TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MIND | POWERFUL Motivational Video Speech Compilation

so then let's consider first of all what is a mind in the grip of vicious circles well one of the most obvious instances that we all know is the phenomenon of worry the doctor tells you that you have to have an operation and that has been set up so that automatically everybody worries about it but since worrying takes away your appetite and your sleep it's not good for you so the doctor tells you not to worry because he wants you on the operating table in a state of good health well rested etc but you can't stop worrying and therefore you get additionally worried that you are worrying and therefore will not be in the right shape to be on the operating table and then furthermore because that is quite absurd and you're mad at yourself because you do it you are worried because you worry because you worry that is a vicious circle so now can you allow your mind to be quiet isn't it difficult because the mind seems to be like a monkey jumping up and down and jabbering all the time once you've learned to think you can't stop and an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence when you're alone nobody's saying anything there's nothing to do as this this worry this lack of distraction I'm left to learn with myself and I want to get away from myself I'm always wanting to get away for myself that's why I go to the movies that's why I read mystery stories that's why I go after the girls or anything that you do or get drunk or whatever I don't want to be with myself I feel queer so well why do you want to run away from yourself what's so bad about it why do you want to forget this why do you want to become absorbed because you are addicted to thoughts this is a drug real dangerous one compulsive thinking going on and on and on and on and on all the time it's a habit so there's a difficulty about stopping that activity and you really have to stop it if you want to be sane because if I talk all the time I don't hear what anyone else has to say and then I'll end up in the situation of having nothing to talk about but my own talking more so in exactly the same way if I think all the time I won't have anything to think about except thoughts and that's the academic fallacy see when you add books to the library the great many of the books that are added to the library our books about books they're not necessarily books about life some of them but most of the books especially PhD dissertations are books about books of our books of our books and that doesn't really get us very far so in order to have something to think about there are times when you simply must stop thinking well how do you do that the first rule is don't try to because if you do you will be like someone trying to make rough water smooth with a flat iron and all that will do will stir it up so in the same way as a muddy turbulent pool quiets itself when left alone you have to know how to leave your mind alone it will quiet itself I think the fear is uncertainty I think that's the reason why there is a billion dollar industry now teaching people how to become more present and the irony is is if we would have been able to live in the present of a hundred thousand years ago in the savannahs of Africa would have gotten beaten by the line that we didn't see coming living in the present is not evolutionarily advantageous you know what's advantageous is the fact that we can imagine future scenarios the reason we have memory and Jordan Peterson talks about this is not so we can relish about past times it's so that we can learn from things that happen in the past and make inferences about what's going to happen mitigating against future risk was biologically selected for those who did that read more widely so we have inherited that brilliant neuroses of foreshadowing future danger in mitigating against it problem is once we've made the world safe we still are like a hamster in a hamster wheel it's like you may have money you may be paying your rent you may be have a wife and a kid it's net but you're still worried about tomorrow like what's gonna happen oh my god the collapse of the government a terrorist attack and airplane does act like we would that's the wire ironically we've got we're now some of the hardware that has served us so well is now problematic and there's this desire to return to a kind of capacity to be here now and actually like neuter our foreshadowing capacity and a relishing of memory to block the signals forwards and backwards in fact in mental health now there is a renaissance again I'm talking about like the rise of learning to be in the present meditation mindfulness all of these techniques are teaching us to neutralize our wiring to think about the future human the human brain human beings are like an artificial intelligence program we take in data from the present we compare that data with data from the past and we use that than to make predictions about the future and that's what we're always doing automatically all the time in fact a lot of the time we dispense with the present data all together and just leapfrog to the conclusion and so we're living in this perpetual bin there's and seeing that to be at ulta mind also known as jaded miss you're not even there you're like rather look at your phone or you rather what movie are we gonna watch later like you're just never present because our brain is so effective at saying I know what this is and making predictions about the future but the futures not dangerous then we're gonna have to pay attention to what's happening right now so we live with this kind of Perpetual low-level hum of anxiety this future tense like we're like crooked like having a crooked back with a future tense all the time never now always future tense you know maybe that makes you a good businessman or a good planner but unless you're like an architect that you're like planning a structure you're gonna build like the incapacity to enjoy and smell the flowers is very problematic but what are some of the ways that we can neuter our compulsion to constantly leapfrog to the future travel experiences and violate your expectation art what these things do is they block all signals forwards and backwards it's hard to know what's about to happen if you're in a place that's completely new when you're off the reservation you don't know where that path leads and when you don't know where that path leads it's hard to imagine where it leads so instead your senses are heightened then you're here now paying attention and it also ensures this from this dilemma of our existential conundrum to do about death because it's not even that more afraid of dying tomorrow we're afraid of dying in 30 years like I'm afraid of turning 90 and dying with a mind set when I'm traveling when I'm exposed to great beautiful art when I'm making loved what happens is you block all signals forwards and backwards when you block all signals forwards and backwards you enter the flow of the present a present that is literally wonder national wonder being the byproduct of exactly unencumbered sense of first sight or virginal No so you obliterating the adult capacity to foreshadow everything and you were returning to a more virginal state of heightened appreciation for what's unfolding in real time and that seems to be the answer to our ills because when we have those experiences we have oh and AH is an experience of such a perceptual expansion in the moment that all your mental models by what this is our [ __ ] obliterated oh now I know what a glacier looks like oh that's what a lion looks like in its natural habitat what do you are you are dumbstruck you are awestruck even though these are transitory experiences they leave that's all we people take magic mushrooms and have mystical experience and go to the Grand Canyon they see their child be warned they're left with this afternoon weeks months sometimes even years afterwards increased well-being increased creativity and increased compassion perhaps the answer to the existential agitation and what to do with ourselves in the face of death is simply to stop and smell the roses to learn to steward the contents of consciousness to the hearing now when we get caught up in like the excessive rumination and overthinking not get caught up in the team or patterns of thinking by exposing ourselves to great art to travel do things new and different or you know you're hurled back into the field [Music] my notion of human wellbeing is really open-ended I don't think we understand what the horizon is if in fact there is one for ultimate flourishing of conscious Minds we have a pretty good sense of what we don't want and are right not to want we don't want to be terrorized and depressed the generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers Ravin that we the seven billion of us we have we need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non paranoid interaction with strangers it's not just about having you know five or so close friends who's got who have your back right I mean like clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree we'll have the world we currently have we're in a situation now where I think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of you know other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of more and more destructive technology I just think I think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet philanthropy is one of when it's telescopic in this way when you're just signed in a cheque you're not necessarily connected to the good you're doing and I could imagine someone doing immense good in the world by signing in very large checks but not actually internalizing the gratification of that some level we have to be aware of the possibility of growing and to boat simultaneously what the effects are in the world of how we're living so you know we want to have a good impact on others but we actually want our conscious States of psychological pain and pleasure to be mapped in some rational way to the kinds of effects we're having having our beliefs map onto reality to some degree is obviously good because if they're not you're just bumping into hard objects your map is completely wrong you are bound to suffer right so we have to be in a situation where radical ignorance can't people is they be useful to have a slightly delusional self-serving bias right they think you're coming off better than you are well I get may give you more enthusiasm for your life confidence that's one principle so I think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually if you closed yourself off if you say well listen I'm done I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true then again what more data comes in you know when something surprising when one of your intuitions troops would be faulty if you can't error correct again you're just gonna fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what with what other people think is true so really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation we have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking and we have you know in the conversation we have with ourselves we have to do like what we have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong and in fact we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time so then you know then hence the virtue of getting educated and surrounding yourself with smart people and reading good books and just exposing yourself to the kinds of lessons that other people have learned over up you know thousands of years and are learning in real time most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill and that well being is a skill not suffering unnecessarily it's a skill regulating noticing your emotional life and regulate a negative emotion is a skill I saw you know I have a meditation app and you know meditation as a skill is a very useful one and I'm spending a lot of time teaching what's now referred to as mindfulness meditation and but the moment you begin practicing mindfulness which is just just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience you add in anything you're experience you're just noticing what it's like to be you moment a moment but in a way that is not reactive you're not grasping it what's Pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant way let's say you have the fear of public speaking right so you've got to go down sit out on stage and you feel anxiety the the usual the default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience it's just trying to figure is one to you know in advance to worry about that experience when the anxieties Kindle just by the mere thought of what you have to do then once you feel the butterflies you are at war with them they first even knows that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology they're really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that that's the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these these tingles and this you know is slightly I'd rental eyes response right before you know you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience right but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to you know walk out on stage that's intolerable the sense of self for most of us is not a feeling that were identical with our bodies but most people don't feel identical with their physical bodies they feel like they're passengers inside their bodies right they think that like my body is down here like these are my hands these are my legs you know I obviously care about these things you know if you know I you know this is one of my pains and pleasures are coming from but I'm up here in the head so much of our of what we're thinking is making us miserable right so much of it is unpleasant so much of it is causing anxiety we go you look at your to-do list you got 50 things on it you just feel like oh my there's just the day's not long enough this is the state we're in and the obverse of that is when we're really just connecting with life in a joyful creative beautiful way like when you look out the window and it's the most beautiful sunset ever and you are just looking at the sunset right you're not like you fully connected with its beauty those are all moments where you're losing this sense of self you're not really aware of losing the sense of self in those moments you're not really aware of what is freeing about those moments and you can't do it in other circumstances what sports what's happening for people most people is that they're waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present and to be present so fully that they lose their sense of of self right they're no longer behind their face you know just waiting for something good to happen right or figuring out how to change that the experience enough so that again they can start there there no long at war and they weren't working until a greater or lesser degree we're always at war and we're always fighting something there's always it's like you know you're always noticing something wrong you're feeling uncomfortable in your body you're reacting to something that somebody did or you thought they did the moments where you really feel good or moments where you can you hurt they're there isn't it a coming to rest right where it's not about the past or future you know it's not even about it's not about half a second ago it's not about half a second from now and the ultimate version of that is to jet tech entails the dropping of this sense of self for me flourishing is a matter of spending your time pleasantly and happily and creatively every moment when someone asks you well you know that last hour that last day that last week that last year do you feel good about that was that a good use of your time that remembering self that retrospective gesture that's where people worry about things like meaning and the remembering self is the self that you're talking to when you say you know are very satisfied with your life whether you're asking yourself or someone's asking you the answers that are available in that in those moments really determine whether or not somebody has a global life satisfaction whether they have meaning but the experiencing self thinks with the self that is just going a moment a moment feeling pains and pleasure and just dealing with dealing with this view very short you know time horizon I think that is that's fundamentally our real self the use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you as if you're just if you're stuck in traffic drive into the job and you're you're frustrated you can think of all the things that could happen to you right that happened and if any one of them happen to you you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment right like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer right you've got two young kids say you know you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is gonna find out you've got two months to live that's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in [Music] I had a really good friend of mine I went to lunch and he said you I don't know who this guy is here in front of me and he goes let me ask you a question honestly right now what are you grateful for and at the lunch I said jack [ __ ] nothing brother there's nothing good in my life right now and I'm not exaggerating this to you when I tell you this and this is a factual story as I'm mouthing these words two people walked in with an older man both of them clearly were fighting cancer somehow both had lost their hair one of the ladies had a bonnet on and they were barely moving in both walked by our table and gave me the most warm greeting the warmest smile as a stranger and he goes that's pretty freaking pathetic you can't find anything in your life to be grateful for right now and on the drive home I'm not kidding you I started to stack gratitude I started to taking inventory because if you can find things to be grateful for in that space man as your life going to be rich when there really are external things to be grateful for so my first mechanism out of that space was honestly to stack the things I was grateful for and I started reinforcing it over and over and over again and what happens is there's this reticular activating system in our brains right and all of a sudden because that's the messaging I was giving myself all of a sudden all these things start to come into my awareness that I'm grateful for I start to magnetized to myself some people that I needed to find into my life and that was the next layer I started to see things to be grateful for my health my fitness people who loved me when it is it changed my state when I stacked gratitude I changed what I did in the morning and I changed what I did in the evening and so somehow by grabbing control of my morning and by grabbing control of my evening I got some measure of control over the middle of my day I was an out of control person back in those days meaning this I woke up worried stressed fearful and I immediately started thinking about a bill I had to pay something that was wrong and I'm in a state of reaction to begin every sound talk within six minutes of waking up six seconds most people listening to this that's what they do I said I got to grab control of my morning and I set up routines in my morning maybe they serve me maybe they didn't but they were things I could deliver on for myself that which you do not hate you will eventually tolerate and I think that identifies most people's lives in other words they average becomes sort of like this slow asphyxiation it's almost like an anesthetic and that over time would become kind of immune and dulled to the average that we're becoming I know this is true at least for me you probably experience it yourself too and so over time we sort of minimize where we're at in other words I'm a little pudgy instead of being know your fat ass right you know you don't magnify the degree to which the pain ought to be affecting you and so really what he means on that is listen you're gonna get out of your life what you'll accept that's really difficult for people I think to understand is look what you think you're worth and what you're gonna tolerate is absolutely what you're gonna bring into your life and what the outward part of your life is gonna look like and so I live by that like I let myself sort of feel the pain and the difficulty of being not where I want to be in whatever that areas were those would be my spirituality my relationships my money I let myself feel that pain because as you know there's two motivators right there's the gaining of pleasure right wanting to go get something chasing the dream but then there's the avoidance of pain and for a lot of champions that's a pretty big driving force for them and so at least for me I I leveraged both of those things on me to get myself to take action this thing people think that like I'll be happy when once I get like this big amazing home or once I get this car or once I get this relationship or an amount of money then I'll allow myself some happiness the problem is the bill finish line always moves you never arrive there right the other part is people think well if I enjoy myself now I'm gonna lose my drive in other words if I can just wire myself with enough pain all the time I won't lose my driver ambition the truth is there's no correlation between the two at all there's no relationship between you feeling complete pain all the time and losing drive and so I talked about living in a state of blissful dissatisfaction and really the best example of that would be like if you've ever I love a good meal right if I bought into a great piece of steak if you're a steak eater like I am you take that first bite it's like complete bliss right there's no correlation between how great that tasted and your lack of desire for the next bite in fact that bliss causes you to want more of it and so the more we can pin to a reward ourselves with bliss we're not gonna lose our dissatisfaction we're not gonna we're not gonna lose that and so for me our brains there's dopamine hit you get when you do something successful if you constantly cheat yourself out of that it right biomechanically in your body less and less in the future where you want to achieve the next level the next dream the next step and that's why so many people stall out in life they didn't they got to a certain point and they cheated themselves out of the bliss out of a celebration it's important that we celebrate our wins we celebrate our lives because it causes us to want the next bite it keeps us hungrier not the reverse and so for me I want to live in a state of being grateful and blissful now not waiting for some future place or date that may never arise for self confidence is really self trust so the first thing is the people I know that are really happy are very self-aware in fact the best entrepreneurs I know are very self-aware they're aware of their shortcomings right they want to improve them they want to get to the next version of themselves all the time and so for me self confidence comes because I didn't have it and I think anytime you meet somebody like yourself or myself who might now appear self confident because I really had to find tools and resources because I was so insecure and shy and introverted so I had to find techniques and resources to build that up in me and for me it's very simple it's the promises that I keep to myself if I have a habit over and over again to stack one on top of the other of keeping promises I make to me not other people in other words the minute you begin to get external in your life worrying about what other people think about you right you've out you've lost all control you and and it never fills you up and people's admiration people's gratitude towards you will never fill you up at your own it's your own inside and so for me self-confidence comes from keeping the promises I make to myself and the other part of it is being aware I'm doing it in other words most people don't give themselves enough credit all the time they're very aware of these 20 percent things and not aware of the 80 right and that's why the dosage is so important - you've nailed it it should be 80/20 right because people get addicted to this I'm not good at this people don't like this about me I don't feel good instead of focusing on the 80 and stacking up well I did eat what I said I was going to today I did get up when I said I was going to I made the amount of phone calls I treated people in such a way I promised myself it's not just doing those things it's rewarding it's being aware of it and stacking that up when I work with athletes the successful athletes I work with when they're in a slump it's never that they can't hit a ball anymore versus make a shot or swing a golf club they've lost their self-confidence somewhere along the way they've lost the ability to focus on the things they are great at and stacking those promises they make to themselves and the way I get them to break their slump is not correcting their swing or getting them positive it's getting them to acknowledge the small promises showing up the batting practice early hitting that extra bucket of balls beginning to reward themselves for the extra promises they keep to themselves puts them back in a state of self confidence all of a sudden they're hitting the ball grading you [Music] you