your life is pretty trashed at least I'm assuming it is if you decided to click on this video perhaps things were going pretty well for you you finally started taking care of yourself made a couple friends and your self-talk was starting to transition to positive but then you had a laundry list of L's pile up that led you down a deep deep rut or maybe your entire life up until this point has felt like a never-ending nihilistic doomsday with a self that doesn't care about anything and gives in to everything that makes you feel worse
about you and your life either way I'm sure I can relate at least a little bit because not too long ago I also had very few friends about ten dollars in my bank account was getting terrible grades had no job no purpose and I had very low self-worth so I wanted to ask myself if I had to start from absolute zero and had no friends no money I was out of shape I locked myself in my room all day and I hated myself how would I unfuck my life well that's the question I wanted to
answer so I tried to simulate exactly everything I would do to get myself out of rock bottom foreign before I would even try to move my life in a direction that would benefit me I'd first want to make that direction my own you see most people are just aimlessly wandering throughout life hoping that they will eventually find their calling if they just keep doing what they're doing or even worse they don't realize that if they don't pick their purpose themselves then someone else will pick it for them this is the first step to establishing some
sense of control over your life creating your own purpose the night before I would start my journey towards leaving the ruts I'd write down exactly why I am seeking a different life and who I am trying to become when figuring out my why I would take into account Maslow's hierarchy of needs this is an idea proposed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow that essentially states that there are tears to human motivation represented in a pyramid like this now within each tier there are things which almost all humans need in order to feel fulfilled and safe in
their life and I would make sure that the why I wrote down contained one of those hierarchy of needs and was descriptive enough so I wasn't confused about where I was heading okay so I just took some time to write down my why in my journal and I just want to explain what I wrote and why I wrote it this is what I wish I would have started off as back then when I first started getting into actually improving myself and caring about what I do with my day so first and foremost I want to
wake up every day feeling energized instead of tired AF secondly I want to enjoy the body I'm in not just because I know I'll be treated better but because it'll be easier for me to feel good about myself so that's hitting a few of Maslow's hierarchy of needs it's hitting safety as well as love and belonging next I want to have a fulfilling job I want to feel like I'm contributing to the world in a positive way that can also support me financially then I'd also like a close group of friends that I can enjoy
downtime with and who will also help support me and lift me up lastly I just want to be more present enjoy my limited time here on Earth and know that I loved the journey instead of the destination then I would start to write down my new identity or the person I was trying to transform myself into if you are unhappy with who you currently are and the types of things that people say about you to reinforce who you are then just be yourself is pretty terrible advice of course everybody has some sort of unique gifts
or interests that make them who they are but if you're in this stage of your life you either haven't figured those out yet or you're not using them in a positive way so I would start to mold the idea of the person who I could become who I would be proud of in my head I'd make sure to visualize what that person looked like the things they would tell themselves what type of Life they would have and lastly write down what I think it would take to get there so I could start a plan of
action alright so I've written a whole bunch of bullet points for my new identity that I would like to create I'm not gonna try to go over all of them right now I'll just show them on screen very briefly right here but I think this gives me a good foundation with which I can build upon and transform myself into this new identity the next part of stage one is the most crucial because it's when Real Change starts to take place once you've prepared yourself for the journey ahead you need to ask yourself what is the
next smallest step I can take to start moving towards that identity the reason we want to do this is because we want this process to be as painless and actionable as possible what stops a lot of people from moving in the direction that they want to move towards is when they start to think about the bigger picture and just how long that's going to take to get there it is not in your favor to try and think about every part of your new identity at once and to try and adopt each new habit at once
you'll only end up overwhelming yourself and you should focus on no more than two gradual changes you want to see out of yourself at a time alright so here's the next small step it's going to start tomorrow morning I'm gonna not use my phone for the first hour of the day and I will do so by hiding my phone in another room and that is literally it I'm not going to focus on anything else until I finish that smallest step and once I am done with that small step I'll move on to the next smallest
step so the last thing I'm going to do tonight before I go to bed is I'm going to rip out the why I want to change page that I filled out as well as my my new identity page I'm gonna put it on my wall I'm just going to tape it on my wall so I'm constantly reminded of why I want to do this the direction that I'm trying to strive towards and the person I'm trying to beat with that all out of the way we are starting the first day of getting out of this
massive hypothetical rut all right good morning today is the first day of getting myself out of this very down bad rut I've been awake for about 30 minutes and I already started my day by not using my phone so I should be able to do that for the first hour like I wanted to and then we can start to focus on the next smallest step also what I'm gonna be doing every single day is I'm going to be writing down three goals I want to do now let me show you this every time I complete
something no matter how small it is that is getting me towards the identity that I'm trying to become I'm gonna write it as a w on this board so I already started off my day with a W because I didn't use my phone so we're just gonna put that down right there and I'm going to tally up a bunch of W's or L's throughout my day based on the actions that I do with my day no matter how small they are as long as they are pushing me towards the self that I'm trying to become
it counts as a w so because one of the goals on my board is 30 minutes of movement total I'm gonna go outside and get some movement right now I'm just gonna go for a simple walk and I'm going to count that as a w because we're trying to pile up those W's all right walk done you know what that means it means we are adding another W to the board let's start stacking those up today now at this point in the day I would simulate me going into my part-time job as a busser which
I was doing when I was down bad and when I got back to continue on completing the first goal I would do a very simple at-home workout pretend I don't have any muscles if you are someone with zero previous gym experience then doing a couple exercises at home is a great place to start even if it doesn't seem like much when that goal was complete and we tallied another W I decided to tackle the next goal starting to write a script for YouTube and the reason I'm gonna be writing a YouTube script is well because
if I was starting over I would still want to be doing YouTube because I love what I do and the first thing to becoming a YouTuber would be to make YouTube videos so in order to do that I need a script to record [Music] foreign let's just say I finished half of the hypothetical script that means I did this that means another W but I'm also going to put an L up on the board here because while I was writing the script I used my phone a little bit too much and I wasn't totally focused
on it so I'm being realistic with myself and counting that as an L even though it's really not a big deal but still we got four W's 1l it means that's today overall has been a w so far now there's just one thing I would like to do because I think it will help me improve my conversation skills as a down bad person with pretty much no friends and not very good social skills the last one here if you can even read my terrible handwriting is to say hi to a stranger maybe ask them a
few questions again we're not focusing on Perfection because Perfection is the killer of dreams so I went to the grocery store to start swapping some of my unhealthy foods for healthy ones and I decided to use this opportunity to talk to the cashier who was wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat tough 49ers game tough loss but hey man it's all good we made it to I felt where we were supposed to be yes sir uh no thank you all right thanks my friend have a good one have a good day all right how about that
made a nice conversation over some football action because he had a 49ers hat on and that was my last goal for today as the days would go on and I kept asking myself what's the next smallest step I can take I'd finally start to see my first bit of progress now for a little while as I was following this next smallest step routine and I was adopting good habits getting rid of some bad ones and just slowly working my way towards that new identity things would go pretty smoothly but if I'm really trying to come
out of dark place then sometime within the first couple weeks the dopamine I would get from essentially starting a new life would start to wear off and I'd hit my first roadblock being too hard on myself if there's one thing that will be inevitable when trying to improve yourself and get out of a rut it's that you will fail you will mess up sometimes and you'll have periods of time where you are less motivated and fall off but from my experience one of the only things that separates those who actually build the new identity from
those who don't is their ability to just keep moving forward even when they hit the Dead so what is the dip the dip is the part in your getting out of a rut Journey where you start to regress a little bit you're going to start to notice some of your negative habits come back your confidence that you have slightly built up I'm making promises to yourself keeping them and going through with them will start to be harder to do or you might not even do them at all and this is the pivotal point where you've
got to figure out why your self-talk is like this who instilled that self-talk into you and how you can start to become a more aware of when it happens and how to transform it into something more positive so here's what I'm gonna do in a journal I'm gonna evaluate exactly what is going on in my head when I start to feel myself regressing a little bit each negative thought I have about myself or my life I'm gonna write down in this journal entry titled the dip thoughts and some of the thoughts that arose were I'll
never have the strength to make real progress I'm just gonna fail like I always do most people could easily do what I can barely accomplish I need to be doing more than what I've been doing and there when I wrote These down I'd ask myself where did these come from because clearly I can think back to a time in my life when I was a really small kid or I was happy and I felt like I could do anything with my life but eventually I was conditioned to believe that I'm not going to amount to
many things because I'm not doing a certain sort of lifestyle or I just was beaten down so much by peers by family members and that's what I actually ended up writing down after I answered that question so all these thoughts I had about not being good enough about feeling like a failure it was all conditioned it was all programmed into me by someone outside of me and it wasn't really an accurate representation of reality when instead I need to transform all of these dip thoughts that I had into something that relates to the growth mindset
this is when I would look up a growth mindset chart on Google Images after finding a solid one which I'll be sure to link in the description I would find the sentence that most resembles each fixed mindset thought I had for my journal and transform it into its growth mindset counterpart so I'll never have strength to make real progress turned into I am still making progress even though my brain has unrealistic expectations for me if I keep going I'll only make even more progress than I've already made I'm just gonna fail like I always do
change to if I fail I know it's just an opportunity for me to get better and there's no hope for me changes to if I keep going and staying consistent I will see massive changes in a few months and every time this happens because yes it's gonna happen more than once you need to stop yourself real quick before you start reacting immediately and thinking my life's over I'm going back to the person who I was I'm never going to meet that identity you stop you put your thoughts onto something physical like a piece of paper
like a journal and you transform them and yes they're gonna keep coming up throughout this journey it's inevitable I still have negative thoughts the actual cold not the down bad call still has negative thoughts but I just know how to properly handle them and not let them overtake me to the point where I just stop wanting to put in the work and every day you come back here to these two piece is a paper that you put up on your wall constantly remind yourself of why you're doing this the identity you're trying to become and
eventually you'll get out of that rut that you have found yourself in and you will become a completely different person after doing this for a couple months you should start to notice an improvement in your energy levels mood and well-being from here on out things won't necessarily get easier per se but it will be easier to stick to the stuff you adopted no matter where you find yourself at this point in your life you'll be able to look back with a smile knowing that you got yourself out of one of the worst ruts you could
ever imagine and all it took was figuring out the first smallest step thank you very much to all my patrons on patreon if you don't know what this is It's a platform separate from YouTube where I put out exclusive content you can also talk to me one-on-one over the phone on there if you've ever wanted to do that link in the description and if you are still struggling with the social aspect of everything and trying to make friends check out this playlist where I go over all the ways you can build relationships with others a
lot of good social skills advice in that playlist thank you for watching please take action on this video instead of just mindlessly consuming it and love you guys I'll see you soon
