The 5 Strategic Mistakes That lead to Self Sabotage

what I want to do in this video is show you five ways that are very common that when we're in the wrong mindset maybe we're in egoic Consciousness the job of meeting our needs and staying balanced emotionally meeting our emotional needs is very difficult because of five identifiable strategies or problems that come from that mindset I'm going to you can see them there and I'm going to in this video outline why they're a problem and how you can adjust your approach to meeting your own needs based on not falling for these issues so we're going to get back into that in a moment but if you want to learn more about this you can there's a free book on my website it's called forget happiness so it's basically not about the idea of the book is that searching for this elusive thing called Happiness is incredibly frustrating and difficult to do and really what's easier to do is to try and identify the needs that we have and to go about not necessarily Meeting those needs but removing the blocks that are in place that are making it very difficult for us to meet the needs that we have for ourselves so back to our picture here I want to show you in the model I use and I outline it in the book there are five needs within the individual in the model that I use now there may be others this is just my model this is the approach I use but if you see it there the the needs there are five needs the first is inner work the second is called responsibility we have purpose we have our health and we have finally relaxation spontaneity now my thinking on this is that if we're doing a pretty good job being attentive to these needs these five needs as an individual self contained human we will be relatively emotionally balanced now this does not go into emotional connections with others the idea here is that if we're more balanced within ourselves emotionally it will be easier to have uh more healthy fulfilling relationships with other people and I I talk about that in other places but those five needs if we can find a way to meet those five needs we're going to be pretty solid emotionally okay now the person in the middle of those five needs there that's you and you can consider yourself I talk about in the book quite a lot about self parenting seeing yourself as his parent the sort of children that live within us it's not necessarily just an inner child we have there are children plural within us and we consider these are our needs and if we do a pretty good job as that self- parent we're going to feel relatively emotionally in a good place now the the five needs there the first is inner work now that to me is the most important one because actually if you're watching this video you can consider what you're doing here now is inner work almost because this is where you sit down and reflect and you try to figure out what's off what what blocks are coming up how can I bring more awareness to them what things can I do to make myself more balanced and that's the whole the entire process of inner work and ourselves or reflection I sometimes call it so that's one need and that takes time and that takes some commitment and energy responsibility is basically the stuff in life that presents itself as sort of needing to be done that we're not always totally enthusiastic about and it's okay that that is a part of life but quite often it's the loudest of these inner children or these inner needs and it can make Meeting those other ones quite difficult purpose or meaning or creativity I sometimes call it is another need that we have and because responsibility takes up so much of our time and energy sometimes purpose gets cast aside but it is an essential need now health is also one of our needs I'm not talking about getting a great physique or looking amazing but it's just about doing something that's you know our bodies need our attention they need a certain degree of commitment or to be taken care of and that's an ever present need that we have and I'm talking emotionally here right it it does something we all know the benefits of regular exercise for our health and things like this and the last one is what I call the black sheep of the family which is the need for relaxation spontaneity and this is typically why I call it the black sheep with the family is because it's often looked upon as a luxury item and it's actually not a luxury item it's an essential need that we have all of these needs are essential okay so there's there are the needs they're outlined in a lot more detail in the book but if you can do a pretty good job in finding some kind of balance between that those needs you're going to be in a pretty solid state emotionally now I mentioned the blocks what problems do we run into when we start to try to achieve balance in these needs and here are the five they're listed there the first one is we will fixate on one need where there is a difficulty or a challenge taking place so you've got five of these needs and if you're struggling to meet one of them maybe you're doing okay and the others but if one of them isn't perfect we'll often find ourselves fixating on the problems within that need and what that can do sometimes is it means the other four start to fall into out of balance also we start we sto giving those needs that we were doing pretty good with we stopped giving them attention because we become fixated on why is there a problem with this one need okay so reflection is required to find out well what the block is but if we come fixated on it and and we it's it's actually related to the last point I'll talk about here which is a sort of Need for Perfection right so it's sometimes if there's a block seeming Block in one of these needs it means only that the other needs need a little bit more attention at that time and not we don't have to be perfect at this every single time excuse some of the the noise outside if you can hear it I hope it's not too loud here coming through the the microphone but it'll go away in a moment I'm sure but the the second need here or the second block to us being this skilled self- parent is we will try to meet each need with what I call egalitarianism now what that means is we and I've seen this with many people they're trying to find this thing called balance right and balance means well what does balance often mean it looks like you know everything is kind of equally divided right there's this sort of um almost a fairness in terms of how our time and attention is spread out and when it comes to these needs that's actually really unhelpful because it's not actually the case that each of these essential needs that we have within ourselves needs equal time attention and energy now what they do need each of them is to be validated as essential and non-negotiable and that they will need something right anything above zero effectively is what they need um that's where we begin but they don't always have to be equally um met in terms of time and attention and that is a big mistake that a lot of people make right so some of your needs can be met with very little energy and in very little time others may need more time energy and we sometimes think well I'm out of balance here that's not true balance means I'm meeting all of the needs but the time and attention that's given to each one is always something that we're reflecting to and we're tuned to and in flux all the time so don't try and equally distribute your time and energy to all your needs because that's an error that won't it actually doesn't work and it's not necessary now the third block here to usin an effective self parent is we'll try to when we're in this egoic mind this Consciousness that you know my videos I'm hoping are helping us go into a new mindset when it comes to how can we be more compassionate and actually feel more alive through meeting these needs and that's going to be a completely different mindset to the one that we had when we were young we were conditioned with we were told we have to do everything in multitask for instance that's that old mentality it's very egoic form of mentality but the third block here is we will uh try to when we're in this ego mind will try to give maximally to all needs overwhelming the parent this is a huge one a huge block very often because of that old programming that conditioning that more is better and I have to do this and I have to succeed push myself Force change we start off and the question is well how much can I do now for these needs and that's the wrong question it's overwhelming the self apparent the right question and I've said this many times in the past is what is the least I can do for each of these needs to make to make it feel as if I've met it to some degree right to some significant degree not what is the maximum I can do to squeeze every aspect of of energy out of myself and meeting the needs because that's not sustainable so this is very very uh tied into the type of programming we've received about this or maximize your productivity life hacks get every little second of your day is super super important right it's not helpful that's a big block and we got to let go of that if we're going to become skilled self appearance here right so focus more on what is the least amount I can do to make it feel as if I've met the need to a degree to a significant degree to make it feel like I've made some progress towards this goal not how much can I get out of it entirely the fourth block when we're in this egoic conditioned uh mindset we will advocate for abandoning completely certain needs that we have if necessary right so if you look at those five needs there inner work responsibility purpose health and relaxation St spontaneity not one of those needs is less important than any other and when we are it's often because we're in this this mindset that we've been conditioned into we become so overwhelmed that we think well look maybe I'll just let that go maybe I don't really have to have a life of meaning there doesn't really need to be not many people I know have meaning in your life maybe I don't need that much meaning so it's this thing of some of the needs are negotiable some of them should be just put aside now really all it means is maybe I'll just go into denial about this and pretend it isn't there try and live it as if it isn't there but that doesn't work right so while I'm saying they don't all need equal share of time and energy and while I'm saying you don't actually you have to give that much to them I am saying that you don't have the option of forgoing any of them they all need attention they all need some degree of attention and none of them can be forgot they can't be abandoned and if they do the wheels start coming off it doesn't work right the balance of the whole ecosystem Falls it falls off of balance so we're trying to maintain contact with all of our needs all the time that's ideally what we're trying to do here in a way that isn't going to overwhelm us now the last point the last block we have when we're in this egoic mindset we will always turn on the parent for failure to execute perfectly 100% when we're in that mindset that's what we'll experience why I wrote the book on this called forget happiness is that being a skilled self- parent meeting our own needs given the lives that we've had many of us a lot of trauma a lot of very very questionable guidance and parenting maybe and uh abandonment we've experienced in our lives it is not easy to find emotional balance through meeting needs so I wrote the book as sort of uh to give some some outliers in that so some indicators of how we can start to do this or how we can improve in this but the truth of it is and this is why I put inner work as the most important part of this because we are going to make mistakes we are not going to be balanced all of the time and we will in inner work go back to constant reflection constant self-achievement reatment what happened today what happened yesterday why do I feel so out of balance that's it's it's not like you're going to find the one answer to this and then for the rest of your life you just repeat that it's going to be because life is so changing our needs vary they change depending on what's going on in your lives it needs constant atunement so it's not this thing of you're going to nail this and constantly be perfect in balancing your needs often times you're going to be out of balance some of your needs are going to be not getting what they need and there are good reasons for that but the old programming will turn directly at you and say you're screwing this up what's wrong with you and it's completely UNH helpful doesn't actually help a thing so what we want to do as uh you know effective self parents is give a little bit of compassion to how to the parent the self- parent and accept that this is not easy what we're doing and it's going to take a lot of practice it's going to take a lot of reflection and a lot of learning comes from that when and if of course if we're beating ourselves up and we're guilt tripping ourselves and we're criticizing ourselves we never getting it quite right all that does if that's our experience we're going to run away from reflection and if you don't have reflection you're not going to meet the needs so there are the five blocks okay I want to know what you guys think I hope you found that useful seriously check out this book right I wrote this because and it it came directly from here that book because this is a lot of this is about my own lived experiences what I have found to be most helpful in terms of meeting needs and I think a lot of the the the stuff that's out there the the content for emotional well-being talks about like uh issues and pathologizes things and I think sometimes it just gets away from the fact that we are human beings and we have inherent needs that we can't do anything about this isn't and I'm not even talking about emotional relational needs the needs for connection which are so fundamentally important in fact they're the most important but if we can start to see ourselves understand ourselves ourselves our identities as been so intricately intricately connected to needs I would almost Define humans as needs a complex system of needs is is a way you can understand yourself so if that's the case if we can start to say well what do we do it needs there's two options you can either repress them and you know deny them or you can find a way to start meeting them skillfully and that is my feeling on this so that's what the book is about I hope that's a useful idea and that maybe you can identify some of the ways in which you have been meeting those blocks to finding and maintaining emotional balance I'll leave it there for today guys but thanks for being with me I hope that's a useful video and take care of yourself we'll talk again soon bye for now byebye [Music]