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: Just last year, every morning we would wake up and our kids used to love playing the superhero theme songs on YouTube and stuff, and they really loved the Superman song. Dan-da-na-na-dan, dan-dan-dan, dan-da-na-na-na, rat-tara … And they would run around, dance and whatnot. They got into Ant-Man and the Wasp thing.
There's something about superheroes and superpowers that has taken the United States at least by storm. What with all the Marvel comics and the Marvel movies, and the DC comics and the DC movies. Superheroes have been around a long time. [01:10.7]
When I was studying Kung Fu, they used to degrade that and looked down on it, and be like, No, in China, the old warriors were real people and they had these tremendous, amazing, legendary powers, and all this other stuff. Whether they did or not, things get exaggerated over time, so who knows if the real heroes actually did the things that we're claiming they did, given the fact that the books that were taking them from were made for entertainment?
Anyway, the point is there's something about feeling super, about being superhuman, about having superpowers, and I want you today to discover just how many superpowers you have, because most of us wander around feeling like “I'm only human” when we don't realize that being human is super.
We sit there and we think, Oh, life is hard and I don't know how to do that, and we have this negative self-talk a lot where we're like, I can't do that, or, Oh, wow, that's crazy. Did you see what that person did? That was amazing. And it's not like we all have to have the same skills, but consider for a moment that the ability to have those skills rests in almost everybody. [02:12.1]
Today, let's look at what it means to be an addict and I want to share with you some of the untapped superpowers of every single addict. These are things that because of the fact that a person got into addiction … and don't think just people who are using substance abuse or people who are looking at pornography, or people who are alcoholics. Don't think that. If you have any compulsive behaviors of any kind, some of these things are going to be true of you.
Okay, so I'm going to speak from my own experience with regard to porn addiction because I know that well, and with food stuff when I'm sneaking treats from the fridge … anyway. And some of the other things that I was doing like with adrenaline stuff where I was shoplifting and stuff when I was a kid. Okay?
I'm going to share this with you and I want you to see just how powerful this idea is, because a lot of us, we think, Oh, there's no way. I don't have the ability to really live a life of freedom. I don't have the ability to leave depression behind. I don't have the ability to leave anxiety behind. I don't have that kind of ability. I don't. That's why I'm stuck here. [03:20.1]
But what I want you to see is you do have the ability. You've just been using it on a different thing. You're a black belt. You have super powers, man, but you’ve just been using it on a different thing.
So, the first one I want to bring about is hyperawareness. Hyperawareness. When I was sitting there on a computer in a computer lab looking at porn or sitting on my laptop with my kids in the other room or whatnot, I had amazing hyperawareness, the slightest sound. I was able to focus a hundred percent on what it was I was doing and still have my ears tuned and my body tuned in the background to the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, to a sound of a step on the stair, to the sound of a click in a door handle, to anything like that, so that I could immediately shut things off if needed. I had my hand on the trigger of the close-the-window button. [04:08.6]
When I was busy shoplifting, I had my awareness everywhere. I could tell where the clerk in the store was. I knew where all the mirrors were. I knew what kind of … to the extent that I did—I mean, I was a teenager, so to the extent that I did—I knew what kind of gesture I needed to make to make it seem nonchalant and different.
I had a hyperawareness of a lot of different things, and when I left, I was aware of the cold in the air and I was aware of so many different things. I was super awake, super alert. I couldn't be in my head. I had to be aware because I might have gotten caught. And anybody who's stuck in addiction has this. Anybody who's done anything, where they feel like they might get caught, has developed and already has within them the innate ability to be hyperaware.
For instance, one time, some years ago, I sprained my ankle. I sprained my ankle and I was sitting there on the couch. It was extremely painful. I couldn't move my foot. I couldn't flex my foot up, and so it would shoot these jolts of pain up my leg and I kind of breathed heavy. [05:07.1]
So, I'm sitting there just kind of feeling sorry for myself and my kid walked into the room. He's 10 feet away. He walks into the living room and I feel him with my body. A pressure wave runs through my body. Enter the room and I automatically know that he's going to land right where my foot comes because he's just plowing through with this little toy car. So, I moved my foot out of the way and, a second later, the kid comes running right past. It was literally that level of awareness because I had something I needed to pay attention for.
Now, all you have to do is turn that awareness not toward trying to not get caught. If you can use that awareness the rest of the day and pay attention to “How do I feel? What's my emotional state? And when I'm aware of that, how long do I want to stay that way? How long am I willing to tolerate feeling bored or feeling blah?”
And a lot of people are like boredom is not a bad emotion. All I have to do is ask them, Do you want to feel bored for the rest of your life? No. Okay, cool. Then, obviously, you don't like it. It's one thing to just feel lazy, and enjoy it and feel totally relaxed, and it’s another thing to feel bored, right? [06:14.7]
So, how long are you going to tolerate all of these little tiny emotions? And if you have a hyperawareness of body aches starting to build up, of slight nausea starting to build up, of a headache starting to build up, if you have those types of things and you catch it early on, how fast do you think you could do something to circumvent it?
The hyperawareness is a gift you already have. You just have to use it in a way that makes your life improve a lot more, and that is to use it on how you feel your emotions and your physical state, and start to not allow yourself to tolerate feeling bad. It's nothing you deserve. It's not your birthright. You don't merit feeling bad. It's happening and it's your job to make a different choice about how you operate in your life. [07:01.0]
Second superpower. Addicts are willing to give up everything important to them, everything that they love, in exchange for what they want in that one given moment. Now, that may not seem like a superpower, but consider this: how many people are stuck and they cannot move forward in their life because they're so attached to the things that they care about, to the things that they've accumulated in their life?
And there's even a Bible story of the young rich man, which we've talked about before, but where he had done everything. He'd followed all the rules, all the commandments, everything his whole life. And so, then Jesus told him, Oh cool, then the next step is sell everything you have and come, follow me, and, in that moment, he couldn't do it. We don't know if he did it later. We just know that, in that moment, the kid couldn't do it and he walked away. He was sad because his possessions were great, but an addict, an addict will literally leave those behind. If they really want something, they have the capacity to ditch everything and go for it. That is a quality that every successful person on the planet has. [08:00.9]
If you look at them, they have the ability to see something that they want. Determined, yes. Even if it's risky, I get that. Inside my heart, I get that this is the thing that I need, that I want, that this is what I want to do in my life, and they will give everything up in order to be able to accomplish it and they will find a way. An addict, he never said, Oh, I don't have enough money. They'll find a way to get the money if they really want it, which they do. They never said, I don't have time. They'll find a way to have the time. They'll steal the time from other things.
And that level of commitment to what you care about, you already have. You don't have to go look for it. You don't have to listen to the people that are like, Well, yeah, he's just not committed. You are committed. You're committed to your happiness.
That's what addiction is, right? You want to feel better.
That's even what anxiety is. Something is not right and you want to go do something about it, but worrying is as much as you know how to do at the moment, right? You literally are committed to your own wellbeing. You really are. [09:02.5]
And depression, same thing. It's just that you're wanting to stop. Okay, cool, look, I don't want to deal with this anymore so I'm going to slow down and I'm going to retreat from life, and I'm going to sit in my hole because that's better than going and dealing with all this other stuff.
You're already committed. So, don't let anybody tell you lack the commitment. Don't let anybody tell you lack motivation. You have it already. The difference is you don't see just how good the other stuff is, and when you can really see how good relationships can be and how fulfilling it can be to simply have a good laugh with another person, when you can see how amazing a really nutritious meal is, when you can see how good it feels to exercise or to breathe and to feel what it's like when your lungs are full of oxygen, when you know the feeling that it feels like to be a workaholic in one sense or committed to work, or achieving things in your life, when you know that and when you can really see how good those other things are, you'll naturally go there. You already have the ability. [10:03.2]
Okay, third superpower.
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.
The third superpower is visualization.
Now, there's a lot of work out there in the coaching world at least about positive visualization, I mean, even in the science, even in the medical world. They've done this with Psycho-Cybernetics and things like that, which is a good book, about a plastic surgeon who figured out that when he was having his clients, his patients, positively visualize their life after the surgery, that these people had tremendous life changes happen because of the surgery. [11:02.6]
The ones who didn't, some of them just had the same life experience. Because he was doing plastic surgery, they couldn't even accept that the plastic surgery had really changed them. They just still felt the way that they had before. The visualization made the difference.
A porn addict has the ability to imagine something so vividly that his body or her body literally responds. In fact, any addict who has a, quote-unquote, “trigger” has the same thing. They just have to think about it and automatically their body is having a response, whether it's a fear response, whether it's a craving response. Whatever it is, they already have the ability.
You already have it—and you I'm talking to. You may not be an addict by the general terms, even though there really isn't such a thing anymore. We covered that in the last episode, but you may not be an addict in that sense or you may not be necessarily in some taboo behavior, but you already have it. This is already a human skill. It's just that, with me, I was using it for porn and I was using it for other things, and the frequency with which I did that created a life where that was my behavior. [12:07.2]
But if I had used that same skill more frequently to visualize positive benefits in my life, to visualize outcomes that were different, just to even visualize in such a way that I could feel that it was real, the experience of having a positive day or the experience of really succeeding at a public speech, and the experience of being with my family present at night and whatnot, and if I could have that visualization with as much intensity and as much feeling, so that it really felt real, my life would have been different. In fact, it has been different, because what you focus on, you create.
What you focus on, you create. It's simple as that. Which brings us to our next superpower—focus.
A lot of people think that focus is some weird thing. You only have so much willpower in the day and you almost only have so much attention, and we're worried about attention spans these days and everything else. But the reality is, yes, there is some training of attention spans, just given digital media. [13:05.1]
If a kid grows up and is constantly being stimulated every second from something, then the moment that five seconds go by without an extra stimulation, the kid is going to feel like he's on an alien planet. So, that does happen, but that doesn't have to be the end of the world. That's easy to circumvent.
The bigger thing is why do kids not pay attention in school? Well, school is boring. Kids will pay attention for hours on end to something that they care about. Hours on end. My kids will sit and read a book for hours or they'll play a video game for hours, and, yes, a video game is stimulating, but the fact is they're focusing on a certain mission, on a certain goal, and going to accomplish it. They'll go play for hours or they'll go outside and they'll play basketball for an hour or two, just focused on one thing.
My second son, he'll just be like, Oh, I want to figure this thing out, and he'll just go tinker in the garage for an hour and a half or something. It's not that he lacks attention. It's that he lacks something that he's interested in a lot of times. And so, those same kids will come and be like, Dad, there's nothing to do, and they'll be wandering around as if they were people that had no attention span. They'll be knocking on things, and poking their brothers and sisters. The only difference is their interest and their motivation, their engagement and love of life, is either active or it's not. [14:17.7]
You already have the ability to focus on the things that you care about. You already have the ability to focus for long stretches of time, right? I could sit there for hours at a computer looking at porn, and I can sit there for hours studying things now that I care about, truth and perspectives about what life really is and all this stuff. Sometimes I'll spend hours and I'll go talk to my wife, and she's like, How do you sit there and study that?
I mean, one time—confession time—I really wanted to know what percentage of the human body was the sexual kind of organs, for men, particularly, and I wanted to know how much of the DNA it was. And so, yeah, DNA was easy to figure out. One out of 46 chromosomes is the Y chromosome and that's what makes you a man. Okay, cool, that's 2.17 percent. [15:00.7]
But I was like, But what about the genital organs and whatnot? And I spend a couple of hours doing mathematical calculations and cylindrical volume measurements, and looking at research on average sizes of, yes, yes, that member. I know, is this embarrassing? I was sitting there like, Man, I hope the kids don't come in the room because it's going to look weird what Dad's researching, but I’ve got to know. And it turns out, ah, the average male, less than 2 percent of the total volume of the body is sexual organs. Less than 2 percent.
And the people that want to include the tongue and whatnot in the sexual organs, sorry, that's part of the eating and speaking system, too, so it's not exclusively sexual. Sorry. Same with the skin. The skin is its own system. It's called the integumentary system. Sorry, you get those covered, right? But less than 2 percent of the human body.
I studied that for a long time because I already have the ability to focus on finding an answer when I want to find an answer. So do you. So, it's not a question of whether or not you had the ability or the motivation to do stuff. It's only a question of you seeing something that you're really engaged in and that really lights you up. [16:00.0]
So, here's a fun exercise. Go make a list of 50 things that really light you up. I think we've mentioned this in a previous episode some time ago, several months ago. Go make a list of everything that really lights you up and go start doing them, and find the ones that just grab your attention and spend more time with them, and you'll discover that this muscle of focus, 1) is already there, and 2) it'll grow over time.
All right, the last one, and I'm going to say this because there's more that we could talk about, the last one, number five, the one we're going to talk about—did I say three? Whatever, five—the one we're going to talk about today is your ability to train your consciousness. Okay? We've talked about the moral implications about pornography and whatnot before and moral implications of drug abuse and whatnot.
Fun side note. What determines if a thing is a drug? Is it the U.S. government that tells you whether a thing is a drug? Because we go to the drugstore and we buy drugs to help us with pain relief and with inflammation and whatnot, and then there are some things that the government has decided are not good and are illegal, but those are things that they've seen also very therapeutic benefits for. It's a fun little thought experiment to go look at how you define what a drug is. [17:10.4]
Anyway, maybe that wasn't helpful, but I always am questioning my assumptions about what things are because it helps me look at things clearly, and when you can see things clearly, like the superpowers we're talking about, then you can make better decisions about what you want to do in your life, including “What are the aftereffects of if I'm using drugs? What are the aftereffects of those?” And if I'm using them, I need to know what those after effects are. And do I still want those in my life? I need to clearly see it, so I'm not just putting something up on a pedestal saying, This solves my problems, when it doesn't. I have to see it clearly.
All right, last superpower—training of consciousness. As someone who spent a number of hours a day sometimes, and then, at other times, I'd go a couple months without it, but thinking about it still, I trained my mind to size up women, and it took a long time to train my mind to think differently, but I trained my mind to size up women, to look for the ones that were the most feminine in a group. [18:04.0]
I would go into a room and I'd spot all the pretty women and which ones were showing the most skin, which ones were the most feminine. All that stuff was happening unconsciously because I had trained my mind to look for those things by all those years looking at pornography.
Those of you who think I'm a pervert, okay, cool, you're welcome to think that. What I'm trying to do here is help you out to understand that you, as a normal human being, have trained your mind to think and behave a certain way. You already have the ability to train your mind, because what entertains you, trains you, and what you tune into, you turn into.
Now, those are statements that I read some time ago on Facebook. Somebody else mentioned them and I was like, Wow, that's a really brilliant way of stating it, so I can't claim the origins of those two phrases. But that's the truth. What entertains you, trains you, and what you tune into, you turn into.
So, if you want to train your mind to not have urges for certain things, if you want to train your mind to not think about certain memories in a certain way or to not feel you train yourself to not feel a certain way about certain things, you already have the ability within you. [19:08.3]
And that ability starts with understanding that, shoot, if I want to feel differently, then let me figure out what I can entertain myself or what I can tune into that will train my mind in the way that I want it to go. How can I entertain myself in a certain way that naturally trains me to think that way? And if you already have the ability to train it, and if you start looking for entertainment that helps you train it, then that's helpful.
Now, that's not always the fastest way to do it. There are different ways to train your memory, your mind and your emotions, and I'll talk a little bit more about that here in an upcoming episode. But just so you know, you already have the ability to change how your mind thinks. You weren't born thinking like an addict and you do not have to stay that way, because whatever has a beginning has an end.
And so, the moment—“the” moment—that you really want to be free of what you've been struggling with this whole time, that moment, you just have to start to train your mind differently, and the more frequency you bring to it, the more quickly it'll happen. [20:04.0]
So, that's it for our brief list of untapped superpowers. My invitation to you is go tap into them.
As a recap, briefly, go tap into your ability to be hyperaware, but now be hyperaware of your emotional state and how your body feels, and start to not tolerate it feeling down.
Second, your ability and your willingness to sacrifice everything for what you love in a given moment. Right? You have to go now and go see if you want to tune into this. Go see just how good and start to connect just how good the things that you want are, so that you feel more desire for them than you feel for the thing that you held close to in the first place, whatever, whether it was an addiction or something else.
Visualization. Practice visualizing things that you really want to in your life, in such a way that it feels so vivid, it feels like it happened. Joe Dispenza is a great one. He's got tons of meditations and stuff where he can take you through things like that. Great resource there. He's got some great material on that, and amazing anecdotes and stories as well. Okay? [21:01.7]
The next one, focus. You already had the ability to focus for long stretches of time. It's just that you're not giving yourself permission to go be interested in things in the world. Go find things that grab your attention and discover just how much focus you really have.
Last one, train your mind. Go entertain yourself with something that naturally trains your mind to be the kind of person that you want to be. Now, a lot of people do this with scriptures, I'm going to read my scriptures all the time, or they do it with family history because they love that feeling of connection to family and their own history. So, it doesn't have to be games and entertainment. It can be any kind.
But these five superpowers, hyperawareness, self-sacrifice, visualization, focus and training of the mind, these you already have, folks. Go rock your world with them.
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 podcasts 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.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
