Today, I'm going to share with you an
embarrassing breakthrough that I had in the last couple of weeks
and I do it not so that I can cut myself open in front of an audience but
because this has been something that has been
very profound in the way that I behave and I think that realizing this
and moving through it has made me a better person and
if that's the case with me, I know that many of you out there
will have similar reactions if you can relate it back to your own life.
So I want to tell you my story
in the hopes that you get as much out of it as I did.
I just want to say before I begin,
normally in these videos, I have a lot of points that I want to hit —
in this video, I just want to talk.
I want to tell you the story, it's very fresh on my mind,
and that means I could ramble at times — if that's the case, I apologize but here we are.
So the story is about last month and I spent March traveling.
Right now, I'm at Rio by the way in my beautiful Airbnb
which is not so beautiful but I spent March
in Las Vegas where used to live.
And I went and I visited my ex-girlfriend,
I visited my younger brother who still lives there,
and I did a personal development program called Choice Center
and this program is intense.
It's a total of eight days throughout the month and each day is about 12 hours long.
The idea being that we all have patterns
and what they want to do is put you in kind of stressful situations
to see those patterns so that you recognize them
because when I say pattern what I mean is that
angry people tend to get angry
meaning yet they could be at a food store in line
or waiting in traffic or their sports team could lose
and the go-to-reaction for them
when there is stress in their life is anger
and the same is true of sad people,
people who put on a smiley face and are really dying inside —
whatever that go-to-reaction is
tends to be the same when stress is introduced into their life
so what they do is they keep you in this room for a long period of time,
have you do these experiential exercises which are quite difficult,
and you get to see, firsthand, how you react in stress
(the idea being that the way that you behave there
is the way that you behave when tough things happen in life).
And these patterns, what we often think,
"This is just who I am. There's nothing I can do to change it."
The whole idea is that we form these patterns when we're very young.
Something happens when we're children,
we don't know how to deal with it,
and so we try getting angry, right?
Mom won't pay attention so we throw a tantrum
and if that works, if mom comes over and gives us what we need,
we have started to create a pattern that can run for the rest of our lives
so that angry person, in many cases,
is just someone who learned from young age that tantrums get them
the love and the attention that they're desiring
and then 30 years later, when they're alienating people in their life,
and they're getting fired from jobs and they're pissing off friends,
they still go to anger because they learned at a young age that it works
and they don't remember where they learned it —
it's just built into them and they think it's who they are.
So, the whole idea of this program is
find these patterns and if they're not working for you, change them.
One of the things you have to do to do that is you go to
your primary caretaker so for most people, our mom
and dad or grandma and grandpa — who ever plays that role for you.
And you think about your early experiences with them
so I'm going into this exercise and I should say that, right now,
I kind of sense that something is going to come of it because
I have wonderful relationships in my life and I love my mom and dad
but the truth is, as good as many of my friendships are,
I do not have the most amazing relationship with my dad.
In fact, when I go home and I visit,
I find that I can only stay three to five days
because we argue so much that I need to leave.
I come and, typically, the first thing that happens is he goes in on me
about how I need to run Charisma on Command and what we're doing wrong,
I'm leaving money on the table, blah, blah, blah,
and then it's politics and then it's something else
and then it's that I need to come to dinner as soon as he says
and I can't at the other room and we just argue about everything.
Now, most of the time it's simple bickering and we don't scream at each other
but there's this combative nature between my dad and I
that I feel like has always been there so that's the background.
So we go through this exercise
and we're thinking of our early relationships with our parents
I do my mom very similar to the mom that I know today —
caretaker, loving, really supportive,
made me feel like I could do anything and is a huge reason the Charisma on Command exists because
she gave me that foundation of just unconditional love to feel like
I can go take a risk and fail and it would be okay so
I love you mom — you're instrumental in everything that I do.
My dad was more complicated.
As I thought back on my dad,
it wasn't this combative guy that I know today that just argues with me about everything.
In fact, when I thought about him when I was a kid, he was my hero.
I was shy, I was introverted, I was weird, I was video game–obsessed,
and my dad was charismatic, athletic, musical, best storyteller I've ever met
in my entire life — I remember just marveling at the way
that people gravitated towards him in any room.
And I had such admiration for him.
I wanted to be like him and I wasn't and that was simultaneous.
He was my blueprint for who I wanted to be and I fell short.
And that was hard for me as a kid
because, then, I had a little brother, again, who I love
who was more like my dad in many ways and
I fought with my little brother.
So, I'm reflecting on this and I'm realizing, "Holy cow, this relationship of
fighting with my dad isn't how it always was."
In fact, I wanted to be like him.
I was just not for a long time.
I couldn't have been more opposite — whereas he was outgoing,
I remember he literally paid me $100 on a summer day
to go outside and get away from my video games for 15 minutes.
So I took his money, I went outside for 15 minutes,
counted until the end of 15 minutes on the dot, came back in,
and then immediately went out and bought two more video games.
That's how different from him I was and I remember resisting him.
He wanted me to play basketball and forced me,
he was the coach of the team, and I quit as soon as I could.
He wanted me to play piano and he forced me to take lessons
and I remember screaming and cricking and quitting piano.
He wanted me to be the things that he was
and I wanted to be the things that he was but I felt like
I couldn't or didn't want to or I just fell short.
So that's coming to me now and
I'm realizing, as we're going through this, that I really admire my dad
and that's not experience of him that I get a lot today —
it's mostly like, "God please stop. Please stop arguing with me."
So that's weird for me.
We go through into another exercise
which is you think of the things that you resent your parents for
and, immediately, I go to dinner because
I think back, we always used to have family dinners
which is really good as we grew up
but one of the things that happened was
that my dad would pick an argument with somebody at the table —
usually with my mom but could with my brother, my sister, and me —
and he would just steamroll them
because nobody at the dinner table was as loud or charismatic
or just, brute force, would run you over like my dad could
and I remember getting so mad about this
and wanting to stop him because even as a kid, I knew that he wasn't making any sense.
He was just bullying people
and telling them, "No, you can't do it this way. You have to do it my way. You got to see it my way."
So as a kid, I couldn't stop him from doing that —
he was clearly much bigger than I was.
What I learned to do at about six or seven years old was to argue
and I got really, really good at arguing and not just arguing to win a point.
What I considered a victory at that age and
still to this day with my dad was riling him up.
It was not just arguing to get to an agreement
or to prove my point or to have him consider things my way
and, in turn, consider things his way,
it was to upset him, piss him off, and get him to storm away from the dinner table if I could
and if he grounded me and screamed at me, even better — victory.
And that was what happened for many dinners —
that would be the dynamic that played out
with varying degrees of upsetting my dad and then getting in trouble myself
and I've always felt that when people tell me,
"You're so much like your dad. You can be so stubborn sometimes,"
that makes me so angry because I don't want to be like that —
I hate that so much and I go, "Oh, that's not true,"
and then, again, now I'm arguing with my friends about how I'm not argumentative.
But these two exercises combined and
a lot of the things that I've done in my life begin to come into focus.
If you look around, you see there's a piano right here.
I picked up piano after fighting and resisting it as a kid.
Basketball, once I got away from it, I picked it back up in high school.
Charisma, my dad was this charismatic guy.
I didn't want to do it and I didn't want to go outside and now I run a company
that teaches people how to be more charismatic, confident, and extroverted.
I have this very complicated relationship with my dad —
or maybe not so complicated, maybe it's more common and you're relating to this — in that
he was my blueprint for what a man I was — for what I wanted to be.
And I couldn't be like that so I fought against it
but subconsciously, I've been driving at being like him my whole life
and what that has meant is I picked up a lot of the good things but I picked up the bad too —
I can be argumentative and I absolutely have been with him.
So I go through all of this, and this is the embarrassing part —
is accepting and admitting, for me, that I am like my dad to a point.
From when I was a little kid, I just wanted to be like him
and set an autopilot there that I didn't realize
and, in many ways, have become him in the extreme.
So that's strange for me because I've resisted.
Going through these exercises,
what I want to cover now is — after you realize these kind of things,
maybe you are having similar realizations about ways in which you are like or unlike your mom or your dad.
That's kind of my hope in telling you this story because
your parents or whoever raises you has an indelible effect on who you are.
You often can't remember necessarily the specific times —
you can if you try very hard —
but they really do shape your concept of what
success is, of what love is, of what you should be driving for in life
and if you don't realize that,
you often find yourself being guided towards things —
you wonder, "How did I get here? Why did I sabotage that relationship?"
and if you go back far enough,
it's often from a pattern that you picked up at a very young age from your mom or your dad.
So that's why I want to share this with you.
What I want to cover now is how you can begin to change this
if you're finding that it's not serving you as in my case that it really wasn't in some ways.
The first thing you got to do is accept it
and that's the whole story that I just told you.
Typically, it's difficult to accept —
it's something that people might have told you about yourself in the past
that you've just gone, "That is not true. I can't believe they would think that about me."
It's something that's going to embarrass you like this embarrasses me because
if it didn't embarrass you, you wouldn't fight it —
you wouldn't pretend that it wasn't the case.
So you sometimes got to go to programs like this, I would say.
If you're not finding it now, sign up for our email list.
I'm going to be creating more videos in this either on Youtube
or in one of our paid courses — I'm not sure yet.
But there will be more on this
so join our email list and I will definitely be writing more because I find this
to be fundamental for self-awareness and for
success for goal achievement in your life because this can really derail you.
So go ahead and join the email list if that's something you're interested in.
That's the first step — it's being honest about what your pattern is.
For me, it's a copy of my dad.
The second thing is
doing something immediately that is way out of your comfort zone
and that gets someone else involved that is going to commit you forward to change
and for me that is often calling this person.
For me, that was calling my dad and telling him everything I told you.
I told him and I said, "Dad, I didn't realize it, I admire you so much.
I admired you sinceI was a little kid. I wanted to be like you.
I didn't even realize it. I bought all these instruments lying around.
At our house, there was always instruments you always tried to make me play.
As soon as I left, I bought a bunch of instruments and did it.
I wanted to be like you my whole life and I didn't even realize it
and quite frankly, I'm proud of the ways
that I've wound up like you and there's some ways that I'm not proud of that I gotta work on
but I wanted you to know that and that I love you."
So we had that conversation which is very different
from the typical arguments that he and I have and he's taken aback and just says, "Oh, thanks.
I love you too," and that's that.
The third thing is that at some point, you do that and you have your epiphany,
what often happens with people is that life comes back into play.
And you have this big breakthrough moment, you're ready to commit,
everything's going to be different, and then when the rubber hits the road,
you guys go back to your same old patterns so you need to be very, very careful.
especially for the first time that there's friction between you
and with me and my dad, this happened as soon as I saw him which was just last week.
I was coming home from Las Vegas
and I mentioned I was visiting with my ex-girlfriend.
One of the things that we decided was that we were not going to continue to stay in touch
and that was hard for me because even after we broke up
we stayed in touch, we continued to see each other —
in many ways we were still dating
and we decided just a week ago
that we were going to stop that for the both of us.
That was hard for me — it was very hard for me so I got on a red-eye plane
fresh out of a breakup, basically,
flew home to visit my mom and dad,
got there at 8am and my dad picked me up and I told him —
I said what had happened and he immediately went in on me,
"What did you expect? I mean, this was obvious.
You guys broke up last year. This is going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," for five minutes.
And I sat there and I started to prepare my case
to just argumentatively destroy him, to take him apart, and win this argument
but I caught myself, thank God.
And instead I said, "Dad, I just want you to consider this —
I just got off a red-eye flight that I didn't sleep on
because right before I got on that red-eye flight,
I basically broke up with someone that I loved and now I'm not going to be talking to them.
And I feel really not good about all of that
so you can say whatever you want to say to me but
I ask that you just consider that that's how I'm feeling right now."
And that was it and he took a deep breath and said,
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say it like that. What I was..."
and the conversation, the whole tone, shifted
from him here, and me here, and boom, boom, boom, boom,
to he was now trying to guide me in a kinder way
and I realized my pattern was my dad take a firm stance, I take the opposite firm stance.
Or I take a firm stance and my dad takes the opposite firm stance
and we just see who's tougher.
And this was the first time in my life that I did the opposite.
He took a firm stance and I said,
"I'm hurt. This doesn't feel good. I need help,"
and, what do you know, my dad helped me.
So I say all of this because
you might have this pattern
in which case, the answer is if you're always the tough fighter,
you might have to be vulnerable like I did.
It's not going to feel good.
You might have a different pattern though.
You might be someone who just gets steamrolled all the time.
Your parents tell you who you're going to date, where you're going to go,
how things are going to be, and you accept, accept, accept.
You might have to stand up for yourself.
You might have to say, "Mom, I love you
but you cannot tell me who I'm going to be dating in the future.
I love this person and this is who I'm going to see. And I need you to accept that."
Whatever it is, you're going to have to do the opposite and it's going to feel hard
and you need to pay special attention to that first moment of conflict
because that's going to set the pace going forward in your relationship.
So those are the three steps to changing it.
One, I hope my story helped you to start to reflect
and realize what kinds of blind spot patterns you might have
that come from your mom and your dad in your early childhood.
If you haven't yet, like I said, more videos — join our email list.
The second piece is committing forward as soon as you realize that.
So text someone or call someone right now.
You know who that person is and just tell them what you've realized.
And the third is that when you get back to normal life,
be on the lookout and be ready to do the opposite of your instinct
and it's going to feel very strange, sometimes it feels like you're exposing
your most vulnerable part so it didn't feel good for me
but the relationship I've spent five days with him
and it was the best five days we've had in a very, very long time.
So, I hope that you've enjoyed this video.
If you have, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
We'll have more like this but actually next up we have a charisma breakdown
on Louis C.K. coming next week.
I'll be back to the weekly videos now that I'm back in Brazil
and hunting for a studio so I have a better place than this goofy Airbnb
to shoot these for you guys.
If you want to know more about this topic, like I said,
we're definitely going to be doing more on it.
Probably not so free style like this one but more guided exercises
and some of those will be on YouTube, some of them we might put in Charisma University.
Either way, join the email list and you'll learn about wherever this might end up.
I hope that you've enjoyed this video
and of course I will see you in the next one.