 I always say a brain that is left up to its own devices is going to find something wrong. Your brain is naturally going to be negative if you're like most people, which means that you're going to have to work harder to be positive. There's nobody in control of your life internally and externally except for you. We're going to talk about why negative thoughts exist in the first place. I've got a lot of opinions on this. I've also got some, I guess some, I wouldn't say it, empirical data, but I've got a lot of data from working with thousands of people. I would say it's a little bit of nature. It's a little bit of nurture as to why our negative thoughts exist. I actually think that as we get older, as we have more responsibilities, that people actually, it is more natural to be negative. That's the first thing I want you to realize. If you're negative as hell, it might actually not be your fault. It might just be natural, but it doesn't mean that you can't change it. It doesn't mean that you have to stay that way. The reason why I think that it's natural is because your brain is always searching for what is wrong so that it can keep you safe because think about this for a second. If your brain is sitting out there and it's saying, okay, you know, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, it's trying to figure out what's wrong around you so that it can keep you safe at all points of time. Your brain is just a problem-solving mechanism. That's all that it does. It's constantly looking for what is wrong so that it can solve it so that it can keep you alive because something that's wrong automatically needs to be solved and therefore you're safe. The thing about it though is that you're safe right now. As you're listening to me right now, you are safe. There's nothing that is immediate danger that's right in front of you. We all know that. When there's no immediate danger that's right in front of you, your brain is going to search for something still. I always say a brain that is left up to its own devices is going to find something wrong. We've all done this before. You've been sitting around, nothing's wrong, you're just hanging out, and immediately you start getting these bad thoughts, these bad feelings, and it becomes a cyclone of shit. You could call it. You go from everything's amazing to, oh my god, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. Your brain starts searching for what's wrong because it thinks that it needs to keep you safe. A brain left to its own devices will find something that's wrong. Finding something that's wrong and searching for something that's wrong, we would call negative. It searches for what is negative. When you look at a child, children aren't really negative, but as you tend to get older, you've got more responsibilities, you've got to pay for your bills, you've got to keep yourself alive. When you're a child, you're not in charge of your safety. There's somebody that's really taking care of your safety, so you can kind of just be free. But as you get older, safety is something that you become in charge of, so you have to start focusing on, okay, I've got to start finding ways to be safe, to protect myself, and as you do that, your brain starts looking for things that are negative. Now that we know why you're negative, and know that you're not weird if you're negative, and know that it's natural, know that it can be changed, how do we change this? Knowing that all of this is the case. We can let it run rampant, and we can let our brain go crazy, and just be negative, and get anxiety, and stress, and worry, and fear, or we can decide that we want to control it. I always give people an example, it kind of blows our mind when they think about it, but you know, if I'm sitting here, for those of you guys that are watching through video, those of you guys in the podcast listening, you're not going to be able to see this, but if I'm sitting here and my arm starts flying all over the place and moving all kinds of crazy, you'd be looking at me going, what the hell is wrong with Rob's arm? Like, he needs to control it, right? Actually, because I should be controlling my arm, why? Because it's part of my body, like, if my arm was just, we had just arms that were just going all weird and crazy, that'd be kind of odd, wouldn't it? Because we control our body. What's the difference between me not being able to control my arm, and me not being able to control my brain? The difference is we think that our brain isn't something that can be controlled. Let's talk about how to not let your mind run rampant, and how to actually change the negative thoughts inside of your head. Two ways to do it. Two ways. And if you can master these two ways, it's going to help you out a lot. One is you've got to do it through your mind. My favorite is thinking of your mind as a garden. There's a book called As in Man Thinketh, it's like a hundred years old at this point. And he gives this example as your mind, as if your mind is a garden. And an easy way to think of it is this. Let's say that your mind is a garden, and you're the only person that can tend to this garden. There's nobody else in the world that can tend to this garden. It's set for you. You know that if you had strawberry seeds and you went and you planted these strawberry seeds in all of their perfect places and you watered them and you make sure they got sun. If you plant all these strawberry seeds, they start to grow. You see the little green guys come out of the ground and eventually you're like, oh my gosh, it's going to happen. You would never expect that you're going to get tomatoes from that, right? You never expect that. You know if you plant strawberry seeds, you're going to get strawberries. You're not going to get tomatoes. So how could you possibly think that if you're thinking negative thoughts, negative thoughts, negative thoughts all day long, that you're just going to eventually have a beautiful, positive mind, beautiful, positive life? That your first thought isn't going to be negative. How crazy would it be for me to have negative thoughts all day long and then something happens to me and then I get mad and surprised that I have a negative first thought? No, it's like I planted those negative thoughts. I'm going to get more negative thoughts. I'm going to reap what I sow. Same way that I can never expect to just think negative all day long and then just have beautiful positive thoughts that just come out of it, right? Same way that I can't expect to plant strawberries. I'm going to get tomatoes. So imagine that you're the only one that's in control of this garden, right? The other thing to think about is this. If you're the only one that's in control of this garden, eventually you know what's going to grow, right? Anybody who's ever planted anything, if you have property, we have property here. Freakin' weeds, they just grow, right? Weeds are going to grow, but you're the only one that can tend to this garden. So you can let those weeds grow. More negative thoughts by themselves just popping up. That's the equivalent of negative thoughts coming up. Or you can pluck them as soon as they start coming up. You start pulling all of those weeds. You're the only one that can control it. So if the weeds pop up and it starts overflowing and you get too many weeds, that's your fault. There's no one else that can do it. So when the weed pops up, you pull it, throw it away. Pops up, pull it, throw it away. Same exact thing for the negative thoughts that pop up your head. Whenever a weed does grow, you've got to get rid of it. Weeds are going to grow in any garden, of course. But you can either pull them or you can leave them. And you have to make sure if you're the only that keeps control of your garden, you must keep it as clean as you possibly can. Anytime a negative thought or a weed pops up, you've got to get rid of it as soon as you possibly can. If you're somebody who judges people, you've heard me say this before. I've had this problem for years where it's just like, I don't even know where that thought came from. Who the hell made that thought? I don't want to judge this person in front of me. So if I notice myself judging, I've immediately got to, if that first thought pops up as judgment. I've got to look at that person. I've got to, in my head, I've got to say three positive things about them. Why it's like pulling a weed, right? If I get cut off in a car, I can get pissed off. And I've gotten pissed off many times. I need to immediately notice when those feelings start to arise to switch my mindset around it. And what do I usually do? Try to make it funny. And I go, ah, that person's probably got a poop. So I go from being pissed to he's got a poop. And it makes me laugh. And I'm like, ah, whatever. I just, what am I doing? I'm changing my state. I'm changing my mindset around what happened. I'm just like, this person cut me off. That's so dangerous. What are they doing as if I've never cut somebody off in my entire life? What a freaking, you know, what a liar I am in my own head of like, oh, that person put me in danger. That's what I'm thinking as if I've never cut somebody off is we've never cut somebody off, right? We're always perfect in our own heads when there's someone else doing something wrong. So if someone cuts me off, instead of being pissed off, I got to switch my mindset. I've got to pull that weed. Maybe they got a poop, right? Your mind is like a wild monkey just jumping around breaking shit. And they're going to jump around and break stuff until you decide that you're going to put in a cage. So when you notice that your mind is doing stuff that you don't want it to do, you are the person that has to put in cage. It can continue to keep breaking glass and throwing stuff all over the place and taking its poop and throwing it at people that walk in or you can take that monkey, you can put inside the cage and you can say, I am the one in control. And that is when you start to take your power back. So that's the first thing you've got to take your mind and you've got to focus on getting the negative thoughts out through your mind. The other way of how to change your negative thoughts, second thing is through your body. So really interesting study that Harvard did found that when people change their physiology, their thoughts and their feelings change as well. Simply changing the way, I want you to be aware of this right now. How are you sitting? Are you sitting in your state the way that you're sitting? You're now aware of it, aren't you? Literally, side to camera, Chris, my videographer just shifted her body because she became aware of the fact that she was slouching a little bit. Now you got to ask yourself, we all slouch, all of us do, it's we're on computers, we're driving, we're all of those things, but if we're slouching as often as we are, is slouching a weak or a powerful position? We all know it's a weak position, right? So we've got to become aware of our physical body. Our physical body will actually change the chemicals in our body and the chemicals in our brain. They found at Harvard that if you put your hands in a, it's called a power position, you've heard of power position most likely, put your hands on your waist and you stand there and breathe deep for two minutes, it will actually lower the cortisol, which is a stress hormone inside of your body and it will actually release dopamine, which is the motivation chemical inside of your body, right? So it will lower the bad chemicals, it will raise the better chemicals. So how do we start to change our thoughts? We start to change what we feel. We also change our body. Let me give you an example. Let's say that I want you to think of somebody who is depressed, right? Not somebody that you know, but I want you to see what somebody looks like that's depressed. Think of him as a cartoon. There's a depressed cartoon. It's a human. What does he look like? Well, I bet we could all say the same thing. Shoulders are down, the head is probably down. If you think of how they're talking, they're probably talking slow, they're probably talking low and they're slumped over and that's just the way that they look and we all know the physiology of depressed bodies, right? A depressed or anxious person or sad person. We know the physiology of what that person would look like. Now, if I said describe somebody that's walking into a room confident, what do they look like? And see that person inside of your head. They're standing straight, their chin is up, their shoulders are back, they're probably talking louder. They're probably talking with confidence. You can hear it, the boom in their voice, right? We know the difference between looking at somebody who is sad and depressed and looking at somebody who is confident and, you know, excited. We know the difference between the two of those. So when you think about your physical body and wanting to shift your thoughts, you can shift your thoughts in your mind, yes, but you also need to shift your body to realize that your body is actually controlling the way that you think, the way that you feel, the chemicals that are going on inside of your body. Explain to me, if I were to say, hey, take a pen and paper, write down everything that you would see in a happy person, right? What would it be? They would be standing up straight, they'd probably have their shoulders back, there'd be a smile on their face. Why is that important? Why is this important? Because your physiology will literally change the chemicals in your brain. So when you notice yourself, I always notice myself and I'm like, dude, my posture sucks. Why am I sitting like this, right? Immediately, I'm like, all right, this posture is not a power posture. Let me try to put myself into a powerful position knowing that when I do this and stay there and breathe deep, I'm actually going to change the chemicals in my brain. I'm gonna change the chemicals in my body, which then puts me into a place of power. And when I'm in a place of power, am I thinking negative? No, I'm thinking positive. I'm thinking powerfully. I'm gonna dominate this task that I have to do. I'm gonna go up and I'm gonna give this talk and I'm gonna give the best talk that I possibly can. If you notice, you're about to, if you're really nervous about something, you're about to go give a speech in front of your company and you maybe have to present something. Think of your physiology. What's your physiology? Like, you gotta change it. Change your state will change everything about you. So you're like, all right, let me get into a power posture, let me get my chin up, let me get my back straight, let me get my shoulders back, let me talk a little bit louder, let me breathe deeper, let me put my hands on my hips and let me breathe for two minutes. And you know what I'm gonna do? I'm also gonna talk positively to myself. I'm gonna look myself in the mirror as I do this. I'm gonna look myself dead in the eyes and be like, you're a badass. You're amazing. You have so many great accomplishments. You're so great. Whatever it is you need to say. You don't usually feel like after a great workout, do you? No, you're motivated, you're inspired, you got ideas running through your head. You usually feel like when you've been sitting on the couch all day long, not moving your body, not making your physiology, not making something happen. I was listening to an interview because I'm interviewing George St. Pierre pretty soon, which you guys will be hearing, which is awesome. He is the ex-UFC fighter who is an actual champion in multiple divisions, multiple weight classes, considered one of the best fighters that's ever lived. And the interesting thing about it is he says he hates fighting. He would get really anxious and really fearful right before he's about to go into a fight because he doesn't know what's about to happen. He's about to go into a fight in a cage. This guy could knock him out. They could break his nose. He could be covered in blood. There's so much unknown going into a cage fight where someone's just there to try to knock you out. That is the most unknown situation possibly for all of mankind, right? So there's a lot of fear and anxiety we're feeling. And so he said he had to literally before he would go and walk in, he would have to look himself in the mirror. He'd have to fix his physiology. You have to look himself dead in the eyes and you have to start giving himself affirmations. Start talking positive in yourself. You're faster than this guy. You're more powerful than this guy. You've been training harder than this guy. You're going to win. You're going to win. You're going to win. He had to literally start to talk to himself. And as he said, become a different person. And he would be that person up until the bell, the final bell was done and someone's hand was raised. He would make himself become a different person mentally through his mind and physically through his body. So next time you start to feel negative thoughts, you start to feel down. You start to feel unmotivated. Change your mind, change your thoughts. And then number two, change your body, change your physiology. All too often, I see people sit back and say, my life is the way that it is because of something. And that something always tends to be something outside of them. And then they're like, oh, you know, it's my circumstances. It's my parents. It's the way I was raised. It's my family. It's my past. It's my children's fault. It's the president's fault. It's the government's fault. And they blame everything on something externally. And one of the biggest things, the biggest thing that I learned from my very first mentor when I was 19 years old is that if I want to change my life, I need to take everything that's happening and just blame it on myself in a good way. Not in a bad way, not in a way to make me feel bad, but in a way of going, you know what? If everything is my fault, it then empowers me to know that I am the one that's fully in control of my life. Because what you think in your head, you will get in reality. So if you're a negative person, you have negative thoughts all day long, what you think in your head, you will get in reality. If you are negative all day long, I guarantee you, you are gonna find more negative things in your life all day. You literally create your reality. Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system. If you've never heard me talk about this, this is super interesting. The reticular activating system is your brain's filtering system. And so at one point in time, there's approximately two trillion bits of information per second that your brain could latch on to and have come into its awareness. But your brain filters out everything except for 200 bits of information per second. This is why if you go and you buy a new car, you never see that car. And then you buy it, and you're like, holy crap, this car is everywhere. I had an experience not too long ago, someone that I knew from middle school passed away. And I went back onto his Facebook and I was looking through some of his pictures and seeing what he was doing and see what his life was. And I didn't know anything about it. I haven't talked to him like 17, 18 years. And I saw a picture of somebody that I haven't seen in a while. His name's Ryan. I was pretty good friends with Ryan back in middle school. And I didn't thought about him in like 17, 18 years. And then the very next day, I was at a coffee shop. And I was working, getting my stuff done. And I look up and I see a guy with a dog walking into the coffee shop. I was outside of the coffee shop. And I was like, oh my God, that's Ryan. I haven't seen him in so long. And then he turned around and I saw his face again. I was like, oh, that isn't Ryan. And I was so surprised because I realized that my reticular activating system, because I had seen a picture of Ryan the day before, saw him that day in somebody that wasn't actually him, even though I hadn't thought about him in 17, 18 years. So what happens is the same way that I'm gonna start seeing a car that I haven't seen before, the same way that I'm going to see somebody that I haven't seen in 17, 18 years and someone that's actually not them, if I'm setting my reticular activating system on what sucks in my life, if I'm setting it on all of the things that are negative in my life, I'm gonna start to notice more negative things, which means like I said, you literally create your own reality. If I'm waking up and immediately going to what sucks, I'm negative, this day sucks, I don't wanna be awake, then I'm going to create more negative things by just having negativity in my awareness. If that negativity is circling in my awareness, I will find more of that. What you focus on, you will get more of. That's what happens with reticular activating system. So if I'm thinking about negative thoughts all day long, how in the hell am I going to figure out a way to be positive? How am I gonna be positive? That's gonna be really freaking hard, isn't it? Because if I'm waking up and immediately going to negativity, I'm gonna find more negativity. And so before I give you tips real quick on how to actually change that, let me give you a couple of examples of the way negativity or positivity or anything works in your brain. Let me give you a couple of examples. Think about it this way. Let's say that I have a big old bucket of water. Into the right, I have a flower bed. Into the left, I have a flower bed. On the right hand side is all positivity. On the left hand side is all negativity. I have an option of taking the water that's inside of the bucket and pouring it into one of the two of them. Whichever one I put my water into, it will grow those flowers or those weeds based off of how much water I put into it. The water is the equivalent to your energy and your focus. If I'm putting my energy and my focus into the negative stuff that's around me in my day, that will grow. I will grow negativity weeds if that's what I'm putting my energy into. If I'm putting my energy into the flower bed and my water into the flower bed, that is what's going to grow. You will not have something grow unless you water it. But the water is your energy. What are you putting your energy to? Are you waking up and saying, whoa is me and oh my life is this way because of my parents, because of the government, because of my circumstances, because of this, because of this, because of this? Or are you going, hey, these are my circumstances but I'm gonna take my energy, I'm gonna take this water and I'm gonna pour it into positivity and find something that I'm grateful for. Find something that I'm positive for and something that I can appreciate because I know that what I appreciate appreciates. So I'm gonna focus on finding the things that actually I'm happy with and that are going well for me. The reason why this is important because you have to realize that humans are inherently negative. Let me explain why that is. Humans are inherently negative because negativity is bad. Our brain wants to search for things that are bad. And the reason why is because our brain wants to solve the bad because bad 100,000, 200,000 years ago meant death. And so our brain wants to, our brain, the thing that it does more than anything else is its job is to keep us alive. Our brain cares about survival more than anything else. So our brain is kind of like a negativity searching mechanism. It's always looking for what is negative and what is bad around us because it wants to stay away from those things or pay attention to those things so therefore we don't fall into that trap and die. Now I know that if you wake up and you start thinking about how you lost your job, you're not going to die, that you're gonna hate what's going on, that's for sure. But what happens is your brain will seek out what is negative. The reason why it seeks out what is negative so that therefore it can make sure that it avoids that thing because negativity means bad, bad means death. Your brain wants to avoid anything that's bad and negative because therefore it means death. So your brain will find the negativity automatically. That's why if you want to be positive, you better make sure that with every action that you take, you're trying to find something that's positive because you're automatically most likely gonna go to the negative. And so people are like, why do I have these negative thoughts that pop in my head automatically without me even thinking about them? Because that's what your brain is designed to do. So if you want to be more positive, you have to realize, hey, I gotta do everything that I possibly can to be positive knowing that my brain is gonna go towards the negative. Now when my brain does go towards the negative, what do I have to do? I have to do everything that I can to pull myself out of that negativity knowing that that's just what's gonna happen. Make sense? Your brain's naturally going to be negative if you're like most people, which means that you're gonna have to work harder to be positive. But it doesn't mean that positivity is impossible. It just means that positivity and being positive and finding things you're grateful for takes work. So you're gonna have to put the work in. You also have to realize that sometimes what you're doing is you're actually searching for the negative things within yourself. This is where it gets really difficult because what do a lot of us do? We talk to ourselves in our head and we say things that's not positive. We say things that's not motivating and we say things that we would never say to somebody that we love. Think of all of the negative things that you've said to yourself. All of the, you look fat in these jeans. You're ugly. Look at that pimple on your face. You're stupid. All of the things that you might have said to yourself and realize that you probably would never say any of those things to someone that you love. If your friend called you and she had a really bad first date, she's like, yeah, I was really into the guy and he said that he thought we'd be better off as friends. You wouldn't go, yeah, well, Stacey, it's because you probably need to lose 15 pounds. Probably because your haircut. Probably because you don't look too good. Probably because you're not too smart. You'd never say that to your friend. You'd be there and you'd be there to support her, right? So why would you do that to yourself? Because how many people go on to a date or have something happen and go, oh, you shouldn't have said that. That was stupid. You shouldn't have spoke up at that meeting. You're always so stupid. You say the stupidest, be quiet. Don't start, don't say anything anymore. Oh, that's why no one's interested in you because you need to lose 15 pounds because your hair looks stupid because that zit on your face. How often do we talk to ourselves that way? How often do we hold ourselves back from all of the amazing things that we could do in this world because we're too busy talking trash to ourselves? You would never talk to someone that you love the way that you talk to yourself. So why would you talk to yourself that way? Because ultimately, the one person that you should love more than anybody else in the world is yourself. Because the more that you love yourself, the better that you are, the better that you leave the world, the better that you interact with everyone else that's around you. One video that I absolutely love that has to do with this, my friend Jay Shetty made a video and he sat down with some women who were in their late 20s, early 30s, and he said, hey, what I want you to do with the pen and paper is write down all of the negative stuff that you know you say to yourself. All of the crappy things that you say stuff. Write it all down. So they have a pen and paper and they're writing it all down. They're writing it, they're writing it. And he goes, okay, what I want you to do is this, come with me. And he takes them into another room. And they didn't know this, but in the other room are their little sisters, like 10 to 16 years old. And he goes, I want you to go ahead and say everything that's on that sheet of paper to your little sister. And these women are like, there's no way I can't do that. He goes, why not? He's like, because that's, why would I say that to a 10 to 16 year old girl? Like how bad is it to say something like that to them? And then you realize that you're still that five, 10, 16 year old person deep down inside. And you're saying that to your little self all day long. You would never talk to someone that you love the way that you talk to yourself. So why would you talk to yourself that way? What benefit has ever come from talking down to yourself? Ever. What benefit has ever come from seeking out the negative in everything that's happening? So what you have to do is you have to become very self-aware of when you start to do this. You have to become aware, number one, that you might have a problem. We all have problems in different ways, but a lot of people have problems with the negativity side. So if we're trying to destroy negative thoughts, we need to first become very self-aware that we have a lot of negative thoughts and we need to pay attention to every single thought. Because what happens is a lot of times thoughts will come up, we just act like they're just reaction, they just pop up, they just pop up, kind of like, you know, bubble into the surface and we're not in control of them. And then when they come up, then we react to them. So what do we need to do? We need to become very self-aware of these thoughts. If we want to change something, we need to become aware of when this something that we want to change comes up. And here's a tip that I'm gonna give you to help you out with this. Try this for one week. I know that majority of people out here listening to me right now won't do this, but if you're serious about becoming better at self-love, about becoming better at appreciating yourself and finding more positive things and getting rid of the negative self-talk, this is a challenge I wanna give you. Go to a store, Walgreens, CVS, whatever it is, wherever you live in the world and get a little notebook, like one of the ones that's like, you know, the size of your hand, basically. One that'll fit in your pocket. And I want you to, for a week straight, don't do this on your phone, do it with pen and paper. Every single negative thought that pops into your head, I want you to write it down with pen and paper. Don't type it, I want you to write it down. Every single negative thing that you say. And the reason why is because you're gonna start to build awareness. You can't change anything that you're not aware of. And so I want you to take them from inside of your head to on a piece of paper. And you're gonna build this awareness. And you're gonna start to notice that when I do certain things, I start to talk to myself this way. When this happens to me, I start to talk to myself this way. And you'll notice, and listen, the thing I'm gonna tell you is this, if you're gonna be doing this, don't attach any emotion to this. Look at it as if you're just writing stuff down because the worst thing that can happen and I know that some people do this if I don't preface it this way, you're gonna write something down and then what are you gonna do? You're gonna start to judge yourself for it. You're gonna start to shame yourself for it. You're gonna start to guilt yourself for it. Don't do that. You're just gonna take whatever's going on your head and you're gonna put it down on a piece of paper. And you're gonna start to build awareness around all of the things that you say to yourself that are negative every single day. Because when it's in your head, when it's in your head, it doesn't seem real. It's not tangible. It's not something that you can hold on to in this world. But when you take it and you actually write it down going from your head and putting it on a piece of paper and it's physical and you can hold it, it becomes real. And then you look at it and go, wow. Yeah, I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna talk to myself anymore. You start to realize, number one, the negative stuff that you're saying. Number two, what makes these negative thoughts come up? Maybe certain actions or certain feelings or certain people that you're around throughout the day make it come up. And number three, what you realize is that I can change this. And writing it down makes it real. And you're like, you know what? This is something that I'm gonna take, I'm looking. I said 17 negative things in myself today. These are all the things. You look fat in that. You look stupid. You shouldn't speak up because you got a list. Whatever it is, you say all of these negative things to yourself. So the first tip I'm gonna give you is write down every single negative thought for a week. Just the awareness will start to have you change your mind in the way that you are. Then what happens is you start to change that negativity and turn it into positivity. So that's the second tip. Whenever I notice a negative thought, pop it in my head. That's one negative thought. I'm gonna write it down. My job is to now say three positive things to basically take that one thing and trump it with something that's even bigger. So it's like, if I have one negative thought, I'm gonna have three positive thoughts. And I'm gonna do this over and over and over and over again. And by doing this, you're actually starting to rewire and reprogram your brain. You're not gonna be the most positive person within seven days. But if you do this for a while, over and over and over and over again, you're gonna start to notice you're a lot more positive of a person because you're starting to rewire yourself to be more positive and less negative. So that's the second tip I'm gonna give you about it. First one, write every single negative thought down. Number two, whenever you get a negative thought, you gotta go ahead and take it and make three positive thoughts out of it after you write it down. And number three is to program yourself with gratitude and positivity from the beginning of your day. The same way that if I were to get into my car right now, I live in Austin, Texas, and I were to go, you know what? I'm gonna go to Houston, Texas. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna take my phone out. I'm gonna get my GPS and I'm gonna say, okay, here's my friend's address. This is my intention is to go from Austin, Texas to my friend Mike's house in Houston and it will take me there. I want to program myself in the morning, set my GPS every single morning to then get me to how I want to feel. My morning routine is not just a checklist. My morning routine is actually giving me up for how I want to feel for the day. And so what do I do? The first 15 minutes, the very first thing that I do, I wake up, I go to the bathroom, I drink water, I brush my teeth and then what do I do? The first 15 minutes of my day, 10 to 15 minutes, I focus on what can I be grateful for and I just find things to be grateful for. I'm not trying to find things to be grateful for, just be grateful. I'm trying to program gratitude into my brain. What you appreciate, appreciate. So if I'm gonna find more things to be grateful for, I'm gonna set that reticular activating system first thing in the morning, then I'm going to find throughout the day more things that I'm grateful for. I'm gonna feel better and I'm going to create more things to be grateful for. So the same way that if you wake up and you're me like, shit, I don't wanna be awake, I don't wanna be here, I wish I could just keep sleeping in, I don't wanna go to my stupid job, you start off on negativity, you're gonna be more negative throughout the day. I'm gonna program myself knowing that my brain is naturally gonna gear towards negativity to actually program myself and set myself up, set my GPS up to how I wanna feel to be grateful and positive throughout the day. So the third thing is to start every day with gratitude. Set your mental GPS for how you want to feel because negativity is what you will gear towards. But if you start setting your, if you turn your ship and go, I wanna go this way instead and you start focusing on things that you could be grateful for, you'll find more things to be grateful for, you'll be more positive and within six months, a year or two years, three years, you notice that you're not the same person and the reason why is because you've changed yourself, you've rewired your brain and you've changed yourself to find things to be grateful for and to make positive out of negative and you become an optimistic person when you used to be a pessimistic person. So that is how you rewire yourself to destroy your negative thoughts to become a positive person. How to always be positive. And I don't mean it from a standpoint of like, oh my gosh, man, let's just, let's just be positive all the time and from a woo woo wee standpoint or any of those types of things. I'm talking about from an actual practical standpoint, how can I make sure that no matter what happens to me in my life that I build the mental fortitude to be able to handle it no matter what it is? Because ultimately that's what we're really trying to build an incredible mind for is to be able to handle everything that life can throw at us. And in reality, we know that, there are some beautiful moments of life, there are some terrible moments of life and we want to build a mindset that can handle all of this. It's like the phrase, a skilled sailor didn't stay inside of the harbor. You have to go out and actually literally go through and take some bumps and some bruises and you have to get out of the harbor in order to actually become a skilled sailor. You know, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor I think is actually the better phrase. I think I just took two phrases and put them together for the first one. And so whatever, who cares? You know what I'm trying to say. And I mean from a practical standpoint, how can we make sure that no matter what happens to us, we are positive? And I want you to know this from the very beginning. I'm not talking about how can we just ignore all of the negativity. I'm actually talking about more than anything else besides ignoring the negativity is actually focusing more on the negativity to extract the positive from the negative. And so people that are out there like, well, I don't wanna just ignore the negative because positive thinking is a bad thing. You shouldn't just think positive all the time. I'm actually gonna be talking about and teaching you how to extract positivity from all of the negative stuff that happens around you. And we're gonna go dive into two aspects of your life. The first one is your internal negativity, which is just 100% you. And then the second side is gonna be your external negativity, which is also you, but it's also other people that might be around you as well. And the goal of today is for you to mentally sit there, maybe even with a pen and paper, and to see how you can clear house in all of the different pockets of your life and pull the negativity out of it so you can have as much beauty and joy as possible. So when we're talking about the internal negativity, you may have heard me say this before, but I always like to talk about your mind as if it was a garden. It comes from a book, As a Man Thinketh, and he says, imagine that you're the gardener of this garden. You're the only one that has access to this garden. It's impossible for you to plant strawberry seeds and expect that tomatoes are somehow going to grow because you can't plant strawberry seeds and expect tomatoes that's not gonna happen. Same way that you can't have negative thoughts, negative thoughts, negative thoughts, negative thoughts, and then just automatically you're just positive all of the time. And so what happens is you have to notice the negativity and just as if you were a gardener, see that that weed grows, you have to go pull the weeds as soon as they pop up. The secret to it though is that you're the only one that actually has access to this garden. There's no one else. And so you can't allow that negativity to creep in. When you do, you have to immediately identify that negativity, go and pull it like a weed that's inside of your garden. And the reason why I say it once you notice it is because you can't always control your first thought. You have to rise up until the moment that you're listening to this right now or watching it, however you happen to be consuming this piece of content. You have a lot of patterns and habits and traits that were built into you as a person. So you might immediately have a thought of judgment against somebody. That might not be the thought that you want to have but it's your first thought. And a lot of times because of your programming and because of your subconscious thoughts and everything that's been happening to you up until the first 20, 30, 40 years of your life, whatever it is that the age that you are, that is your immediate first thought. And you can't control your immediate first thought right now, but you can always, always, always choose your second thought. And so if you notice that a first thought comes in that is not the thought that you want, the same way that you would pull the weed, you gotta pull it and immediately replace it with a thought that you do want. The way that you start to repattern yourself is to make sure that you notice the things you don't want and replace them with the things that you do want. Now here's another thing that you have to realize. A lot of times people will have a judgment thought or a negative thought or a thought that they don't want to have. And then instead of pulling that weed, they now judge themself for having that negative thought. That does nothing for you to just judge yourself for that negative thought that you now have. It doesn't help you in any sort of way. And in fact, it makes it worse. So it's like looking at the weed and going, oh my gosh, weed, why are you there? I don't want you to be there. That's not gonna do anything to the weed. Get off your ass, go and pull the weed. That's what you need to do in your mind. Don't judge yourself for it. Don't get emotional over it. You look at it and you say, that weed is there, I need to pull that weed. So you can't control your first thought but you can always control your second thought. And the other thing that makes it beautiful about life is realizing that negativity is going to happen, no matter what, things are going to happen that you don't want to happen. Failures are going to happen. People that you love are going to die at some point in time. I'm not trying to get more of it, I'm just being very practical and realistic here. People that you love are going to die. Relationships are going to end. People are going to be fired. Things are going to happen in life that you don't want to happen at some point in time. Instead of allowing those things to get you to go down a path of negative thinking or judgment or fear or worry or anxiety, why don't you look at them, knowing that it's going to happen, there's nothing you can do to avoid it and say, what can I learn from this? What can I learn from every aspect of it? I'll give you an example. My grandparents passed away a few years ago within 17 days of each other. Tragic sucks, they have beautiful lives though. And so what I wanted to do instead of getting sad and depressed about it, I'm not saying don't grieve, is what I did was I actually sat down and I planned out what I loved about them and how I could put that into my personality so that I can look at a death and something that I didn't want to happen but did happen and I can try to figure out some form of positivity from it. Because ultimately, you're either looking at the world one of two ways. As if it's happening to you, which is like, oh, woe is me. This just happened, this person broke up with me, this person died. I'm so sad for myself, that's woe is me. Or you look at it as if something is happening for you. Imagine as if you're in the Truman show. You know, the show with Jim Carrey from years ago in every single event, every single challenge, every single thing that happens to you is a perfectly crafted curriculum for the life that you are trying to live. As if somebody up there is just like, okay, now make it rain. Okay, now make this person break up with this person. Now make this person get fired, whatever it is. Because you have to go through those things in order to get to the next level of life. Imagine as if it's just a giant game and life is just a perfectly crafted curriculum for your growth. If you thought of life that way, how differently would you approach every single thing that happened to you, every single challenge, every single beautiful thing and every single negative thing that happens to you as well. Life is happening to you is a negative way of thinking of it. Life is happening for you is a beautiful positive way of thinking of it. It's your choice. You are the one that's able to decide which one it is because it's never about what happens in your life. It's your perspective and perception of what happens to you in your life. And so you could say, okay, yeah, these things are happening to me or these things are happening for me. So things are going to happen. It's never the event. It's your perception of the event and how you're actually putting it into your life. Hey, if you're enjoying this video, do me a favor and hit that like button down below. It helps with the YouTube algorithm so that more people can see this message cause it helps us get it out organically. So hit that like button and I appreciate you. One of the things that people really struggle with the most when it comes to negativity and positivity is that when these things do happen, they are almost resisting reality. Like they don't want this negative thing to have happened. And so they're almost resisting it and trying to fight it. Even though it's already happened, they're trying to fight it because they don't want it to be that way. And I will always say this, the amount of stress and anxiety and worry and fear and all of those things that you feel around something or that you're currently going through will be in direct proportion to how much you are resisting the way that the world is. Let me say that again. The amount of stress, anxiety, worry, fear, all of those bad feelings that you don't want that you're going through or will go through throughout life will be in direct proportion to how much you are resisting the way that the world is. The world is going to happen. People are going to die, relationships are going to end, people are going to get fired, people are going to run out of money. All of these things are going to happen probably at some point in time. There's a chance that they could happen to you or someone that you love. And if you resist it, it's going to put you into more stress, anxiety, fear, whatever. But if you accept it, then you can realize that now it's time to move on and see this as a challenge in life and now you can go into it with an open mind, more positive in seeing it as a learning lesson. You know, if somebody passes away, if you try to resist that, you're going to put yourself into a torture chamber in your mind of resisting because you can't bring that person back. It's impossible to bring them back. So what can you do? You can grieve, but you have to accept. That's part of the grieving process is to accept it and then try to take the beautiful aspects that that person put into your life. If a relationship ends, your stress and anxiety will be higher if you are resisting that and wishing that it were different than it currently is. So you have to realize we can't control all of those problems that happen to us, but we can always control our reaction to every event in our life. So that's talking about the internal negativity. That's your job is to clean house in your mind. Now, when we're talking about the external negativity, let's dive into all of the different aspects of it. First thing that we think about, and I hear all of the time is, Rob, what do I do if people around me that I love are negative? And we have two options and really two options that you have. Either number one, you let them go and let them live their life the way that they want to. Or number two, you have to figure out some way to spend less time with them. It's that simple. If you want to truly grow into the person that you can become and someone's bringing you down, either they need to be released and let go or you need to spend less time with them if you truly want to become the person that you can become, right? Those are the two options. And whichever one you choose is your choice and that's beautiful. But ultimately, you have to realize if there's external negativity around you, it's crazy to think that the external does not affect the internal. So if it's really important to you to build a big, beautiful life that's positive that you love full of joy, peace, happiness, all of that, it's gonna be really hard to do when you have people that are bringing you down all of the time. So I'm not saying that you need to just leave your parents and never see them again. What I'm saying though is can you spend less time with them? If your mom calls you and throws all of her worries on top of you, can you tell her to stop doing that? Can you, and you have to realize this, you teach people how to talk to you. So if that's happening, for instance, where your mom's calling you and throwing all of the negativity and all of her worries on top of you, just say, mom, stop, I don't wanna listen to this. Don't call me, call somebody else anytime you wanna be negative, right? You teach people how to talk to you. And you're an adult now. So teach people how you want to be talked to. You have to realize that. Because the top five people that you spend the most time with, you will be the most like. I always say, if you wanna be a millionaire, hang out with five other millionaires, you'll probably be the sixth. If you wanna be fit, hang out with five people who are really fit. If you're hanging out with five alcoholics, you're probably gonna be the sixth. If you're hanging out with five people that are overweight, you're probably gonna be the sixth. You are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. You need to start paying really close attention to who the people are that you're hanging around with and how they affect your internal environment. Because ultimately, you might start to realize, go through your top five and say, okay, number one, two, three, four, five. These are the five people I spend the most time with. Okay, three of them are really great. Three of them are really supportive. Two of them, I need to spend some less time with these two. Okay, so let me drop these two out of my top five. I can still hang out with them every once in a while and see them at family events or whatever it is, but now I can replace two other people that I know will support me and push me and allow me to think better and have them in my top five so that I can grow and expand into the person that I know that I can be. Now, some people say, but Rob, I still live at home with my parents. My mom is so negative. Then what do I do? Well, see it as another challenge. Once again, like the Truman Show, like I said a few minutes ago, everything that happens to you is a perfectly crafted curriculum for you to become the best version of yourself. So if you are in the Truman Show and you're just, bloop, you're given a negative mother, as an example, then how can you see that as a challenge for you to become more positive in that environment, right? How can you see it as if it's a game in order to get to the next level of life you have to eventually get past this level that you're on. And that might just have a really negative mother as the example that you have in this level, right? And you have to think about it. It's like walking into your house and it's fully negative. If that's what you have and there's nothing you can do about it right now, it's like walking into the gym for your mind, right? How can I go and lift as much weight as I possibly can to get my muscles as big as possible? That's how you grow. If you want to get bigger biceps, you do heavier biceps curls, right? If you want to get more positive and build a strong mental fortitude, you're gonna have to put it under some strain. Here's your challenge. If you choose to accept it, go into there and realize that you're gonna be surrounded by negativity and you need to build this mental fortitude of positivity because that's what you're given. You gotta figure it out. So who do you surround yourself with? Who do you spend the most time with on a day to day basis? And do you need to shift your top five a little bit because you're going to become the people that you surround yourself with. It's just the way that it works. You will hold yourself to the same standards that everybody that you surround yourself with as well. Do as well do, I don't know. That wasn't even right. You're going to hold yourself to standards that everyone else around you holds themselves to. So you have to think about that. So that's part of externals. The people that are around you. Other aspects of external that you might not think of? Well, number one, how about the music that you listen to? This is a big one for me. I didn't really realize was actually effecting the way that I feel. I have music that I listen to now. I have music that I used to listen to and I don't listen to as much anymore. Sometimes I'll indulge. You know, when I was younger really didn't like hardcore metal. Then I moved in and had a roommate and we were both musicians and I started to really appreciate it because hardcore metal, like they are the best most talented musicians in the world, incredible. But for me, I've come to realize that music makes me really anxious and it's super negative and about killing and death and all of this stuff. I can appreciate them from afar but I don't listen to it anymore, right? I've just realized that that music and that's just me, it might not be you, it's okay. I've just realized that that music, the external of that music affects me. Some of the music I used to listen to, hip-hop rap music, it's not the way that I live my life and I don't want to say out loud some of the things that they say because anything that I say out loud is an affirmation and going into my subconscious. And if I don't want to treat people the way that they treat people I'm probably not going to listen to that music. Do I still indulge if it wants to fall? Yes, as much as I used to? Absolutely not. So I try to literally listen to music that I can feel inside of me is raising my vibration, I guess you could say, because music is a vibration. You are a vibratory being. And so you have to realize that's going to come into your body and make you feel a certain way. The words will, the music will, the vibration will, all of that stuff will. I'm not trying to be weird and we have like, oh, your vibrations but really essentially music is a vibration. You are a vibratory being. There's no way around that. So that music is affecting you in some sort of way. So think about that. What else external affects you? What about the stuff you watch on TV? Hmm, the news, stop watching it. It doesn't, it doesn't really inform you. It doesn't keep you informed. It keeps you conformed. That's really what it does, right? There's other ways to get your news. The new stations probably not the best especially if you live in America, right? So news, reality TV, oof. And some people are like, oh, but I just watched reality TV because it's just mind-numbing and it's just fun to watch what people do. No, you're watching people, I've seen a lot of reality, I've walked in the room when it's on, screaming, treating people that you would never want to treat. That external, that's coming into your eyes, it's coming into your ears, everything. You are consuming it the same way that if you were to eat your shoe, it's going to in some form of, some way come into your body and make you not feel good. You're still consuming all of the stuff that you see in here. Think about it that way. What about games you play? Do you play video games that are hardcore shoot-em-up games that make you anxious, that are keeping you on the edge of your seat? I had a friend that literally, he was on this podcast where he was playing video games that were just hardcore games that kept him anxious and it clicked a part of his brain over and he wasn't able to sleep for a year and a half because of all of the anxiety that it created. And that wasn't just the video games but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Which shows you, those things come into your internal environment. So if you're not going to go up and honestly think about it, if you're not going to go out and shoot a bunch of people on the street, why would you want to do it on a TV? Really deeply think about that and start to reassess it. What you do is your own prerogative but really start to think about these things that you do. You know, I was playing VR the other day, played it like for a few hours with one of my friends, so much fun, so incredible. But when I was done, I realized my level of anxiety was so high because I was literally in VR, in reality, shooting things and it was just like, things were popping up and it was scaring me, it was keeping me on the edge of my seat. It literally raised my anxiety. I was like, I can't do that again. Was it fun? Hell yeah, it was fun. But it literally made me feel bad after. Something to think about. Just think about the games that you're playing. How about people you follow on social media? Hmm, think about that. Just think about all of the external pieces of your life because ultimately everything that you consume is going to affect you in some form of a different. Like whatever it is that you do, no matter what it is, if you drink cyanide, it's going to affect you because you're consuming poison. Think about how many forms of poison that you're consuming that's not actual cyanide, but stuff that you're seeing, stuff that you're hearing, people that you're surrounding yourself with and thoughts that are going on inside of your head. Ultimately, the best thing for you to do is take a pen and paper out right now and actually plan out what your life looks like, the positive side, the negative side in what you need to do to clear house of every aspect of that negativity because ultimately there's nobody in control of your life internally and externally except for you. You need to sit down and actually plan it out as if it was a business and you were creating a business plan because internal and external environment are going to affect you in some form. That's just the truth. You have to see if it's something that you want to be consuming or if it's something that's poisonous to you. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you wanna learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well. I'm going for longevity. I realize that this life thing, although it can be very short, it's also a marathon. And you know what makes running a marathon easier? A good attitude.