Today, we're gonna be talking about how to find your true self and why it is absolutely 100% necessary to lose yourself in order to find your true self. And in this journey of life, which is all life really is, right? Like everybody can say there's a purpose in life, there's not a purpose in life, it's to be this, it's to be that, it's to follow this path, it's to follow that path. But in this journey of life, your truest form of who you are, in my opinion, maybe this is true for you, maybe it's not, but my truest form of who you are and what I believe is you at birth. That in my opinion of a baby, a child before it is brought into the world and told what to do and what to say and how to act, that is a human, that is a perfect human, that is a obviously knowledge-less, I don't know if knowledge-less is a word, but it's a knowledge-less human about the world, but it is perfect. It has not been indoctrinated, it has not been changed, any of that. And as time goes on, you know, you could be six months old, you could be 12 months old and maybe you throw up or let's say maybe you pee yourself, right?  And at six months old, you don't get yelled at for it. At 12 months old, you don't get yelled at for it. At 18 months old, you may or may not, 24 months old, two years old, three years old. As you get older, for instance, what you now are getting yelled at, you didn't get yelled at before. We are changed in many different ways as to what is right and what is wrong. And that's just kind of the way that life works. That's kind of the way that it works for us to fit in as a species, to have, you know, live inside of cities, to get along with others, to just fit really is really what it comes down to. As time goes on, that perfect child is changed to be different. We're changed by our parents. We're changed by society. We're changed by our peers, the people who we surround ourselves with. We're changed by comparing ourselves to other people and thinking that we should be different than we are. We change ourselves and we are changed. And I don't want you to think that any of that is wrong. I actually want you to think that all of it is perfect. It is a perfectly crafted curriculum for your soul to do whatever it needs to do and learn while it is here. That's the way that I see it. We are conditioned and we are socialized to fit in, aka what I like to call, we are domesticated. And what happens is we break from our true selves. And I think that that's a perfect thing. Because if we weren't broken away from our true selves, we would be this fully enlightened being that goes through life and ends up dying fully enlightened and perfect. But what happens is in order for us to discover who we truly are, we have to find out who we are not. And honestly, I don't think that there's any other way. I've spent many hours sitting in silence thinking about, is this way that we're raised? Is it perfect? Should it be different? I believe that there is no other way. I believe that this is how you find yourself. You cannot find your true self unless you lose yourself first. You cannot find who you are unless you find also who you are not. It's just the way that life goes. And I think many, I can, I can think of many times in my life where I have lost myself. I have lost myself hundreds, if not thousands of times, probably thousands, if not tens of thousands, if I'm being honest, I can think of very specific ones as I was planning out this episode, I started thinking about like, can I remember times in my life where I was someone else than I knew who I, that was different than who I knew I truly was, right? I remember the first thing I popped in my head for some reasons, I remember it was like sixth grade, seventh grade. I remember being on a school bus and I remember saying something really incredibly mean to a girl named Tracy on the school bus. And as soon as I said it, and I said it, the reason why I said it because I knew that it would make other kids laugh and I knew it would make me feel more accepted. But what happened was I said this and immediately after I saw her face, I went, that was wrong. That was not me. And I feel really bad about it. And I didn't have the capacity, I guess, as a sixth, sixth, grade or seventh grader to say, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I just wanted to be accepted and would do anything that I could to be accepted by other children because in all honesty, I didn't feel accepted by my father, who was an alcoholic. And so that's just kind of the way that it went. And so that was a memory that first popped into my head of me breaking away from who I truly was. Then I remember certain times in high school that I would act differently than my true self so that a group of people would accept me. You know, I remember I smoked a lot of weed in high school, even though I never really liked the way that weed made me feel like it made me so anxious. But I remember the group of people I love to surf. And so the people who I hung out with surfers loved to smoke a lot of weed. And so I felt like in order to hang out with the people who had the same hobby that they loved as I did, which was surfing, I needed to change myself. I needed to smoke a whole lot of weed like they did. I needed to miss a lot of school. I needed to do a lot of partying and drinking and all of that. That thing carried into college. And I remember drinking and partying like crazy because I thought that's what everybody did. And I enjoyed doing it. And the reason why I enjoyed doing it was because it broke me away from the reality of I was not living a life that was true to myself when in reality what I was really just doing was numbing the fact that I didn't feel like I knew who I was anymore. I was numbing the fact that I didn't want to go to college.  But I was just trying to fit in with people. And I remember other moments when I broke away from who I truly was. I remember getting into relationships and falling for people who showed me their true selves and I thought that they were going to be different. And I remember changing myself in order to have that person accept me or quote unquote what I thought was love me. But in the long run and ended up just hurting me again and those people that I changed myself for now I'm 36 years old. I'm not with those people and all of those things in my life. And there's probably 40 50 thousand other moments where I broke away from my true self. And it was a moment of realization. This isn't who I want to be. Even if it was just a momentary thought of this isn't who I want to be. This isn't this isn't how I want to act. This isn't how I want to do it.  Like really, really hard moments. But in really hard moments come really incredible lessons. The hardest moments in your life are going to give you the most incredible lessons and those lessons show you where you need to change.  The problem is that I don't think most people understand this. I honestly don't. And hopefully this episode will hope more people understand it. This is a realization that I came to over over 30 years of going through this right. I don't think people understand that all of these really hard moments are lessons. When I get a hard moment in my life, the first thing I try to ask myself when I become aware of it is what is the universe? What is God trying to teach me right now? And instead of getting the lesson from it, what people tend to do, what we tend to do is we tend to get completely lost and then we don't know who we are anymore. And we don't realize that we need to get lost in order to find ourselves.  And I didn't realize any of this until I was in my 30s. And most people don't realize this maybe ever. And then you get to the end of their life and they realize that they have all these regrets because they didn't live a life that was true to themselves. Because most of us, what we do is if we're looking through life as just kind of the journey that we go on is most of us were told what to do. Like we are children and we're told what to do. A lot of the times it's we're told what to do in order to stay safe because children are pretty crazy. If you look at them, they'll jump off of things, all of this. But what we do is a lot of times people want to keep us safe. And so they tell us what to do and we learn to do what we're told, not just from our parents, but from everything. And then we go into school and teachers tell us what to do. And we're told we have this whole paradigm of you have to get good grades in school. You have to be a good boy. You have to be a good girl and you have to be do really good in first grade so that you can get to second grade. And then you've got to do really good in second grade. So you could get to third and you've got to fourth and fifth. And then you're about to go into middle school. For those of you guys outside the United States, middle school here is, you know, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. And then high school is ninth grade, twelfth grade, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth. And so you've got to be a good boy and a good girl in middle school so that you can get into high school and you've got to do really good in high school so you can get into a good college. And then when you get into college, you've got to be really good so that you can get a good job. And then once you get a good job, you've got to be able to, you've got to be really good and do better than anybody else. You can climb the ladder. And then you realize you're just chasing this thing that you never even wanted to chase in the first place.  And they just wake up one day and they feel like they have this life that they didn't want or they didn't create for themselves and they just kind of followed the herd or they were followed, followed what they were told to do what they saw other people do. And that's a really hard moment for a lot of people. And for a lot of people, they notice it, but then they go, I'm stuck though. Like I can't change. I can't be any different than I am. I'm too, I have a mortgage. I have children. I have all of the stuff. I have a job. I've been, you know, I have people, I'm a manager and there's 12 people that are under me. I can't just leave them. And so it's not easy. It's a really hard moment for a lot of people, but it's a moment of transformation if they let it be a moment of transformation. And that's when we realize a lot of times that what we've been focusing on is on the external. We've been focusing on what we want to do and what we want to create and accomplishments and money and buying things and the external of how people will perceive us based off of what college degree we have or what car we have or what our house looks like. And we realize that everything that we've done up until that moment, the breakaway and the many, many, many breaks from our truest self was focusing on all of the external. What other people wanted, what we think we want, how we want to be perceived, all of these things. And we stopped looking external. And at that moment, the realization is I need to start looking internal. Like when I look at myself, if I'm not where I want to be, what parts of the old me need to die? Like if I'm thinking of myself as like a snake, a snake constantly sheds its skin. It constantly sheds its skin. It's constantly sheds its skin. And so it has to change and mold in order to discover who we're not and let go of it like a dead skin in order to figure out who we are. Like one of the biggest realizations in my life that really changed a lot of things for me was back in 2008, I was running an office, I was a sales manager for an office and my mentor and manager above me, Matt, called me up one day and he's just, you know, the crazy thing is like we were one of the top three offices out of 700 in the United States.  I was, you know, 21, 22 years old. And I thought we were crushing it. And he goes, Hey man, can you call me up? Hey, can you go get some lunch with me? I'm like, Yeah, sure, let's go. We meet at Chipotle. I'm there for maybe 45 seconds with my burrito. And Matt goes, Hey man, I don't know how to tell you this, but a lot of people don't like you. And I was like, Sorry, what? Like, what do you mean? I thought everybody likes me.  Like we have this successful business and things are going really well. And he said to me, he goes, Hey ma'am, I know your heart. I know who you are, because I've known you for so long. That's not who you're presenting yourself to be to other people. And what I realized is that I was really brash, really sharp-tongued would tell you exactly what I was thinking.  It was, it was my way of protecting myself and my low sense of self worth because my self worth was so fragile that I had to try to hurt people and put up a barrier first before anybody could come and try to hurt me. So nobody even tried. Myself was so low that I had to bring other people down.  I did not know that I was acting this way. And then as I started seeing it, I started seeing all of the ways that I was showing up and the things that I was saying to people that were not the best way of putting it, not what my true self wanted to say to somebody. And I noticed that I lost myself. I noticed that I had become somebody that I really wasn't truly. And it was over years and years and years of becoming this way. And luckily that happened to me.  And it's, it's because we lose ourself in so many ways that we have to identify who, we have to eventually find who we truly are. And so I want you to think about this. Like, have you ever lost yourself in a romantic relationship? For instance, in, you know, become somebody who is not necessarily you hoping to please the other person, hoping to get love from the other person when in reality, what you're really searching for is love from yourself for your true self, only to eventually lose yourself in that relationship. And then in the long run, eventually lose them most likely. Have you ever done that before? Have you ever lost yourself in a relationship with your family?  You have to act a certain way around your dad. You have to act a certain way around grandma and grandpa. You act a certain way around your brother and sister. You act a certain way when you show up to the office. Like, have you ever lost yourself in a relationship to anybody else around you? Lost yourself and acted certain ways. Have you ever lost yourself in your family? Have you ever lost yourself in your work? Have you ever lost yourself in your work relationships? Have you ever lost yourself in your friendships you know a lot of times what we do is we become a chameleon for other people and we are never actually a truest self but what we are is we are different versions of somebody different mass that we put on depending on who's in front of us and then we do this because we hope that people will accept us because in reality we don't really truly accept ourselves because we're not our real selves so we're hoping that if we change ourselves other people will accept us but then what happens is we become somebody else for all these different people and a lot of times we end up not even liking ourselves like if you ever lost yourself in any other relationships or here's another example if you ever lost yourself in a job like acting like you need to be somebody else acting like you need to have a specific job title acting like you're supposed to act a certain way because of you're a manager or you know I'm a doctor so I'm supposed to I know more than everybody else or I have this degree so I have I know more than everybody else or getting a degree that you really didn't want because you were told that that's where you're supposed to want and it can seem really daunting to lose yourself but there's a lot of benefits of losing yourself first off and the biggest one of the overarching theme is you have to lose yourself in order to find yourself and as you go through these hard moments you have to go through the hard moments to really sit down and feel all then say who the fuck am I right and one of the things that you're going to get is you're going to get a greater sense of self-awareness when you find who you're not you will also discover who you are and you you you in turn start to move and shift yourself you start to understand how you want to be who you know it makes it easier to say yes or no to people you stop being a people pleaser because you're not looking for other people right another thing that comes from it is you're going to be more confident when you start finding to yourself like who you are you stop needing that love and acceptance from other people and what's interesting is when you find who you truly are and start becoming more of that the people who really truly do love and accept you love and accept you even more and so the less you need it from others but the more you'll actually get it from others which is crazy and so you become more confident because you don't need a reflection from anybody else to change your perception of yourself because your perception of yourself is so strong another thing that really helps and I just mentioned it is your relationships will improve because people start connecting to the real you they start connecting to the true you because you're not lying to them anymore even if you weren't lying to them on purpose you're not lying to them anymore and some relationships are going to die it's the way it's going to be some relationships will change and some relationships will strengthen but overall your relationships will become better last one that I think is an important one is a greater sense of self-fulfillment because you're able to start to step into who you truly are and when you start to step into who you truly are become very clear and what is that you truly want and when you find out what it is that you want it makes it easier to go on that path and so I'm curious for you as you're listening to this what what things do you need to change about yourself what beliefs do you need to change what habits do you need to change what relationships do you need to change all of this can be super scary but I promise you it is extremely empowering it will build your confidence and you'll stop caring so much about failing you'll stop caring so much about other people's opinions what other people think of you and you'll become stronger in your sense of self which over your lifetime will improve your life drastically so that's what I got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on your instagram and tag me in it rob dial junior r o b d i a l j r also we're putting up a ton of super valuable stuff on instagram that is not from this podcast so if you are on instagram follow me on there rob dial junior r o b d i a l j r and i'm gonna leave the same way leave you every single episode make it your mission make somebody else's day better i appreciate you and i hope that you have an amazing day