 There are phases in life where everything just seems to flow and work out, and there are also phases in life where nothing seems to work. You feel like you're this aunt who's being burned with a magnifying glass by some angry deity you're being blown about in the wind and nothing works out the way you wanted, and it can be encapsulated in one word, lost. So you feel really lost, and you're not really sure what to do next in your life. In my opinion, this can be fixed from one very simple exercise from Martha Beck, and I'm going to share it here today. What's up guys? Alex Hine, author of the book Master the Day. Now the first link below I've included for a free journaling exercise to help you get direction in life. You'll also get an email every couple days on how to use journaling to totally reinvent your life, get it together, and find the perfect path going forward. So you can check out the first link in the description. Now this exercise from Martha Beck I absolutely love, and not only have I used it in my own life many, many times, it's something that's come up a lot with coaching clients that I've had. So Martha says that you have an essential self, and you have a social self. Now the social self is the self that really takes its cues on what to do in life from the external, from other people, as in your mom wants you to do this job, so that's just what you do because you're in this family, or your friends want to go out to this place, so that's just what you do because that's what everybody's doing right now, and it's fine. But then you have your essential self, and your essential self we could say, one could call it your gut, and your gut often wants you to do something different from what the social self wants. So it is the eternal battle between being the artist or the lawyer your mom always wanted, between booking that trip and going to that unique part of the world because something speaks to you versus playing it safe and keeping your job. Or it's that feeling when you go on a date where you meet someone and you just feel something special, and you trust it, even though they may not be what you expected or what you thought you wanted, versus this person seems great on paper, but something feels off. Now here's where this all comes together. We often feel lost because we listen to the social self, not the essential self. So of course you're going to feel lost when your inside is telling you something and you do the exact freaking opposite. No wonder we get lost so easily. So here are a couple examples. For example, for a long time you always wanted to move to California, but you are in middle America doing your waitering or waitressing job, just thinking, how am I going to make it work? It's a big move all my families here. Or maybe you've always wanted to go and walk the Camino de Santiago, but you're like, I've got a good job even though I don't love it. How am I going to find work when I get back? Or how am I going to just rebuild my life after I've been gone or after I've lived abroad? Or maybe it is the prototypical, you know, I've always wanted to go after being a professional writer or a YouTuber. But my mom really wants me to go into finance because she says it's really secure and it's recession proof. The essential or the essential versus the social, the social is usually fear mixed with other people's expectations. That's why we usually cave and ignore the essential self. So let's take a look at your social self 101. These are some of the traits and criteria that typically fall in here. The first is that you usually base your decisions on what your friends and family or your culture and location want. The decisions are usually based on fear, not based on love and excitement. They're typically based on the question, what will everyone think if I do this versus what will I think of myself? So an example of the social self generating pressure was I was in a relationship for five years with a Filipino girl. And as many immigrants are just like my dad, she wanted me to have a safe, secure job because that is what she was taught was the way to have ultimate security in life. Now she was always talking about this because I just had started my own business known as Modern Health Monk. I was making no money. I was still working a full-time job coming home and working weekends to build this thing. And she just was like, why are you doing that? Like entrepreneurship is so risky. Why don't you get a good, secure job? Hey, maybe you should become a nurse or a physician assistant or go back to medical school like a real medical school. This is an example of I wanted to do something different and this external pressure was telling me you should do this because the message is almost always fear or other people's expectations. Now let's take a look at what the essential self 101 looks like. The first thing is that your essential self usually makes decisions based on what you want to do, what excites you. You often make decisions based on gut hunches or hunches. Intuition is a signature of your essential self. You also recognize a feeling of high energy, excitement, feeling good, feeling pumped about life and feeling lit up. Now an example of this is when I was 22, I booked that one way ticket to China excited to fulfill some mission or some dream that I didn't even know what it was. But how did I know it was my essential self? Sitting there working at my job and my insides were screaming, let's get the fuck out of here and I felt good about it. It wasn't rage. It wasn't anger. It wasn't I'm trying to get away from something. It was full energy, nuclear reactor, full steam ahead. So if you feel lost, spend time alone in silence, in peace, away from information and social media and just feel your decisions based on are they aligned with the essential self criteria? Do they feel exciting? Do they resonate with your gut and with your intuition and hunches? Does it feel like it's coming from you? And it's not a message from another person. Try that out. Feel very confident it's gonna help you. And again, the journaling worksheet down there below, the first link can really help you as well get started and the emails in that journaling exercise. So check it out down there below. And then before you go, come check out the related video right over here.