioned.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  I love your saying this, Joan, positive.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  So if I'm gonna encourage you to go speak up, or you want people to kind of experiment with it, then it's not about.

• 18:59Lewis Howes?

  This is how you made me feel.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So it's, it's not, it's not about that.

• 19:04Lewis Howes?

  You know, I love that you said this because I, um, I was telling you beforehand off-camera that I've been doing this, you know, therapy and coaching almost every two weeks for the last almost two years now. It's been almost two years. And with my girlfriend Martha, we, when I started the relationship, I said, listen, I've always wanted to start therapy in a relationship. You know, after a few months of us dating, I said, I'd always wanted to try it together, not because there's a problem, but because I wanna make it great. You know, I wanna make sure we're on the same page, we have agreements. And I told her early on, I go, there is no reason I will ever get upset at you for anything.

• 19:41Lewis Howes?

  Based on, you know, we have our agreements and things like that, but there's no reason, you can live your life fully and I will not get upset at you. I will not like expect things from you, I'm not gonna get upset at you, because we have a certain standard of our agreements. And I said, the only reason I will get upset, there's only one thing, I've told this story many times, I go, there's only one thing that makes me upset. Is if you come at me with an attack and you don't do it from a conscious point of view.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:08Lewis Howes?

  If I let you down, if I, you can talk about anything you want. You can come to me with anything, but it has to be a conscious conversation. Come from a loving, kind place. You said positive, kind and well intentioned. Know that I'm not intentionally trying to hurt you.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:22Lewis Howes?

  Know that my intention in this relationship is good. If I do something stupid, then you can let me know from a positive, kind and well intentioned way. And I'm going to receive it. But if you come at me with anger, resentment, expectation, aggression. I'm gonna be defensive. I'm gonna say like, what are you doing right now? You're not being conscious in this moment.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:43Lewis Howes?

  I can't receive your information. So I will never come at you in that way. Don't come at me that way. And that's why doing therapy together, I think, allows us to keep a peaceful environment.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 20:57Lewis Howes?

  Of growth.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:58Lewis Howes?

  So I'm so glad you said this because it's not speaking, let me tell you how I really feel. And just unload on you my emotions.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:06Lewis Howes?

  You can't create a bond.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 21:08Lewis Howes?

  Or a bridge in that way.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 21:10Lewis Howes?

  Right? People are just gonna be on the defense.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Right. It breaks the safety.

• 21:13Lewis Howes?

  But why are so many people, why is it so many people struggle at speaking up in a conscious way? The way you talk about positive time and well intentioned. Why do they react? Or scream or say mean things to the other person?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Well, again, that's gonna get into lots of other dynamics, but, but, but think of it as first thing, it's uncomfortable in me.

• 21:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna make you feel it as opposed to me feel it.

• 21:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You made me feel this way, so now I'm gonna let you feel it.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Right, right. Or, and it's this, this sense that you made me. Which is also an incorrect way of thinking about it.

• 21:46Lewis Howes?

  It's a victim mentality, right?

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So then I'm gonna, I'm just gonna be aggressive in response or I'm going to attack you so that you feel. What I'm experiencing, as opposed to me telling you, because somehow the telling doesn't get through. So now I'm gonna amp it up, I'm gonna escalate it.

• 22:05Lewis Howes?

  Make sure you hear me.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Right, right, but that's a whole nother story that we can go to as well. But that's part of it. I don't want to experience it, so I'm gonna make you experience it instead.

• 22:19Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when someone does that?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Well, the bond breaks, right? And so there's no safety, and now if you're doing it to me, I'm gonna withdraw because it doesn't feel safe.

• 22:30Lewis Howes?

  Right, I'm gonna disconnect, I'm gonna put a wall guard up, I'm not gonna talk to you. Or I'm gonna go back at you and be aggressive, whatever it might be. But there's no intimacy then.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 22:41Lewis Howes?

  You lose the bond.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  You lose the bond, and for me, it's not only talking about what is being said, it's also talking about how it's delivered. And most people in a relationship don't do those two things. They do one, and they get lost on the detail, but they don't do the second, which is to talk about how it was delivered, like if you're rolling your eyes, right?

• 23:04Lewis Howes?

  Bottom language, yeah. Energy, tone.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  All that, but sometimes that's where the real infraction is.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  So it's not necessarily what you say, it's how you say it?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Think of it as both.

• 23:15Lewis Howes?

  You gotta be conscious in how you say it. You can't say, "You're a horrible person in a loving way," right? You can't say, "You're just such a bad person, I really hate you." You know, it's my...

• 23:25Speaker 00

  It doesn't work.

• 23:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you have to be, you know... What is the best way to speak up to an intimate partner, or someone intimate in your life, a friend or an intimate partner? What's the best way to speak up if you feel hurt, let down, disappointed in what someone did or didn't do?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing is to... For me, it's actually, I talk about it in the book, and I call it a preemptive bid. So what I want people to do, or I want to encourage people to do, is to think about whatever the obstacle is to talking. So let's say, "I think you're gonna laugh at me." And so the first thing I do is to say, "You know what, Louis, I really wanna talk to you about something." My biggest concern is that when I bring it up to you, you're gonna laugh at me. Well, if I say that to you, the pull typically for the listener is to go, no, I won't.

• 24:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll listen to you.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let me hear it. So now I have your attention.

• 24:25Lewis Howes?

  So it's kind of sharing the concern or fear upfront with the person.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Right, right. So I want, because why? Because I want to break down the obstacle to the conversation.

• 24:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Right? Then, again, speaking up does not give you license to be malicious. So it's coming from a kind and well-intentioned place. So it's the reason I'm coming to you is because I, you know what? I feel like I'm being a little bit distant from you. And I, that's not what I want. I want us to be close. So I actually want to talk to you about X. And, and when I was seeing people face to face, I used to hold up a pillow. So if I can borrow the book for a moment.

• 25:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  What I used to do, so I think of this as the pillow. And, and I've, we've got something to, to deal with. Or I want, and I want to talk to you about my disappointment, or whatever it is, I would do this. It's like there's no connection if the obstacle is there.

• 25:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  If I haven't talked to you. It's just obstacle.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  But the moment I say, alright, I want to talk to you about this thing that's getting in the way. Which is my disappointment. Or my concern you're gonna laugh at me, or whatever. Now the obstacle is removed and we can be close again.

• 25:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  So.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  So it's, it's super important to be able to speak up in relationship. Because it allows the, the bonds of intimacy and the depth of that connection to grow.

• 25:47Lewis Howes?

  A lot of people don't create the preemptive bid first. They just unload.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 25:53Lewis Howes?

  And they don't do it from a positive, kind, or well-intentioned way.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:58Lewis Howes?

  They do it from a frustrated, hurt, malicious way, right?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:01Lewis Howes?

  I don't want to feel one of these eight unpleasant feelings. I want to dump it on you. I'm not going to be conscious in the way I communicate. I just don't like what happened, so here you go, take it.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Right. You hurt me, I'm gonna hurt you back.

• 26:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:15Lewis Howes?

  And that doesn't do anything good.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  No, no, there's nothing good that comes out of that.

• 26:19Lewis Howes?

  Nothing good.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  No. So, and here's, here's the other thing for me around speaking, speaking up. There's, again, there's a variety of, of great things that happen. I actually think that our capacity to speak with ease in life.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  To say what we want to say, who we want to say to, all that kind of stuff, timing. Again, with the caveat of being kind and well intentioned. That to be able to speak with ease is actually the super glue to confidence.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  That if we don't speak, if we feel confident in a variety of different ways, and we can experience our feelings fine, but we don't have that additional layer of speaking with ease to, in any situation we need to, then I don't think that it actually, we feel that kind of unwavering experience in ourselves. So what I've found is that we have this idea that the purpose of speaking up is actually to get what we want. Or, in this case, it might be to stop something, setting a boundary, setting a limit, whatever it might be. Or it's to literally get something. You know, I want the ice cream now, whatever, it doesn't matter what it is.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  And then what dawned on me is that that's the benefit of speaking up. Getting what we want is the benefit of speaking up. The real purpose of speaking up is to grow us. And I think that when we find that we have our voice, that's when we start to feel that real deep strength.

• 27:59Lewis Howes?

  Confidence.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, confidence and strength within us.

• 28:01Lewis Howes?

  Okay, there's two things I want to discuss here. One, the first one is the ability to speak up and practicing it and owning it, and being able to sit with the feelings and be comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings. It's like learning how to master sitting with sadness, sitting with, you know, vulnerability, anger, helplessness, all these different things, shame, and not let it consume us, but feel it and let it flow.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Move through.

• 28:29Lewis Howes?

  Move through us, right?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:30Lewis Howes?

  And be okay with it. Okay, I have an uncomfortable conversation today, some feeling, but I'm alive, I'm okay, everything's good now, we actually came together stronger now. Okay, cool, I can move through it, I feel okay. And practicing that on a consistent basis. So that's one thing I want to talk about. And then the second thing I want to talk about is, is it possible to just not let things affect us? And not need to speak up because we are so okay with ourselves and know that people are people and people do what they do and say what they say and they're in their own stuff and their traumas. And, okay, I'm not gonna take it personally, I'll process it. And I don't need to speak up, maybe I can, maybe I don't need to. And I'm gonna be okay because I'm living an intentional life.

• 29:15Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of the two things, practicing being uncomfortable, being comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings. And practicing speaking up consistently and moving through it. And then also saying, do I even need to play this game? Not game, but do I need to play in that space? Or, I don't like what happened right there, but I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm here for myself, like, life is good.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  That one has some complexity to it. The second one, the first one is obvious because we're gonna get practice. And the more practice we engage in that way, really the healthier we become.

• 29:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  But with the second one, it's like, well, I don't need to do it, I actually feel okay, I'm not taking it personally, that kind of an idea. To a degree, I would say that works. And that that's probably fine.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Right? But there's another element of that where I've seen people respond that way, where that's their way out.

• 30:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's like a spiritual bypass or something.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Exactly, that's their way to not deal.

• 30:15Lewis Howes?

  Like, I'm fine, everything's okay, but it's actually, you haven't processed.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? So to use your words, one is it's a spiritual bypass. The second is, it actually doesn't allow yourself to grow or the other person to grow.

• 30:29Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, that's true, because then maybe they just keep disappointing or they're not being their word. And you just let it go every time.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Right, right, and you're being affected, and it's damaging the relationship. So now you're pulling away because the person's continuing to do what they're doing.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  Right, they're out of integrity or they're disappointing you or whatever it is.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  So now, right, so now you don't get the growth, the other person doesn't get the possible growth, and the relationship doesn't get to grow. So for me, it becomes really important for people to kind of really check themselves.

• 31:04Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  And go, you know, do I, do I need to say something? And most people will back off because they don't want to deal with the discomfort.

• 31:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  So they do the spiritual bypass.

• 31:14Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Rather than going, you know what? It's important to me. And once again, to understand the purpose of speaking is not necessarily to get it to be totally right. It's to grow yourself.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's to try to get what you want, I guess, the end result. But it's more to grow yourself and hopefully grow the other person and create a deeper relationship.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  How often are you speaking up in your life?

• 31:43Speaker 00

  In my life?

• 31:43Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Once I realized this, it changed how I behaved.

• 31:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did, it did. And, and in both directions.

• 31:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  I, I will tell you that I'm, you know, if I look back five years, 10 years, whatever it might be. I'm a very different person now in terms of my willingness to lean into the discomfort. And to go there because I know how much better it gets. And again, I'm coming at it from a kind and well-intentioned place.

• 32:15Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  So there's, there's no effort to hurt. It's, it's, I want to make whatever's going on better. You know, have I had, have I had situations not work out? Yep, then I have to deal with my disappointment.

• 32:28Lewis Howes?

  And it doesn't feel good.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  It doesn't feel good, but then, again, same thing. For me, it's, it's, again, a part of it has to do with the mantras we live by. So one of mine is that I'm going to learn from every life experience. That's part of the intention. Or I'm going to see how far I can stretch. Also part of the, you know, so it's like, okay, then this is, this is part of it. And so then, then for me, it's like, how can I, how can I grow from this experience? So it's to your, again, to your earlier point, it's living in a conscious way. And and the other side of it is making sure that people know I care about them. So it's I've become much more expressive about love and much more intentional about

• 33:13Speaker 00

  about making sure I convey my care, my deep care, my love, whatever it might be.

• 33:18Lewis Howes?

  Did you not communicate those things in the past?

• 33:20Speaker 00

  I when I was when I was much younger, I would say I was not so great about it. It was it was really an evolution. And I was probably better at describing the caring feelings I had or expressing those. And and then it over time and also working with the work that I was doing, it was like, I gotta get better at this.

• 33:40Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  So and and the other part was really finding that when I combined the two of being kind and well intentioned, then I could typically speak the things I would have typically found much harder to speak. So it it got my it became much easier.

• 33:59Lewis Howes?

  So what when did this start to really shift for you? When you started to implement this speaking up strategy more frequently? Was this five years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago?

• 34:08Speaker 00

  No, no, I wow, that's a good question. So part part of it was professional, which to me is a little bit funny because in my role as a psychologist, I'm often saying to people things that they don't want to hear.

• 34:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  Right? So I so I had to learn how to deliver that message early. So I and this work in its in its earliest form started probably 25 years ago.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Or a little bit more. And I would say the evolution was it the probably it was a much softer start 25, 30 years ago, but as time went on, I you know, I would say easily 15, 20 years.

• 34:50Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:52Lewis Howes?

  And how long did it take for you to kind of feel okay with these consistent uncomfortable conversations until you felt like I can speak up almost automatically now without having to wait for weeks to think about what I'm gonna say or how I'm gonna say it?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  That's been a number of years. That's probably been 10 to 15 years.

• 35:09Lewis Howes?

  Really? Yeah, okay. And what is available for people on the other side? Like, what was available for you after you started implementing this?

• 35:18Speaker 00

  You know what? I think I actually the benefits are profound. What ends up happening is you become more congruent.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  And that to me is where the magic of emotional strength and confidence is. So if we talk about congruence, I usually include about eight things here. But the first four are, I would say, singularly the most important. And that's that our thoughts, our feelings, our words, and our actions match.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  So the first benefit, or set of benefits, is that you, again, you have an experience of yourself as having that kind of internal strength and confidence.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  So you become more confident when you're congruent?

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 36:10Lewis Howes?

  And what are the other four? You're on the spot here now.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I am on the spot. One, two of them have to do with that we own our past history, that our attitudes and beliefs and our values, so that's, I'm kind of putting attitudes and beliefs together and our values. Is the sixth one, our past history. And then the last one is our vision of what we want for the future. That all of those align. And what's really interesting here, Lewis, is that if they don't align, oftentimes we feel anxious.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  And then part of it is going, okay, I'm anxious, then what's out of alignment?

• 36:52Lewis Howes?

  One of these four things are out of alignment?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Well, no, or one of the eight. I'm not telling the truth about my past. I'm not owning what's true for me for the future that I want for the future. Or I'm feeling something and not saying it. Or I'm believing something and it's, but I'm acting out of integrity with my belief.

• 37:13Lewis Howes?

  Right. Or I'm saying my value is this, but I'm not being that value.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 37:18Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  So that you can, if...

• 37:21Lewis Howes?

  I'm saying I want this in the future. I want to be healthy, but I'm eating bad food every day, so I'm out of alignment.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:26Lewis Howes?

  And then I start to feel anxious.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:29Lewis Howes?

  Or overwhelmed or stressed or whatever it might be. Something's off.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Something's off.

• 37:33Lewis Howes?

  Because you're not a whole person in congruence with thoughts, feelings, words, actions, matching. Attitudes and beliefs, values, past history, and vision of the future. What is past history? How can you be in alignment with past history? Is it just addressing and facing the past history? And dealing with it? As opposed to distancing yourself and numbing?

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Right, and acting like the past history I had, I didn't have.

• 38:00Lewis Howes?

  What happens when we don't face the past?

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Well, again, we start showing up in ways that are not very effective with other people. We don't show up in ways that are necessarily good for us. So I might, again, I might be drinking a bunch. I might be using food. I might be using sacks, right? It doesn't matter what it is. But I start checking out. That's what happens. When I don't deal with my past, then I check out in some ways.

• 38:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  And I don't, and again, it's not, the past isn't everything.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  But it does contribute.

• 38:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  So we just have to acknowledge that it contributes in some way to who we are in the present. And, but it doesn't have to be the thing that actually defines our future.

• 38:44Lewis Howes?

  How does someone develop a set of beliefs and values that will support their life? What if they don't know what their values are? How do they create them?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  You know, an easy starting place is to look at people that you admire.

• 39:01Lewis Howes?

  And say, what do I admire about this person? What type of life they have that I respect and like?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  And then pull some of those values.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Right, it's like, how did they get there? I mean, you know, go read stories, go read biographies.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  Learn all their mistakes and don't do that.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Exactly, but not only learn their mistakes and don't do it, but learn, learn what they had to go through on the journey to get to where they evolved. Right, so, so a first place is to look outside, to see people who are doing what, doing what you want to do and being the ways that you think you want to be.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  And then it's looking inside and basically asking the question is, who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? How do I want to show up?

• 39:52Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And then you practice that.

• 39:55Lewis Howes?

  And then your words and actions match your values.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  Match the vision you have for your future self.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:03Lewis Howes?

  What's the best way to address the past history? What if someone's gone through a crazy past history? And they had a lot of different challenges at home and relationships and abuse or abandoned men or just bullying? How does someone face that amount of pain or trauma?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  You know, I call that whole area as disguised grief.

• 40:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay, explain more.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  So I'm going to give you a couple of ways to think about disguised grief. One has to do with the words we use. So if I'm saying to you, I'm bitter. I'm angry. I have this longstanding anger. I'm resentful. I hold grudges. I am pessimistic, cynical, sarcastic. Again, this hurt. Any words that jealousy, jealous, envious, all those kinds of things. For me, everything underneath that is grief.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Grief of what?

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Well, again, I'm going to take you to the second layer of it. So grief of something I'm missing, grief of something I'm expecting, grief of something I'm wanting. And when I'm talking about grief, I'm putting at least four of those eight feelings into the mix. So for me, again, I don't know that people necessarily talk about grief and kind of break it down. But when I think about grief, I think about sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment. As comprising, at the minimum, comprising grief.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  And they can be singular responses. So I might be sad about something, well then I'm grieving.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I might be angry about something. Well, then, to a degree, there's grief. Right? So you can think about them individually, you can think about them collectively. And the easy way to remember them is that instead of being sad, I'm shad.

• 42:06Lewis Howes?

  Shad.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Right? Sad, helpless, anger, or disappointment.

• 42:09Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Angry, disappointed. So underneath all those, what I call grief signal words, is grief.

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  And what is grief?

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Again, think of it as, again, the emotional response

• 42:25Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  to some situation or

• 42:28Lewis Howes?

  That you're lacking, or upset about, or missing, or jealous of, or frustrated that you don't have, or something like that. So how do we eliminate grief? How do we process it?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  We don't eliminate it. Right? So, again, if you'll allow me, I could get one step over. The other way to think about grief, and this is to your point about our life experiences, is that almost all of us have been through experiences where we got something that we didn't deserve. So think about that as kind of the bad stuff. So it's chaos, it's abuse.

• 43:06Lewis Howes?

  Bullying, whatever it is, yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Or we deserve something we didn't get. So that's the good stuff. The praise was missing, the support was missing, people not showing up for events, you know, meets, performances, whatever it is. Or, "Great job on the progress you're making," right?

• 43:28Lewis Howes?

  The letdowns.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Right. That's all missing. It's grieving over what never was. So think about facts and circumstances of your early life. And think about it also from the standpoint of missed opportunities.

• 43:43Lewis Howes?

  This could have happened.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  But it didn't. That wasn't my life experience. Also grief over your, what is not now. So you might not be exactly where you want to be. So there's grief about that. And then there's grief about what may never be.

• 43:59Lewis Howes?

  It's a lot of grief.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  It's a lot of grief. But that, that really takes us to our life experiences. And to me, there really is a way to work through all that.

• 44:10Lewis Howes?

  How do we do that?

• 44:11Speaker 00

  The most important thing, I can kind of one sentence to remember here is that you want to be able to make sense of the impact and meaning that the experience, the difficult life experience or experiences had for you. And the key here is across time.

• 44:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  So again, the question is, who did I become because I went through this?

• 44:44Lewis Howes?

  Yep. Why do a lot of people not think that way? Instead, they hold on to the grudge of what happened to them as opposed to saying, what's the meaning and impact that this had on my life over time?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  I think in some ways, they think, well, one, they may not want to do the work around it. Right? Because to make sense of it, you have to go back to the pain of it.

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  So I'll just, I'll just act like it didn't happen and I'll put it away. It's in the past. It's nothing, except you're still, you know, becoming reactive.

• 45:17Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Right? Highly reactive because you didn't deal with whatever's going on from the past.

• 45:23Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  So, so that would be one reason. And why else do people avoid? I think people actually don't understand that there's a roadmap out. There really is.

• 45:35Lewis Howes?

  What is the roadmap?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Well, part of the first is to recognize, one, is to go, okay, I have this, these set of stories or these set of life experiences that shaped me.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And in the book, I talk about, I kind of give people a process to walk through. Let me pick just one.

• 45:57Lewis Howes?

  Not all of them, yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Let me pick just one. So I go, alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with whatever the experience was. You know, how I got yelled at about something. And, and how that affected me, that I pick out this one incident, right? So, so the, so the first is to recognize that you've got the grief. The second is to pick out something that, to reflect on. The, the third then is to do what I call kind of a deeper inquiry. Or to inquire more deeply.

• 46:27Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  And what that involves is that, this to me is really the, the core of it. This is where you want to make sense of the impact of meeting across time. So, how did it affect me? Did I become kinder? Did I withdraw? Did I shut down? Did I start to become more aggressive? Did I ignore authority? Did I?

• 46:50Lewis Howes?

  Rebel, whatever it is.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Exactly. Did I become really sarcastic? Did I become cynical? Did I, you know, start feeling more of a victim of life, right? So, there's a whole array of possibilities in terms of who I became because I experienced.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  It's so interesting. You know, as you're saying this, I'm thinking of, okay, what are some of the experiences and stories of my life that shaped me, right?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 47:12Lewis Howes?

  I talk about this on my show all the time, so I think a lot of people heard this, but my brother was in prison when I was eight years old till I was 12 years old. And it was a big gap of time that affected the family, that affected me, you know, not able to have friends in the neighborhood, all this different stuff.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  And also witnessing the suffering, the pain of my brother, what he was going through. And in some ways, it shaped me to, I never want to be in this place.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:35Lewis Howes?

  You know, I, I want to make sure I never do this. Which is one of the reasons why I never drank alcohol, I've never been drunk in my life, never been high, never done any drugs. I've had a sips, but I haven't like, you know, never been all of those things. It's just like, I just don't want to see where that leads me to, you know? It's not even worth experimenting.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Right, yep.

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  There was other reasons why I didn't do that for sports and things like that, but you know, there was, you know, stories and experiences that shaped me from that, that were painful, but also some more positive, right? It was, you know, sexual abuse that I went through. There was being injured, losing kind of my dream of playing professional sports. And it took me down a path of a couple of years of stress and overwhelm and sadness and losing an identity of a dream.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 48:20Lewis Howes?

  But what, if I look back over time, like what you said, to reflect on over a period of time, what are the benefits that this gave me, you know, and how did this make me a better person?

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:31Lewis Howes?

  Even though I may not wish that this would have happened, even though it wasn't okay, or wasn't fair, or wasn't, I don't wish it on anyone else, to go through certain experiences, but how can I serve humanity at a higher level, the people around me at a better way, and myself because of these experiences?

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:50Lewis Howes?

  It's making sense and meaning of the impact and shifting it from a negative victim mentality to, okay, how can I use this to my benefit?

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 48:59Lewis Howes?

  It happened, I can change it.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  I can be a victim for the rest of my life and be in grief and angry and sad, or I can try to do something better with it.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:08Lewis Howes?

  And that sounds like the only things you can do, there's only a couple of options.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  And more people we see landing on, I'm just gonna stay in this grief place. Again, they don't even recognize it's grief.

• 49:19Lewis Howes?

  They're just angry.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Angry and resentful, bitter, holding grudge, right? They're doing all of that, or cynical, they got a cynical view of life. Nothing's gonna turn out good for me, right?

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  Cause it hasn't in the past, so why would I believe it will?

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So, so people get lost and stuck in those places without an awareness that there really is a way out, and they don't realize that they're grieving.

• 49:41Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  So, so for me, it's, it's kind of bringing, it's like, like, let's expose it, let's bring that to light. What you're doing is you're experiencing grief. And really, there's a way to make sense of what the experience was. So that you can finally let go of it.

• 49:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  And resolve, get some resolution, and then move on.

• 50:00Lewis Howes?

  And so, once you inquire more deeply.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:02Lewis Howes?

  And reflect on it, which is painful and scary a lot of times for people. What's the next step after that?

• 50:08Speaker 00

  You extract the good.

• 50:10Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, okay.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Right? That, to your point, or just a few moments ago, is like, okay, how can I? Your question was, how can I, you know, serve humanity better?

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Right? Because I went through this.

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  But now you're shifting, now, not only are you making sense of your life story. And, and again, feeling more whole, more centered inside, more grounded inside, more authentic. Because you're owning your life history, right?

• 50:40Lewis Howes?

  Not detaching from it.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Not detaching from it, not acting like it didn't exist. And, but, so, so now, now you're, you're making sense, if you will. And I know that Susan David talked about this, is you're making sense of the narrative of your life. And the story of your life.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

  Laurie Gottlieb talks about rewriting your story, you know, not having the story hold you back in a negative way, but rewriting it into the positive side of your life.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:03Lewis Howes?

  Tell, you know, where Sir Pierre says, "Tell a different lie," you know? We hold on, we hold on to these lies about ourselves that hold, hold us back. Like, tell a different lie, you know? Tell it in a positive way, not in a way that it holds you back.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 51:16Lewis Howes?

  Right? Whatever it might be.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So there's lots of ways to come out of it. So, so that, once you've inquired more deeply, then what you want to do is you want to extract the good. It's like, how, you know, what were, what were really the benefits? Who did I, again, who did I become, in a good way, because of what I went through? And then, for me, that, that's the process that leads to forgiveness.

• 51:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. So how does someone learn to forgive the pains of their past?

• 51:42Speaker 00

  It's to go through this process.

• 51:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Once you make sense of it, it loses its, its hold on you, its grip on you.

• 51:51Lewis Howes?

  And once you find the good in it, then you can say, okay, I forgive this experience. Because good came from this.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 51:58Lewis Howes?

  If there was no good that came from it, it'd be hard to forgive, probably.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  Well, that's, that, for me, that brings me to a kind of another point. And that has to do, if there's difficulty forgiving. What I, what I recognize with that is that that has to do with... Finally coming to a place of acceptance within yourself. That you cannot undo what was done. You can never undo what was done. And you can never do what was undone.

• 52:29Lewis Howes?

  You can never go back and change it.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  It was whatever it was.

• 52:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  And but so that so that the resolution then, the resolve, becomes moving to that place of acceptance.

• 52:39Lewis Howes?

  Accepting at first, then you can start to forgive.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  If you, right, if forgiveness is hard before that. And again, it's forgiving yourself for what you did or did not know, and for what you did or did not do. And the same for someone else. So it's forgiving them for what they did or did not know. And what they did or did not do, or say, in this case.

• 53:02Lewis Howes?

  What happens if we go through all these different steps and we get to a place of saying, you know what? I'll see the benefits of how I've become an okay person, or I learned these lessons, but I just, I can never forgive what this person did to me, or did to my family, or how horrific this was. It was so extreme that they just could never fathom forgiving that person.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  So what's interesting about forgiveness is that forgiveness doesn't have to do with the other person. Forgiveness has to do with me choosing to live my life more in the present.

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  And in peace.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  And in peace.

• 53:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Not to continue to go back to the past and to and to go, okay, this is still affecting me, it's still affecting me, and it's still affecting me. And and it's still coloring how I'm living my life in the present and how I'm likely to live my life in the future.

• 53:51Lewis Howes?

  What happens if we continue to not forgive the past from five, 10, 20, 30 years ago?

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Same, same, we're living with a level of toxicity within us that's unnecessary.

• 54:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  And so again, was it good? No. Is it, are we condoning and saying, that was great that that happened? No. Are we, you know, are we getting, letting people in quotes, get away with something? No. It has to do with us moving to a place of greater inner peace, which is why it's important to forgive.

• 54:20Lewis Howes?

  It's it's amazing because in the last couple of years, I've really believed that peace is my highest currency in life. Like, and being in a peaceful environment.

• 54:31Lewis Howes?

  Is the place I want to be in. You know, I'm just. I've lived in so much high emotion, drama, low emotion, you know, all these different, you know, joy and desire and high emotions to stress, anxiety and overwhelm. Like kind of that up and down roller coaster for so many years. And I was always like, why is this happening? You know, why is it like? Life is really great and then life is really challenging and suffering.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:58Lewis Howes?

  And I think a lot of it was because I didn't learn how to do this in every area of the past that was affecting me. And you said to start with one experience to reflect on this.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, just start there.

• 55:08Lewis Howes?

  But I really feel like when we can start to do this with every experience that hurt us, affected us, made us resentful or cynical, when we can start to go down the list of these things and do the process, more peace ensues.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely, right. So on my end, it's like, start with one. But, but once you open up one, yes, if you can stay with the process and do it for those kinds of things, absolutely.

• 55:35Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing because my, my therapist and coach, she, she had me start with like one of my earliest memories, right? It's like, sexual abuse was one of my earliest memories when I was five. And it kind of set a baseline unconsciously and subconsciously for reaction throughout my life, for defensiveness, for feeling abandoned or abused or taken advantage of. Unconsciously.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 55:59Lewis Howes?

  It was just in reaction.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:01Lewis Howes?

  Things felt that way.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Bodily sensations.

• 56:05Lewis Howes?

  Right, just like, I feel something, let me react.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  You're right.

• 56:08Lewis Howes?

  You know, there was no consciousness to it. You know, I was a joyful, happy person a majority of the time. But if I felt like, oh, someone's taking advantage or abusing me, like, I don't like this, you know, it's like this, let me come after you. And so she had me start with like, that season of life in those experiences and let's start here. And then she was like, okay, what's the next major season of life where things happened that could have affected you? And so I had a photo, I had shown this many times, I had a photo on my phone of myself when I was around five or six, right? For the last year plus. Then recently I switched it to a time when I was like 10, 11. And so it's reconnecting where I'm at to where I was in those times, those moments in time,

• 56:49Lewis Howes?

  and rewriting the story and the process from each stage of life to come from, you know, early childhood to where I am now, to be able to be in full alignment and congruency of my values, my life, reflecting on all the experiences, so that hopefully I can continue to stay in a peaceful state a majority of the time and just get closer to the vision of the future and bring it closer faster as opposed to staying in the past longer. And it's really allowing me to, we were talking about this beforehand, manifest things so much easier.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:24Lewis Howes?

  Things flow.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 57:25Lewis Howes?

  Things come, because you're not tied to an emotional baggage, emotional weight, right, of the past.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Absolutely true.

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  And staying stuck in this narrative. So I highly recommend people doing this work and going through this process with you. This is fascinating to me.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  So, no, no, go ahead, let me, let me.

• 57:42Lewis Howes?

  You go ahead, you jump in.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:44Lewis Howes?

  I was making too much.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, I'm enjoying the conversation. The, the last two pieces of it, so the process moves you, in the ideal, it can move you to forgiveness. And again, having the understanding that forgiveness is about moving yourself to that place of inner peace, freeing yourself from the past. So it, it allows you to move to forgiveness. It also allows you to forge new images of who you want to become.

• 58:12Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  So you can, you can release the, you free yourself from the like, the previous life story, and then the next one is to forge new images of who you want to become. So.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  Creating a new identity in the future.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, now you can, right, now you can say, that's who I was, or that's who I've been up until now, and this is who I want to become.

• 58:34Lewis Howes?

  And a lot of that is. It's almost like you have to have a death of some sorts, like an emotional death of a person you once were holding on to.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:45Lewis Howes?

  And you've got to, I don't know if kill off is the right word, but you need to allow that to shed, you know, the skin of this old story, an old narrative and say, okay, this is who I was, but this is not an identity I'm living into anymore.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:58Lewis Howes?

  And that is hard for people to let go. A lot of people have been carrying baggage and luggage around for years.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:06Lewis Howes?

  They don't want to drop their bags.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Because if they do, they have to be in a place that's now more free, more vulnerable, and now more open to connection and hurt.

• 59:13Lewis Howes?

  Why is, so why is it so hard to be free and open and vulnerable? Because there's more room for potential pain?

• 59:20Speaker 00

  A lot of people don't know what to do when, when they have, you know, the image in my head is the blank, the artist's.

• 59:29Lewis Howes?

  Blank canvas.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Blank canvas, right. So they don't know what to do on a blank.

• 59:33Lewis Howes?

  It's unfamiliar.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:35Lewis Howes?

  It's scary because it's new.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  It's new and now I have to step into the unfamiliar.

• 59:39Lewis Howes?

  It might be the most blissful, healthy thing in the world, but it's scary because it's new.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 59:45Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, this is so fascinating. So it goes back to having the courage to, you know, consistently speak up, you know, going back to like feeling the uncomfortable feelings.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:58Lewis Howes?

  And being comfortable with the uncomfortable consistently will give you more freedom.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Absolutely true, 100%.

• 1:00:05Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, this is fascinating. So is there anything else here that I'm missing? That at the end of this process, this forges the new image of who you want to be?

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Then, then, then at that point, it really is, then it's, it's starting to take action to step into those images.

• 1:00:20Lewis Howes?

  Going back to the eight, kind of like things that will help you create congruence to living into that identity.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Right, right, so it's like.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  Thoughts, feelings, words, actions, and just taking consistently living into that.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Right, right. And what, what values do I want to embody? What attitudes do I want to hold? Right, and then, and then what actions will I take? You know, for instance, for instance, there was a, a time in my life when I didn't consider myself very generous.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  And, and I was like, you know what, I wanna, I actually wanna embody that more.

• 1:00:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  So, so I would think on a daily basis, or not, not, maybe not daily, but consistently. What do I need to do that would allow me to actually embody that more? So for instance, if I was traveling, then it meant I tipped more, right? Uh, it, to do that kind of thing, or I became more generous in my compliments.

• 1:01:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Or I became more generous in giving of my time, right? So there's all sorts of ways to, to be generous, generous in terms of sharing knowledge. There's, there's lots of ways to, to do that. So, again, you can choose a value, you can choose an attitude, you can choose a belief that you wanna hold or embody, and then you start to take the actions that support that. So again, that's the congruence piece.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  Because I believe that a lot of people, I, I love everything you're saying here because action consistently is my whole motto. It's like, the reason I've gotten to where I'm at is because I've had a couple of things. One, a meaningful mission. I'm clear on the vision that I have for my future and wanting to bring it closer to the now. So I know where I wanna be. I don't think a lot of people have a meaningful mission, right? They're not a hundred percent clear on what they want, why they want it. That is more than just for their needs and desires, but it's also for contribution.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:16Lewis Howes?

  And I think without the meaningful mission, it's just kind of you're reacting to life. You know, you're just doing what you're told, you're reacting, you're just, you're not creating your life.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:27Lewis Howes?

  So I think it's, you're having the action consistently towards the meaningful mission. And I think most people also aren't taking consistent action. You know, they'll sometimes take action, and then they're out of integrity because they're not consistent. Or they're sometimes generous but not consistently. So again, you're not congruent, which causes stress and anxiety.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:45Lewis Howes?

  When you're out of alignment.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:47Lewis Howes?

  So all these things, I mean, this is not for the, you know, the faint of heart, I guess. This is for people that want a rich, fulfilling life. And who are willing to go through consistent uncomfortable feelings until it becomes more comfortable, right? Until it becomes more second nature because you've practiced it. But that's hard to get to in the first place.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  To your point, you've got to make, you've got to go, that's, that's important to me. I want that. Let me make the decision and choice to do that. And then it's with an understanding that you're going to be in the discomfort for a while.

• 1:03:20Lewis Howes?

  Period of time.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Right. And, and what's interesting to me here, Louis, is that I actually consider our ability or our capacity to experience feeling and to express feeling. So communication as skills.

• 1:03:35Lewis Howes?

  Huge skills.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  So they're not, it's not that we should be able to do it because we have a brain and we can speak.

• 1:03:41Lewis Howes?

  Oh, no. It's, you've got to develop a skill.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  No, it's skill-based.

• 1:03:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  So we get better through practice.

• 1:03:47Lewis Howes?

  Well, this is why great leaders are great leaders because they've learned to develop these emotional skills. Their EQ is usually so skillful because they've practiced for decades on how to have tough, meaningful conversations that are also uplifting and forward, you know, they, they create forward momentum, not creating a barrier.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:11Lewis Howes?

  It's why leaders can build businesses or create movements or whatever it might be because they have that ability to speak up.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:19Lewis Howes?

  Consistently.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:20Lewis Howes?

  So what is this 90-second method then? I mean, the whole book is 90 Seconds to Live a Life You Love.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:27Lewis Howes?

  You created like this Rosenberg reset thing, right?

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  Right. A friend of mine called it that.

• 1:04:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Okay, it landed.

• 1:04:33Lewis Howes?

  It's a good, it's a good method.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  I didn't do it. I, I said, thank you very much.

• 1:04:38Lewis Howes?

  I like it.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  I think I'll use that.

• 1:04:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes. What is this 90 seconds process?

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  So, so, right. So the, the idea, now, the, the book is 90 Seconds to a Life You Love.

• 1:04:48Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  That's, think of that as kind of the method. And sort of a secret sauce to leaning into unpleasant feelings. But I will tell you that the subtitle of the book is where all the magic is.

• 1:05:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  And the subtitle is how to master your difficult feelings to cultivate lasting confidence, resilience, and authenticity. So the magic is in the eight feelings. And so, but the Rosenberg reset is, think of it as a formula for leaning in. So it's one choice, eight feelings, 90 seconds. That's the formula. So the one choice is awareness as opposed to avoidance.

• 1:05:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  So we've talked about avoidance, you know? Substance use, screens, sex, porn, food, right? The list goes on. Harsh self-criticism to me is a distraction.

• 1:05:40Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Anxiety is a distraction. You know, making geographic moves is a distraction. Having feelings about having feelings is a distraction, right?

• 1:05:50Lewis Howes?

  Anything besides the awareness of it is a distraction.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So my invitation is for people to be as aware of and in touch with as much of their moment-to-moment experience as possible. That's what I'm asking people to lean into is be aware of the present moment. Be aware of your experience in the present moment. As opposed to avoid. The eight feelings, we've talked about. So again, briefly, they're sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Vulnerability, embarrassment.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Disappointment and frustration. And then the 90 seconds piece is really the specific around leaning in, right? So, and again, we've talked about aspects of it, but if I kind of do it in sequence, the first thing is to understand that we're one interconnected whole. I mean, obvious to many, but the truth is that our brain is always feeding information to our body. Our body is always feeding information to our brain. We're an interconnected whole. We're not separate, but we get trained to be separate. We cut off from feeling when we cut off from our body.

• 1:07:01Lewis Howes?

  Right, we stay in our analytical thinking as opposed to feeling.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Right, which is where people many times will describe where the subconscious mind is. So that's the first thing to understand. The second, I mentioned, which is that most of us come to know what we feel emotionally.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Through bodily sensation. So again, why is that important? Because what dawned on me was that it's not that we don't want to feel the full range of what we feel, it's that we don't want to feel the bodily sensation.

• 1:07:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  That helps us know what we feel. There's a great story for me around this too, which if you're interested, I'll come back to. But the third part of that then is the 90 seconds idea. And it's not my 90 seconds. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, she wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. She's the one that first.

• 1:07:52Lewis Howes?

  Big TED Talk, right?

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Right, right, early, yeah.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  She was like a neuro brain scientist.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:07:57Lewis Howes?

  Had a stroke.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Harvard trained neuroscientist that has a stroke and takes eight years. Eight years to come out of that stroke.

• 1:08:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  But she had a capacity of awareness and put it to use. And what she became aware of is that, it was her observation, that when a feeling gets triggered, there's a rush of biochemicals into our bloodstream that activate the bodily sensations we're talking about. And those same biochemicals flush out of the bloodstream in roughly an upper limit of 90 seconds.

• 1:08:28Lewis Howes?

  So you might have this embarrassment and this redness or whatever rash feeling that comes on your skin because of a situation.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:37Lewis Howes?

  Does that come through the brain first? Like it comes through the mind that connects to the brain and then flushes through the nervous system?

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  It can go both directions.

• 1:08:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  So it's what people call bottom up and top down process.

• 1:08:48Lewis Howes?

  So it might be the body connecting the brain.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:52Lewis Howes?

  Because the body keeps a score.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:54Lewis Howes?

  The book. And then, or it might be like I see something, I think something, and then I feel something.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:08:59Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  It can go both directions.

• 1:09:01Lewis Howes?

  And what I'm hearing you say is that it takes around 90 seconds for it to leave.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:06Lewis Howes?

  If you are able to recognize it and go through the process.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  And stay present, just, and again, how do you stay present? Breathing is the, right, breathing is the key. You can actually think, so I like to talk about it from the standpoint of, think about walking along the shoreline and ocean waves kind of coming and going from the shoreline. It's like they come up, doesn't matter the degree of tumult, right? They can be tumultuous waves, they can be medium waves or moderate waves, and then they can be really light waves. But no matter what, they come onto the shoreline, they seem to hang for a moment. And then they subside. Well, think of the same process going on in terms of these bodily sensation waves. So it's not one wave we're talking about. We're talking about one or more waves, right? And so the notion is that you want to be able to ride

• 1:09:54Lewis Howes?

  The wave.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  One or more short-lived bodily sensation waves to stay present to the feeling.

• 1:10:00Lewis Howes?

  The challenge is if you're so, if you resist the feeling so much and it's so painful or uncomfortable, that 90 seconds might feel like 90 minutes.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:10Lewis Howes?

  You know what I mean? Ah, I just want to get away from this. So let me get a drink, let me eat food, let me watch porn, you know, have sex, let me buy something, let me work harder to not feel this feeling.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  Correct, yes.

• 1:10:22Lewis Howes?

  Why, was there anything else to this process?

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  Right, so again, the key for me, again, then it's kind of bringing it all together. It's, you want to be able to stay present. So it's choosing into awareness and then it's staying present to one or more bodily, short-lived bodily sensation waves or riding those waves and understanding that what you can do is to just

• 1:10:45Lewis Howes?

  Breathe.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  Pause, breathe and kind of pause. So that you just allow your breath actually to be like that ocean wave. And that'll help you stay present to the feeling. And if you do that, you can then in those paused moments, if you really want to start to master even more, then what you start to do is you reflect. And you start to go, well, what triggered me? Or geez, is there any pattern to my reaction? Is this attached to anything in my past? So depending on the depth of reflection,

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  you know, you can stay with that process and then you'll start to gain insights into your experience. The more you gain insight, the more you're able to develop the mastery over your feelings.

• 1:11:37Lewis Howes?

  Mastery, that's what I'm looking for. Why do you feel like it is, it takes an extreme

• 1:11:47Lewis Howes?

  Breakdown in life for people to start the process of healing and change. Versus, "Life is just really painful consistently. I'm not gonna change." You know what I mean? Sometimes it takes like a divorce, a near-death, a breakup, a loss of a career for them to wake up and start doing this process. As opposed to the, "I'm just living at a five in life, you know, out of a 10. And life is hard and sucks, but it's not enough for me to want to do this work."

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  That's a very interesting question. And it makes me recall, and I don't remember the specifics of my life, but what I became aware of is that if a certain problem happened in my life and I didn't address it, it would escalate in intensity and scope. So, I have no idea, like I said, I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember that if I looked back, I realized I could have handled it earlier. And I didn't. It just got bigger and worse.

• 1:12:53Lewis Howes?

  And more painful.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  Right. So, part of it is that we don't pay attention at those earlier opportunities to actually deal with whatever's going on. And we go, "Oh, it's not hurting enough. So, I can play it off. I can handle this." Right? So, or we don't wanna deal with whatever unpleasant feelings and other, whatever the experience is gonna be.

• 1:13:16Lewis Howes?

  We will avoid those unpleasant feelings until it is so painful, until we break.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  Right. But that then is the crisis point, is the wake-up.

• 1:13:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  And so, think of, no matter what level it's occurring at. So, let's say it's occurring at this level as opposed to this level or the crisis level, right? If you can be aware that you're getting caught into a pattern early on, then deal with it down here because you know that life truism is that it's just gonna get bigger as you go, right?

• 1:13:48Lewis Howes?

  But how many people actually deal with the event down there when it's just starting?

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Fewer.

• 1:13:53Lewis Howes?

  What's the percentage, you think?

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Oh, come on.

• 1:13:56Lewis Howes?

  Give me a range. 5%? 10%?

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  It's, I don't know. It's low.

• 1:14:01Lewis Howes?

  Because the people that you've worked with over the years, most of them... They don't come to you and like, I'm just feeling a little off.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:08Lewis Howes?

  They come to you when there's a crisis usually, right?

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Right, or, or it's, it's, it's gotten to enough where, where it's preoccupying. Right, it becomes something that now it's kept.

• 1:14:18Lewis Howes?

  Consuming them.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:14:20Lewis Howes?

  It's every thought, every feeling is this pain.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:24Lewis Howes?

  That could have been avoided years ago.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Right, right, so I haven't dealt with it, but now I gotta deal with it.

• 1:14:30Lewis Howes?

  Gosh.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  So, so, you know, what's the, what's the, I think John Gottman talks about people being in marriages six to seven years before they, and having a problem go along that long where they finally go, okay, now I gotta deal with it.

• 1:14:43Lewis Howes?

  Six to seven years.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Because we're at a breaking point.

• 1:14:46Lewis Howes?

  They'll live in, you know, just disconnection, or the resentment.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:52Lewis Howes?

  Or a lack of love or affection for six or seven years until they're like, okay. Every Christmas we think about this, every anniversary, it's just getting worse and worse. Now is at the time where we gotta, we gotta do something.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Right, so, but the, the key here then is that, is that the points at which we choose to deal with it, that, and again, the idea, and the idea we're noticing early. As opposed to letting it accumulate and intensify.

• 1:15:16Lewis Howes?

  We're feeling it early and noticing it.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:15:18Lewis Howes?

  And we let it intensify.

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Right, but so that, so, but no matter what, the point at which you start to deal with it, think of it as an opening for your growth.

• 1:15:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes, right, right, and don't shame yourself for how long it took you to get to it.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:15:31Lewis Howes?

  I mean, I'm, I'm, I put my hand up and say I've, I've stayed in painful situations for many years too long, too many times.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  As have I.

• 1:15:37Lewis Howes?

  So it's not like I'm sitting here thinking, you know, I get excited about this because I reflect on my life and how much I stayed in pain for so long, low level pain, until it intensifies. Stayed in relationships for years that I knew I shouldn't have been in. But I was afraid to feel those eight unpleasant feelings and to speak up.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:15:58Lewis Howes?

  And it's crazy to think now how simp, how simple the concept is, but how challenging it can be. If I stayed there and thinking it was, yeah, I could have avoided so many painful experiences, relationships, if you want to call it saving years on your life in relationships that people think about, just by speaking up and saying, you know.

• 1:16:22Lewis Howes?

  From a positive, kind, well-intentioned place, you know, this, you know, this isn't working for me, or this is something that's affected me, and I want to talk about this in a loving way. But, you know, this is my value, and your value seems like it's off. Can we meet somewhere in the middle, or what can we create?

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:16:38Lewis Howes?

  And the ability to walk away from a relationship and feel the pain and sadness, as opposed to staying it because it's familiar.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:16:46Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy what we do to ourselves because we're afraid of these eight unpleasant feelings.

• 1:16:55Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, this is powerful stuff. And I wish that, I mean, I wish I had this stuff sooner, but I hope people listening and watching really are taking this in, and taking this to heart, and are taking notes like I am, and starting to think about, like, where in my life am I allowing things to happen where I'm not speaking up? That's what I wish people would start thinking about. And how can I start to process these different things and start communicating in a way? And it's probably not going to be easy at first.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:17:25Lewis Howes?

  It's probably going to be extremely uncomfortable.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17:28Lewis Howes?

  The first few times you do this.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  Vulnerable, embarrassing, don't want to do it.

• 1:17:32Lewis Howes?

  Humiliating.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  Whatever, yeah. The inclination is to want to back off from it. But let that be your signal to move forward. Yeah.

• 1:17:41Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh. I want to ask you about confidence, because you said in the beginning that there are five keys to unwavering confidence. Can you talk about those?

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  Right, we've talked about two major ones, actually, and touched on the third. But for me, and again, there's more to it, but I would say there's five, really five core things to pay attention to. The first, we've been talking about kind of throughout, and that is to be able to experience and move through the unpleasant feelings. So I define confidence as the deep sense

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  That you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you face or whatever you pursue.

• 1:18:29Lewis Howes?

  Can you say that one more time?

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Yep. The deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  of whatever you face or whatever you pursue.

• 1:18:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  So, what's the emotional outcome? The eight unpleasant feelings.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Right? So, being able to experience and move through those eight unpleasant feelings is the foundational aspect of confidence.

• 1:18:56Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  That's your starting point.

• 1:18:58Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Move through unpleasant feelings.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:01Lewis Howes?

  The eight.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  To experience and move through, right. The second is speaking up. Why? Because I just, you know what? I have no, there probably are ways to prove this at this point, Lewis, but I actually think that our capacity to speak up changes our molecules.

• 1:19:18Lewis Howes?

  Our cells.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  Literally.

• 1:19:20Lewis Howes?

  Our nervous system.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:19:21Lewis Howes?

  Yes. I believe it.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  So that when we have that sense of ourself internally, like I said, that's when, for me, that becomes the superglued to confidence.

• 1:19:29Lewis Howes?

  Yes. You build so much confidence because you have the ability to speak up and handle these feelings.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Right. So, and what's interesting is that you're, and two things here. It's not, it's, it's not that you know yourself and then you speak. It's not that you are confident and then you speak. It's actually as you speak and through speaking

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  that you gain the confidence. So, it works.

• 1:19:56Lewis Howes?

  It's a process of, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  It works the other direction. And, and the interesting thing is also you actually come to know yourself better.

• 1:20:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  The more you speak, the more you actually come to know what you believe and it, and it, it.

• 1:20:10Lewis Howes?

  You're owning your beliefs more.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it solidifies. Again, if I go back.

• 1:20:15Lewis Howes?

  And it's speaking up in a kind, positive, well-intentioned way.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Right, right. If I go back to my, my youth into like high school years, it's like I was aware at some point, I wasn't even aware of what my own opinion was.

• 1:20:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:20:28Lewis Howes?

  You might go back and forth on opinion, or who knows?

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like, how come I don't know my own opinion? I was super shy and I wasn't speaking then. I actually came to know more about who I was and what I believed as I spoke.

• 1:20:43Lewis Howes?

  By taking action consistently.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  In this case, the speaking piece.

• 1:20:47Lewis Howes?

  Speaking consistently, speaking up, yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  Right. The third then is taking action, and taking action is similar to speaking. It's not that you're confident and then you take action. So you wanna learn a skill, whatever, you know, playing piano, playing tennis, doesn't matter what it is. Or practicing communication. It's, it's that you take the risk, you take the action, and then you gain the confidence.

• 1:21:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're not gonna, you know, I'm learning Spanish right now, but I, I say learning, I mean, it's like I'm still feeling like a beginner, you know, two years into like practicing daily.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:21Lewis Howes?

  I don't have confidence, like, speaking it, right?

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:25Lewis Howes?

  But I have more confidence than when I started.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:21:27Lewis Howes?

  And it's gonna take time practicing and taking action.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:30Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Right. So, so the third is taking action, because that, again, that's gonna further solidify. The fourth is stopping or ending harsh self-criticism. And then the last one is accepting compliments, really accepting and absorbing compliments.

• 1:21:46Lewis Howes?

  How many people in the world criticize themselves consistently?

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  I would say the greatest majority of us do.

• 1:21:56Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Now, here's the interesting thing. I look at harsh self-criticism, I mean, it's a problem in and of itself. But I don't look at it exactly that way. I think our self criticism is a thought hijack of the eight unpleasant feelings.

• 1:22:15Lewis Howes?

  It's a, is that a spiritual bypass essentially? It's kind of like a bypass to not facing the eight feelings.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:22:21Lewis Howes?

  I just criticize myself.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  Right, so, so let me, let me give you an example and then if you want, we can unpack it.

• 1:22:28Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  I was, I was doing an interview, but this time it was over Zoom, right? And, and I could hear the person who was going to be interviewing me. He could not hear me.

• 1:22:39Lewis Howes?

  So he was saying something mean to himself?

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  No, well, he was, you could see him starting to fumble with the computer and see if he could get the sound to work that way. And then you see him kind of crawling underneath the table.

• 1:22:49Lewis Howes?

  Trying to wire something.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, so he's doing the wires, but while he's doing the wires, I hear him say, "I'm so embarrassed."

• 1:22:59Speaker 00

  But without missing a beat, so embarrassed is one of the eight. Great, awesome, okay, and I'm chilling, I'm fine, it's cool, I have time. And, and I'm pretty easygoing anyway, but he goes, "I'm so embarrassed." And then right after that, without missing a beat, he says, "I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot." Now, harsh self criticism.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  The, so what's the difference? Embarrassment, we don't, we're not in charge of what we feel or that we feel it. Once it's in our conscious awareness, we can manage it, right? So, "I'm really angry, okay, I don't wanna, I don't wanna blurt out things that are mean to people when I'm really angry, so I'm gonna take a breath, okay, but I'm aware of it, now I can take the breath and chill and not say anything."

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  But some people act and don't have the, that gap between the thinking and the responding or the reacting. But, so the interesting thing here is that for me, what we think, how and what we think, we are in charge of. Not in charge of that we feel or what we feel.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  What we think we're in charge of.

• 1:24:08Lewis Howes?

  So we feel something, we're not in charge of that because it could be just a response to something. But once we think it, we can change the thought.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Right, we're in charge of the thinking. So what I watched, and again, it came out of an experience when I was, I was working with a guy working on his dissertation. I was a staff psychologist at UCLA for a period of time. He was working on his dissertation, he was really, really frustrated.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  But he was talking about the frustration, and frustration was really difficult for him. Okay, got it. But then I heard him start to shift to, I feel inadequate, unworthy, and undeserving. And in my head, it's like, how did he get from frustration to inadequacy, or frustration to, that he wasn't worthy? And then it dawned on me that, that if we think of those as feeling bad, right? I'm feeling bad if I'm frustrated. Now he's creating the same, sort of the same feeling bad, but now he's in charge of it. Because he's in charge of what he's thinking.

• 1:25:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  Right? So that's when it kind of dawned on me that harsh self criticism is actually a thought hijack of unpleasant feelings.

• 1:25:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  And so I think more people shift into, I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot, or what a dumb thing, I'll never be able to do that. I mean, the list is endless in terms of how mean we can be to ourselves and what we say to ourselves. That, that we're doing that because we don't want to deal with the unpleasant feelings underneath.

• 1:25:43Lewis Howes?

  Man, I feel like for decades, I would say mean things to myself. You know, you're such an idiot, you're stupid, how can you be, so, forget whatever it is, right? Say all these nasty things to myself. I'm so grateful I don't do that anymore, but it took practice and it took time to heal and kind of go through this process essentially. What happens to us when we are in a consistent, harsh, critical state to ourselves?

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  Well, we turn everything toxic. So again, I don't know if I said this earlier, but a friend of mine likes to say, "What doesn't get emotionalized gets physicalized." So now we're affecting our physical body, right? Har- so we know that harsh self-criticism, it depletes our immune system.

• 1:26:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  We know that. There's studies out that can show the difference between somebody who's optimistic, positive, kind, expresses gratitude, all those kinds of things, right? And there's vast difference between somebody's immune system when they behave in those ways, or think in those ways, and then when somebody's mean to themselves. It's like you're crushing your cells. Every cell hears you, right? And so now you're moving yourself into a depleted and toxic state.

• 1:26:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, your body's getting older, it's aging, it's, you know, unhealthy, it's not as got, it doesn't have as much energy.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:03Lewis Howes?

  It's more effort to do things.

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. What's really interesting to me too, Louis, is that most people think that unpleasant feelings and the harsh critic, that they're equal. They are not equal. So again, just from, again, no proof here, no research, but from an observational standpoint, I actually think harsh self-criticism is the thing that takes us down to depression and often takes us down to suicidality.

• 1:27:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Because we're saying such mean things to ourselves.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:37Lewis Howes?

  Consistently.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:38Lewis Howes?

  And if you remove the mean words and things, criticism, you're gonna feel a lot more peace.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:27:45Lewis Howes?

  Just removing that. But people are so caught in a cycle of beating themselves up that it just comes whenever they make a mistake, or they're not perfect, or they let themselves down, or they feel like they, whatever, hurt someone, they react to, "God, you're such an idiot. How could you do this? You're so stupid. You're such a..." Dummy, whatever it is.

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 1:28:07Lewis Howes?

  You're so ugly, you're so this, you're so bad, you're so, all these different things.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:28:11Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to what should we do when there is a letdown?

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  We experience the embarrassment, we experience the disappointment, and we ride those short-lived bodily sensation waves.

• 1:28:23Lewis Howes?

  Experience it for ninety seconds.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  Experience, or one or more times, right? You just, you just keep on going back, that that's, that's the key. You just keep, stay, you stay with the experience. So, so kind of think of it as reversing course, right? And, and you're gonna go, alright, if I'm, if, now you're catching yourself doing the harsh self-criticism. And, and I'll tell you, the, that harsh self-criticism takes a lot of mental space. A lot of mental and emotional space. So, when you change it, you're gonna have, you're gonna have some open space. Creativity comes in, right? Connection comes in, and, to yourself and to others. And, and so, what you wanna do is, when you find yourself engaged in the harsh self-criticism,

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  you stop yourself and you go, alright, what was it that I was experiencing just before that? Just before I let myself go to the, to that kind of thinking? So that I can be in touch of, with what was hard for me to know? Hard for me to bear, hard for me to think, or hard for me to feel? And, and typically, it's gonna be one or more of those eight feelings. Stay with it, make sense of it.

• 1:29:29Lewis Howes?

  Breathe.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  Breathe, right?

• 1:29:32Lewis Howes?

  Process it.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  And come out of it. And, and it's also understanding, again, in my world, the difference between those unpleasant feelings and the, and the harsh self-criticism, is that, is, think of, think of it, it, like, when we experience something that's unpleasant, it's just, it's unpleasant. It's like a one-to-one ratio. But, we live in California, right? And, and California has earthquakes. Well, if people are familiar with the Richter scale, a one-point difference is not a one-point difference, it's a ten-times difference. So think about that in relation to harsh self criticism.

• 1:30:07Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  That, that when you're engaged in it, we're not talking about it's just the same as unpleasant feelings. It's not. You're in a, you're really in a takedown.

• 1:30:16Lewis Howes?

  You're in it, yeah. And, you know, there's a difference between harsh self, self criticism, and I would say conscious feedback. It's like, okay.

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:30:25Lewis Howes?

  I was late for this meeting. I messed this up, or the audio isn't working on the Zoom call. Okay, it's just information that I wasn't prepared, and how can I be prepared better next time? And it's not the end of the world. You know, maybe I let someone down here for this moment, and that doesn't feel good, but, all right, it just means I need to be more present for the future. And now I have a checklist, and now I have a processor, you know, I'm gonna improve this.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:30:49Lewis Howes?

  So it's just feedback. It doesn't have to be this huge failure.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Correct, correct, right. And, and I will say a couple of different things here. For me, doubt and questioning myself is a more subtle, insidious version of harsh self criticism.

• 1:31:04Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  And if I hear somebody say, I'm a disappointment, that's harsh self criticism. People will, rather than saying I'm disappointed, it becomes I'm a disappointment, or I failed at something, becomes I'm a failure. Now we're moving from a reaction to something into actually harsh self criticism.

• 1:31:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, once you own that, and you say, I am this, that is very harsh. Not, I'm disappointed that I let this person down, or I did this thing, or this person did this, as opposed to I am a disappointment, I am a failure. That is, that is hard to come out of. If you claim it as an identity.

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:42Lewis Howes?

  I am, and then use that word, right? That identity will stay with you until you break the identity.

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:31:48Lewis Howes?

  And create a new identity. It's hard to get out of that and build confidence if you're in a hurtful identity. So that's step four.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:55Lewis Howes?

  And then what was step five?

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  Step five had to do with truly absorbing compliments.

• 1:32:01Lewis Howes?

  Receiving compliments, absorbing.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Lewis Howes?

  Why is it so challenging for people to receive gifts, compliments, support?

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  Well, it, one part of it has to do with us being able to be okay with the dependent side of our nature, and that it really is okay to receive. And frankly, the greatest experience of life comes when we can do both. We can give and receive, right? That's where the richness, much of the richness of life comes. And so that's one piece of it. The second is we're socialized not to receive them.

• 1:32:39Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  Because, one, I think we have the sense that people will see us in a negative light. Then we won't fit in, then we won't belong, and then, you know, it's just gonna lead to unpleasant or difficult connections with others. But I really differentiate or make a distinction between this whole idea of arrogance and what I would consider kind of that healthy esteem or that healthy confidence. And the, because arrogance is just the opposite. Arrogance is coming out of a place of inadequacy or a sense of inferiority. And so I'm gonna need to tell you 17 times how great I am. Right? Because I'm actually not feeling it.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  And now, we start to think that person is conceited or that person is arrogant, when in fact, that's, it's actually reflecting the opposite back to you. It's, they're, they're not feeling very great, and that's why they feel like they need to tell you all the time.

• 1:33:37Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:33:38Speaker 00

  So, so, so I wanna make that distinction. When people feel really good about themselves, and, and they take in the compliments, and for me, taking in the compliment actually allows you to update and up-level your sense of self and self-image.

• 1:33:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  That's, that's the thing that I've noticed, is that it's, it helps you forge that new story of yourself. And if you don't allow them to come in, then you don't necessarily have, or you're not making use of the new information.

• 1:34:09Lewis Howes?

  You're not receiving the information that confirms the values and the person you wanna be.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 1:34:15Lewis Howes?

  You're blocking the information. You're saying, no, but you're saying, but I want this thing to be this person in the future, but I'm not allowing it to happen right now, right?

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  Right, so think of a compliment...

• 1:34:26Lewis Howes?

  So you're not a congruence, you're not congruent.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  You're not congruent, that's right, that's exactly right. Think of compliments as a reflection of you back to you. So it's the essence of, I'm holding up a mirror to show you back to you.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  And if I dismiss that compliment, not only am I dismissing my reality, I'm dismissing your reality of

• 1:34:57Lewis Howes?

  Of me.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  Of me, right?

• 1:34:59Lewis Howes?

  So if I'm rejecting this of you saying it, then I'm telling you that's not who I am.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  And I'm saying dismiss your reality.

• 1:35:06Lewis Howes?

  Right, your reality is wrong.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:08Lewis Howes?

  That's not who I am. I don't deserve this.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, we do all sorts of machinations on the back around that. So now we're back into harsh stuff criticism, right? I don't deserve this. So it's as if we were in charge of our deservedness and our worthwhileness. But that's a whole separate issue.

• 1:35:24Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  The, so the, the truth is that if somebody's giving you a genuine compliment, it's coming out of an experience of you and an experience with you. So if you're dismissing the reality, if you're saying, no, no, no, not taking it, and you play it off, oh, it was nothing. It was just luck, you know, it was, it just happened. And you dismiss the truth. Now you're dismissing your reality and the other person's.

• 1:35:53Lewis Howes?

  And you're dismissing your effort. You're dismissing your action. You're dismissing like your consistency and

• 1:35:59Speaker 00

  All of that.

• 1:35:59Lewis Howes?

  All of it.

• 1:36:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Lewis Howes?

  It's like, ah, it was nothing, no big deal.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. I, I really have come to see that compliments allow you to update and up-level your self-image.

• 1:36:11Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  So that if you start to get a whole bunch of compliments about the same sort of thing, and you didn't see yourself in that light, then it's like, oh, wait a minute. Everybody's kind of telling me this. Maybe I need to take a look at this and actually own that that is part of me, or that is who I am. That is how I show up. And then you're not stuck in the old image of who you were.

• 1:36:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  You now can make use of that. It's like, oh, okay, I can, I can step into this new place. And see myself in a different light, or experience myself in a different light. That, oh, I can be capable of this. Or I already exhibit the generosity, or the kindness, or whatever it might be. Right? So, so I think it makes a huge difference. And what's interesting to me around this, Louis, is I often get the question, well, what about conceit then? Isn't that gonna give you a big head?

• 1:37:07Lewis Howes?

  Right. How do I stay humble and receive endless compliments?

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  Right, well.

• 1:37:13Lewis Howes?

  How do I stay grounded?

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:37:15Lewis Howes?

  And in service still, not just like, I'm the per, I'm the man, I'm the woman, or whatever, you know?

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  Right. So, for me, there's, there's kind of two answers to this. One is, I actually think of humility as telling the truth of who you are.

• 1:37:27Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, interesting. So, tell me more. What does that mean?

• 1:37:31Speaker 00

  That, well, if you think about arrogance in relation to humility, right? And I, I was doing this during a talk at one point. And I asked people, how, like, I asked three questions. And all of them had to do with playing down your skills, dismissing compliments, dismissing your accomplishments, you know, devaluing all of that. And then I looked at the audience and I said, that's arrogance.

• 1:37:57Lewis Howes?

  Really? Playing down your skills is arrogance?

• 1:38:00Speaker 00

  Right. So, kind of, who are you and what gave you the right to dismiss who you are?

• 1:38:06Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  That's arrogance.

• 1:38:09Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  Humility, then, would be telling the truth of who you are. So if you're a really skilled opera singer, you're a skilled pianist, you're great at tennis, you're, you know, a kind and generous person, it doesn't matter what it is, you're, if you own the truth, you don't have to tell me 17 times. You might say once or twice, yeah, I'm really good at that, or I'm really excellent at that. But people will receive that as truth. And they don't think anything of it. It's like, yeah, they are. And they recognize they are cool. And my experience is that when people feel good about themselves, Louis, they don't have to tell people.

• 1:38:49Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  They just live good.

• 1:38:51Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 1:38:52Speaker 00

  Or live the good.

• 1:38:53Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. What's the best, what's the best way for us to receive compliments? What's an approach we can have where we're authentic? It doesn't come across as arrogant or dismissing something. What's the best response?

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  Two comments. One is first a thank you. Or thank you, I'm glad you see that. Or thank you for recognizing that. Thank you for saying that. And the second, and this is actually borrowed from Lisa Nichols. And that is, I receive that. So it would be, thank you, I receive that.

• 1:39:29Lewis Howes?

  I like those, yeah.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  And if you don't take time to, if you haven't taken the time to take them in, in my world, compliments are timeless.

• 1:39:43Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean?

• 1:39:44Speaker 00

  Take some, think about the compliments you've been given. And, given and dismissed.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  Now, go back and, and I would have you ask yourself the question, or kind of two around this. One is, what are those compliments that you've received? That you've dismissed? And, and I've actually had people jot this down. You can go back as far in time as you want.

• 1:40:09Lewis Howes?

  Childhood, yes.

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  You can, so, and who would you have become if you had actually allowed yourself to accept those compliments at that time? And who can you become now by taking them in?

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  So for me, compliments are a super important part of this whole experience of confidence.

• 1:40:33Lewis Howes?

  I'm so inspired by this Joan and your book, I want everyone to get this, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love, How to Master Your Difficult Feelings, To Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. I believe that doubt is one of the things that holds us back from living a beautiful life. Doubting ourselves, doubting our past, doubting our future, just being in doubt. You know, we're not as rich to be around. You know, we don't, we're not as beautiful as an experience to be in the presence of when we doubt ourselves. People don't want to be in a relationship as much with someone who's constantly doubting themselves or doubting everything.

• 1:41:19Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like doubt is one of the killers of our dreams. Agreed. And in order to, you know, build, eliminate doubt, we need to learn how to build confidence. And you gave an incredible five-step process here to doing this. And again, it's an easy concept, but can be very challenging for people to go through. But I believe that these steps will make it a smoother process to experience the uncomfortable feelings, which are necessary. You're gonna have to experience them in order to get more comfortable and confident with experiencing them. So, I highly recommend this.

• 1:42:00Lewis Howes?

  I've got a couple of final questions, but before I ask you Joan, I want to acknowledge you for your incredible commitment to understanding people, to breaking down the science of the emotions that people go through in a practical way that for me was very easy to understand this process. And I know that's taken you decades to understand and to experience, not only individually, but also experience with thousands of people, you know, face to face and hearing life stories and problems and stresses and pains from a lot of different people. Right. A lot of different walks of life. So I really acknowledge you for your work, your ability to speak up and communicate effectively so that I can understand and that others can understand.

• 1:42:44Lewis Howes?

  And the work that you're doing with this book and everything else, so.

• 1:42:49Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing to connect with you.

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  Likewise.

• 1:42:51Lewis Howes?

  And I really appreciate this.

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:42:54Lewis Howes?

  Thank you, I receive.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. Thank you, I receive that.

• 1:42:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes. This is a question, but before I get to the final two questions, I want to make sure people follow you over on social media, Dr. Joan Rosenberg on social media, and also, what's the main place to send them? What's the main website for you?

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  DrJoanRosenberg.com.

• 1:43:15Lewis Howes?

  DrJoanRosenberg.com, social media. Get the book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love. This will be a game changer for a life. If you know anyone who's lacking confidence or is suffering, get them this book as well. Really helpful. How else can we be of service to you before I ask you the final two questions?

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  For me, really, Lewis, it's really about getting the work out. For me, it's about the kinds of things that help me get this kind of message out.

• 1:43:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  Like I said, I've had the opportunity to experience repeatedly what a difference it makes in people's lives.

• 1:43:54Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:43:55Speaker 00

  And so, that's really, for me, it's about being bigger service.

• 1:44:00Lewis Howes?

  Cool.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:01Lewis Howes?

  Well, we'll get it out in a big way, so I'm very excited. This question I ask everyone at the end is called, "The Three Truths."

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:44:08Lewis Howes?

  So imagine hypothetical scenario, it's your last day on earth, many years away. You get to live the life you want to live, you create everything, you accomplish things, but for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you on your last day. So no one has access to your book, this conversation, TED Talks, they're all gone. But you get to leave behind three lessons to put the world, three things that you know to be true, that you'd want to share with the world. And this is all the information we have of yours left. What would be those three truths for you?

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  The first would be to think, speak, and take action in the direction you want your results to be. The second would be to be congruent.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  So if we can go for the first four, we can go for all eight. So that, and the list goes beyond, it can go beyond eight. But again, it would be that you want your thoughts, your feelings, your words, and your actions to match, at the very least.

• 1:45:21Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:45:22Speaker 00

  And if you can get your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, your attitudes and beliefs, your values, your past history, and the vision for your future, if you can get them all to match even more, you're gonna be that much more fully aligned.

• 1:45:33Lewis Howes?

  You are.

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  In line.

• 1:45:35Lewis Howes?

  You're on a rocket ship to what you want.

• 1:45:37Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So that would be the second, congruence would be the second. And then the, the third would have to do with, with speaking up. It would be that, understand that the purpose of you speaking, and again, it's speaking from a kind and well-intentioned place. I would say internally to yourself, as well as externally with others. That your capacity to do that, and the importance of doing that, that that purpose, if you will, is to grow you. And it's one of the best ways to evolve through life. And not only have a deeper connection within yourself,

• 1:46:21Speaker 00

  but it allows you to have the deepest and most enriching connections with others.

• 1:46:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Powerful truths, I'm a fan of those. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:46:33Speaker 00

  You know, I said earlier, in terms of kind of a personal mantra, this idea of kind of, that I wanna see how far I can stretch in life. And, and so, one of my definition, or a definition of greatness for me, has to do with the willingness to, to step in and to pursue something, no matter what that journey looks like. And so, as I might say many times, that we disappoint in our ways to success. But, but it's to, to pursue those things that, that we really wanna pursue in life, and to allow ourselves to be as fully expressed in life as possible.

• 1:47:18Lewis Howes?

  John, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

• 1:47:20Speaker 00

  Powerful, inspiring.

• 1:47:22Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.