So I think that this is going to be the most profound video that I have ever put on YouTube
and I'm not exaggerating with that. It's also the most personal because for the insights
that I'm sharing, there's no way for me to communicate them to you without letting you
know it's been going on in my life for these last couple of weeks. So, if this is rambling,
I apologize. I'm putting my thoughts together on this, still, but it is incredibly important,
and that's why I want to share it with you.
So here's the personal part. About two weeks ago, I broke up with my girlfriend of a year
and a half. And if you've ever been in a relationship with someone for that long or longer, you
know, and you've broken up, it's not a fun feeling.
So the reason that it occurred was not because we didn't love each other, because we didn't
like each other. The reason that it occurred is because our values for what we wanted in
a relationshp long-term which is not in line. And there came to be this moment of realization
and acceptance that she wasn't changing and I wasn't changing, and for the both of us,
the best thing that we could do was separate, not because we wanted to but because it was
the right thing to do.
So it started off completely fine, like we're both logical, rational. She started packing
her things. She lived in this house, this studio, in my bedroom, and started packing
her things, started putting them in the car, and by the time we get all the things and
put the stuff into the car, and the last thing is in there, she is bawling. And I see her
like this and I'm numb, right? I can't even believe this is happening. We've been talking
about it because we think it's the right thing, but in that moment, I'm just like freaked out.
I want to show her that I care but I don't want to fabricate and manufacture these tears
so I feel guilty about the fact that I'm not crying, and I, eventually, sent her off. I
gave her a hug and a kiss and I tell her that I love her, but she drives off for another apartment.
I come back inside and that numbness stays with me for a couple of hours into that night.
And that sort of numbness shifted into loneliness and sadness, and I bawled my eyes out, right?
I held a voice recorder up. I talked my feelings out into my phone, which I need to delete
if that's on the iCloud; don't need that getting out there. But I just bawled into this phone
for, probably, 10 minutes, said everything that I felt, everything that I regretted.
I typed it out. I felt miserable, but even at the end, I felt better, a little bit relieved.
There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I felt even though that I knew
that I did the right thing. I felt incredibly lonely because this is the bedroom that I
shared with her. So, what happens after that is a couple of days go by. I still have this feeling,
with my friends, they're trying to-- They're amazing, right? They take me to Escape rooms,
all the things that they know I like, trying to keep me busy.
But in-between these events, this feeling comes back and I'm thinking of her, and I
eventually go to her Facebook, which is the dumbest thing that you can ever do if you've
had a breakup, do not do this. I go to her Facebook and before I can even scroll down,
I don't know why I reflexibly did this, I saw a picture of her that I hadn't seen before.
There was of her in a dress with a group of people near a club and I booked it off that
page, but not before my adrenaline shot through the roof. My blood pressure started pounding.
I felt my heart beat. I felt myself get angry and jealous, and my head just started to go
into this crazy spirals of, you know, I can't believe that so soon after, she would go out.
I was angry at her. I felt silly that I had wanted to be upset on her behalf. Here I am
a night and a half ago, or even the previous night, crying in my bedroom. Maybe she'd gone
out that night. I didn't know when this was taken. I start wondering if there was a guy
there from her past or that maybe she met someone at the club, she kissed him drunk,
how that would be like low standards and this guy couldn't compare, blah, blah, blah.
So, now, I'm comparing myself to this person and imagining how I'm going to go become better
in every way that matters to me, meaning, I'm going to go work on my business, I'm going
to try to get more talented with music, I'm going to try to be a better friend, a better
person, I'm going to travel more, become more worldly.
I'm comparing myself to this person who doesn't even exist. An imaginary guy that she might
have seen and kissed at a club I'm in a death fight with in my head. And 5 minutes later,
I realized, what am I doing? But I can't snap the streak. For the rest of the day and the
next couple of days, I feel divided. Every time that I'm with my friends, I'm wondering
what is she doing now? And I know a lot of you that have felt this, but it tends to happen
with a friend, a family member, someone close when there's a falling out.
Sometimes you wish that they're not having a good time, right? Or even people that you
don't know well that who, maybe, you're jealous of, you start wondering what they're doing
comparing your life to theirs, and it becomes impossible to live your own life in a happy
way, and that's where I was.
So I'm still trying to get my work done. The videos, I know I got to get to work to create
these breakdowns, I need focus. So I start doing whatever I can to get there--all the
exercises I did and then some. And one of the things on this list that I created that
I have to do is something I've been interested in which was a hypnotherapist. I'm going to
go to hypnotherapy and would have him sit me in a chair, just knock me out, and make
me feel amazing.
So I've never done it but that's kind of what I'm looking to--sign up for this guy in town,
drive in, get to the office, and I see he's got the plush black chair, and he's got the
desk with the chair there, and I'm ready to go sit into this giant black chair, and just
be put to sleep, and made to feel like a million bucks at the end of it. And he kind of goes,
"That's not how it works. I'm not really gonna do too much hypnosis today. Just sit down
on this chair next to the desk and tell me what's going on."
So I start to tell him and I get to the story about Facebook, that how I saw her, and my
blood pressure rise, and it just felt terrible, these triggers for me. And he said, you know,
something similar happened to me. There was a girl. We haven't been dating as long as
you guys had but there was real connection there, and it didn't work out. For whatever
reason, I wanted to date her, she didn't feel the same way, a few days later, weeks later,
I see on her Facebook that she is in Hawaii and she posts this photo, and it's with her
and this tanned, huge, handsome, stunning set of pearly white teeth guy, on this beautiful
island in Hawaii with the sun setting in the back, and she's wrapped around him with the
biggest smile I'd ever seen on her face. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, "Man, that's,
I know, that's rough. I hope you're okay."
And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, all I could think about in that moment was how grateful I was
to that guy for making her smile so big." And that, for me, was a complete plot twist.
I could not have seen that coming from a million miles because when I got sad, I went to myself.
How does this affect me? And what he thought me that I want to start to teach you guys
that has been, perhaps, the most pivotal shift is how to get to that point of sharing in
the happiness of other people, even when you don't necessarily feel it. Because in that
moment, what he made me realize is that even though I did love my girlfriend, I had a very
limiting concept of what love was.
First off, if you look back at my story, love meant to me that you need to be able to negatively
impact the person, right? So when I saw her cry as she drove off, I went "there you go,
proof that she loves me." And I felt guilty because I wasn't crying in that moment. I
went, "Oh man, she might not know that I feel that way about her." So when I did finally
cry that night, I was like "Crap, I want her to see this. I want her to know that I care."
Now that's all nice and that's how we often times perceive love, but guess what? A part
of your definition of love is that you need to be able to make someone feel terrible,
you will have to make them feel terrible at times to feel loved.
Another part of my definition was that I want to make her happy, right? If I love her I
want to make her happy. Now that's nice and it made me do a ton of nice things for her,
right? It made me be a better person because I wanted to spread that to her, but it also
made me very self-centered in where her happiness came from. It wasn't that she should be able
to go out with anybody and her friends the day after, and I was happy for her that she
was happy, I was jealous and upset that shortly after our breakup, she'd gone out and had
been happy with other people.
By the way, I later find out, that photo was taken weeks prior when we were still dating,
and this entire episode in my head was completely manufactured. But the point stands that I
couldn't feel happy for her because my definition of love was that I needed to be the one that
made her happy. And, of course, the third piece of my definition was that love means
you need the other person, and if she's out there not needing me, or if I was getting
over her quickly, that meant that we didn't truly love each other. So I was stuck in this
negative spiral to prove to myself and trying to get out of her that she love me, and the
only way that we could demonstrate that to one another was by continuing to stay_. That's
a really screwy definition and it will guarantee pain in your life if you want love, which
we all do.
A much better definition, and the one that I had been trying to go for, and I will teach
you guys how to implement it into your own life, is that love means truly wanting the
happiness of someone else no matter what. So the definition that I'm driving for would
have had me see that photo of her, with that smile on her face, and went "Thank god, she's
not sitting at home crying about this." I'm so happy and grateful to whoever it is in
her life, whether it's family, friend, or someone else that she met, that they're making
her feel that way because I care about her and I love her.
And, for myself, if I expected her to love me, I would know, you know, what? She doesn't
want me to sit in my room crying to a voice recorder. She would want me to be happy and
I want that for myself too. So rather than do that, I'm not going to have this predermined
grieving period. I'm going to try to feel good immediately. That doesn't diminish how
I felt about her and how important she was to me. That is just what love should look
like and the shift, though, and it sounds nice, and I go, "You know what? If I really
love her I should feel that way," but then, I'd imagine thinking of her out with another
guy, and that is not how I felt. Immediately, a trigger came back and I would be jealous.
So I said, "How do I actually get here?" And this is the crux, I hope now, of this video
now that you kind of understand where I'm coming from, which is how do you feel that
genuine feeling of love for someone else? Well, it starts with the fact that in order
to do that, you need to feel loved first. This is a human trait. Babies, if they don't
get touched, will literally die. Humans thrive on the affection and the love of other people.
If we don't get it, our lives go out of whack. Everything starts to break down. Our health
breaks down. We start being mean to other people. We stop achieving our goals. We need
to feel that.
And so, the metaphor that I think of is that our well-being is kind of like a table top,
and as long as it's supported with legs, it's fine. So what we spend a lot of our time doing
in our lives are getting, okay, I've got my friends supporting me, making me feel loved.
I got my family who makes me feel loved. I got my girlfriend who makes me feel loved.
And everyone has different ones. Think now, who are your legs that provide that love,
that sense of well-being that you have?
The problem is that these legs are inherently unstable because life happens. I mean, take
this one, for instance, right? I got my friends, my family, and my girlfriend, and we break
up. And my well-being just goes to crap. It's awful. I'm no longer not only feeling good,
but I'm certainly not being very fun for the people around me. And I'm bitter, right? I'm
not very nice, I'm not very concerned with how things are going for other people. So
what do most people do in a breakup, when their table has been knocked off?
Well, they spend more time with friends, and they spend more time with family, and then,
they go get another girlfriend, boom. After a month or whatever period of time, they're
completely back to their old self because they've built another leg there, or they strengthened
some of the other legs. All good, wonderful, and great, but that doesn't solve the problem
that this table is so wobbly because the legs underneath it are not.
For sure, the truth of life is people can die, people will leave. Even my friends who
I have complete confidence who will be with me for a long time are going on a vacation
for two months to the other side of the planet that I don't want to participate in. So that
leg, for me, is going to be shaky. What we try to do and what I try to do was to reinforce
these legs, right? So we go, I need this well-being here, how can I lock this in?
We try to build braces around the legs, and that brace can look like a couple of things.
For some people, it looks like threatening. They say, "If you leave me, I'll hurt myself."
In that way, they'd be certain that that person will never leave them. I had a bit more healthy
way to do that, which is I would try to make myself very important to that person and it
had a lot of self-improvement and self-development. It's kind of how this channel got started.
A lot of situations in my life, particularly with girls that didn't work out, I would go
back and say, "How can I avoid this?" What I'll do is I'll work on myself. I'll make
myself more critically important. I'll make myself better at making people happy. And
that will ensure that the people who are most important to me stay in my life. But like
I said, the truth is my friends are going on vacation, doesn't matter how important
I am to them, they want to do that, so I'm not gonna have them. And that's when these
braces become negative.
Take my friends. They're going on vacation. Rather than just being happy for them because
they're going to spend two months in Asia and it's gonna be amazing, when we talk about
it, I find myself going, "You don't want to go to that city. It's gonna be no fun, you
know, probably skip that one too. You'd probably just want to come back two weeks earlier because
you're not even gonna like it." I'm not so concerned with if they're going to have an
amazing time. I'm concerned with how it affects me.
Take my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend for that matter, right over here, this leg, I was so
concerned with myself being the happiness--that was my brace. If other people did it, right?
If she went out with a different guy, who's, maybe, single and had a great time with him,
that would threaten me, and that would make me feel crappy, and that's why that Facebook
photo affected me so dearly. So what you have to realize is that every single leg in your
life, in so far as it comes from someone else, is unstable, and you'll be insecure for the
rest of your life, no matter how good your friends, family, and loved ones are. If you'll
do that, you'll constantly be seeking security.
There's only one solution, and that is to build yourself, not just the wooden leg, but
a marble pillar coming up from the ground through your well-being table that is supported
by you, and tht is called SELF-LOVE. Now, my concept of self-love prior to this, I thought
that I completely understood it because I like myself, and proud of myself. I've done
a lot of things that make me feel really good about me. I got self-love handled. And the
truth is, that couldn't have less to do with self-love in any sort of universe.
Self-love has nothing to do with what you've achieved. It has nothing to do with goals.
It is completely unconditional, just as your love, truly, for another person should be
unconditional, no matter what, with me or without me, self-love for yourself means I
love and I accept me regardless of what I've achieved. Even if I'm a complete success by
my own standards, that has nothing to do with my self-love. My self-love on my worst days
and my best days needs to be the same.
And if you can build that pillar of self-love, it doesn't matter what happens to all those
wooden legs, right? Your friends can go on a vacation and you can still feel supported,
which means that you can be nice and happy for them, right? You can have a breakup. Your
girlfriend can leave. But as long as you have that central pillar, you will ultimately not
get stuck in this thought process of comparing yourself whether I am better than her new
boyfriend or whatever. You'll just feel good and you can feel happy for her.
One of the most amazing things that I've realized is that this enables you to tap into the happiness
of everyone around you instead of being concerned with what you lack. So I want to try to teach
you now the exercises that help you do this, and I realized this is going long, I got to
keep going, though, to plow through it, because this is the action stuff.
So, first thing is that every emotion that you have is a habit. Same way that you learned
to play the piano, for instance. You play a chord, first time it's really clumsy, 10
times, 100 times, 1,000 times. Each time you play, you're blazing a neural pathway in your
head. And with repetition, that gets stronger, it gets easier to fire, so you play it more
clearly every single time. Same thing is true for everything we learn, including emotions.
We all have habits with emotions and you should try to identify yours, because for me, in
this relationship, I could go to guilt easy, right? That became something that if I saw
glancing her, I go crap; I feel guilty.
You need to figure out what yours are. Maybe you get angry very easily. Maybe you get sad.
Maybe your person gets joyful or happy at the slightest thing. The point is, your emotions
are habits, and you can re-train them with practice, but you need to identify the bad
ones first. So, for me, it was this spiral of comparison, right?
I'd wonder if I was better or could prove myself beyond some imaginary guy that my ex-girlfriend
might see. So this was the habit that I needed to first cut off. I need to interrupt it.
So whenever I was out, say for instance, I'm in a gym, I see a guy, I know that was her
type, I go, I got to be better than that guy, yada, yada, yah, boom. Cut it out.
Notice it. Stop it.
The easiest way to stop it is something called an eye scramble. And this is what the guy
taught me in the hypnotherapy thing. It goes like this. You can hum a song, you gave me
a happy birthday, and when you feel that emotion, the first thing that you do is you just go this.
(humming "Happy Birthday" song)
It looks ridiculous. It feels ridiculous. But what it does is-- If you know, your brain
is divided into two parts. So if there's people who say that I'm not sure about this, that
your eye, depending on where it goes, accesses different parts of your brain. So you're quickly
just cycling through all the things in your brain. You are basically etch-a-sketching what
was going on. You do this a couple of times and you'll come pretty much to a neutral state,
as long as you're just imagining something negative. Now you're neutral. So you interrupt
the pattern. That's step one, with an eye scramble.
Step two is now that you're neutral, you need to feed yourself what you really need. And
I promise you, whether you're feeling jealous, insecure, angry, less than, whatever it is,
the feeling that you're craving, it might feel like you need to feel respected. It might
feel like you need to feel important. The underlying feeling that you need beyond all
of that is love. And I'm telling you, you can give yourself those intermediaries the
respect, the importance, the significance, the one that is going to fill you up is love.
So give it to yourself. Make it a choice.
And, again, simple way to do this. There are tons of exercises. I could talk about them
in other videos. For now, I'm just going to keep it very simple. You can go to a mirror
or imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror in your head and say out loud, or in
your imagination, looking at yourself, even though you are jealous of that guy, or even
though you're running a lapse in your head, or even though you miss your ex, or even though
your friends are gone, I love and accept you exactly as you are. Even though X, I love
you and accept you exactly as you are. You do it a bunch of times and you'll start to
smile because it's goofy, one, because you're talking to yourself, but, two, you will start
to generate that feeling. That's a good sign. Once you've broken that and you're starting
to feel good, that's the second step. You need to feed yourself that self-love.
The third step and this is the part that locks it in that is the hardest part. If you remember,
you cannot feel love for other people in an unconditional way, unless you first feel full
of yourself. So the way to test if you're full of yourself is to try to extend that
to the person that you least want to extend it to. And what I mean by that is that I would
go, okay, extend myself. I interrupted, I taught myself the self-love, can I feel genuinely
happy for my ex no matter where she is? Can I imagine my ex on a date, and hope and mean
it that the guy that she, perhaps, is on a date with is awesome, and makes her happy,
and is great in a lot of ways? And can I imagine him being there and be happy for him that
he is spending time with someone who I think is so great?
And when you can get to that point, which might sound ludicrous and sounded crazy to
me when I first walked into this guy's office, when you can get there in the moment, you
are free. You come back down to being present. You don't have to worry about what everyone
else is doing all the time. All of a sudden, rather than comparing where you are, you get
to just look around you and see all the happiness in the world and you get to partake in it.
I had never, in a completely unselfless way just looked at someone else and had been happy
for their happiness.
I always wanted people to feel happy, but I want to have contributed to what made them
happy. So it wasn't like I was running around being a completely jerk of a person, but I
was not going, "Oh, you know what? That guy did something on his own. That's amazing."
But for the first time in my life, I see that LeBron James win, for instance, the NBA Finals
in Cleveland, and I feel a swell of like that is amazing. That was that guy's dream, and
it can feel you up, and you can get that from every person in the world. You don't have
to be concerned with what you're lacking. All of a sudden, all the happiness in the
world becomes yours to tap into. So that is the basics of what I've learned this week.
I will definitely be talking about this more. I hope those steps are clear because they're
the important pieces.
Interrupt the pattern. It's a habit you need to get in there, cut it off. Second, once
you've interrupted the pattern, you need to feed yourself self-love. Like I said, lots
of exercises here. I'm happy to touch on more if you guys want. And then, third, extend
that; make sure that your cup is overflowing. This is the second analogy. You got the table,
the cup. You need to fill your love cup to the point where it's overflowing, and then,
you can start to distribute it to other people, kind of like the oxygen mask, right? You need
to take care of yourself and your self-love first, before you can really extend it to
other people in a meaningful way. You do those three things and you make a practice of it.
You just have to do it once, it's kind of like going to the gym, you got to continue
it, you will develop happier habits, and make you less insecure, less jealous, and a more
joyous person. It is the most profoud thing that I have come across in at least the last
year, and I hope that you guys have found it helpful.
If you want more on this, subscribe to the channel, and there will definitely be more
of this. Of course, more Game of Thrones and Breakdowns and all that stuff. I'm not gonna
stop, but I do think that this is gonna have a lot more. If you have any questions related
to this, I've never taught this before. Everything else on this channel, I've been studying for
10 years. This is the first time, at the start of this two weeks ago, that I stood in front
of the camera and tried to share. So if I've went over anything too quickly, if I've rambled
on things that aren't important, there's a piece you'd like to know, please let me know
in the Comments.
I will definitely be doing more videos on this and I want to answer your questions,
and then, of course, to my ex, who I'm sure will watch this video, eventually, because
she's been incredibly supportive of the channel pretty much since the beginning, I love you,
I really hope that you're happy, and I love you. So, that's all.