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. [00:27.9]
Bob: What is the problem with problems? My friends, that's what we're going to explore today. What problems are, how they came about to be controlling our life. And I want to give you a way of seeing them that allows you to be free. A little bit of the compulsive need to find problems and the capacity to start finding solutions and opportunities without needing to overcome something in order to get it. So we'll dive in a little bit. The other day I was walking up the hill and I go on these semi long walks in the up along the mountain. Sometimes my dog needs a walk at night and so we go. I was walking up the hill the other day and I was looking out over the valley and I was mulling over some of the things that have been caught in my head because walking is a great time to do that for me. And I realized that one of the common things that most of our clients come to come come with is some sense that there's something wrong with them or something wrong about them. [01:30.3]
Now, some of them, them might feel it in this way that they're not good enough. Some of them might feel it like, Oh, I'm a disappointment. Some of them might feel like there's something wrong with me. Some of them might feel like nobody likes me, but the general sense is a sense of comparison, right? It's a sense of there's something bad about me. I'm a bad person, or there's something wrong with me and I don't measure up. Now have you ever felt that way? Once, twice? Has it been a recurring theme in your life? Are there certain situations in which you find yourself there? Well guess what; today we're going to start to dismantle that a little bit for you. So here's the deal. I'm walking down and I realize I'm asking myself this question, and this is a question that I ask myself quite a bit, which is, does it actually exist? [02:15.9]
Is it really a real thing? Now, this will make more sense as we go along, but it's a really fabulous question. That question is one that makes a distinction between the creator's creation. Now, whether you're religious or not, I'm talking about whatever created this world, that creation versus the creation in our own heads, meaning our psychological stories, our thought processes, and what we create inside of our bodies. Think of it this way. There's the earth that has been created and all that stuff that's going on in there, and then there's our own little planet earth that we call our body, right? That's something we took certain ingredients from the ground or plants or animals, and we ingested them, and this magical process occurred inside of our system that transformed those into our human body. It's a refined bit of matter, right? [03:07.9]
And so there's just little planet earth that we've got. It's just earth, right? If you're a Christian, then you have this sense that, Oh, Adam was formed from the dust of the ground. In some real sense, it's really true. It's just that it's been gone, it's gone through a little bit of a refiner's fire and people talk about digestion a little bit as a fire and it's come out as cells, the building blocks of the, which then are then made into cells and all the other amino acid chains and proteins and everything else that goes on inside your system, right? So here we are. We are on our own little planet and we've created things in our planet. We'll call it the weather system, right? What's the weather like today? That would be a great question to ask your friend on the street. [03:48.8]
Instead of asking them, Hey, how are you? I always like to ask, how are you feeling? Because then that gives them a chance to actually just check in for the present moment and see. But you might ask, how's the weather? So we create stuff, chemical situations inside of our body, volatile stuff, earthquakes, where we're shaking and doing all kinds of things. We've created this little planet of ours. And the distinction or the question of what is real is a question of is it inherent in reality or in the creator's creation? Or is it just in my head or just inside me? Because it's just inside me, Oh man, I have ultimate capacity to do whatever the heck I want with it. If you've learned the skills, freedom is a skill, not a pill; we say this a lot. But if it is inherent in reality, then my only job is to accept it, right? [04:39.9]
Oh yeah. That's what's actually there. And all the rest of this is stuff I made up. So here I was looking at this, is it possibly true that there is something wrong with anything on the planet? Anything with a person, for instance. And I realized as I was walking down the hill, you know, kind of kicking a few rocks and stepping over the large grass, that the only way you could ever make wrongness like make sense is by comparison. That's it. Because if we say, Oh no, that's wrong, and that's right, then another person comes on and says, no, that's wrong and this other thing is right, and we realize that wrongness this idea of something being bad or something being wrong is something is a label we've put on it something. Well, how would you know that something is wrong or right? The only way you could possibly know is if you had some anchor point to compare it with. [05:33.0]
In other words, there have to be two things, two people for instance, you and me, and then a third person has to come along or you can do it on your own if you want. And look at those two things and judge them by their own standards, which are not universal, by the way. Everybody judges things differently and decide which one they liked better and the one that they like better is the one that they call good and the one they don't like as much they call bad or the one they call or it's right or wrong. Either way you want to look at it. This is how this goes down. You cannot have something right or wrong if you're just looking straight at it because all it is, is what it is. All you are is all that you are and all I am is all that I am only another person or you and I, we do this a lot to ourselves, comes in and create some fantasy idea of what we think we should be. [06:30.5]
And then we slam that on top of each of our shelves and we look at it and we go, Nope, we are not that and therefore I am wrong or I am not good enough or I don't measure up or I'm not as good at dad as I need to be or I'm not a great employee or I'm a little, I'm lazy, I know or I'm not that smart or I'm all this other stuff in comparison with this fantasy idea or with some with our fantasy ideas about somebody else because let's be honest, you and I really don't know anything much about other people. We know our ideas about them, but if you ever sat and just stared at somebody, just looked at them for a long time, really trying to grasp who the being is underneath all that skin. [07:14.0]
Have you really just sat with somebody either looking deeply into their eyes like the New York times article experience that my wife and I did a number of years ago where we had to ask each other. I think there were about 20 questions or maybe there were 40 and we had to ask each other, each of those questions answer them, and then we stared into each other's eyes for like four minutes. Have you done that? Have you noticed that the other person is an enigma, but the more you try to understand them and create ideas in your head so that you can predict them, you might be able to predict them, but do you ever, do you ever recognize that you really don't understand anything about who they really are as a being that all you've figured out is some of the behaviors that they currently are doing or some of the thought processes that they typically have, but if you were your thoughts instead of just being who created those thoughts, then when those thoughts ended, you would die. You're not your thoughts. [08:09.0]
If you were your emotions when those emotions end you would die. If you were your behaviors, then every time you stopped doing that behavior, you would die. Because if you are it and it ceases to exist, then you cease to exist. And we spend our time looking at people and pretending we know them. When all we know are things that they have done in the world, right? We pretend we know the wind when all we've noticed really are the rustling of the leaves and the sound in the air. But do we really know the wind? This is an important distinction. Do you really know you or you have? You've been busy your whole life judging you by the things you've done, the thoughts you've had, the words you said, the people who are around you, your friend circle, all of this stuff, right? So I just, I sit there and it becomes very clear to me that you can't have wrongness. [09:03.8]
So I asked myself this question, is there such a thing as wrongness? Have I ever in my entire life seen such a thing, like a literal thing in the world? In the creator's creation as wrongness or badness, and if you closed your eyes and ran and scan through your memories, my hunch is that you would find what I found. No, I know my heart wanted to say, ‘Well, yes….that was bad’, but no, actually it wasn't. It was simply a behavior that I didn't like or society didn't approve of or whatever else it was, but there was no inherent, there was no object in the world called wrongness. You can't go to the store and buy one. You can't take wrongness out on a date. It doesn't exist. Same with ugliness. Same with badness, same with stupidity, same with peace even, right? All of these things, they're not inherent in the creator's creation. [09:58.3]
They are, they are thoughts and experiences that we're creating in ourselves. So I look and scan through my life history and I'm like, there's no such thing as wrongness. It's, it's not a thing. It's like a shirt or a little cardboard box. I stick over the top of things and then when I look at those things, I can't see them anymore. All I can see is the little box I put on top of it with the label that says wrong. And sometimes the boxes we put on top of things, there are boxes we put on top of them when we were young. In fact, a lot of things when we were learning how to navigate the world when we were young, Oh that's bad, that's good because that's how you help kids not die in the middle of the street. [10:34.2]
But then no one came along and challenged those ideas. So here we are. Here we are. And as I looked at it, I was like, wow, you know what? I can't even say that the same thing is wrong to everybody. Because there are people that do heinous things on the planet and they are getting value and benefit from those things. And there are other people who look at those things and gain the exact opposite and they hurt them and they're miserable about them. So even in the same thing, we're having different experiences and the lie, like we talked about last time with the color blue, the lie is that when we use the same word, we mean the same thing. So for instance, I say, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm a Utahn, right? Or when I walk around, I go, this is my home. And what I mean by that and what you def probably mean by that, ask yourself, check and see if this is true. [11:27.5]
What I mean by that is this is the place that I feel comfortable. This is my comfort zone, right? This is a place that I, when I come here, I have a certain feeling of belonging and I don't have a feeling of that same feeling of belonging in certain other areas, right? So when I say, Oh yeah, I'm from Utah. I mean, I don't mean Utah and we just moved here a little bit ago. So it's weird for me say that because I grew up in the military, but my wife, you know, she grew up here. So it's weird for me to say I'm from Utah, right now but when I say I'm from Utah, what I really mean is a small little set of experiences surrounding where I live, the people I interact with and the kinds of experiences I have and the smells in the air and the sites out my front door. [12:14.5]
But somebody who lives in Logan, Utah, when they say I'm from Utah, they mean their idea about Utah. And when I say I'm from Utah, I mean my idea from my, from about Utah, and when my brother in law says he's from Utah, he means his idea. And he's down South near st George where there's all the red rock stuff and Zions national park. And it's a very different climate down there in some ways, right? Or very different landscape. So when we say I'm from Utah, we don't actually mean the same thing, but we're using the word to signify something. And if you really get down to it, no two of us have the same experience of anything. And so we've learned all of these details and factoids and things in school growing up. We've learned how to identify and grab labels. And then when we bump into each other, we're like, why is it no, no. He said he was from Utah. I said, I was from Utah and we started talking. We realized it wasn't the same experience. [13:08.0]
What's going on, what's going on here? And we run into all of these struggles in life because we have predetermined associations with stuff, right? And we learned all this stuff in school to a certain extent. We were trained in school to define things and to have a certain definition. We talked about definitions last time, but we were trained in school to define things and to make it very clear what we mean. Have you ever had a conversation with somebody who didn't mean the same thing that you meant, but you were, and the conversation was tough or it went on for a while and it ended up being very different. There's some really funny letters that I've read over the years. And I don't even know if they're true, but in comedy books and other types of articles where there's this glorious mistake happening because two people think they mean the same thing when they don't. [13:56.0]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [14:25.2]
Well, we were talking about problems here in the beginning and the problems that start to arise because of the labels that we put on things you see, and we have to ask ourselves the problem. I mean, the question do problems actually exist? Think about it. Now, you might be saying, well, okay, so there's, I mean, okay, someone could brand as a problem, but really that's not what it is. That's just the label on it. Okay, but there are math problems. Really? Do math problems exist? Think about it in the creator's creation inherent in reality. Outside of your mind, do they exist as problems or are they income paper or pixels on a screen? What about crossword puzzles or Sudoku? What about word problems? All of these things that we're calling problems, do problems actually exist? Do problems actually exist? but I'm late for work and that's a problem. [15:25.0]
Is it? Is it really? Because when you say it's a problem, does that make you less late for work? Is it effective in your life to call something a problem or do you just end up having a little bit of anxiety about it? The reason I believe from what I've been thinking about over the last little while that we have this situation in this pension to call things problems is because we were taught to have problems. We, it was glorified in us from the time we were a little kid that we had homework, that we had jobs to do, something to solve. And we were trained from early on that life was a series of problems that we overcome, achievements that we have to make, you know, landmarks to pass by in our journey in life. That life somehow, God, it's meaning by the problems that we solved. [16:13.5]
And so we started to look at ourselves as problems. Now we didn't learn that necessarily in school, but we might've learned it in church. There's quite a number of religions out there that look very, very disparagingly toward the human body and the human being and see it as a problem. Like it's got some issue and its whole job is to become something different than what it is. So the whole idea of problems is something that arose from our upbringing. Right? Think about it. Think about just school for a second and then we'll, we'll take this really wide and far right. Think about school for a second. Okay. We go into school and what do we get? Okay, we have a reading thing and then we have some questions that we have to answer and then we have a math, math learning, and then we have some homework problems. [16:56.7]
What are these problems? They're completely made up. They're made up by mankind, and then we go answer them and in answering them, if we get the answer correct, what happens is we get this little jolt, this little hit, and I don't know if it's dopamine or some other kind of a serotonin hit or something else like that. I don't know what exact chemist chemical cocktail happens when you get something right and you're celebrating it, but we get this little hit like, yes, I'm right, right? Versus I'm wrong. Again, the way we use language is really imprecise. Are you rightness? Does rightness actually exist? Are you wrongness? Does wrongness actually exist? These are all ideas we have in our head. What does right and wrong mean? It means that whatever is out there that we can see somehow matches the person who's grading's idea about it. I remember I came home one time from a math test. I got a 99% I was kinda miffed about it. Was there, did there, was there anything wrong on the test? [17:56.4]
No, they were all just marks on paper. Oh, but Bob, you got one question wrong. What does that mean? It means that a teacher made up some answer, made up some questions, and the teacher wanted a specific answer and when that answer didn't match what the teacher wanted, the teacher put a red Mark on the page and then marked me as a 99% did that mean there was wrongness on the patient? No. That meant that there were marks on the page. But Bob, you can't just, you know, do the laws of mathematics wrong. That's wrong. Right? Again, where did the laws of mathematics come from? Human beings made them up and human beings decided the rules and when the rules don't match, when the rules don't fit, when something goes off, right? When you get creative with your mathematics, then we say it's wrong, but is it's not really a thing. [18:50.8]
It's just a human convention. It's a social thing and don't get me wrong. Mathematics is amazing for calculating all kinds of stuff. So it's not bad that we make up these distinctions. What happens is where the trouble comes for people is when we confuse what we've made up with what's really out there in the world. There ain't a single specimen in the world on the planet today outside of human beings who cares one wit about mathematics, not a single one, and yet they seem to manage their living, their lives fine…fine and somehow they've managed to grasp physics and understand distances and jumping and all kinds of other things that we're busy here like making weird symbols on a page to try and understand and they're living just fine without it. So we grew up and going through science problems and math problems and everything and what we learned, what you and I learned just by osmosis just by being in that marinade is Hey, it's really valuable to create problems and then solve them. [19:51.5]
It's really good to be a problem solver, right? That's the kind of person you want to be. You want to be a problem solver, but the problem is with that is that, listen, I'm doing it right now. The problem with that is that you have to make a problem in order to have a solution and therein lies our suffering. We turn what is really out there in creation into problems. Now, don't believe me, just take a look at our entertainment, right? We have television shows called Survivor. What do we do? We stick a person in an environment with a bunch of rules and we see if they can make it work and at the end they get rewarded for solving a problem, right? Now we have cooking shows where we have a time limit and a number of contestants and all these other things. We create a problem and then we watch avidly as they try and solve this problem and in the end actually happened except that food got cooked. [20:49.5]
All the rest of the experience was created by us, by the camera man and the angles, by the way, that the director yelled at people if it's hell's kitchen or something like that. All of that was created by us. We have sporting events, which is basically a problem. Hey look, let's draw a rectangle on the ground and all of these various ways. We're going to allow each team this many players and the problem is in X amount of time, who's going to score the most points? Problem, solution, right? Our politics is built around finding problems and solving problems. You know, technology is built around finding problems and solving problems. Marketing is built around finding problems and sometimes in a sly way, creating problems for people and then solving problems, which really kind of, you know, yanks my chain a little bit. It kind of bothers me, but in any way, shape or form, we have built up an entire society that's built around, Hey, you have a problem, here's a solution. [21:45.0]
Even religion is focused on, Hey look, there's a problem here. Let's have a solution. Now I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad or a good thing that you having experienced in life and you don't want that experience anymore. That will be a natural, organic way to have a problem. Well, what I'm talking about here is the multiplication of problems. See, because once you've gotten hooked, once you've got that little hit, your first like crack cocaine dose of being a problem solver who's really good at what you do and people start applauding you for it and saying, wow, you're so talented and you're so good at this thing. It's, it's like a little bit of a high and you want that high again because it makes your life feel meaningful because now you are a problem solver. You've identified yourself with a little box that you stuck over your head and wrote label on it, problem solver and all that did all that box did was cancel out all the other possibilities that you could be by you identifying solely with problem-solver in that moment. [22:44.0]
Not advancing it's one experience in life and yet when you get addicted to it, when you really start to understand it, now we have crossword puzzles and Sudoku and Oh no, no, you gotta have your, your mind sharp and all this stuff and now we've built things that to keep your mind sharp. What they mean is we got to go create problems and solve problems. So you're really good at creating and solving problems or finding problems and solving problems and you need to think this way and that way as if that is the one mark of a truly happy and blessed life. Let me ask you this, how happy are you on an average day on a scale of one to 10 and could it be that there's a whole bunch of stuff in your life that feel like problems but might not actually be like, what if we're wrong here about all the things we've declared our problems and what if they're not actually problems? [23:34.0]
I'm not talking about the creator's creation. I'm talking about the stuff we've made up in our own mind. The problem with problems is they're addictive. And the problem with solutions is they're addictive and in the process you end up spending a lot of your time in life finding problems. Case in point, I turned into a guy who was got really good at finding fault with other people. My kids would do something and I'd get irritated and annoyed because I'd turn it into a problem. Then I'd yell at them because I had to solve this problem because I couldn't be happy with my life the way it was. I would correct them, you know, they'd be doing homework and I'd be like, no, no, it's like this. And I'd step in and micromanage and correct them all the time, making them feel like they're stupid or they're idiots, or they don't understand a thing about life because I was busy. So addicted to being right, which doesn't exist by the way. Right? [24:29.0]
So addicted to being right that I was busy trying to make everyone wrong so I could make myself right. Do you know how many relationships I've struggled in or I struggled in over the years because that was initially the one thing that I went to a lot of them, or I simply didn't have relationships because I had a hard time having a relationship with people because then I'd always be finding fault with them. I got really good at solving problems. I was incredible at academics. But then when you turn that on another person, it can be devastating and the people in your life and you, nobody wants to be looked at as a problem. The reality is this, the only problems we create are in our head. The other person is not the problem. [25:10.0]
What we've created is the problem and how about we work with those people and collaborate on a solution or figure out how in the first place to stop creating problems that we have to solve. So the problem with problems is that and the solution to it is to start questioning. Like I asked you last time, is it really a problem? Is this really a problem and is it real, is what I'm thinking about this actually real in reality. Start there this week guys. That's your homework and then I look forward to hearing from you. Send me notes or messages along the way, bob@thefreedomspecialist.com if you have some cool insights or stuff that's going on from the podcast, I'd love to hear if you have questions you want me to answer, happy to answer them. This is for you guys. Alright, have a good week. [25:55.1]
And that's it for todays “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. [26:14.5]
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