Mastering the Mindset
Mastering the Mindset
The Problem with Working on Yourself
Reminder: the journey of self-development is ever evolving. We have to remind ourselves that personal growth is a continuous process rather than a destination. In this episode I talk about the challenges of perfectionism, the importance of managing our emotional responses, and how setbacks can be a part of meaningful progress.
• The quest for personal growth and self-improvement
• The myth of perfectionism and the pressure to succeed
• The 90% rule: valuing progress over perfection
• Understanding our reactions to external triggers
• Embracing the lifelong journey of self-discovery
• The balance between confidence and insecurity
• Recognizing the role of burnout in personal growth
• Celebrating small victories in the self-development journey
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Losing myself and finding my strength, came to the conclusion that I want it all, feeling that pressure of trying to do better. I wanna reach heights, but too scared to fall, too scared to fail. You're way more scared of feeling regret. I'm not even trying. That's terrifying. I understand that chasing my goals are burying my clocks because it take time. I gotta go. I already know if I wanna grow, you breathe what you sow. That be the case, planting my seeds and water my base. Yeah, I made mistakes. Yeah, I know you grow in your garden, but watch for the snakes, the people that act like you crazy but trying this, they fall away. They don't think it's possible. I think it's possible. That is just hate if they hate themselves because they're on the shelf.
Speaker 1:Why you create a life that you love, a life that you love Loving the fact you improving yourself, decided that you would not settle, decided that you got the drive to do what the road got. Bumping your foot on the pedal. You go up a level. You turn up whenever it's time for you to go. Put in that work. I know my worth. I know it ain't gonna be easy. Yeah, I know it hurt. One thing is for sure yeah, until they put me in this earth. Before I ride in that hearse, I'm chasing my goals. I'm chasing my goals. Yeah, love and affect you, improving yourself. Decided that you would not settle. Decided that you got the drive to do it, to go, got punker, just put in the gutter. I'm chasing my goals.
Speaker 1:All right, and welcome back to another episode. Thank y'all so much for being here. If you're watching me on youtube, please go ahead and like and subscribe to the channel. If you're listening on a podcast platform, leave leave a review. Also become a supporter of the show. You can choose the monthly amount it can be either $3, $5, $8, or $10, and you can cancel at any time. But let's go ahead and get to it.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to talk about some of the problems that come with self-development, and I've only been doing this for what I would consider a short amount of time I think around three and a half, four years and I've been working on myself and learning what I can about how our brains affect us and just trying to understand how we limit ourselves most of the time, and one of the most common things I've found and it's something that holds folks back in their personal development is that people want to be at that destination and they want to get there right away, to that place where everything is perfect. They wait and they wonder when it'll all be perfect for them, when will all my problems go away? When will I finally be perfect? When will I finally get there, whatever there means for them? And they put themselves through all this extra stress and anxiety because they've been doing this self-development right.
Speaker 1:As you're doing it, you're aware of what you have to work on and as they're working on it and making those efforts to better themselves and they're doing the work, those things that they need to work on keep on popping up. They see it way more often now. They become aware of the things that are holding them back and they know that they're working on it. They're getting better at it.
Speaker 1:But damn it, I want to be done already. I want to be done with this, I'm ready to be better at it and I want to be done with working on it. And I experienced this my damn self. I become aware of something, something I need to work on. Maybe it's a thought pattern I have that isn't a conducive one, and I work on it and I'm aware of it. Now I make that conscious effort to get better at it and I do. I get better at it and I feel much better now and that problem is kind of way in the back of my mind, right. And then maybe three months, six months down the road, that problem pops right back up for me again and I'm like, damn it, here goes this same damn problem again and that way of thinking I thought I was done with Right, I thought I was done with this way of thinking, and it's right back in my head and I think to myself well, damn man, what's wrong with you? I thought I was done with this.
Speaker 1:For me, it's my perfectionism and my imposter syndrome. Perfectionism and imposter syndrome and I talk a lot about those on here, especially perfectionism, how your perfectionism actually isn't real. That is some fear you have, fear of looking foolish, fear of putting something out there to the world, and it won't be good that you ain't ready, right? It's really just a fear. And even though I make it a point to work on that perfectionism and I follow my 90% rule way more often now, every now and then way less often, but still every now and then. Way less often, but still every now and then, I catch myself having to deal with it. And the 90% rule, that's, if, whatever that thing you're working on and you you've been making tweaks and changes and redoing it, everything to make it better, if you get to a stage where you think it's 90% done especially if you've been working on it for a long time, making those small tweaks and changes If you think it's 90% done, it's done. Leave it alone. 90% done is done. Because that 10%, because it's so small, you run the risk of it taking you way longer to actually get it done and more than likely you're going to be the only person that even noticed that small change. And you've done all this time that you wasted for something that only you can see or even tell that it's different. But have you ever caught yourself in one of those situations, right, you thought you were dumb or something, thought you fixed it, you thought you grew past it, only to realize that you actually didn't. You're still in it.
Speaker 1:And the thing we need to come to grasps with and accept is that in personal development and self-development, there is no destination. There is no destination. You won't ever be 100% past anything. Now, does that mean that whatever that thing is you're working on can't go from a nine on a scale of nine out of 10, with 10 being the worst? Whatever that or maybe it's the number of times you make a mistake Right? It doesn't mean that it can't go from nine to a one. No, it most definitely can do that. Or go from a nine to a two, right, but it won't ever become a complete zero and we can't expect it to be.
Speaker 1:And I follow and learn from people who are doing what I'm doing with personal development, who've been doing it for way longer than me, who are way further into their journey than I am, and all of them, every single one of them, talk about how, even now, they still have moments when they go down that hole and they make the same mistakes they've been working on for years. It's just human nature. We're still human, we're still going to have those human issues and we're going to fall into those traps. And those traps, those triggers will always be there. But we have to understand that it's about how much value we allow them to have, how much time we let it linger and affect us, right?
Speaker 1:So let's say somebody walks up to you, they walk up to you and they say something that pisses you off. Well, the fact that it pisses you off is actually your fault. How is that your fault? Well, it's your fault because of the amount of value you allow that comment to have on you. It's the way you receive that information and perceive it and attach it to yourself.
Speaker 1:Like Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. You are consenting to feeling that way. If that person would have walked up to you and said the exact same thing, but said it in a funny clown voice and they were drunk, it probably wouldn't affect you the same way. Right? Your level of consent would be way lower in that circumstance, even though it's the same words, right? So it's not the actual words that are the issue, it's our reaction to them, and that's a big part of personal development, controlling whatever those triggers are, whether it's somebody talking down to you or lying to you or being a compulsive liar, whatever it may be. There's a trigger. And let's say somebody says something to you or something happened to you on a Monday and you wake up on Tuesday and you still pissed off about it. And you wake up like damn, they really pissed me off. I can't believe they said that. And Wednesday comes around and you still pissed off like man, they really did that. They really treated me like that. I'm pissed. And Thursday, same thing.
Speaker 1:And you go all the way to Friday being pissed off at something that happened to you on Monday, right? And same thing with something like procrastination or something like perfectionism. You procrastinated a whole week, or you took a whole week to perfect something that could have been done in two days. And when you start working on yourself and you work on those triggers and those areas you have to or you need to be improving on and maybe this is a few months down the road, years down the road but now you only stay pissed for two days, or you procrastinate for two days, or you do the perfectionism thing for two days Still not the best thing you want, but it's less than before and that's improvement. And you keep on working on it and you work on it some more and more.
Speaker 1:Time goes by another year, let's say and now you're only pissed off for one day and you keep working, and you keep working, and now you're pissed off for a half a day, then eventually only a couple of hours, then you're only pissed off for 30 minutes and that goes down to 30 seconds. Same thing, same trigger, but now over time, whenever it happens to you, you're only pissed off for five seconds and then you're over it, right, or you don't procrastinate no more than five minutes and you've been getting stuff done, right. And then this one time, this one time it happens. Now you pissed off a whole day again. Or you look up and you don't procrastinate a whole week again and you realize, like damn it, there it is again. I thought I was better than this, I thought I was at a better place than this. I thought I got to a point where nothing bothers me anymore. Right, that I don't have any triggers. Right, and I and sometimes you want to have that negative self-talk Right, what things will set you off any kind of way? Right, but that's not what it is. It's the journey in noticing the trigger that you notice that trap, that you work on it and get to a point where it gets shorter and shorter, and shorter and shorter. And there's a quote I like and I've used this quote before, but there is a. It's a Jewish psychologist by the name of Viktor Frankl, somebody who survived the Holocaust, the Holocaust, and he says between stimulus and response lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom, our power to choose a response, and in our response lies our growth and our happiness. So, between the stimulus and the response lies a space, and in that space it can be a real small space, a tenth of a second, a millisecond, and in that space between it happening and you responded to it, in that space, that thought, that space determines what you do or say next, and a big part of self-development is working on that space. For example, whatever those things are, you've been working on those things.
Speaker 1:You decided to go on a journey with the procrastination, the imposter syndrome, the negative self-talk, the goal setting your belief in yourself, discipline, drive, following through, showing up for yourself whatever it is, and you're working towards getting past something or working towards being done with something. It can be easy to lose a little bit of happiness when you say to yourself I'm not quite there yet, I'm not done yet, I'm still working on this. That makes you a little less happy. You ain't quite as satisfied with the progress you've made. It takes some of that joy away, and what we need to be doing is getting rid of that thought process of something having to be completely accomplished or 100% fixed for us to have happiness about it right, because what happens is, when you do happen to fall back into your trigger or you walk right back into that trap.
Speaker 1:You realize you're not 100% done, it's not 100% fixed. You end up judging yourself right, and you feel like you mess up all the time and you talk negatively to yourself. Right, it's like having a scab open back up. Let's say you cut yourself and it scabbed over and then a week later it happens to open up again and then you say, damn it, dumb ass scab I thought you healed, and then you put salt in it because you're unhappy with it. We do that to ourselves when we judge ourselves for slipping back into whatever that trigger is or whatever that thing we were working on goes left and we realize that we actually didn't fix it right. Same thing. We get frustrated and we pour salt in our wounds. Don't judge yourself. Instead of judging yourself and saying, damn it, I thought I was better than that. I put all this time into working on this problem and I didn't even get rid of it like I thought I did.
Speaker 1:Instead of having that mindset, what we should be doing is saying, okay, here's that wound again. It was healed, but now it opened up a little bit. Let me figure out how to heal it back up, how to get it back to where it was because it was better. It's not a new wound, it just opened up a little bit. Let me get it back right. So my question is what if we were never done? What if this journey you're on right now is one that's going to have some moments here and there where you're going to mess up? And that wound, that same mistake that you thought you fixed, that bad habit, you thought you corrected that trigger you thought you had passed, got passed, it shows up and it opens up that wound. What if we had the mindset that it'll never be 100% fixed? But if we can get it to 90% and keep it there as long as we can, that will make our lives better. That will be worth it. I don't know about you, but I would much rather have it at 90% fix for the majority of the time and have to patch it back up every now and then than to have it not be healed at all, to have it be a constant bad habit or trigger that we don't work on at all.
Speaker 1:And the reality is you have to have both sides. You can't know what it's like to be confident about one thing without having some kind of insecurities somewhere else. You can't know what it's like to have a bad temper without recognizing you have a moment where you are actually being patient and calm. Good can't exist without evil. Bravery can't exist without fear. There has to be an opposite side to it. You can't know that you have imposter syndrome without at some point recognizing your worth Right. So in order to get where we want to be, we have to understand where we don't want to be, how we don't want to feel, how we don't want to think. Sliving back into that negative area is part of the process. We have to mess up to realize who we are, who we are becoming, to get back on track. But what we can't do is stay in that negativity. Understand that it is a journey and you'll never be 100 percent done or 100 percent quote, unquote better, and it's going to happen at some point.
Speaker 1:For me, I can't tell you how many times I get burnt out and I work on it. I really do and I always get to a point where I'm like, ok, ok, I'm doing a lot, I figured it out, I would have been burnt out by now. Or I feel like I'm in my zone and I got it all together and then after a while, boom, I hit a wall and I need to go sit my ass down somewhere, and I used to beat myself up over that. I used to feel so embarrassed when my social media presence just dropped off and folks start reaching out to me like, hey Dutch, you know you good, I ain't seen you make a post in a while, right. The last time this just happened to me. I ain ain't have no shame. I'm like yep, I'm good, just taking a break. I'll be back soon, right? Or those times when I would be too tired to clean up, to clean my room, and it'll be junky and if you know me, you know my room is not junky. But that's usually when I know I'm burning out. I look around, I'm like, damn, you need to clean up, clean your room, right. And it's always accompanied by me being exhausted and feeling like I don't even have time to clean.
Speaker 1:And again, let's get to the point where we accept that this is all part of the journey, that as you work on it and get better at certain things, eventually it's going to open back up like a wound and you're going to need to repair it. You're going to have those setbacks and I know I say that all the time, but it's true. Setbacks are going to happen, but you have to give yourself grace, because the fact that it's called a setback set back means you were moving forward, and that's the part you have to remember. You're making progress and this is a never ending journey, so make sure you stay at 90 percent as long as you can. Right the journey towards them. Goals are going to be way easier to move towards if you stay at 90 percent as long as you can. So that's all I got for you today.
Speaker 1:Again, go ahead and become a supporter of the podcast and my YouTube channel. You can pick the amount. It can either be three3, $5, $8, or $10. You can cancel at any time and I truly appreciate it. Let's go ahead and get to this music. The song I got for y'all today is called Flight to Chicago. Let's ride out. We'll be right back. I'm turning up like a flight, up like a flight. I'm turning up like a flight.
Speaker 2:I touch down, we turning up like a flight, up like a Flight to Chicago. Yeah, I took a flight to.
Speaker 1:Chicago yes, I like Chicago. Unfortunately, I think we might have a problem because we, some bears and you trying to talk to me like we, some cubs. Over the year I put in my blood and my sweat and my tears. The public can Like we, some cubs. Over the year I put in my blood and my sweat and my tears.
Speaker 2:It probably can fill up the whole Navy Pier. I'm keeping my head above water, even though shit was a flood Up like the big leagues 05 for a series. I'm pulling my white socks up, ayy Up like nosebleeds At Wrigley's she.
Speaker 1:Let me hit a home run, ayy, I promise to hold my liquor, but I can't have the time to have fun. I'm in the city with niggas. Be flexing and pull out the guns. That's not a pun. Taking it high. You ain't want to get high as I possibly can. I'm not talking blunts.
Speaker 2:They know I'm taking it serious and that's on period Like it's a time of the month.
Speaker 1:Don't act like I turned my back.
Speaker 2:I can't help it. Up like a flight, up like a flight. I'm turning up like a flight, I touch down. We turning up like a flight, up like a flight to Chicago. You.