Transcription
There's a saying, "It's not the thing, it's the thing behind the thing." You ever noticed that in your life? It's not that you procrastinate; it's the fear of it going wrong causing you to put things off. It's not that you're scared of relationships; it's that you're scared to get your heart freaking ripped out from you, put in a doggy bag while it's still beating, like that scene in Dumb and Dumber. An all-time American classic. We call that movie a film. It's not the thing, it's the thing behind the thing.
And in this video, we're talking, talking about the stories you tell. I can't tell you how important this subject is for you. And once you see how it's affecting you, I'll talk about a film strip of your life. We're also going to talk about core stories and where they come from. Most people are running on three, four, and that's it. That's literally the thing behind the thing controlling your whole life. And of course, I'll give you a question or two of how you can fix it. We're just going to get straight to it. Smash the like button, subscribe if you're not already. Here, the term "limiting beliefs" a lot. "Got to fix your limiting beliefs." You know, it's all a mindset game, man. It's all what's going on up here. I know you've heard that, haven't you?
Here's why that's wrong. You work in three layers. Your thoughts are on the outside. This is what we'll call beliefs. "If I can just believe in myself enough, you know, I'll take the actions to build my business." Or, "If I can just have better thoughts, then I'll feel successful or content with where I am." But it's not the thing, it's the thing behind the thing. What's behind thoughts? I'll tell you. Emotions. Not to be confused with how I dressed in middle school or the music selection that's still on my Spotify to this day. I haven't grown out of. You know this to be true.
Take driving. You ever gotten in your car when you're in a bad emotional state? Your thoughts are really different. Why is that guy going so slow? He's, he's so dangerous. Why is that person driving past me like a maniac? They're so reckless. Your emotional state of being stressed causes your thoughts and your actions to change. See, your thoughts are like files on a computer, and your emotions are the folders that they are stored in. So if you change your emotion, what you notice is that your thinking changes as well. It's not the thing, it's the thing behind the thing.
Now, there's one extra layer, and this is the whole video we're talking about here. Just take a guess. What is this first layer? What is it? What do you think this is? Your core story. Also could be called your identity, your self-image, your self-view. The most important thing. Why does rewiring limiting beliefs not feel effective? Why does positive thinking feel so hard when we're in such a low vibe? It's because most people, they go from layers three to one. They think, "If I can just change my thoughts, then my emotions will change, my story will change." And maybe sometimes that's true. But the fastest way you can change your entire identity in your life is to go from the inside out. Go from level one to three. When you change your story, your emotions change, and your thoughts change as well.
Before I get to these charts, why don't we briefly just touch on what I mean by stories? This is how, since the dawn of humanity, information has has been passed down. It's literally how our brains evolved to store information. Not with just like ones and zeros like a computer. Not with just linear thinking. Okay, that's absolute fact and logic. Those are all tools we kind of developed. How we developed is through passing down stories orally. Before written language, it was passed down around a campfire. "Big son, come make warm." Movies. Tell me the last movie you watched. Tell me like the factual things that happened. Happen. Probably can't. But if I ask you to just summarize the plot, the story of it, what genuinely happened, genuinely happens, you can probably do it. Think of The Lion King. Think of The Matrix. Think of Lord of the Rings. Think of Harry Potter. The reason those sell billions and billions of copies, views, and tickets is not because of the factual little scenes. It's because of the overarching story.
And so, in your life, have you ever questioned the story you're telling yourself about you? Let's keep going on how your brain works, 'cause this is very important. Are you getting this? I hope this is making sense. You're essentially right here. Okay. Now, when you come out of the womb, you're a blank slate. I know there's parenting and kind of your environment, but for the sake of this video, you're a blank slate. Something happens related to money, and you notice that, like, okay, money. Then another things happens about money, and you link that to the previous thing, and then the next thing, all in this chain till you get to your beliefs about money.
Now, in this moment, same thing in relationships. Something happens in middle school or childhood, and you store that information. You get into your next relationship, you start linking that information to that person. Is is what we call a projection. You're projecting your past experience onto that person, even though they're totally different. Then you have a third thing. Maybe you got your heartbroken, and now you have relationships that are either positive, or you're just in fear of recreating what has happened to you in the past. The chain of events. Same thing with fear. Same thing happens how you view your life. What is happened in your life that went wrong? You link that back to core stories. And lastly, your self-image about you.
There's a Jesuit saying, "Give me a boy till the age of seven, and I'll show you the man." "Give me a boy till the age of seven, and I'll show you the man." Why does therapy hound so hard on your childhood? My child happened in the past. Why am I going back to it? Like, why, why are people so obsessed with their childhood? Well, it's because your childhood is this level one. The first things that happened to you, the age of seven, of how you developed your core stories. Here that project outwards to your now stories. This is powerful stuff.
Speaking of stories, is it cool if I share with you, uh, maybe we'll have time for a couple? One I got from Michael Singer. Is one of my favorite books, guys. The Untethered Soul. Um, this, I love this book inside and out, and it has a beautiful story about core stories of where a woman gets stabbed by a giant thorn right there. It's a thorn in her arm. Every time she touches it, there's pain there. Every time she goes to lay down, there's pain. So what does she do? Well, instead of taking the thorn out so she can go on with her life, she associates so much pain to that thorn that that would just be excruciating to look at it and to deal with it. So she constructs her whole life around not touching this thorn. She gets a bed where she can only lay on her right side because if she rolls on her left side, oh, that's too painful. She used to love fashion, and now she doesn't wear half the dresses that cover her arms. All of them have to be sleeveless so they don't touch her thorn. She used to dance, now she doesn't dance. She avoids it because she doesn't want to touch that thorn. In her eyes, she constructed this whole life out of safety to avoid pain. But has she really avoided pain, or has she just made her life more painful? Because everything she does has now become about this thorn in her side. Her life has started to suck the fun out of it because she's so concerned about where this thorn is and not touching it. Obviously, that's a story, not fact. But I think it really rings true for us that these core experiences we have are the thorns that stay with us, and instead of dealing with them, removing them, we just let them linger there, and we construct our whole life to avoid it.
You know, I'll give you a personal story on this. When I was 8 years old, I was in a math class in elementary school, and everyone got called up to do multiplication tables on this big chalkboard. And it was okay. You do the ones. So 1 times 1 is 1, 1 times 2 is 2, 1 times, etc. Threes, fours, fives, all the way up to 12. Maybe you did this yourself. Now, I got the elevens. 11 times 3 is 33. 11 times 6 is 66. I didn't know that trick. It was so hard in my mind. I, I was trying to add up like, okay, 11 plus 11, that's the next one. It took me so long. And the teacher wasn't very supportive. Um, and everyone kind of started laughing 'cause it took me like five minutes and everyone else was done for the last couple minutes. Now, as an adult, now, if that happened, we'd just maybe laugh it off and sit down, and it wouldn't stick with us. But because I had no prior experience, because I was eight years old, because I was so like, new to everything in the world, it stuck with me. And for the longest time, I thought I was dumb and I was not good at math. That was the thorn. The story I told myself. "I'm just not good at math. I'm not good with numbers." Now, I carried that belief around and constructed my whole life to avoid numbers. And I got into college, ended up failing some classes, almost didn't graduate because of that belief. "I'm not good with numbers." Then what happened? I graduated and got into the world of business and being, you know, an entrepreneur and having my own business. And I realized that numbers are just data. And I started looking at numbers and started getting so much information from them. "Ha, if we cut this, we save this." And a penny saved is a penny earned. "Where else can I cut?" And I started just playing with numbers, and I realized I loved numbers. I realized that story wasn't true. I realized that I was actually good with numbers. They made sense. They're binary. They don't have any emotions. They're just ones and zeros. What's there to be afraid of? So my story of math trauma, which is a real term, a lot of people pick up, was not true. And by questioning, "Is that really true? Am I really bad at numbers, or is that just a label I picked up and a story that projects out to my now story?" By questioning that one core story, I was able to break through to the next level.
Here's another angle on this subject with your life. 'Cause you might be like, "Well, Clark, I look back on my life, and that really did happen. I really did get my heartbroken. I really did fail at business and lose a ton of money. I really did have something terrible happen in my life. This isn't just a made-up thorn. It's a real thorn that I have." And I'm not here to tell you to discount all the trauma or the pain that has happened in your life and write it off and just think positive. I don't think that's healthy. I think that can actually suppress and repress things down deeper. We're not talking living Lululand here, okay?
This is where the film strip comes in. Where here's you in the past, and all these are like scenes in a movie that build and build and build till you get to you in the current moments. You now. Psychologists will say there's two primary types of stories you can tell yourself about your life. The first is how most people view it. This is a contamination story. Where, you know, "When I was 27 years old, and that one screwed me over, and my life has never been the same thanks to that guy. I had such a good thing and I lost it, and I messed it up, and I threw it all away. I made a bad decision in my teens, and I'm now a bad person forever, and I have to live with that." That is a contamination story, okay? And your life won't get any better if you're telling how your life changed because of one event, one scene in the movie, and it soured the whole thing up until now. I can tell you what the next movie strip will look like, and it's not going to be very good.
But then there's a second type of story. And this is a redemption story. Some people call this a commitment story. Something bad happens, and you used it to grow and redeem yourself, and now you can build from that and totally redeem yourself. Isn't that the kind of story we love hearing? We love seeing that. We love seeing growth and people publicly change their opinions and admit fault when they were wrong. See, a commitment story is when you change the meaning. That's the million-dollar question. What does this mean?
There's no better story on this than one you're probably familiar with, but it's like an, the most extreme example of this we can have is Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It was written by Victor Frankl, who was a psychologist who was in, uh, Auschwitz, you know, one of the Holocaust camps. Talk about the worst thing that can happen to anyone. And he saw people who lost their meaning, and they literally died inside, and they lost their will to live. He was able to create so much meaning from negative events. "I'm going to make it through this because I want to write a book and make sure it never happens to anyone ever again." Now, I'm not saying, and you can do it too, and that's easy. To be fully honest, I don't know how many of us could find that level of meaning in such hell. There's someone with literally hell on Earth finding such strong meaning in the story he was going to tell, in the vision of his future here, that he didn't let it break him. Talk about the epitome of meaning-making, willpower, and grit. Talk about perspective. You know, the way we use trauma today is like, "It was so traumatic, like my Uber Eats order took an extra 20 minutes, and now I, like, don't want to order Uber Eats anymore." Victor Frankl taught, "It's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it." That's what stoicism teaches. That's what Buddha teaches. That's what all core philosophies at their core teach is that you are always in control of not what happens to you, but your response to it. You are 100% responsible. The ability to respond to whatever happens. And that 100% responsibility lies in the stories you tell yourself about where things went wrong, about what's going to come next. You can react and live in a reactive state, and that's the easiest thing to do. Just reacting to things. You know, someone cuts you off in traffic. What do you do? You flip them the bird, you speed up, you try and get even. That's reacting. The hardest thing to do is respond. Someone cuts me off in traffic. Maybe they're in a rush. My friend just had a kid, and that was the story. Okay, they literally were like, on the way to the hospital, and he had to pull over 'cause his wife was in labor in the back seat. He catches the baby in his hands and delivers their kids. If you had seen him going 90 miles an hour, driving like a maniac, you would be like, "What? Screw that person. What is he doing? He's drunk." And it's only 9:00 AM, dude, chill. But if you respond, you're able to change the meaning and have a more charitable response to whatever is happening.
Here's something that's very inspiring. I find a lot of, uh, inspiration from the concept of neuroplasticity with your mind. So your neurons literally fire and wire together. Uh, that's Hebb's Law. Neurons that fire together, wire together and get habituated. Just like you have habits in the morning. You know, you wake up and maybe you grab your phone first thing, that's a habit. Um, or you go make coffee first thing in the morning, that's a habit. And you know this. People are obsessed with habit changing because it changes their life. But at first, changing the habit is really hard. Why is that hard? It's because your neurons have literally linked faster connections and they literally formed together. This is actually an image right here of neurons connecting. So when when you're learning information about thing A and thing B, and you make a connection of how they're related, your neurons are like little spider webs, and your brain is the spider weaving them together. And they connect. That is what learning is. It's forming those connections. And sometimes learning is breaking those connections that aren't true. So neuroplasticity, you can form these new connections by just going back and changing the meaning. Maybe my next growth isn't learning something new. It can be, but often times it's unlearning things that aren't true. True. And things that aren't true about myself, or where things went wrong, or the story I'm telling myself. And then you can rewire and create new stories and new identities. That's how it happens.
There's also where humility comes in. This might be a weird turn in the video, but I, I want to throw this in here because it's important. Some people's stories are inferiority. "Oh, I'm less than others." Or, "I'm too young." Or, "I'm not as talented." That's very common. That's like low self-esteem. Some people's stories are of superiority. "I'm better than them. I'm chosen. I'm special. I'm above people." Or they look at what they have and they use that as evidence of why they're better. And those stories can hold you back as much as the inferior, inferiority stories, let me tell you. They can shut you off from otherwise good relationships. They can close you to experiences that you think are beneath you. They can keep you in this confirmation bias of why you're right, and there's no growth, and it makes you stagnant. Man, there's a ton of growth in humility. And that is a lesson I've learned this year more than any other. Not trying to be better than others. You know, not trying to pursue status at all costs. Understanding that we all have the same worth as humans, and that your money or your status doesn't elevate you or make you better than people. It means you're further ahead in a game, but it doesn't mean you as a person are chosen. I find this in the spiritual community. You know, um, it's not without flaws. In the self-improvement community, it's not without flaws. Some people use inner work as a superiority flex. "Well, once you start doing the inner work that I've done, you're just not as spiritually evolved as me." The irony in that is that is from a place of superiority and ego. Story of why I'm better than others 'cause I'm chosen. The universe speaks through me and not other people.
Now, you're probably thinking, "Well, Clark, give me the coffee shop exercise. Like, what do I need to take my journal to a coffee shop and journal on to really apply this?" And here, I'll give you, I'll simplify the entire inner work in one question that you can ask. "I can't." Because whatever it is, "I can't." If you want a juicy nugget to dive into and do some inner work, you ask yourself that question. "I can't make money because..." and you'll find the story. Level one. "I can't find love or get in a relationship or trust people because..." and you'll find maybe three, two, maybe one. "I can't get myself to stop procrastinating because..." Often times a core story there is fear-based. "I need to uphold an image. I'm scared of rejection. I don't want it to go wrong. I don't want to admit that I'm not as far ahead as I thought I was going to be." "I can't because..." If you got the cojones to sit down and ask that question, I promise you, your next level of growth is going to unlock. And all of this is fear-based. And what you find about fear is that most of it is not true. Fear is just a negative visualization. That's it. Um, it's just seeing what could happen and assuming that it's going to go wrong. What's so funny about fear is that nine out of 10 times, maybe 99 times out of 100, your fear doesn't come true. And you don't even remember the times where you were afraid of something and it didn't go that way. You don't, like, give yourself credit for that. You just kind of ignore it, and then you move on to the next fear and the next fear and the next fear. "I can't because blank." Realize that 99% of the time, those fears actually never happen. And this takes a lot of self-awareness. This takes a lot of guts to ask 'cause it's painful to realize, "Dude, I've been telling myself a contamination story for like a decade." Five years. Oh, man.
So let's recap what we learned. I hope this was useful. If it was useful, let me know in the comments and, uh, give me your biggest takeaway. There's two types of story. There's commitment and contamination stories, and most people are telling themselves the first. Your stories are at the core of your emotions and your thoughts. You need to go from levels one, two, and three, not three, two, one. You don't change your thoughts so you can have better emotions so you can tell yourself better stories. It's much more effective and efficient. And all inner work gets to story changing so you feel different, so you think different. Remember that your thoughts are files, and your emotions are like the folders they're stored in. So when you change the folder, the files can change as well. You can delete them, and then they're gone, or you can create new ones. And understand that you have core stories. Most people are running on four main categories: money, love, fear, and their self-image. And if you want to see where you are, "Give me a boy till the age of seven, and I'll show you the man," as the saying goes. It's more effective to not just go after your now, but to do inner work, which is what this is called, and trace it back to where you picked up these stories. Are they really true? Fact-check them. Just like I did with my math story. Just like the woman did in Michael Singer's book, The Untethered Soul, with the thorn, making sure your whole life isn't just a construction to avoid pain. And that, my friend, is one of the most important videos we can talk about. Hope this was useful. Let me know. Love you. See you in the next one. Stop settling, start living. See you. Hey guys. Oh, big golfs, huh? All right, well, see you later.