It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the "F Word" here - Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same, and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: Alright, guys. Welcome back to the Alive and Free podcast for Episode 6 today where we talk about you. We're going to talk about your strengths and stuff. I'm going to open it up with a question, especially when we're talking about freedom from addiction stuff or freedom from weight stuff or whatever else, any program you're trying to follow. You know how when you go into a program, they tell you, "This is the way to do it. Trust the process," which to a certain extent is very, very helpful, and people get results from that, so I'm not knocking it. [0:01:00.1] But you know how they go in and they tell you, "This is the way to do it. You have to trust this process. You have to do it this way. If you don’t do it this way, you're going to fail." We all have this kind of absolutism in us because we want to be right. We're in a culture of knowing - oooh, that would be a good podcast episode, culture of knowing, that could be a fun one - but we all have to be right. So you know how we go in and you feel like, oh you gotta do it this way. Now, if you're anything like me, I would walk into these programs, especially the addiction recovery program, and they'd tell me like I needed to do x, y, and z; I needed to go, if it was a 12-step program, I had to do my, you know, go to the meetings once a week. I had to connect with my sponsor x number of times and I had to do step four in the way that he prescribed. I had to go through and then I had to do step five and confess it to him, and then step six and so on and so forth, and go through all of these things. It didn't work, by the way. It didn't solve the problem. It was helpful, to a certain extent; I'm not saying it wasn’t a helpful place to be in, but it didn't work. But I, you know, I had to do all these things, and I found myself, in every program I tried, not just that, even in business building programs and in personal development programs and mentoring and coaching program, you name it - when they give me instructions, my first, first natural instinct is to be like, "Uggghhhh! Don't limit me." [0:02:17.2] But I would do it. I would go and do it and I would try to like be top dog and do it in a cool way, my own way or whatever. And after a while, I would just start to burn out because I couldn’t maintain the momentum. And have you ever had that happen? Where you just can't maintain the momentum, and the results are getting, even if you're getting decent results, because there's just something that is off, it's just hard to do and it's starting to become a burden? And short of having to have someone come in and motivate you, all the time trying to get you to see, "Oh, no! Just do this, that and the other," and you get a little bit of pump of it and Tony Robbins comes into your life, or some other great life coach, or you go to a speaking event or something and you walk out super pumped. And then you have a little bit more momentum and then you go down. What if, instead of peddling three times and coasting and eventually losing steam and then finally getting up the courage to peddle, what if you could just peddle to whatever way you wanted and it was easy to peddle? [0:03:09.7] And I ran into this all the time, in every program I've ever tried. Because they always wanted me to behave a certain way. Well, what if that's not actually the best way to do it, long-term? And so I'll have you consider this question - before you buy into a coaching program, unless it's technical, right, and there's a specific way to do things because of how technology is wired or something else like that. Right? Obviously. But before you buy into a coaching program, and especially before you buy into anybody's ideas or programs surrounding addiction/recovery, and I don’t even like that phrase; I prefer freedom because I'm not recovering you from addiction. We're just going to get free. The addiction can go away by itself. But before you buy into a program like that, ask yourself this question: Is this built for the way that I am naturally wired, so that by the end of it, even if I have to do a bunch of weird stuff and crazy stuff or whatever they tell me to do, by the end of it, all I have to do to maintain freedom is just be myself? [0:04:06.8] Because if there's a maintenance program, it means the work wasn’t done. Ultimately, the way to maintain freedom is to become it, and the easiest way to maintain it is to just be yourself.
So we want to talk about you being the way today. So we're going to go to piano lessons. When I was a kid, I mentioned before I think, that I had a temper a little bit and struggling. We were living in Germany and we had all those different instructors and so, one time my mom took me to piano lessons, and that didn't work out because they wanted me to learn how to play the piano by memorizing notes and by learning how to read music. And a lot of people do it this way, and there's probably a few different methods, I don't know, but that is the way that all these piano teachers taught - here's the stuff, these are the notes on the staff, this is how you read the notes, this is how you play the piano. You stick someone else's tune in front of you and you learn their tune. And so that's what I thought it was. [0:05:01.0] That's what I thought I had to do. So I kind of gave it up. I was like, whatever. But you know, age 14 comes around, I kind of feel like I'd like to learn to play the piano, partly because it's cool and maybe the girls like it, but partly because I just wanted to. So there were a couple of cool songs that I knew, and I went and I grabbed the music and I memorized the music. And it was painstaking because I couldn’t read music, so I'd be sitting there with the staff like, "Okay, so that's a Every Good Boy Does Fine… okay, so… that's a G, G, what's after… A, that's an A… okay. Oh yeah, FACE, okay. So that's an A and that one is a … cool…" So I put my hand here and it was like, I think, oh, man, you would have poked your eyes out with a pen or something. It was bad. So there I was. There I was. Just trying desperately to do it the way they told me and learning it; I memorized the songs and after I memorized the songs, I could get some expression in them and change up the way that I played them a little bit, shift up some of the timing based on what I wanted, and it was good. [0:06:06.1] It was good. I had learned some cool songs. I could play them in front of my friends. I could wow the girls with like, I mean I literally learned like two songs. It was Manheim Steamroller Silent Night, which I thought was rad, and then I learned John Schmidt's All of Me, which I thought was really cool, except that I have forgotten it since then. And I may have learned one other song, but that was it. I learned these songs and I could play them. Then when I got to college, I would go down into the basement of the dorms at BYU and they had these piano rooms, and it was basically a room that was two times as wide as the piano and a little bit longer. I mean two times as deep, so the piano was you know, like 18 inches - it was just enough for you to basically sit in there with a bench and play the piano. And I would turn the lights off and I would play these songs that I had memorized because I loved, absolutely loved, the feel of the sound waves from this piano just rattling through my body. It was like the most beautiful experience for me. [0:07:00.0] I absolutely loved it. So I would do that over and over and over again, and just play these songs and sometimes I would just kind of play whatever else came. Then I went on a service machine for my church and there, I met a guy who was just playing, you know, some songs without music, and they weren’t necessarily memorized; some of it was. But he was like, yeah, no, if you just feel a certain way, and that gave me permission. Permission to say, "Well, what if I could just go to the piano and play what I wanted to play?" So, gradually over the years, I started playing and then there were songs that I knew and I'm like whoa, what if I could figure that one out? And I started to play those songs in the keys that I had learned by memorizing music. Okay - so I figured this out. And then one day, I'm married by this point, one day my wife, as a father's day gift, she registered me into an instant piano class. Literally, I went to a class for three hours and I walked out and I could play pretty much any song I wanted. Some of them would take me a little bit longer to figure out, but I could just - I could riff on things. [0:08:02.4] I could, like I walked home and I played like 10 hymns from the hymn book, and a couple of popular tunes and melodies. I was like, oh, sweet, I can do this one and that one, and it wasn’t because… it wasn’t because like I wasn’t capable of that before, but I hadn’t been given permission and then just a little bit of like know-how and understanding about how do, the skills to make what was native to me work. In other words, when I was a kid, people wanted me to memorize other people's tunes and learn how to read them and play them so that eventually I could play my own. That was the sequence. But what I really wanted to do was play my own tune, or take other people's tunes and adapt them because I have a good time doing that, and just playing them in different ways and just figuring them out, but without having to read all their stuff. I just wanted to figure it out on my own, and then like mix it with other things and create different possibilities and feelings. [0:09:00.2] And so then from then on, over the next few years, I learned how to just like, when I'm having emotional stuff, I just sit down at the piano and let those sound waves wash over me and all of this emotion that I'm feeling, I'm able to get out because of how I'm able to interact with the piano. And I create songs and sometimes people are like, hey, do you want to come play in church? So I make something up to go play in church, and people are like, oh my gosh - that's an amazing talent. They forget that they could stick any book of sheet music in front of them and play anything that anybody else has written, where I'm, I don't. It's not my thing. And I'm not - I mean, I could learn it, but I'm not really interested in that because for me, and my life, music has a different role.
And what does this have to do with you being you and getting out of addiction? It's a good question. What I thought was a weakness was actually a strength, and when I was finally able to play to that strength, pun intended, other people recognized it as a strength instead of a weakness. "Oh, I can't read sheet music. I'm really slow at reading sheet music. I'm awkward with my fingers." [0:10:03.9] And I'm so busy trying to like mold my life and shift my energies and shift my approach so that it matches what somebody else says it's supposed to be. I'm trying to make a weakness or a non-strength into a strength instead of taking the strength I already have and making that into something more profound. And we live in a culture of trying to make weaknesses strengths and trying to improve yourself, as if you don’t have gifts and talents already. But the moment I just honored the strength that I had, music became a playground. It became a place I could go to just experience life in a different way, to let emotions loose, to express emotions, to have a good time with people, to accompany if needed to accompany - to whatever I wanted to do, when I did it in a way that matched my natural gifts.
If you're going to an addiction/recovery program, okay, or if you're going to a health program or a personal development program and they're saying, "You have to do everything this way, and if you don’t do it my way, it's not going to work." [0:11:07.7] What they're actually saying is, "I kind of figured out what my natural strengths are. I kind of stumbled into it and I found a way that works for the way I'm wired. So, if we're lucky, you're wired like I am and this will work." But you've got less than a 5% chance on the planet of being wired exactly the same way, instinctively, as anybody else. And we have measured this. There's tons of research behind this, and in fact, what we do with our clients is we actually have them, we run them through a pretty rigorous assessment so we understand the way that they're wired so that we can start to fine-tune everything for their natural strengths. Because the reality is - everything that you've been taught is a weakness for you, what if it's actually a strength, and not a weakness?
If you, or someone you know, is looking to drop the F Bomb of Freedom in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety or just anything that's making you feel flat out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateaMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
Bob: [0:12:13.8] "Oh no, Bob, you procrastinate a lot." Procrastination is a gift - the ability to look at what's going on in the day and to clearly see, "This does not need to be done right now. I can do this in crunch time, no problem, which means I can set it aside for now and I can enjoy what's happening in life at this moment. And I can have a jolly good time." "No, you're not supposed to procrastinate. You're going to, you're supposed to beat yourself up about that because really successful people don’t procrastinate." Baloney! Go look at them! All kinds of successful people procrastinate, all the time. "No, no, but we have read all these books, Bob. Successful people are people who, who, who like, they have these 117 different mental toughness secrets and there's the 68 billion laws of financial freedom," and there's the whatever that people made up. [0:13:06.7] Do you know where those came from? One person who has a particular gift for seeing patterns, his strength or her strength, goes and interviews a bunch of successful people, zooms out enough to see similarities, and then tells you, "These are the similarities that make successful people tick." When if you took any one of those successful people and measured them against the pattern, and really looked at the details of their life, my guess is - most of them would fit at maybe 10% or less. The successful people are themselves. They learned to use their own natural gifts, and so what we try to do is we're like, okay, well, not everybody is going to be Bob. So how can I make these same processes work for somebody who is wired totally different? Bob will just go wing it, but what about the person, like my wife, who plans for Christmas in April or May, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but she's already calculating. [0:14:01.5] But when she's going to solve a problem, is going to step up and have a checklist of things to do and is going to schedule it out so she can consistently do the work every day. Where I'm going to plan for Christmas in December and I'm going to have a good time the whole rest of the year, and in December, and it'll still get done. Well how can I make a program that would allow her to take it on her terms versus me take it on my terms, and it still be successful for both? Freedom, folks. Freedom from anything. Freedom from relationship problems. Freedom from - because like relationship problems is huge - freedom to be yourself inside the relationship. Freedom from addiction. Freedom from food struggles. Freedom from financial problems and what not. Freedom is: You get to be who you really are, without having to pretend anything, and it works, and you thrive. That's freedom: The ability to be yourself and still have life work. Total freedom. Complete and utter freedom. So if you, like in a relationship, well why are relationships having problems? [0:15:01.7] Because both of them are expecting the other person to be other than who they are. Both of them are trying to fix the other person. I'm not saying all relationships are going to work out, but I've seen some of them end amicably because both of them are like, "This just isn't going to work because I rub her the wrong way and she rubs me the wrong way." Both people have to handle their own stuff, be themselves. If you can't accept the other person for who they are, you're probably not accepting yourself for who you are, 1, and 2, how is that going to be a long-term relationship fix? Especially if you believe you're going to be a family for eternity, but you've trained yourself not to accept the other person for who they are, that they always have to be better than who they are. What if they don’t have to be better at all? What if we, and I've said this before in a previous episode, what if when God declared creation good, he really meant it, and what came to this planet, whatever that is, is literally just fine, and it's meant to be that way? And if we allowed it, it would blossom and there would be this beautiful aroma that would show up. Instead of that seed running around the garden trying to be a carrot, what if could just be the flower and bloom? [0:16:05.4] Freedom, really, is the ability to be yourself. So inside of any program you're looking for, inside of anything you're trying to accomplish in your life, if you are negating who you are and saying, "I'm not good enough," and you're trying to be someone else, if you're going in a mastermind programs and everything else, "Well, I'm just going to be like that guy," you can't. Now, you can learn skills, and this is a critical distinction - if you are yourself, but you don’t have the skills, well then you still won't really do very well at it. That goes with business. That goes with addiction/recovery. That goes with everything. There are skills. You can learn skills from other people. You can learn ways of thinking from other people, and different paradigm shifts. But if you're trying to be them, you'll always fail. Because you're not them. And what if there was something even more powerful and easier and more long-lasting or longer lasting or however you say that, inside of you? [0:17:00.3] You've got to look at your natural gifts and strengths.
Now what does this turn into? What are your natural abilities that you've got to honor? One - instinctive strengths. Okay? These are things that we measure very, very rigorously when we're coaching people and when we're looking at them so we understand the way that they naturally approach and solve problems. Because well, when they're trying to get out of addiction, that's a problem that they're trying to solve. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to get out of it. So how are they natural instinct… what are their natural instinctive strengths and how can we play to those so that they solve this thing fast? Two - you're going to have talents and abilities. Talents and abilities are going to give you a sense of what comes easiest to you and what you can use and build on in order to make your life this beautiful, beautiful thing. Three - your deepest, most unconscious kind of longing. So of all the things that you want in your life, all the things that you're yearning for, those are expressions or branches off the tree trunk of what your, like just innate desire is - something underneath it. We call it the true north. [0:18:02.2] And when you find true north, when you really become conscious of it, now you can deliberately achieve all the other stuff that you want but understanding where it's leading, and you can use your strengths and your instinctive gifts to be able to handle that in a really good way. And now, you can really chart your course well because you know where you're going, you know what gifts you have, and you know, instinctively, the best way that you thrive. And that's what you want to build for yourself. Because ultimately, you really are the way. Freedom is something that exists inside you. It's a state of being. It's a skill, not a pill, but I think it's even more than a skill. It really is something you become. And when you are free, it goes with you everywhere you go, and it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are - you're not deliberately trying to test yourself because you don’t care. You're busy heading true north. But when stuff shows up that normally would have derailed people, if you have the skill sets and you know who you really are, and you've discovered some things, then freedom just follows you everywhere, even into the abyss at times. [0:19:06.8] And that's what you really need to understand. And that's what makes freedom so much easier to maintain. Because all you have to do is be yourself, and that's scary at first because as an addict, I was like, "Dude, what if people find out who I really am? What if I find out who I really am and I don’t like it?" And I'm just going to close by having you consider the possibility that who you really are is something so much grander than anything you could possibly concoct in that little imagination of yours - that you don’t have to make up some great new identity - that you could possibly just handle the root issue, get rid of the junk on top of it and discover something so much bigger so that life, on its own, starts to become something beautiful and sweet. That's a wrap for today, guys. [0:20:01.3] We'll talk to you guys next week - what do you do when someone tells you to get a life, and what does that even mean, especially if you've spent your life busy trying to fix yourself and solve problems and get out of poverty and all the other stuff that we end up doing. That's what we're going to talk about next time.
And that's it for today's Alive and Free podcast. If you enjoyed this show, and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast from, and while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you, plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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