 Everyone has a calling to do something or to be someone. There is a small voice, a gut hunch, just a little whisper. Now, the problem is most people ignore that whisper, but a select few, they listen. Now, in my opinion, listening to that little whisper is the secret to both success and fulfillment in your life. What's up, guys? Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk. Now, I've put together a free seven-day self-growth challenge. It's the first link right below this video. It'll help you figure out what one specific habit is you can do every day to live a better life. So check it out right below the video. The world wants you to be the same as everyone else and to do the same as everyone else does. But in my opinion, you should ignore the world and be you. So when I was young, I was obsessed with reading the stories of these mystics, these holy people, and physicians. So while all the other little boys were chasing after girls or even learning about girls, I'm over here nerding out, reading about Merlin, and reading stories like Lord of the Rings. And I just was caught up in this fantasy world where medical esotericism meets mysticism. So in my mind, the perfect person I would love to be a apprentice to was a mystic, right? The problem is as I got older, when I said I wanna go into integrative medicine or alternative medicine, this is young, my early teens. I already had the calling, I already had the dream. But when I would speak to parents or authority figures or teachers, they would always sort of give me that quizzical look like, are you sure you wanna do that? Like is that what you really wanna do? Does that stuff work? Is there any money in that? Are you gonna be able to pay your bills? And so inevitably what happened to me is what happens to everybody or most people. You have a dream, you have a calling, there is a vocation, you're listening to that voice. And then you get to a certain age as an adult where suddenly the voice of society tells you that you shouldn't be who you are. You shouldn't do what you actually wanna do. And so you settle down. And you end up being a realistic, ordinary person. They want you to be normal, right? They want you to just go to school, get your job, get married, 2.5 kids, white picket fence life, don't make too much drama, don't stir things up. Just do what I told you to do, kid, all right? But that voice is still inside you, right? It's loudest when we're young. And as we get older, it gets silenced more and more and more unless you listen to it. And for me, that came to a really a crescendo in my early 20s where after working a job as a high school teacher in New York as a teaching assistant, I realized that I'm gonna do this for the next 40 years of my life. And that's the end of life. Like I'm 22, this is the end game of life. It's never gonna get any better than this. Same job, same car, same blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nothing, those dreams I had when I was young, they're never ever gonna happen. They're never ever gonna come to fruition. Screw that. So it came to a peak at around 22 or 23. Now, the next year, I bought a one-way ticket to live in China. That's not normal, I realize, but the point was that I had reached that kind of impasse where it was my soul meeting reality and the voices of the people that wanted me to stay in reality. And it created the sort of friction or a kind of pressure within me where I was realizing that this way goes this way and my soul's going that way and they're not going in the same direction. They're going almost in opposite directions, right? They're going in different trajectories and it's time to choose. And wisely, I made the decision to listen to that voice and to trust my gut. Martha Beck has this great set of terms that she calls the social self and the essential self. So she's a Harvard-trained, I think, therapist or a psychologist and she calls the essential self really the gut or intuitive self. That's the little kid that wants to be the artist. That's the little kid that wants to be the athlete. That's the little kid that wants to go travel and be a writer. Then there's the social self. The social self is the kid that responds to the social pressure around him or her. That's the kid that is really a writer but becomes a doctor because mom said, writers don't make any money. There's no respect, just being a doctor, right? So you become a doctor. The social self is the one that said, you know, I really want to be, I don't know, a police officer and your dad's like, no, no, no. They don't make that much money and it's too risky. Just go be an accountant or go be a finance guy. You're going to make your safe, secure 70K and everything's going to be good. So your essential self is the real you. It's the dreams, the hopes, the things you've always wanted to do and the social self is who you think you should be, who your mom wants you to be, who society wants you to be, who your professors want you to be. But that's not you. And depending on your upbringing and your self-esteem and your courage and your fear, most people will gravitate towards being their social self which is not the real you. It's the socially safe self that doesn't fear being ostracized or being different or being other than the tribe, right? But your essential self, that's where the magic happens. So listening to your essential self is difficult for one main reason. Because of the fear of being ostracized, of being othered, right? If you're the only one in your family that decides to be an artist in a family full of surgeons, you're going to be ostracized unless you're dating the world's wisest surgeons that are like, you know what, Clarice, do you. That's all good. But that realistically doesn't happen because I know tons of friends from those families and it's rare that if you do something different from the mass, the society, your family, usually you're met with sideways glasses, skepticism, what are you doing, that stupid criticism judgment and it makes you feel like the black sheep. It makes you feel like you're on the edges of society. Like you've been excommunicated or exiled. And that's why so many people play it safe and don't do what they actually want to do. Now the ultimate decision and the ultimate mark of courage is making the decision to be yourself in a world that frankly doesn't really want you to be you. Your world wants you to be like everybody else because that is safe and secure and you're not stirring anything up. So while the world is saying don't be yourself, I say F that, be Rocky Road in a world full of vanilla people because at the end of the day, when you become your true self, you have a courage and a confidence and a success eventually that inspires every other person long after they're done resenting you and you will inspire them to go after their biggest dreams and the things that they've always wanted. So listen to your essential self, take the risk of being your true self and I promise you magic will happen. All right guys, check out the free seven day self growth challenge. I have related videos on the same topic and I'll see you soon.