 I always tell people, give yourself a break. It takes three to four weeks to get that habit to form. So if it's hard in the first, you know, one or two weeks, it should be. A great topic for the new year. We all want to get better. We all want to move past our bad habits. And in order to do that, we must learn about them to help stop cell sabotage. And with us today is writer and Dr. Judy Ho. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for joining us. And of course, we enjoyed reading the book. It's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts as we talk about personal development and changing yourself. But we got to know first and foremost, what made you decide to write a book on self-sabotage? You know, I saw self-sabotage in everyone around me. So I'm not just talking about my patients. I'm talking about my family members, my friends, my colleagues, and even to a degree myself, especially in my 20s. And I saw that, for me, my main sabotage was procrastination. And there's always a way to make that sound really good in your head, like, oh, I'm the kind of person who, if I wait till the last minute, it's going to be amazing, right? Until it's not. Until the day when you fail a paper in your grad program, which is what happened to me, which really made me take a look and say, was this really the best thing for me? But I mean, I did that for so long and told myself that that was the right thing to do, to get myself motivated enough to put out my best work. So now knowing that, are you the character that procrastinates in the book, or is that? No. Hi, you're like, did you write yourself? So all of the characters in the book are based in real people that I've worked with, or they were my family members or my clients, obviously, personal details changed so that they were not looking at this and thinking, oh my gosh, Judy's writing about me. But no, I did not base it on myself, although when I wrote that chapter, it was one of the easiest chapters for me to write, because I just felt like, yep, I know this person, I know how I feel when I was in this mode. And you bring up a really good point because it's easy to spot in others. But we are telling a story in our head to rationalize our own self-sabotage and exactly that, for procrastinators who've been rewarded for procrastination, it's easy to be like, oh, I'm under pressure, I'm definitely gonna perform. I perform well under pressure. That's the narrative, that's the reason to procrastinate. And of course, we're gonna dig into how can we self-diagnose to stop this? It's so easy as we were talking about before the show started to see it in celebrities, to see it in others, but it's difficult to see it in ourselves. And it seems to me like this is one of those things that almost everyone struggles with. Yes. And why do you think it's so common? Well, I do think that sabotage is universal, that we all have the inclination to self-sabotage, but it's really about when it becomes an issue, if it becomes a pattern. And I think people do it because even though they say that they want something, getting there is actually really difficult. And it's scary because change is scary. And so we say we want these things, but we have this approach avoidance conflict where the closer we get to the goal, we all of a sudden start thinking about all the things that are so bad once we reach there. Like for example, with health and diet, I oftentimes find that people will get so close to their goal weight or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden start thinking about how hard it is to maintain that. And then they'll start to take a huge step back. They'll go on like a one weekend binge fest and then they'll beat themselves up and then it kind of sets them back for two or three weeks. And even simpler stuff where you started a diet, you're all excited and then you slip once and then you just throw the diet out the window. And it's very difficult to restart towards that goal when we feel like we've gone a little off course. And I know myself, I've sabotaged on my health goals, on my New Year's resolutions even. And I feel like when you start to see the patterns in yourself which we're gonna talk about in a little bit, it becomes a lot easier to stop that before it starts. Exactly, it's all about being able to identify the patterns that you know then what to do about it. And sometimes we run away from that. You know, we don't wanna deal with it. We sort of have this escapist or avoidant mindset towards doing the self-examination. So you do have to do that. And then you can have a lot of good action steps in the right direction. And I think obviously with it being the New Year, everyone even chuckles about resolutions now. Do you think over the past few decades we've come even further into our own way of self-sabotaging? Yes, I feel like New Year resolutions can be a real hotbed for people self-sabotage because you commit to this thing that is really tied to an arbitrary day. And you know everybody else is doing the same thing. And then the minute that you make a misstep, you start to look around you and evaluate yourself against someone else and that can set you farther away from where you wanna go. I've actually advised some of my clients and my friends, if that's you, just don't do a New Year resolution per se. Just do a goal, do a goal whenever. Why does it have to be January 1st? Why can't it be December 30th? You know, just don't be so black and white about it because I think people get really, really, really fixated on this idea of it's a New Year, I don't wanna blow the New Year, but it's arbitrary. To go along with that, a lot of these things that we think are common sense. We've never really dug deep enough to understand why they are. I always have this saying that I've been eating my whole life but I've never really learned how to eat until I was in my late 20s. I know to exercise but I didn't really learn how to do that until I was in my early 30s. So a lot of these things, we've been told, we hear about them, but there's no understanding behind them and it takes about getting interested and to get the knowledge so then we can actually implement these things so that they'll actually mean something to us. Right, and I think that that's a really good point. It's really about learning and sort of stepping back and taking that educational process on and it is sort of a new thing because if you've never done that self-examination, you wouldn't really know where to start so you do have to start from the beginning but the good news is once you start, then you really have a prescription plan for how to address all of the pitfalls that come up. And I think that's the scary part, right? The self-reflection, the admission of guilt, right? I'm a procrastinator, I'm a sabotager. That's really the hardest part for a lot of us because we hold ourselves in high regard. We see it in others but to say, okay, let me dig a little deeper here and see what's going on. The other thing I wanna make note and this will go on with your point is people tend to look at self-sabotage as if I'm to go back and do some reflecting to find out why I'm doing this and there must have been something horrible in my past that has led me to continue doing this. No, it doesn't have to be that at all. You could have been wrapped and bubble wrap your whole entire childhood. That will be the problem. There is no perfect way to raise a child is just giving the child enough for it to understand that it's gonna still need to grow after it leaves the house and to recognize the efficiency so that it can get to work on itself. Right, I mean, growth is forever. Growth is all your life, right? And I think that sometimes it's difficult to take a look. As you mentioned, this admission of guilt but it really doesn't have to be like that because as I mentioned earlier, self-sabotage is universal. So we're all gonna do it at some point but if it becomes a pattern, let's take a look at it. So there's no shame about it. We're all wired to do it in many ways, biologically and physiologically and evolutionarily. It's almost like something that was adaptive gets turned on its head because we all have to watch out for fears. You know, we have to protect ourselves but if that particular drive becomes more prominent than thinking about all the rewards that can come with you going forward and taking the risk, that's when the self-sabotage switch happens. It's like all the fears of today though is not a physical fear per se. We're not running away from the Sabre II Tiger. We're running away from possible rejection, possibly getting somewhere slower than maybe your friend or your sister. You know, all of these comparisons that we do, they can feel just as scary to us and trigger that fight or flight the same way that a physical threat can. I think it's difficult for people to understand how easily that fight or flight mechanism gets turned on. And we certainly have some fun with our clients in our classrooms with it so they can feel that but it doesn't take much for your body to flip that switch. And it's in that moment which your rational thought process goes right out the window. Right, when the fight or flight switch turns on the frontal lobe which allows us to be the human beings, the thriving human beings top of the food chain species that we are, it's not really active. It's all the more primordial just drive to get away from whatever's scaring you. And I think that that's what people sometimes don't realize. Like, wow, I couldn't logic my way out of that one yet because that center wasn't really working in that moment. And that fight or flight switch turns on so quickly and then people blame themselves for it but I always try to educate people, who do you think survived from your ancestors? The people who already learned mindfulness and were mindfully eating berries and didn't see that a bear came and ate them all? Or was it the nervous Nellies that were always looking around darting behind bushes, but they were the ones who survived. So in many ways, it's in our genes, right? It's in our genome that our ancestors who were more of the nervous Nellies are probably the ones that populated the earth. And so now we have some of that and it's not a bad thing as long as we know what it is and know how to work with it. And I feel the audience has a sense of relief just to sigh like, okay, everyone is dealing with this. And I feel like those of us who are top performers who set lofty goals often run into this and it's sort of counterintuitive because it's like, wait, you're so close to your goal. Why are you sabotaging now? Do you see that in your patients as well? Absolutely, I see it all the time. And again, people are like, man, I could have tasted that goal and then I just blew it. And again, that approach of witness conflict is real. People don't realize it could be with all kinds of things whether it's career or relationships where you get so close and then you do something to kind of mess it up but it doesn't mean that you have to start over. As long as you can sort of stop there, re-examine and reset yourself, you can keep going but a lot of times people just completely veer off the path. They'll say, I guess it's not for me and they'll just completely take such a step back that it takes them so much away from what they were trying to do in the first place that they completely lost sight of their first goal. And I love the fact that in order to be self-sabotaging you have to be taking action, right? So we are moving in a direction which is good. Action is good, it's recognizing it. What do you think is the biggest misconception with self-sabotage? Well, I think the biggest misconception with self-sabotage is that it only happens to people who are characterologically weak or people who just don't have it together or people who haven't done the self-examination because you may have been doing it but in a different way, right? And as you mentioned, it actually applies more to people who have many lofty goals. They have big expectations of themselves and when they don't meet that expectation that drives their guilt even further and then that's why they don't look at the problem and then solve it. And I think willpower is another component that people tend to rely on and over rely on and not realizing that willpower is to a degree finite and when it depletes, we still need that motivation. We need that drive beyond willpower. We can't just rely on that alone. Yeah, and I think that that is another big thing about self-sabotage too is people think, oh, it's because I just don't have enough willpower and it's just not true. You know, willpower is just like anything else. It's like a muscle in your body. It depletes after overuse and it does deplete over time throughout the course of the day or if you've had a very stressful day, it'll deplete even faster. If you've tried to multitask too much, it's gone by noon. I mean, so there's all of these things that we have been trying to do to like hack the system. Like how do we get into really honing our willpower in the right way and letting it sustain for as long as possible. And you know, I think I have a lot of conversations about that with my clients and they're just like, how do we do that though? It's like, well, it's all about setting your goals in the right way, aligning them with values so that even when the going gets tough, you're still going to push forward because you know that it's really crucial in the end. Yeah, because it matters to you. Yeah, exactly. Now you use life as an acronym for the foremost common forms of self-sabotage. What does that acronym stand for? So yes, I love acronyms because it helps me to remember for myself but life stands for L is low or shaky self-concept. So that's somebody who, you know, and self-concept is a complicated thing. It's not just one thing. A lot of times people have great self-concept in one area of life, not so much in another. And so I think sometimes if your self-concept is more shaky in the area in which you're trying to create a certain goal or make something happen, then that could be your driver of self-sabotage. I stands for internalized beliefs. These are things that we learned from childhood. If you had parents who were very nervous, very risk adverse, you might pick that up. And actually it becomes your own belief system when you're an adult. You become like your parents sometimes. F stands for fear of change or the unknown. All human beings in general are not loving change but some people personality-wise have an easier time with change or the unknown and others don't. So that could be a driver. And finally E is my favorite. It's excessive need for control. This is all those type A super high achieving people out there. But if you can't see every step of the way and if you don't feel like you have control then you're not gonna move forward at all. And of course control is all perceived. I mean, we really don't have that much control but it's that feeling of losing that control that scares people and makes that their primary driver of self-sabotage. I'm just gonna point out to that last one the excessive need for control because I know for a lot of the guys we have in our programs and the guys who listen to this show that one right there is the big one. Yeah, I went on a hike with the buddy recently and we were talking about exactly that and the need to control. And when you start to realize that you have this incessant need to control it's even more scary and overwhelming because it kind of hits you like a ton of bricks. Like holy cow, have other people been perceiving this? Have I been impacting others? All you want is to just be in control of what you can control. A lot of this is outside of our purview. It's impossible for us to control. Now you mentioned this low self-concept. Can you break that down a little bit further for us? Yeah, so self-concept is something that develops over time. When we come into the world we're pretty much like blank slates and we're trying to absorb and soak up everything about who we are in the world, what people are to us and how we can achieve goals and get what we want. And it happens a lot in many people's childhoods where they start to get messages about who they are to other people. Like for example, how do we know that we're smart or funny or anything? It's because somebody either told you or you watched yourself in a social situation and noticed that you were rising to the top on certain criteria. And so self-concept can develop over time but they can also be very easily crushed by big events. And so you get fired once and all of a sudden all of that self-concept that you built around work that you're an efficient person, that you're somebody who is motivated can get things done. All of a sudden it goes away and then it takes a little bit of time before you can reset and get all of that evidence again from the world that actually you are still that person but it's sort of like the negative cycle that'll continue because the more you back away, the less you provide yourself with the opportunities to prove to yourself that you are competent. And so I think that can happen to a lot of people where they start to shy away from an area where they feel like now they're not performing so well but that actually ends up reinforcing that low self-concept over and over again. Yeah, and we see this in our clients in their social lives with drawing because of some negative response, whether on a date or from some peers and all of a sudden it's like, well, I'm just shy so I'm not gonna talk. And it's like, well, you have a low self-concept of your social abilities. And then you see it in their career where it's like you get passed over, you get a negative performance review and all of a sudden instead of leaning in and trying to work on those areas, you just withdraw because you don't wanna keep getting the negative feedback. Yeah. Well yeah, it just goes with, I've always been bad at that. This proves I've always been bad with that so now I'm just going to try to avoid that or put myself in a position where that is. We were just talking about this last week on the, we were talking about talking in a stranger's toolbox about developing those skills. If you're somebody who thinks that small talk is awkward or that you're not good at it, that's on you. Yes. That is a skill that can be developed. You can learn to take small talk to smart talk. Yes. And certainly by not putting yourself in that situation, you're never gonna get better with it. And here's the frustrating part and as a PhD you know this. If you don't collect enough data points, it's not relevant. Your observation is not relevant. And that's why we love in the week-long boot camp for our clients who have gotten some negative feedback in an area of their life and their social skills to go out the entire week and start getting some positive experience and collect new data points, positive data points and all of a sudden they're like, man, why wasn't I doing this before? This is so much easier than I thought it would be because we hold on to the negative data point. Yes, selective memory too. You only remember that once or twice where you blew it or you didn't have a good social situation. And then you don't remember all of the other times where actually you did get positive feedback because your mind is so set on that low self concept that you just keep only remembering the things that basically give you that sort of reinforcement of that particular idea. And I recently have worked with a number of patients who they'll come to me and they'll say, I just have poor social skills. I don't know, maybe I'm on the autism spectrum. And they almost wear it with like a badge of honor. Like, you know, I'm a tech guy. Like we're all kind of, I'm like, you know what? Let's try to get some evidence. And so I'm a neuropsychologist. So we actually have tests that look at their social perception. Like, do you read emotions correctly? Like how do you perceive social situations and tone? And they'll score in the 95th percentile. And I'll say, wait, let's line that up with your belief about yourself that you might be on the autism spectrum. And yet on social skills testing, scientific testing, you're in the top five percentile compared to your peers. So what do you think about that? And they're just, their minds are just blown because all their life, they've just thought, I'm this shy, awkward person. That's why I haven't been dating. That's why I can't move forward in my job even though I have the skill sets. Cause I'm just not that guy. It's like, but you are that guy. You can be that guy. And that's the crazy part about it is, you know, we started this company 13 years ago. And Johnny, how many of our clients would you say self-assessed and identified as on the spectrum at the start? Very, very, very few. But it's interesting. It seems like in the last decade, more and more people are either going on WebMD or getting some signals from others and all of a sudden they label themselves as on the spectrum. It's like, no, you're just lacking an experience in this area. You do not actually exist on the spectrum. And we've seen clients on the spectrum. They're pretty easy to spot. It's very different, yeah. And the other thing, I think Brene Brown calls it like getting rid of supposed to is where you can unhook yourself to this idea of what you're supposed to be like. And we certainly see it. It's now while I'm introverted. So you don't even want to try. Well, no, because I'm introverted. It's like, why is everyone just beating themselves up with these? We get so attached to labels, right? And we use those labels as excuses to not move forward. And unfortunately, more and more labels are being thrown around. We're seeing these labels everywhere, social media. And going back to what you said earlier, this comparison that we're struggling with, it's amplified every time we open our device. You go on social media, and I can compare myself with someone in Australia that I've never met. And all of a sudden, start self-sabotaging. Yes. And of course, people sometimes forget that other people's social media feeds are most often their highlight reels. No one is crafting a post around when they accidentally spilled coffee on their notebook. Exactly. Living in LA, we've seen food get cold with all the photos being taken at the table. And hold on, wait, we can't leave. Nope, another shot. So when we're comparing ourselves to others' highlight reel, of course, we're going to start self-sabotaging. Now, the book breaks down six steps. Let's talk about the first one. And this is what Johnny was touching on, these cognitive distortions, identifying the triggers. Yes, so the first step is identifying your self-sabotage triggers. And really, it's all about finding out what in your thoughts is creating the type of pattern that then leads you to go down the self-sabotaging action over and over again. And I talk about several different types of triggers, because we all have patterns once we actually start to notice our thoughts. And we talked about some of them already, the labeling, the comparisons. I have different names for these, but black and white thinking is a big one. We talked about that earlier today, where people make one little misstep. They had one muffin. Big deal. And forget it. I'm just going to have a binge fest all weekend as opposed to, you know what, put down the muffin. You're going to finish it. And let's just restart. Let's restart. They can't do it. So the black and white thinking of all good or all bad, there can't be any in between. It makes it really hard to get back on track once you've made a misstep, which we all do. There's also catastrophizing. So one little thing goes wrong, everything's going to go wrong. And then that really does cause people to withdraw, because you're thinking in your head, I don't want to see that catastrophe. But that catastrophe hasn't even happened. Or maybe won't ever happen. The shoulds, that's a big one. I always tell my clients, stop shitting all over yourself, because that's what people do. I should have done this. I should have done that. I should be a better mother. I should be a better boyfriend. I should be, I should be, I should be. And these rules are just made up out of the ether. I mean, yes, maybe from their past experiences, but who says that you have to do those things? But those rules can really bind people into a certain label again of how bad they are, how deficient they are, and it causes a lot of anxiety for people. And a lot of excuses too. The shoulds, especially a lot of excuses. Now, which is your biggest trigger? You know, I think for me it's probably the shoulds. I think it's another one of those type A, high achieving people. I should have gotten more done today. You know, I feel guilty sometimes if I've been less productive on a day than I was hoping to in my head. It's hard. I mean, I still struggle with it. And I have to back up and say, you know what? Like, it's okay, you know? Mine is personalization. Johnny knows this too. And it's one of those, we break it down in class. So you think I should be able to overcome it, but I still do it. This idea of I'm the focus of my own movie, so everything happening around me is because of me. And all of a sudden, you're in that cognitive distortion. It's hard to find your way out. What's yours, Johnny? Well, when I was younger, it was certainly black and white thinking. I tell this story all the time. That's why you always were black. You're already YouTube and live streamers. It was one of the reasons where I had a, my ex-girlfriend in my 20s, she was trying to argue with me about whatever it was. And she mentioned, she's like, life isn't black, white, you do this all the time. And I go, I do not. And she just opens the closet. And there was white shirts and black shirts. And I got so mad because, whoa, she just, that was checkmate. So I was like, I'm out of here. And I went to them all and I bought a red shirt and I put it in the middle. I was like, there. And it never wore it. I was gonna say how many times I put it. I felt good at the time. They certainly change as well. I think I deal with a little bit of should now, but in my 20s, it was certainly black and white thinking. And there was always, yeah, those were definitely the two main. The big one we see in our classes too is discounting the positive. It's so easy to just, no, that wasn't for me or no, that's not really positive. And we really have to dig and ask them, okay, but let's talk about the last time you were out. How many people did you talk to? How many people did you socialize with? Did you approach a stranger? No, then this is a positive. There are tons of positives. You are discounting them. The other thing about it, and perhaps you can shed some light on this, we've seen that the smarter you are, the more intricate the rationalizations and the web of thinking gets. And I've certainly have argued with people who were trying to rationalize a cognitive distortion with another cognitive distortion. Yes. And I'm like, I'm like, let's take this one away. That's cognitive distortion. Let's take this one away. And now what do you have left? And they're like, they're just freaked out. It's so funny that this caused a chain reaction sometimes when somebody tries to get you to look at that distortion, they just give you another one. And so then it can just keep going from there. But you're right. And I think that people sometimes that discounting the positive is really huge. It's almost like, I don't wanna be a part of a club that would have me as a member. It's like anytime they actually get something, it's like, yeah, but everybody can do that. But can they? And also were you able to do this a week ago? You weren't. So this is a big deal. And they almost take that away from themselves when they do something well. And that again, just contributes to possibly lower self-concept overall, right? It's like that selective memory of this wasn't a big deal anyway. And that there are a number of cognitive distortions. Episode 704, if you are interested in this discussion, we go deep into them, the bad house guests. And when you start to recognize them, we can now start step two, which is deactivating these triggers. Yeah. So deactivating your triggers is huge because now that you know that these triggers are there, it's kind of scary like, oh, great. So my head is just filled with all these thoughts. We have on average 50,000 thought fragments in a day. Of course, we're not processing all of it, but it is still wreaking havoc on our emotional life and also then leading to certain behaviors. And so you have to deactivate them. You have to deactivate the triggers. And I talk about three different methods of deactivating them. One is to change them. So that is the classic cognitive behavioral therapy approach is to question them and then to try to change them. So really the questioning of it is just not thinking all of your thoughts are reality. It's so easy for us to do that. It's the way that language is constructed. The minute that we have a thought, we think it's either gonna occur or it has already occurred. And so it's really about routinely questioning it. Like what's the validity behind this thought? Let's play not so much pros and cons lists, but evidence for and evidence against a particular thought. And really taking a look and trying to balance it out. Oftentimes people have cognitive distortions because it's maybe one-sided. And so one quick technique I ask people to do is to try to construct a new sentence with yes, dot, dot, dot, but, dot, dot, dot, right? So yes, I still haven't gotten to the promotion that I wanted, but I have gotten three amazing performance evaluations in a row and I feel like I'm really ready to ask for that next step soon, right? It's like people don't sometimes recognize where they are in the journey and they only think about one step of the way. Yeah, the butt is what they're discounting completely. They're unable to look at that. And I think another big part of this, and we talk a lot about this on the show, is just journaling. When you actually start to write down your thoughts, you process them, and then the best part is you get to flip back through your journal and see those thoughts three, four months ago and you're like, what planet was AJ on? That is not reality at all, but we fuse our thoughts to our being and our emotions and all of a sudden they can start to wreak havoc on our emotional life and it's really frustrating when you see these patterns in others and then you start to think, I'm probably doing the pattern myself. I just don't realize it. Takes some honesty, takes talking and communicating with people you trust as well. I think what makes all this difficult is certainly when you're heroes or people that you look up to, their flaws, nor the work that they've done on themselves to get in the positions that they're in is shown. It's not romanticized. It just shows this amazing person who's done all this stuff and maybe their book or the biopic or it's just all the highlights. If there is some downtime, they may show the person had a phase where they were maybe partying a bit too much or whatever, but it doesn't go through that work. And so for instance, in going through your book and I was reading all of the exercise and I was like, oh, how wonderful, how great. It's like, if those movies, if they show the work that a lot of these people do of being reflective of mindfulness, meditation, writing, just getting their thoughts out so you could see what it had taken from them to get there. I think more people would do these things but even for me, I'm reading through it and it's like, well, John Wayne would never do that. But I bet John Wayne was scribbling and writing his memoirs and seeing, looking at what his thoughts are. It's a very natural part of growth and it's just not, it's not shown enough. Right. And I think people sometimes think, ugh, writing thoughts, ugh, journaling. I'm sure you guys kept that resistance to it but it is so helpful because you actually put your thoughts on a page. They become external just in that process, right? When it's inside your head, it feels so amorphous. It feels like you can't tackle it. It's just like when I tell people, doesn't it always feel better when you put something down on a to-do list? Like, it's scary because you're like, I have too many to-dos. But once you put it on a page, it actually does feel better. It feels like you can manage it and then you can really look at it and decide what to do next. And not be overwhelmed, right? And not be overwhelmed. That's the problem. When we're overwhelmed, we're ready and willing to self-sabotage. Yes. And we ask this question all the time in class. Is there evidence that the thought is incorrect? Because we are so primed to find the truth behind our thoughts and rationalize that our thoughts are real. We very rarely go, could there be an alternate explanation for this? And Johnny, you have a classic example that I love from class about walking down the street and people laughing because I feel like we all can relate to this. Well, yeah. I mean, what I tell the guys is I use this scenario of you're walking down the street and let's just say that leading up to that hasn't been a very good week. Maybe you blew something to work and you're beating yourself up. Maybe you're a little bit under the weather. And when you woke up that morning, you realized you didn't wash clothes and you're trying to put something together that's not offensive. So you're not feeling very good about yourself. And now you're walking down the street and let's say you pass three people and as you pass them, they just start laughing. Now, we know the whirlwind of thoughts that are gonna pop up in that scenario. Yes. We are geared to take the bad one for many different reasons. Certainly evolutionary reasons, as we talked about, but there's also people that the Dunning-Kruger effect where people of high intelligence are gonna write themselves on things they don't know about rather low. It's just an easier thing to do to take the bad one and work from there. And so many different reasons to be geared towards that. And allowing people to think through that and realize, well, why can't you have chosen the good one? Right? Or why did you make this about yourself? Whether or not it was good or bad. Right, yes, that personalization again, right? Where, uh-oh, they must be laughing about me as opposed to they were in mid-conversation before I walked up. Maybe it's just a continuation of that conversation and they're having a little joke. And it's about them and it's not about me, but it is so easy to go there and it's so easy for us to look for that confirming evidence because we don't like cognitive dissonance, right? As human beings, cognitive dissonance is just the worst thing ever. And so even when a belief is negative, we'd almost rather find the confirming evidence so that it's a consistent picture as opposed to, oh, wait a minute, maybe they're saying something wonderful about me. For once, maybe not even the first time, but at least you're gonna try to start recognizing that as a possibility. So the first strategy is question thoughts and the second strategy you talk about in the book is modify thoughts. So let's break that one down. So the modifying thoughts is to really try to get in there. And again, once you've examined the thoughts and as you mentioned, what's the evidence against, right? What's the evidence for? What's the evidence against? Now that you have it in front of you, let's look at how we can actually change the thoughts. But in a way that feels meaningful. Sometimes people do these exercises and they're a very intellectual exercise. They'll say, well, I feel like a loser today, but I guess I'm not a loser. I'm like, well that's a very lazy modifying the thoughts because I know you don't believe that. You did not just change it. You're not selling me. Yeah, you're not selling it to me and you're not selling it to yourself. So you have to be honest. Find a thought that you can get on board with that maybe isn't so grand sweeping, right? Going from I'm a loser now, I'm not to, okay, let's just talk about what's going on today. Let's talk about this particular situation, break it down and find a balanced way to look at the situation. And there's a really quick mnemonic that I utilized too with them, which is like the three C. So it's like, catch it, check it, and then change it. So catch it, catch the thought, check the thought for both sides and then change it. But in a way that you can at least get on board with it to some level of believability, right? So I tell them to do a believability rating. Like what's the believability of this new thought? I mean, I'm not expecting it to be a 10 out of 10, but it's gotta be at least like a five or a six out of 10 or else we just did that exercise in vain and it's not gonna actually change your actions. Yeah, then it's those silly affirmations that we've seen on Saturday Live where I'm good enough, I'm strong enough, people like me, that you're not gonna buy into. It's not gonna reinforce and certainly not changing the thought. And I think when, again, as Johnny was saying, with the Dunning-Kruger effect working, it's very easy for us to be like, but I don't know this. So I don't have evidence for this, so I can't make that grand of a sweeping change of this thought. But we have to just dig a little deeper and start observing things a little bit more. I think we're also, as you said, once we start to catch it, then we start to realize, okay, I am on autopilot, my habits have set me up for this. So now I have to start really thinking in these moments where my habits are pushing me in one direction and I know that I wanna go in another direction to just slow down a little bit. And it's so easy for us to quickly rationalize to find that response that fits our thoughts and our beliefs and then move on. So we wanna move to the next task, we gotta move to the next thing. And I think that a lot of times people don't realize that it is gonna take some time for you to examine the thoughts and then to change them. In the beginning it will be slow going because you're trying to work against this autopilot. So it's almost like putting things in manual, you're learning this new skill, but just like anything else, once you've learned the new skill, it becomes your new autopilot. So after that learning process, it's not gonna feel so tedious every time. A lot of people think because it's in our mind, we could just flip a switch and now we've just changed our thinking. Unfortunately, you're undoing wiring that you have put together for years, decades. Right, and so it takes a little bit of time. It takes a little time. And your brain knows how to outsmart you. Oh yes, you can logic, I mean, your brain will just keep trying to solve the problem in its head. And that's why I think it is so important to put things on paper, check it with somebody, check it with a coach, check it with a friend. Because again, it's so, so easy to feel like you're being productive in your brain when you're ruminating on the same thing over and over. But really, you're just having a little logic battle with yourself going from one distortion to the next distortion. I always get the question I get, well, how do I then know what's the truth or not? How do I know what's evidence? And I was like, could you use it in a court of law without being laughed out of the room? And they're like, no. I love that. Yeah, and it's like their whole phase completely changes. That's hilarious. Because yeah, now think about that scenario. Are you gonna go up and say that in front of a jury and not get laughed? It changes everything. Yeah, it's a great visual. I love that. I also tell people it should be something that somebody else could observe. So when they say, well, I have evidence, I have tons of evidence. Like, okay, but could somebody who is in the room with us right now attest to that evidence? Could they actually visualize it themselves, see it in some way? They're like, oh. And then it had to cross off a bunch that was on the list that supposedly was evidence for the thought, right? Now, our favorite is diffusion. Mine too. And this one is a little bit trickier for some of us, but I think it's the most powerful. We've talked about this with our guest, Steven Hayes, but de-emphasizing the impact of these thoughts. So understanding that thoughts are just thoughts. Yes. And your number is startling, right? 50,000 thoughts buzzing around my head any given day. Why am I giving this one so much power, so much credence? Yes, yes. I love, so I love ACT and I love Steven Hayes. Really revolutionary technique. You know, I remember I've been classically trained in cognitive neural therapy, and when I was exposed to ACT for the first time, it was mind blowing. I was like, whoa, wait, this is such a new way of thinking about how to deal with our thoughts, right? So instead of just checking them and modifying them, yes, there's going to be the day sometimes when you wake up and you're like, I know what thought I'm supposed to be modifying, but I just don't wanna do it. I don't feel up to it today. I'm just in a bad mood. We've all been there, and you can still let that thought live with you, but why do you have to let it affect how you feel and how you act for the day? So this concept of diffusing, not fusing with every thought or some specific thoughts, is really about backing up, recognizing that a thought is just a mental event and nothing more, and the easiest way to access that is by labeling it. Labeling it as such. So if you have a thought like, I'm never going to reach my goal, putting the claws in front of it that says, I'm having the thought that I'm never going to reach my goal. And all of a sudden, it does take the wind out of the sails just a little bit. All of a sudden, there's a little bit of distance between that really horrible original thought and now doing the diffusion practice and noticing that, oh, it's just a thing. I could just say it's a vegetable. It's a hamburger. I mean, it doesn't have to be me or explain me. And I was just gonna say, and I love the exercise of if you were sitting next to the child version of yourself, right, five-year-old AJ is sitting here and he's saying, I'm such a loser. How would you talk to him? How would you explain that thought? You wouldn't be like, yeah, you are and reinforce it. You'd be like, no, come on, AJ, look at all these other wins. And we tend to be patient with children, but we're not patient with ourselves. And that's why I like that mental exercise, because it's like, oh, the thought is me saying it as a child? Well, yeah, I'm gonna give myself a little bit more opportunity to improve than just write that thought into my being. And to go along with that, it's the patience with this child, but that patience, I mean, our lives are so consumed with distraction. And I always make this joke, like 30 years ago, 20 years ago, if you went to the bank, you got in line and you had to deal with yourself while you stood in line, but we don't even have those moments anymore if you're even at the bank, but you'll get in line and you'll pull out your phone and you'll just start scrolling. I mean, it's distraction from the moment you're up to the moment you're asleep. So mindfulness is incredible, it's a tactic and it is and it works. We need to now find time in our lives on the daily to practice those things. To practice diffusion because we don't have the time to deal with ourselves as we used to. Right, and I think everything is so go, go, go all the time. People have multiple things that they're looking at, even when you're watching the news. There's a ticker on the bottom that's moving and there's pop-ups in the corner. I mean, I don't even know what I'm doing. And then I look at people around me who are watching the news with me and they're on their phones the same time on CNN.com, watching CNN. Like, I don't know what's going on, right? It feels so hectic all the time. And people who are somewhat impatient, people who, again, are very goal-oriented. They're like, I don't have time for mindfulness. It's like, but actually you're wasting tons of time by doing all of this distracting stuff and not getting anywhere. And mindfulness doesn't have to be a minute of sitting on a yoga mat meditating in that particular way with their legs crossed. Mindfulness can just be taking a five-minute break and just noticing what's around you. Putting everything away and just having a few bites of your meal without other things in front of you. I've been very busy with our social media lately. And the other day I was out on my normal weekly run and I got to the top of running Canyon and I completely had a panic attack because I thought I lost my phone. Only I had to sit there and like, wait, you're jogging, you're on the Canyon, everything's fine, it's at home. And I was just laughing about that. But even that hour that I have without my phone and the chemicals flying, it allows me to shift through so much stuff. And of course I don't have my earbuds and running on down Franklin Avenue because I'm going to get not safe, hit by a car. So there's nothing to do but focus on myself and my mind for that hour, 15 minutes. And it's, and I have a rule that if it's above 50 then I, there's no excuse enough to go. But I look forward to it every week because it's also, I know it's an opportunity for me to organize a few thoughts that I haven't had the proper opportunity to shift through. And I love that point because meditation, mindfulness doesn't have to be on a mat, legs cross chanting. It could be running, it could be eating your lunch. It is taking a moment to collect your thoughts and be present with them versus staring at the device, watching the traffic, every other distraction that's going on in our lives. Now, you love your acronyms so moving on to step three we are reconfiguring ABC chains. So what are ABC chains first and how do we reconfigure them? So ABCs are a different type of ABCs. This is behavioral management ABCs. So A stands for antecedent. This is any kind of thing that happens before the behavior. So any kind of triggers. We've been focusing a lot on thoughts but they could be other things. They could be other people. They could be certain memories. They could be a particular situation or surrounding and really understanding that there's so many different types of things that we should be looking for that lead us down a behavioral chain because the next thing that comes is the actual behavior. So that's the behavior you're trying to change. Whatever behavior that is getting in the way of you reaching your goals, whatever that self-sabotaging behavior is, we wanna know all of the things that can lead to it and their consequence. And people sometimes don't realize that the consequences are not necessarily what you think they are. Sometimes people think, well, duh, of course I don't want bad things to happen to me but yes, there's also negative reinforcement. This idea of an avoidance of something uncomfortable and my classic example, of course, is thinking about going to a party when you know you're not gonna know anybody and it just gets so anxiety provoking that you finally then call the host and you make up some bogus excuse. Oh, I got stomach poisoning, whatever. Food poisoning and they say, oh, I'm so sorry. And then you hang up and oh, that flood of relief that now you don't have to go to this party. That is reinforcing for the next time. So the next time you have another big function, you get to look forward to that relief when you do that self-sabotonic behavior. There you go. The flaking. The flaking. Everybody's got one of those stories, I feel like. And these cues exactly that could be as simple as having your phone on the nightstand so it's easier to surf the internet than it is to go to the gym. And when you start to understand that, well, hey, my phone being next to me is the cue. What if I put my gym shoes next to me? That's the first thing I see. Oh, I'm a lot more ready to go to the gym with my shoes on than a phone in my hand. So it's understanding the chain of events and trying to go upstream of that bad behavior to really knock it out. Right. And I think I have some personal examples for, again, when you're trying to relearn exercise as a practice. When you're younger, it's just part of your life. I was in team sports. You just do it. But then when you get older, you have to actually schedule it in. And it took me the longest time to finally get to a rhythm with it because there were all of these antecedents in the way. It would be like, I'll just work out after the end of a long day. It never happens. It doesn't matter what I do. It just doesn't. So then once you know that, okay, you got to set it up for the morning. I remember I used to have this gym membership that I never use. Well, it was because I didn't have anything in the car. In my mind, I was thinking I would drive home first, go get my gym shoes, get my clothes in. No, you're never gonna. So you're gonna just have to have it next to you on the passenger seat with your gym back. Your water bottle's ready to go. Everything's ready to go. You know, the easiest gym clothes to put onto, I used to have all of these fancy, I'm like, you know what? You're not gonna spend five to 10 minutes just getting dressed. You need to spend the one minute getting dressed and get out the door, right? And so it's about reconfiguring all of those things for yourself so that then the behavior follows. And I always tell people, give yourself a break. It takes three to four weeks to get that habit to form. So if it's hard in the first one or two weeks, it should be. Yeah, it's normal, right? We are fighting against the way we've conditioned ourselves for months, years, some of us even decades. And Johnny talks about this as well. It's the idea of stopping a moving train and getting it moving in the opposite direction. The train doesn't come to a dead stop. The train has a lot of momentum in the wrong direction. So we gotta slow it down. And then in order to get it to go in the opposite direction, it's gotta get some momentum and pick up some steam. So just like that, when we're talking about behavior change, we have to slow down the bad behaviors. Then we gotta give some time for the new behaviors to pick up some momentum. But even with that, it doesn't take forever. And if you're patient and it starts to pick up its momentum, then it's something that you do, you look forward to, you're excited about, and you've done that. And that momentum, you can chain other good habits too. Once you start to realize, oh, if I move it in the right direction, all of a sudden I have the endorphins after the gym, well, I'm excited to make myself a healthy lunch. Totally. But if I feel like crap, because I didn't go to the gym, then I'm more excited about frying something up for lunch. So it can be chained together. Now, step four, mental contrasting and implementation intentions. So that is a mouthful. I love this, even though it is a mouthful and nobody ever calls it that, but that is the scientific term for these two techniques that are very effective when combined. They're fantastic. Oh, I love them. When I first learned about it, I realized that people, you know, fortune 500 CEOs, like really high performing elite athletes were all utilizing these techniques to get to the next level. And then of course we utilize them too to break bad habits and whatnot as well. But MCII is actually the combination of two techniques. The first one is mental contrasting. Now visualization is obviously a really powerful tool. We love visualization. I'm a very visual learner. But if you're just visualizing your dreams, but not thinking about the specific obstacles that might get in the way, then that visualization is empty. Sometimes I'll have clients come to me and they'll say, I've been doing vision boarding for years. And at the end of the year, I'm always so depressed. And I'm like, bring me one of your vision boards. I wanna see what's on this thing. And so I remember one of my recent clients came with this vision board and it was like, you know, like a cut out picture of a $5 million home, picture of like some perfect bride and groom in a magazine. And it was like, I didn't have any of these things. It's like, okay, but how were you gonna get to the $5 million house in 10 months? And how were you going to get to that wedding in 10 months? Did you have the specific steps in between? Did you think about the obstacles that might be getting in the way? And that's the mental contrasting. So not only do you picture the big rosy thing that you want at the end of the rainbow, but you're also picturing and what is it in my current life right now that's getting me sort of holding me back or stopping me from moving on to the next step up that ladder. And once you do that, of course, then you can start to implement things that can really help you to deal with those obstacles to actually address the specific obstacles rather than just this big dream that you're supposed to get to later. There's a lot of research that shows that when people give themselves a big lofty goal, but they don't think about the in-between steps, they basically don't reach it. But if you work at the specific in-between steps, that's how you get to the big goals. And so I think it's kind of a take on that. So that's the mental contrasting portion. And the science is pretty clear that just thinking positively has a very modest impact. It's not what we'd hoped it to be. So the contrasting is so important. For you to wrap your head around what that journey actually is and not just think about the destination because the destination is not gonna supercharge your willpower and get you charging up that hill. But thinking about all the steps in-between and looking back at what you've accomplished with all of those steps. When we were training for running a half marathon, having nothing behind us in terms of running races or running at all, 13.1 was really freaking scary. It feels insurmountable to me. And our trainer, Chris, he knows like, hey, I just need you guys to run a couple miles and log the time. And I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna run as slow as this is gonna be awful. And you log the time and you're like, okay, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. And you know what, I did have some energy left. I think I'll stretch it a little. And all of a sudden, you're now working up to 13.1. You're not just going, bang, I'm gonna go run 13.1 miles. It's not gonna happen that way. And our brain has to follow along with these goals too. It's not something that we can just physically will our way towards. And it creates motivation. The mental contrasting creates motivation. It gets you pumped up for that event. It really gets you excited and it makes the picture much more vivid, right? Instead of just this big pie in the sky, it now becomes something that you can actually visualize in front of you. Something that you can actually do today. Something that you can move towards in this moment. And these implementation intentions. Implementation intentions, again, a mouthful to say something really simple, which is then to create a series of if thens from your mental contrasting exercise. So now that you know what the obstacles are, create the if thens related to each of those obstacles. If you've identified an obstacle, for example, you're trying to get to a healthier pattern of eating. And okay, you've realized that, okay, something that's getting in the way is every night I come home from work, I'm spent. And I just start picking up whatever's in my pantry. And there's oftentimes lots of really bad things in my pantry. So the if then is really kind of to create the setup so that when you get to that triggering moment, you already have a prescription plan. It's like following a recipe. So if I come home and I'm tempted to reach for the chips, then what? Then what are you going to do? And the art of replacement behaviors is to actually find a behavior that can replace a bad one as opposed to something you can do in conjunction with a bad behavior. So sometimes people will say, well, then I'll just watch Netflix. I'm like, no, but that's when most people eat bad snacks and then forget because they're so mindless about it. They're watching this TV show and all of a sudden the whole bag of chips is gone. So it's really about something that would actually get in the way of the bad snacking. So what would that be? It has to be something that is going to keep you occupied in a way that you can't be snacking at the same time. I know for myself when it comes to nutrition, it's empty fridge equals postmates. And so for me it was like, okay, I have to work backwards from that. I know come Thursday the fridge is gonna be empty so it's easy to just queue up some delivery that's not gonna be healthy that I'm not gonna feel guilty about and have to go see Chris on Saturday. So how do I work backwards from this so I don't have to see Chris on Saturday? Okay, this is simple. Sunday I'll throw something on Netflix in the background and I will meal prep and I will buy the ingredients on Saturday so that I have Sunday all laid out and now my meals are mapped. And when you start to look at your life and meal prep is a classic example, when you start to look at your life in all these different areas of like, okay, what are the potential roadblocks? What have I done in the past that's gonna lead me astray? Okay, now let's start thinking about building in the if thens. If this happens, well, what are my options? And I've been doing a lot of work with some one-on-one clients and we're talking a lot about six-month goals and it's so easy to articulate the goal and I think everyone gets so fired up about that and then I go, okay, well, what are the potential roadblocks? Oh, yeah, that, yes, guess what? This is why this has been your goal for the last 12 months because you have not thought about the roadblocks and thought about what you're gonna do when those arise. Yes, and it's so important to do it in advance. Sometimes people will say, okay, if then, simple enough. So then when that happens, I'll make the if then in my head. No, because at that point, the triggering thoughts are already there all those antecedents that leads you down that self-sabotaging track are in place and happening. It's too hard then to make your if thens. You gotta make them in advance. You gotta do the mental contrasting at a time when generally it's sort of like your mindful time. You know, maybe it's a morning meditation that you're doing or maybe you just have like 20 minutes in the morning to do this before all the triggers happen. So then when they happen, you literally open up the page or you open up the phone where the notes app is where all of this is written and then you just do what it says. So you have to cut out that hard work for yourself because at that point you're spent. You have decision fatigue. The motivation's already been worn. There is no willpower left at 11 p.m. at night when you're trying to change your habits to healthy eating. And with all of this, I think the self-reflection being able to talk to people about it and what we've been trying to do with the show is really just paint the picture that it's okay. Everyone is going through this. Share this with your friends. Share this with the people who care about you. They can help reinforce the good behaviors. Even talking about accountability, just sharing your goals with others allows you to be held a little bit more accountable than just keeping all of these thoughts in your head. And a lot of us think, oh, I can do that battle every day and we're draining our willpower. We're not tapping into the deeper motivations which we're gonna talk about here and building out our blueprint for success. Now, how do we take all of this and keep on track? Because it's a lot for us to consume. It's a lot for us to process. And I know, being a Stephen Hayes fan, understanding, we've talked about it with him exactly, values-based living. Not relying just on willpower. No, and again, if you do want to hone your willpower and train your willpower like you can train a muscle, it's gotta come from values-based work. And this also I think was very counter-cultural when I was learning it. I think it still is because we're so focused on goals as a society that we forget about values. And when I talk to people about values, they think, oh, wow, this is a really new fangled idea. It's not. It goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle. Those guys figured out way in advance because they were all about living the good life and living the good life. It's not the absence of negative emotions, right? It's not the absence of challenges. It's living a life while lived. It's living a life that's full of values, things that really nurture you from the inside. What do you want to stand for when you leave this world? We all have such a brief period of time. How do you want to be remembered? And values, unlike goals, can't be checked off. So running a half marathon, that's a goal. But a value that might be related to that might be healthfulness or physical health or something that you don't stop pursuing because you've had enough of. And I always use this example with people like, for example, if one of your values is honesty, do you think that's an easy road with the absence of negative emotions? Absolutely not. People sometimes don't want you to be honest. You might get into fights with your loved ones because you're honest with them about something, but you still do it anyway because it's important for you to be an honest person. The thing that I've noticed with values, and I, I mean, they changed my world and my life when I learned about them and then implemented them. And, and even more so, the more I lean into them, the better everything around me is. And then also at the end of the evening, I'm, there's a fulfillment that is there of like, I live today pretty awesome. I nailed everything I wanted to do. I've, I'm tired from, from engaging into things that are important to me. I'm good. In fact, I'm so good that I just want to go to bed so I can do it again tomorrow. Yeah. And that's so profound because I think again, you know, when you're used to just living your life based on checking off goals, you might not feel that way at the end of the day. That sort of internal fulfillment of, wow, like I'm excited to start the next day again. And I really feel like I lived my life authentically when people say that they suffer from not feeling authentic or that they suffer from imposter syndrome. I oftentimes ask them how much of their work has ever been values based because I think if it was, then they'd have a lot less of that. And maybe even none of that, but people sometimes say they grab onto goals that are not their own. They think somebody else wants it of them. They look at other people and they think that's the kind of goals that I should have, but they forget to ask themselves, what's my internal compass? What's driving me and what's the direction I need to travel? Well, just think about what was the, one of the distortions that we were talking about earlier when you were mentioning about, or it was for life, right? It was the excessive need for control or the fear of change, right? Doing something new. But if ceaseless learning is one of your values, then all of a sudden that is something that you should be looking for and throwing yourself into and grasping. And the minute that you talk about if there is a light switch, when that switch there, that is a light switch. And when that dawns on our clients and when it dawned on myself, it was like, oh, this gives me anxiety, but now this also gives me change and growth. My value is growth or ceaseless learning. So I am throwing myself into this every moment that I get a chance. And for myself, it's, as long as I have a moment to prepare myself, to walk into the unknown, then I'm good. Being forced into it outside of my will still makes me mad. However, when I'm like, okay, I'm ready to go. I've done what I needed to do to make this a learning experience. Now the question we get asked all the time is how do you come up with your values? So when your clients come in and you're like, hey, is this in line with your values? And they go, well, I don't know what my values are. And I know our audience asks us this all the time. What are your theories on how to develop your values? So I'm a very tactile person as well, as well as visual. So I love the values card sort for trying to figure out what your values are. And so there's a version of this in my book. It's also available on my website where obviously there's thousands of values. But to get people started and thinking in the right direction, I have 33 of the top most common values that people might have. So then you cut them out and you basically play a little game with yourself where you sort these values on front of you on a board. And so all of your top values will be on your left column. Then the medium important values will be in the middle and then like the least important values on the right. And you actually order them and you try to force yourself to make a tiebreaker because people are like, oh, all five of these are the same level of importance. No, really try to line them out because it's almost just as important to know what your top values are as well as the ones that are not important to you because then don't spend energy committing to goals or saying yes to things that are on the bottom of that list. Something that's interesting about this and this is something that AJ and I were talking about just the other day, which is, so let's just say that you might not think this is a very masculine thing to do or I can't believe I'm here with these Q cards with these stupid values. All major corporations have had sit downs to build their companies based on these values so that they can lean into them. There's nothing more masculine than that. This is about building, it's about engineering, it's about putting together a foundation so that you don't lose yourself in this voyage. The other thing is when people think about committing to values, they can also start to self-sabotage because they're like, but I'm not sure that this is gonna be my, it's not your value forever. It's okay for it to be your value right now. Give yourself permission to choose some values for the now and learn, hey, in a couple weeks, this really wasn't one of my values. I was sort of misguided. I heard it on the podcast, Johnny said it was his value. We also don't realize how easily we're influenced by others' values. And some of us grew up in religious households, we've talked about that or even if we're completely secular, we'll look for values outside of us and oftentimes just grab them because oh, it's someone else's, it's making them happy, it'll make yourself happy and it doesn't work that way. Right, because that then is sort of counter to what we're trying to achieve, which is that idea of where does it feel for you? What's the self-reflection here? What's the internal compass as opposed to everyone else? And oftentimes goals are set according to our environment and our people. And so what does the values that nurture you best, how do they look on your board and you're right? They shift. In a couple of weeks, you can do this again and it can look completely different. I also find this reminds people of self-sabotage when they do this work because they'll find, okay, community is one of my top values. And then they'll say, okay, I feel so driven, I'm gonna throw a fundraiser. I'm like, okay, have you ever done a fundraiser before? And then of course they burn out, oh my gosh, now I'm overwhelmed. It's like, you know what? Just because community is your value, you can maybe build up to that fundraiser. That's an awesome goal. But what can you do today to honor that value of community? And it can be something so small. It can just be you picking up the phone and calling your mom because you know that you haven't talked to her in a couple of weeks. That's it. That is going to love on that particular value of community in a small way that gets you to the bigger and bigger goals in the end. Now, let's tie it all together for our blueprint for change so that all of our audience members can hit 2020 running. Okay. So my blueprint for change is basically the way that I think people should approach a visualization tool. There's lots of other visualization tools. We know that they help. But again, sometimes it doesn't get you to the finish line because the visualization is sort of more of a pie in the sky picture as opposed to the actual prescriptive steps. So the blueprint for change just puts everything that we've talked about together today. It really starts with your values. That's at the top of the blueprint. And just like a blueprint for the house, it gives you the steps and the foundation of how to construct something so that anybody who looks at this blueprint for change, they'll see everything they need to see on the page and they'll know how to move forward. So you start with identifying your top five values. And then you focus those values onto maybe a couple of your most important goals right now. You wanna make sure that the goal is aligned with those values. And if the goal is not built from the values, then you should really reconstruct that goal so that they are. Because otherwise you won't have that motivation or that willpower when you need it the most. And then I have people put the life factors on the bottom of the blueprint because you need a reminder of where you came from. Why did you establish these self-sabotaging actions in the first place? How did these patterns evolve? And just making a couple of notes on which ones are actually impacting you and activating at certain moments to present as triggers. So then the middle part of the blueprint is all about the ABCs. It's like, what are my triggers? Write them all down. The thoughts, the thought distortions, the environments, the memories, the people maybe, certain social situations. And what behavior am I trying to change? And then creating the if thens right on that page. So then when you kind of take a step back and you look at that blueprint, everything is there for you. You can see the if thens there. You know why you're working towards it because the values are at the top and you see the self-sabotaging triggers on the bottom and on the side so that you can really make sure to avoid those pitfalls whenever they come up. Having a plan, being in touch with their values, being able to visualize all of this. And again, have some acceptance for those moments. There are going to be dips in any goal you put together. There's going to be days where you're just not feeling it, there's going to be days where there is not the willpower, but having all of that mapped out can tap into the deeper motivation, the values that drive us towards the change. Yeah, and giving yourself that grace sometimes. Like you said, that acceptance of, okay, this day wasn't in 100% day, but that's normal. And yet did I still live a day that I'm proud of? And I think when people have really nurtured those top values and they can still step back and say, but I did live a day I was still proud of. Maybe I didn't get to this particular benchmark on my goal, but when I step back and I take an inventory on whether or not I've honored my values today, I believe that I have. Now we got some questions from our network members and they're live streaming with us. So Dan T.S., how do I move past giving people higher esteem than I give myself and caring about their opinion of me? Which isn't even something I can control or something that I'm a better authority on. So he finds himself putting other people's judgment of himself ahead of his own. Yes, and that's such a great question. I feel like so many people can relate to that. And it's because as human beings we're social animals. So we are primed to want to care about other people's opinions. You know, we have a little bit of a herd mentality and it helps us to survive. So we want to be liked by others. We want to be accepted by others, but anything that is good in small doses and too big of a dose can very much be self sabotaging. And so I think it's really about taking a step back and utilizing this technique that I've taught to some of my clients of literally this technique is called phone a friend. And sometimes you actually call a friend that you trust and can actually talk about this with. And other times you imagine yourself phoning a friend. And what would they say to you in this moment where you're basically deprecating all of your own accomplishments and making somebody else's standout before yours? And what would they say to you? And then trying to follow that mentality because so many times we're unkind to ourselves but when we speak it out loud to someone else who actually cares and loves us, they will set us straight. And they will say, well, hold on a second. Did you remember that yesterday you achieved this really major thing and you didn't even think about it. You woke up this morning, you started to think about this other person's opinion more or their achievements more and sort of deprecating everything that you've accomplished. And I think that actually is a really powerful technique because we forget sometimes how unkind we are to ourselves and yet how kind we can be to the people that we love. And I think the important thing to realize here is these other people's opinions, they only have a snapshot of all of the information. They haven't lived your life with you. They haven't seen all the other steps that brought you there. And I think we have to start inserting a grain of salt based on how well they truly know us. So phoning a friend is huge because your friend, your family member, they know the full story versus that coworker or your boss who's had limited interactions with you who you're holding in higher esteem, they don't have the whole picture. So you're giving them too much power and you're giving away your own. I agree. And I remember I had a friend who went to Harvard and she quit. She dropped out and then she went to another school. It was fine, she graduated, but she always had this chip on her shoulder that she was gonna tell people when we were at a party or at a work function and they were just gonna look down on her. And I always had to remind her, by the way, I understand why you might take stock in other people's opinions, but they're thinking about you literally for one second. And then they're back to thinking about themselves because guess what, everybody is more self-centered and now they're on their own problems again. And so even if you feel like there was a judgment there, it was literally a blip in their consciousness. Maybe they said one word to it to a friend and then they forgot about it. And so kind of reminding yourself of that too. And understanding that, sometimes they haven't diffused themselves from their own thoughts. Yeah. They're just spinning out that passing thought. Right. So Roz asks us, how do you avoid self-sabotage in romantic relationships? So when someone else is involved, we talked a lot about self-sabotage, but what if our self-sabotage is influencing the relationships in our life? And are there ways you've seen others do this without being conscious of it? What do you recommend to be present and engaged to have a fulfilling relationship? Awesome question. When I first started to write this book, I actually wanted to write it just on romantic self-sabotage. That was really my first motivation to write it because it was happening to everybody. People say that they want a great relationship and they were totally self-sabotaging when somebody else was involved. There could be a lot of different life factors for why this is the case, but basically what it would look like is they either write off everybody who could potentially be a good relationship partner or once they get into a good relationship, they sabotage it by doing things to check the person, to test the person, and then eventually it doesn't work out. And then they get to reinforce that negative belief of see, I knew it. I knew it wasn't gonna work out. I'm just gonna be alone for the rest of my life. I might as well be a loner and then it kind of keeps spinning out from there. And I think you have to get really honest about which life factor is triggering your relationship self-sabotage because for everybody it's different. Some people who have an excessive need for control, they prefer sort of more of like a workaholic mentality where they distance people and they say, well, no one's gonna work out and they always have an excuse for why a relationship isn't going to work. But if somebody has more of a low self-concept, they may actually test that individual more, perhaps act out on their jealousy, maybe do things that are controlling. And then again, that person will then leave because nobody can take that forever. And then they then reinforce their low self-concept and romantic relationship. So I think the answer is to really look at the life factors, get honest with yourself. What is your particular brand of relationship self-sabotage? And then do opposite action. So this is something that is from dialectical behavior therapy where even if you feel, not don't, you don't feel like it, you do the thing that is opposite of what you would usually do. And so if you usually would write off somebody because you'll say, well, that person's 10 pounds overweight, that would never work out for us. Go on the date anyway, because that's the opposite thing that maybe your old self would not do. I think there's also this romantic idea tied to relationships of where you're looking for somebody to complete you. Yes. Right? So like, oh, if I find the one, then I'll be whole and everything will be perfect. It's like, no, you're bringing your undeveloped self into a relationship and forcing all those problems on this other person. And that other person is bringing their undeveloped self into the relationship. Yes, because life tracks life. That's so true. So if you're undeveloped, you're not gonna be sitting across the table from someone who's fully developed, willing to put up with that. So understanding that, yes, we're both a work in progress and the relationship is going to have to grow just like we're growing. And it's funny, we talk about this, like if you think about what you've done, how much you've changed over the last 10 years, you're like, oh, immensely, I've grown, I'm a new individual, I'm working out now, running half marathons, I've changed so much. Then you ask, okay, well, how much do you plan to change in the next 10 years? Oh, not very much. Like there are a few things I'm standing down here, but not, I like where I'm at. And then 10 years from now, okay, same thing. You've changed a lot. You're going to change a lot. Relationships are going to change and develop. You're gonna grow close, depart and close again. And it's being patient with that process. That self-sabotage of writing people off too soon, looking for the negative and attaching onto it or the opposite of being super jealous and controlling, I feel like phone a friend is also pretty relevant here. In those moments where you're about to take action against the person you're in a relationship with or place this heavy judgment on them, talk to someone outside of the relationship. Talk to a friend, maybe a therapist, and you'll find that that behavior that you're about to reinforce actually damages the relationship and is unnecessary. So this is from Tim, our boot camp guy from Vienna. And he writes, and he's an obsessive person, so this will be interesting. He asks, how much time would you recommend somebody spend on their personal development a day? And what questions do you ask yourself to help prioritizing trying to combine different activities? Oh, I love this. Okay, so knowing that Tim might be a little bit of an obsessive person, we're gonna actually challenge him to not have a strict prescription every day. I think self-development probably should happen daily, but I think it can look different every single day. Some days it can be five minutes. Some days it can be a whole hour. And also it depends on what you call self-development. So his follow-up question is really about the types of activities and the mix and the priorities. And I think if we go back to the values-based work, you'll find some of your answers there. And so again, if one of your values is self-development, to keep growing, to keep learning, then you know that every day you should try to make some kind of contact with it. But some days you're gonna have a lot more contact and other days you might not. And I think that's where you kind of start to combine the values with your goals and also where your energy level is at that particular point in time. Some mornings you wake up and you're ready to take on that two-hour hike. And as we've just discussed, a hike can be self-development. A hike can be mindfulness. That's my favorite kind of mindfulness actually is exercise mindfulness. And so realizing that some days those activities might take precedence. And then other days it might be the more slow, contemplative, reading a passage in a book. And that is enough as well. But I would encourage him that he actually starts to make an inventory of things that he believes are self-development types of activities. And then it's almost like every day you can have a little bit of fun with it. You can actually pick things out of a box. I've encouraged some of my clients who get bored of self-development to put all of their self-development activities in a box and post it. And then just pick one out and just doing that one that day and just experimenting and having fun. But I think as long as he's touching base with it every day, the mix of activities should follow where his natural energy is that day and where the values are in terms of what's on top. You just blew my mind. People actually get bored of self-development. We're too far in it. Too far in it. And I agree because the problem with being so prescriptive of I'm gonna do it for two hours a day is that the second you only do it for an hour and a half. Yeah, then you feel bad. Yeah, then you're triggering yourself for self-sabotage, right? You're putting yourself in that position. So putting time on it less impactful than having values tied to it with goals that are clear. Right, yeah, trying to get him away from those shoulds. Tim feels like a should person, so I wanna make sure that he doesn't get too many shoulds on board. Now, every week we love to leave our audience with a challenge, self-development worthy, and Johnny had a favorite exercise in your book that we'd love for you to share with our audience. And this is something I talked to the guys about. You mentioned in the book that we're all susceptible to our own harm self-talk at certain times. I certainly realized for me it was late at night and that's an easy one. You're worn down, you're usually at home, you're laying in bed or sitting on a couch and these things have an opportunity to bubble up. So if you could chat about having them be mindful and jot down journal when they're having these moments. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think again, you know, once we start to notice what our thought triggers are, they can pop up at all of these different times. And so in the beginning, I try to just challenge people to keep something on them that they can write down. Right, sometimes for people it is writing on paper, which I still recommend, but sometimes it's hard to get to that. So I say, okay, fine, then open up an entry on your notes page in your phone. And just a couple of times a day, get into the routine of checking in with your thoughts. And so I recommend to start three times a day. And you can set those alarms on your phone, 9 a.m., 2 p.m., and 6 p.m. And when the alarm goes off, just ask yourself, what was I thinking just now? And just get used to writing that down. And even when you think nothing's happening, as we've already discussed, 50,000 thoughts in a day on average, if we're more obsessive, ruminative type, maybe more. So there's gonna be a thought in there, but it's really about just getting yourself ready for that pattern of what was I thinking just now? Because oftentimes we'll have a feeling, a negative feeling, or we'll do an action. And we don't know where it came from, but if you just start to get into the routine of asking yourself, what was I just thinking right before this? You start to identify those thought triggers that lead you down a path that you don't wanna go. I love it. And the book is full of great exercises and value cards. Where can the audience find more about your book and all of your work? So they can follow me on social. I'm on Twitter and on Instagram at Dr. Judy Ho, my website, DrJudyHo.com. And my book is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for reading and for this awesome conversation. Absolutely. But I feel alive with you.