 Do you ever feel hopeless in terms of achieving your goal? By goal I'm talking about anything like your career, your financial growth, maybe a business you're trying to launch and you feel like it's hopeless is not going to go anywhere. I'm going to talk about a really useful concept to keep in mind that will help you let go of that feeling of hopelessness. That's what this video is about. This is a big issue because most of our life is about personal growth. When I talk about personal growth, it's a growth over which you have pretty much complete control. Think of something like exercise or something like learning a musical instrument or any kind of skill that you're trying to develop in isolation. Even when I talk about here on this channel, which is the inner work that we do, that's kind of like personal growth. Outside of that, we enter the social sphere and that can be trying to launch a business that could be trying to get your career going, it could be trying to make more money, any of those things. We can experience helplessness or hopelessness in both of those spheres. If we understand the rate of growth expectation in either in both the personal and the social sphere, it makes things a lot easier. What I'm talking about is this. I want you to imagine a graph and here's your access on the graph. This relates to your personal growth, things over which you have complete control. Let's say exercise. You haven't exercised for years and you decide, one day I'm going to start to exercise. It's an area in my personal growth I'm going to work on. Here's your graph and you will notice that over the first few weeks, your progress is going up very rapidly. Every time you exercise, you can do a little bit more weight. You can do a few more reps. Maybe you can run a few minutes extra each time you're doing it. You're getting faster. You're getting fitter. Your muscle is developing. Your stamina is developing. Notice that over week after week, you see this trajectory of, wow, this is amazing. It's getting better and better and better. Over a period of time though, your view has gone past the average mark and now after that point it tapers off significantly and you're still improving but every improvement is marginal. The graph looks like this. It goes rapidly up and then it goes across like this, personal growth, personal development. When you enter the social sphere, it is completely the other way around and this leads into a lot of hopelessness that we can feel when we're on this journey, okay? Be that a career, a business, whatever it is you're trying to do. In the social sphere, what happens is you start off at zero. Here's your graph again. You start off at zero and your growth is tiny and it is tiny, tiny incremental growth for a long, long time and eventually you start to get noticed maybe and people start to see what you've done. It gradually starts to go up and up but you get to a certain point where your growth now becomes very, very exponential. It goes up and up and up much faster. So completely different. If we bring the same expectations for growth from our personal sphere into the social sphere, we are inevitably going to feel hopeless. What I'm saying here in this video is don't give up. Don't expect dramatic things to happen for a while. Okay, and that can take a long period of time. What you have to focus on is your process, is doing the inner work, fight it because it's these feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that make us think, well, this isn't going anywhere when we're on this lower end of the graph, right? If we can do the inner work, we will not give up and eventually things start to take off for us. So it's so easy to miss this because intuitively we're used to the personal trajectory, the growth trajectory in the personal sphere. That's what intuitively we feel it should be like. But it isn't like that in the social sphere. So doing the work to calm down that inner critic that again all it ever tries to do is keep it safe but it's very excessive. So we need to learn to calm it down. We need to feel good. We need to calm our nervous system. We need to reset the nervous system periodically so that doesn't get overwhelmed by this. But we have to start kind of welcoming up this as an inevitable part of the growth process, the journey. It's going to happen. We're going to inevitably feel some kind of helplessness. But it's very easy to let it go once you are aware of what reality is like, what the expectations should be in this. I saw an interview recently from the comedian Pilper. He was talking about something kind of like this and he said he was talking about young people coming into making podcasts into that arena and there's many like gatekeepers and big organizations that would promise these young people loads and loads of things to get them started. In other words to avoid this long drawn out process of growth and he says if you can at all avoid those guys because they can't really do anything for you anyway. And once you do get to that point of massive growth all those gatekeepers or those people who are giving you that initial boost are just going to become problematic for you. So you're as well off just hanging in there and just enjoying that process if you can until you start to take off. But it seems appealing to begin with because we don't like this long slow gradual process. For us it's the same. Avoid anyone that's kind of showing you shortcuts. It's not supposed to be a shortcut. Anything worth doing in life is going to be a long journey. But think about how much more satisfying it's going to be if you do hang in there and you get to the point where you start to see something that you've created, you've worked on, take off. This is how it's supposed to be. There's no problem with this. Okay, it's okay to feel sometimes afraid, sometimes dejected, sometimes hopeless. But learn how to quiet that inner critic. Do the inner work and it makes that experience much, much more bearable and even enjoyable. Okay, we start to look forward to when we see this part of the journey. Hope that was helpful guys and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.