How To Build The Best Relationship With Yourself | Adam Lane Smith 2185

What's up, everybody? Look, we've never done this before. This is a brand new thing that we're attempting. So our goal here at MindPump has always been to bring our audience the best information around health, fitness, and wellness. So this is something completely different. Adam Lane Smith is a friend of ours. He's an expert in attachment theory. He helps coach people with their relationships, friendships, relationships with their partners and their kids. We had him on the show and we were so strongly and positively impacted by him that we invited him back on to do a series exclusively for his show hosted on our channel. This is the first episode. He's going to explain attachment theory, why it's important to understand what influences it, how it influences and impacts your behaviors. But there's going to be a whole series of videos where Adam, the expert on attachment, is going to coach you and teach you how to make your life better. So this is not a MindPump episode or a MindPump podcast. This is Adam Lane Smith bringing to you something that we couldn't do because we're not experts in this field and we respect him so much. We are hosting again on our channel. Now, Adam Lane Smith can be found at attachmentadam on Instagram. So make sure you give him a follow. And then he has an attachment bootcamp video course. He actually gave me access to this. It's so profoundly impactful. If you want to become a better person, a better husband, a better father, a better mother, a better wife, a better partner, better friend, if you want to attract those people in your life, you need to check out this video course. And we got him to give you 50% off. So if you're interested in what he talks about, if you're interested in learning more about this, how to make yourself a better person, go to mpadamsmith.com. And then use the code MIND. That'll give you 50% off that course. Also, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Viorey. Viorey makes athleisure wear that looks good, lasts a long time, feels comfortable, some of the best athleisure wear you find anywhere. And because you are on our channel, you get 20% off. Go to vioreyclothing.com forward slash MindPump. Viorey is spelled V-U-O-R-E-Y. So vioreyclothing.com forward slash MindPump. We're also running a program sale this month through MindPump. MAPS bands is half off and the hard gainer bundle is half off. You can find them both at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Just use the code OCTOBER50 for that. Okay. So without any further ado, here's Adam Lane-Smith doing what he does best, which is communicate how to get better relationships. Watch this. In this series, I'm going to be showing you the five key areas where you need to make sure that you have rock solid attachments. So your relationships are everything you want them to be. I don't want you to leave anything on the table when it comes to your relationships. You could think that they are incredible right now, and they may be in some areas, but they're not where they could be. So today I'm going to be walking you through the process to fix with your integrated self, to build the best attachment with you. In future installments, I'm going to be talking about your relationships and friendship, your dating, your marriage, and your parenting. Make sure you come back for those because we want to build you the best possible relationships in your life that you can get. Today, let's focus on giving you the best version of your relationship with yourself. That means an integrated relationship where you respect yourself, like yourself, and you can live the rest of your life taking care of yourself. Let's do it. So before we dive in, let's make sure you know exactly what attachment is because everybody thinks they know, and nobody really knows. It is not something that you connect to an email. It is not that thing that they discuss in Buddhism and how bad it is to be attached. Attachment, third definition I'm going to give you, is the way we connect to other people to give and receive love. We develop attachment as little children. The moment that we are born, we start developing it. The moment that we get skin to skin contact with our mom, that we're comforted when we're crying, we get that first breastfeeding with mom. Hopefully we get all those connection pieces and then we stay wrapped around mom like a little baby monkey for the first year of our life and we can't be separated from her. Attachment is the way that we connect and to give and receive love with her, to share bonding, to get comfort, to talk to her. There are a lot of ways that this happens, but first let's talk about the ways that this can break. So little kids, sometimes they can be born premature and they get put into the NICU, right? And they get put in there and they don't have skin to skin contact hardly at all. I have seen so many clients come in that say, Adam, my family has been incredible. They are wonderful. And I have been anxious my entire life and I have no idea why. And we often can trace it back to those first three weeks that they spent in the NICU being scared, being alone, being isolated. Then they came out and their parents didn't do the work to take care of their needs afterward to fully reassure them. And they ended up with broken attachment. It can also be from being in daycare way too early. If you spent a lot of time yourself in daycare, you may not even remember, but you formed an idea that you were being abandoned every single day among strangers and that you had to compete with other strangers to get attention from strangers. And then your parents would come home exhausted at night. And that's another one is how did mom, especially mom interact with you when you were little? Did she come home exhausted and have no time to put into you? Was she trying hard all day? Was she a single mom to pay bills and take care of you? So she didn't have anything to put in emotionally that can really track as a little child has no idea why mom is doing this. They don't get that she's paying the bills. They don't get all the complicated factors. They just know they aren't getting the connection that they need. Another piece though, as it was your mom, was she really anxious? Was she depressed? So there's something called mirroring neurons in your brain that when a baby is formed, you've got mirroring neurons and you've also got your amygdala in the back. Those two are the biggest structures that are really formed as a child. You're mirroring neurons, track how other people respond to you. Mom, in the first few weeks and months of your life is supposed to be smiling at you, talking to you, petting you, playing with you. A baby's eyes is only about the distance they can see from the breast up to the face. And babies stare at mom's expression the whole time. Is she looking at me? Is she talking to me? Is she connecting with me? Mom is supposed to be visibly connecting with you. In our modern day, what is mom probably doing instead? Phone. This can happen. Babies right now are losing their attachment and their mirroring neuron connections are going bad because mom is on her phone instead of staying and paying attention to the baby, talking to the baby, playing with the baby. Mom is supposed to be teaching you at this point, you are worthy of attention. You are worthy of interest. You are interesting just by being you. You don't have to be anything else. I will interact with you because you're great. That's what little children are supposed to learn. And they may not. Mom could be anxious. She could be constantly looking around, looking for things to do. She could be freaking out about whatever problem of the day is there and not paying attention to you. She could be depressed and not talking to you, not looking at you. She could have postpartum depression. This can really affect a child's attachment. And we don't even track this right now. We don't even talk about it. That's why I'm teaching you here today. It can also come from neglect. It can come from abuse. Yes. The more severe cases can also be there, but it can come from your father being totally absent in your life. What does it tell you? If one of your parents is overcompensating mom by smothering you with affection, but dad is never there. Your brain learns that there's only a 50, 50 shot that anybody is going to care about you, even among your close family. So when you get out in the world, you are probably going to try to be interesting. What attachment does is create this idea that you are not good enough on your own for other people to respond well to you. Those mirroring neurons do it, how people interact with you. If they are around you, they don't interact with you. So you try to interact with them. And if they don't, then you try to get attention. We've all seen kids that act out. We've seen kids that act out in bad ways where they become the class clown, the class Joker. A lot of comedians grow up this way, interestingly. And we've also seen those issues where kids act out violently, angrily, throwing tantrums, trying to seize control. But we've also seen kids act out in the more silent ways, the good ways that we praise them for that comes down to perfectionism comes down to performing perfectly, always being quiet, always being agreeable, being a perfect little child all the time, because they think that they will lose what scraps of connection or trust or love that they are getting kids act out in a number of ways. But what really, really gets awful is when you think later on in life that you have to be interesting for people to like you and you have to stimulate them endlessly manually to make them stay around you. If mom was calm and connected and loving, she taught you that you don't have to be interesting. You have to be you because being you and being authentic and honest is interesting enough for people to want to be around you. If you have broken attachment, you were listening to this right now and probably crying and thinking that you have fought your entire life to be interesting. And the only people that you have attracted are people that want to be interested and don't love you for you. And that is the problem with getting attachment issues. This also leads later on to us violating our own values, our beliefs, our principles, all of those core pieces that make us who we are. If you have ever done something you don't agree with that you don't like that you disrespected yourself for that you hated yourself for, if you struggle with self-hatred, it is almost always an attachment issue because you have done everything possible, everything necessary to be interesting, to not be abandoned, to not be hurt, to not be rejected. You will break everything that you hold important for the convenience of others so that you will not be left alone. You do not want to go back to that hurt and that fear that you experienced as a child. You want to make sure that you are safe. And the only way to do that is to not stick to your values. In fact, to be somebody that you don't like and don't respect. If you are struggling right now with that, don't worry. We're going to talk about how to fix that here. So stay tuned for the rest of this episode, at least, because we will walk you through fixing that self-hatred, but for now be aware that this is where it comes from and it can be fixed. If you have experienced any of these flags for attachment issues, this sets you up for life and your romantic relationships and your friendships and your dating and your parenting. Sound familiar? That's why I'm walking you through this five part series to do this, but this will set you up for life to violate your principles, to hate yourself and to probably have no long-term goals that you aim for very well. A lot of people have a foreshortened sense of future. They're just trying to survive into the future. Step-by-step-by-step. They can't track very far. They don't believe good things will happen. A lot of people lose beliefs that things will happen for them. They just think that things happen to them. Your internal locus of control shifts to an external one and everybody else has control over your life. You will lead to midlife crises. Pretty much every midlife crisis that I've ever worked with in any of my coaching clients or my therapy clients before that, all of those midlife crises came down to, I have $2 million in the bank. I have every car I can think of. I have every gadget and I have sex every single night with a different person. And my life seems so meaningless that I want to kill myself. That is from being interesting for being stimulating and from stimulating yourself instead of building good connections that actually matter. If you don't have an integrated sense of self and fix your attachment, every great thing in your life that you managed to get will feel like nothing. By the time you hit middle age, because you'll have no connections that matter to you. That's why it's so important that we fix this right now. That that will save you from a lifetime of regrets. My oldest clients that have come to me are in their late seventies into their eighties, and they are filled with nothing but regret, unfortunately, throughout most of their life. All they've done is avoid connection, avoid intimacy, avoid all the bonding pieces that would build meaning and value into their life. And instead they come to me when they're 80 years old and we have to try to fix it. And we do. The good news is even 80 year olds can fix this and build a fulfilling life that means something in retrospect. So if you are less than 80 years old, you are catching this at just the right time. Don't be afraid if you're 30 or 40 or 50, it is always the right time to fix your attachment. Be very, very hopeful, please. And if you like me have kids, I've got four kids with number five on the way right now. If you have children or if you mentor people or you adopt kids, or if you just teach other people, or if you just have one person in your life that you are helping or guiding, what we're going to show you also how to do throughout the course of this series is build a meaningful legacy that will endure through generations to come so that more people can start off healthier and better than you did. This is what I have found. One of the biggest effective pieces for building meaning into your life is understanding the quality good impact you are having in the human lives around you. This requires you at first though, to feel safe in yourself because you can't focus on a legacy. If it feels like every single day you are on the edge of losing everything, you cannot focus on a legacy. If you are miserable and depressed and crushingly alone and unhappy, if you think no relationships will ever matter because you're easily forgotten, you cannot imagine building a legacy that will actually have purpose. So. If kids are going to be your legacy, I have a whole segment on parenting toward the end, but it doesn't have to be kids. There are so many other ways for you to build purpose into your life. I will show you exactly how to create that legacy for yourself, but it does come down to attachment and that's why we're fixing it. So really quick to recap and we'll go a little bit deeper here on this part. This vision of yourself that you have right now, it was colored by your parents interaction with you by mom talking to you and playing with you or not by dad being there and building with you or not by the daycare you might've gone through by any Nick, you experiences, any medical trauma, you experienced any bullying or abuse or hurting anything where you felt so alone and so afraid that you shut out relationships and promised yourself you would never ever be this vulnerable and this hurt ever again, no matter the cost. All of that comes down to today. And that has created any self-hatred that you experienced, any self disrespect that you experienced, any parts where you feel like you are not worthy or where you are afraid because it feels like nobody else will ever rise to be worthy. If you struggle to believe other people will ever really love you. If you think that they only want you around for what you do for them. If you think you have to be endlessly entertaining and interesting and stimulating for everybody around you all the time, and you can never be yourself because no one will ever love you for you. That's attachment. And that's what we're going to fix. So we are going to start by building your moral code and showing you how to do that. You will not be surviving all the time. You're going to be thriving and living the life that you want. We're going to be building you long-term goals, and I'm going to show you how to stop disappointing yourself and how to stop being disappointed by other people around you in your life. So the answer here comes in three steps. Number one, we need to define. We need to correct, and we need to improve all three of those one, two, three. I'm going to show you exactly what that means with step one. Now this is from a portion of my, this is a portion of my attachment bootcamp video course available on adamlanesmith.com. It should be down in the description below with the mind pump link, check that out because that's a fuller version of this, but today we're going to dive into exactly what it means to follow this three-step process to fix your life with yourself. So first step one, we need to define your personal honor code. This is your values, your principles, the things that make you, you, it is your right and wrong. I'm not talking about a religion here. I am not talking about any particular code that somebody else has created your code. What makes you believe a person is worthy of honor and integrity and belief in and trust? What makes a person trustworthy? What makes a person quality? What characteristics and not just show, not just living characteristics and inborn, but chosen characteristics, their virtues, their values that they live with every single day. I don't care what religion you are or, or non-religion, no religion at all. Your values are there and I'm going to show you how they were already created, but you've covered them up. Some examples of these are loyalty, honesty, integrity, compassion, love, discipline, and freedom. Now, which one speaks to you? There's a couple of methods for this, but I will tell you this. They usually come from places where you have been wounded, deeply wounded. Look at your biggest regrets in your life. Let's start there. That's one method that works for a lot of people. Where did you, where do you regret how you acted? Where do you dislike what you have done? Where are you most ashamed? When somebody asks you, why do you believe you don't deserve to be loved? What is the first example in your life of your behavior that comes to mind? If you look at your regrets, you will see that you regret those things because you violated your core principles. Now it could be that you ruined a relationship that means so much to you because you lied and lied and lied, and you lied because of fear. You didn't do it because you're a bad person, but you were so afraid. You felt like you had to keep lying and lying is the one thing you hate most of all, so you hate yourself for lying. In that case, honesty would be one of your biggest priorities. Also, someone else may have hurt you by lying. Your honor code can also come from almost a form of trauma. Somebody else wounded you so deeply as a child by lying to you continuously that you can never trust anybody who lies ever again. Maybe your dad lied all the time to you and you've learned that any man who ever lies is completely untrustworthy in your eyes. Even if he lies about the smallest thing, honesty could be your biggest one. Maybe you were around people that didn't care about if you were hurting or if other people were hurting, or maybe you screwed up sometime and you didn't take care of somebody who was hurting and now you regret it. Maybe compassion is a specific wound for you. What leads you to either say you are worthy or somebody else would be worthy? What would make them trustworthy to you? That's one place to find your values. Another one is a little more cheerful. It is looking at your heroes. Look at your heroes. What are they embody? This could be anything. This could be a hero in a book. It could be a major celebrity figure. It could be a major historical figure. It could be an eighties action hero. What, who do you admire? Who do you want to be? Like, who did you want to be when you were a kid? Who did you want to emulate when you were a kid? Their values is really what you responded to might've been their courage might've been their discipline. Who do you want to be when you grow up? I don't care how old you are, how old you are right now. What hero do you want to be when you grow up? If you're saying Batman, that's a good answer. But what part of Batman makes you really admire his character and wish you could be like him? In what ways do you want to be like Batman? You can put on a Kate, but that doesn't make you Batman. What character pieces would, here's another way to think about it. If somebody walked up to you tomorrow and said, Hey, I've heard about you. People's I don't want to, I don't want to know you though. No, thank you. Because people say you are not, you're not a person of integrity, keeping your word. You don't keep your word. I don't really want to know you. What if at your funeral, everybody gathers and they all say, well, I wish we had something good to say about them, but they never kept their word. They lied a lot. They weren't there for us when we needed them. They had no discipline in their life. They didn't really care about their own personal freedom. They were a slave to other things, their whole life, and never, never rose above that circumstance. What hurts the most to hear? What would hurt the most for you not to be, if you were called out on it? This is the honor code that is built into you. It's already there. You've been suppressing it all this time, but it's still there. You've been suppressing it because it wasn't safe for you to do these things and live to these things. It wasn't safe for you to step up and be those things, to be honest, to keep your word, to be disciplined. You didn't have the energy for it because you were so focused on surprise, surviving your fear, or it was going to take so much to keep your word that you just collapsed and withdrew, or you give your word over and over and over to make people feel good, but you never keep it. And you hate yourself for it. We all hate ourselves when we dishonor ourselves. This is the core of self-hatred. And this is what you can fix. This is what we're going to fix. First, you have to define, then we will correct, then we will improve. So what we need to do is pick two or three core values. For me, it's honesty, integrity, and compassion. What is it for you? Honesty, love, freedom, discipline, compassion, integrity. Look some up, scan online. You've got all kinds of virtues. Every major religion, if you're associated with one, has a bunch of virtues you should be following. Or behaviors or characteristics they want you to embody. Look up your core heroes and see what they do. Even just Google them. Say, what virtues does such and such character have? Look this up online and you can start following them. Write them down. Two or three of them. Now, here's what I want you to do. Set a phone reminder every single morning, about half an hour to an hour after you wake up, don't make it your alarm clock, set a phone reminder that says, I am a man or woman, whatever, of this, this, and this. I am a, for me, it's, I'm a man of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Now the research shows that if you say, I like these three things, or I will do these three things, or just list the three, you have about a 30% chance of actually following through. If you make it your identity, I am a man of honesty, integrity, and compassion. When you make it your identity, the research shows that you go up to about an 80% chance of succeeding at this. Make it who you are, because it is who you are. We'll talk about what people want from you in some future episodes, but this is a big piece of what they actually want from you, healthy, securely attached people that you want to be around. Do not want you to endlessly stimulate them like a dopamine machine. They want you to be a reliable human being with good values and good goals. And we'll talk about what that means, but this is who you really are. So identity makes it stick. You also want to set an evening reminder at the end of the day, seven o'clock, eight o'clock way before bedtime. Set a phone reminder that says something along the lines. Mine says this, did I uphold my honor today? You could say, did I keep my principles today? Did I uphold my values today? Say something along those lines. For me, it's, did I uphold my honor today? That word sticks really hard for a lot of men, some women too. You see this reminder every single night that pops up. So you've got the phone reminder in the morning. I'm a person of this and this, and this at night. Did I uphold those things? You reflect on it for two minutes. The goal is not to beat yourself up. Cause you're going to fall short at times, especially at the beginning. The goal is this, where did I fall short? Do I need to make it up for tomorrow? If not, how will I live differently tomorrow? Do I need to apologize to somebody tomorrow? What is my plan to do better tomorrow? Spend a couple of minutes on this, make it your plan for the next day and refine every single day. One more thing, write them on your bathroom mirror, go to Walmart, get a $1 dry erase marker, write it in red on your bathroom mirror, your three principles. So you confront them every single morning and night. And every time you go to the bathroom, I don't know. I don't know how many times you go, but however many times you go, you will see those things written on the mirror. And if you have a wife or you have kids or a husband or a girlfriend or whatever, you will have to explain to them what those are. And now this opens up a conversation about honor, about values, about living to those things, instead of just losing your way through life, losing your way through life, terrified. Now you can talk about those things. This is half of who you are is these values. Now, the other half of who you are is your lifelong goal. This is your mission, your legacy, your purpose. I used to do therapy at a really rough clinic. They used to call us the Walmart of therapy, not because we were bad, but because the clientele that came in was such a, such a mixed batch, but especially people from the lowest rungs of society, people who are terribly unhappy, I also worked with plenty of millionaire entrepreneurs and all kinds of families that at that clinic, but the roughest clients would be bused over from the hospital after getting out after a 72 hour suicide attempt hold. And they would walk in my office, young men, 18 years old, 20 years old, sit down on my couch and say, Adam, don't bother. I'm hate my life. It's pointless. I tried to kill myself. I'm going to go home and I probably will kill myself again. I will actually kill myself this week. And I had 60 minutes to try to turn their life around with some kind of deeper purpose that would at least keep them alive enough for our second session. So I developed this pattern that I'm about to teach you this method right here. It's what I call the 240 method. I'm going to give you the crash course on this really quick. So the idea is this, the simplest, the simplest approach is to think about kids and biological descendants. It doesn't have to be kids. It can be foster kids, adoptees. It can be people you mentor, even just people you help through the course of your life. But it's this, let's say that you have a deep, compelling impact on three people in your life. Maybe it's kids for me. I have five kids now, three people though. Let's let's pretend you have three kids in your life. Okay. You have three children. Those kids each have about three kids. That's nine grandkids. Those kids each have three kids and that's 27. Great, great grandkids. Those kids each have kids. Well, that's 81. Great, great grandkids for you. 81 plus 27 plus nine plus three. It's 120. That is 120 biological descendants roughly over the next hundred to 120 years. Now, if each one of them were to get married, for example, or have one lifelong partner, just one, one serious lifelong partner that they build with and that they have kids with, then that is actually 240 people. Whose lives are deeply, deeply impacted by the choices that you make every single day, 240 people over the next hundred to 120 years who are impacted by your decision to live to your values every single day to lie or not lie, to keep your word or not word, not keep your word to go to work, to build a career, to build a business, to take care of your health, right? I'm not getting in better shape. Maybe you've noticed since I was the last time I was on this mind pump show, but I'm taking care of my family. I have to for 240 people. What are you doing for your 240 people? Very important that you start taking care of this now, because you've got 240 people. It doesn't have to be children. It could be three people that you impact so deeply over the next 50 years that it ripples out and affects three people that they help and three people they help and three people they help and get your 240 and this is a conservative number when I was a therapist, we might see a hundred clients in a year. Now I'm a coach. I might see a hundred clients in a year, a hundred people in a year times 40 years is 4,000 people and each one of them has three and each one of them has three and each one of them has three or each one of them becomes a coach or a therapist. Each one of them has 4,000. Each one of them has 4,000 over the course of a couple of years and if you just assume that people have a lot more connections than three, you are looking at thousands of people relying on you. Tens of thousands. It gets to a hundred thousand pretty fast. The exponential increase is out of control. Your impact is bigger than you could ever possibly imagine. One of my closest friends in the world has one child, but he has impacted so many other people in his life that it's almost as if he has 20 children. One of my other friends has no children and no wife, but the business he's building is incredible and he has helped me with my children. So my children are part of his legacy as well, and they always will be. His 240 and my 240 overlap. So you could build relationships with people where your 240s overlap pretty hard, and that is a basis for a very good friendship. This could be anybody in your life that you help, and that's why the rest of this course, the rest of this, this mini series that we're filming is going to focus on all your other relationships and how you can be building those with those people. It's not just about you, but it has to start with you and that has to start with your values and your mission. This is who you really are and it's what people want from you. And it's, what's going to fulfill you at the end of the day, every day that have this impact, you have to have good attachment. So let me ask you this. You probably sitting there right now thinking, Adam, how am I going to help people? How am I going to help people in my life? How can I help 240 people? What do I have to offer anything? What are your skills? What's your passions? Anything. I work with people all the time. I coach them and they say, Adam, I have no ability to help anybody, but they've gone to financial school. And I say, do you know how many people in this world are struggling? Because they have no idea how to just save some money carefully or build money or make money or feed their kids. Do you know how many people are struggling right now? And they can't feed their kids meat every night of the week. What do you mean? You don't have an ability to help people. You can help millions of people. There are millions of people hurting for your help right now. And they look shocked because they never thought about that before. Maybe you're really big into fitness, right? This is mind pump. How many people have they helped by teaching them how to live a healthy life? Me, I mean, me and my family, other people, too, millions. What are your, what are your talents? What are your skills? If you don't have any yet, I'm sure you do at least one or two, but if you don't want to pursue those, what would you want to pursue? How do you want to impact other people? What are your, what's, what's yours? What's your mission? What stories speak to you? What is your story going to be? What do you want your story to be? This is incredibly important that you start building your own story. How can you impact future generations? Not just for a hundred years, but 200 years. What's a skill you can hand to somebody that they will hand down as an heirloom skill. Now that's the real story. Now that we've defined, this has been the definition part, define, correct, and improve. We have defined who you are and who you want to be. Let's correct where you are. Let's externalize. Let's do this. A lot of people have a hard time because they feel overwhelmed. I say, okay, where do you need to start? Where would you have to start to like yourself? They are so overwhelmed. They can't imagine. They can't imagine liking themselves because they never have, they've never liked themselves ever. So me saying, Oh, what would make you love yourself? That's the stupidest question in the world. So I say, okay, let's do something called externalizing. Most people with attachment issues are terrible about caring about themselves, but they can care about other people. They care very deeply about other people and take care of them. Let's pretend that you have a best friend, their clone of you, right? Maybe let's give them a name, Joe or Sarah or Greg. Give your clone a name. Like, this is your friend who is exactly like you in every way. They've lived your life. They've made your choices. They've done everything you have done. What three things. If they came to you and said, I don't like myself. I don't like who I am. I want you to respect me. And I want to be a person who's worthy of respect and trust. What three things would you tell them? They would have to change to be worthy of your trust and respect. Externalize for a minute. What does Greg or Sarah or whoever, what do they have to do? Two or three changes to be worthy of your trust. Maybe it's more than two or three. Maybe there's 10 things. Sit down while you're doing this, but let your phone, if you're driving, don't do that, but they think mentally in your head, put your phone and make a list of a couple of things that they would have to change to become trustworthy for you, you're going to apply your values because you apply your values to yourself and other people apply those values or those principles to them, what would they have to do more to stick within those values, what would make them trustworthy or worthy of respect? Maybe they would have to show more discipline by keeping their word, have better integrity. Show better discipline by going to work. When they say they're going to go to work, maybe they need to start getting their finances in control because they haven't paid attention and they spend and they binge spend right. Amazon therapy, they call it now Amazon therapy. They're constantly binge spending. Maybe they need to be more honest with their wife about their porn addiction. Maybe they need to be more honest with their friends about how their friends are hurting themselves and they need to speak up for those friends. Maybe they need to be a little bit braver at work when other people are bad-mouthing them or bad-mouthing the boss or bad-mouthing the company, bad mouthing anybody or stealing from the company and they let it happen because they're too afraid to speak up. What are some places that your friend needs to change and how much would they have to start doing for you to respect them? Do they have to max out that entire list? You are unworthy of respect until you have 100% become perfect. No, you don't apply that standard to other people. You only apply that standard to yourself. So your friend, your clone of you, who's exactly like you, but not you. How many steps down that path that they have to start taking before you start respecting them more? The answer I hear from a coaching clients and I always have for many, many years is only a few steps, but they have to be consistent. They can't go backwards, but they can be slow. They can be scared. They can be hesitant. They can be worried, but they need to make consistent steps. That just keep going. And that's all anybody's asking of you. That's all I'm asking of you. That's all you should be asking of yourself because that's the only way you're going to be able to do this. Now start following this list. Maybe you set a reminder on your phone with the list too. Maybe you write the list down, put it on your refrigerator. You're going to see it every morning. Maybe you write the list on your bathroom mirror under your values, your goals. Start tracking this list and crossing things off as you go. Make it a detailed list. I have to do this. Okay. To do that, I have to break it down to these three pieces. Okay. I will follow those three pieces and check them off. And then I will have that one checked off forever. Amazing. Name the problems to build a plan and then start following the plan to respect yourself. So that's step two is correct. Now we're going to improve. Who do you want to be? This is a hard question. Don't don't feel like you have to answer it right now at this moment. This is a question you're going to build an answer to, but when your honor, your mission, and your problems are all corrected and they're all in line and everything is right, who would you like to become next when you are not running scared and compensating and trying to take care of yourself and trying to survive and please other people and when everything is good, who do you want to be sit down, map this out, get a big whiteboard, get a piece of paper, draw it out. Who do you want to be? What parts of your life will be included? Even if it doesn't feel attainable yet, write it down. Where do you want to live? What do you want to eat? How jacked do you want to be? Do you want to be rich? Do you want to be married? Do you have 20 babies? Who do you want to be? Do you want to start a company? Do you want to help other people? Do you want to help families who are struggling? Do you want to help people who are broken? Do you want to be a guest on a big mind pump caught podcast someday? Who do you want to be when you're not scared anymore? Everything that you want, write it down and name it to build your plan. It is crucial that you do this immediately. Map out your plan this way. If you're having a hard time, build it in reverse. So 20 years from now, who do you want to be 20 years from now? 10 years from now, what needs to be in place so that you can still reach that goal at 20 years? Five years from now, what needs to be in place to hit your 10 year goal? One year from now, what needs to be in place to hit your five year goal? Then six months from now, three months from now, one month from now, a week from now, one day from now, build your 20 year plan and map it all the way back to today, and then every single day you get up and you live out your plan. What do you need to do every single day? When you wake up, you just follow this plan consistently. You do the work that's in front of you, define your goal and aim for it and make sure you are going to try to reach it by not violating your values and your goals by not sabotaging, and you will reach those goals someday you just adjust. As you need you course, correct. Halfway through you keep refining and adjusting back to that goal. It doesn't have to be perfect and nothing has to be perfect. You just keep adjusting as you go. If so, if you mess up one day, you shift the plan to the next day. You get the flu, you get COVID cool. That's cool. Let's wait a week, get back on plan. You've only lost a week. Do other things during that week. Take care of yourself during that week. If you can't physically work out, do mental growth. If you can't do that, bond with your family. If you can't do that, do self care so that you come out of it fully healthy and ready to rock. Take care of yourself. No shame, no guilt, just continuous growth for the next 20 years and you will be who you want to be. Now, what we've built here is a three step plan to correct your attachment with yourself, to define, correct and improve. Now note that you're not going to be fully confident yet. Once you finish this, this is not an instant fix day one, but you will start feeling better about yourself. Your confidence will grow over time as you stick with this and prove to yourself that you are a man or woman of honesty, integrity and compassion, or what your values are. As you get up in the mornings and say, yes, I am that person. And at the end of the night, you say, yes, I did uphold my honor today. And you do this over and over and over for weeks and months and years. Your confidence will grow out of control in a good way because you'll know who you are. Self-respect. I don't talk a lot about self-love because self-love is such a weird nebulous feeling. Who cares? Who cares if you feel affectionate toward yourself? Oh, I love myself. No. Do you respect yourself? Let's start with self-respect. Liking yourself can come later. Self-respect your mission, your goals, your values. This is who you actually are. And that continuous refinement is what will keep you becoming stronger and better so that you really, really respect yourself. This also makes you interesting, but more importantly, it makes you consistent and reliable. So you don't have to be interesting. You don't have to find things that make you feel interesting or look interesting. You don't have to stimulate people all the time. Now, number two, the next episode we're going to dive into, you have to come back for this because friends are going to be a huge driving part of your accountability and your growth in your life. The people you keep around you really determine your success or your failure at this. If you follow everything in this episode, we just talked about, and you try as hard as you can to be an honorable person. And you surround yourself with meth addicts who cheat on their wives. Good luck. But if you surround yourself by people with people who are honorable, who respect your values, who respect themselves, who take your values very seriously, who are pursuing similar life goals that you are, and they can work with you. Remember my friends and our overlapping two 40, you need friends with overlapping two forties in a good way. You don't want your friends disintegrating your 240. You don't want to have to constantly fight against them. Friendship is a massive, massive thing that you need. And the research right now shows that at least 33% of millennials aged 24 to 42 are so crushingly alone every single day that they are critically depressed. Friendship is one of the rarest resources in the world right now. And I'm going to show you how to make it happen for you. So do not miss the next episode on friends. And in the meantime, check out my work on adamlanesmith.com. You can get more in-depth help there. And there's a link to the complete attachment bootcamp course that I pulled a lot of this material from down in the show notes below. Please check that out and I will see you in that next episode. Don't miss it.