Transcription
I have tried so many self-improvement ideas to make my life better. And these are the five that I feel fundamentally changed my brain and changed who I am as a human being. And every single one of them is a little bit weird. I'm not going to be telling you to wake up at 6:00 a.m. and journal every day. Stay open-minded. Stay with me.
Practice number one, start paying a little more attention to your friend's flaws. Hear me out. If you want to build more confidence, there is nothing more fundamentally brainchanging than noticing your friend doing something a little weird. Talking for a little too long, rambling when they're nervous, oversharing to a stranger just a little too much. And in that same moment, having the realization that you couldn't care less, that even though they're showing up in a way that's flawed or imperfect, you love them. You accept them fully. And this sounds like a trit idea where it's like, "Oh, that's a nice little thing to do, but it's not actually going to change my brain." But actually, our brain learns really well through mismatch experiences. So, if you're someone who goes about the world and you act in flawed ways like everyone does, maybe you tell stories that go too long, maybe sometimes you overshare, but in those moments, maybe you judge yourself for that behavior. Watching your friends display that same behavior and realizing you couldn't care less and you love them still and they are still deeply lovable, acceptable human beings does a little thing in your brain where it goes, "Oh, that's a mismatch. That's not what I previously expected to happen." All along I've felt that having flaws equals bad equals rejection. But what you're showing me here in this moment is that that's not the case. And it's going to build a fundamental belief in you that having flaws is okay, which is a life-changing belief to hold. And I think a lot of the time people try to build beliefs like this through affirmations. I love an affirmation, don't get me wrong, but our brain isn't as good at learning when we're just saying words to ourselves. It's much better at learning through experience. If you've ever learned anything, you know that the framework is kind of tell, show, do. You get told something, then someone shows you how to do it, and then you have to do it yourself in order for your brain to really have it sink in. The same thing goes for fundamental core beliefs. You might be able to intellectually acknowledge, yes, people can have flaws and still be lovable and acceptable, of course, but it's a whole different thing to actually be in the moment and to feel that belief being a fundamental truth. Hence, flaw noticing. It sounds really bad, but this has been so brainchanging for me.
Practice number two, the reccast technique. Imagine you're around 8 years old and you're at school and you see a bunch of ants on a bench. The kids around you are going crazy. The ants are a spectacle. And at some point you think to yourself, you know what would be the move? Jumping on the ants. Everyone's so scared of these ants. Let's do something about it. So you impulsively start to jump and the crowd goes wild. There are giggles until a substitute teacher grabs you, screams, "What is wrong with you? What did those ants ever do to you?" And you feel a deep well of shame. Actually, you're an ant killer. A horrible, horrible ant killer 8-year-old. That woman was so right. Something's deeply wrong with you. Of course, your fellow school friends forget about it immediately. You do not. You're in your late 20s. You get a flashback of that aunt memory, and the feelings that came alongside it are still there. So, you sit down and you reinvision that memory, but in your place, you put your niece, who is around the same age. You see her stomping impulsively on the ants and you realize you're not judging. one bit. It's giving impulsive 8-year-old energy. It's not giving horrible, deeply wrong ant killer energy. The saga is over. All of a sudden, when you think of that memory, all those feelings that came right alongside it have kind of dissipated. In that scenario, I am the ant killer. And this is called the reccast technique. I have a really sticky brain, and it remembers weird stuff like the ant ordeal. I like to think of it as my vegetarian origin story. But using this technique has truly changed my life. And once again, this taps into our brain's beautiful ability to learn through the mismatch technique. When I first was reliving that memory and I saw myself, I was experiencing all this judgment. But when I replaced myself with someone like my niece and realized, oh, I'm not judging her at all, my brain went, oh, that's a brainchanging moment where your brain goes, oh, okay, well, maybe it's actually nowhere near as bad as I thought. Maybe we don't need any shame around that. And this kind of goes back to pretty basic advice of, you know, you wouldn't judge your friend for doing that, so why would you judge yourself? We've all heard that. But once again, it's show verse tell. Intellectually, you can very easily understand, no, I probably am not going to judge my friend for that. But the older I get, the more I realize that intellectually getting something means nothing. You have to have a felt experience of something to really get it.
Practice number three, reality broadening. In my least confident era, I would be scrolling through Tik Tok and I would see these videos, hot takes, if you will, of people saying stuff like, "If you people, please, you're a manipulator." If they wanted to, they would. If you don't like and comment on every single one of your friends posts, you're a terrible friend. And there would be thousands of comments agreeing with that take. So, in my mind, I'd be like, "Well, it must be true." Now, when I see that stuff, I just think about that Tumblr post. People be saying things so definitively like, "Man, I think it depends." that runs through my head at least a few times a week. Which is why this next fundamentally life-changing practice is really for my online girls. Reality broadening. If you want to be online, you have to be able to zoom out and be able to see that a lot of these hot takes on the internet kind of carry Harry Wormwood energy. If you don't know Harry Wormwood, he's the guy from Matilda. Think I'm smart, you're dumb. I'm big, you're little. I'm right, you're wrong. And a lot of these hot takes are Harry Wormwood feelings squished into little oneliners stripped of nuance. And they help people to feel a little bigger, a little more justified in their feelings or their behavior, a little superior or even a little certain. We all crave certainty. But also, I think it depends. And I can say all of that, but once again, that's just the tell part of the learning framework. The way that you can show your brain that this is true is whenever you do, watch a hot take. Reality brought in. Firstly, you can find the opposite opinion on the internet always, and that too will have a thousand comments agreeing with it. That's one way to reality brought in. The second way to do it is to just mentally contrast what you're watching, what you're reading with your lived experience. For example, the viral take of if they wanted to, they would. You might be able to bring up like 10 memories where that simply wasn't true. And the more that you can show your brain something not to be true, the more it can register the very important fundamental belief that you should develop, which is people on the internet are no smarter than you. I'm no smarter than you. They're no less biased than you. Even sometimes when they have a degree in their field, they just say things and sometimes those things do really apply and sometimes those things don't.
Now, let's talk about another really weird practice that has fundamentally changed my brain, changed me as a human being. We're getting weirder. We're talking about mentally rejecting people. If you're really sensitive to rejection, I implore you to start rejecting more people. I am not talking go out and get rejected 100 times. Instead, go out and reject people 100 times mentally in your mind. Keep it to yourself. I remember I was in my community era and I was like, I'm going to go out and meet all of these new people. And the more I went out and the more I met new people, the more I found myself mentally rejecting people. I did a little bit of Bumble BFF, which is like a whole thing, but I met up with some people and I'd be sitting across from them at coffee and I'd be like, I like this person. This person is lovely, cool, interesting. I would recommend them to anyone. If anyone asked me about them, I'd be like, "Yeah, they're cool, and I don't want to be friends with this person." And I know that that sounds horrible, but it's also reality. I think we all have that experience from time to time. But that was a mismatch detection moment for my brain. And that mismatch experience once again was so healthy for my brain. Everyone will say, "Rejection's not personal. It doesn't mean anything about you." And as I've been saying throughout this whole video, it is one thing to understand something intellectually. It's another thing to have the felt experience of something being true. And rejecting people, I found, has been a really helpful way for me to learn that rejection isn't personal. That you can be likable, funny, cool, interesting, gorgeous, and someone cannot want to date you. Someone cannot want to hang out with you. Someone cannot want to be around you too much. And it can mean nothing about you. And having that fundamental belief built up by experiencing it to be true, fundamentally brainchanging.
Practice number five, watching your thoughts and feelings. And I am kind of just repackaging meditation, but I want to talk about one big realization that I had through meditating that no one talks about. I used to sink into these real like ruts, I would call them. I would just feel so unmotivated and then I would feel so annoyed at myself for feeling unmotivated and that would make me feel less motivated and that would just go on. And this is not a cute situation. This is like a bedroing situation and it would just drag. And I did a lot to manage that. you've seen me do a lot on this channel to manage demotivation. I've talked about it a lot, but they only really stopped happening when I had this one realization. So, one day I was sitting outside. I was meditating. I had my little meditation practice going strong. And I was watching my thoughts and I was watching my feelings as they passed. And if I got distracted, I would bring my attention back to my breath as they tell you to do. And I just had this moment where I was like, "Oh, my thoughts are passing really quickly." And my feelings, they stay a little longer, but they disappear, too. I watch them and they don't hang around for long so long as I don't fixate on them. And of course, you've heard this stuff before. You can't get stuck in a feeling. We know this. Thoughts will always pass. Feelings come and go like the weather. But knowing something intellectually is not the same as feeling something to be true. And meditating and actually watching those ideas and action and seeing, oh yeah, I really can't get stuck in a thought so long as I don't fixate on it or feelings really do just come and then they go. That was the moment that I went, "Oh, yeah. I can feel the fundamental truth of those ideas." I don't get those long dragging spells of feeling unmotivated. It just doesn't happen. But when I do feel unmotivated, I also am very quick to go, "Oh, we don't fuss over those feelings because feelings always pass. We don't get stuck in our feelings." And don't get me wrong, I can still have times where I'm not motivated, but it's just not the same. They last max 3 hours and then I just get over it, which feels a lot more normal and also just is more functional.
So, those are five real life practices that I've done that feel as if they have fundamentally changed my brain. And I kind of talked about the science behind why they feel like they updated my brain. But I didn't go in deep on it. In my next video, I'm going to talk about the science of spontaneous change, of how little moments like these really can shift how your brain works and shift how you show up in your day-to-day life. Techniques for change that are a little more natural, a little more effortless. So, if you haven't subscribed already, click the subscribe button below. And if you liked this video, you're going to like the videos in this playlist.