Transcription
morning because if you want to run the marathon, you need to get up and train. You need to put in the work, and that’s the bridge. The bricks are the actions you take every day to get there.
So, manifesting is not just about visualizing the end goal; it’s about recognizing that you have to build the path to get there. You need to take small, actionable steps that will lead you to your dreams.
In summary, while it’s important to have a vision of what you want, it’s equally crucial to focus on the daily actions that will help you achieve that vision. The high five habit and the five-second rule are tools that can help you break negative patterns and take those necessary steps toward your goals.
By practicing self-acceptance and taking action, you can create a life that aligns with your dreams and aspirations. It’s about building a foundation of self-love and resilience that will support you on your journey.
Morning, because that's what time you're gonna have to get up in order to get your training runs in. You better put a runner that's gripping their leg like this when they get a muscle cramp. You better put up, you know, a vision of you at mile 13 and your earbuds run out, and you still got two more miles to go. Visualization is the bricks.
So what I want you to do when you visualize is instead of visualizing, "Ah, the marathon, I did it, I was amazing," and then you open up, you're like, "Okay, and I still have not even bought a pair of sneakers." That's not happening. But that was a fun little exercise. No, what you do is you literally visualize walking into the store and getting sneakers, calling your friend who runs and asking for advice.
"Oh my God, that's me on my first training run! I've only gone 30 seconds and I'm out of breath." Oh, there I am running three miles in the rain, and I feel proud of myself because I've actually gone out in the rain. Oh, there I am saying, "Uh, no to my friends, I can't go out tonight because I didn't get my run in, but I'm gonna go on my big run alone."
You visualize the annoying, irritating, amazing things. I'm sure people look at you all the time with your extraordinary success, Stephen, and are like, "How'd you do it? How'd you do it?" And like, do you know how many things I missed out on? Do you know how many, like, the amount of work that nobody wants to do because they're not thinking about it is extraordinary?
That's the bridge. Anybody is capable of achieving anything. I actually believe that because I think human beings are designed to change. You're capable of breaking any pattern. You're capable of getting control of your health. You're capable of launching a business. You're capable of making millions of dollars. You're capable of healing your trauma, of finding love, of doing absolutely anything that you put your mind to, as long as you are willing to do the work for it and as long as you give up your timeline.
Because I do believe that people who put in the work get rewarded, but you just might not get rewarded when you think you're going to be, and it might not be the reward that you thought you were going to get. Is that the case in your life? It's always the case. And that's why I always have big dreams, because I have learned time and time and time and time again, especially in entrepreneurial ventures, that you put this huge flag out there, you write the business plan, you set the goals, and then you put your head down and you put in the work.
You ride the wave, you have the disappointments, you spend the late nights, and you have the heartbreak and the heartache. And then things change, and then you think, "This didn't work out, and I got betrayed, and why didn't they recognize me? Damn it, I've worked hard, and now I got to start all over." You have all of that, but if you keep going and you keep going, eventually you will look up one day and be like, "Holy, this is exactly what I was meant to do and what I was meant to discover."
Yeah, my business plan said I was supposed to go over here, and I ended up over here because this is what I was supposed to do. But without this business plan, I never would have gotten started. The business plan was but a dot on the map of my life, connecting me to where I meant to go.
You know, I think one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to me in this past year, especially now that I have this real partnership with myself, where I have a level of trust that through my attitude, through my actions, through a sense of faith that it's gonna turn out, that even when things are really hard, I still believe deep in my core that through my attitude and my actions, it's gonna be okay.
That I have within me the power to ride the ups and downs and to come out on the other side of it. And you know, I think that we've all had the experience, Stephen, of being able to look backwards and say, "Whoa, you know, I wouldn't ever wish the experience that I had back in fourth grade on anybody, but without that experience, I would not be able to help the amount of people that I help. I would not be able to understand trauma as a lived experience and inside and out and at a layer that's so deep because it is an experience that I had in my life."
Without 25 years of struggling with anxiety, without having two kids that have struggled with anxiety, I would not know what I know about anxiety and be able to help people, including my own children. I would not, without having made mistakes with my kids and their anxiety, be able to tell parents, "Do not do this because I did this and it made my kids' anxiety worse, and I didn't even know."
And so I can see how everything from, you know, working as a public defender to being a legal commentator for CNN to the number of stages that I've been on to the number of people that I've helped, I can see how all of that comes together to help me do what I need to do in this moment.
And I think one of the most powerful things that you can cultivate when you cultivate partnership with yourself is being able every single day to have a level of trust in your life, in the magic of things, in yourself, to know that this moment right now is also a dot on the map of your life. And 5, 10, 20 years from now, you will look back on this moment and you will know exactly why this happened and why it happened is it was preparing you for something.
It was giving you a skill or an experience or some wisdom or a relationship that you're gonna need for something extraordinary that's coming. And when you believe that, it gives you the strength to face absolutely anything.
When you look back on the person you are now and the tremendous wisdom that you've just demonstrated just speaking to me just then, do you recognize the male that couldn't get out of bed, was feeling depressed, couldn't find, you know, described herself as you did as being lazy? Do you recognize that person? And what's at the very essence in the engine room that drove that change? Was it passion? Was it finding your calling?
Because I know you weren't this person. You couldn't have been this person. Dude, it's also been 31 years. I mean, come on, I've had, I've like basically been changing for as long as you've been alive, for crying out loud. And also, human beings are designed to grow, but not everybody seems to because you have.
Because they don't understand being stuck. Yeah, interesting. See, being stuck is one of the most universal feelings of the human experience, and nobody understands what it is. What is it? Oh, it's amazing when you hear this. It's like, so remember how we've talked about how human beings have this crazy amount of natural intelligence wired into us?
And inside your body, we've talked about one of the signals: anxiety. Anxiety is a signal that means pay attention. That's why you go into fight or flight; you're in an alert mode. Okay, that's all it is. It's a signal, an alarm system, and your body has a sophisticated system of signals and alarms, and they're all tied to fundamental needs. Anxiety is tied to your fundamental need for safety; that's why it's a signal.
Let's talk about your most important fundamental needs. Let's go right back to psychology 101: Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You need food, or else you die. So when you need food, what is the signal that your body sends you? Hunger. When you need water, what is the signal? When you need air? Yeah, you catching your breath. When you need rest, what do you feel? That's right. When you need connection, what do you feel? Lonely.
Human beings are designed to grow. When you stop growing, what do you feel? Stuck. Yeah, I was gonna say stagnant, but I guess stuck is, you know, we're stagnant, we're still trapped, I guess. Yeah, feeling stuck is a signal that you've stopped growing. That's it. And when most people feel stuck, since they don't understand that it's tied to a fundamental need for growth, we believe it's an existential crisis, and we blow up our lives.
For most human beings, what actually will get you feeling like you're not stuck is having something in the future that you're looking forward to, or taking a class where you're learning something, or changing a routine so that you try a new class at the gym. Learning anything gets you back in touch with a fundamental need. It makes you start to feel like things are moving, and from that place of feeling a little bit more empowered, you'll be able to make better decisions about what big things need to change in your life.
And is that you would also describe that as a moment where your life has like an absence of purpose? I think about various examples: Olympians that come back from the Olympics, and they're like 80% chance of depression after they've, you know, and then I think about people who have lost purpose in their lives for whatever reason, been fired from their jobs or whatever, all people that are in jobs that are, you know, absent of purpose completely.
That feeling of being stuck, and then you said we talked also about the importance of goals and ambitions going forward. When humans don't have that forward ambition or that thing to look forward to in the future and their current situation lacks purpose, they become very psychologically disoriented.
The way I describe it, I have a different take on purpose. I think everybody's purpose is exactly the same. What is that? I think your purpose is to share your true self, to be fully seen. And for the Olympian, when you are training and you're in that arena, that is an experience of being seen.
And for most people that are lacking purpose, they feel profoundly invisible. And being seen fundamentally comes back to whether or not you even see yourself. And when you start to feel empowered and you start to see yourself and meet you where you are, what happens is every day that you're able to stand with yourself, to accept where you are, to give yourself the compassion, to give yourself the support and the love and the respect and the worthiness that you deserve, you're going to go out into the world and share more of yourself.
That Olympic athlete is sharing more of themselves. And so I think our purpose in life is to come back home to ourselves, to reconnect with ourselves, and to empower ourselves to go back out into the world and share our stories and share our experiences and share our full selves with the rest of the world.
From a prehistoric standpoint, let's say, you know, because I always try and like check things against the caveman of my, you know, my ancestral beings, the idea of being seen when I was, you know, my ancestors 10,000 years ago, what kind of role does that play in from a survival perspective?
Well, I mean, I'm freestyling here, so okay, my suspicion is if you were not within your mom's eye view, your ass was going to get eaten. And so I think that, you know, if you wandered off as a kid, you were in danger. If you weren't hunting with the pack, you were in danger. And so being seen means safety.
And that's why when you look at psychological safety, there are three fundamental needs: the need to be seen, the need to be heard, and the need to be celebrated for the unique person that you are. Those are your three fundamental emotional needs when it comes to feeling safe and whole as a human being. And most people's experience by the time they are done with childhood is they feel invisible. They feel like nobody gets them, and they feel completely disconnected and unloved or not celebrated.
It makes a ton of sense. Yeah, so I did okay on that answer? Yeah, it's a really, really remarkable reframing. We have a new tradition on the Diary of a CEO, which is in the diary, the famous Diary of a CEO, the previous guest always writes a question for the next guest that's coming, and they don't know who they are.
Okay, and these guests, they're so diverse. It's always so fascinating, and they never know who they're writing it for, which is also interesting. The previous guest wrote, "What is the one regret you have, if you have any at all?"
Um, it's a tricky question because I'm one of these people that doesn't want to go back and change anything. I think everybody is, according to the science. We had a mogul sit here from Google; he talked about the eraser test. He said even people that have gone through profound trauma, when asked the question if they were to erase the trauma, 99% said no because of the domino effect. You don't know. You know, it's an interesting one.
Yeah, um, you know, like any behavior that hurt somebody else, you know, anything that I did, whether it was light or cheating or, you know, just being an [ __ ] when I was just trying to survive that unintentionally hurt somebody else. Yeah, I wish that that wasn't part of my story.
Um, but you know, I wouldn't understand at a profound level that really well-meaning good people do really shitty things when they feel shitty about themselves. And you know, if I hadn't done shitty things when I felt shitty about myself, I wouldn't fully believe that. And you might do that again, I guess, had you not done it once?
Yeah, yeah, or twice or three times or four times. Like first, you gotta wake up, you know? And then there's all the things that I did that I don't realize hurt somebody else. But you know, I know in my heart that I was still a good person; I was just in a really bad place, which is, you know, why you do bad things.
Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for everything in life. And if you believe you're a bad person, you will tend to do bad things. And the opposite is also true: if you believe that you are a good person who is worthy of good things, you tend to do good things.
Unbelievably true. My last question for you is one that I tend to always ask people I meet that I find to be incredibly wise and very good at helping others. I mean, you help hundreds of millions of people combined, which is, do you still struggle with all of the [ __ ] you talk about?
Oh my God, like yes! That's why I'm so [ __ ] relatable. I do not have this stuff figured out. I am shoulder to shoulder with everybody. Um, whether it's issues going on with one of my kids, issues going on with one of me, you know, just the other night, I mean, this is what happened. I self-published the audiobook, okay?
And, um, which is amazing because I'm a smart [ __ ]! I own my rights, and you should too! This book? Oh no, no, this one I did a joint venture on the publishing, but I own all of the audio. Amazing! And, um, because the five-second rule is self-published, and it's the number one selling self-published audiobook in the history of audiobooks. The book is self-publishing, and, um, which is why I need to get into NFTs because my, I don't like it when somebody else has control.
I, as an artist, want to own what I do. As a businesswoman, nothing pisses me off more than getting into a dumb deal and then I resent the people that I'm in the deal with because I didn't negotiate properly. And if you believe in what you're doing, you better own your work. You better understand the long-tail payoff of your work because nobody will market your work better than you.
And you will be profoundly pissed off when somebody else is making their money a hundred years from now. And for every author that's listening, make sure you look at Amazon because the relatives of, uh, what's his face who wrote the seven habits of highly effective whatever, they're the ones collecting checks on that because that book is still hitting.
So you want to be like Mariah Carey; she laughs all the way to the bank whenever Christmas rolls around because of that song. And so, you know, I, uh, self-published the audiobook. I have a tremendous partnership with Audible where we create a lot of original content for them behind their paywall.
And I self-published this book, and we destroyed it in sales the month of October. The number one selling audiobook, period, hands down, of any book that was published, period. AP reported it; everybody reported it. And then the New York Times comes out in November, and they rank the top 10 audiobooks of the month of October, and they deliberately left me off.
And when that happened, I punched the wall, I drank a gin martini, I lit up a joint, I called a couple friends and bitched, and I immediately got triggered because I went right back to the experience of being a ninth grader on the tennis team and having the seniors throw a party, and I was the only ninth grader who wasn't involved.
And so it triggered a very old pattern that I thought I had [ __ ] gotten rid of, which is I'm an outsider, nobody likes me, I'm always having to sneak in. Why am I never invited? Why am I not part of the cool kids? Why am I not for, you know, like it's that old stupid-ass story that got triggered.
And so, of course, this [ __ ] happens. It happens all the time, and I just happen to talk about it because I don't like feeling these things. And I find that just trying to shove it down makes the next time it happens get even bigger. And so I share this stuff because I think holding it in is what's creating a lot of anxiety and regret and upset and stuckness for people.
We are all so the same, and the more that, you know, I kind of share the ups and downs, I think the more people listen to the things that are working and try them out and tweak them for their own life. And look, if I can save anybody the heartache and the headaches that cause myself, that's a life well lived.
You know, if I can laugh at myself along the way, if I can punch a wall and drink a gin martini and then share with you like, "Okay, this," and then get out. Because how I got out of that, because I could have been in that cycle, the old male would have been there for a month. Everybody's out to get me, I never get recognized, why even bother? It doesn't matter.
And it allows me to share in real time that I feel all the [ __ ] but I don't like to stay there. And this is not toxic positivity. It is important when you're disappointed to allow yourself to feel disappointed. It is important when you lose something to give yourself the grace to grieve for as long as you need to.
It is important to have a good cry, to have a good scream, to draw. It's important to feel the highs and the lows. You're meant to feel it all, but you can shorten the length of time you stay down. And what always helps me, it's something that, you know, I developed when the high five, the five-second rule launch was coming off the rails, is I just kept saying what I've said a couple times during this: I say to myself, "I refuse to believe that if I'm a good person and that if I'm working hard, I refuse to believe that this doesn't work out. I refuse to believe that I'm not going to be okay."
Like, I know that this moment's going to pass, and I know that I will look back on this moment five years from now, and I'll see exactly what I was meant to learn. And what I was meant to learn, I already know, is that I have got to once and for all stop looking for validation in old institutions if I truly want to be an artist on my own terms.
Don't even pay attention to that [ __ ] because it doesn't matter in the world that we're living in now. It doesn't matter if you really want to make an impact because the person that's struggling is the person that you want to reach, not the person that's deciding who gets on some stupid list that's printed in a paper.
And redirecting your focus to what actually matters and the fact that you believe in your heart that you got the mindset, you got the work ethic, you got the ability to figure this [ __ ] out and to keep going, and that eventually, if you do what's meant for you, it's gonna find you. You will be rewarded for all this in the way that you're meant to be rewarded.
That's amazing. It's an amazing feeling because you can pick yourself up no matter what happens. Well, thank God you do share it because, you know, you're a very special human being, and there's very few in the world that have the genius of the skill stack where it's kind of how I see it that you have, where they're able to go through things in life, analyze them, understand them from a psychological, a scientific perspective, from a sort of intrinsic internal perspective, and then be a masterful orator in sharing that in a relatable, honest way that helps others to change their lives and find the peace they're looking for, find the outcomes they're searching for.
There's very few that can do that with such genius. So that's a beautiful compliment, and thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it, and I can hear it for the first time in my life. I can hear it. And you've also given me this extraordinary insight that I just got.
Um, so you asked me in the beginning kind of what is it that created all of this insight or this drive to figure it out? I think I just figured it out. You just [ __ ] did it. I just figured it out. I spent so long being dysregulated, having a nervous system that was constantly on edge. Like what it felt like to be me any moment in my life, whether I was sitting in a classroom or I was sitting at that law firm bait stamping, or I'm sitting as a young mom with postpartum depression, or I'm sitting in yet another job I don't like, is it felt like being in a car at a stoplight that had a green signal and the emergency brake was on and the gas was floored, and I was going nowhere.
Like just the engine revved and the sense that I needed to go but not being able to go. And when I finally started to get control of my own thinking, when I finally started to understand anxiety and how to quiet it in my mind and then how to quiet it in my body, when I finally got serious about understanding trauma and healing it in my nervous system, first through EMDR, through therapy, through guided MDMA sessions, I finally had the experience of being in my body and being safe and being okay.
And I hadn't had that in a really long time. And, um, I'm so aware of when I'm not in my body now. I'm so aware of when my nervous system starts to go on edge that my tolerance for staying there is zero because I lived for far too long feeling on edge, anxious, dysregulated, self-loathing. That when I dip into that space, and everybody, you dip into that space once a day, if not, like I used to live there.
And so when I start to dip into that dysregulated, anxious, on-edge, intense space, it's like, "Get this out of my body! We got to get back into my new default, which is grounded, centered, in control of what I'm thinking, what I'm going to do next." And it's a fluid situation, but you just gave me the insight as to why it's so quick for me now because I've made a commitment to myself that after spending 30 years that way, 40 almost, that I don't want to live another year that way, another week that way, another full day that way.
Now, do I have things that happen in my life that are tough that put me into a mode where I'm anxious and on edge? And of course, do I disassociate when I get really awful? Of course! But I now have the tools to bring myself back into my body, to give myself the encouragement, the assurance, the support that I need so that I can face whatever's happening and know that I'm not only gonna be okay, I'm actually gonna be awesome eventually.
That's beautiful. And, um, yeah, I've got a little bit emotional there too. I would also assert that you figured that out, and you're also helping a lot of other people figure that out in themselves, which is a remarkable, I mean, it's the highest service I think any one human being could do for society is to do what you're doing at the moment.
And yeah, I, you know, if only there were more forces in the world like you. I really, I was thinking as you were speaking, I was thinking, "This woman really is a force in the world." And I don't, nothing can stop you. I really believe that. I was thinking nothing is, you've got too much, too strong, too much intrinsic drive that's coming from a lot of the sort of traumas and experiences you've described. Nothing can stop you.
No inclusion on any list is going to stop you; probably only add to the coal fire inside that's, uh, everything better just get out the way. Thank you so much for the time, the honesty, the openness, the inspiration. For many a year, I've seen you going way back into the viral video days on Facebook where you'd come up all the time in my feed, and I'd say, "Who's this person, and what's this thing she's talking about jumping out of bed?"
And I was trying, you know, trying it myself, and it was working for me. So it's such a huge honor, and that's what I use sparingly, but in this case, it's perfectly adequate to sit here with you and to, um, spend some time with you, and it's time I won't forget. So thank you.
Thank you. [Music]