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You have to tap into suffering every day of your life because we have so much scarring that we have to clean up.
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You have to look at suffering as almost like I look at failure.
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To succeed, you must fail.
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In failure and in suffering, all the answers are in there.
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All the answers to all the test questions the test is your life.
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All the answers are in there.
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You don't have to live in suffering and pain and failure all the time.
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You have to learn, I need to visit it.
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Like people hate working out.
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You're only going to visit working out maybe an hour a day.
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23 other hours of the day you're not in it.
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But how you become in shape is you must visit suffering, visit working out 1 hour a day.
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Visit suffering 1 hour a day.
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Visit your past failures 1 hour a day.
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The relationship with it is the answers are in there. They They are in there.
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Within the suffering, go in there and I call it the live autopsy. The live autopsy.
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How you find out someone died?
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They crack you open after you're dead.
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How you can live is do it while you're alive.
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Go back in your brain, crack it open while you're alive.
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Don't wait until you're [ __ ] dead to figure out why you died.
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Do it while you are living.
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Go in there, go into the suffering.
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Go into the pain of your life and say, "Why did this suck for me so bad?
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Why am I afraid of all this stuff?
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Why have I shut down the whole world?"
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I guarantee I'll tell you why you shut down the whole world.
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It's in these nooks of the suffering within your brain, in the scarring are all the answers to why you are on the couch feeling sorry for yourself.
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They lie within the scars.
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Visit them for at least an hour a day. Study them.
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And then you'll find out more about yourself. You will then grow.
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So don't look at it as everyday I suffer.
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Go into it an hour a day. Learn from yourself. Learn from life.
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Learn from your failures.
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Learn from your insecurities.
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Learn from your self-doubt.
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Don't just say I'm afraid to jump off an airplane.
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What makes you afraid of it? Study it.
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That's why I study my mind.
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Why I became so powerful in the mind because I realized I was weak.
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So, instead of running away from the mind, I dove into it and said, "What is making me weak?" Oh, this makes sense. I came from hell.
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I came from a place that beat me down to nothing, which is why I'm afraid. All this makes sense.
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So, systematically, one by one, I went back and met every single person in my mind, every situation.
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I went one-on-one with them again in my mind and said, "Okay, let's now revisit this."
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And that's how you do it. That's how it works. Absolutely, man. That is I love that. It's brilliant advice.
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Brilliant advice because it's ultimately, it's observing and self-study. That's it.
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Like observing and self-study, becoming an expert in observation of oneself.
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And the reason why that that process can be so challenging or that process is because like you said, and I love that.
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You literally went through and re-met every person that caused you pain. Every person. that. And guess what?
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People say, "How did you do that?"
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You know every painful moment. Yeah, you remember it. You remember it.
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We try to put it under a rug.
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Lift the rug up, you'll find them.
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Yeah, the dust will come up in there. come up quick. Yeah.
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So, how's Yeah, that's how That's how I was able to write that book.
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I You don't forget that [ __ ] You want to. Yeah.
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And that's where you fail. Mhm. By trying to forget it. That's where you fail.
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That's where there's no growth.
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Let's just move forward from all this. Yeah. There's no growth there. There's no growth there. No.
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You just want to You just want to forget about it. Yeah.
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You will continue making the same [ __ ] up mistake. Yeah.
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You will continue doing the same things wrong if you don't go back. Yeah.
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And the challenge we have is when we do revisit it, when someone tries or starts, they end up revisiting it, but then we end up And the we, me too, all of us.
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Like I'm not saying when I'm whenever I'm referring it's me too.
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It's It's also we become complaining or criticizing or comparing.
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So, we do start like I know a lot of people who are and myself too.
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I sometimes start revisiting something. Right.
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But then I just use it as a crutch or an excuse.
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Then I'm still not getting there. That's right. I do the same thing. Yeah. Right? same thing.
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How have you broke through that times when that's happened sometimes?
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So, as I'm talking and as I'm going back, I'm very aware that I'm going to do that. Yes.
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And I may do it for 45 minutes.
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And then I'm like, you knew you're going to do this.
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You have to be very aware of the conversation you're having while you're doing it cuz your mind chooses the path of least resistance.
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Your mind has the ultimate tactical advantage over you. It knows what scars you.
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It It It knows your fears.
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It knows your insecurities.
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And it protects you, which is why I talked about the 40% rule in my book.
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The 40% rule is all about the brain has the tactical advantage over you.
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It knows and it it keeps you away from all that.
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That's why it says don't jump out of airplane.
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Don't go in the ocean where there's sharks.
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It's a protective mechanism.
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Don't go back to the place where your dad beat the [ __ ] out of you in your mind. Don't go back. The brain protects you.
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But it protects you so much, it doesn't allow growth.
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So, the brain is a amazing thing, but the brain controls you. You must control it.
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You must take power over your own mind or your mind will guide you into all the soft spots soft places that your brain wants to live in.
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Your brain has enough information.
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It doesn't want to go through that process of of mind hardening. Doesn't want to do that.
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I got to remember what time I got to be here, what time I got to be there.
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This is where I want to stay. I'm peaceful.
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It wants to stay very peaceful and away from scarring.
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So, that's that's that's what it is, man. Yeah, that's what it is. It's as simple as that.
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And we just never touch it like a like a box that you never look inside. You just leave it there. You just mark it scar. Yeah. Put it up in the attic. Never touch again. Let it get dusty. Yeah.
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I wanted to talk to you about this because when I was reading about it in the book, it fascinated me because it reminded me of my my 3-month boot camp as a monk. I love that.
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the first 3 months, I was sharing with you earlier, the first 3 months of of monk training is super intense, like really really tough because the whole point of it is to figure out who's in and who's not. Right.
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Like they don't want people to just be be passengers on this side.
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It's not a It's not a place you come to just have quiet and and don't do anything.
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So, that 3-month something that taught me so much.
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I'd love to hear about Hell Week and specific programs you built in your life that you went on.
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What did you learn from it? What did you take away?
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But tell us first a bit about the program and then tell us about what you learned.
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So, what I liked about your 3-month Hell Week Yeah.
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you know, was the fact that that's where you find yourself.
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You find yourself when you are the when you're not comfortable.
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When you're not comfortable on a daily basis.
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And that's how I started to grow.
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Like I said about the mind, it wants to put you in that nice 72° temperature with with everything right there.
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It wants to be in that nice with the little massage therapist.
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That's where your mind wants to be.
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Doesn't want to be and we're talking about Hell Week.
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So, it doesn't want to be in Hell Week.
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In Hell Week, I I was in three of them.
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I finished two of them in 1 year.
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Only person ever do that in SEAL history.
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There's been people who who you know who who have gone through Hell Weeks, but in like 5 years, 6 years, 7 years, 8 years.
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I did I was in three in 1 year.
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They say it takes off 3 to 5 years of your life.
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So, Hell Week is 130 hours of continuous training.
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You might get 2 hours of sleep.
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And what it does is it's designed to break a man.
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To break a man down to the parts where like I talked about the surface, how I was fixing the surface, if you only fix the surface, you will never get through Hell Week.
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Cuz what it does, it starts to bring out these demons.
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Cuz even though there's a lot of yelling and stuff like that, there's times where it's very peaceful in a very eerie way.
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So, the first hour of the 130 is breakout.
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They're shooting guns, it's loud, it's noisy, your mind is in chaos.
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When your mind's in chaos, you can't think. So, you're having fun. Yeah, this is great.
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Yeah, we're in Hell Week. We're Navy SEALs.
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We're trying to be Navy SEALs. We're badasses.
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Then what they do, and I don't even think that they understand what they're doing, but I study the mind. It's perfect.
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It's psychological warfare.
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They go from a hour, the first hour, when you're going crazy.
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The second hour of the 130, they put you in the cold water.
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It's called surf torture.
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Now, they don't call it surf torture cuz it's a kinder, gentler word.
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It's called surf acclimation or something like that. Whatever.
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Everybody's getting soaked.
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So, they call it surf torture for a good reason. They put you out there. No one's quit yet. It's only been an hour.
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Maybe a couple guys have.
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And you're in the Pacific Ocean, which is never warm. You're all linked arms.
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You're sitting there and the waves are crashing over you.
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I went through winter Hell Weeks, which is cold.
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The Pacific Ocean is like 50°.
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It was 49 this particular night in my third Hell Week.
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And what it does is it makes your mind flip out.
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We've been doing this now for 3 weeks, being in this water.
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But for some reason now the water is colder than it's ever been. It's not. Our minds are fragile. We can process a day.
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It's hard to process 130 hours. There's no end. There's no end.
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So the mind starts to ramp up.
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So you're sitting there, it's quiet, no one's yelling at you, you hear the ocean. And you're freezing.
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And your mind goes [ __ ] Starts to think I've another 129 hours. You're not going home.
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You're getting yelled at. You could be frozen. So you panic.
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You freak out and you want to quit.
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What I realized about the mind is those people who can be in that time and embrace that time and be in that moment and not allow the mind to go to 129 hours on hour one.
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It's the control that we don't have in our minds.
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It's the control that you had to have for 3 months when you're miserable, when you're suffering, when you're laying on the floor, when you're doing all the disciplines it takes to be a monk.
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You cannot think about the whole process.
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It will make you it it will it will make you so insanely crazy. It's impossible.
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It's inhumane what I'm about to do to myself.
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You have to be able to break all these big, humongous, painful things in life down to the smallest molecule cuz that's all the brain can handle.
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The brain can't handle hours and hours and hours of suffering.
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But it can handle right now I'm in the Pacific Ocean and it's very cold.
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And this is what I'm doing.
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Don't think about the rest of it.
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So that's what I learned from Hell Week.
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That's what I learned from being in three Hell Weeks.
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That's what how from all the military. I went to Ranger School.
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I went to all these different schools to learn all of that.
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To learn how the mind process.
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So, I I talk about theorists, I talk about practitioners. Mhm.
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A theorist is a person who reads a book.
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Doesn't do it, reads a book, learns about something, and then talks about it. Mhm.
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A practitioner is myself.
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A practitioner is a person like me.
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I want to be an expert in the mind. Mhm.
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A mental toughness guy, beyond mental toughness.
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The only way to do that in my eyes is to put yourself in hell. Mhm. Put in hell repeatedly.
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Repeatedly put yourself in hell, and study how you process it.
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And that's how I was able to come up with all these different ways, all these different tools to to slow the mind down in hell. Mhm.
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Cuz the mind just speeds up.
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The mind wants to get out of the painful situation, the suffering.
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It can't It can't process it.
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So, that's what I realized by going through all these different processes of being in hell weeks.
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You know, it's it's just that. man.
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How the mind processes in hell.
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Were you ever scared that you would lose the processing ability to be able to coach yourself through it?
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Were you ever scared when you were there?
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I was There There's sometimes where the mind gets overwhelmed, Mhm.
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and you cannot slow it down.
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But by these these certain tools I developed, by not allowing your mind to get away from the moment.
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You cannot You have to think about the exact moment that you're in.
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But I saw when I was younger, the moment became too big. Mhm.
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It became too big, I spazzed out, and I would quit.
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But now, I don't think about even like an hour from now I'll be eating. I don't even go there. Uh-huh.
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Cuz then your mind Yeah, I see.
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No, we must embrace this, because now there's You have to be a leader in this moment.
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It's not about you just getting through it.
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I had six guys I had five guys, and six including me, in my boat crew.
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Now I was the boat crew leader.
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So now, another trick is this, if you don't think about yourself, there's no pain. Mhm.
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Which can also lead to pain later on in your life, but in these moments when you're struggling, if you are a true leader and you're worried about your men or women beside you, your mind doesn't care how cold you are anymore.
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Your mind is only worried about taking care of the men and women beside you.
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So I started realizing, man, if I take care of these cats to let them have my life in the worst moments, my mind is no longer thinking about, you're miserable, David Goggins.
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Get the hell out of here.
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You're thinking about, how was John? How was Andy? How was Sam? How was Pete?
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How Hey, how are you guys doing?
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You're not thinking about me.
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So there's so many things you can do to get outside your own head to then allow your body to just be like, hey, we're just a machine.
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But you have to let your mind be able to process all these different tactics to do that.
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Take a different vantage point in life.
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When you are in the hell, you can't see the beauty of being in it when you're in it.
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Get on top of that mountain top in your mind.
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Get on top of that mountain top and look down at what you're doing.
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You can see a whole different world.
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That world is beautiful, but you got to get a different vantage point in this in the suck. Don't be in it.
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Spiritually, get out of it. Get that soul.
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Look down at what you're doing.
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Be amazed by the process of where you're at now and where you came from. Wow.
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I've got I've got so many questions from that.
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I've got so many questions from that.
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Okay, let's let's start with you said and I love that.
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So you said one of the tricks is when you stop thinking about yourself because when there's no self, there's no pain. No pain.
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start living for your team, the people, the other people suffering. Is it I love that. Totally understand that.
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Servant leadership, wanting to go beyond oneself.
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But you pointed out something really fascinating.
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You said it can lead to pain later. That's right.
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Explain that because I I I get that.
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And So, I've had this mentality for years.
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It got me through a lot of hard times.
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You cannot use it every day of your life.
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That's yeah, that's what I was thinking. You cannot use it.
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I use it as like, "My god, this is the perfect I found it. This is the trick.
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You just totally you don't even matter. You're just a machine. You are a machine.
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Like just just just like a lever. That's all you are, man. You're not. You're not.
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And in my book, I talk about when that lever starts to get rusty, starts to get crusty, it starts to like, "I can't even think about anybody but myself."
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So, through the process, what I started to learn was that helps a lot, and you can tap into that all the time.
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But you have to be able to heal yourself.
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You have to be able to recover yourself.
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It can't be something that you continue to do and do and do.
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There has to be a recovery process for your mind, your body, your soul, your spirit.
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Encompasses your whole body. So, those are tactics.
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But those tactics must be oiled up.
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That lever has to be oiled again to go back in it. Absolutely.
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Yeah, it's it's it's not it's not emergency use, but it's used in specific moments, knowing you can go back.
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And it's so true that for so many people who want to serve, it becomes the default.
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And I made that mistake myself.
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When I became a monk, it was because I wanted to wake up every day and serve. That was my goal.
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I was like, "I'm going to wake up every day.
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I'm going to use everything I've been given to serve humanity.
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I just want to serve people. I just want to give."
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And I was just being that. Right.
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And so, I would go through sleepless nights.
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I would push myself for weeks on end to go further for other people.
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And it was amazing, because it felt fulfilling.
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And it And it helped them, too.
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But after a while, I was broken.
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I I I lost my voice for 6 months.
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I was eating out of tubes for 6 months.
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I was writing on a whiteboard.
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You know, it was just my whole life kind of crumbled.
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I was sleeping 14 hours a day then because my life kind of went to the other side because I'd worked so hard to just give give give give give and I loved it.
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But in the process, I broke myself because I wasn't refueling. I wasn't renewing. That's right.
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Even though I was still taking, I was still meditating, I was still doing everything. Yep.
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I talked about that big time in my last chapter, how it just takes me to nothing.
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How I'm where you were at.
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You know, it's taking me 5 years of doing my meditation, my stretching, my eating right, my sleeping right.
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And you have to be on a constant reminder.
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Almost like how you put a reminder on your phone, 15 minutes you got this.
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That has to be in your brain. You've done too much. Stop.
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And what happens in life is that we start to see our lives become so successful. We're making money. We're doing this. We're doing that. I want more. I want more. I push harder.
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I'm all about pushing hard. Don't get me wrong. I'm all about it.
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But to push as hard as you can, you have to be mindful of the machine that's pushing.
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It is going to end up dying.
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And then it takes years to get it back. So you lose that time. That time is gone.
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You know, I lost 5 years of I could be crushing it.
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Where now I'm just now back to crushing it, realizing God, man, I learned the hard way.
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That's really sometimes the only way to learn.
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Yeah, sometimes that Sometimes the only way to learn.
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That's how I've learned the best. Yeah.
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How do you know those indicators?
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So what are those indicators to know I'm pushing too hard or I'm I'm suffering too much because it's hard to know. Mhm. Right?
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Everyone gets in the gym even once a week or whatever and it's like if you don't go often you can feel like you're falling apart at 10 minutes. Do me a favor.
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Go to the first Go to the first page of the of not No, not my fault.
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Go to like the first three pages of that book.
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You see one one sentence. Okay.
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To the unrelenting voice in my head that will never allow me to stop. Okay.
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The unrelenting voice that we all have.
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What happens to that voice?
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I'm going to I'm answer your question.
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We all have a voice in our head.
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Some of us are very spiritual.
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Some of us are not, but we all have this voice and you're doing [ __ ] up [ __ ] This is wrong. Don't do that.
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The more you don't listen to that voice, the further that voice gets away from you.
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And some people call it Holy Spirit. Some people call it God.
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Some monks, whatever whatever you call it. It's there. We all have it. Mhm.
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It's the right or wrong voice.
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But the more we don't listen to it, the more that voice goes away. Mhm.
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And the only voice you hear is yourself. Mhm.
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We all when when the only voice you hear is yourself, you're wrong.
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There's a voice that guides you through life.
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And sometimes it's guiding you in direction that you don't want to go. Mhm.
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That's usually the right place to go.
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It's that uncomfortable place.
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So, that voice is always talking to me, but we don't listen to it. I listen to it.
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And when I start getting anxious, nervous, like I've done We all know when we've done too much cuz it's telling us, "I'm getting tired. I'm wearing down." But we we go. We go. We go.
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I start talking to my fiance, "Hey, I'm doing too much."
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You start now like like I did in Hell Week. Like I do all the time. The one-second decision.
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It's that decision when your mind starts to get so amped up when you can't hear yourself think. You got to slow down.
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Whenever you're living off a schedule, every day is a schedule, every day is a schedule, you have no time for yourself.
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When you start and we all know it.
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I don't have time for this anymore.
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I don't have time for that anymore.
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That's when your mind and your body is saying, think about that.
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I'm neglecting my fiance.
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I'm neglecting my disciplines of life.
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I'm neglecting my reading, my learning, my my workouts, my my my diet.
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You start neglecting all of that. You neglect one of them.
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You can You can neglect all of them a long time. It's going to haunt you.
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When you start seeing that, my guy, I haven't eaten right in a long time.
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I haven't been sleeping right in a long time.
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It can only be one of those things to take you off.
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So, I'm I'm I'm very aware of my eating, my sleeping, my my my disciplines of life.
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And I start to get too far away from them, it's a hard stop.
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Because what made me me are the self not just disciplines, the self-disciplines of life.
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And those are always in front of you if you have any.
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They're always in front of you.
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So, that's So, that's my hard stop. Yeah, I love that, man. That's great advice.
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And I guess a simple example is is of like sleep.
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Like when you wake up in the morning, That's right.
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there's a part of you that's going, "I'll just go back to sleep." Exactly. Right?
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When we used to wake up at 4:00 a. m.
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as monks, sometimes 3:00, it's like there's the part and then that's what you're saying.
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And then you only you hear is yourself saying, "Ah, it's all right. Just go sleep. It's okay." That's right.
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But then that voice has got quiet that says, "No, you need to get up. That's right. to get up."
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And you've just pushed it away. Mhm. You've pushed it away.
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And that's the discomfort that you need to That's right. embrace. Exactly.
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So, those voices are very important. They They can guide you.
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That's the thing about it.
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Like I said, the mind is the most powerful weapon in the world. Yeah.
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It can guide you to being very comfortable also. Yeah.
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So, you got to be You got You got to be careful.
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The The The mind will trick you. Yeah.
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And it's saying, "Just sleep in the day. You deserve it." Yeah.
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Sometimes you don't deserve it.
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So, there's that There's that fine line of of the mind getting a tactical advantage over you to where you're like, "I've worked too hard." Yeah.
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You really haven't worked hard enough. Mhm. So. Yeah, absolutely.
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Yeah, in in when we were trained as monks in the Vedic philosophy, it talks about the difference between the mind and the intelligence.
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The mind is compared to a child and the intelligence is compared to a parent.
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And so, when the child goes loose, when the mind goes loose, when it's not trained, controlled, disciplined, self-disciplined, etc.
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It can have tantrums, it can throw things out the pram, right? It It demands more.
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Like a child always wants to sleep in. Right. Always.
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Even if the child knows that it's better to wake up to go to school, the child doesn't want to A child doesn't want to study for exams because it's hard, it's painful.
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And the adult's role, which is the intelligence, which is often we forget that it exists, the intelligence is that voice coaching the mind. That's right.
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But what often happens is the intelligence just tries to shout at the mind like a bad parent. The parent just shouts.
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That's 100% No teaching, no education, no no knowledge, just shouts.
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That is 100% The way you explain that about the child's mind is 100% the truth.
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I just want to sleep in, always throwing tantrums.
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Never getting what they want.
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Whenever they don't get what they want, they throw a tantrum.
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But what happens is we never grow.
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We We are 40, 50, 60, still throwing that tantrum we once did at 7 and 8 years old.
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So people think with age is growth. No, it's not.
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You have to go back into the scarring to get the growth.
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Absolutely, because if if with age you just repeated what you did when you were younger, it's just stronger. That's it. Right?
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You've just strengthened a bad muscle.
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I'm throwing a bigger tantrum at 43 Yeah. than I did at 8. Yeah. So true.
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Yeah, you just strengthen the bad muscle, stronger, stronger, stronger, stronger.
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And then that can break you.
24:30
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24:36
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24:45
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