it's actually quite rare for people to take an active approach to self-improvement they may go through seasons in life where they like think oh I'm going to go work out or eat a little healthier or I'm going to find a higher paying job or I'm going to try to find a partner but they don't actually look at themselves and at their goals in a holistic systemic sort of way they don't look at the root causes of some of the problems in their lives and so they try to Patchwork together a self-improvement plan that ultimately ends
up being a series of bandaids they slap on themselves that just fall right off after they start resorting back to their default programming I have been on a self-improvement journey for about 15 years since my father died when I was 18 years old and at this point in time I've realized that it wasn't until the last 5 years did I make the biggest improvements and I learned a lot of stuff along the way I learned exactly what it was that I needed to be focused on in order to see the biggest changes in my life
and the outcomes in what I'm doing and in this video I'm going to share with you what they are let's get into it the first thing I want people to recognize is Band-Aid Solutions are usually the gateway to a bigger problem a bandaid solution is some sort of external factor that people are focused on that's actually rather superficial it's not getting at the core of the problem a very common thing I see here is someone is looking for a partner they're trying to get into a relationship because they think that's going to make them feel
better they think I just need to be loved if I'm loved if I have someone I will feel whole and complete when in reality a person is not going to complete you if you're feeling like there is some sort of missing component in your life that cannot be filled by another person that has to come from you but people seek out love and attention and Intimacy in order to try to fill that hole when you can give that to yourself and then you will be more prepared to share your life with someone but they don't
do that inner work they don't actually address the root cause of their loneliness because what they're feeling is a disconnection from themselves and they think that having some sort of intimacy with someone else is going to make them feel more connected with themselves when in reality they're just falling into that person and distracting themselves with that person that's one example of a Band-Aid solution another one is trying to get more money in order to feel like have more worth in order to feel more valuable because people value money and therefore if I have more money
people will value me that's coming from a place of lack that's coming from a place of want I have seen the same story over and over again where a bunch of people have gone out and made a lot of money and then they realize that there is an emptiness there that they never addressed there is something missing because they poured their whole life and all of their attention and time into making more money because they were running away from a pain and a fear fear that they were inadequate and they needed that money to feel
adequate it may take some time but eventually what you're actually missing what you actually need the work that you need to be doing is going to catch up with you you may have become successful you may have found a partner you may have made the money but you did not address the root cause of what was motivating you to get those things and that is always going to be the thing you need to to work on the most because that will make everything else fall into place you can't be running away from something you have
to be running toward something when I'm watching someone run down the block they're jogging they're exercising that's what I ask myself I really hope they're running towards something and not away from something I know people who might be running because they had a slice of cake and they feel like they have to burn it off but in my experience and my opinion if someone is like I just ate a whole bunch of food I need to go run it off they're running away from the fear of being fat they're running away from the fear of
gaining weight and what comes with that they're running away from the fear that they are undisciplined there's a lot of fear there when you're running away from something and if you're one of those people who comes into my comments and says actually gaining weights it's super unhealthy for you blah blah blah like you know good and well that eating a piece of cake is not going to make you gain 20 lbs like you're fine thinking oh I ate a piece of cake and now I have to run it off otherwise I'll gain weight that's eting
disorder babe you might have an eating disorder I'm not here to argue with anyone about that mess just toose it with someone with a goal who wants to run a marathon or someone who really cares about their heart health regardless of what they ate that day they're like I'm going to go for a run because it's good for my heart and I really want to make sure I have a strong heart as I get older or someone who just really enjoys running always think about your why and your motivation and make sure it's driven by
a vision for something a vision of a healthier future a vision of winning a marathon not a fear of gaining weight and all of the stigma that comes along with that the most important skill set you will learn is self-awareness and it can be learned you have to get good at it you have to think about your actions you have to think about your motivations you have to be honest with yourself and you learn to do it in a compassionate way self-awareness is key in this journey you have to be honest with yourself you have
to maintain Integrity when you're assessing your actions and your behaviors self-awareness is a muscle that gets easier to fle as you Flex it and you just need to sit with yourself Journal think about what you were doing and how you were approaching situations and ask people for feedback you can learn so much about yourself from the people in your life and this is different than saying to care about what people think of you even though I do think that there is validity in caring about what people think about you it's just you can't care about
what everyone thinks about you just a select group of people who you value whose opinions you value and who you respect feedback is important and if you don't have the ability to give yourself feedback you need to find people in your life you can depend on to give you that feedback in a way that you can receive it in a way that will not make you defensive cuz that's also a skill set giving people feedback people can say things to you that you just had no idea where is the reality of things because we all
live in our own little bubbles right so for example I had to drop out of school my dad died when I was 18 and I went to college for about a year and a half but I had to drop out I was having too much emotional difficulty it was way too too much too quickly and it was never a question in my mind about whether I would go back to college I knew that I was going to graduate college I was made for college I had a friend of mine who had seen me struggle during
those that year I was in school before I I ultimately ended up going back and finishing and she tells me one day after I graduated from a different school she's like I'm actually like I'm really impressed by you like it's truly amazing what you went through and you were able to graduate and I'm like what do you mean of course I was going to graduate like that was never a question in my mind I just needed to take a few years off before I could do it those kids are so loud oh my God there's
a playground behind my building the windows are open cuz it's 68° out anyway back to the story my friend she was basically like I don't know if I would have finished if I went through what you went through if I struggled with what you were struggling with I don't know if I would have finished school like I'm truly impressed by your ability to finish and it had never even occurred to me to be impressed with myself for getting through it it had never even occurred to me that what I did was in any way extraordinary
because it just was in my head something I had to do I had set an intention to finish college there was never any question there may be another example where someone points out a kind of nasty habit that you have that is hindering something in your life like you have this tendency to point fingers when when something goes wrong you really want to find someone to blame and you never blame yourself and that is really frustrating to the people around you and so you should probably cut that out because it's not serving anybody you don't
need to blame people for things all the time you just need to fix what happened that could be an example of feedback someone gives you and you don't even realize you're doing it I've seen Reddit posts where people are like I had no idea I was being an a-hole until someone pointed it out to me and then I realized after thinking about it that they were right sometimes we have blind spots self-awareness if you are too self-aware it can breed anxiety and it can lead you to second guessing yourself sometimes because you're questioning whether what
you did was right or whether you should forgive yourself or whether you need to to change some way because self-awareness can lead to overanalyzing your situation but there is a spectrum of self-awareness and you also get better at at trusting your intuition when it comes to understanding what you're going through you can get better at analizing your behavior and your thoughts and your intentions you just have to flex the muscle and I recommend trying to find some people that you can lean on in the meantime therapists are a very good tool for that on top
of self-awareness I really need you to learn how to self soothe and I really need you to learn how to get your mindset right and get your emotions in check you've probably seen this vibrational energy chart out there on the internet and I got to tell you like I can't tell you the science behind any of this like the frequencies and vibrations and all of that stuff I do believe that there's something to it but I can't explain it to you I have seen the shift when you are living in that enlightened space on this
chart your life changes things open up for you things will happen for you but so many people choose to live in lower vibrational States an example is I take this bus once a week it's the same driver and this guy allows himself to get angry about every little traffic thing that happens in front of him like a biker is in front of him he starts hitting the steering wheel he's like he's like sucking on his lip he's like come on man like come like he's getting mad at every single thing and I'm like dude why
are you choosing to live like that just let the biker go who cares you're going to get there a minute later who cares it's fine and so many people are allowing themselves to live in lower vibrational States and it does not serve them that bus driver probably goes through life constantly looking for things to get angry at because he wants to be angry he wants to be frustrated he it's where he's comfortable it's where he his brain goes automatically whereas I'm constantly looking for reasons to let things go to let my anger go to let
any sort of negative frustration inconvenience anything release it from my body I don't want it near me and I understand sometimes it still washes over me and I just have to let it go and coming up with ways to do that is is very unique to the individual for me I think about a waterfall and there it's like a river and there's lily pads on the river and each of the emotions is a little frog on the lily pad and they're like riting and all that stuff and then to make myself laugh I have the
water like the waterfall like the lily pad go over the waterfall and the Frog kind of fall he's like R it's on its way down it's kind of like The Emperor's New Groove it gives me a little chuckle I don't know that's how I try to release my emotions I just let them wander away from me I want it gone I want it out of my space out of my aura I have a friend who notices micro expressions of the people around us and if they look cross or like they're annoyed or whatever they they
pursed their lips or they gave her a weird look or whatever she will say something about it to to me like H that girl had like such a stin face I'm like who cares don't absorb her stin face or like that guy looked at us weird I'm like who cares why are you giving this man any thought he didn't talk to us like he didn't interact with us you have projected something onto him who cares if he thinks something about us he's irrelevant we're never going to see him again don't let little things bring you
down you want to stay in these high vibrational States as much as possible you want to feel that calm and peace and serenity and Enlightenment inside of you that is the goal and you want to figure out ways to self soothe let it go don't let people get to you the next thing I want to talk about ruffle some feathers because people aren't ready for it but I'm going to throw it out there anyway you have to get rid of your victim mindset so many of us are living in victim mindsets without us knowing it
thoughts that are victim mentality come in a lot of different forms it could be a hopelessness I'm never going to meet the right guy that's a victim mindset or I'm never going to get the job there's so many people out there looking for a job right now why would I get it that I can't do this victim mindset you're allowing your circumstances to dictate your outcomes that is why your frequency and how you look at things is so important being honest with yourself about what you are doing what you're not doing what you could be
doing understanding that sometimes things are out of your control but you can always problem solve it everything is figureoutable as Marie forleo's mom says that was a good book you should read it getting to a place where you truly believe that you are capable of achieving what you have set forth despite the obstacles in your path despite the circumstances that you are being put in it is possible and if you allow learned helplessness to dictate your outcomes you are living in that space you've probably heard of the demor trend Jules LeBron is the one that
popularized it and I want to play a Tik Tok from her that I thought was wonderful so let's play it clock that tea though okay so recently I stopped victimizing myself and it's crazy how life has opened up since I stopped pretending like I'm like aing victim like since I pretend like the world's against me sometimes you're theing problem like honestly for me I felt very like unheard throughout like most of my childhood and I felt like my parents like invalidated a lot of my feelings and that made me turn into a loud ass complainer
anytime anything happened to me or anytime I perceived something I perceived it as it was like the worst thing that ever happened to me or like it was only happening to me like other people don't be going through the same [ __ ] you know what I mean like especially like you know being trans being plus-sized it was just so easy for me to be like no like brand don't want to work with me because like I'm big and BR don't like want to work with me because I'm trans maybe BR don't want to work
with you because you're NY and you don't post consistent content or quality content most of the time maybe that's the reason babe maybe actually maybe it's because you come on this [ __ ] complaining all the god time about Brands and then you put brands on the spot and then you wonder why don't Brands want to work with me well and ever since I shut the up and I looked at myself and I said you're acting like a victim you think you're owed something because you got a few followers people are dying like like people
are literally dying you know what I mean like get it together and you know what's crazy ever since I like took more responsibility and stopped acting like a kid um got a full-time job got my own apartment brand deals coming in started losing weight started having better skin started feeling better started being more confident like like when you just say hey you know what sometimes I'm a piece and I need to fix it then you can actually fix it but when you come up on here all the time talking about like oh my God and
this happened to me and then oh my God like that happened to me and then oh my got like no and then this brand doesn't girl the world don't owe you sh if you don't get up off your ass and make work for you that's exactly what I'm talking about like if all you're doing is complaining about things not working out for you you're going to just focus on things not working out and then that's going to just keep being your reality when instead if you take a look at the reality of situation it may
not be a pretty situation there may be some obstacles in your path but at least you have an understanding of what you're up against and how you can go about changing things in your life she talked about how she kept complaining about Brands not wanting to work with her and then she realized the fact that she was complaining and putting them on blast was probably leading to them not wanting to work with her and she also realized that she wasn't doing everything she could to actually make the brands want to work with her to make
herself more marketable Jules manifested all of her success right now because she did the internal work to realize where she was going wrong and she fixed it Jules also brought up being trans and being press siiz which to me is an illusion to systemic oppression right and and the obstacles that some people face because of the circumstances of who they were born obviously this is a real thing the thing people have to understand about self-improvement is it is focused on the self and in that it is not focused on the systemic issues and changing society
as a whole self-improvement focuses on self-efficacy self-improvement is looking at what you can do to change your situation and your circumstances within the existing system if you're looking for something that's going to tear down the you know patriarchal racist whatever structures that are out there then that's not self-improvement content that's not what you come to this content for you come here to focus on what you can control I'm not saying that we shouldn't address those issues obviously we should I received a comment on one of my videos about manifestation talking about oppress and systemic oppression
and manifestation sounds like you're telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and it is because it's an incomplete conversation manifestation is only focusing on the self and when you only focus on the self you are telling people this is what you can do to improve your situation despite the obstacles out there now I think a lot of people get upset at the victim mentality stuff because there is a subset of people out there who will look at activists and look at people trying to change the oppressions out there and they will call those
people victims they will say you're just being a victim there are plenty of people such as who share the same characteristics as you race gender whatever who are able to make it in this world and they're doing fine you're being a victim by calling out the oppressions that is them trying to silence people that is not what I'm talking about when someone is saying that an activist is being a victim they are just basically saying that the person who's pulling the fire alarm set the fire it's not the same thing as saying don't allow your
circumstances don't allow some sort of systemic oppression to affect your goals and your actions in life what's the alternative do I just lay down and rot I can name a bunch of activists who didn't do that despite the tremendous amount of odds placed against them Martin Luther King didn't say everything is bad we should all just give up and not even try he said the Ark of the moral Universe bends towards Justice that sounds like law attraction to me I recognize that I'm practically translucent I can't talk about racism I can't talk about any of
that my Foundation shade is sickly Victorian boy I'm that pale I have seen my fair share as a plus-sized woman who has dealt with other issues that I'm not going to put on the internet it can suck and it can be defeating and it can really knock you down but there's it's very important to have a shorted up self-concept to give you all of the strength and perseverance that you can have in the face of the these oppressions in the face of dealing with situations that will not be fair I just don't want people to
allow themselves to think well the world isn't fair and therefore I'm screwed that is go that don't do that please don't do that I'm begging you I'm not going to pretend like the world is fair I'm not going to pretend like sexism racism homophobia transphobia all the isms and the phobias don't exist they do but why are you going to let that stop you just because it's hard just because it's unfair don't let it stop you please I wrote this out a little more than I usually do because I wanted to get my words right
and I really like how I wrote it here so I'm just going to read it to you the alternative is giving up self-concept work which is at the core of manifestation and of doing the self-improvement work it's about building the resilience to keep going even when the world knocks you down it's about trusting in your own power to rise up again and if you believe in spiritual guidance if you believe the universe or God or whatever it is is forging a path for you it's leaning into that strength it's leaning into your strength it's leaning
into your right as a person to exist despite how difficult it is do not just lie down and rot please I know it's hard but you can do it because you're extraordinary and you have to believe that the last thing I wrote down for this video is to talk about mindset and how to get your mindset right gratitude every little thing be happy about every little thing find joy in anything you can grateful express it just think it in your head like oh my God I'm so glad I bought this new phone case I just
dropped my phone and if I didn't have that phone case I would have broken my phone that's gratitude taking a split second out of your day to recognize that something went right and it makes it easier to deal with all the things that go wrong because you're balancing it out another mindset tip is always trying to reframe negatives as a positive earlier today when I was going out I missed the train and I had to wait 10 minutes for the next one and it was annoying but I told myself I wasn't meant to be on
that train there was probably some gross thing in the train car or I got to look up my directions and make sure I'm going the right place and and that I was going to make everything on time and this next train that I got actually lined up with my connection much better so I ended up not having to wait as long at the connecting stop and I like waiting at the previous stop better so it worked out little things to reframe negative experiences to positive ones it wasn't that bad my life goes on another MP
tip affirmations just affirm yourself every chance you get tell yourself good things if you could choose to tell yourself something why would you tell yourself bad things tell yourself good things how you speak to yourself matters I am valuable I am good at this I am meant for doing this work if you could find affirmations that you really like and just keep them in your phone keep a list of them some of my favorites are today could be the day that changes the rest of your life that makes me happy saying that I I have
that as a recurring reminder in my phone every day affirmations can also be questions uh one question I ask myself every day another recurring reminder is is this a choice a person who loves themselves would make are you making choices throughout the day that is consistent with a person who loves themselves makes you think makes you think that's it for the video today thank you so much for watching to the end I really appreciate you you have no idea uh and I'm going to let the algorithm pick a video that it thinks you might like
and please consider liking subscribing and commenting I love hearing from you guys until the next one bye
