How To MOVE ON, LET GO & LEAVE Your Past In The Past... | Mel Robbins EP 272

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatest Mindset, today.

0:51How do you think we heal trauma if we don't have the resources to go to therapy or do workshops or whatever it may be? even if we do have resources, we don't have the courage to put ourselves out there. How do we start to heal trauma within our body? We did a whole project for Audible Original called Take Control. The thesis was this, any area of your life that you're stuck, I am willing to bet everything I have that you have a trauma pattern from your past that you've never healed. You got a boss that is abusive, guarantee you, this has to do with a trauma pattern from your past. You can't succeed in the areas you want you can't lose the weight there's some pattern from your past so the first thing is recognizing that you actually experience trauma and i am a huge proponent as so many people are of widening the definition because i think up until about five years ago most of us thought that trauma just meant okay you were in active duty or you were in a huge accident or incident that was highly traumatic, or you survived some sort of physical, sexual, whatever, abuse.

2:03Trauma is just about any kind of experience that you witness or you absorb that has your nervous system light up on edge and start warning you. So if you've ever had, like you could have a critical parent and you just brace for them. You could have a parent that drinks like crazy and you brace at five o 'clock because you know they're coming home. You could have been abandoned by a parent or have a parent that was mentally ill. And so you were constantly on edge. It's when your nervous system fires up to a state of alert that now gets programmed into your body as a response. There's a reason why so many couples at five o 'clock at night start bickering.

2:48And it It has to do with the fact that at five o 'clock is typically when a lot of parents 20 years ago were coming home from work. And that's when the arguing would start. And so what happens is as a kid, you're now in a state where you're on edge. There's a lot of good things that usually happen to our childhood, but we just seem to remember a lot of the bad stuff. And it's because it's you know why, right? Because it's trauma, just like in your nervous system. And also your mind is wired in a way to prioritize the negative as a means to keep safe from not experiencing it. Correct. Which is why you've got to work on your positive mindset because your mind defaults to negative.

3:28So you've got to build up the programming to positive. This isn't just woo-woo. This is actually science. There's this concept called ghost in the nursery, which basically means if you had parents that were just stressed out and they come home and they've been busy and you're sitting there playing on the floor and there's toys. everywhere and mom or dad's reaction to a mess is to scream that creates this kind of thing in your nervous system now you may not remember that episode that happened on may 17th 1972 but your nervous system remembers what it's like so fast forward you're now 51 years old you walk in the house and there's a mess everywhere and even though you have said i'm not going to bulldoze and yell at anybody.

4:11My body recognizes the situation. So what do you do? You repeat the pattern you saw. Why are boundaries important when we also have the mindset of like, you should be breaking your boundaries all the time? I think the hardest boundaries, honestly, are the ones to set with yourself. To not drink during the week, not tolerate the bulldozing, and immediately apologize and try to do better, not waste hours on social media, like all the things that the small promises you need to make in order to create boundaries with your old patterns and your excuses. I think that the definition with boundaries that has helped me the most is understanding the boundaries are for me, they're not for you.

4:53And the single biggest mistake that we make in any relationship, particularly romantic ones, but also work-related ones, is we do not express what we need. the greatest thing that you can do is ask for what you need. Your friends need to know what you need. Your lover needs to know what you need. Your kids need to know what you need because then they can show up in a way where you feel seen and they're going to feel incredible. If you can start to identify the bulldozing, the anger, all that stuff, you will literally change your whole life by just changing one or two patterns. The other thing, and you know, you asked me about the talk show.

5:33The single greatest gift of the talk show content-wise is something called the word wheel. If you Google word wheel or wheel of emotions, you will find that if you ask somebody, name as many emotions as you can. Most people can name three. Happy, sad, angry. There's literally like 113 of them. This thing allows you to start with a core emotion and go out. And so the word wheel is something that we used several times a week to help people go from the thing that they are expressing to communicating what you're feeling. What do you think are the reasons we doubt ourselves or what do you think is the steps to gaining more confidence in ourselves when we doubt?

6:19I always thought that confidence was a thing that you feel. and I have come to prefer that confidence is something that you do, meaning that a lot of people like to think, okay, well, you're going to feel confident first and then once you feel confident, then you'll take the action. And that's wrong. It's not a chicken or an egg in my mind. I think what happens is you have to force yourself in a moment of self-doubt to do something. And when you see yourself taking action, the confidence follows. So I have created my own definition of confidence, which is confidence is the willingness to try. And you display the willingness to try when you take action.

7:12It's a lot like the relationship between courage and fear. You can't have courage without fear. Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's acting in the face of it. And confidence isn't the absence of self-doubt. It's being willing to try, even though you doubt yourself.

7:45Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:35Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

8:50Thank you.