 All right, welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about a hot topic on social media. You've probably encountered it surfing around rewriting your story. And for many of our clients, they recognize that they have a self story, a vision of themselves based on past events, actions, and behaviors, and probably some chapters in that story that they would love to go back and edit and change to influence future behavior. And there's a lot of pop psychology online about how to rewrite your story, how to go back and be the editor. So we want to share today what that actually means, why story is so important to us in how we navigate the past as well as the future. Some strategies that we can actually use to take that self story to create behavioral change in our lives and how we work personally with our clients to create values that orient their goals in a way that they can take action on the next chapter of their lives, what their future holds. So I know many of us probably have a past memory, a negative event that has influenced us. And we have written a story around what that event means to us, why we act the way we do, and what patterns have persisted in our lives because of this past event. And that's totally normal and natural. As humans, we all love stories. You're probably clamoring to go see Dune 2 in the movie theater because we love great stories on TV, in movies, in books, even sharing stories amongst friends. That's how we connect with one another as humans. And there's an evolutionary reason for this, right, Michael? Yeah, and the evolutionary reason here is simply that our brain is amazing in predicting what's going to happen in the future and how is our brain able to do that. It looks at the past, at what has happened before in similar situations, and then extrapolates out. A very simple example that hopefully none of you have gone through is touching a hot stove as a kid. Now, you do that once, and then your amazing brain writes this story that says, if I touch a hot stove, I'm going to be in a lot of pain. And then our brain acts on that story. It's amazing. You're never making the same mistake again. That can also happen in adult life when you are asked to do a presentation at work. And you're kind of like screwing it up because you're storytelling, your presentation skills, your confidence isn't quite there. So you're getting a few laughs from the audience. The story your brain learns is, if I give a better presentation in public, I'm going to get laughed at, and that stings. So I'm not going to do that again. And so you see how our hunter-gatherer brain has this ability to log those things, write them in the pages of our life and the self story, and then act on it. Prefront frontal cortex is what does that. The human brain is a predicting brain, and it's amazing until these stories start to hold us back. Now, these stories are an opportunity for us to seek certainty in those experiences. So we don't deal well with uncertainty. What's going to happen when I walk into that presentation room? What's going to happen on that first date? How am I going to be perceived? Am I going to be liked? Are things going to go the way I want them to? So naturally, we gravitate towards those past experiences to become the narrative of future events for us. And you made a great point, Michael. Sometimes those stories are negative and they impact our confidence in a very negative way, making us fearful, making us feel like we don't want to do that or we're going to fail in the future. But sometimes the stories can actually be good and helpful and create confidence and create action in our life if those past experiences were positive and we wrote positive narratives around those experiences. Yeah, even though our brain, really, we have this negativity bias, everyone is really good at pointing, hey, AJ, Michael, hey, Johnny, I have this one story and it just holds me back. No one ever says, hey, AJ, Johnny, Michael, I have this amazing story. It's really giving me a confidence boost. We just see the things that creates obstacles in our life and our negativity bias just highlights those for us. But yeah, there are definitely two kinds of stories out there and neutral ones as well. If I buy cucumbers in the grocery store, nothing big happens. Totally neutral unless you're allergic to cucumbers and then you have a negative story at your hand. I also want to add here that I'm really glad that we're speaking about this because stories have come up in the show many times through all those psychologists that we have on the show, from all of the researchers that we've had on the show, but also the lawyers that we have talked to. They have to build narratives and stories in order to present a case. The advertisers and marketing people that we've had on the show and all of the marketing folks that we have talked to and working with in this company over the years, it's all story driven. In fact, when you build marketing funnels, there is aspects of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey because these are the stories that we track. This is why movies are so important. We're looking at billion dollar industries that specialize in storytelling because storytelling is what pierces our worlds and hits us emotionally and stirs us up. What we're going to be talking about, I want to make sure that you guys understand the power and how our brains work to create these stories, but also every industry that is story driven. The list goes on when we go to art, we go to music. It's all story driven. Even finance. For those that we work with and investment banking, they're telling stories with their pitch decks. They're turning numbers into stories. Many of you right now are probably very adept at storytelling because you're persuasive. You get people on your side, on your team to join your venture to agree to fund what you're going after in your life. We are naturally drawn to stories. We're probably very adept at creating stories. What's the natural conclusion? Oh, great. I just want to go back into my past, open up that deck of slides. I just want to make a couple deletions. I want to rearrange a couple chapters of this past story and poof, I'm confident now. Poof, my fear disappears. Poof, I don't have to worry about that past failure in my life. It's a very natural inclination to want to grab the red pen and scratch out chapters of that book and go back and furiously rewrite chapters so that amazing opportunity that you saw as a fearful situation can turn into something that powers future behavior and confidence. There are problems with attempting to just rewrite and wholesale edit and delete stories from our lives, right, Michael? Yeah. The biggest problem is it doesn't work. This is the reason that we're doing an episode like that because this is one of the number one patterns that we see with clients coming in. Hey, if I can change that story, then I'll be good. Then I won't be afraid of rejection anymore. Then I'll be confident. I just need to change that story. It's an understandable approach for a couple of reasons. One, that's how a Word document works. That's how we added the movie script. That's how we added a pitch deck. We go in there. We take the parts that didn't resonate with the audience. We change them around, not so with our brain. The second reason that this is such in the forefront of our mind when it comes to solving problems is that it's easy. It's that quick little thing, right? I don't have to put in the work. I don't have to learn new skills. I don't have to step outside of my comfort zone and try something that's a little bit scary. All I have to do is go back into my brain and turn a little things, turn some knobs around, change things a little bit, and I'll be good. And we humans, we have this tendency to go the path of least effort. And what's easier than just to go in and change a story unless we've tried it for a couple of years and we realize, you know what, actually, this isn't working. This is like the best we can do is maybe understand where that story is coming from. But we can't go in and change it. That's not how the brain works. I think there's a lot involved with how those memories of these stories get burned into our minds. And because they're imprinted with them comes a lot of emotion. So Michael, you had brought up that touching the stove earlier. Well, with that, there is pain involved, right? There was heightened emotions. So that imprinting is incredibly strong. So if I just go back and just tried to delete that story from my brain, the imprinting is still going to be there. I'm in a contradiction with my mind over, I'm not scared of this stove. That happened a long time ago. But that imprinting is so strong. It drives behavior through those emotions. And this brings up a lot of the work that we do because we want our clients to understand when they're in a heightened emotional state. That heightened emotional state then goes to default behaviors. And if you don't know that you're in a heightened emotional state, then you don't know that you're resulting to those default behaviors. So this is why in moving forward and creating new stories is so powerful because these new behaviors are going to rewrite that story in your mind. Very, very good point, especially in moments of high tension. That's when our prefrontal cortex, the logical part of the brain likes to go offline because we want to preserve energy and our thinking brain takes a lot of energy. So put someone in a stressful situation, be it being chased by a tiger or giving a presentation or seeing that person a networking event that's really important to talk to. High stress moment prefrontal cortex goes offline and we're doing what we've always done, which is what we've learned in the past, removes that uncertainty and means we're just standing there in the corner, not making eye contact, not talking to people. And that psychological need for certainty can also lead us to create the wrong stories around those past behaviors. It can color our memory of what happened in a different way than how it was actually unfolding in real life. So it's very easy and it feels very fulfilling to be like, okay, now I know why I have this fear. Now I know why I lack confidence in this one arena. It's because this one thing happened in the past. And now if I just spend time ruminating and thinking about it and replaying and visualizing it, I could do that in my pajamas. I don't have to go out and talk to a new stranger. I don't have to prepare a new pitch deck. I can just sit there and daydream that the pitch actually went swimmingly and I got my idea funded. But that doesn't actually lead to real-world behavior change in results in your life. No, that's delusional. Like sitting there and telling myself that actually, I didn't get that job interview because it was totally overqualified and they were intimidated by me. I can tell myself that all day long, but it probably doesn't improve my interview skills. So it's not about rewriting in your mind the stories that happened in the past. We actually want to impact our future behaviors. And what we are doing is we're staring at a blank page today and future chapters to be written. It is great to reflect on the past. It is great to recognize patterns. It feels very relieving to understand, oh, this is a behavior that I tend to do over and over again because of these past experiences, but what if tomorrow you don't want to behave that way? What if in the future you want to be able to walk into that room confidently and pitch effectively and know when you leave that room that you're going to get funded? Well, you can't do that by just daydreaming and thinking about all the past failures and pitches that didn't go your way. Yeah, for myself, I've spent many nights staring at the ceiling, going back through old stories, trying to figure out, well, what had went wrong in those situations? What could I have done better? Why is this memory still haunting me or that I'm ruminating on it? Well, it's because I'm looking for problems. I'm looking for issues. I've drawn myself to those moments, but the most important piece to that is to understand that all of those past events, all of those memories that I'm ruminating on are taken without any context. Let's say it was a social event. Maybe I said the wrong thing, upset somebody that I consider as a high-value person, and now they're mad at me. Now I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about what I had said. Could I have said something different? Was it as bad as I think it was? Or is that what I had said? Is that even why maybe this person doesn't like me or I'm having issues with this person? But you can't put yourself back in that moment. You're not there in that emotional atmosphere. All of that is gone. All you have is these bits of fuzzy memory that you're trying to draw conclusions from. There was a piece by Michael Shermer that had stuck in my mind. In fact, I've used this very scientific research to get out of jury duty, which is your memory of past events, especially if there was trauma involved or there was a lot of stimuli going on, your memory of those events are going to be distorted. That distortion is going to cause you to draw out all sorts of things that make no sense, that have no relevance to what you're trying to do. That rumination only gets worse. Your conclusions that you draw from that only get worse. This is why a lot of people feel frustrated and then eventually exhausted by the whole thing because they notice a pattern. They're trying to figure out what is the cause of this pattern and that abyss is endless. Or you might be in a situation where you recognize the pattern. You've understood the behavior that's happened by looking at the past, but that behavior is still going to present itself in the future. I was at a point of pure exhaustion. My fiance at the time turned to me and said, have you ever drawn a boundary with your family? It was totally foreign to me what she was saying. I want to be a great son. I want to be helpful. I want to be supportive of everyone, but I was taking so much on my own plate. I wasn't even taking care of myself. She was like, I think you should talk to a therapist. I took her opinion very strongly and said, you know what? I'm going to do it. I reached out and found a therapist after a couple of sessions. We started to talk through some of my past experiences with my family and how I felt like they were just stacking all of this stuff, all of their problems onto my plate. I felt like I had to clear my plate of their problems first before I got to anything in my own life. My therapist said, have you ever put the oxygen mask on first? You're running around the planes on fire. You're helping everyone get off the plane, but you're running out of oxygen yourself. You're going to die on the plane. I said, well, I want them to feel that I love them. I want to show up for them. I want them to know that I care. He said, this pattern that I see you riding a white horse, you're the knight in shining armor who comes in and sweeps everyone off their feet. I had a light bulb go off. I said, that is the pattern. That is me. I'm the white knight. Of course, it felt good in the moment to recognize and string together certainty around these past events, why everyone was giving me their problems and their stress, and why I was the first person they called, and why they called me the rock, and why I was so supportive and stabilizing in their lives. But guess what? Having that recognition, it didn't change my family's behavior. Their problems were still being thrown my way. I was still the first person they were called. I was the person that they were so excited to talk to you about negative things in their life. So here I am recognizing that I'm the white knight, but their behavior hasn't changed. I'm forced to have to change my behavior, and having that recognition of that pattern, although it feels good in the moment, and it can be helpful in clarifying around past behaviors, it doesn't change how I show up when that future phone call hits. It doesn't change how I show up when they have a legal problem that they need me to solve, or when they need some money for me to help them overcome some struggle in their life. So it can feel really good in the moment that you have this clarity around past events, and sometimes that rumination can feel really good of like, aha, I unlocked a pattern in my life, but we want to change the behavior. We want to break the pattern because the pattern has created suffering in my life. The pattern has held me back from accomplishing what I want to do in my life to grow my family to handle my own problems. AJ, you brought up a very good point, which is recognizing that it was going to be up to you who is going to have to change your patterns, your behaviors, because they're not. And that's taking responsibility. And the minute you take responsibility, you get choice. You can leave it, you can stay the same, or you can figure out what you're going to do to change those outcomes. And I want to point out that that recognition didn't change anyone else's story. So what we're talking about here, oftentimes we like to think that if we take the red marker and we just delete and remove some parts of our story that it's going to change the whole scenario, but oftentimes we're dealing with other people who are running their own story and whose story is enmeshed with ours. And just because you decide that you want to break this pattern doesn't mean that everyone else who's influenced by you is going to start breaking their pattern immediately when you've had this recognition around your past story and your pattern. Recognizing where a story comes from, what the origin story of that story is, can be very interesting, but most of the time it doesn't change anything at all. Just because you do a lot of work at a lot of rumination and chatteling and you find out why you're afraid of dogs. You suddenly have this epiphany, it's like, oh yeah, when I was five years old, I got bitten by the neighbor's dog. That's why I'm so afraid of dogs. Finally, I found it out. I know what the reason is. You're still afraid of dogs. It still requires the work that needs to be put in moving on from here and out on the new pages in the life story on the blank pages saying, no, you know what, my significant other has a dog. It's very important for me to spend quality time with that person. And for that, I need to get over my fear with dogs and it's going to look like this and this and this. I'm going to pet the dog. I'm going to get close to the dog. Maybe I walk the dog by myself, but it starts with changing the behavior that we bring out into the world. It's such an important point that oftentimes it doesn't require you to think through, like what is the behavior change? It just feels good in the moment to recognize the pattern. Aha, this is why I'm afraid of dogs. But what's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen the day after? You are faced with a choice point, a decision to be made, how your future behavior is going to go once you recognize that self story. So super helpful to understand past behaviors and the stories that are guiding our lives that are maybe creating goals for us, maybe steering us in certain directions around past experiences, but really important to recognize that there's a lot of stories still to be written. There's a blank page in front of you and that story is going to be written on future behaviors, not future thoughts, future emotions, or what you would think you would do in that scenario and rationalizing and daydreaming about what could have been or what could be in the future, but it really comes down to what is that step you're taking with your behavior to influence the future, to break that pattern, to write that story. AJ, I want to highlight that. So those of you who might be listening and I hear it all the time that you guys take a lot of notes during this show. So I want you to write this down and I want you to circle us because this is the key. Changing your story doesn't happen in the past. It happens in the future. I'm going to say that again because it bears repeating and it's the most important concept to understand and get you moving. Changing your story doesn't happen in the past. It happens in the future. And it's not a delete function, right? It's a letting go of that narrative. It's a walking away from those past behavior patterns that we can't, unfortunately, like men in black, just hit the button, wave the wand and delete the memory and it's gone. But instead, we are taking actions, changing behaviors that are influencing how the future story is written and ultimately building the character that we want to become based on those actions and the values that stem from those actions. So we can't think our way into rewriting our story, but we can act our way into writing a future story that we're more proud of, that breaks patterns, that creates the person we want to become. And we can think our way. I'm going to use the thinking part because you can use your thinking to decide on what you want your future story to look like. Think about your life story, like this gigantic tome lying in front of you and let's say half of the book is written with handwriting. It's the past, but right now you have it open somewhere in the middle, plus, minus, give or take and it's a blank page. And now you're going to write a new story in there, which is a little bit difficult to do if you don't know what you want that story to look like. So my invitation is don't spend your mental energy thinking about the past and ruminating and trying to change that, but use your energy to think about what you would like to see on the next pages coming away. What are you going to write down that you did, that you said, that you acted upon? What do you want to show up on those pages? And that's going to be hugely oriented towards your personal values, the core values that you have, as well as the goals that you're setting for yourself, short term, midterm, long term. And once you're clear on those, on values and goals, you have a recipe to fill the rest of your book with amazing stories and seeing the behavior unfold that you actually want to see in there if you're able to see the choice points coming away as you're going through the pages. I just want to highlight that in hearing that, I know a lot of people will logically then conclude, great, I just need new goals. I need to stretch myself with new goals that fly in the face of these fears. I want to grab that pen of the future, write the chapter, and what will often happen is we'll set goals that are so lofty that only then put us back in that same position once we fail reaching those goals. So it puts us back in that pattern of rumination of like, see, I knew it. I can't break this pattern. I tried with goals to break this pattern. I only defaulted back to what I was doing in the past and that narrative becomes stronger. So you made a key point, Michael, that I would love to unpack around the values and goals equation because we can't just focus on goals to write our future. Yeah. So the concept of goals and values is really something that for those going through the X factor accelerator and unstoppable, this is one of the key takeaways they have. Like every single time at the end of the training, when people's lives have changed, most of them will point to the concept of values and goals because they say, yeah, I only ever had goals. I had no idea what values are. And I want you to think about explaining this on a high level. I want you to think about goals and values as two sides of the same coin. And once they work together, or let me give you a geeky metaphor, think about playing Street Fighter on the Nintendo and you had like the punches and then you had the kicks. And once you brought both of them together, though, that's when the superpowers unfolded. When you bring values and goals together, that's when the superpowers come out. So goals, everyone knows what those are. They're destinations in the future. They're waypoints we want to reach. They have milestones, other good stuff. Everyone, most people know what goals are. Values, however, are present moment oriented. They don't happen in the future. They happen right here, right now. And they define how I, as Michael, want to show up in the world. That's the kind of person that I want to be. It's not what do I want to achieve. It's what do I want to be? Who do I want to be? So for me, my values are hope, adventure, responsibility, integrity, laughter, and self-care. And they happen in the present moment. As we're talking here, I have my water ready. I ate some fruit before we started recording self-care. Integrity comes in because I never talk about stuff that I'm not knowledgeable and I don't bullshit. Pardon my French. This is integrity kicking in. And so values have this amazing ability that whatever you are doing in the moment, whether it's pleasant, whether it's unpleasant, whether it's something ambitious, something difficult, something easy, you can make it your own by bringing your values in. Whether that is a workout or watching TV, like what would watching TV look like if you brought in your values, hope, adventure, self-care, whatever it might be? Suddenly the things that we do change just a little bit. And now you have this two-part combo and then I'll shut up about one of my favorite topics. You have your goals that orient you towards the future and you have the values that give you orientation in the here and now. How do I want to show up right here and now? And if they're set up really well, then your values are automatically going to lead you to the fulfillment of your goals as well. If my value is self-care and my goal is, I don't know, running a marathon, I don't know, they go hand in hand. I think for a lot of people, if they actually thought about their values in relation to watching television, I bet a lot of people would be turning that thing off and selling it. For myself, how I came to get to my values, and this came from Russ Harris' book, The Happiness Trap, where it is the easy thought experiment of what would you do if you were financially set, right? You have a hundred million dollars, what are you going to be doing? And of course, everyone's thoughts go to the vacation that they're going to take and how they're going to relax, but that only lasts so long. After you do all that, what are you going to do? What are the things that are important to you? For me, going through that exercise came to my values very easily. And then upon looking at those values and what my week looks like, and then recognizing if anything was not value-oriented and if it was adding to my life or was redundant or was left over from previous living where those values weren't set, I got rid of a lot of things. And then everything that was tied to my values became more important. They became more fun. They became the things that I was excited about because I recognized in those simple tasks, the value that I got from them. That's why they're so important. And it was easy to go from staring at the ceiling and ruminating and trying to figure things out, to wanting to go to bed early because I was excited because everything that I was doing the next day was tied to the things that allowed me to extract the most enjoyment out of life. And I think it's easy for a lot of us to default to goals because it's a destination. It feels good. There's a sense of accomplishment and a finality to it. So if you stretch to that goal, you reach it, you celebrate yourself, you feel victorious, that's all great. And I wish nothing more than success for everyone listening to the show. But we know that there will be roadblocks on the way to those goals. There will be friction. We're not setting goals that are easily achievable for ourselves if we're listening to this podcast. What happens in those moments where you encounter stress, you encounter a roadblock, maybe you encounter a family member who's ready to stack another thing on your plate even though you recognize that you don't want to be that white knight anymore and you need a boundary, you need to change your behavior. What do you do in that moment? We talked about this a little bit earlier, but that's a choice point. So you recognize you have a pattern. You recognize there's a chapter in your life that you want to rewrite from the past. And now we're living in that present moment. The goal is in the future. The goal is off in the distance. You want to get there. And oftentimes we'll just lean on discipline and motivation. And it would be wonderful if we were all David Goggins and we just had discipline and spades and we just had endless motivation like Tony Robbins. But a lot of us sometimes struggle with discipline in that moment or struggle with motivation. And we can't rely on either of those at this choice point of how I'm going to behave in this present moment based on the goal that's in the future and the friction I'm facing right now. And you can choose to default to that past pattern, default to that white knight in my case and just answer the phone and immediately offer help and drop everything else and kill yourself care and kill your goals and help your family member achieve their goals. Or you can choose to let go of that pattern, not be the white knight in this case and move towards your values of actually taking care of yourself, self-care, creating that boundary. We are constantly facing these choice points in our lives and goals are not the answer in these moments. Goals are not reachable for us in these moments. I wish they were. I wish we could add smooth sailing towards our goals, but we don't. And that's why the values conversation is so helpful in these choice point moments, right, Michael? Yeah, definitely. And there's something important to notice about these choice points as well. And taking a toward move, this is how Russ Harris phrased that going through a choice point, you can make a toward move, which means moving towards your goals, towards your values, towards the life you want, or in a way move from all of that. And dear listener, beware when you're making a toward move going through a choice point, it's going to be uncomfortable because now you're introducing the uncertainty that we talked about before. You do an a way move. You go back to your autopilot, old behavior. You know exactly what's going to happen. And while that's not the optimal outcome, it's a safe one. It's a sure one. It happened all the time. You know what's coming. Make a toward move towards the new life, the new page, the new actions you want to take. The uncertainty, welcome. This is part of it. And it's beautiful because there's possibility there. There's hope there. And something that I also want to prepare the listener for because we see this an unstoppable when we talk about choice points in the very first module. People recognize the choice points they missed at the end of the day. Or they would come to our Saturday Q&A and say, Michael, there are so many choice points and I saw them when they were passed. An hour later, I realized I had a choice in that moment. And I went with the old option. On Friday, I realized that on Monday, there was this great opportunity. And that is perfectly all right. Recognizing choice points at the beginning when you're still learning, when you're growing, when you're trying this out for the first time, it is totally normal to recognize these choice points when it's too late. And that's okay because that will happen once or twice. And the next time you're at the choice point, you're like, no, no, no. This one I know, I missed it twice, but now I saw it coming from a mile away and I'm ready for it. And recognize that these toward moves are going to have resistance from others. Oh, yeah. Again, going back to my example, just because I no longer want to be the white knight, there's resistance from my family members around me now choosing not to solve their problems, choosing not to put priority on their issues above everything else on my to-do list and the things that I need to do to be the best version of myself. And that resistance will be hard and it may result in me making an away move, defaulting back to that old pattern. But how I continue to show up in those choice points and choose to go toward my goals and orient my behaviors around my values, the more in alignment I am, the better I am at rewriting my old story. Now, this is important because it's counterintuitive, right? We think, as we talked about earlier, that it's delete, delete, delete, it's just edit, it's go back to the past, think about it, think positively about things that have been negatively in the past and it's rewritten. No, what actually happens is at these choice points, making towards move over time, I'm writing on that blank page who I am moving in my core values towards my goals and those behaviors then become the new story that ultimately overtakes the old story. And I don't remember all of my failures from middle school. I know Johnny has a silly story about his milk, but I don't remember all of those things. But I can tell you what's gone on over the last 10 years of my life we're constantly orienting ourselves around memories, but memories fade, memories get overwritten by future events and things that are happening to us in the here and now. And that's the more important part of this exercise. So now you're sitting there going great, AJ, but this one time I failed miserably in my PhD thesis presentation. And I've been holding onto this for 10 years now. And I'm recognizing choice points, but this is really painful part of my past. What do I do? The answer is self compassion. We have to recognize that those events as terrible as they were, they're unchangeable. But we can bring self compassion into the equation to how we think about our behaviors in those past moments, to now having the recognition around these patterns. I can give myself self compassion for being the white knight and dropping the ball on my own goals and letting down the people that I care about for my family. I can give myself compassion for choosing to act in ways that I thought in that moment were helpful for me, but actually were negatively impacting my life and the people that I love and care about. That's an important part of this equation. So we're not saying just completely ignore the past and forget about the past and shove it aside. We're recognizing that the past is still present. There's a blank page in front of you. There's a future to be written. We talked about how orienting around goals and values create choice points and allow you to take control of the pen as you write the future. But let's unpack what we can do around that self compassion side of things for those in our audience, Michael, who are struggling with those negative results and negative stories. Again, this negativity bias is just inherent to our brains and it kept us safe. You wanted to use the stick much more than the carrot, but we humans also had this weird ability to if I go through something I screwed up and my best buddy went through the same thing and screwed it up. I'm going to be really kind to that dude. He said, come on. You tried your best. It wasn't your day. Don't be so hard on yourself. It made sense that you reacted like this, but would I say the same thing to me? Oh, no. I really screwed this up. However good I am, such a bad person. Part of this self-compassion idea is to speak to yourself like you would to your best friend. What would you say? The idea here is also that you unearthed a couple of things that are part of that story. Maybe, okay, yeah, you screwed up your PhD defense. You screwed it up, but let's look at why. Well, you know, I really tried. I really tried. Okay, look, that's a new aspect. We haven't thought about this before. You really put the work in. You really worked hard and it wasn't your day. You didn't sleep well. You were a little bit sick. You prepared for the wrong questions. Look, that all makes sense. You tried your best, but it didn't work out. Or it might even be, hey, look, you had a bad day. You were lazy. You did see your mistake. Come on, like everyone screws up every once in a while, right? It's bringing that voice into the past story to find peace with that chapter that might bring up so much pain. I think it's very easy to see in real time with sports, right? When Tom Brady be as successful as he was, if he wasn't able to shake off bad interceptions during a game, and think about the other players, right? If he was ruminating on it or they noticed that he wasn't in the game because of what had happened, they're going to tell him, listen, shake that off. We got to go. It's time to move. And so when Michael says, talk to yourself like you're talking to your best friend, it's the same way. Shake it off. We got a game to play. And it's not, hey, Tom, I'm sorry that you did that. We only end up now go sit at the bench and figure out what had happened and how you're feeling about it and what you think you can do to do better. It's shake it off. We have a game to play. We're at choice point. We are going to move forward and move to the better. I think another example of this is for anyone that's ever been on a trip or an event with a friend who maybe had gotten dumped or is feeling down about himself. And you're like, we spent how many hours preparing this planning this getting fired up to be here and you're going to act like this. Shake it off. Let's go. We're here in the present. You can do all of that all you want later. But right now it's about having the time of our lives or doing what we need to do to get to where we need to go. And there is a future to be written for all of us. There's a blank page in front of you. So in recognizing that self compassion is one of the best ways to manage the patterns in the past that we recognize in ourselves. Bring those patterns to the forefront as you orient yourself around your goals of what you actually want to achieve in spite of that pattern you may have had. And the values, the other side of the coin of how you can show up in that present moment at these choice points. And now you're grabbing the pen at the choice point and you're writing the future chapters and you're narrating your movie that you're the star of in a meaningful way that actually creates the behavior change in your life that gets you closer to those goals if not achieve those goals faster. That is why it's so important to recognize it can be easy to fall into the trap of just holding on to the past and wanting to hit the delete button on these stories or you might be ruminating and trying to find other lenses that you can look at the story through to have a different viewpoint. But how does that impact you in the future choice point that's in front of you when you have to give another presentation, when your family members calling you desperately to handle their problem. Recognizing that pattern is not enough to break it. We have a choice in the matter and we want to help you here at the art of charm write the future in a way that lives out those values and goals that we all have for ourselves.