 G'day mate 40 here. So you've probably heard that the the first step in the 12 steps is we admitted we were powerless over sex and love, dating, under-earning, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, whatever. The first step is now we admit we were powerless. And so you often hear people in 12-step programs talking all the time about how they've got this mantra. I'm powerless over people, places, and things. And a lot of people just keep emphasizing how powerless they are. And so if I was to look back over the course of all my romantic relationships, I could objectively state that whatever power it takes to make good decisions in in matters of relationships and sex and love and romance does not reside within me. So I benefited from a 12-step approach. But you're not supposed to stay in powerlessness. The whole point of joining a 12-step program is to get power. Whether it's your power in a higher power in God, your belief in the power of the group, your belief in the power of the program, your belief in working 12 steps or just going to a meeting should fill you with power. The friendships that you make from belonging to 12-step programs are just a great way to gain a sense of power and mastery. Like a lot of people just terminally feel awkward around others. And I suddenly felt that way growing up. In eighth grade, I decided I wanted to be a journalist because that way I'd have an all-access pass to reality. I could go anywhere I wanted to be. I could just put myself in the middle of things because I had the journalist's path. I had an all-access pass to reality and I could just put myself in the very center of things. So that was really exciting to me. But it was kind of a cover for my own sense of awkwardness and lack of ease. So I had the power to go where I wanted to go, do what I want to do with whomever I want to do it to. But that was just a coping mechanism. But another excellent shortcut if you feel awkward around people I found is volunteering. So when you volunteer, you have a place to go, people to hang out with, you have a project higher than yourself. It's just a great way to bond with people. So you get to hang out with people who you otherwise would not hang out with and you'll probably spend a lot of time with them. You've got this common project that unites you. I've met a lot of people they've met through volunteering or just you make friends through volunteering or you start to feel at ease in your community because you've got a role to play in your community. You're giving back to your community. You're making things better. You're going to feel better about yourself. So all sorts of good things result from volunteering. It's a wonderful way to feel, you know, an increased sense of ease with yourself and with others and to make connections. And when you connect with people and when you succeed, that gives you a sense of power and mastery. And then these things multiply. They can turn into a forced multiplier. Once you build a friendship or two, that gives you more confidence, more power. It helps you get new insights on to your life. It expands your social circle. It can expand your connections for business. All sorts of wonderful things result once you make friends. So I love this expression, the forced multiplier. You can develop new habits such as getting up early, taking a cold shower, exercise, things like that, the way you make one change in your habits. And then as a forced multiplier, it just kind of ripples through your life. So the whole point of a 12 step program is not to stay in the sense of the powerlessness, but rather you want to gain a sense of mastery. So there's a good, good article in the New York Times today, I just read this article and I thought, Oh, just do a quick, quick video on it, how to lower your child's risk for addiction, strong sense of self efficacy, one of the most powerful protective factors parents can give their children. So what the heck is self efficacy? So it's basically the ability and belief in your own ability to succeed. Now, for me, that would not mean succeeding as a singer, right? I don't have any talents as a singer. So this is belief in your ability to succeed in things where you do have the ability to succeed. I'm never going to be a fast runner due to the shape of my feet. I'm just never going to be a fast runner. But self efficacy, it's your belief in your ability to succeed at things that you should be able to succeed in your ability to regulate your thoughts. So your thoughts aren't driving you crazy to regulate your emotions. So your emotions aren't taking you out of control, and to essentially navigate your life and to cope with challenges that come up. So we may be powerless over other people, but there are things that we can do that predispose us to getting along better with others. And we're dealing with more ease. When other people don't behave as we would want them to, for example, if you're stuck in traffic, you know, getting really angry about it, that's not a life that works. But if you put on an audible book or you listen to music or your daydream, and as long as you're finding joy in life, and in challenging situations, right, that's that will give you a sense of self efficacy. So self efficacy builds resilience, grit, fortitude, perseverance gives gives you a sense of control over your life to the extent that you do control things. So I've always had a life where I've almost never had a regular commute longer than 20 minutes. Because when you have a commute, when you kind of be unpredictably stuck in traffic for long periods of time, the more things that you have going on that are completely out of your control, like, like traffic and being stuck in a long commute, that can be an absolute nightmare. So I always place the premium on a short commute. I don't want to be stuck in traffic for hours a day. But having like a sense of control agency and hope, right. So many people, if they're capable, enjoy working for themselves, because they feel like they have more, more control, more agency in directing their own business. But if you have this weak sense of self efficacy, right, you don't know how to regulate your emotions, thoughts, behaviors, right, people like this tend to be pessimistic, they tend to be inflexible, they don't get along with other people, they're very quick to give up, they, they feel bad about themselves. And then they exhibit learned helplessness, right? Employees often say, you know, I can't do something because if they prove they're capable, then they'll be given more of that work. And they're just showing up work trying to do as little as possible for their paycheck. So the average employee seems like they want to do as little work as possible. And the average employer is like the incentives are for them to try to extract as much work as possible from, from the employee. So people who exhibit this learned helplessness, who suffer from depression, right, they often feel fatalistic, hopeless, right, being pessimistic, showing learned helplessness, being inflexible, being quick to give up, having a very, you know, low sense of self, low self esteem, you know, feeling badly about yourself, just suspecting that nobody's going to like you if they really get to know you, right, this, this will just spiral to, you know, a fatal, fatalistic and hopeless and likely addictive approach to, to life, to lack of self efficacy, lack of an ability to regulate yourself, you know, predisposes people to addictions, because when you don't feel like you can regulate yourself, your turn to alcohol, the use of pornography or dating or online spending, or these, these other addictions to try to regulate your feelings that you can't otherwise handle. So you may feel absolutely impotent and like a total loser and an insult in life. So you like to, you know, watch pornography for an hour a day, because then in your pornographic fantasy, you feel like you're really controlling things that, that you're the man. And these bitches are going to do what you want them to do. So life is a spiral staircase. We're always going to be one of four modes. We're going to be in a mode of feeling small in a big world. Like we will inevitably feel lonely at times, lonely and lost, inevitable. You never completely leave that. Other times we're always going to have times when we're, we're helpless and dependent. So our back might go out, we might get sick, we might get injured. All right, we might have all sorts of things happen to us where we then become helpless and depend on others. Like there's nothing we can do that prevent these possibilities. We're all going to grow old and fragile. Then there's another mode of mastery where we develop new skills. So particularly as a kid, when you learn new skills and you excel at tennis or reading or math, it really builds up your sense of self. And then the next mode of life that we're going to continually cycle back into is grandiosity, where we get an inflated sense of self, because as long as we're living in our subjective head, when we're just thinking about our own desires and wishes and fantasies about our self, we're going to inevitably develop an absurd, exaggerated sense of our own abilities and our own importance. So whatever mode you're in, there's one thing that you can always do. You can always work on mastery. You can always learn new skills. So even when I've been sick or my back's gone out and I've been lying in bed, I can listen to audible books or, you know, online courses, etc. So I just love this notion of self-efficacy. It's the foundation of human motivation while being an accomplishment. So it's the belief in one's own capacity to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations. So it's your belief in your ability to succeed in a particular situation. So it's these beliefs that determine then how you think, behave and feel. So it comes from a psychologist, Albert Bandura, and his seminal 1977 paper, Self-Efficacy Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change. It's one of the most studied topics in all of psychology because it's a forced multiplier, right? It affects everything from your psychological state, your emotions, to your behavior, to your motivation. Like our belief in our own ability to succeed plays a huge role in how we think, how we feel, how we act, where we see ourselves in the world. It also determines what goals we choose, how we go about accomplishing those goals and how we reflect upon our own level of performance. So yeah, I'm going to throw down links. So what is self efficacy? So you can just Google the topic self efficacy. It's perhaps the most talked about area in psychology. So we all, I think everyone has goals, right? Things that we want to accomplish, things that we'd like to change, and we have ideas about how we're going to achieve our goals. But putting these into action is not always so simple. So it's our self efficacy that plays a major role in determining our goals, our tasks, our challenges and how we go about reaching our goals. So if you have a strong sense of self efficacy, your own ability to regulate your emotions and to detect reality, you're going to develop much deeper interest in the activities that you participate in, such as your work. You're going to form a stronger sense of commitment to your goals and activities. You're going to recover much more quickly from setbacks and disappointments. And you're going to view challenging problems as tasks to be mastered. So for example, I've always had this fear of learning new technology. So even though I've been using computers since about 1981, I've often had this fear that it's going to be hard, that something's going to go wrong. And so the intensity of this fear, you know, freaking out over technological problems makes it more difficult for me to learn new software. But through writing about, okay, how does this fear serve me? Well, it prompts me to concentrate on the things that I'm good at and to stay away from things that I'm not good at. It conserves my time. So I stay away from spending hours trying to hook up a printer. Then how does the fear hurt me, makes my life smaller and makes me less competent and capable? Then how would I benefit from being in the opposite of the fear, which is faith and generosity? I want to learn new skills to improve my life and the lives of people around me. So with this new improved attitude, I was able to learn the basics of OBS for live streams in about an hour. So I use Streamlabs OBS. And so usually when I'm live streaming, I'm able to play, you know, media from all sorts of different sources. Right now, I'm just doing the show from my phone. But by developing myself efficacy, it's been much easier for me to learn new software skills and to reach out for help, such as with my audio problems. I finally, about six months ago, paid some dude $500 just to tutor me through my audio issues. So we usually develop our sense of self efficacy and early childhood. We have a variety of experiences, tasks and situations. And we can keep building it throughout our lives. The most effective way of developing strong sense of self efficacy is through mastery, right? We can always start mastering things. Performing a task strengthens our sense of self efficacy. Like that's the idea of stacking wins as you go through the day. So I wake up at 5 30am, I get out of bed, I make my bed, I get in the cold shower, I take my supplements, I get on a 12 step meeting, I have my sponsors lined up, and then I get to work, I make money. And so I've done all these good things by say, 9am, you know, I feel great, because I'm just stacking win after win after when. So witnessing other people successfully completing tasks is another important sense of self efficacy, having friends and community being part of a 12 step program. Seeing people similar to yourself succeed, right? By sustained effort that raises our belief that we too possess the capability to master comparable activities to succeed. Then people can be persuaded that they have the skills and capabilities to succeed. So listening to motivational talks or belonging to communities where more and more people say buying Bitcoin and succeeding, if you belong to a community, you can patronize each other's businesses. So you can, you've often probably had the experience, you've said something positive to someone, you've really cheered them up, you've encouraged them and you've helped them to achieve a goal. So when we have other people in our lives, they can cheer us up and encourage us to achieve our goals. So getting verbal encouragement, giving verbal encouragement helps us, helps other people overcome self doubt and helps us all give our best effort to the task at hand. Then our own responses and emotional reactions to situations play a big role on self efficacy. So our moods, our emotional states, our physical reactions, our stress levels all impact how a person feels about their abilities in a particular situation. So if you just simply change your emotion, if you like smile, right, that usually gives you some kind of endorphin rush. And like you listen to some music that really speaks to you, just changing your emotions can change your capability at dealing with a task. So I often like to have music playing through the day music. I have like a playlist of music that energizes me and makes me feel good. So if I became extremely nervous before doing a live stream, that would make my live stream suck. But on the other hand, if I came to a live stream with just the same level of energy that I'd come to a phone call or a zoom call with a friend, the live stream was sucked to. I need to come to this live stream with at least five times the amount of energy that I'd bring to a daily conversation. So I need energy enthusiasm to make a live stream pop. So it's not the sheer intensity of emotional and physical reactions that is important, but it's how they are perceived and interpreted by. So by learning to navigate through life, learning to minimize stress, to elevate our mood, having things that will make us feel better, such as food, you know, drink, stuff that's healthy practices, cold shower, you know, exercise, getting some sunshine, quality of sleep. For me, my daffodils, certain supplements, my Fisher Wallace device just zapped away my underlying depression and anxiety and improve the quality of my sleep. So if you just change your mood, change your energy level, it will completely change your performance. So when I do a live stream like this, when I have more sleep, it's going to be a bit of a live stream when I have more energy, when I have more enthusiasm, when I have more power, more sense of self efficacy, these things just build on each other for a small supplier. So what exactly does high self efficacy look like? So if you're struggling with a chronic illness, but you feel confident that you can get back on track and improve your health by working hard and following good directions, all right? If you feel confident that you will be able to study and learn information to pass a test and you take a new job and you feel confident that you can ask for help from certain people so that you can develop all the skills that you need to succeed at your job. So having a strong sense of self efficacy, it can help you quit bad habits such as using porn or smoking or excessive drinking. And it just maintains that you're happy person, right? You can remain optimistic and confident in your abilities even when things are difficult. So individuals with high self efficacy, when they're having difficulties and challenges, they're still interested in the tasks ahead. Difficulties and failures don't mean inevitable defeat. It just means that perhaps we need to learn a new way of doing things. People who are low in self efficacy tend to get discouraged very easily, to give up very easily, to settle. They avoid setting goals and the goals that they do have. They just show a low level of commitment. When setbacks happen, they give up easily. Stressful situations freak them out. So here's a way to evaluate your level of self efficacy. Feel like you can handle problems if you work hard and study hard and get help. You're confident in your ability to achieve your realistic goals. You feel like you can manage unexpected events that come up. You're able to bounce back fairly quickly after stressful events. You feel like you can come out with solutions when you're facing a problem. You're able to keep trying when you at first have difficulty and are not succeeding. You're able to stay calm in the face of chaos. You perform well under pressure. You tend to focus on your progress rather than getting overwhelmed by all you still have to do. Do you believe that hard work appropriately directed will eventually pay off? So if you answer yes to most of these questions, then you have a strong sense of self efficacy. So one of the key ways to build on your self efficacy is to celebrate your successes. So you just do a lot of work in the yard. You take time to appreciate all your good work. You clean your room, take a little time to appreciate your work. You clean up your computer, get rid of unnecessary files, free up memory on your computer. You can feel good about your good work. So when you succeed, you can build on that and you can develop a sense of self belief and self efficacy. And then you also can learn a tremendous amount by observing other people, particularly people like yourselves who put in effort and succeed, particularly people most similar to yourself, getting positive feedback and contributing positive feedback. And noticing your thoughts and emotions journaling, staying when you journal, you're getting a window to your soul, a window to your mind.