- Hey there, thanks for clicking on this video.
My name's Roberto Blake.
I'm a creative entrepreneur, a public speaker,
and I do a lot of stuff here on YouTube about social media,
business development and sometimes I do
the occasional motivational video,
and this is one of those.
One of the things people talk
to me about in social media a lot
is their struggles with motivation, procrastination,
a lack of productivity and just not feeling confident
in themselves and this is a really big deal
and it breaks my heart
because I know exactly what that's like.
I used to think of myself as a loser,
I used to call myself that.
A lot of it had to do with the fact
that I was broke and I was struggling
especially throughout my college years.
All of my friends were driving cars.
I couldn't afford one.
I used to have to bum rides to go to school
and to work and I was paying for community college cash.
I didn't have the money to go to a good school,
and I struggled in high school with bullying and depression.
My grades suffered for it.
I had some issues in my family and home life
that were really getting to me.
There were a couple of issues with me where
it got really bad.
I was in a dark place and you know what?
It impacted so many aspects of my life,
and I felt like there was nothing I could do
to take control back,
and to just even feel good
about who I was seeing in the mirror.
So I understand what it's like
to struggle through those things,
and only by overcoming that and only by taking back
the control over my life was I able
to build a career that I was proud of
when I was working as a graphic designer
and working for other companies.
Only by mastering that confidence,
and feeling like I deserved better in life
was I able to step away from a steady income
and those opportunities to go out on my own
and be a full-time freelancer,
and from there I had to find my voice
and I decided to use YouTube to try to do that,
and it gave me the opportunity
to become a public speaker.
It gave me the opportunity to build my business
as a consultant and then later as a coach,
and it continues to give me
more and more opportunities and the foundation of that
was finding my confidence, finding my voice,
finding my inner charisma and finding a way
to make meaning out of my pain
and out of my suffering and to just stop the struggle.
You have to step off of the struggle bus at some point,
and it's going to be one step at a time,
but once you get out of that door
it is the most important thing that you can do,
and part of that is going
to come down to taking responsibility for your life
and for your outcomes.
Finding the things that you can control
is much more important than dwelling on circumstances
that you didn't ask for, that you don't feel your deserve.
The things that shouldn't have happened to you,
the things that you think should have happened to you,
the things you think you should have gotten
in life are irrelevant.
You don't want to, as my friend Amy would say,
you don't want to should all over yourself.
Instead what you need to do is you need to flip the script
and you need to tell yourself a different story.
Instead of calling yourself a loser,
you need to understand that you haven't arrived yet,
and that you're working on yourself.
Instead of saying that you're broke
you need to say that you're not as financially secure
or stable as you'd like to be,
but you're someone who's going to educate themselves
and walk out of that struggle.
By telling yourself just a different story.
Positive affirmation sound like bunk or hokum to people,
and some of you want real solutions to your problems,
but I'm telling you that it does start
with what's in your head.
Your thoughts ultimately become your actions
and only through your actions are you going
to change your circumstances.
You either need to find a way or make a way,
and you can't do that if you're abusing yourself
day in and day out because I tell you what
there are plenty of other people
who are gonna do it for you, so why pile on?
The person who has most cheated you,
the person who has robbed you most of your potential
is in the mirror and you need to change that person
into your greatest ally, your greatest champion.
You need to be your own champion.
You are going to save yourself.
I'm not gonna save you.
I'm not gonna step in for you.
I'm not gonna be the one that delivers you
from your suffering, you are.
You're going to do that and you're going to do that
by taking extreme accountability.
You're going to do that by changing how you treat yourself.
You're going to change your standards,
you're going to hold yourself accountable,
you're going to develop good habits.
You're gonna become disciplined.
You are going to learn things and work hard,
and that is how you are going to exit
from your suffering and getting off the struggle bus
and getting on the success train.
That is how you're going to arrive at a destination
that you know you deserve.
Now here's practical advice in terms
of taking responsibility
and taking back control of your life.
One of the first things I did to take responsibility
was I started treating myself better
in terms of my habits
with regard to my health and to my energy.
I started making it a priority to find five, 10,
15 minutes every single day
to do physical activity and exercise,
to get my blood circulation better,
to get my breathing better,
to just get healthier.
I made that absolute priority
because I needed more energy if I was going
to work any harder than I already was,
so I had to make that a priority.
I had to discipline myself to eliminate my distractions
and my bad habits, things I was wasting time on,
and things I was wasting money on
that weren't bettering me.
That was an extremely hard thing to do
because we tell ourselves what we deserve our escape is,
and we deserve these distractions
because we worked hard all day we deserve something.
That's real easy to do.
I'll tell you what, you deserve more sleep.
You deserve more sleep.
Instead of the video games, instead of the Netflix,
instead of anything else that you're doing,
maybe just sleep a little bit more, okay?
Because that's gonna feel really good,
that's gonna be great.
You deserve more rest
and you're gonna have more energy to attack the day.
Other things you can take control of
is stop giving people access to you.
Stop letting people rent space in your head for free
if they are toxic or if they're abusing you
or they're treating you bad.
This can be really hard
especially when those people are family,
but I'm telling you if they are abusing you,
you need to raise your standard, set real lines in the sand
for how you will be talked to,
how you will be treated like be very ruthless about this.
Your life will get better, your life will get better
because now without them in your head
and without them taking energy and time from you
and demotivating you,
you can put more of that time and energy
into people who are your allies,
people who are helping you to achieve your goals
and you can leave behind people
who are also on the struggle bus, those crabs in a barrel
that might be hindering you or holding you back,
and you can find people that are gonna lift you up.
You can find people who are gonna join forces with you.
You can find people with common values,
common beliefs, common goals, and common ground.
Like that is so important
for you to put yourself into a better environment
with a better class of people,
no judgment to the people in your life,
but I say a better class of people
in terms of what you expect, what you deserve,
and what is going to be valuable to you,
and if you don't feel like you have permission to do that
I'm giving it to you now.
By taking responsibility for my relationships
and who had access to my energy,
by taking responsibility for how I was spending my time
and investing in myself and even treating myself better
in terms of what I was eating, resting,
what I was reading, what I was watching,
deleting the news apps from my phone.
These things made it a lot easier
to combat the struggles and the hardships
because I had more energy or more resources
or more knowledge because I freed up time away from things
that were taking from me in favor of things
that were adding to me and when you do that,
your struggling will just slowly incrementally
get less and less and less.
I'm not saying that suffering
is gonna be eliminated from your life forever,
but you're gonna become more powerful
to combat those challenges and struggles,
and they're not gonna feel like a weight or a burden
or something insurmountable anymore
and you need to change your habits by making them
a little bit more obvious and making them easy.
Do you know why I leave my YouTube camera
and my podcasting gear always set up?
Because it's easier to actually turn on the camera
and hit record or turn on the microphone
and hit record and do something
when it's staring me right in the face
and when there's not friction,
when there's not a barrier between me and the outcome
except for my own execution and
that makes me more disciplined
and more committed and more accountable,
and you need to find ways to be more accountable
in your life, whether it's someone to hold you accountable,
a promise you make
to people on the other end of something like
the promises that I make to show up for my audience,
those things really matter.
So again, if you're someone who's been struggling,
if you're someone who's felt demotivated,
defeated I understand where you're coming for.
I was you, okay?
I was you, I felt that in my gut, in my soul,
every single day when I looked in the mirror
and I'm telling you this is how you make a change.
If you take no other advice from me ever.
If you never watch another YouTube video from me again,
watch this one over and over and over
until it sinks in 'cause I was really hardheaded
and these lessons had to get through this thick skull
of mine and it took years.
If I had, had somebody to tell me this,
to really just go in on me in my early 20s
it would of made a difference in my life fundamentally.
It would of fundamentally
made a difference in my life, okay?
So I'm doing for you what I wish somebody had done for me.
I want you to understand that it is within your control
and within your power to change the circumstances
in your life, that you can be the author of your own future
and your destiny.
John Connor, this is a Terminator quote.
"No fate but what we make for ourselves."
I genuinely believe that, I genuinely believe that
and you know why?
Because I rewrote my own destiny,
I rewrote my own life and I did it from rock bottom.
I did it from a place of feeling absolutely worthless
and defeated to the point of wanting to take my own life
and if I could come back from that,
if I could do it then I genuinely believe
you have that same ability and power within you
because I don't believe I'm that special, okay?
I want you to understand that I'm not an anomaly
or a unicorn in that way, not in that way.
This is a very human thing.
This isn't a Roberto thing.
This is a human thing, so I want you to understand
and to feel that and to relate to that and to know
that it's not about me promising you hope,
it's about you having the honor,
the promise of your own potential
and to give yourself a fighting chance
because you need to believe and if no one's told you this,
I wanna be the one to tell you this.
You need to believe that you're worth it.
You're not a mistake, you're not a mistake.
I don't know who told you that.
I don't know who made you feel that,
but you're not a mistake and you're not lost.
You have a responsibility to build the life
that you want for yourself so that you can do right
by other people.
So what I want you to do
is I want you to honor that commitment.
I want you to honor the promise of your potential,
and I want you to go out there
and create something awesome today
because you deserve it and the world deserves
what you have to offer.
I hope this worked for you guys.
I hope this helped you feel confident,
help you feel that you can do more,
that you can earn more, that you can be more
because you can, alright?
Hope you're having a good one wherever you are,
whenever you're watching this go out there,
create something awesome today, take care.
(gentle music)