Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life (Unfu*k Yourself series)

by Gary John Bishop

For a simple example, take a moment to think about the daily chores you dread the most, all because you’ve built them up in your mind to be something worse than they really are. We sometimes avoid simple things like folding laundry and unloading the dishwasher, when they actually take little time and effort. With enough of these little persistent items hanging around it’s easy to collapse them in with the bigger, more important things until we find ourselves overwhelmed or exhausted by life.

Assertive self-talk is when you stake a claim for this moment of time, right here and now. When you start to talk in terms of “I am . . .” or “I embrace . . .” or “I accept . . .” or “I assert . . . ,” all of which are powerful and commanding uses of language rather than the narrative of “I will . . .” or “I’m going to . . .”

But there is always something you can do to impact those circumstances even if you’ve had them for years and still can’t see a way.

When you are finally willing, you can literally experience that willingness, that innate freedom that courses through your veins, and similarly when you are not, the kind of primordial stuck-ness that halts and presses down on you like some invisible weight on your chest.

Every time you add the “but” to the end of that statement, you turn yourself into the victim.

Life won’t stop for your pauses and procrastinations. It won’t stop for your confusion or fear. It will continue right along without you. Whether you play an active part or not, the show will go on.

There’s another way for your unwillingness to free you from the hamster wheel, because sometimes it doesn’t matter what you ask yourself or how many times you’ve said it; you just can’t muster the willingness long enough to change anything. You might well be one of life’s great starters-but-not-finishers. At the end of it all, you might have to face the cold reality that you have been all too willing to remain the same. You have been unwilling to fundamentally change your life and lose that weight for good, that somewhere in there you are okay with living this way. I mean, come on, you must be or you would have changed it by now! At some level you must have some tolerance for having your life turn out like this.

All too often, we focus solely on what we don’t have, even though deep down we don’t really need it or perhaps even want it. When I lay these things out, you might be nodding your head. “He’s right, I don’t need to be a millionaire” or “I don’t even really want six-pack abs.” Which of course is all fine until the next time you see that nice car and think, “Why don’t I have that?,” or when you look at the cover of a magazine and wonder, “Why don’t I look like that?” or “Why aren’t my clothes that nice?” Making sure we’re striving for what we really want requires a constant check-in with ourselves. It’s not a one-and-done deal.

Bear in mind we all tend to build things up in our minds to be a lot bigger than they really are.

You see, our thoughts are so powerful that they are constantly pushing you toward your goals, even when you don’t realize what those goals actually are! Your brain is wired to win.

That brings us to our next assertion: “I am wired to win.” You’re always winning because your brain is wired to. The trouble comes when what you really want—on a subconscious level—and what you say you want are different, sometimes radically so. “For the most part, you’re basically on autopilot, mindlessly gouging your way through life’s predictable, muddy field.”

While it’s important to identify what you’re at work on and whether you are being productive instead of just busy, sometimes it really is a question of getting yourself into another domain. How does one do that? Firstly, you have to uncover and realize the ways in which you have limited yourself. The kind of “absolutes” that you are currently unaware of. In short, the conclusions that you have come to about yourself, others, and life itself. Those conclusions are the limit of your potential. It’s only when you have broken through those conclusions and can experience a life outside of your current existence that you start to understand the power of this phenomenon.

We are always winning at proving something. In the case above, you win at proving either you have no time or that you are a procrastinator or a loser by getting things done at the very last minute.

Many of my clients, I have found, have one particular thing in common: the subconscious desire to prove that their parents did a bad job raising them. This can manifest in so many different ways, some being worse than others. Some are subtle, others obvious, while all are very potent.

You might try to prove that your parents failed to raise you well by treating your body like crap, getting arrested, becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol, dropping out of school, consistently failing in relationships, encountering chronic financial crises, or any one of a number of seemingly random paths we get ourselves lost in. They can drop all the way down to simply being disconnected or lost in the pressures of work as an adult.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. Therefore, guard accordingly, and take that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”

But just like a captain facing a major squall, you can’t just let yourself be tossed about. You have to step up and steer your life back in the direction you want it to go. So your journey wasn’t as smooth as you wanted it to be. Does that mean you’re just going to let yourself get blown off course? I didn’t think so. And you definitely shouldn’t let what happens in one area of life affect your outlook on the whole. You just can’t afford to allow your struggles at work to make you miserable at home or let your relationship troubles affect your mood at the office.

Often the reason you can’t see the solution is because you’re too close to the problem. Zoom out a little, zoom out a LOT and look at the big picture. This is a phenomenon similar to what psychologists call “cognitive restructuring”—shifting the way in which your problems are presenting themselves in your life.

You have a gnawing craving and that craving is for prediction.

If we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, maybe we’ll look awkward. People will think we’re “weird.” If we push our limits and try to achieve new things, maybe we’ll fail. People will think we’re a “failure.” “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” - Epictetus

In fact, you could change your life overnight if you simply abandoned the notion that other people’s opinions matter. Life goes on, opinion-heavy or opinion-lite.

That’s because you’re rejecting and avoiding uncertainty. You’re afraid of it. You’re trying to control and know things that you simply can’t know or control. You’re caught up the la-la land that we are all born into and can never quite seem to get out of.

When you stop searching for certainty, when you quit trying to make sense of everything, a lot of your stress will simply melt away. There really is nothing to figure out. If you took the time to be with what I’m saying, you’d realize that what causes most of your worry is trying to predict the future and then refusing to accept things when they don’t or aren’t going to go your way.

That “to-do” list quickly becomes a “don’t-wanna-do” list.

It’s not that they never doubt themselves or never have a desire to procrastinate or avoid a particular situation. It’s not that they always “feel” like doing what they should. They simply focus and lean in. They act anyway.

You’re going to have days when you don’t want to get out of bed, when you don’t want to go to work, when you don’t want to take care of your responsibilities. But you do. Every day you engage in activities that you don’t really want to do. That means you already have a muscle for having thoughts and acting independently of them.

“Our biggest successes are born out of discomfort, uncertainty, and risk.”

“This is all great and good, Mr. Scottish-man, but how in the hell do I uncover my hidden expectations?” Easy. Pick an area of your life in which things aren’t going as well as you’d like them to, maybe even somewhere in your life that sucks right now. Take a pen and piece of paper and write out how that area was “supposed” to turn out. How had you planned it? How should have this gone? You might have to use your imagination and sense of wonder to get in touch with how the future looked from back there. Get in touch with the hope and positivity of that area and where it was supposed to head. Describe it in as much detail as you can possibly recall. Next, on a separate piece of paper, write down how this area actually looks. Again, make this an exhaustive description, not just “it sucks.” Get into detail about why it is the way it is and what you now have to deal with. How do you feel now that this part of your life did not meet your expectations?

I’ve given you seven personal assertions. “I am willing.” “I am wired to win.” “I got this.” “I embrace the uncertainty.” “I am not my thoughts; I am what I do.” “I am relentless.” “I expect nothing and accept everything.”