4 Things to Stop Doing for a Better Life

The wake does not steer the boat, just the same way that the past should not control your current circumstances. Today, we're going to be talking about four different things that you should stop doing if you want a better life. And if you're watching this, you're probably a human. Unless you're watching this in the future, you might be AI, but you're probably a human. And let's be real, being a human can be really, really tough. There's some really great moments. There's some really great, amazing, beautiful things, but there's also really, really hard things as well, like this can get really tough sometimes. But the craziest part about it is that 99% of the time, we are the ones that are making it tough on ourselves, not the external world. The external world isn't making it tough. Sure, like there's moments where people get sick and people die and accidents happen and things outside of us happen. Yes, those do happen. But the majority of the toughness, like what I mean toughness, like tough things that people go through, is a normal day where we're just in our heads and beating ourselves up and thinking about the past, thinking about the future, and thinking about what we're doing wrong and guilting ourselves and shaming ourselves and talking down to ourselves and thinking about our fears and limiting beliefs and all this stuff, right? So 99% of the time, we're the ones that are making it tough. And often, what we do is we get stuck in many different places. And we can be consumed by the past or the future or regret decisions. We can worry about what might happen, how things might turn out, all of that. And we live in a world where we have kind of been taught to always be chasing something, to be searching for happiness, like it's just outside of our grasp, to search for our fulfillment, to find meaning in our lives. So why shouldn't we try to make life a little bit easier on ourselves as we're trying to create the life we want and have success and have happiness and have all of those things? So today, I'm going to dive into four different things that you need to stop doing immediately if you want to be happier. And number one, this is gonna be hard for some people listening, is this. You have to stop regretting the past. Some people are consumed with what happened to them in the past. And they say, oh, but you don't understand. I am the way that I am because of this thing happening. It's common to look back on your past and to regret decisions that you made and wish that things would have turned out differently, to regret and think that you would have done something different, things that you did or things that you didn't do. Or now you can see that there was an opportunity that was right in front of you that you missed. But it's important to know and to really have true self-compassion, you have to start understanding this. And not even understand it, you have to truly believe it. Is that no matter what happened, you did the best with the knowledge that you had at the time. And it's easy to go, oh, well, I should have done this. Yeah, because you have more knowledge now than you did back then. Of course. And it's natural to feel this way. It's important to understand that holding on to the past will hold us back from moving forward in our lives. So instead of regretting the past, what we need to do is we need to look at it and learn from it and use it as our teacher. Because the mistakes that we made in our past, the things that we wish we would have done differently, or the things that we did wrong in some way, are our greatest teachers. And we can use them to improve ourselves in our lives, but we need to be the ones to extract the lessons. So we can say, yeah, hey, you know what? I really, really screwed that one up, but I can't do anything about it now. So the only way I can make good from it is to learn from it. So what was I supposed to learn from that big screw-up that I had in my life? Because you know, like, you consciously know and understand that you cannot change the past. But sometimes you might spend a good portion of your day beating yourself up about it, wishing you would have done differently, even though you know there's nothing you can do. We can't control what happened in the past, but we can't control our response to it. And we also have to stop living in the past. The past has nothing to do with the present moment. So many people say, oh, well, I am the way that I am because of, you know, because of things that have happened in my past. And no, I am this person because this happened to me, and I have proof to show you that I am this type of person because this is what I've done in the past. But I want you to imagine that you're on a boat. The boat's going forward, and you turn around and you look behind you, and you see behind you is the wake that's coming off of the boat, showing you where you were. The wake does not steer the boat, just the same way that the past should not control your current circumstances. So the wake doesn't move the boat at all. All it does is just show you where you've been. It's the exact same thing for you. The past, and this might be hard for some people to understand, has nothing to do with what you decide to do in this current moment. You can learn from it, you can make adjustments, but you don't have to take any of the past and throw it into your future. Another thing we should learn is when we're looking into the past is to practice more self-compassion. We need to be more kind to ourselves and forgive ourselves for our mistakes. We also need to get better at being kinder to other people and forgiving other people as well. Oh, that's hard. Forgive ourselves and forgive other people? Oh no, I can't do that. We need to understand that if we can understand that we did the best that we could with the knowledge that we had in that moment, that means that other people, as much as we want to hate them and resent them, other people did the best they could in that moment with the knowledge that they had. Listen, I understand. Some people have done some bad things to you. Some people have done some really bad things to you. In my line of work, I hear the worst of the worst that people have gone through. Absolute tragedies. Crazy stuff that people have been through. But I want you to understand, holding resentment towards another person doesn't do anything for the other person at all. It doesn't hurt them in any sort of way. It only hurts you. It's like the phrase, anger is the acid that burns a vessel. You're the only one that is being hurt and harmed by holding on to anger and resentment. So one of the things that we need to do is to learn to let go of that. And I have, you know, episodes on forgiveness if you want to scroll back and listen to those, but I have entire episodes on how to actually forgive. And if we can learn to grow and forgive others and ourselves, we grow as individuals. So that's the first thing. We need to stop regretting the past and focusing on the past. The second thing is we need to stop worrying about the future. The future is this great unknown, and it's natural to worry about it. Your brain wants to worry about it because your brain does not like uncertainty. It's the animalistic side of you. The unknown is dangerous to the brain. So your brain wants to solve the unknown. How does it usually solve the unknown? By taking the past and throwing it in the future. That's what it usually does. So it creates fears. If you want a phrase that might change the way that you think of yourself and change your life, if you think about it, is that you have fears that are in the future, right? You have fears that are things that you worry about and things that you fear. The pain that happened in your past will create the fears that you fear in the future. Pain of your past, whatever happened, creates fears in your future. And so your brain wants to solve the unknown. It wants to put fears out there so that you don't have the same pain that's happened to you before. You had your heart broken in the past? Well then, that's the pain. The future, what's going to happen? You're going to go, well, I want to try to avoid relationships because I don't want to do that. Even if you consciously want to get into a relationship, subconsciously you're going to be like, no, no, no, we need to protect ourselves. Remember what happened last time? So we have to learn to stop worrying. Psychologists have found that 85% of what we worry about never actually happens. And out of the other 15 remaining percent, 12% happens better than we think that it should. Meaning 3% of what we worry about never happens the way that, like, 3% of what we worry about is the only percentage that happens the way that we think it's going to happen. 1 out of 33 worries happens. 32 out of 33 don't. What a waste of your precious time and energy worrying about things that may never happen, worrying about stuff that statistically probably won't happen. And you're worrying about the future is what leads your anxiety and leads your stress. It can also cause you to miss out on opportunities because you're too focused on what might happen in the future that you're not even really here. So to stop worrying about the future, what you need to do is you need to get better at focusing on the present moment. We need to practice gratitude. We need to practice appreciating things that we have in our lives right now. We need to learn to take action in the present moment so that we can better prepare for the future. How do you prepare for the future? Take the right action now. Setting the right goals, taking the right steps forward, trying to achieve them. It means being proactive and taking control of our lives instead of just waiting for things to happen to us and trying to sit back and prepare. And so I talked about the past and I talked about the future, which means what do we need to focus on? The present. How do you focus on the present? How do you get into the present moment? Let me give you a really quick tip that will help you out. Your mind is almost always not here in this present moment. It's either in the past a lot of times or for most people it's usually in the future. Worries, fears, planning, all of that stuff. So how do you get yourself into the present moment? Your body, this physical meat suit that you're stuck in, is always here. It's always here. It's always in the present. Your body's never in the future. It's never in the past. It's always present. So what do you do? You start noticing and bringing your awareness to your body. This is why breath work is so good. This is why meditation, where you can move and start to feel what you can feel. You can feel like you want to be more present right now. Feel your butt on your chair. If you're sitting in your car, if you're sitting down, feel the bottom of your feet. Feel your clothes on your skin. Feel the temperature of the room that you're in. See if you can hear anything. See if you can taste anything in your mouth. All of these things are happening in the present moment. So bring yourself back to your five senses. That is how you bring yourself to the present moment. So that's number one and number two. Number three is stop thinking so much that you forget to be here. This goes perfectly into what I was just saying, right? So many people are not even here. They're so focused on the past. They're so focused on the future. What they want, what they don't want, what needs to change, and they ruin a perfectly beautiful present moment. Your life for your entire existence will only be a bunch of present moments. So you can't be worrying about the future all the time and then think that when you get to the future that you want, that you'll just somehow be present. You've never even been there before. You've never been present before. How do you think that when you get yourself to, oh, once I have $10 million in my bank account, then I'll be present and I can finally chill out. No, once you get that $10 million in your bank account, you'll be the same freaking person. You'll go, well, I need to get more. I need to get more. I need to get more. Because you've never trained yourself to be here. You have to train yourself to be here. How do you do it? The breathing, through being present, through journaling, through focusing on gratitude. So you have to stop being somewhere else. Stop thinking so much that you forget to be here. It's really important for you to understand like your life is just a bunch of present moments and you will literally miss your entire life if you're constantly thinking about something else, thinking about the future, thinking about the past, having worries, fears, limiting beliefs, why you're not where you want to be. You have to train yourself to be here. The same way that you train a dog to sit, to be quiet, to go outside, to go potty, you have to train your brain the same way that you train a dog. You notice that you're somewhere off in the future? Come on back. Let me do some breathing exercise. Let me feel the air going in my nose. Let me feel the air going out of my mouth. Let me feel the bottom of my feet. Let me feel my hands. Let me get myself into this present moment. You have to train yourself to be here. When you notice yourself too much in the past, too much in the future, bring yourself back. Bring yourself back. Hey, you're lost again. Just bring yourself back. You'll never be here and present all day long. But when you find yourself off track, you just bring yourself back. That's all that it is. You don't guilt yourself and shame yourself and call yourself an idiot, have all that negative self-talk. No. Oh, I'm off course. Let me get myself back on course. So that's number three. Number four is to stop looking for your happiness in other people. We talked about how to be here, how to be happy. But one of the biggest mistakes that we can make in our lives is to search for happiness and to rely on other people to make us happy. Sure. Don't get me wrong. It's very important to have positive, loving relationships in our lives. But ultimately, your happiness and your fulfillment comes from you. It doesn't come from your relationship. It doesn't come from getting into a new relationship. It doesn't come from trying to get it from your wife and having her make you happy or making sure that your husband makes you happy. Your happiness is your job. Happiness is a decision. It's a state of mind to get ourself in. An example I'll give you is this. If I'm in Austin right now and I decide to drive to Dallas, I can drive to Dallas and I can be pissed off and I can be mad, or I can just put on my favorite music, I can breathe deeply, I can sing, I can dance around a little bit, and I can have a really good time on my way to Dallas. Being pissed off is a state of being. Being happy is a state of being. Both of those are a choice. And so the same way I am a human that is traveling through time right now. Actually, we're traveling through space and time because we're on a rock that's like spinning 22,000 miles an hour in the middle of nowhere. So we're traveling through space and time the same way that if I'm traveling from Austin to Dallas, I'm traveling. What's the state of being I'm going to decide to be in? And that's our choice. Because when we rely on other people to make us happy, we gave away our power. We give away our control of our own lives. Looking for happiness in other people is going to lead you to a lot of disappointment and frustration because other people are not going to make you happy. Other people are not perfect, and they will inevitably let us down at some point in time. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that there's no way that another human could be exactly what you want them to be every single second of their entire life. That's not their fault. And so when we place all of our hopes and expectations and joy and happiness into other people, what we're doing is we're setting ourselves up for disappointment and heartache. So you have to stop looking for happiness in other people. We need to focus on making ourselves happy. We need to identify the things that make us happy and fulfilled, and we need to pursue them with passion and with purpose. It means developing your own interests, developing your own hobbies, deciding that you're going to make yourself happy, finding your own goals, and not going, well, I'm going to rely on her to make me happy. Because that is way too much pressure for another human to have to make you happy. And you're struggling to make yourself happy, and you're giving all of the pressure onto another poor individual to try to make you happy? Oh my god, that poor person, right? So we need to take responsibility for our own happiness, for our own emotional well-being. And so that means learning to manage our emotions, not relying on other people to regulate our emotions for us. It means developing healthy coping skills within ourselves—exercise, meditation, therapy, journaling, whatever it might be—to help us deal with life's challenges. Please don't put all that pressure on someone else. That is not their job. And so we've got to stop looking for our happiness in other people and realizing that happiness is a state of mind and happiness is a choice. We have to choose to be happy regardless of what happens to us on the external world. So we need to stop looking for happiness in other people. We need to rely on ourselves, and we need to identify the things that make us happy. We need to stop focusing on the past. We need to stop focusing on the future. We need to be here in this present moment more often, and we need to decide to be happy. If you do that, I promise you, you have a pretty good life.