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Self Improvement

Taking Risks is The Most Important Part of Self-Improvement

by Visko Matich · Jan 29, 2019

why risk is good

Did you know that on the eve of his first Indian rights demonstration Mohandas Gandhi thought “You know what? I might get smacked about for this!” And called the whole thing off, staying in his neat black suit, practicing law with civilized gentlemen, and earning a nice and comfortable living for himself and his young family.

You might also be surprised to learn that Count Leo Tolstoy, on deciding to pursue a career as a writer found his prose abominable and couldn’t bear the effect of failure on his social reputation, so sacked the whole thing off and remained an officer in the Russain military, who in between moments of gambling and whoring, went back to his country estate, where he gambled and chased peasant girls, never to touch pen to paper again.

You will certainly be shocked to discover that Sylvester Stallone (I know, a bit of a step down from the last two) when sitting down to write the first draft of Rocky, couldn’t help but find the movie formulaic, his characters simple, and the idea of some Cinderella boxing story just a little too hokey. So two scenes in, he called it a day, and went back to being just another schlub, except with a bizarre, scarcely intelligible voice.

Or at least, that’s how it would’ve gone had they never taken any risks.

WHAT IS RISK?

“My momma always said life is like a box of chocolates.” Said Forrest Gump. “You never know what you’re gonna get.” But Forrest Gump is full of shit. And although it seems tangential to the article, this actually illustrates a key point.

People often fail to understand the difference between true risk and what is in fact uncertainty. And as a result, react in a way that doesn’t have any bearing on reality.

When Forrest says you never know what you’re going to get in a box of chocolates he is speaking in terms of uncertainty. As far as his analogy applies to life, he’s correct. The odds of anything in life are uncertain. But as far as a box of chocolates is concerned, he’s wrong. You have a fair chance of knowing exactly what you’re going to get. Because unlike life, the box of chocolates has pretty tangible odds. I mean, not only is he going to get chocolate, but there are fairly standard types of chocolate that someone gets in a box. For instance, it’s good odds that he’ll get a chocolate with strawberry filling.

While slightly less certain, Forrest’s catchphrase is no more realistic than saying “Life is like a pack of 52 playing cards, complete with Kings, Queens, Aces, suits, the lot. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Tell that to Rain Man.

REDEFINING RISK

In life, risk and uncertainty are not the same things. When it comes to true risk, elements are known and an outcome can be potentially calculated. It’ll rarely ever truly be known, but it’ll be far more certain than otherwise.

For instance, in a freshly opened pack of cards, you have a 1/4 chance of drawing a Heart. With those odds in mind, you have an idea of the risk you’re going to take if you’d gamble money on that outcome. It’s the same with reaching into a box of chocolates. You might risk pulling out the wrong flavor, but if you only dislike strawberry filled chocolates then there are good odds you’ll manage to pick one of the many that aren’t.

That is what actual risk is.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is what life is all about. There are no real tangible odds for whether your business will succeed, whether your motorbike will crash, whether you’ll win a fight, fall in love, publish a book, or have a good time traveling alone. In reality, nobody could possibly know these things. At best you’ll get statistics that fall apart under scrutiny.

So when people talk about “taking risks” in life, what they’re really talking about is uncertainty. This is what “taking a risk” in life is. Confronting the unknown. Yet when people talk about these kinds of risks, they talk about them as if the odds are already known.

The call uncertainty risk, yet treat uncertainty like it operates under the rules of risk. But in life neither of those things are true.

Got a headache yet?

So, for the sake of cleaning up:

When you think of TAKING RISKS IN LIFE, RISK-TAKERS, or tell yourself “THIS IS RISKY” you are thinking of an unknown that you have to confront. An unknown where there are no odds.

Unless it’s gambling or a box of chocolates, this is the rule.

This is what I’m referring to when I say “risk” from now on.

(After all, I’m not here to give you gambling advice).

WHY IS RISK SO IMPORTANT?

You. Your life. The opportunities you are confronted with. The very idea you have of your own identity. All of this is affected by the risks you choose to take in life. The more you choose to take risks and confront the unknown, the more each of these elements expands. The less you take risks, the more you’re confined within your apparent certainties.

“I can’t do that.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“X will happen, which will cause Y, and that would be stupid.”

“Only an idiot would do that!”

And so on. Whether it’s starting a business, riding a motorbike, defending yourself in a fight, approaching a woman, writing a book, traveling alone, there is always a certain answer as if the outcome is already known. And why confront the “unknown” if you don’t believe it’s unknown in the first place?

This is the hallmark of people who are risk-averse: they’re certain about something that it is not possible to be certain about. And as a result, they rarely discover what they never had the uncertainty to discover.

“I did have it in me to start a business.”

“I did have it in me to defend myself.”

“I was capable of getting her number and I did end up in love.”

“I did have a great time traveling alone.”

And when you never discover this, you never get to say the next part:

“I’m glad I risked it.”

The only way to engage with any form of self-improvement in life is to take consistent risks and confront the unknown. And the only reason you don’t take these risks is down to incorrect assumptions about the nature of risk itself, and incorrect, negative assumptions about yourself. As good old Mark Zuckerberg says “the biggest risk is not taking any risk… the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

(I imagine he said this prior to the Cambridge Analytica scandal…)

But if you’re risk-averse, then taking consistent risks is easier said than done.

THE ART OF RISK-TAKING

As that last tasty little quote demonstrates, it’s not out of character for successful people to recommend taking risks. On the one hand, they may be offering good advice, but on the other, given that -as I’ve pointed out- risks in life are a complete unknown, their faith in risk-taking probably has a lot to do with survivorship bias.

That is to say, it worked for them so they think it’ll work for you. But it doesn’t take a genius to work out that quitting your job and eating baked beans whilst broke isn’t necessarily going to turn you into Richard Branson.

However, regardless of the odds of it working, taking risks in life and confronting the unknown is an unavoidable step in changing anything in your life. It can’t be avoided and it can’t be eliminated.

So how do you do it?

The essence of embracing risk-taking behavior lies in the fact that a single big risk does not exist in a vacuum, but is in fact composed of much smaller risks you take day to day, and even, in the way you choose to think.

For instance:

If you choose to always think you can never make a lot of money, you will likely spend your money frivolously instead of investing it into your own development or opportunities, and when an occasion or idea strikes you that may have large potential returns (like say a business opportunity), it is unlikely you will have the courage to pursue it. In fact, you’ll probably self-sabotage it.

New position open up at work? Too late, you never asked about it.

Great business idea strike you? You’ll probably write it down, then find the piece of paper down the back of your bookcase in a years time.

Have a skill that you can offer to people? That’s great, but you’ll never face rejection by marketing it so nobody will ever know.

YOU HAVE TO APPROACH IT HOLISTICALLY

The big risks don’t happen as long as the small risks don’t either. And neither occurs if the thinking is confined by false certainties about yourself and resultant self-sabotage. But where does this process exist? Do you solve the thought and the rest follows? Or is it more complicated?

I think risk in life is something that has to be approached holistically. It’s not as simple as fix the thoughts and the rest will follow, as every step operates by the same principle. Whether it’s the thoughts, small risks, or big risks, the same principle is true:

You don’t know.

This is the only real certainty you have. You have no idea what thoughts are true and what aren’t. You have no idea whether a small risk of self-improvement (like saving money or reading) will pay off. You have no idea whether pursuing a promotion will end will in your favor; the big risks are always more unknown than any.

And I’m not here to tell you that they will pay off if you muster the bravery to try. I’m just here to say you have no idea. And neither do I.

It’s up to you whether you risk it.

THE MOST IMPORTANT RISKS YOU NEED TO TAKE

Ironically given my earlier examples, I don’t actually think the risks you have to take in life involve chasing big dreams like starting a business or writing a book. In many ways those are irrelevant, or outcomes of smaller, more fundamental risks that play out day by day, altering you in ways that actually push you towards those kinds of eventualities.

In my experience, the most important risks to take in life are actually fairly simple, but almost universally avoided. They’re risks that fundamentally relate to our character, and specifically what makes us comfortable. Whether that’s in life, love, friendships, or the way we view the world.

Here are the most important risks to take:

1) RISK FAILING TO CHANGE… OR CHANGING AT ALL

One of the main reasons why I believe people genuinely avoid real, challenging self-improvement is that they’re afraid of the result. And I don’t just mean the one where they fail.

When you’re used to living a certain way it becomes comfortable. And as much as you might think you want to change, improve, or achieve your dream the way you do; the reality is that this change threatens your comfort now.

Let’s say you feel like a loser and want to be successful. Sure, succeeding might make you feel better, but it also threatens your conception of yourself now. On the flip side, if you attempt to become successful and fail, what might that confirm about you? Again, pretty threatening.

Either way, the answer is uncomfortable. So what do you do? You never risk failing or changing at all. You procrastinate, put off, or distract yourself with easier, lighter forms of change – like hitting the gym till you get that endorphin high.

But the real, identity level change? That remains untouched.

2) RISK REJECTION

A great relationship and a great dating life are determined by the same thing:

Your willingness to reject or be rejected.

In brief, as I’ve built an entire dating course teaching this, the more you are willing to be rejected, the more you will naturally, and attractively express who you are and attract women into your life who are great for you.

The less willing you are to be rejected, the more you’ll engage with needy, manipulative behaviors, and all around have a shit time.

Sure, you have to do some groundwork on yourself too. But actively risking rejection will determine the vast majority of your results and happiness in dating. So next time you get shot down, remember that you’re doing yourself a favor.

3) RISK VULNERABILITY

Emotionally exposing yourself is the easiest way to defeat the persistent sense of loneliness. When you constantly repress, hide, and filter your emotions from other people, you stop yourself from ever feeling truly connected to others.

This obviously has a negative effect on your happiness, relationships, and friendships but it also has an effect on your ability to express yourself, and ultimately, understand yourself.

When you develop the habit of never making yourself vulnerable with others, you’re actually developing the habit of never being vulnerable with yourself. Everything that would be beneficial for you to understand you’re instead jamming down into your subconscious. Typically for stupid reasons like being “more masculine” that have nothing to do with actually being masculine.

As far as taking risks in life go, the risk of vulnerability has its hands in everything from success to just your overall well being. Don’t discount it.

4) RISK CONFLICT

There is no way to be honest without inciting conflict. You can be the nicest guy in the world, but if you’re honest, someone’s going to get pissed off. Don’t believe me?

Look at what happened to Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi. Hell, Western civilization revolves around the idea of one guy getting whacked for being a decent bloke.

But when you fear confrontation or reprisals, you’ll do your best to never be honest. You’ll supplicate, you’ll amend and filter your opinion until you either have no idea who you are, you’re walked all over by others, or both.

Ironically, you do this to become more likable to others. Not only is this vain and insecure, but as I said in an earlier article, the best way to actually be likable is to embrace being unlikeable. Go figure.

5) RISK YOUR CERTAINTIES

Beliefs and intellectual opinions are some of the things we hold closest to us. But they’re often the most confining.

The easiest example of this is the divide in US Politics. Guys on the Right shout about how the Left are all Marxists and must be silenced at all costs, and guys on the Left shout about how the Right are all fascists whilst simultaneously recommending kids in MAGA hats get beaten up. Neither listens to the other, both shout at great volume, and both think they have all the answers.

Who’s right?

The right answer probably lies somewhere in between. A little bit of left and a little bit of right. But being locked in zero empathy certainties does nobody any help. Not only does it shut down discourse, but it’s fundamentally unintelligent and fearful.

You don’t become intelligent and confident by only understanding one side of a debate. And whether this is politics, religion, economics, or just the basic everyday opinions you have about yourself and other people – you owe it to yourself to challenge them.

Because it is in challenging them that you not only form unique opinions and get closer to the truth, but you also begin to face why you were clinging so tightly to those beliefs in the first place.

THE COSTS OF NOT TAKING RISKS

The cost of taking any risk is failure. If you were to take any of the risks listed above, you would be exposing yourself to the (possibly bleak) reality of your potential, rejection, emotional shame, conflict, and realizing how little you actually know.

And guess what? All of those things suck.

Some of them are painful. All of them make you question yourself. But despite this, all of them are worth it. Because the hidden cost of taking any risk is not taking it at all. Behind the painful outcomes, the embarrassments, and the shame that comes from failing, there’s also the reality of what you and your life will be if you don’t take the risk at all.

Sometimes this will mean you’ll stay exactly the same. Many times it’ll actually mean you’ll get worse – growing into someone bitter, who resents the opportunities they let slip away. Always wondering “what if?”

Because that “what if” is the biggest price to pay. We all have to choose a life, to commit to certain things and discard others – but we all want to make that choice from a place of freedom, not fear. And it is making it from fear that has us paying that price.

The real cost of not taking risks isn’t the potential you see in your dream, in someone else’s life, or on a movie. It’s the potential you have no idea that exists. The potential you have no certainty of and have to attempt to discover.

Because just like Mohandas, Leo, or Sly – until you try, you’ll have no idea.

 


Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Certainty, Comfort zone, Confidence, Courage, Goals, Identity, Personal Development, Self Improvement

How To Stop Your Pursuit of Emotional Validation And Approval

by Visko Matich · Jan 22, 2019

how to stop chasing emotional validation

AS FAR AS shitty life choices go, I think relentlessly pursuing emotional validation is in competition for the top spot with cowardice and immorality. Sure, the other two make the bold claim of making you incapable and inhuman, but pursuing emotional validation is pretty much the life choice equivalent of opting for a life of torture.

And I don’t mean bamboo fingernails off to the execution block torture. I mean slow, mind-destroying, water drop torture. It just drips, and drips, and drips, until you’re a shell of the person you once were.

This is really what the pursuit of emotional validation is like. Why? Because, as a result of your unhealthy motivations, your resultant behaviors have the unfortunate side effect of turning everyone off, and rarely, if ever consistently giving you the validation you want and feel you need.

But sometimes you do get it.

So like a gambler down on his losses, you say to yourself “it’s gotta happen this time!”.

And you keep on playing.

Now, I’m gonna dive right into this and make a bold claim:

When you have problems with pursuing emotional validation from others this really stems from a desire to get it from your parents. In other words, I’m saying you have a big old dose of mommy and daddy issues.

And sure, I know what you thinking. You’re thinking fuck you, what do I know, that’s gross, I have no problem with my parents I only keep pursuing toxic relationships by accident. Sure, that could all be true, but if you’re honest with yourself… we both know it’s not.

Let me explain.

PROBLEMS WITH MOMMY AND DADDY 

Here’s how this whole thing works:

When you have validation issues with one or both parents, you operate from a place of “why doesn’t he/she love me?” And when you’re operating from this place, you are constantly trying to validate that it isn’t correct, that they do in fact love you, but you go about this in a fucked up way.

What you do is that you seek out relationships that actively make you feel the same “why doesn’t he/she love me?” feeling so that you can “solve it” when they give you attention.

Aloof partners, chasing women who aren’t into you, staying in relationships where you’re treated like crap. That sort of thing. These relationships are all proxies for your mommy and daddy validation issues.

(Feel sick yet?)

To make this clearer, let me use an example. And as this site is geared at helping men, I’m going to stick to mommy issues. Sorry ladies, but feel free to swap it out for daddy – you know you want to. 😉

So go ahead and wrap your head around this:

  1. Mommy acts aloof.  Child you thinks “why doesn’t she love me?” And as a result feels worthless and chases validation to stop feeling that nasty worthless feeling.
  2. Mommy then gives you attention. Child you thinks “she does love me!” And as a result no longer feels worthless.
  3. Mommy is aloof again. Rinse and repeat.

Now this, with age, becomes:

  1. Woman is indifferent = “Why doesn’t she like me?” = I feel worthless = Chase validation.
  2. Woman gave me attention = “She does like me!” = I’m no longer worthless.
  3. Rinse and repeat.

See how it’s the same thing?

THE WAYS YOU PURSUE EMOTIONAL VALIDATION 

You’re probably thinking that this is one fucked up way to live. And you’d be right. Not only is it a fucked up thing to have boiling away in the back of your head, but it has a lot of nasty consequences in terms of your behavior.

Here are some examples:

  • You will pursue women who aren’t that into you because you’re addicted to chasing their (or rather, mommy’s) validation. You will often pursue these women at the expense of women who genuinely like you because they don’t give you that same feeling of worthless that you want to validate yourself against.
  • In order to get this validation, you will likely adopt a number of toxic strategies. You’ll either try to out aloof their aloofness (“Mr. Cool Guy”). Degrade their self-esteem (“Mr. Asshole Guy”). Be incredibly nice to them so that they’ll owe you something(“Mr. Nice Guy”), and so on. In other words, you’ll be a manipulative piece of shit who’s just chasing an emotional bandaid.
  • If you get rejected by a woman you’re seeking validation from you will take it extremely personally (“I knew it! I AM worthless! Woe is me”) regardless of whether that rejection had anything to do with you personally. (Spoiler: it almost always doesn’t).
  • You will then pursue women who have rejected you (i.e. exes) in order to heal that negative validation you’ve perceived yourself as receiving. This won’t end well.
  • You will generally attract into your life women with similar issues, who have, as a result, developed problems with attachment. This makes it more likely that your relationship will 1) suck 2) end in disaster, and 3) validate your emotional issues.

How about that for a bad cocktail?

HOW TO STOP CHASING EMOTIONAL VALIDATION

By now you should be thinking one of two things. Or maybe both.

  1. This sounds just like me!
  2. How the fuck do I avoid this shitshow?

But don’t go gouging your eyes out just yet Oedipus. There are a number of simple things you can do.

The first thing you need to understand is that having a screwed up relationship with emotional validation is pretty normal. The vast majority of people are like this, so you’re not some abnormal weirdo, and you don’t need to start beating yourself up and telling yourself how much you suck.

(That is what’s motivating all of this after all).

On the flip side, however, having a screwed up relationship with emotional validation is not an emotionally healthy way to live and won’t benefit you (in any way) in the long run. So it pays to sort it out.

The second thing you need to do is bring awareness to your behaviors. If you accept that your process of pursuing emotional validation isn’t that healthy, then you need to figure out what exactly it is that you are doing.

For example, I was the kind of guy who consistently chased women who were hot/cold on me. I would then act like I didn’t care, and get in some kind of game with them. Either way, I was pursuing, trying to force, or run away from validation. This is something have to bring awareness to and manage even now.

You might be someone who constantly supplicates and acts like a friend, or you might be a complete jerk. The key thing is that you look at your behaviors and ask yourself “what motivation does this behavior really serve?”. “What need am I trying to get met?”.

It won’t take long for you to unmask the ones that are after validation.

YOU ARE YOUR NARRATIVES

On the surface, calling something “mommy and daddy” issues probably makes you think you need to go lie on someone’s couch and cry for 200 dollars an hour. But this isn’t quite the case.

Sure, if you hate your parents, I’d probably sort that out. Carrying around that baggage is going to do you a world of hurt. But if you have issues with emotional validation that you connect with your parents, yet at the same time, your parents are actually kinda okay – the problem lies less with them and more with the narratives that you live by.

When you’re a kid, running around in your diaper, building legos, and getting your penis out for no reason it’s easy to misinterpret things. Whilst your parents are all around good people, they make mistakes (parenting is hard after all), and these mistakes are part of the way you come to understand the world.

Mom can’t come to your birthday because she’s overseas on work? Oh, that must mean I’m worthless, unloveable, and the rest of my life will follow this belief. Cue years of bad relationships.

The issue here isn’t some massive issue stemming from your dark, terrible past. It’s just some dumb, misinformed, childish narrative that you adopted mistakenly, and held on to for far, far too long. So long that your behaviors and identity began to form around it.

This is what the stories you tell yourself do. They sit there in your brain repeating over and over, branching out into thoughts, beliefs, and even actions themselves, which validate and continue the narrative ad infinitum.

“I’m unlovable.”

“I’m not as good as other people.”

You get the idea. I believe this doesn’t just stop with issues of lovableness, but also relates to people’s conception of life, morality, and their role in the world. But that’s another issue.

The answer, then, to your pursuit of emotional validation isn’t to cry to Dr. Phil. It’s to pay attention to how you’re forming your narratives about yourself in the small day to day moments. Specifically how those narratives relate to your pursuit of emotional validation.

So to bring it back to your mommy and daddy issues. The key thing here isn’t that the issues are about mommy and daddy, the key thing here is that they’re yours.

SORT YOUR BEHAVIOUR OUT AND THE REST WILL FOLLOW

You are what you choose to do. But you are also what you choose not to do.

Every time you take an action motivated by your desire for emotional validation, you reinforce that desire. Every time you do not take an action because of your fear of being negatively emotionally validated, you reinforce that desire.

I.e. every time you play games with someone over text because you want them to validate you, you reinforce your need to be validated. Or alternatively, every time you avoid approaching because you fear being rejected (and the “confirmation” of being unlikable/unlovable) you reinforce that desire.

Your actions, in a sense, are a discussion you’re having with yourself. When your actions are based around validation, you are telling yourself that you NEED to be validated. You’re telling yourself that there is something wrong with you and that you need to confirm that it isn’t true.

And it’s a conversation you keep having to have over and over again. Because it never stops needing confirmation.

(This is something like the self-hatred version of James P. Carse’s infinite game idea).

On the flip side, when your actions are based less on the desire for validation (which will always be there), but rather on what you genuinely want to do, you are telling yourself that you don’t need to be validated. You are telling yourself that you are OKAY regardless of the outcome.

Sure, a negative outcome isn’t enjoyable. But you’ll live. And you’re not going to base your actions around avoiding it.

THE MOMENT BY MOMENT PRACTICE OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE 

This conversation you’re having with yourself is what I like to think of as the 1% improvements of self-acceptance. There’s an idea, popularised by James Clear, that says you either improve by 1% or regress by 1% every day. That these percentages compound over time to produce massive changes. For good or bad.

Now I think when it comes to self-improvement this is an easy way to get really insecure. However, I do think that it is this way with emotional issues and self-acceptance. Sure, you can stare in a mirror and explain what you accept about yourself, but your actions demonstrate this as well. And they’re happening moment by moment.

Each action pushes your 1% in one direction or another. Playing games? Oops, you’ve fucked it up. Approaching because you want to? That’s my boy.

At first, you’re going to struggle with this. There’s another idea popularised in self-improvement that says “happy people don’t need to try to be happy”, “confident people don’t need to try to be confident”. But this idea is predicated on the fact that “happy” or “confident” people are universally the same. Which is comically untrue. You’re different from me (thank God) and everyone else. Your level of acceptance, your beliefs about yourself, and the techniques you’re going to have to use to improve your relationship are going to be unique. So if you struggle at first, that’s normal.

Why wouldn’t you?

1% changes in the right direction are often imperceptible. You have to keep making them. Keep acting from a place of indifference to validation. Challenging your behaviours and questioning their motivations. So that in a year, you’re 365% better. And you accept yourself and interact with your need for emotional validation in a way you never really believed you could.

Because at the end of the day, it’s like L’oreal says.

how to stop chasing emotional validation

THE OPPOSITE OF CHASING EMOTIONAL VALIDATION

To wrap up, as frankly, this article is getting too long, I want to put a final note on vulnerability. The opposite of chasing emotional validation is allowing yourself to be vulnerable in a way that you would normally avoid.

To bring it back to mommy issues (thought you’d escaped didn’t you!?), this would be allowing yourself to take actions that would risk “confirming” that you’re “unloveable.”

This means getting rejected for authentically expressing your interests, values, boundaries, opinions, and so on. What would otherwise be called your identity. All things that you’d typically hide or alter to avoid being rejected and the “confirmation” that comes alongside it.

At first, this is painful, and your behaviours will be based around avoiding this at all cost. By either desperately pursuing a “confirmation” of the opposite, or trying to manipulate the other person into pursuing it from you.

But the opposite of chasing emotional validation is to accept it and take the hit. And sure, it’ll suck now. But over time, if you keep moving in the right direction, you’ll just be better at being you. And the only person you’ll be looking for validation from is yourself.

 

Photo by Mark Daynes on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Dating Advice For Men, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Confidence, Dating, Emotions, Relationships, Self Improvement, Women

How To Set Yourself New Year’s Resolutions That Won’t Fail

by Visko Matich · Jan 15, 2019

IT’S NEW YEAR’S DAY. You wake up hungover, or perhaps, fine because you spent the night alone, and you decide you’re going to change your life. This is something you’ve done on many New Year’s days, as well as on your birthday. You feel that somehow, with the passing of a year, your life isn’t where you want it to be. You remember your list of goals that you set yourself 365 days ago. Despite having over 8000 hours to achieve them, they sit there as reminders of how badly you’ve fucked up your time.

What was it? Youtube? Netflix? Overeating? Procrastination? Fear of failure? Social anxiety? Never asking anyone out? All of the above? You run through all the reasons your life isn’t where you want it to be, and this makes you feel like shit. So instead, you retreat into a fantasy of where it ought to be. The success, the confidence, the feeling of control over your life. And that fantasy, mixed with the anger at your own failing alchemically transforms into a new and empowering motivation.

“This is the year.” You tell yourself, maybe looking directly into the mirror.

The motivation feels like your fantasy is now an achievable certainty. You pace about your room, sometimes speaking out loud, crafting new goals that will, in turn, craft you into the person you feel you must become. Then, feeling like you have a grip on exactly what it is you need to do, you set yourself some concrete goals.

“Lose 30lbs.”

“Get laid.”

“Start my business.”

“Write my book by April”

“Quit my job by July.”

And maybe you do something to get started on them today. Then you go to bed, feeling that you’ve surmounted the obstacles that beset you last year, and have now entered this new year with a newfound capability and self-mastery that ensures your success. Smiling, you fall asleep.

But then you wake up.

WHY YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FAIL

There are over 500,000 minutes in a year. Sure, you’ll probably spend half of them asleep, but no matter what your goal is, that’s plenty of time to achieve it. Hell, it’s plenty of time to achieve multiple goals.

Why is it then that they so rarely get achieved?

I think the answer revolves around a basic misunderstanding. Instead of setting our resolutions around an honest understanding of who we are, we set our resolutions instead around a desperate desire of who we want to be.

And that’s where we slip up.

The start of a new year is a weird time. There’s the arbitrary desire to reflect on your life and assess how far you’ve come along to date. The fact that this can be done at any point during the year doesn’t seem to affect it, even if you actively do this. So we’re all left, day one, sitting there wondering just who the fuck we are, and why we aren’t where we wanted to be.

In part, this stems from a western way of looking at life. Goal orientated. Ladder orientated. Constantly trying to improve your lot. You’d think, given the important role Christian thought played in western culture that “take no thought for the morrow” would’ve gained more traction, but we really went the other way. We’re constantly searching for what it is we want next. We’re constantly looking for the next “thing” to achieve, possesses, or become.

Where eastern philosophy is more about living in harmony with life, westerners, rightly or wrongly, have a predilection to see life as something to be consistently conquered. Couple this with basic human motivations (fuck more, earn more, impress others more) and insecurities (you’re not good enough, nobody loves you), and you’ve got a recipe for everyone massively overestimating the importance of the New Year (it’s no different from any other day), and some serious self-esteem beatdowns.

Stemming from all of this is a simple perspective:

I’m not who I want to be. I’m not where I want to be.

And this perspective, understandably, makes you feel like shit. Why wouldn’t it? You’re essentially telling yourself that you’re not good enough as you are right now. You’re also telling yourself, inherently, that you will feel better once you become who you want to be and arrive at where you want to be.

(Spoiler alert: humans are terrible at predicting what will make them happy. So you’re probably definitely wrong).

Happiness has become a destination. Cue the fantasy of your life to come.

Now I’ve railed on fantasy before. And rightly so. Most of them, if you’re honest, are vain and have their roots in a desire to be more loved, respected, admired and so on. Even the shallow ones, like having sex with hot women, have sinister roots in a desire to feel approved of (read: mommy issues). But in the instance of resolutions and goals, fantasy presents a unique obstacle.

When you build goals around the person you want to be, you neglect to pay attention to the person you actually are.

THE NEGATIVE FORCE OF HABIT

Over the course of your life, you have acquired certain habits and are acting under the influence of others that may well be genetic. The sum total of these habits are the actions you take on a day to day basis. But here’s the crucial part:

Just as these habits determine the flow of your day to day life, these habits also act against any new habits you try to force upon yourself. This is the resistance that acts against you when you attempt anything that is contrary to how you have lived so far.

When undertaking any new goal, you have to take into account that it is YOU who is undertaking it. The entire way you’ve lived your life until now, what you are comfortable with, what you have conditioned yourself to do, what your strengths, weaknesses, limitations, culture, and rhythms of living are… All of this has to be taken into account.

You can’t just break a goal down into steps and assume it’ll work for you.

This is one of the great failings of the self-improvement industry, and why so many people are left empty-handed by it. What works for me does not work for you. What works for guys like Tai Lopez, Tony Robbins, James Clear, Mark Manson, does not work for you.

What works for you is what works for you. And only you can figure that out.

For you to achieve any goal, or in this instance, ring out 2019 having achieved your resolution (you go girl), you have to find a way to apply that goal to the person you currently are. Because like anyone else, you are imperfect and chaotic. You don’t make sense. Many of your character traits are random, and not beneficial. This is who you are. But you’re also unique (that’s right snowflake!), so you have to apply a unique solution that works for you: one that takes into account all your chaotic, random imperfections.

In other words, the most important part of your goal isn’t the goal itself. It’s that it’s yours.

HOW TO SET NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS THAT DON’T SUCK

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re probably not a slob. But luckily for us both, I am.

I hate waking up. I have poor self-control with food. Or rather, I have poor self-control with anything. I procrastinate often. Minor, forgotten chores build up into a mountainous day long ordeals. My work ethic is random and unpredictable. Some days it’s 16 hours, other days it’s 16 minutes. Either way, it’s never on what I need to do. And to top it off, I’ve spent a sizeable chunk of my life walking around daydreaming.

By all accounts, these traits would make me completely worthless. I mean really, read that over again. What a piece of work. But luckily for me, I have slowly managed to, uh, manage these traits.

My dating life is great. My work is going well. And despite constant obstacles, I generally bounce back and am usually pretty happy.

Which begs a question: how can someone who on paper blows complete ass do okay despite it? Don’t you have to be some completely composed, Bruce Wayne hardcore motherfucker to nail this stuff?

The trick is what I like to call the PRINCIPLE OF UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES. (I know, great name). And when you couple it with a little bit of understanding Y-O-U, you’ll be just fine. No matter how much Dorito cheese dust you’re covered in right now.

THE PRINCIPLE OF UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES

Here’s how this bad boy works.

First, you need to understand that you suck. You don’t inherently want to do things as much as you think you do, your motivations are inconsistent, unreliable, and likely vain, and you’re flawed in ways that directly conflict with whatever you want to achieve.

Second, you need to understand that your goals and resolutions suck even harder. Telling yourself to lose 15lbs, start a business, write a book, get laid; these are all vague goals that have little to no connection to who you actually are, how you live, or how you’re flawed. Unless you’re like Tiger Woods and have spent your entire life pursuing your passion, you’re probably not very well calibrated to it.

But more importantly than that, the goal itself is an outcome. Losing 15lbs, starting a business, writing a book, getting laid; these are all outcomes of certain actions that you will have to take. And those actions are outcomes of even smaller actions that exist in small, day to day moments.

Don’t understand?

Here’s an example:

Want to meet a nice woman, have a great time, and get buck wild?

This is going to require you to approach women and talk to them. This is also going to require you to start going out to places where women are more often. Perhaps that’s just being more pro-social, perhaps that’s specifically going to bars. This is also going to require you to confront a lot of anxiety when it comes to other people, regardless of their gender. On a day to day basis, this is probably going to mean you’ll have to take more risks socially, in order to confront and manage your anxiety, so that eventually, sometime this year, you’ll be comfortable enough to meet plenty of women, and eventually, the one for you.

In which case, you might think the resolution would be to take more risks, as that’ll end up with, uh, the buck wild. But I’d go even further than that. The resolution would be to confront your emotions and allow yourself to be vulnerable on a day to day basis. More so than you ever have. Dating is an emotional process after all.

But that’s not even the full picture. That’s just me breaking it down for a random fictional man who doesn’t exist. You do exist, and you would interact with that breakdown in conflicting ways. Which brings us to:

Third, and finally, you need to set incredibly simple, achievable goals that take into account your flaws, and take into account these simple principles. And then you need to do them.

Here’s another, and I promise final, example:

Let’s say you’re an ambitious, intelligent, creative guy. And like any ambitious, intelligent, and creative guy you want to write a great book, and start a great business. Okay kiddo, sounds good. But you also happen to be lazy, disorganized, and a chronic procrastinator. Oh boy, no longer sounding good.

Now you would probably, in anger at your flaws, and the fact you’ve let yourself down for years set yourself all manner of specific goals (i.e. first draft by February. Latest!). But as you’ve read this article, maybe you’ve broken it down into even more specific goals. After all, isn’t getting the first draft by February an outcome of smaller actions? You bet your ass it is. So wouldn’t it be better to set writing every day as a goal?

Now you’re on the money. Except…

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

You never write every day. You often wake up late, feeling groggy and disorganized and kiss the whole day goodbye. Then you get mad, set an alarm, wake up early but feel like crap because you haven’t got enough sleep, start procrastinating and then pass out at 3 in the afternoon. Fuck, this isn’t going so well!

And you don’t understand. You feel like you have everything you need to achieve. But everything’s a mess. You can be consistent for a little while, but then it all falls apart and you return to type. It’s not even that the writing and business work is hard. It’s just that you can’t be consistent. But then you realize…

The work isn’t the thing you need to focus on. You already want to write and start a business. Finding that motivation isn’t the problem. The problem is that you’re always lacking sleep, feeling groggy, and either missing or not having access to the best energy of your day.

Your resolution shouldn’t be any of those goals. It should be to go to bed early, sleep a decent amount, and wake up on time. If you did that, the rest would start taking care of itself.

This is the underlying principle. The thing that actually determines whether you will succeed or fail. And it’s almost invariably nothing to do with the goal itself, but everything to do with mistakes you’re making in your everyday life. Some flaw, or bad habit that you’re letting get in the way.

Fix that, and things start to click.

By taking into account the underlying principles of your goal, and understanding the inherent flaws of your own character, you get to the heart of the changes you need to make. Instead of getting lost chasing goals and fantasies of the far-flung future, you stay in the here and now, making the exact, simple, achievable changes you need to make in order to succeed.

This is why when people tell me their grand, impressive resolutions for the year, I start to zone out. I’ve heard it all before. More often than not, from myself. Not only do we usually tell people these for no other reason than that we want them to admire us (as if we’d actually achieved them), but these resolutions aren’t the things we actually need to achieve.

It’s the small moments where we stay up late, keep our phone in our pocket, or hide from the risk of anxiety. Those are what count.

Because at the end of the day, the big things you’re chasing, they’re just made up of the little things you’ve never paid any attention to.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Goals, Life Direction, Life Experience, Personal Development, Self Improvement

Who Do You Admire? And What is That Saying About You?

by Visko Matich · Oct 2, 2018

who do you admire?

A CLOSE FRIEND of mine is what’s commonly known as a complete reprobate. He drinks himself into oblivion, he’s been arrested multiple times, is wildly promiscuous, frequents casinos (which he is then banned from), and never backs down from a fight. Not even against bouncers.

To most people, someone like this would sound insane.

But despite all of these flaws, he has more boldness than any guy I’ve met. And I admire him for it.

Most people would probably find an example of admiration like this at best amusing, or at worst, an indication of my stupidity – but they’d be missing the point, and misunderstanding admiration itself.

When you ask people who they admire, they usually offer up some braindead list of celebrities, historical figures, or politicians whom they claim to wish to emulate the virtues of. But when they’re pressed on what it is that they admire about these people it’s clear that they have no idea what they’re babbling about.

“I admire Barack Obama because he’s a cool guy and tells it how it is.”

“I admire Helen Keller because she’s defiant in the face of her disability.”

“I admire Leo Tolstoy because he wrote beautifully and defended his convictions.”

On the surface, these seem no different from my admiration of my friends boldness. But here’s the difference:

I’ve known my friend for over 10 years, spoken to him almost daily, spent hours, upon hours of time with him, and his life situation is extremely similar to my own. They’ve probably never met Barack, unlikely to have met Helen, and sure as shit haven’t met Leo.

Even if it’s an admiration that extends over hundreds of hours of video, or thousands of pages of writing, or even, in the case of Leo, his wife’s diaries – they’ve never met them. They’ve only met the idea of them.

Whilst the two statements might seem similar on the surface, they aren’t. One is superficial, the other is born out of tangible experience. It can be seen, interacted with, and understood. And that is the key to admiration.

If it’s superficial, it was never real in the first place.

THE SUPERFICIALITY OF ADMIRATION

When I was younger, I admired Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, cliche, I know, but bear with me.

I was one of those 18-year-olds who watched Pumping Iron and immediately went and got himself a set of weights. A few years later, I was hitting the gym to the point where I’d get withdrawal symptoms if I didn’t, I’d put on 10kg of muscle mass, and had read the Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding, cover to cover, multiple times (alongside countless other lifting books).

One simple act of admiration had made me singleminded, obsessive, and for the first time in my life, focused.

But despite admiring Schwarzenegger. And despite the impact he had on me. He was a useless, superficial role model.

Everyone knows his story – poor kid in Austria, wants to be a bodybuilder and movie star, hits the weights, wins all the competitions, travels to America, wins more competitions, conquers Hollywood, winds up in politics, balls deep in the family maid.

He’s the ultimate ‘American dream’ story, wrapped up in one big celebrity bow. But then there’s that other detail:

He’s a complete anomaly.

What’s most admirable about him is how remarkable he is. Most bodybuilders don’t have a lick of charisma, yet he’s oozing with it. Most people struggle to build decent physiques, but he pretty much had a perfect one before he’d even started. The vast majority of people who dream of making it in America never do, whilst he conquered all of America and global pop culture.

(Even The Rock hasn’t managed to do this as well. Don’t believe me? Name one of his characters… I’ll wait).

I mean, shit, Arnold’s so famous, his voice is famous. That’s a club of him, Morgan Freeman, and the guy who voiced Darth Vader and Mufasa.

Arnold doesn’t make sense. He shouldn’t make sense. And that’s why, as someone to admire, he completely and utterly sucks. Because his life is so astronomically different from yours, mine, and everyone else’s – you can only really relate to him on the most obvious, superficial level: get bigger.

And even though Arnold is one of the celebrities of celebrities, this example extends to all of them.

When we admire celebrities, we admire what is most superficially admirable about them. We see them in the light of their strengths because it is those strengths that made them celebrities in the first place. They have a great sense of humor, they’re intelligent, or they’re just great at talking to people like Joe Rogan.

But when it comes to genuine admiration, we have next to no idea who they are, and their lives are almost always nothing like ours.

In other words, we’re admiring something we can’t really see. We’re admiring something we don’t really understand. And we’re admiring something we don’t truly feel. 

Because we can’t relate to their life, it’s difficult to truly admire what their strengths are born out of. Our admiration is shallow and consists of nothing tangible.

THE MUNDANE REALITY OF ADMIRATION 

The people closest to you are the ones whose lives are most in common with your own. So despite the fact they may not be on television, or in every watch next suggestion on Youtube, they are a far, far greater focus point for admiration than anyone else.

Because their lives are similar to your own, the strengths they present in response to the similar challenges of life are far easier to see, far easier to understand, and when it comes to admiration, far easier to feel.

Which is basically rule one of admiration: before you can genuinely admire, you have to be able to relate.

Which in plain English means you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Admiration isn’t as glossy as we think it is, in reality, it exists in the mundane, grey monotony of our everyday lives. People suffering through the same issues and problems, but with different and unique solutions. Procrastination, fear of failure, social anxiety, rejection, sexual shame – these are all problems everyone you know faces, every single day. But they all do it in different ways.

Some better than others.

When I was younger I’d struggle with asserting my boundaries. I’d always fantasize about being some generic form of tough guy who had no problem doing this, and as a result, would idolize anyone I saw in popular culture who mirrored this shallow solution.

I read self-help books, biographies, and watched every video I could get my hands on – but in the end, it was someone right in front of me that helped me fix this. Someone who was more ferocious, boundaried and confident that anyone I knew.

And I never noticed them.

I’d been so focused on the far-flung images of the people I wanted to be, that I hadn’t noticed what was right in front of my eyes, existing in a way I could completely relate to.

We all instinctively know what we admire in others. We see it and we feel it. But where we’d like to find extreme examples of this in action, it’s actually the most mundane and ordinary examples which affect us and influence us the most.

If you know someone who succeeds where you fail, who is strong where you are weak – you can watch how they do it, you can ask them how they do it, you can see what they change in their life to accommodate that strength, you can see how it interacts with their priorities, their beliefs, and their choices.

You can gain a deeper understanding of where you’re going wrong, what mistakes you’re making, and what judgments you’re making about yourself that are fundamentally incorrect and self-limiting. In my case, that was learning that people who assert boundaries well aren’t fearless, they just have solid habits.

These are small details that add up to big, real, practical changes.

In other words, you have everything you need to take that strength, and start building it into yours.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

As I came to understand this, I came to understand two things about admiration.

First, what I admired about people was typically something that subtly appeared in their lives, and, even in the case of ferociously asserting boundaries, wasn’t their defining trait. It just happened to be something they did well.

You had to pay attention to see it.

This was anything from one friend’s quiet, comfortable confidence with his sexual desire, to my father persevering through illness, to another friend’s seemingly effortless ability to live rightly – to go to bed on time, get his work done, and hold realistic ambitions. Something I struggle with to this day.

All of this was there, but if you didn’t look, if you didn’t pay attention – you’d never see it.

Second, I came to understand something a little more unsettling:

What you dislike about others is almost always something you’re not seeing in yourself.

You just aren’t aware of it.

When we admire others we always see a reflection of what we lack. But when we condemn others, we always approach that condemnation as if it’s something we’d never do. But if we look closely, it almost always is.

We condemn people who are sexually promiscuous when we’re not, only to act in the same way when we get the opportunity. We condemn people who are ill-focused and poorly disciplined, whilst simultaneously pursuing more goals than we could ever hope to achieve. We condemn people for their ignorance and bigotry, racism, and sexism, only to generalize them to a group that strips them of any humanity. We look at others we find selfish, self-serving, and narcissistic, whilst simultaneously entertaining fantasies where the world is a movie and we’re the main character.

What we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves is what we so easily see in other people. 

Because it’s easier to condemn them than it is to confront ourselves.

What happens when you begin to realize this is that your relationship with condemnation changes. Just as a close attention to someone you admire exposes new possibilities within yourself, close attention to the people you judge actually reveals ways in which you’re limiting yourself, or just being a dick.

Understanding the flaws of others in more detail helps you understand the flaws in yourself. So next time you’re throwing some judgments someone’s way, ask yourself this:

“If I really look at my life, is this true of me?”

You might just realize it’s not them you hated after all. It was always you.

WHO DO YOU ADMIRE?

Admiration and condemnation are offshoots of empathy. The more we can empathize with ourselves and others, the deeper our admiration grows. The less we can, the more our condemnation grows. Not just of others, but of ourselves.

The best teacher is whatever you can experience most deeply. Because our admiration will drive us to emulate the virtues of others, it’s a better use of our time to direct our attention to the people around us, no matter how ordinary they may be, as their virtues are the only ones we’ll ever have a chance at truly understanding.

Instead of being built by pursuing vague, far off, idealized people – you’re built by the ordinary people around you. Maybe it’s your mother, maybe it’s your father, friend, or teacher. Maybe it’s a sibling, a boss, a rival, or a partner. Maybe you don’t even know. Because you haven’t been letting yourself see.

But they’re there. And they all have virtues worth paying attention to, and flaws that are mirrors of your own. You just have to look, and figure out just who it is that you really admire.

 

 

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Admiration, Life Choices, Personal Development, Psychology, Self Improvement

How To Be Honest – The Painful Art of Stopping Your Bullshit

by Visko Matich · Sep 21, 2018

how to be honest

I WAS the last of my friends to lose his virginity. For years they would talk about girls and sex and I would sit there, terrified that the conversation would get directed to me.

I thought I’d say something dumb and be exposed (‘yeah I love boobs, right guys?’), so I would always make up some quick lie (‘so, this girl last weekend…’), and move the conversation on as fast as I could.

It was a miserable way to live.

Not only was nobody fooled by this, but I was constantly in fear of my own lie being found out. Because of how much importance I put on the lie, the amount of anxiety that was born out of it compounded on itself until being exposed seemed like the worst thing in the world.

But this was just one way in which I was dishonest:

I was unhappy with my social life, but I told myself and others that I didn’t care. I was unhappy with my work life, but I told myself and others that I was fine. I was terrified of girls, but I told myself and others that I wasn’t terrified of girls and was, in fact, good at talking to them (??? – This one baffles me to this day).

I was full of shit and miserable.

But it taught me a valuable lesson.

Lying to prevent pain doesn’t actually work. All it does it cause more pain. When, instead, you’re honest about what you’re trying to hide, people’s reactions are often a lot better than you’d think.

When people found out I lost my virginity older than they did – nobody cared. When I told my best friend I was scared of socializing, he admitted (amazingly to me) that he was too, and helped me get better at it. When I admitted to myself that I was terrified of girls, I started taking steps that led me to be able to have a solid dating life.

Honesty wasn’t just a step in the process, it was the most important step in the process.

Research shows that people lie in casual everyday conversation. Often for reasons they think are compassionate. But research also shows that when people start being more honest, there is a considerate positive effect on their health that comes in tandem.

If you want to live a happier, healthier life – It turns out it’s better to cast aside the silver tongue after all.

THE BODY HAS A MIND OF IT’S OWN

The parts of you that drive you to be dishonest are always the ones that are most focused on short-term, easy gains.

But it is this focus on short-term, easy gains that prevent us from having the long-term, hard-won well being that we actually want.

The way I like to look at it is this. If you’re honest with yourself, you always seem to know what you should do. Whether you call it your conscience, your daemon, your soul, or the voice of God – something inside you always seems to be directing you towards what you ought to be doing.

But that thing is always within you, inside your head. Your body, on the other hand, has a mind all of its own.

You want to be social, but your body fills you with anxiety so you don’t. You want to be faithful, but your body fills you with lust so you don’t. You want to be hardworking, but your body is lethargic and distracted by you don’t.

The immaterial thing inside your head always wants X, but your body, equally, always wants Y.

It is within this dichotomy that the skill of honesty is acquired.

HONEST IS JUST ANOTHER SKILL

It is from this that everything percolates. The skill begins with understanding the motivations of your body and what is true, separating the two, and acting on the latter.

Whilst one might feel better in the moment, you begin to recognize that one is better. You aren’t applying universal rules or judgments to your behavior, you’re using your judgment in the moment to determine what is the honest course of action.

In other words, you tell the truth.

You’ll very quickly learn that honesty is a conscious choice. One that always seems to go in the opposite direction to which your body compels you.

In the beginning, this is going to trigger a lot of uncomfortable emotions in you. Being honest with yourself invites anxiety, shame, regret, anger – a whole swathe of difficult emotions. Being honest with others triggers them even more.

This is why it takes hard work.

But it’s in being honest with others that you learn that these emotions and your dishonesty were always misguided.

HONESTY IS AN ACTIVE PRACTICE

You don’t decide to be honest and then suddenly start walking around spouting truths and baring your soul.

That doesn’t happen. Honesty is an active practice. Because left to autopilot, you’ll just end up casually neglecting information and being dishonest.

This isn’t done maliciously, it just happens. So much so that once you start actively practicing honesty, you’ll be amazed at how much bullshit you allow to just casually stroll out your mouth.

Being honest is like meditation.

You don’t just sit there, hum a few mantas and then live in bliss all day. You have to carry that practice around with you, returning to the present moment and noticing when your mind has floated off into thinking about that hot girl on the weather forecast.

Like meditation, honesty requires an active attention to your behavior and weighing up whether that behavior is actually truthful, or if it’s just a momentarily beneficial lie.

This is both easy and hard to do. Easy because the mechanism of observation is simple, but hard because you’re actively emotionally invested in not always being honest. Sometimes for personal gain, other times for reasons as seemingly benign as compassion.

Honesty isn’t just about deceiving others. It’s first of all about deceiving yourself.

UNCOVERING THE WAYS YOU LIE TO YOURSELF

Every now and again I get emails from guys asking me to solve a problem in their life. They’ve had a breakup, they’re scared of girls, or they can’t focus enough to achieve their goals. So they send me an email like I’m some guru, sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop, holding the answer in my navel.

how to be honest

Photo of me yesterday

But this isn’t the case. Whilst I give them an answer based on my personal experience and experience as a dating coach, I always find the concept of any kind of guru kind of laughable.

Why?

Because I suck just as much as anyone else. And everyone no matter who they are sucks on some level.

Sure, I can focus better than before, and I have a solid dating life –  but I’m also lazy, have a weird attention span that gets distracted by literally anything, I’m sometimes completely crap on dates, get rejected for reasons that are entirely my fault, and I’m often wracked by self-doubt.

It’s not something I try to hide. In fact, this is littered throughout my blog.

As I said at the start of the article, being honest about my (many) shortcomings is the only reason I’m in any position to manage them. It’s the only reason some people read this stuff and see themselves in it.

If you want to be honest with others, the first thing you have to do is unravel the ways you’re dishonest with yourself.

DISHONESTLY REMEMBERING

The first way that most of us do this is that we conveniently forget what we ought to remember. Not only is our memory unreliable – we also neglect to remember what would make our lives uncomfortable, no matter how true that memory may be.

I see this all the time in guys who are angry at women, say they don’t need anyone and are quite happy pretending to be a tough guy on their PS4. Behind all their justifications they’ve conveniently forgotten that, like anyone else, they need human connection.

That’s certainly how it was for me.

Not only do these guys end up being dishonest with themselves, but they send up dishonestly viewing, and engaging with an entire gender of people.

Likewise, whenever I hear one of my female friends talk about how they’re done with their boyfriend, one of the first things I notice is how they conveniently neglect all the positive shit about him and only focus on the negative.

They do this so much, that eventually, all they remember is the negative.

This is exactly what I’ve done when I wanted to move on from a relationship for whatever reason. I’ve chosen to ignore all the things that don’t justify that decision.

This, again, isn’t just being dishonest with ourselves, but it’s a dishonest way to interact with someone we claim to care about.

DISHONESTLY BEHAVING

Whenever we have feelings we don’t want to feel, our brains concoct ways of convincing us that we should avoid whatever it is that is triggering that feeling. Our brain deceives us into taking a course of action we don’t really want to take, and in doing so, defends us from uncomfortable feelings.

Psychiatrists call these defense mechanisms.

I’ve written about these extensively before, but the main gist is that your behavior isn’t as trustworthy as you’d think it is. And neither is your identity.

A lot of what you think is true, and a lot of what you think is you are simply complex patterns of behavior designed to protect you from uncomfortable thoughts.

Apathy, blame, repression, intellectualization, childishness – these are all ways in which we defend ourselves from what it is we’re afraid of. Perhaps an external ‘threat’ or an uncomfortable realization about ourselves.

So we get lost in our defense mechanisms, and, over time become so attached to them that they’re just part of our identity.

Which, if you haven’t guessed, is hard to unravel.

When we familiarise ourselves with the studied patterns of defense mechanisms and consider our actions, we will slowly bring awareness to the ways in which we are deceiving and misrepresenting ourselves.

Although this might not seem like it impacts others, when we stop tricking ourselves, we tend to stop trying to trick others as a result.

DISHONESTLY PERCIEVING

The way we choose to perceive ourselves and others are ways in which is train ourselves to be dishonest.

Just like a girlfriend who has chosen to only see the flaws in her partner, the way we choose to listen and see ourselves and others has a huge impact on our deceptions.

What we know is wrong is typically much harder to resist. So we extrapolate ways of justifying it, using logic, argument, and whatever we can find in real life to act as evidence.

But rather than being an impartial detective, we actively motivated to ignore what’s contrary to what we want the evidence to suggest.

Take this example:

A guy who has neediness issues is afraid of women and thinks they believe he’s worthless. Whenever his girlfriend yells at him, rejects him for sex, or complains to him about something, he takes this as evidence that she believes he’s worthless.

As it stands, that might seem fairly irrefutable.

But what he doesn’t notice is all the times she acts contrary to this. Whenever she’s nice to him, kind to him, or attracted to him – he overlooks this in favor of all the evidence that lines up with the neediness he’s attached to.

Despite what might be true, he’s only focused on what he feels is true.

As a result, his behavior with his girlfriend is inauthentic, and his relationship falls apart.

We tend to think that seeing and listening are infallible tools, rather than something we use to perceive what we want to perceive.

Bringing awareness to what’s actually going on around us – what’s actually being said and what details are there to perceive – helps us make more honest judgments.

But more than that, it helps us provide evidence that, rather than the other person being bad news, it might just be us.

HOW TO BE HONEST

Being honest with others first requires being honest with yourself. Not only does this involve presence of mind, but it also involves digging through your identity and examining your issues. Paying attention to your perceptions and seeing if they really line up with reality.

This is an everyday practice.

The art of honesty lies in this practice, but also in the acceptance that you’re going to get it wrong.

Being honest isn’t about being truthful 100% of the time. You’re fallible after all. It’s about paying attention to where you should be being truthful but also checking to see whether what you’ve done and what you’ve said lines up with is actually true.

This doesn’t just involve presence. This involves active thinking. Questioning whether your assumptions are correct, or whether they’re just convenient.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

 

Photo by Callie Gibson on Unsplash

Photo by Aaron Thomas on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Honesty, Personal Development, Self Improvement

Defense Mechanisms – How to Stop Being a Victim of Fear

by Visko Matich · Sep 2, 2018

WHAT IF I told you that half of what you think is ‘you’ isn’t actually you? What if I told you that you that almost your entire idea of ‘you’ was just a series of inventive lies that have tricked you into becoming someone that you never, ever wanted to be?

And what if I told you all of this was done in an affectionate effort to keep you safe?

You’d probably be thinking – if that’s true then just who the hell am I?

Your brain isn’t always on your side. As you attempt to do anything that provokes anxiety, your brain almost automatically comes up with patterns of thought and behavior to stop you. These patterns are so convincing that you don’t even spot them for what they are, and often, they come to form your beliefs and eventually your very identity.

Just as you can be full of shit, it turns out you can also be full of poor patterns of thought and behavior.

Psychiatrists call these patterns defense mechanisms.

I call them ‘your bullshit.’ And if there’s a magic pill in any kind of personal development it’s this: ‘learning to spot your own bullshit.’

Because it’s that exact bullshit that keeps you from growing, stifles your happiness, and turns you into a version of yourself you never actually wanted to be.

———

I first came across defense mechanisms when I was a plucky young man learning about improving my dating life. I was reading as many books and forums as I could (not advised), and trying to combine them as best as I could with some kind of grounding in psychology (also not advised).

A lot of what I came across was toxic, unnecessary, or just flat out wrong.

But in the case of defense mechanisms, it was slightly different. There was something about them that always rung true. That I saw reflected in myself, and everyone I met. And as they seemed to be directly related to anxiety, approaching, and expressing sexuality – they were simply too good for this young man to miss.

Defense mechanisms it seemed, were what stopped me and everyone else from taking the actions with women that we wanted to take.

Whenever we wanted to approach one, kiss one, or even ask one out – there they were. And in this new, fancy psychology, I figured I’d found myself a cure.

So like any good nerd, I was hooked.

A SHORT, UNNECESSARY HISTORY OF DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Even though my focus was on dating, defense mechanisms have been something that have found their way into every aspect of my life.

Whether I was trying to pluck up the courage to talk to a cute girl, or procrastinating my way through video game after video game instead of writing – defense mechanisms were always lurking behind the scenes.

Just as they will be for you.

Defense mechanisms aren’t exactly a new discovery. Whether it’s Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or John Milton’s fallen angels – observers of human behavior have long been pointing their fingers at the bizarre ways people go about avoiding uncomfortable feelings and unraveling their lives.

The idea of defense mechanisms was popularised by Anna Freud. She took what was her father’s rather doom-and-gloom view of the human psyche and created what could be called a roadmap of human self-deception. One that, through understanding it, offered a way of undoing our flaws.

To her, our defense mechanisms were the ways in which we defended our ego from harm, and in order to live properly, we had to understand and manage the ways in which we did this. In other words, these seemed to be the elephant in the psychological room.

Years later, her work was expanded upon again by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant. And his expanded research was so on point, it paved the way for many of the psychiatric classifications we have today.

He also gave this incredibly good Tedtalk. Unique for teaching what is maybe life’s most important lesson, and is also a good substitute for Nytol.

Vaillant was the first to organize defense mechanisms into hierarchies that corresponded to what was essentially our emotional development. To him, a person’s ability to manage their defense mechanisms healthily was intrinsic to their maturity and well-being as an individual.

And he was right.

What Freud and Vaillant managed to do was lift the lid on everyone’s mind, and reveal the hedge maze of behavioral patterns underneath. Far from being unique snowflakes, we all engaged with highly similar methods of bullshitting ourselves and hiding from our emotions.

Y’know, like children.

Luckily for us, Vaillant also showed that through understanding their patterns of bullshit, people can and would change for the better.

Which is where the next part of this outrageously long article comes in.

THE MANY, MANY DEFENSES FROM ANXIETY

defence mechanisms

Despite what Darth Vader says, it is wise to lower your defenses. Defense mechanisms don’t actually protect you. They imprison you.

Now, I totally get that’s dramatic. But bear with me:

The more you give into your patterns of bullshit, the more you avoid taking actions which are going to:

  1. Actually, represent your desires.
  2. Confront anxiety and make you grow.

I think I speak for all of us when I say nobody wants to live life with the training wheels strapped on. Eventually, we’ve gotta kick those fuckers loose and start nosediving down staircases.

There are many, many ways in which you’ll try and keep your own training wheels on. My bullshit won’t always be your bullshit, but in almost everyone I’ve met, they’ve collected not one, but a cluster of defense mechanisms that hold them back.

Some are lost in denial, fantasizing, and blaming the world. Other’s are always acting out and regressing into a childlike, dependent state.

For me, I was either avoiding reality completely, intellectualizing it, overcompensating, or worst of all, forming my reactions to events in completely disingenuous ways. As you’ll see in a moment, all of these suck.

Now for the sake of brevity, I’m going to try and limit this to anxiety and dating. I do write a blog that covers that topic after all, and to be honest…

Nowhere are people’s defense mechanisms more on show than in dating.

That said, I will add some other, personal development related examples where appropriate.

These all apply whether you’re feeling anxiety, sadness, anger or any emotion you find uncomfortable. And whether you’re dating, trying to start a business, or doing public speaking – it doesn’t matter.

Within every behavior that provokes an uncomfortable emotion, there is a defense mechanism that can and will rise up to ‘protect you.’

Here are the main ways you’re doing this:

DENIAL

Reality can be scary and upsetting. So you deny the reality of situation exists, as to accept it would make you anxious or in emotional pain. This is called denial, and it’s pretty much every teenager ever.

There are thousands of ways this can crop up in your life. In dating, this is most commonly seen as:

“I don’t really want to speak to her.’ When you’re attracted to her. Or “I don’t have anxiety around women.” When you quite clearly feel anxiety around women. Or ‘I don’t care about winning.’ When in reality winning is extremely important to you.

PROJECTION

If you’re racist, sexist, or bigoted, this one almost definitely applies to you. Projection is where you start seeing in other people what you refuse to acknowledge in yourself. Whether this is a feeling you don’t want to feel or some unconscious motivation – projection is your easy way out.

Instead of dealing with it yourself, you protect it onto someone else – and you see it everywhere.

These are projections are usually persecutory in nature (i.e racist/sexist).

This is deeply tied to blame and anger, and in my experience sits at the origin of many generalizations about the opposite sex. “Women are sluts” is actually “I’m scared of women”, “All women are over-emotional” becomes “I’m emotional and just not conscious of it.”

Instead of pointing the finger at everyone else, maybe it’s a better idea to look in the mirror.

FANTASY

There isn’t a single person reading this who isn’t guilty of this. In fact, this is less a defense mechanism than just a part of being human.

The idea behind fantasy is simple: what you want provokes anxiety, so you seek out some kind of unthreatening fantasy to ‘achieve it.’

For example, this could be:

“Expressing my sexuality makes me anxious, so I’m gonna feel good about myself by fantasizing about being some sexuality confident guy all the time.”

I have a friend who does this with violent movies and he doesn’t even realize it. That’s his defense mechanism for being afraid of confrontation. I have another friend who does the same thing with video games.

What’s your method?

REGRESSION

Regression is where you adopt a childlike, dependent state in order to feel safe from whatever anxiety you re currently experiencing. This can be anything, but I always tend to notice regression in social situations.

For example, you’ve come to a party to socialize and meet new people, but doing so makes you anxious, so instead, you cling to the people you know, often following them around like a lost puppy.

Regression is a relinquishment of your own personal power. You’re saying ‘I can’t confront my anxiety, but I hope you can do it for me.’

This might seem like a downer, but almost everyone engages with this on some level. If I haven’t been on a night out in weeks, and am feeling nervous, this can be something I spot in myself.

The trick is to spot it, then break the dependency.

PASSIVE AGGRESSION

If you live in the western world, please stop and read this section. It applies to pretty much every element of your day to day life. If you’re British, read it twice.

Passive aggression is where the confrontation that comes from direct aggression makes you anxious, so you attempt to mask it or sidestep in socially acceptable, but unpleasant behavior.

An easy example of this would be someone has annoyed you, and instead of confronting that directly, you say something shitty in the guise of being socially acceptable. All because the idea of direct confrontation makes you anxious.

But in terms of dating… I find this directly relates to sexuality. For example, you’re sexually attracted to a woman and want to express that. But expressing sexuality makes you anxious. So instead you throw some bullshit lines at her, or you tease her, or you try to be her friend.

These are all passive forms of expressing your sexual aggression, which makes you anxious. Instead of saying ‘you’re cute’ or something direct, you dodge it, smother it, and stifle it.

In any instance, whether its sexual, or just confrontation – the rule is almost always the same:

There is no good substitute for being direct.

defence mechanisms

ACTING OUT

Acting out is an action that you take almost impulsively, without awareness of the motivation that drives it.

This one is more complex, and often hard to spot. But in my own life, this came in the form of being highly impulsive with alcohol and eventually, with sex.

I had unconscious needs to avoid anxiety and to get validation, and I ended up taking those actions as ways to get those needs met. For a long time I just thought I was a big drinker and so on, but in reality, I was just acting out.

A while later, when that was less on an issue, I found myself avoiding anxiety about my future by procrastinating and impulsively watching garbage on youtube. It was the same shit, but with a new outlet.

I see this all the time in people who cheat on their partners, need excessive attention from the opposite sex, and guys who objectify their sex lives. They just don’t know what’s really motivating them, and they’re acting out on autopilot.

They have something they don’t want to feel, so the immediately start to smother it.

INTELLECTUALIZATION

A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality. A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight. ~Carl Jung

This is probably the reason you arrived at this blog. And if you’re male, almost definitely the reason for 99.9999% of your issues in personal development.

Intellectualization is where you try to learn/understand as much as you can about whatever causes your anxiety in the hopes that it will make it go away. I.e. You feel anxious about expressing sexuality, so you learn as much as you can in the hopes the fear will go away.

But here’s the thing…

This never works. It cannot work. It is impossible.

If your problem is emotional, then dealing with it is an emotional process. Thinking has nothing to do with it.

Whether your problem is anxiety in dating, fear of failure in your work life, or underlying issues with procrastination and motivation – the issue is always emotional.

Some probably think this sounds like the least masculine thing in the world to do. All I have to say to that is this:

You don’t become a well-rounded man without getting in touch with your feminine side. It’s not possible.

Moving away from the feelings is what made you end up here. Maybe instead you should start moving towards them.

COMPENSATION

Compensation is where you attempt to cover up your perceived weaknesses or anxiety by taking actions that ‘mask’ them.

This is usually where people overcompensate. You feel inferior to women and that makes you anxious, so you pretend you’re superior to them. You act cool. You act indifferent. You try to demean them by insulting them.

In reality, you’re just scared.

When it comes to dating, one of, if not the main reasons for this is feelings of inferiority. An inferiority that we desperately try to compensate for.

Alfred Adler, a psychologist back in Sigmund Freud / Carl Jung era has a quote that explains this perfectly:

‘If people feel inferior and weak in one area, they try to compensate for it somewhere else.’

In regards to dating, or even socially, what he’s saying is:

If you feel ‘less’ than other people you will act in a way to compensate for this feeling.

Nearly ALL your bullshit behavior comes from this one principle of Adler’s. All the faking, trying to impress people, and delusions of superiority – they all come from this. Jokes about the guy with the sports car who has the small dick? This too.

In my experience, compensators always know what they’re doing deep down. They’re the small kid on the playground shouting about his dad being bigger than everyone else’s.

RATIONALIZATION

Rationalization is where you use faulty logic to explain a poor behavior or feeling.

You get rejected by a woman and it makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed. Which is normal. But instead of going ‘oh well’ you go ‘she’s a fucking bitch’. In reality, she’s allowed to reject you, and it doesn’t make her anything.

You procrastinate on your work, telling yourself that you don’t need to do it yet, even though putting it off longer noticeable causes you more stress.

You cheat on your partner, telling yourself you shouldn’t tell them because it would just hurt them if they found out.

Rationalization is where you try to turn whatever is obviously an unacceptable act into an acceptable one. But you don’t do this for others. You do it for yourself. To rationalize away the feeling that comes from your shame, guilt, or anxiety.

REACTION FORMATION

Have you ever had someone you completely disliked, thought they were an asshole, but instead of making this obvious, you were in fact really nice to them?

Reaction formation is where you start acting in completely the opposite way to how you want to act due to feelings of anxiety.

I.e. In the example above, it causes you social anxiety to be upfront about your feelings with that person, so you ‘form’ a new, non-threatening reaction.

Or, you want to have sex with women, but this provokes anxiety in you, so you outwardly express zero sexuality and may even claim to not care about it all. In truth, you do, you’re just scared. (This was pretty much my entire teenage life).

DISSOCIATION

Have you ever noticed that when people are fresh out of a breakup they suddenly start hitting the gym and setting themselves wildly ambitious life goals?

This is dissociation. Drastically changing who you are to avoid emotional pain.

In the case of a breakup, you feel shame about yourself for having been part of a failed relationship, and you don’t want to keep seeing the person in the mirror. This was me 100%. In reality, I was just sad and needed to confront it and accept it.

It’s also anyone who felt like a loser back home, moves to a new country and suddenly drastically overhauls their identity. The geek at school who becomes a try-hard later in life. Pretty much any stereotypical “zero-to-hero” cliche.

But as with my own post-breakup life change – it doesn’t fix the feeling. At best it just puts down a band-aid.

Funnily enough, dissociation is also nearly always the plot of superhero origin stories. Which I think lies in their appeal.

DISPLACEMENT

Displacement is when you shift your sexual or aggressive desires to a safer, less emotionally threatening outlet.

I.e. the guy who wants to shout at his boss, but can’t so comes home and screams at his wife.

This is one of the more complex defense mechanisms, as it tends to burst out of you unaware. Something happened to you earlier that you repressed, and later it erupts out of your when it feels safe.

This can be obvious, like the example above, or it can extremely subtle. Like pornography.

You feel sexual desire, but you’re afraid of women. Approaching women and asking them out threatens your anxiety, so instead, you seek out somewhere ‘safe’ to outlet that sexual desire. In reality, all you’re doing is avoiding anxiety.

Displacement can also be seen in the micro-moments of your life, where stresses at your own failures are repressed (see below) and then you lash out at people with anger you’d actually been directing at yourself. This is something I do all the time, and have to work hard to get a handle on.

REPRESSION

What you want causes you anxiety, so you attempt to force it out of your mind and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I.e. You avoid anxiety by repressing any sexuality whatsoever.

I.e. You tell yourself you’re happy without a social life.

I.e. You say you don’t care about achieving anything.

And the sad thing is that you can do this so much that it eventually does become unconscious, and begins affecting you in subtle, almost imperceptible ways. Not only is this a bad idea, for reasons Carl Jung expresses nicely in this quote:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

But it’s also a bad idea because you’re taking who it is you really want to be and driving it deep down into the back of your mind. Which, if you’re honest, isn’t something you truly want to do.

Instead of repression, you just need to develop a better method of confronting your fear.

THE DANGER OF YOUR DEFENSES

defence mechanisms

Remember when I said that if our defense mechanisms get repeated enough they become our identity? Well if you acted in all these ways enough you’d probably end up hating and avoiding women, socially needy, addicted to pornography and shallow escapism, and at the same time decrying sex and behaving sexless.

A bizarre, living contradiction. All because of simple mental patterns.

You can probably imagine why it’s so important to bring awareness to these. If we want to direct our lives, we have to know what’s already pushing us, or in this case, protecting us.

Even though I’ve kept much of the focus of this article on dating and sexuality – defense mechanisms affect every part of our lives. Procrastination, fear of failure, and all the ways in which we avoid bringing to life the person we wish to be – these all sit hand in hand with our defense mechanisms.

When you bring these kinds of tools to the story that you tell yourself about your own life, it’ll soon become apparent that not everything you consider ‘you’ is actually you. In most cases, it’s just armor that you’ve accumulated to make yourself feel only what you want to feel.

But you can’t live life picking and choosing your feelings.

You have to feel it all. Especially anxiety. Especially the feelings which suck.

As long as you succumb to your defense mechanisms and allow them to protect you from uncomfortable feelings, you will always hinder your growth as an individual – keeping yourself immature, infantile, and incapable.

In all the ways you never had to be.

—

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Dating Advice For Men, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Anxiety, Dating, Defense Mechanisms, Fear, Personal Development, Psychology, Relationships, Self Improvement

How To Build Self-Esteem – 5 Simple Ways That Don’t Suck

by Visko Matich · Aug 20, 2018

how to build self-esteem

If you want to learn how to build self-esteem, the first thing you have to do is just believe in yourself.

Alright, that was a joke, but a dumb one. This is serious. Nobody wants to have low self-esteem. You feel down, you’re a drag, and everything hurts way than it does (and should). So I’ll level with you: If you really want to learn how to build self-esteem, the first thing you have to do is stop chasing it.

Because when you chase it, you just make it worse.

We all want to develop self-esteem for different reasons. For some, its success, for others its happiness – but whatever your reason is, the rule of self-esteem is always the same:

Self-esteem is the result of certain actions, not the cause of them.

You don’t fix your self-esteem and then start magically liking yourself more and achieving your goals. That’s not how it works, and in reality, thinking this way actually makes your self-esteem worse.

No, you build self-esteem by adopting a very simple rule:

Be the best parent you never had.

WHAT IS SELF-ESTEEM?

Self-esteem is pretty weird. It doesn’t really exist. At least in the sense that say, a heart or lungs do. But despite this, we all feel something that falls in line with the general idea of self-esteem – feeling good about ourselves and our ability.

And this is not only felt but felt to be more important to us than the heart and lungs that we know to be real.

Human life exists in irrationality. We feel things for no reason, we have thoughts that come from nowhere, and we make free choices that we can’t logically explain as free. Everything that we do and everything that is important to us is intangible and doesn’t make any sense.

Love, hate, enjoyment… and self-esteem. All of these are things we experience, but they are also things that come from somewhere.

WHAT IS LOW SELF-ESTEEM?

Have you ever tried to be happier? Or be more in love? Or be less sad?

Did you ever notice how the more you tried the more you failed, and that when you did feel happiness, love, or sadness, these feelings all seemed to arrive of their own volition?

It’s no different with self-esteem. Feeling good about ourselves isn’t something we can force, it’s something that arrives on its own.

A lot of advice I’ve read on how to build self-esteem follows a similar pattern. It usually says something to the effect of ‘think positive about yourself’, ‘assert yourself’, ‘remove negative friends’ and so on – but all of these put you at the mercy of something that’s either very difficult to do when you have low self-esteem, or they put you at the mercy of some external factor.

The advice is either unrealistic or just plain sucks.

The problem is that in the act of trying to build self-esteem what you inevitably end up doing is reinforcing all the ways in which you believe you suck and are doomed to suck forever.

Nobody wants to suck forever.

But if the answer isn’t to try to build self-esteem, then what is it?

HOW TO BUILD SELF-ESTEEM

Happiness tends to arrive when our life warrants it. Love shows up when we develop true intimacy with another person. Sadness comes when we have a reason to be sad. Like any of these, self-esteem is a product other things, it is not a thing in itself.

Self-esteem comes when you have a reason to feel it.

That is why you can’t pursue it as it is.

But what you can do, is develop an environment in which it’s more likely to blossom.

The first thing you have to understand is that self-esteem is hard work. You don’t get it for free, and it takes time and effort to develop and maintain.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty how to, you’re going to need two things:

Awareness and responsibility.

Awareness for when you’re investing your self-esteem in the wrong places, or when you’re protecting your low self-esteem through false, narcissistic delusions (that will come crashing down).

And responsibility, because it is through responsibility that you are going to steer your life (internally and externally) into a state where you can experience greater wellbeing.

how to build self-esteem the ultimate guide

This image has next to nothing to do with self-esteem. But it’s cool as fuck so I’m including it. Maybe pretend the rock is a symbol of the self, and the dust is all the…

5 STEPS TO BUILDING SELF-ESTEEM

Here is everything you need to know about how to build self-esteem:

1) REALIZE THAT YOUR IDEA OF SELF-ESTEEM IS LARGELY BULLSHIT

It’s easy to get lost in the idea that we need an abundance of self-esteem to do anything challenging but this is mistaken. We don’t actually need self-esteem to get started at the things we think we need it for. What happens instead is that once we start them, the self-esteem follows.

Research suggests that self-esteem isn’t really the cause of anything, but rather a pleasant effect. It’s a reward for taking initiative when there was no obvious reason to.

So if you’re ever wondering how to build self-esteem, first start with doing something (no matter how small) that’ll make you feel a sense of achievement. But make sure it’s something real, and not a false sense of achievement like a video game.

Although the research on this is light, I’d strongly wager that’s part of their popularity. A short-term self-esteem boost with rapidly diminishing returns.

2) SET GOALS AND STANDARDS THAT AREN’T TOXIC

If self-esteem is the result of a sense of achievement, then you have to set yourself things to do that are actually achievable. Therapists couches are strewn with people wounded by their parent’s impossible standards, don’t do the same to yourself in your own head.

This is something I fuck up all the time. I’m constantly, constantly setting myself unachievable goals, and as a result always slightly disappointed in myself. It’s something I’ve only just got a handle on, but it’s already benefiting my life and general wellbeing massively.

The way to do this is simple. Pick fewer goals, make sure you understand what is required to achieve them, what is realistic, and how much time you need. You also (and this is really important) need to understand your limitations.

If you can’t focus for more than 2 seconds, are addicted to Doritos, and have never held down a steady job – then writing a book, getting sick pack abs, and starting a business all in 6 months probably aren’t realistic. (In fact, I’d just start with fixing the focus).

Part of the reason we set ourselves poor goals is that we’re disappointed with who we are and desperately want to change. But this is a toxic loop.

The more we set ourselves unachievable goals, the less we achieve them, and the less we get self-esteem as a result. Cue disappointment. Cue more unachievable goals.

Another thing to understand is that our goals are set to meet needs. Make sure your goal can actually meet that need. If you have a need for love which is unfulfilled, chasing it in shallow sexual encounters is not going to work. You’re just going to be disappointed.

And yeah, you know how that goes.

3) BUILD A LIFE THAT DOESN’T LEAVE YOU EMOTIONALLY ABANDONED

Here’s some really groundbreaking stuff:

If your life sucks, you’ll feel like you suck.

When we live a life that doesn’t take care of our fundamental needs, we’re constantly left is a state that lacks fulfillment, and makes us doubt ourselves. This is why one of the first things we need to do if we’re looking to build self-esteem is to take a serious look at our life and see what needs fixing.

We want to create a life that passively supports who we are.

Now, when I say needs I don’t mean warmth, shelter, food etc. That’s a given. I mean things like emotional connection, health, fun, and financial security.

Foster rewarding friendships with people where you are free to be vulnerable with your emotions and they are free to be vulnerable with theirs (instead of pretending to each other like you’re both ‘fine’ 24/7 – because who actually is?)

Take care of your health through a consistent diet, and have fun socializing and exercising. Not only is this good for literally your entire life, but you’ll also get into better shape and be much more likely to make new friends and date new people. It all compounds.

Avoid debt (like the plague) and build a career where your financial needs are taken care of and you’re saving, no matter how little, each month.

All these things pay off. And when it comes to self-esteem, they pay off big time by not having you constantly dragged down by things that you should have taken care of.

4) LEARN NEW SHIT, GET GOOD AT NEW THINGS

Humans are compelled to learn. It makes us feel good, expands our abilities and understanding of the world, and alters the development of our brains. 

I’m partially inclined to believe this is where our some of our motivation to become ‘better’ comes from. Sure, a lot of it is driven by insecurity – but at the same time, there is a curiosity towards what we could do and how we could change, because fundamentally, we’re aware that we can.

In my own life, a hallmark of building self-esteem came from the fact that I always supported my interests and pushed my comfort zone to beyond what I knew or was comfortable with. This included things like traveling on my own, studying languages, reading countless books, and even starting this blog.

When we take small steps outside of your comfort zone and towards new learning experiences, or deeper understanding of skills, we are engaging with a process that embraces our own innate ability to improve ourselves. And where, with our unattainable goals, this is driven by insecurity – this is driven by self-love.

Yeah, I know. ‘Cool it with the hippy shit Visko’, but hear me out.

When you actively look at what you want to learn and do and push yourself to do it, you’re honoring your life, your interests, your ambitions and your values.

This is what kids do every day.

It’s no wonder they’re having such a good time.

5) YOU’RE ALL ALONE IN YOUR HEAD, SO DO THE SMART THING

If you want a phrase almost guaranteed to build self-esteem:

‘Yeah, I failed. So what? I’m okay.’

Yes – more hippy shit. But you’re here for self-esteem, and this stuff works. So deal with it.

No, I’m not asking you to throw on hemp, blast yourself with marijuana, and go on a spirit quest (although it sounds like a great time). All I’m asking you to do is pay attention to the relationship you have with yourself.

Because not only does that relationship affect your relationship with others, but it also hugely determines how you feel about yourself, in particular, when it comes to self-esteem.

Here’s a spoiler for life:

You’re going to fail, fuck up, get rejected, be a loser, and let yourself down over, and over, and over, and over again.

No, you’re not going to avoid the mistakes others have made. A best, you’ll dodge some of them. What’s going to happen is that you’re going to screw up.

It’s inevitable. And in many ways, it’s extremely difficult to control.

What you can control, however, is how you interact with those screw-ups and failures. You can either meet them with judgment and condemnation (which is how you’ll meet them in others), or you can meet them with acceptance and compassion (which is… yeah you get the point).

Judgment or compassion. Which of these do you think is going to help you understand your self better? Help you understand your mistakes better? And help you learn from them in the future?

And then, of course, there are the little bonuses like the increased happiness, improved body image, increased resilience, and reduced psychological distress.

Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

As I said at the start of the article, the easiest way to think about building self-esteem is to be the best parent you never had. This counts even if you had good parents.

The more supportive and nonjudgmental your relationship with yourself is, the more you will develop self-esteem. The more you encourage your own curiosity, and set yourself achievable standards of success, the more you will develop self-esteem. The more you treat yourself with kindness, compassion, and love, the more you will develop self-esteem.

In other words, you have to come at it from just about the complete opposite motivation that most people come from. I.e. Insecurity and self-loathing,

This is for a simple reason:

The more you take care of yourself, the better you feel.

Not the other way around.

 

 

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

 

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Personal Development, Self Improvement

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