Do the Work: The Official Unrepentant, Ass-Kicking, No-Kidding, Change-Your-Life Sidekick to Unfu*k Yourself (Unfu*k Yourself series)

by Gary John Bishop

I’m saying this so you can confront your own bullshit. You, my friend, are full of it and you are full of it with yourself. You have become enslaved by your own feelings and excuses and become so entrenched in your own web of deceit and head fakes that you actually believe most of the shit you tell yourself. To you, this unreal shit is real!

You can’t keep getting offended at everything that touches a nerve. Perhaps it’s time to start understanding your emotional charges rather than indulging them at every turn.

Your sense of personal power is directly correlated to the strength of the relationship between you and what you say. Keeping your personal promises is the single most underused, undervalued, and ignored source of power for people.

Turning your life around will require you to start holding your promises above all else. Why? Because your promises don’t have feelings to consider; they also don’t care about the weather or how much money there is or what people think. They stand there alone in the universe, calling you to be your greatest self. To entice and sometimes demand that you act in your life, especially when you are most denying or resisting or hiding from them. Your promises are the future, your feelings, the past, and that’s the choice you will have to make every day between now and when you die.

If you look back in your life, you’ll see that every single personal failure of yours was a function of some broken promise. Something you set out to do but somewhere along the line you and that commitment, that promise, got stopped by some seemingly insurmountable thing, some circumstance or event that allowed you to say “enough” and then you ended it. You might have seduced yourself with a compelling change of direction or sought agreement from others for the absolute validity of your quitting. Your problem has been that you have fooled yourself into believing it was something other than you. Then you become a victim to it, just like everyone else is.

If you want to change, you need to stop tolerating and start doing. You need to do the things you know you should.

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

Do what you have to do. Take the steps necessary to be what you would be—and stop tolerating the person you think you are.

Have you ever really thought how much weight relationships have on your quality of life?

Often we’ll try to “fix” our relationships, but what we’re really doing is a hack job at trying to change the other person, to grind them into submission to become more like the person we want or think they should be.

The new insanity is trying to get others to be different so you can be your best self.

The only tips you ever picked up about relationships were from watching everyone around you during your childhood.

Everyone is modeling their adult friendships and love life and business connections around the methods they learned when they were a kid.

Acceptance is brought to life by you. It’s a self-generated grace you grant yourself to illuminate real peace of mind and human connection. It’s a state where we can all take a breath and allow someone or something to just be itself without the need to alter it; change it; or hell, sometimes even interact with it. In short, we let that situation or person just be. Often, in our most contentious relationships, we are irked by the things that the other person says or has said, the way they act, character traits or behaviors that we think “shouldn’t be.” In reality, those are all things we just don’t accept about that person. That’s right—you’ve become the kind of person who is not okay with someone else being themselves!

Being an accepting human being means you are open to allowing others to be who they are. Judgment, resentment, or whatever else is currently fueling you will eventually be your undoing.

I devoted years of my life to quietly blaming my mum for how things had turned out for me. My punishment (although I didn’t know it at the time) was to distance myself from her, to be stingy with my whole self, to reveal myself in very small doses to her. I had become a resentful, angry, and disconnected man. I had spent so much time focusing on what I thought my mum should have done or shouldn’t have done that I completely lost sight of what she actually did do.

You can choose to have that shit be as relevant as the eggs you had for breakfast this morning or significant enough to model everything you do from here on out. The choice is yours. Whichever one you choose could well go on to be the making of your life.

After doing some hard work in this area, I can truly say I now accept all the people in my life just the way they are, but none more so than my mum. I accept her, and I love her without condition. She is who she is, and I choose to love all of that, not just the easy bits.

Your ability to forgive is directly correlated to your peace of mind. Whatever you refuse to forgive lives on in you for as long as you hold onto that thing, and no matter how small or insignificant that thing might seem to you, it gnaws at your joy and satisfaction in ways you can’t even begin to see until you finally do forgive.

Unfucking any relationship will require you to relate to that person from a new place.

You see, making real change in your relationship requires you to change. It requires you to be different, to walk into the same familiar environments and “show up” in new ways.

And the solution comes from changing your typical ways of being, from coming from a different place when you interact with this person.

People aren’t nearly as fucked up as we’re led to believe. Just because someone doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean they don’t make sense to someone else.

Because you are looking for something you don’t currently have but that you are certain you need and if you don’t get that thing, something bad is going to happen.

Finding your purpose has become an external answer to what is fundamentally an internal question.

A commitment to turn off the autopilot you’re currently coasting on. To be alive to your potential, eager to make a difference. To no longer just go along with the bullshit. To step out there and take a stand for what really matters to you. A point to everything that you do.

To live with purpose.

inspiration and purpose are both self-generated.

“The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”

It simply means that the rut you find yourself in has less to do with your circumstances than it does with how you view and handle it.

Your purpose comes from you—it’s an invention, a dare you present yourself with and that you’ll have to remind yourself of over and over as you occasionally slip into the ordinary stream of mindless conversations and behaviors that most of us do when going about our lives. You have to hold yourself to account for your own purpose; no one is coming to save you or lift you up or inspire you. That’s your fucking job.