Personality Isn't Permament, Bejamanin Hardy (Transcend yourself...)

[Deleted78083]

Link to the Book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593083318/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20


Hello,

It's me, mon_fi.

I promised I'd make a threat summarizing the book "Personality isn't permanent" by Dr. Benjamin Hardy. This book may be one of the best self-development books I have ever read and I am very excited about it. Furthermore, I think it could help a lot of people on the forum that are stuck in bad habits, scared, can't make decisions, or procrastinate.

If you enjoy the posts you're about to read, by all means, buy the book. I feel a bit guilty for summarizing and creating a threat based on...the work of someone else. However, I really think that what you are about to read is a game changer.

So if you feel you're getting into it, please think about the author, Dr. Hardy. It will only be small price to pay for the enormous difference it will make in your life.

I found the book randomly on Amazon. It had 5 stars, which surprised me because I had never heard of it. I directly bought it and began reading. 10 minutes into it, it was clear why people were so excited about it.

I have read many excellent personal development books. You may almost call me a junkie. However, each of them only partially solved the self-development equation.

Ray Dalio will tell you to pursue meaningful goals and relationships. Eckart Tolle will tell you to forget about your past and focus on the present. Don Ruiz will tell you to reframe your past. Tony Robbins and Susan Jeffers will tell you to "just do it". Gary Vee will tell you to work hard. Many others will give you other excellent advice.

However, none of them, to my impression at least, ever managed to build a complete solution to breaking bad habits, achieving your goals, and transcending the person you currently are to become who you want to be.

Jordan Peterson may have touched on the topic a bit, but he is still incredibly rooted in the past. When you look at his writing program, it contains two sections about the past, and only one about the future (I do recommend the writing program nonetheless, and you'll find out why soon enough).

Anyway, I am not here to criticize but to bring solutions. This forum has done so much for me I felt I had to deliver something as well.

When I finished summarizing "Personality Isn't Permanent", I had about 18 000 words. So instead of stupidly uploading the document here, I have decided to steal the structure of Lex's "Make Money Copywriting in 15 Days Or Less". I think it will be more interesting, especially since the book is action-based.

Let me explain: at the end of each chapter, the author is asking you to answer questions about your past, about your present, but most importantly, about yourself.

So, similarly to Lex's threat, you'll have the chance to "take action" and meditate on your own life by answering questions related to the theory you'll have just learnt at the end of most of the post.

The book itself is not long, but it is so dense in content that I believe this method will yield better results for transformation. Resolving traumas and coming with a clear picture of who you are is a process. So let's organize this thread as such.

We will start today. For the next 20 days or so, I'll upload one piece of the summary on a daily basis. Some days will be heavier than others. I just hope you will answer the questions and do the work, because I really think this book can be profoundly transformative. At least, it has been for me. There is therefore no reason it can't be for you too.

Side note: don't answer the questions in the threat. There are very intimate questions. You should instead answer them in writing in your journal, or talk about them with a close friend or relative.

If you're sick to be limited by your traumas, if you're willing to rewrite your own story, if you're ready to finally face difficult life events and process them so that they stop preventing you from achieving your goals, and finally, if you have a burning desire to become the person you have always wanted to be, then this tread is for you.

If not, then it's not.

The next following posts will feature a summary of each part of the book. Since we are on the fastlane forum, I have added some "side notes" and have taken some elements of MJ's path as an entrepeneur to illustrate the theory outlined in the book. Since we all know these examples, I thought they would be handy. I hope you don't mind, MJ.

Most of what you are about to read comes from the book, but I have also added some material from "fastlane thinking".

Ok, enough talk.

Let's dive in.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary

​

The mainstream perception of personality tests is that they teach you to “get to know yourself” and to discover “who you are”. Through them, it is implied that who you are is something you need to “discover” because it is “fixed inside you”.

Once you know “who you are”, you can then build your life around “your personality”. As such, there are things you “can do”, things you “can’t” because of what “life gave you”.

This type of thinking assumes that your personality is something you get when you are born. It assumes it is something you carry around your entire life.

Now, take a deep breath and flush all of these ideas out of your mind because nothing could be further from the truth.

The reason why personality is seen as fixed is because psychologists almost only deal with the past. And the reason why they do that is because they have been trained to think that the future is caused by the past. Not influenced. Caused.

And that’s a problem.

Being “caused” by the past means you have no choice or possibility in the matter of who you are and what you can do. Instead, you’re forced to accept whatever personality you have “received”. Who you are right now started with a domino toppling another domino until now. Since you can’t change the past, all you can do is discover and better understand who you really are and why.

All of this is incorrect.

If there is one thing we know, it is that you can choose two things in life: making decisions about what you want to happen and choosing how you respond to what does happen.

The two most crucial factors influencing your ability to make choices are your social and cultural environments, as well as your emotional development as a person. The more emotionally evolved you become, the less defined you’ll be by your past and the less constrained you’ll be by your circumstances.

Instead of being fixed, “anchored” into your past, you will be flexible. Instead of avoiding or burying emotions, you’ll embrace them and be transformed through them. You’ll go after the life you truly want—regardless of how “impossible” or difficult it may currently seem to you or those around you.

You’ll deal with whatever emotions, lessons, or struggles come along the way. Through your learning and experience, you’ll transform. Your circumstances will change.

The reason why most people feel better about being told what to do and who to be is because choosing who you want to be is not only hard, but also risky. If you fail, it may hurt. This creativity to create yourself can also take you to weird and surprising places, and people don’t like weird and surprises. They want predictability, and stability. Ever heard of a 9-5?

On the other way around, when you decide what you want to do, who you want to be, and actively work at it, engage, amazing things start to happen, so amazing you start asking yourself “is this really happening?”

You’re moving forward, fulfilling a vision, focusing on the person you want to be. You think about the future and the good things that are about to come. You’re not limited either by your future or the person you were because you have left them in the past. What moves you is your vision, your project, that thing you’re building.

-------------------------------------

No one was born with a personality. Whatever personality you had, you developed it, you built it. Extraordinary people weren’t born with their abilities – they learned them, developed them, and worked on them to become who they became. They had to transform themselves into the person they wanted to be.

Most people see them as extraordinary, but the truth is that they are just random people. The difference between you and them is that they had a goal, a great goal in fact – a purpose worth pursuing.

Your goal is the reason you develop new attributes and skills, and have curated transformational experiences.

Without a meaningful goal, attempting change lacks meaning. It then requires unsustainable willpower, and ultimately leads to failure. Human beings are motivated by the reason why they do things. You need a “why”. You need a vision.

When you have a why and train yourself and practice what you want to achieve, you fail at first. Then you become better. Then you succeed.

Personality is no different. To put it simply, it’s like learning piano. Whatever you ever wanted to achieve is achievable. Just gotta work hard for it and focus.

It is not more complicated.

The past is not prologue

The only thing “special” about those who transform themselves and their lives is their view of their future. They refuse to be defined by the past. They see something different and more meaningful. As such, they never stop fueling that vision.

With each step forward, their confidence increases and their identity becomes more flexible and less constrained by whatever happened in the past, or by who they were before.

You can be the narrator of your life’s story. You don’t have to be defined by your past. It doesn’t matter what your past identity or outcomes were. It’s all “in the past” now. It’s done.

While most people base their identity on their past, most successful people base their identity on their future. Elon Musk can build a spaceship company because he wants to go to Mars. Every day, he wakes up thinking about going to Mars, and what to do so he can do it.

His actions, identity, and purpose are oriented towards the future, and as such, he builds something. He doesn’t think about the times he got bullied at school. He doesn’t talk about the PayPal days. That is completely irrelevant. Future is all that matters.

This is how successful people live: They become who they want to be by orienting their life toward their purpose, not as a repeat of the past.

Deciding and creating a bigger future isn’t wishful thinking. Before building your future, you must face uncomfortable truths you’ve been avoiding, and take ownership over your life. What currently prevents your dreams from becoming reality is buried trauma keeping you trapped in your past, shutting down your confidence and imagination.

Most of the time, we think about trauma in the context of war or extreme events. However, more often than not, “trauma” is planted in minor incidents and conversations that limit your view of who you are and what you can do, creating a fixed mindset.

This can’t be ignored. To be fixed, it must be addressed.

So the idea of the book is the following: first, you'll have to resolve the traumas that are preventing you from moving forward. This will enable you to see your past under a different light. Your past will be lighter and will no longer be an obstacle preventing you from building your future. You will then be able to think about the goals you want to achieve and the person you need to become to achieve these goals. Finally, you'll choose one goal that will enable you to achieve all your other goals and you'll start taking action to chase it. Action will transform your personality and make you who you need to be to achieve your goal.

Ready?

Chapter 1: the myth of personality

Vanessa O’Brien was a finance executive solely focused on her career. All that mattered to her was work, the stock market, and the upcoming promotion she was going to get. She wouldn’t talk to you if you weren’t in finance or driven to make it in the corporate world.

After the crisis of 2008, she started having some doubts about banks. She started traveling and found out about social and climate issues. She decided to do something about it. Fast forward to today, Vanessa is a complete different person. Good bye Louboutin shoes and finance meetings, she is now a very social person, profoundly involved in different charitable projects, holding multiple climbing worldwide records, and traveling the world to give conferences.

If you had talked to Vanessa prior to 2008, she wouldn’t have answered you. Now, she will give you her undivided attention, whoever you are.

Vanessa is not who she is because of her past. She is who she is because of her new goal: doing good around her, being a force of change into the world.

What happened to Vanessa was that she completely changed her goal. This new purpose transformed her and her life.

Peter Diamandis calls this a Massively Transformative Purpose. When your purpose is so big, you fully immerse yourself into it and become the person you need to become to achieve it.

This story outlines how personality is not fixed, making personality tests completely useless and redundant. Your personality test merely takes a picture of your feelings and moods at instant T. Should you take the test in another context, you’ll score differently.

Thinking you are “who you are” is wishful thinking. You are the product of what you have been building, what society has told you to be and how other people have shaped you. All of “you” is constantly evolving as you go through the day. It is evolving as you live through new experiences.

The way to influence who you are depends on you. You can choose to let yourself be influenced by external agents (environment, culture, family, friends, TV, advertisement). Or you could decide who you want to be by setting goals and develop the attitude needed to achieve them, like Vanessa did.

Which one will you choose?

-----------------------------------------------

Tomorrow, we will debunk some myths together.

1. Personality can be categorized into “types.”

2. Personality is innate and fixed.

3. Personality comes from your past.

4. Personality must be discovered.

5. Personality is your true and “authentic” self.


See you tomorrow

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

Day 2


Myth 1: Personality can be categorized into “types.”

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.- Carl Jung

Depending on the personality test you choose, you will find out there are 4, 10, 16, or 69 different types of personality. Which one is the good answer?

None of them.

Personality types are social or mental constructions, not actual realities. The notion that there is such a thing as a "measurable personality" is a surface-level, discriminative, dehumanizing, and horribly inaccurate way of looking at the complexity of what is a human being.

The Myers-Briggs personality test, as such, is an insult to science. Neither Myers nor Briggs, which are mother and daughter, had any type of training prior to building the test. They built the test at home, based on their experience, proposing the idea that if you reacted in such a way, it wasn’t based on the fact that you had acquired this trait, but that it had always been there “inside of you”.

So much for science.

When you believe in these personality tests, they damage your future by imprisoning you into a label.

“Henry is an introvert, so he will never be good at public speaking”.

This type of thinking is false and dangerous, as Henry may now incorporate the fact that because he is an "introvert", it means he will never be good at public speaking. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While labels (writer) can serve goals (becoming a writer), goals (writer) can never serve labels (becoming a writer). ​

The idea that you have to achieve something to become that thing may forever prevent you from achieving it. So instead of calling yourself a wantrapreneur, you may wanna call yourself an entrepreneur now, and take action.

Your personality should arise out of the efforts you make to achieve your goals.
​

Not the other way around.

Your goals shouldn’t come from your personality. Paul Graham in fact said that “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”

Labels such as “introvert” are limiting your possibilities of being and doing. If you go to a conference and really want to ask a question during Q&A, you may now not do it because you are an “introvert”, and introverts don’t ask questions in public.

“If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration. . . .”.

Abandon all labels that are preventing you from becoming who you are. "Lazy, dumb, loser"…abandon that sh*t now.

It’s only limiting you.

You are nothing, and can become anything.

Here’s one way to illustrate this fact.

Researchers found a strong correlation between social roles and personality types. If the social role demanded for one person to exhibit one of the five personality traits (remember OCEAN for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), they would usually develop that trait.

Yes, you read that right. Personalities are not given jobs. Rather, the job forms the personality.

It was the fact that these people needed to develop that trait (whatever it may have been) to assure their social role that made them harbor it, not the other way around.

Should we put these people that developed these traits into different social contexts, their personality would change depending on the new traits they would need to harbor.

Careful though!

It is not “society” that is deciding who you are. This is NOT a course on postmodernism. What we mean here is that you become who you need to become in function of the situation into which you are.

People that do not become who they want are in situations /achieve goals that do not correspond to who they would like to be.

If they were to change the situation of the goal so that it would force them to develop their desired traits, then it would actually work.

For example, a 2015 study by Drs. Nathan Hudson and Chris Fraley showed that personality can be intentionally changed through goal-setting and sustained personal effort.

Intentional change, however, is emotionally rigorous—it doesn’t exactly feel good and can even be shockingly painful. If you’re unwilling to put yourself through emotional experiences, shift your perspective, and make purposeful changes to your behavior and environment, then don’t expect huge changes (at least in the short run).

Becoming psychologically flexible is key to personal transformation, not overattaching to your current identity or perspectives.

Becoming insatiably committed to a future purpose and embracing emotions rather than avoiding them is how radical change occurs.​

Once again, like pretty much anything else in life, the more efforts you invest into developing your new personality, the quicker it will develop.

Questions:

So, where are you?

In what ways have you defined yourself or others by what was done in the past?

Have you limited and overly defined yourself by categorizing or typifying yourself?

What would happen if you stopped boxing yourself into a category and opened yourself to the possibility of change?

Tomorrow, we will look at the second myth of personality: Personality is innate and fixed.

See ya tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

Day 3

Myth #2: Personality Is Innate and Fixed

In a recently published longitudinal study spanning more than sixty years, researchers tested the personality of the same group of people (on the OCEAN scale). When they discovered the results, they were shocked. People kept on rating differently years after years. Their character wasn't constant at all!

This outlines how people keep on evolving because the situation in which they live evolves as well. People adapt to the situation, and therefore, change.

Even after going through extreme change, we adapt and the new situation becomes our new norm rather quickly (side note: this is why the “I will get a big house and then I will be happy” does not work. You get the big house, it becomes your reality, you adapt to it and come back to the default level of happiness. Happiness is a consequence of pursuing meaningful goals, not an end-state to be pursued. Happiness is a consequence, not an end in itself.)

This is why we may feel like the same person as we age, but in reality, we gradually change and don't realize it. Life feels “normal” and keeps on feeling normal as we adapt to the new situation. When we compare the now to the past, we don't notice any differences about ourselves, while we are in fact, widely different.

This is one of the reasons why people get divorced. They change, their partner changes, and the compatibility they had when they got married evolved and died.

This is also why people remove tattoos. Whatever personality they had when they made their tattoo is gone. And now, they also want it gone.

Quick question: How much time do you spend imagining your future self?

For most people, the answer is “not much”. What we have learned so far described two major obstacles that prevent people from predicting and creating their future personality:

• We assume our present personality is a finished product (the end-of-history illusion).
• We overemphasize the importance of the past, which leads us to become increasingly narrow in how we view ourselves and the world.

Your personality changes. It has changed and it will continue changing in the future. As a result, it’s time to think about who you want to be in the future. It's time to actively decide who your future self is. You don’t want to be surprised, disappointed, or frustrated by where you’re at and who you become.

You don’t want to let randomness decide.

It’s time you take your own personality into your own hands. ​

That being said, it’s best to make decisions based on what your future, not your present, self wants. It’s best to decide and act from the vantage point of your desired circumstances, not your present ones.

This is the power of choices.

You can choose what your present self wants now, or you can choose taking into account your future self in order to speed up your becoming of him/her.

Eg: watching Netflix VS going to sleep.

While the former option may have the preferences of your present self, your future self has more interest in you going to sleep so that you can wake up earlier/get a full night of sleep/don't lose time and become more likely to work and achieve your goals.

So, it's time to forget about your present self and start building your future self.

It is time to choose what your future self wants, not your present self. Your present self probably wants to get drunk, which is something your future self will be angry about tomorrow, hangovered.

Side note, this is why the Dutch people succeed. They literally live in the future. If you live in the Netherlands, you find out these people spend their lives planning what they are going to do in the future. In my university, exam dates were planned two years ahead lol. They're always efficient and organized. They’re always prepared. And they succeed.

Who you want to be in the future is more important than who you are now. In fact, who you want to be in the future should inform who you are now. Your intended future self should direct your current identity and personality far more than your former self does in an attempt to realize that vision you have of your future self.

It’s like a walk. If you intend to walk from Brussels to Beijing, what would your focus be?

What orientates each and every one of your steps? What are you thinking about? What are you making efforts to reach?

Brussels, or Beijing?

Beijing, obviously.

This is the same for your personality. You should consider the present through a lens coming from the future. The aim of the present should be to build your future. Because that's the only way the present is headed.

----------------------------------------------------------​

Life starts taking on a whole new meaning when you begin thinking right now what your future self will want. Rather than making decisions based on your current identity, you could begin making decisions your future self would love and appreciate. It’s your responsibility to set your future self up for as much opportunity, success, and joy as possible. This is how you become the person and create the life you want, rather than becoming someone with regret.

Failure is always better than regret and missed chances.

Always.

Questions:

Who is your future self?

How often do you imagine and consciously design your future identity?

What would happen if you based your identity on who you want to be, rather than who you’ve been?


Tomorrow, we will talk about myth number 3: Personality comes from your past.

See you tomorrow!

M.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

DAY 4

Myth #3: Personality Comes from Your Past

A common scientific principle of many theories is “causal determinism”. It is the idea that whatever happens now is directly caused by a past event or condition. From this view, people are determined—not influenced—by prior events, like one domino in a toppling chain.

Where does this insane idea come from?

In looking at human behavior, psychologists have come to agree that the best way to predict future behavior is by looking at past behavior. And in fact, that phenomenon is validated over and over again. It seems people are quite predictable over time.

But why?

4 reasons:

• They continue to be defined by past traumas that haven’t been reframed or dealt with.
• They have an identity narrative based on their past, not their future.
• Their subconscious keeps them consistent with their former self and emotions.
• They have an environment supporting their present rather than future identity (you know the ones we mean here, these “friends” and family members shaming you for attempting to do something different).

These are the four levers that drive personality.

And guess what? You can control them.

When you change, reframe, or manage these levers, your personality and life can change in intentional and remarkable ways.

It’s up to you whether you allow these four levers to hold you hostage—keeping you stuck and making change feel nearly impossible—or whether you use them to become the person you want to become.

These levers, once dealt with, look like this:

• You reframe and deal with past traumas that stop defining you
• You base your identity on who you are becoming, not who you were
• You take care of subconscious by acting out who you will be (we'll speak about this more in the later chapters)
• You change your environment

Here’s a story explaining why your past does not determine your present.

Ever heard of Tucker Max? That guy published a book with his life-stories of decadent parties and outrageous lifestyle (think Dan Bilzerian, but poor). The book sold millions. He released another one, and then he made a movie.

Predictably, the movie bombed. That crushed Tucker’s ego. He went to therapy for three years, then released a statement saying he no longer identified with the person in the books.

As such, when he reads himself, he only feels empathy for that guy that wrote the words. He is not embarrassed one bit, or ashamed by who he was because who he was is another person than he is now.

He does not let his former self define his present self.

This shows how when you begin to actively and intentionally move forward in your life, not only does your future get better but your past does as well.

Your past increasingly becomes something happening for you, not to you.​

Side note: I think Tucker Max is the one who coined one of the most brilliant citations that explains in a few words the current psychologico-politico-social situation in the West: “you don’t hate capitalism. You hate your dad”.

Our values and beliefs don't stem out of profound meditation on what would be best for society, but out of our own problems and traumas.

Conclusion: send everyone to a therapist and end political division.

End of the side note.

As you truly learn and have new experiences, you begin to see and interpret your past in new ways.

If your view of your own past hasn’t changed much over recent months or years, then you haven’t learned from your past experiences and you’re not actively learning now.

An unchanging past is a sign of emotional detachment and rigidity—an avoidance of facing the truth and moving forward in your life.​

The more mature you become as a person, the more differently you’ll view your past experiences. Your past can change, and it must change if you hope to brighten your future. Luckily, and as we are about to see, the past evolves as you evolve.

A peculiar discipline outlining this claim is the history of history. If you study history from a historical perspective, you see it changes. We still don’t know for example, who really started WWI. As for WWII, some US-centric people consider it started in 1941 when US got involved (could it really be considered “worldwide” without the US?) while others estimate it started in 1937, when Japan attacked China.

This outlines how instead of the past shaping the present, the present shapes the past.

It is the present study of history that enables us to change it, to reframe it, in order to have a more “correct” version of it.

You can do the same thing with your own past. Hell, you must do it.

The present is so complex that even that, we are not sure of. The way you remember your past is only one way, and certainly not the objective version of the events that happened. When you allow yourself to fully relive your past and process the emotions that were then unprocessed, you change it, you let it go, free yourself, and can then move forward.

Here's another example of how the present shapes the past.

Imagine getting a 10% raise on your slowlane job! Nice! Maybe the slowlane isn’t so bad after all?! You decide to celebrate and eat lunch with your colleague Mary. Mary is excited! She also got a raise of…15%. Suddenly, that 10% you were happy about does not seem so good in retrospect!!!

Oh well, back to the Fastlane then…

The moral of the story is that the present context changed the past event.

Consider the following quote:

“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

Context is everything.​

Our past, like any experience or event, is a subjective perspective, which we ourselves ascribe meaning to—whether positive or negative, good or bad. Without question, experiences from our past can and do impact us. However, it isn’t actually our past that is impacting us. It is the interpretation and emotional attachment to that past.

Trauma can and does happen to all of us, both in large and small degrees. When our trauma is unresolved, we stop moving forward in our lives. We become emotionally rigid and shut off, and thus stop learning, evolving, and changing. As such, our past becomes rigid as well, and our memory persists in an unchanging and painful way. By continually avoiding our past traumas and the emotions they create, our life becomes an unhealthy and repetitive pattern.

We get stuck.

A clear indicator that someone has unresolved trauma is that his life and personality are repetitive for an extended period. But as he faces, opens up, becomes more aware of, and ultimately reframes his trauma, he allows himself to take a positive and mature view of his past. His present and future will then stop reflecting his past. He can free himself from his trauma.​

How we describe, interpret, and identify with our past has far more to do with where we are, here and now, than it has to do with our actual past. If you’re still angry with your parents for your childhood, this shows more to who you currently are than what actually happened in your childhood. When you keep on blaming someone or something from the past, that makes you a victim, and that reflects more on you now than whoever or whatever it is you’re blaming.

“Changing your past” doesn’t mean you discount the emotional charge of these experiences! They can actually be an important pool of insights and lessons. It isn’t the contents of your past that need changing, but your view of it.

As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It’s not about seeing a million things, but being able to see the same things a million different ways. And hopefully in better and less destructive ways.

In order to actively create new experiences and be transformed by them, you’ll need to become more psychologically flexible. Psychological flexibility is the skill of being fluid and adaptive, holding your emotions loosely, and moving toward chosen goals or values. You need psychological flexibility to reframe your past and imagine a future self.

The more flexible you become, the less you’ll be overwhelmed or stopped by emotions. Instead, you’ll embrace and learn from them.​

Becoming psychologically flexible is part of becoming more emotionally evolved as a human being. Emotional development is at the core of understanding personality. The less emotionally developed and flexible a person is, the more they will avoid hard experiences. The more they’ll be limited and defined by painful experiences from their past.

This is counterintuitive, as many people come to believe the best way to deal with hard experiences is by burying their emotions and fighting a silent battle, alone.

This is not the way. Consider this quote from Emile Zola.

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.”

Trust me, I have been there.

I buried emotions and when they exploded, it blew up everything in its way.

Emotions should not be buried. They are the doorway to growth and learning.

The reason people’s personalities plateau and get stuck in repetitive cycles is because they are avoiding the difficult and challenging emotions involved in learning and in connecting with themselves and others. As a result, they remain weighted down by their limited perceptions of their past far longer than necessary.

Questions:

So, what stories are you telling about your past self?

Who was your former self?

In what ways are you different from your former self?

How has your past changed due to more recent experiences?

How would your life be different if your past was something happening for you rather than to you?

How could life change if you embraced the truth that your former and current selves are two fundamentally different people?

How would your life be if you never again blamed or limited yourself and your future based on the past?

Tomorrow, we will debunk myth number 4: "Personality must be discovered."

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

DAY 6

Myth # 5: Personality Is Your True and “Authentic” Self

Another problem with the “fixed view” of personality is that people feel entitled to do only the things that feel natural or easy to them. The things “they were born for”.

If something is hard, difficult, or awkward, then people say, “I shouldn’t have to do this.”

People believe they have an “authentic” self which is who they should remain true to.

This self is seen as innate, the “real” them. This leads people to say things like “I need to be true to myself. I shouldn’t have to deny myself of how I’m feeling. I shouldn’t have to lie to myself. I should be able to do what feels right to me.”

Unfortunately, this reveals a fixed mindset and is often a reaction to a trauma or a lack of healthy connection to parents.

“Authenticity” these days is simply another way of saying “I have a fixed mindset. I am a certain way and shouldn’t be expected to do anything but what comes immediately naturally and easy for me.”

That prevents people from becoming good at something they are not, and getting out of their comfort zone.

Questions:

Who do you really want to become?

What would happen if you stopped trying to be “authentic,” and instead faced the truth of why you’re limiting yourself?

What would happen if you had hard conversations with the important people in your life?

What would happen if you were “true” to your future self, not your current fears?

Conclusion of chapter 1:

Your personality is not fixed nor inherent. It is malleable and flexible, and it is something you can shape yourself.

When you understand the four levers that move it, you become the director of who you are. You can transform yourself and achieve your goals. You can become flexible.

Your past and your future can increasingly become a story that you shape and define, instead of being shaped and defined by external factors.

This concludes chapter 1. Tomorrow, we will start with chapter 2: The truth regarding personality.

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

DAY 5

Myth # 4: Personality Must Be Discovered

In order to illustrate his claim, the author gives the example of his friend Kary.

Kary complains she "doesn’t know who she is", but she takes zero action to find out. She bites into the myth that you just “are” and need to “fInD yOuRsElF”. So she sits there, tries out stuff, then quits directly if it is too uncomfortable or too hard.

She believes that “passion” is like love at first sight. She thinks buying the skis is enough for her to find out her passion is skiing. She thinks it will be felt right away. She thinks passion is inherent to who she is. She thinks passion is an event.

However, we all know this isn’t true. Passion is not an event.

It is a process that comes from enjoying hard work, or enjoying something after it's been hard to enjoy it.

And so is building yourself.

Both passion and motivation are effects, not causes. As Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist, said “you are more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.”

The good feelings you get out of doing that which you are passionate about are a consequence, not a cause. When you receive a salary from your slowlane job, you get paid after working for a month, not before. The salary is a payout the same way passion and motivation are a payout of doing something initially difficult.

As such, the author describes wanting passion before putting in the work as, and I quote, “get-rich-quick thinking and completely lazy.”

Lmao.

Passion is the prize and as such, you have to invest first.

Personality is no different. It is not something you discover but rather something you create through your actions and behaviors.

Personality is a by-product of your decisions in life. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, or Lincoln did not do what they did because of who they were. They became who they became because of what they did. Because of their purposes!

Purpose trumps personality.

Without a deep sense of purpose, your personality will be based on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, which is an animalistic and low-level mode of operating.

Have you ever seen people waiting in line to get junk food, or camping in the cold to get an iPhone? That’s them. Their purpose is non-existant besides “fEeLiNg HaPpY” and getting their dopamine hit. The goals determine the behavior. And since their goal is conspicuous consumption, they wait in line to consume conspicuously.

That’s the power of purpose. It gives motivates every single one of your actions.

When you’re driven by a higher purpose, you’re highly flexible and you make decisions irrespective of pain and pleasure to create and become what you want.​

Moreover, if you are serious about your purpose, it will change your personality. Your purpose isn’t something you discover, but something you ultimately choose for yourself. Stop looking for it and make the choice, then let the choice transform you.

Rather than your decisions and goals being the by-product of your personality, your personality should become the by-product of your decisions and goals. As you proactively and intentionally make positive decisions, develop skills, and seek out new experiences, your personality will develop and change in meaningful ways.

It will adapt to the level of your goals and decisions, rather than your decisions and goals falling to the level of your current personality.

-----------------------------------------------------------------​

Trying to discover your personality leads to inaction, avoidance of hard conversations, distracting yourself through consumption, and making excuses for how you’re currently living. It puts you in the passenger seat of your own life.

Instead, you can, and should, be the driver. You can be the creator.

According to Cal Newport, the idea of finding your passion is based on self-absorption. People want to find work they are passionate about because they’ve been taught to believe that work is all about and for them.

However, the most successful people in the world know that work is about helping and creating value for other people.​

As Newport states, “If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (‘what can I offer the world?’).”

The author takes the same approach for marriage and relationships. While there needs to be a connection at the beginning, a successful marriage is not something life owes you – it is something you build!

Marry for aligned purpose, not personality, because personality will change over time. Purpose, however, will transform you, your partner, and the relationship.

Questions:

So, what purpose are you creating for yourself?

What would happen if you stopped trying to find yourself, and instead became more creative and collaborative?

How would your personality develop and change if you went to work on it, chiseling and shaping it in desired ways?

Who would you be if you could creatively design yourself? (Hint, hint: You can.)

Tomorrow, we will speak about the last myth surrounding personality: pErSoNaLiTy iS yOuR tRuE aNd aUtHeNtiC sElF.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

DAY 7

Chapter 2: the truth about personality

The author starts by telling the story of Andre Norman. Andre grew up poor in a violent neighborhood where “getting out” was difficult. As a kid though, one teacher believed in Andre, and she got him to start playing the trumpet.

That sent Andre to the right path. But then, Andre’s goal started drifting because while he wanted to play the trumpet, he also wanted to hang out with the cool kids. At some point, he had to make a choice. He chose the cool kids.

Shortly later, he ended up in prison.

His goal then was to advance in the gang ranks and to become the king of the prison. That basically meant killing people from the other gang. So Andre started trying to assassinate people in prison.

He advanced through the ranks, and one day, as he was about to make his final act to become the king, he questioned what was after…and paused.

What was after becoming the king in the prison? Not much.

Andre’s actions had been motivated by his ultimate goal, and now that he saw the goal was not really…meaningful, he doubted his own actions.

That got Andre thinking. He decided to change goals and got a new one: getting out of prison, then getting into Harvard.

Long story short, he did get out of prison, and into Harvard, and now, he is an acclaimed speaker that teaches people how to reframe their goals to increase their life quality.

Once Andre committed to a goal, nothing stopped him. As a result, he fulfilled it.

Questions:

What is at the end of your yellow brick road?

Where is your life going right now?

What wall is your ladder facing, and where will you be when you get to the “top”?

Your Goals Shape Your Identity

Whether you like it or not, everything you do has is goal-driven. These goals are what shape your personality.

All human behavior is fundamentally driven by, and is a function of, its end, purpose, or goal. It becomes a problem when those goals are not actively chosen or defined. Binge-watching YouTube to distract yourself for a few minutes has a purpose, even if it’s just to distract yourself.

Paying the bills, hanging out with friends, setting the alarm for the next morning, everything you do is goal-driven. Even the most benign, unproductive behavior such as procrastinating and distracting yourself has a goal, often the one of numbing yourself and forgetting about life for a while.

How do you know whether you are on the right path to achieve your goal? You study yourself. More specifically, you study your actions.

Seeing every action you take as goal-driven allows you to take stock in the quality of your decision-making.

Questions:

Why are you engaging in this behavior?

What is the purpose, reason, or end?

What is the goal?

How does this “goal” align with what you’re ultimately trying to do?

There is a reason for everything you do.

Don’t believe it? Take a piece of paper, and make two columns.

On the left, write what you have done yesterday. On the right, write the reason why you did it.

Here’s mine.

What I did	Reason
I did pushups	I want to be healthy and look good and I need to train my discipline muscle
I got breakfast	I was hungry
I went to the office	To work
I translated my copywriting building structure to French	I plan on doing copywriting in French
I googled what histamines were	I wanna know whether I am histamine intolerant as it would explain a lot
I helped my brother	I like it and want him to appreciate me
I went home and wrote a blog article	I like it and it helps me think
I went to sleep at midnight	I want to have energy the next day

The point here is there is a reason for everything you did yesterday. Purpose drove your behavior, even if these goals weren’t driven by an end-state you value.

How you spend your time matters. It reflects your goals.

It reflects the outcomes you’re seeking for yourself. Looking at what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours and then examining the reason for your behaviors will help you see what your goals are.

You will only be able to control your time and yourself when you truly determine what you want for yourself. Your goals must be actively and consciously chosen, then pursued. Spending your days on activities leading you to something incredibly important, something you truly value, is how you live without regret.

Questions:

Looking back at your list of activities from the past twenty-four hours, which ones are aligned with your future self?

Which of those behaviors will your future self not engage in?

Which of them, if removed, would free up more space and energy for what you ultimately want?


Tomorrow, we will talk about the 3 sources of all goals.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

Day 8

The Three Sources of All Goals

Personal confidence comes from making progress toward goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities. —Dan Sullivan

All behavior is goal-driven. But where do “goals” come from?

Fundamentally, goals come from three sources:

1. Exposure:

Goals come from what you know. You can’t decide to go to Mars if you don’t know Mars exists. Similarly, you can’t decide to become rich if you don’t know it is possible to become rich.

MJ pursued the Fastlane once he was exposed to that guy in the Lamborghini as a kid. MJ was exposed to the possibility to become rich other than by being a singer or actor.

When MJ was exposed to this new possibility, he could then pursue it.

2. Desire:

You won’t pursue or engage in something if you don’t want it. But then, why do people do jobs they hate? Because they want the money. Neh. Actually, they want to pay the bills.

That’s their goal. Now, what if you changed the goal? What if you abandoned paying the bills, and decided to choose a meaningful goal instead?

Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should want it. Our desires do not come from our innate personality. Instead, our desires are trained, usually through experiences we’ve had, society, media, and those around us.

Often, your current desires—such as sleeping in, binge-watching Netflix, or staying up late with friends—contradict your future self's desire, and are incompatible with better outcomes.

Now, as we said, desires can actually be trained. You can train yourself wanting something. Amazing, isn't it?

When you evolve as a person, you develop a sense of purpose that expands beyond your personal preferences and interests. This purpose pushes you outside of your preferences and ultimately transforms who you are.

You train desire by actively and intentionally pursuing a goal. As was discussed in the previous chapter, passion follows engagement and skills. Since you can learn to become passionate about anything, you might as well be intentional about what you choose to become passionate about.

3. Confidence

You won’t pursue goals you don’t think you can achieve.

Your current goals reflect your current level of confidence

Your job and income level are based on your confidence. Your friends are based on your confidence. How you dress is based on your confidence. Confidence is the basis of imagination—which is required for seeing and choosing a future beyond your current capability and circumstances.

Confidence reflects your personal belief in what you can do, learn, and accomplish. The greater your confidence, the bigger your future self.

Now, the problem with confidence is that it can easily be broken. Confidence is fragile and erratic. Negative experiences can wreck your confidence and imagination.

The good news is that confidence can be consolidated, built, and rebuilt. It is done through courage, getting out of your comfort zone, and doing that which is not easy.

This is the reason why you should have goals located outside of your comfort zone. As you intentionally and courageously pursue meaningful goals, you’ll have peak experiences.

Those peak experiences will make you more flexible as a person. You will understand you are flexible and can change. You will become more confident and capable to create and achieve even bigger goals.

You can increase confidence in two ways:

Through small and consistence actions outside of your comfort zone (if you're shy, it can be looking at people in the eyes one day, then saying hello in the elevator, then talking to strangers in a bar, hosting people with couchsurfing, etc).

Or you can do so through bold one-time actions towards your future called a “power move”.

A power move can be quitting your job, investing in a mentor, going for a run in public, having an honest conversation, publishing a blog post even if you’re scared, asking for a raise, etc.

The more power moves you make, the more peak experiences you'll have. The more peak experiences you have, the more flexible and confident you’ll become as a person. The more flexible and confident you are, the more imaginative and exciting will be the future you create and pursue.

Identity Should Be Intentionally Designed, Based on Your Desired Future Self

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. —Albert Einstein

Often, identity and personality are reactions to life events, circumstances, and habits. In that case, people are not "in charge" of who they become. And that's most people.

Few people indeed intentionally define and shape their identity based on who they plan to be and then become that person. This is precisely, the subject of this thread.

If you want to change your personality and become who you want or need to be, you need a purpose.

You need a vision, something meaningful to pursue. Yes, engaging in what you love for the sake of it is all well and good. But you won’t actually push your perceived limits without visualizing your future self free of those limits.

One day, you will become your future self. The question is: Who is that future self?

Designing your future self requires imagining what their reality and daily experiences are like—the more vivid and detailed the better. What are their freedoms, choices, circumstances, experiences, and daily behaviors?

When you become the driver of your own identity, you care less about how you view yourself now. You focus on your future self. They see things differently, have different freedoms, have different relationships, daily activities, and experiences.

What seems totally mind-blowing or exciting to you now is “normal life” for your future self.

Exercise: write the life of your future self. Be as specific as possible.

What is your day-to-day life like?

What do you stand for?

How much money do you make?

What type of clothes do you wear?

How do you interact with other people?

How do you view your present and future?

What is your purpose?

Where do you live? Who are your friends? What skills and talents do you have?


Tomorrow, we will expand on goal setting and finish chapter 2. See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn’t permanent: a summary​

DAY 9

Select and Pursue One Major Goal: Your Future-Self Filter

To decide on your mission, simply look over all of your goals and then ask yourself: Which one of these goals would enable me to become the person I need to be to achieve everything else I want in my life. The answer to that question is your mission. —Hal Elrod

Now, choose one major goal. Having multiple goals is a reflection of fear and a lack of decision-making. Choose one goal. Just one.

This one goal must support all the others. In the realm of goals, financial goals are usually important because of all the other goals they suddenly enable. If you want to look better, earning more enables you to spend on better clothes, better food, get a gym membership, and maybe even a personal trainer.

Choose one goal.

One goal creates focus. Focus creates momentum. Momentum and confidence spill over into all other areas of your life.

While it is important that getting to a goal is a process, process itself shouldn’t be your goal. That leads to mediocrity as it doesn’t give you any direction.

As Peter Thiel explains:

“Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.”

Commit to Your One Major Goal: Why Results Matter

Whatever your life looks like now is what you were committed to. Your weight, your dating life, the money you earn (ouch).

Your life is a perfect reflection of your commitments.

If you were committed to something else, you’d have different results.

When you truly commit to the results you want, then your life starts improving. Your future self and the one major goal is what you should be committed to. Everything you do needs to be filtered through that one major goal.

Everything.

And that is hard. That's why the slowlane welcomes the majority of people - the Fastlane is too hard.

Most people never even try to achieve their true desire because they are afraid to admit what they truly want. They are afraid to fail.

When you commit to one specific outcome however, that outcome must become your new narrative.

That’s what you’re going to do because you decided it. You may not know exactly how it will all play out, but you will get there.

The level of honesty and transparency you need to come to this point is both rare and contagious—evoking confidence as you begin making progress, and conjuring desire to support as well as help from others.

Another reason to commit to specific results is that it clarifies your identity. Your identity comes from your goals. Being totally bought-in and clear about the end you have in mind instills a deep sense of purpose. You can imagine your future self in the position you want to be.

Questions:

Are you willing to commit to your future self?

Are you willing to commit to one specific goal?

Are you willing to put it all out on the line?

Are you willing to be honest about what you truly want?

Are you willing to refine and enhance your process to ensure improved results?

Go to Bed earlier and wake up earlier

The author goes out on a rant where he advises people to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier because you do better work in the morning while the night is usually the time of the day when you binge-consume products that do nothing good for you.

It's arguable, but I am not supposed to give my opinion.

Questions:

Are you going to create more peak experiences?

Are you going to be more active and intentional with your time?

Are you going to exercise more courage and commitment?

Are you going to act toward your future self, become more flexible, and stop insisting that your former self is who you really are?

Embrace uncertainty

“If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty.” - Dr. Ellen Langer

If you’re unwilling to embrace uncertainty, then you are limiting who you are and who you could become. You limit your ability to make choices because all choices involve uncertainty and risk.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable for our brain because it means risk, and risk means death.

However, if you want to accelerate your learning, you’ll need to embrace uncertainty. You’ll need to take risks and make mistakes. As you do, you’ll experience far more emotions—highs and lows—and through those experiences, you’ll change as a person.

Those are the very peak experiences you will have when you will be committed to your future self. It may hurt a bit, but it will also become much more exciting and less repetitive.

Transform Yourself Daily Through Journaling

While most people think of journaling as writing about your past, we’ll mainly use it to write about the future.

With the right preframe ritual, your journaling sessions can become peak experience, putting you into the best state of mind to live the rest of your day.

Here’s how to enter that state:

• Remove ALL distractions (phones, etc)
• Meditate or pray
• Reviewing your vision or goals before writing (they should be written somewhere accessible. Don’t hesitate to change them as you move forward and adjust)
• Write about things you’re grateful for—past, present, and future
• Start writing about your future goal

Don’t get overly attached to what you write about. Write with the expectation and excitement that your future self is real, and that you will be successful. Think in terms of what needs to be done to move yourself forward. Write down all of the things you’ll need to do now and people you’ll need to reach out to.


Conclusion of chapter 2

The truth about personality is that it can, should, and does change. Your goals shape your identity. Your identity shapes your actions. And your actions shape who you are and who you’re becoming. This is how personality is developed.

Tomorrow, we will start chapter 3: Transform Your Trauma.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 20

Conclusion of the book:

Embrace Your Future to Change Your Past Life is simple.

Everything happens for you, not to you. —Byron Katie

Questions:

• You’ve made it this far. The question is, what are you going to do now? Are you going to be consistent with your former or your future self?
• Are you going to activate the four levers of your personality and make radical and desired change?
• Are you going to continually expand yourself—imagining and becoming a new future self again and again?

I’ll leave the author conclude the book:

“You are now equipped to increase your imagination, motivation, faith, and courage. You are equipped to embrace your future and change your past.

Throughout this book, you’ve been asked dozens of questions. Go back through those questions and answer them in your journal. Use your journal every single day to imagine, design, strategize, and conspire to create and live your wildest dreams.

Personality isn’t permanent, it is a choice.

Your personality can change in dramatic ways. The life of your dreams can eventually become something you take for granted— your new normal. Once you arrive at your wildest and most imaginative future self, take the confidence and faith you gain and do it again, but this time bigger and better.

Life is a classroom. You’re here to grow. You’re here to live by faith and design. You’re here. You’re here to choose. The choice is yours.

Who will you be?”



My conclusion:

When you study copywriting, you learn about a very important rule: never tell the target of your ad that it is their fault.

If you’re selling a product to helps people stop smoking, don’t tell them it is their fault if they smoked in the first place. If you sell a product to help people lose weight, don’t tell them it is their fault if they ate those damn fries. Tell them instead they are a victim of ultra-capitalism and evil marketing that exploited their emotions and insecurities to get them to buy tobacco and eat poly-unsaturated fat.

This, is ultimately what this book is about. It’s giving you a choice. The one to take your life into your own hand, or to remain a victim of society and of your animalistic instincts. It is telling you that by taking action and responsibility, you can transform your life for the better. It is also honest by telling you that it will not be easy – but it will be worth it.

In essence, I find the book to be strikingly similar to Unscripted . Both start by dispelling myths. MJ dispels the Slowlane myth, and Dr. Brady dispels the personality myth. Then it tells you that you won’t get what you want by following society’s advice (aka the slowlane). It tells you there is a better way – a harder way, but that promises better results.

Finally, it gives you the tools to achieve what you want, the initial reason you bought the book in the first place (the questions at the end of each chapter in PIP, and the CENTS framework in Unscripted ).

I believe this is why the book had such a huge impact on me. It is a “complete” book that treats every side of the problem, building each part onto the precedent one, to arrive at a final conclusion where you are given what you want. It takes a shredded map and assembles it, piece by piece, to show you the way.

This book, like Unscripted , is a complete book. Do you think people would have enjoyed Unscripted as much if it had only featured the Fastlane chapter or the CENTS framework? No. In order to make it work, the myth of the Slowlane had first to be dispelled.

Dr. Hardy used a similar process. He took the entire problem, deconstructed it bit by bit, and showed you what you wanted to be shown.

So I hope you enjoyed the summary. I hoped you answered the questions seriously. I hope you are actively reframing your traumas, changing your narrative, and working towards your future by achieving a meaningful goal – a Massively Transformative Purpose.

I have spoken of Jordan Peterson’s writing program “self authoring” at the beginning of the threat. If you found Dr. Hardy’s questions too “shallow”, or not enough, then you may benefit from the self-authoring.

The principle is the exact same one, except that it goes deeper, and is more specific. You have more questions to answer. Each part takes between 4 and 10 hours to answer. The work is deeper, so the benefit is greater.

It is worth a try, really.

Ok, it’s time for me to exit.

Congratulations for following the thread.

Simply, don’t forget that knowledge, just like ideas, are worth nothing if they remain unpracticed and untried.

Best,

Monfii

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 10

Chapter 3 Transform Your Trauma

Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. —Bessel van der Kolk

The author tells the story of Rosalie, a woman who never fulfilled her vision of writing children books.

When in her thirties, Rosalie took a drawing class to learn how to draw and subsequently fulfill her dream. One day, the teacher asked the class to do a specific exercise. When it came time to review the students' work, he looked and complimented everyone...but Rosalie's. When he arrived in front of her canvas, he took the brush and “corrected” the painting.

The shame mixed with the public embarrassment she felt marked her for life.

Rosalie never drew ever again after that incident. During the 60 seconds of being corrected, she internalized the belief that she wasn’t good at this, and that she would never become good anyway.

Drawing and writing children’s books remained a distant dream.

That is the definition of trauma. Traumas are usually associated with war scenes, or horrific and violent events leading to neightmares and PTSD. But these are extreme traumas.

A trauma can be as simple as someone shaming you, locking you up in a shelf for fun as a kid, or a degrading comment from a teacher.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how trauma influences our lives and actions.

Trauma Shatters Hope and Eliminates the Future

The author explains the mechanism associated with a math trauma.

Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, and an incapacitating fear of being wrong.

Most students develop a math trauma after a bad experience with math. They began to think they aren’t good at math and that it will never change. As such, they stop paying attention to math in the classroom and refuse to make efforts to learn it since “they are not good at it”. One bad experience led to the internalization that they sucked, which led the fear of math to become part of their identity.

Sometimes a student may perform well on initial tests and assignments but still fear making mistakes or revealing weakness or incompetence to a teacher or parent. This is not surprising since they will be sanctioned if they're wrong.

Dr. Ruef, a psychologist dealing with this issue, has called this a “fragile math identity.” As long as students victim of this condition understand the math, it’s alright. But at the first sign of difficulty, the confidence in their learning capacity can be shattered and it’s back to ground zero.

As a result, these students avoid rather than pursue failure, and as such, the inevitable eventually occurs when they reach their skill cap and “fail.” Reaching their skill cap can then be traumatic.

According to Dr. Ruef, the most common experiences leading to math trauma are being told you aren’t good at math by an adult (often a teacher), panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. Without the help of a supportive teacher, mentor, or parent, the student gives up.

Pain and failure become associated with math. All imagination and interest in math fades. A “future” involving math no longer becomes possible.

That’s the principle behind trauma.

One of its features is that it stops you from being psychologically flexible. The trauma creates some sort of rule in your mind (I am not good at math), you become rigid and fixed in your thinking. One way to illustrate that is by measuring the imagination and creativity of people with PTSD.

They score zero.

Imagination is all about mental flexibility—seeing and believing different angles and possibilities, and the trauma simply prevent them from doing so.

When traumatized, you start thinking in black and white. Instead of seeing different perspectives and contexts, instead of seeing nuance, you focus exclusively on the event that happened. You believe the experience you went through is systematic and objective instead of just being one bad experience among many others.

This creates a fixed mindset which is according to Carole Dweck, a mindset rooted in a past experience.

The opposite of a fixed mindset is what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” a flexible mindset. It is the belief that you can change your traits and character. Having a growth mindset means your life is defined by the future and focused on what can change.

Research on both trauma and the fixed mindset shows that they each individually lead to an exaggerated fear of failure.

People don’t want to deal with that kind of failure. It would make too big a mark on their identity, leaving them feeling like a total and utter failure, like the end of the world.

Instead of even trying, they convince themselves to simply go for something else, less risky and more certain. To quote Robert Brault, “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

The trauma leads us to become rigid about who we are and what we can do. We become defined by our past experiences which now drive our future capabilities.

This is why making commitments about ourselves and our future should not be done while we’re in a traumatic or emotionally broken state. From that state, our decisions for ourselves and our future will be limited. Instead, we want to make our decisions and commitments while in a peak and heightened state—when our faith and expectations are high.

Quick exercise:

Describe one negative or traumatic experience that you’ve had in your past.

In what ways has this experience led you to pursue “lesser goals” or held you back in your progress in any way?

Now reframe those negative experiences by writing how they could ultimately help you become a stronger person.

Tomorrow, we will expand on the link between trauma and personality development.

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 11

Personality as the By-Product of Trauma

Traumas are the painful experiences—both in our past and future— that we haven’t processed and are avoiding.

Think of it as a spider web. It limits your capacity to move and decreases your strength.

We think that this incapacitated person we have become as a result of trauma is simply “who we are”.

But it’s not. ​

Who we are is our deepest-held aspirations, dreams, and goals.

Trauma is self-sustaining in the sense that it prevents us from facing our fear and our truth.

Rather than creating the life we want, we build the life around our traumas, enabling them to exists and take space.

Rather than becoming the person we want to become, we stay the person we are.

Rather than adapting our personality to match our goals, we adapt our goals to match our current and limited personality.

Questions:

How have negative experiences shaped you?

Where do you have a fixed mindset?

Where have you built your life around your thorns?

What goals are you pursuing to avoid dealing with your trauma?

How would your life be different if the trauma was gone?

What life would you ideally choose for yourself?

Who is your ideal future self, regardless of what you’ve been in the past or what has happened to you?

Moving Past Trauma

A refractory period is the amount of time it takes to emotionally recover and move on from an experience. Some events take minutes, some take hours, some take days. Some take months.

A trauma is an event whose the person who’s felt it did not go through a refractory period.

A way to decrease the refractory period is to be psychologically flexible, meaning, being in touch with your emotions, feel them, and express them as you go through them. That’s how you can process them.

Being in touch means being aware, and that is different from being grounded. It’s about expressing your emotions BUT without being completely absorbed by them. You hold your thoughts and emotions loosely as you actively pursue meaningful goals.

The less you hold onto mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals. What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being entirely present in this moment. The more psychologically flexible you are, the faster you can let things go. The less psychologically flexible you are, the longer you hold on to even small things.

When someone remains stuck in an emotional refractory period after a difficult experience, they literally get stuck in the memory and continue to experience life from the point of view they had when the event happened.

They stay imprisoned in an emotional and mental perspective.

Therefore, day after day, they continue reconstructing the emotions of the experience. They don’t regulate and reframe how they see and feel about the event. Trauma becomes a rut.

As the author Dr. Joe Dispenza states: “If you keep that refractory period going for weeks and months, you’ve developed a temperament. If you keep that same refractory period going on for years, it’s called a personality trait. When we begin to develop personality traits based on our emotions, we’re living in the past, and that’s where we get stuck. Teaching ourselves and our children to shorten the refractory period frees us to move through life without obstruction.”

Empathetic Witness: How to Transform Trauma

You’re only as sick as your secrets. —Alcoholics Anonymous

Trauma is only an interpretation of an event during which you felt painful emotions.

Although an initial reaction may be highly negative, all painful experiences can be reframed, reinterpreted, and ultimately used as growing experiences. As such, a "trauma" doesn’t necessarily have to remain traumatic.

Solving your trauma is about changing your view on the experience. It’s about going from seeing it as happening to you, to seeing it as happening for you.

In order to transform the event from a traumatic experience to a “learning” experience and hence, a “positive” experience, you have to get rid of the pain you internalized.

You need to face your emotions and get them out by sharing them with other people. By processing your experiences and emotions, by facing them, you change them. They become lighter.​

Dr. Peter Levine, a renowned trauma researcher, said, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”

The reason why traumas happen in the first place is that the more painful an experience is, the least likely it is we’ll talk about it, and the more likely we’ll internalize it.

This creates a fixed mindset.

The past becomes that heavyweight we’d rather not think about. The avoidance of pain creates addiction (cigarettes, alcohol, weed, stress, sugar, porn, sex...) we use to numb ourselves to both the pain of the past and the pain of pursuing a desired future.

We get rid of the trauma when we feel the emotion attached to it and process it by expressing it to an empathetic witness.

As therapist Lynn Wilson said, “It is this honest connection between two human beings that, in the end, makes what we endured together understandable and meaningful.”

Family and friends being too busy, a psychotherapist is the one that now serves as an empathetic witness.

An empathetic witness will help you reach the "next level" of the trauma, the one where you process it, accept it, then move on.

So, you need people in your life who can help you get to your own next level. Otherwise, you’re going to hit some emotional experiences, bottle them up, and plateau or decline as a person. Molehills can become mountains if you don’t have an empathetic witness to help you process and reframe your experiences.

A true empathetic witness encourages you to decide what you can do to move forward.

This demands courage. Courage transforms trauma. Encouragement facilitates courage. Getting encouragement from others in your life helps you act courageously yourself. This is why you need encouraging people in your life.

Quick exercise:

List two or three people in your life who have been your biggest encouragers.

How have they encouraged you?

Why has it been so impactful?

Reach out to them and openly thank them for their help in your life.

A team of empathetic witnesses are people that listen to you express your feelings in a non-judgmental way which enables you to process them and move past them.

Questions:

Who are three important empathetic witnesses in your life right now?

What other people could you add, or do you need, as empathetic witnesses?

Who could you get on your team, right now, to help you get where you want to go?

How much accountability and vulnerability do you currently have?

Tomorrow, we will keep on talking about trauma and see how we can practically solve them.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

Day 13

Chapter 4: Shift Your Story

The author tells the story of Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step foot on the moon. His whole life, Buzz was driven to achieve the extraordinary. When he finally did it, his life suddenly became meaningless. What could be better than going to the moon? What could be more extraordinary than that?

When he was on the moon, Buzz actually thought "ok, it doesn't get any better than that...my life will go downhill after this".

And so...when he came back, Buzz went depressed. He started drinking. He had no longer any goal. Nothing would ever top going to the moon. “My life is over”, he thought.

Aldrin’s problem was that he did not seek a goal, but a status.

He wanted to be the guy that walked on the moon. When he succeeded, he didn’t see what other status he could ever get. I mean, try to ever beat that....

As a result, he lost his purpose. His purpose was driven by status, instead of the opposite (status being driven by purpose).

Once you obtain a status—such as a particular job title, income level, or relationship—your motivation shifts from approach-oriented to avoid-oriented.

Rather than keep on evolving further, your new goal in life becomes to protect that status. You do so by avoiding failure, you stop being courageous and plateau.

Without a future self that has outgrown and outdone your current self, life starts to lose its meaning.

Creating “Meaning” Through Stories

If you have read Joseph Campbell, Jonathan Haidt, the Bible, if you have watched the Sam Harris VS Jordan Peterson debate, if you have studied a tiny bit of copywriting, or if you are simply a smart person, you know that human beings create meaning through storytelling.

Stories are the filter, the structure, the roadmap that enables us to make sense of the life around us and pursue meaningful goals.

Dr. Crystal Park explains that human beings create meaning from their experiences by connecting three things:

• First, we define the cause of the event or experience. (“What just happened?”)
• Second, we link that cause with our own identity. (“What does this experience say about me?”)
• Finally, we link that cause and our identity with the bigger picture of how the world and universe work. (“What does this experience and who I am say about the world?”)

Creating meaning is something we do automatically. But it has a dark side. If we are not proactive in the meanings we create for ourselves, we can generate a premature, limiting and false cognitive commitment about ourselves.

“Because x happened, this means that I’m a bad person”.

“Because x happened, this means that I’m an introvert.”

“Because x happened, this means that I’m never going to live my dreams.”

Trauma is meaning-making which creates a fixed mindset. Indeed, the problem of trauma is not about the event itself, but the meaning we create out of it. Something terrible happened, but what made it traumatic was in your interpretation.

Trauma is the meaning you give to an event or experience, and how that meaning shapes your view of yourself, your future, and the world at large. ​

The meaning you formed during former “traumas” is now driving your personality, your choices, and your goals. Until you change that meaning.

Think about it for a second: Why do you define yourself the way you do? Why are you the way you are? Why do you like or dislike certain things? Why are you pursuing what you’re pursuing? It all comes down to the meaning you’ve shaped of your former experiences, as well as the identity you’ve formed as a result.

As Dr. Stephen Covey said, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.” If you have a negative view of yourself, then you probably have a negative view of the world. If you have a positive view of yourself, then you probably have a positive view of the world. The world is viewed through the lens of your identity.

You only see, or selectively attend to, what is meaningful and relevant to you.

Your view of the world says more about you than it does about the world. Your view of the past says more about you than it does about the past. Consequently, you should formulate meaning based on your desired future self. This requires being intentional about your interpretation of your experiences, even your hard ones. It requires you to decide for yourself the meaning of your traumatic experience, instead of letting your “brain” be in charge of them.

This requires you to be conscious and self-aware of how you have created meaning out of difficult experiences, and what the substance of the meaning is.

Questions:

How would my future self respond to this experience?

What would they think about it?

What would they do about it?

How could they turn this to their benefit?

This is happening for me, not to me.

As human beings, we spend our lives creating meaning out of our experiences to better understand our lives and make better decisions. When you understand this fact, you start to see it everywhere. Any type of experience or event is a chance to create a rule, a principle, an impression which impacts our identity and worldview. Every small experiences count.

When going through challenging experiences, you can actually define their meaning intentionally instead of having it assigned to you. You can choose the mark traumatic events will leave on your subconscious.

Most people don’t do that. Their thoughts are governed by emotions, particularly in emotionally heated situations. Those thoughts are reactive and unintentional, but go on to create long-term meaning and narrative held by the person, which then becomes limited in some ways.

Instead of having emotions controlling you, it should be your thoughts, or, more specifically, your goals, that should direct your emotions, even when the initial emotion triggered by the experience is difficult.

The better you get at emotional regulation in both small and big experiences, the more psychologically flexible you become. As you become more psychologically flexible, your emotions and experiences stop defining you in a reactive way.

As such, the first step is to become aware of what you are feeling. You can’t manage something you’re not aware of.

The second step of emotional regulation is understanding the difference between primary emotions and secondary emotions.

Primary emotions are your initial reactions to external events. You shouldn’t judge them. They are natural reactions to things around us. For example, being sad when a loved one dies, or being frustrated in traffic, are natural initial responses.

A secondary emotion is what you feel about the feeling itself.

For example, you may feel shame about being sad that a loved-one dies. Or you may feel stressed about having anxiety, which will then increase the primary anxiety.

Secondary emotions increase the intensity of your initial emotion, creating some sort of vicious circle that can push you into destructive behaviors.

Hence, part of becoming psychologically flexible is holding your initial reaction loosely—not taking it too seriously or overly identifying with it, but acknowledging it, labeling it, and then deciding how you want to interpret and feel about the experience.

The third step of emotional regulation is letting go. Accept and acknowledge whatever you are feeling instead of pushing it down, pretending you are not feeling anything.

You then want to step back from the emotion and consider the consequences of acting on it. Usually, the consequences aren’t in line with the values and goals of your future self.

Fundamental to the meaning-making process is developing stories. We understand the meaning of our experiences through stories. The more intentional you get about your life, the more you become the author of the story. You shape the meaning of your past. You also shape the meaning of current and future experiences in order to have the story you want for your past.

Questions:

How much of your current narrative is based on primary emotions, your initial reaction to various events or experiences?

What is the meaning you continue to give to previous events that no longer serve the story you wish to tell about yourself?

What is the story of “you”?

Who are you? Why are you the person you are?

Tomorrow, we will further dive into how you can rewire your past and rewrite your story so that you can decrease trauma consequences.

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Madame Peccato]

So far I've read up to Chapter 1.

My takeaways:

- Personality is liquid and not set in stone (yeah it's the title of the book, lol.)
- We create barriers through labels, and follow them to a T to stay consistent within ourselves. Call it sticking to the comfort zone, or call it excuses, the principle is the same.
- Personality isn't something that just exists, it's something you create. It's not a finished product.
- It takes work to change your personality, and it will not be pleasurable. You can shape yourself however you want if you are willing to go through the process.

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 12

Becoming an Empathetic Witness to Those Around You

You can help others by being an empathetic witness to them. When you listen to people in a loving and non-judgmental way, you enable your interlocutor to lift a burden, find clarity, process emotions and deal with their repressed feelings.

Being an empathetic witness is about listening and encouraging. Not about talking. It can’t be done “quickly”. You need to be there to listen, not to solve the problem. The problem needs to be processed first, the emotion released, before any type of solution can be discussed.

To make sure the event is processed entirely, the listener asks more questions.

“Can you explain more for me?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why was that part so important?”

“Have you given up on the idea of a better future?”

“What positives have come from this?”

“How will your future be different because of this?”

“What can you do now to move forward?” “How can I help?”

Questions:

Are any of your relationships stuck in the past?

Have former experiences created a fixed mindset in any of your relationships?

Who are three people you could be an empathetic witness to, right now?

Conclusion of chapter 3:

Trauma is at the core of who we are as people. If we transform it, we remove the barriers it creates and can become unstoppable. If we don’t transform our trauma, we organize our lives around them, which decreases our capacity to get out of our comfort zone and achieve difficult purposes. A cornerstone of trauma is that it is isolated, internalized, and then avoided.

The initial emotional reaction—which is negative, painful, and likely paralyzing—becomes the filter through which the memory is stored, hence the need to release it.

Healthy memories change over time. A growing person continually has a changing past, expanding in meaning and usefulness. If you wish to move on from painful experiences, you can’t avoid them, but have to face them, feel them, and release them.

Writing down and organizing your thoughts and emotions in your journal is an excellent way to do that.

It helps you get your feelings out of your mind and process them, so that the memory can become lighter…or even completely forgotten.

Tomorrow, we'll start chapter 4 which will be about changing your past so that you can change your future.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality Isn't Permanent: a summary ​

DAY 14

Your Past Is Fiction: It’s Your Story—Get Creative!

The author tells the story of a smoker who attempted to stop smoking several times and always failed.

One day he moved to a new town for his new job and when he was offered a cigarette, he refused. “I don’t smoke”, he said. He reframed himself as a non-smoker, and he has never smoked ever since.

Side note: this story outlines how powerful labels are. They really imprison you into action. While they can be useful to stop smoking, they can also be destructive, like labeling yourself as an introvert, and hence, acting it out, just how it was explained above.

The Gap and the Gain: Reframing Your Narrative

According to the theory of “narrative identity” developed by scholar and researcher Dr. Dan McAdams, we build our identity by integrating our life experiences into an internalized evolving story – a narrative.

The story gives a sense of unity and purpose to our lives.

(if you’re interested in how stories can shape your identity, watch the movie “Mr. Nobody”).

That narrative is composed of the past, present, and future. This means that the three parts composing your story as it is are not fixed, but are happening simultaneously as you’re living your present. They are interconnected.

Your narrative evolves as your experience evolves. A fact happening in the past doesn’t change...but the way you interpret it does.

Most people trap themselves into a negative narrative and never come out. A fundamental aspect of “reframing” your narrative is shifting what was formerly defined as a negative experience into a positive one. Instead of having something happening to you, you need to have it happen for you.

You may be wondering “Why would I want to do this? If the experience was negative, why would I pretend that it was positive?”

“Positive” and “negative” aren’t facts, but meanings. The meaning you place on past events determines who you are and what your future is.

Changing how you view your past is essential to upgrade your identity and future. If you want to change your future, you need to upgrade your past since the past may prevent your ideal future from happening. You do this by changing your story, your narrative.

One way to do so is by applying the gain and the gap theory. That theory states that some people only see gaps in what happens to them, while others only see gains (it’s merely about being positive or negative).

You can live in your dream house and only see the one painting which is missing because it was destroyed in a fire. You see the gap. Or you can see everything else that you gained – the gains.

When you’re in the gap, you can’t enjoy or comprehend the benefits in your life. All you’re focused on is why something wasn’t how you thought it should have been.

This gap gain theory also applies to how you see yourself.

Instead of comparing your present and future version of yourself and see what you don’t have, look at what your past version of yourself had and was so that you can measure what you have gained since.

It is important, especially for short-term goals. Of course, you shouldn’t abandon your vision, your vision gives you a point of focus to focus on. But you shouldn’t compare yourself to your vision as it will most likely be depressing – you should look at everything you have accomplished instead.

Seeing progress motivates you, it boosts your confidence, enthusiasm, and excitement.

So, it’s important to focus on the gain, to shift the view of your own narrative and reframe the stories onto which you focused on the gaps, and focus on the gains instead.

Practically, it means looking at it asking the question “how much did I learn” instead of asking “how much have I suffered?”

When you begin proactively framing your narrative, it is incredibly powerful to shift what once was a “gap” narrative to a “gain” one.

For example, you may harbor negative emotions about something that happened to you in the past. You may view the experience for all that it cost or has done to you. You may be blaming your current circumstances on those former experiences.

But what would happen if you flipped the script on those experiences? What would happen if you proactively shifted your attention and began looking for the “gains” of such experiences? What would happen if you chose to reframe and retell those stories from an alternative perspective?

Re-remembering the past is about filtering your past through the lens of your chosen identity—your future self. How would a more evolved version of you view these events? How have these events enabled you to become who you are today? Everything in your past has happened—or more accurately, is happening—for you, not to you.

How you tell the story is the story!

Let’s take an example.

SPOILER ALERT.




I WILL NOW TALK ABOUT THE MOVIE “The 6th Sense” TO ILLUSTRATE THE CLAIM. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO HAVE IT SPOILED, SKIP THIS PART TO THE END. IT HAS BEEN SIGNALED WITH “END OF THE SPOILERS”.


​

If you have seen the 6th sense, you realize the force of the movie does not lie as much in the interpretation of the actors, the cinematography, the special effects, or the story than it lies in the way the story is told.

Imagine a minute that we had known that Bruce Willis’ character was dead at the beginning of the movie? What would have happened then? Would you have watched the movie with the same interest? Would you have been as shocked about the end? Would you have enjoyed the movie as much?

Hell. Freaking. No.

The movie had power because of the way it was told.

Your story has power because of the way it is told. Change how you tell your story, and change its power.







END OF THE SPOILER

What you choose to emphasize or ignore in a story determines the focus and impact of the story.

Part of shifting from the gap to the gain is getting more information.

If you have trouble with the way people have treated you in the past, or the way you have treated others, you may want to go talk to these people and ask them questions, see their point of view. This will help you see whatever happened in a different way. Eventually, you may understand why people hurt you, and be a bit more sympathetic of their situation.

You may forgive them.

Tomorrow, we will look at the 5 steps you can take to reshape your narrative.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality Isn't Permanent: a summary ​

DAY 15

Let’s reshape your narrative together

STEP ONE: SHIFT PAST MEANINGS FROM “GAP” TO “GAIN”

Let’s practice training your mindset to shift from the gaps to the gains.

In order to do so, pull out your journal and answer the following questions:

• Over the past ten years, what significant “wins” or “growth” have you experienced?
• How have you, as a person, changed?
• What negative things have you let go of?
• How have your views of yourself and life changed over the past few years?
• What are one to three accomplishments or signs of progress you’ve had in the past ninety days?

STEP TWO: THINK ABOUT ONE TO THREE NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES FROM YOUR PAST

Now that you’ve thought about your past in terms of the gain, think about one to three key experiences you feel have negatively impacted your life. Write those experiences down in your journal.

STEP THREE: LIST ALL OF THE BENEFITS OR “GAINS” FROM THOSE ONE TO THREE EXPERIENCES

Now spend some time thinking about and then listing all of the benefits, opportunities, or lessons that have come from those one to three experiences. How have those experiences happened for you, instead of to you?

STEP FOUR: HAVE A CONVERSATION BETWEEN YOUR FUTURE SELF AND YOUR FORMER SELF

Your former self is not gone. You carry him everywhere you go. However, it is probably a bit bruised, which is therefore limiting your present and future self. It’s time to make your former self healthy again.

You’re going to change the meaning of the past. You’re going to let go of the pain you’ve been carrying. You’re going to be left with a different identity of your former self. Your former self will now be totally healed.

Measuring the gains of your experiences to see how far you’ve come is one powerful way of seeing the strengths, rather than the weaknesses, of your former self.

Another powerful technique is having a conversation between your future and former selves. You can do this in your journal, in your imagination, in a therapy session, however you want.

First, imagine your ideal future self. They are incredibly compassionate, wise, and understanding. They’ve been through a lot and have created the freedom and capacity you want in your life. To get you started, here are a few questions you could pose in your journal:

• How does your future self see your former self?
• What would your future self say to your former self?
• What experiences would they have, if they were to spend an afternoon together?
• What would your former self think of your future self?
• How would your former self feel when they heard the loving counsel of your future self?
• Who would your former self be after that conversation, once compassionately given permission to let go and move on?

STEP FIVE: CHANGE THE IDENTITY NARRATIVE OF YOUR FORMER SELF

When you shift your story, you see new possibilities for yourself. You’re no longer the victim of what happened. Instead, you’re the one pro-actively creating meaning of your own experience. Your past is a story, which you reconstruct and design here and now.

Every time you go back to your past, you influence it. When healed and healthy, the past is simply a source of information that you can use (not emotion, except for positive and chosen emotions). The past is just raw material to work with. It’s a database which is entirely malleable and flexible.

Following the conversation between your future and former selves, who is your former self now?

• Who is the past version of you that you’re now carrying with you?
• What is different about your former self now that they’ve been healed and transformed?
• How do you feel about your former self?
• When asked about the past, what is the new story you will tell?

As you move forward and change your memories, do so intentionally. Avoid recalling difficult memories when depressed or feeling unsafe. Rather, intentionally visit your memories when you’re safe, happy, and lighthearted.

The way you choose to remember your past, how you tell your story determines your past far more than what actually happened.

• What is your story?
• What are the pivotal experiences from your past?
• What are the gains you’ve had from those experiences?
• Who was your former self? How do you feel about your former self?
• Who are you now? Who is your future self?

Now that we have reframed your past self, we will talk about your future self tomorrow.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 19

Strategic remembering

Strategic remembering is Tim Ferriss always carrying a copy of the book “the magic of thinking big”.

It is Ryan Holiday carrying a coin onto which is written “Memento Mori”.

It is me who put as a desktop background a picture of cubicles, to constantly remind myself to do everything in order to avoid this fate at all costs.

If you want to become your future self, you need an environment that reminds you of that future self, not of your former self.

Goals become realities when you are constantly reminded to go after them. This is why many successful people write down their goals every single day.

They need to remember where they’re going, just like an airplane needs to constantly update its trajectory as it gets pushed off course.

Questions:

What transformational triggers can you install into your environment?

Where would you put those strategic reminders?

Change your computer password to a phrase your future self would use. Move your television so it is no longer the centerpiece of your home (or better, throw it away). Remove all of the social media apps from your phone. Look at your closet and get rid of anything that your future self wouldn’t wear. You could fill your entire environment with reminders of your highest aspirations and goals.

And you should.


Strategic Ignorance

Most of the things calling on your attention are garbage. All social media apps, the news, etc don’t bring anything into your life, nor help you develop and achieve your goals.

Strategic ignorance is about getting rid of everything that prevents you from becoming your future self and anchor you into your past.

Yes, including people.

Strategic ignorance is not about being closed-minded. It’s about knowing what you want and focusing on it entirely.

As human beings, we are easily swayed or derailed. Rather than putting ourselves in tempting situations calling back on our former selves, we should aim at avoiding them altogether.

You can easily design an environment with the principles enabling you to pursue what you are after.

You need to design rules and systems that stop you from finding yourself in a mire of filth or the daze of endless opportunity.

You need to make one decision that makes a million other decisions either easier, automatic, or irrelevant.

I’ll give you some of mine:

• I have a "smart bracelet" (xiaomi band 3, 30 euros) which rings when I have to wake up, when I have to go to sleep, and when I have to do sport. It also helps me monitor my sleep.
• I don’t have ANY social media app on my phone. If I want to check Twitter or facebook, I connect through google, and I always have to type a complicated password which discourages me to connect in the first place.
• I never see my friends during the day because the day is made to work, not to see friends.
• I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, don’t eat sugar, don’t watch porn, as I know these vices lead me to other vices.
• I write a list of things to do in the evening for the next day, so I don’t have to think about what to do when I wake up. I just follow the list.
• My morning routine is the same thing every day, so I don’t have to think about it.
• All of my pants go with all of my t-shirts and shirts, so I don’t have to think about it.
• I only eat the same thing, so I don’t have to think about what to buy because it is now automated.
• Obviously, I don’t have any TV, nor any games on my computer, nor any video game console, or anything else that could stir me off my goal. Wikipedia and the FLF is how I entertain myself + a bunch of tech, blockchain and entrepreneurship newsletters I signed up to.

Now, your turn.

Think about all of the inputs you’re currently getting that are sabotaging your future self.

• Rather than relying on willpower, how could you become ignorant of these things?
• In what areas of your life do you need to apply strategic ignorance?
• What simple decisions could you make right now that would eliminate decision fatigue from your life?
• What are you currently aware of or overly informed about that you shouldn’t be?
• What distractions or unwanted temptations remain in your world that need to be removed?

Forcing Functions

A forcing function is a self-imposed tunnel that forces you to grind to get out of it. You imprison yourself and make the achievement of your goal the sole solution to get out of the tunnel. You’ve designed the situation to force you in the direction you want.

Eg: When MJ moved to Phoenix, he had so little money that he had no choice but to make his website work. He was ready to do anything for it: drive taxis, flip burgers, etc. Since he had no choice…he made it.

Forcing functions exist to weed to coerce you into acting the way your future self would act. It also helps with getting rid of distractions.

Implementing forcing functions into your life ensures that you’re constantly moving in a desired direction, hence my metaphor of it being a tunnel. You can’t go anywhere but move forward.

Forcing functions also require time restraints, which activate Parkinson’s law. This law states that anything will take as much time to achieve as the time you allow yourself to achieve it (unless you work in construction lol). You give yourself deadlines and hustle to meet them. Otherwise, you never get anywhere.

Forcing functions can also arise out of the situation itself. In extreme sport, for example, forcing function is the activity. If you are not focused when you do a backflip with a snowboard…you may die.

A lot of athletes end up getting hooked on the feeling.

Forcing function demand a complete commitment from you.

To quote the author, “the goal is psychological flow and high performance.”

Your life should be designed so that you can focus 100% on your achievement. You want to produce the absolute best, otherwise, you may fail.

One of the most useful and powerful forcing functions is money. If you invest into a costly program, you’ll be more enticed to follow it. Likewise, if you give 1000 euros to someone and they only pay you back 100 euros at a time every time you hit your goal within your deadline, you’ll be much more motivated to work.

Questions:

How can you embed more forcing functions into your life to ensure you become the person you want to be?

What situations could you create that would produce powerful results?

Conclusion of chapter 6

If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us. —Marshall Goldsmith

The environment is one of the most powerful and important personality levers. You must change your environment and design it for purpose if you hope to see any result fast.

To quote the author:

“You are the product of your culture and context. You’re the product of the information and inputs you consume. Everything that comes in —the food, information, people, experiences—shapes you. The first step is becoming mindful of your context and how it is having an impact on who you are. The next step is becoming strategic with your environment and situation.”

Tomorrow will be the last day. We will talk about the conclusion of the book.

See you tomorrow!

 

[peterb0yd]

It is me who put as a desktop background a picture of cubicles, to constantly remind myself to do everything in order to avoid this fate at all costs.

If you want to become your future self, you need an environment that reminds you of that future self, not of your former self.

Haha I love the thread and summaries, but this made me laugh. I would recommend taking that wallpaper off in this case. Put something there that is more inspiring.

 

[Deleted78083]

You sure are working hard at this. Is it helping you to clarify your thinking?

I never studied the material at school. I would rewrite it with my own words and study that. I did the same with the book, it helps me integrate the knowledge.

Also writing enables me to go deeper in my thinking. But that's just mental masturbation lol and for my own pleasure.

This is a great thread (worth GOLD over time), but IMO, you need a better title if you want to attract more eyes. What's the benefit of reframing your traumas, rewriting your past, desinging your future, and breaking free from bad habits?

Yeah...you're right.

I thought about "free yourself from your past and become who you want to become" but idk, it sounded so cheap and fake. Every title i thought of sounded cheap and fake. To be honest even the title of the book is lame: personality isn't permanent. Lol. So what? I read the book cuz it had 5 stars. Certainly not because of the title.

So I focused on the mechanism of the book for the title. I mean, who doesn't want to reframe their traumas and free themselves from their past?

But I suppose not everyone actually want to face that type of sh*t either, and so the title becomes "scary".

Maybe i could have gone a bit more clickbaity with "This is why you get stuck". Or "how to unstuck yourself and reach peak potential forever".


Yeah. That's not bad. Or "unlock mental and personal growth".

"The roadmap to your best self".

"Atomize your self-limitinh belief". Meh, too much like Tony Robbins.

I don't know, if you got any ideas hahaha don't hesitate to propose.

The truth is that i am gonna be posting in this thread for the next 18 days, so i figured people would eventually click on it thinking "but why the hell does this thread which sounds lame keeps on being revived".

Of course it'd be cool if more people participated, but I also do it for myself so it's not like I was looking for an audience.


To answer your question, I guess the benefit of reframing trauma etc is to manage to build the life you want to live. Right now your past is probably preventing you from doing so, and by solving it, you free yourself from your fears and self-limiting beliefs, and go pursue what you desire most.

Edit: "transcend your current self and become who you want to be" may be suitable.

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 16

Your Future Is Fiction: What’s It Gonna Be?!

The remarkable power to committing to your future self is the lack of decision fatigue.

In psychology, “decision fatigue” is one way in which our willpower gets exhausted, using up our mental resources to weigh the pros and cons of every decision as we encounter them.

When I was eating a keto diet, I was struggling to decide the amount of dark chocolate I would eat, because while I was craving it, I knew I should be careful not to go over the 30 grams of carbs threshold that I had imposed on myself. Deciding what I was going to eat every day was painful and exhausting, and resisting eating too much yogurt was torture.

To simplify my life, I got into a carnivore diet. No need to make decisions about what to eat or how much to eat anymore, I knew I would just eat meat, and I could eat as much meat as I wanted since there is no sugar in meat.

Easy.

Decision fatigue can be avoided by making a committed choice.

By not making a clear decision for yourself beforehand, you’ve deferred the decision-making process to some future moment when you’re forced to decide.

That's exhausting.

Let's take another example discussed on the forum: "the battle against the fridge is won at the supermarket”. The idea is that if you don’t buy ice-cream in the first place, you won’t have to hesitate to eat it or not.

Simple. And yet, at I disagree.

The battle is not won at the supermarket. The battle is won when you are writing down the list of food you are going to buy. If you make a committed choice not to eat ice-cream, you shouldn’t even hesitate to buy it at the supermarket. It should be loud and clear from the beginning that ice-cream has no place on your grocery list. If you don’t write it and stick to your list, you won.

That’s what commitment looks like.

As such, if you’re wondering whether you should play video games tonight, you have already lost because it means that:

1. You haven't sold/destroyed your game console
2. You haven't uninstalled all games + your Steam account

When you are committed to your future self, questions regarding the possibilities to do something you shouldn't, shouldn't even arise in your brain.

“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.- Clayton Christensen

One of the first blog articles I wrote was called “moderation is the genesis of decadence”, where I explain the only difference that exists in the world is the difference between zero and one. Not between one and two, one and a hundred, or one and a million. That difference is minimal.

When you have “one” of anything, you can usually get a second one of it. Then repeat, and get a third one. Then a thousand.

However, when you have “zero” of anything, the incremental effort to go from zero to one is enormous. It is bigger than infinity, because you can’t multiplied zero by anything to get one.

The train spends most of its energy going from immobile, to mobile. Once the train is running, it doesn't have to spend much energy.

All of this to say that you whether do something, or you don't. You're not gonna eat just one cookie. You'll eat the entire box. So you whether eat cookies.

Or you don't.

This is supposed to outline how you stick to your principle, or you don’t. There is no difference between eating one spoon of ice-cream, and a hundred.

The difference is in eating it, or not eating it at all.

What people call moderation is the excuse not to respect their own principle ("oNe WoN'T kIlLeD mE), which leads to decadence. As such, moderation is the genesis of decadence.

Becoming 100 percent committed to what you want is how you succeed. Making serious and sometimes hard decisions, rather than deferring them for bad situations, leads to enhanced confidence and progress.

Now, let’s create your future self.

STEP ONE: HONESTLY EXAMINE THE FUTURE YOU’VE CONSIGNED YOURSELF TO

Before imagining your desired future self, take some time to honestly think about the future you’ve currently consigned yourself to have.

Questions:

• What is the current future you’ve consigned yourself to?
• How do you feel about that future?
• Is it what you actually want?
• Do you see yourself achieving the goals you have always dreamt of achieving?

If you are not completely excited about the future you honestly see unfolding before you, then there’s a problem. That limited future self is also limiting who you are now.

In order to upgrade your identity, you need something extremely purposeful that you can shape your current identity around.

Choose a big goal, something that matters to you.

STEP TWO: WRITE YOUR OWN BIOGRAPHY

You need to aim beyond what you are capable of. You need to develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. If you think you’re unable to work for the best company in its sphere, make that your aim. If you think you’re unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there. Make your vision of where you want to be a reality. Nothing is impossible. —Paul Arden

Now, write your future story as if it already happened. Write it as if you were at the end of your life. Write it as if you were someone 300 years in the future writing about you.

• What was your story?
• What were the significant events that happened?
• How will you be remembered?
• How did you live your life?
• What did you accomplish?

Write about your life from the moment you were born until the present. Then take a break. And now write from the present to the future.


STEP THREE: IMAGINE YOUR FUTURE SELF THREE YEARS OUT

• Who do you want to be three years from now? Get specific.
• How much money are you making?
• Who are your friends?
• What does your typical day look like?
• What types of clothes do you wear?
• What does your hair look like?
• What type of work are you doing?
• What does your environment look like?
• If you haven’t done a lot of future-casting, then you might just start with ninety days from now.
• Who do you want to be in ninety days?
• What do you want to have accomplished by then?
• How do you want to be different?
• What changes do you want to make in your environment?

STEP FOUR: TELL EVERYONE YOUR NEW STORY . . . YOUR FUTURE SELF

Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be. —Robert Brault

Most people’s identity narrative is rooted in their past. From now on, your identity narrative—your “story”—is based on your future self. That’s the story you tell people from now on when they ask who you are.

As it relates to yourself, having a three- to five-page printed document of your future self will help you more fully see and believe it. Moreover, you want to share your Vivid Vision document with everyone you know (the author's advice, not mine, since I know you shouldn't talk about your goals too much). As you share your vision and goals with those in your life, they will start to hold you more accountable. Your won’t have a choice in not fulfilling it.

Furthermore, it is important to highlight that your vision should include realizations that are way above your current reality. It needs to inspire and excite you. It needs to give you motivation and hope. It needs to be something that will stretch and change you. It needs to be big enough that when you look back, you’ll be shocked by where and who you currently are.

Also, your vision shouldn’t be fixed, but constantly adapted and worked on. Whatever document you craft your vision on should be a working document, so that you can make sure you can keep on growing.

In order for it to be strategic and useful, it’s helpful to narrow your vision to three or less years out into the future. The vision should focus on your one major goal, which if you achieve will make your future self and everything else you want in your life possible.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve reframed your past and imagined your ideal future, it’s time to get busy.

Tomorrow, we will talk about how to take action.

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 17

IT’S TIME TO TAKE SOME F*CKING ACTION!

In order to solidify your new identity, you need to begin acting in alignment with that new identity so that your present self can transcend himself and become your desired future self.

It also means it is time to leave your former self in the past.

Psychologists have a term for this—self-signaling, which means that our actions signal back to us who we are. We judge and measure ourselves by our actions.

If you change your behavior, your identity will begin to follow suit. You will act yourself into becoming.

Your future self is your new standard. If your current payout for speaking gigs is 5 000 and your future self is earning 30 000, raise your fee to 10 000 first, and refuse any less than that.

Prefer being rejected at your new standard to being accepted at your old one. That’s how you force change to happen.

Make your future self the new standard for your current mindset and behavior. Act out your future self now.

Let’s see how it gets done.

CHAPTER 5 Enhance Your Subconscious

The unconscious is the repository of all of our feelings, regardless of their social or personal acceptability. To know about the unconscious is extremely important, for what goes on down there may be responsible for those personality characteristics that drive us to behave as we do. —Dr. John E. Sarno

The author tells the story of a healthy and fit 36-year old woman called Jane. One day, Jane got a water-skiing accident and her leg was screwed. The doctor told her she would never be able to run again. Jane accepted it as her reality. She stopped running.

Some years later, her husband suddenly retired and started doing nothing with his life. That angered Jane which was working like crazy, but she didn’t say anything.

As time passed, Jane got angrier. Suddenly, the pain in her leg came back.

One day, Jane met Steven Ozanich, the author of The Great Pain Deception. Steven asked Jane about her pain, and when he found out about the water-skiing accident some 15 years earlier, he asked Jane how things were with her husband.

Jane admitted things weren’t great.

Steven understood that Jane’s pain had nothing to do with the accident, but that it was an emotional problem. He also told her that she would be able to run again very soon.

Jane followed Steven’s advice. She expressed her feelings to her husband, got a rage journal inside which she writes her feelings to process them, stopped therapies for her legs to abandon the idea that the problem was physical, and started living as if the pain did not exist.

Now, Jane is fine and is running again.

Your Memories Are Physical, and Your Body Is Emotional

Like memory, we tend to think of emotions as abstract, residing only in our minds. They are not. Emotions are physical.

If you speak with a physiotherapist, they will tell you about times when by massaging one specific part of their client’s body, they released an emotion that had been stored there for a long time and the client began to cry. This is called emotional release.

Emotions and memories have physical markers in your body.

The information relayed throughout the brain and body is emotional in nature. That information—the emotional content—then becomes the body. The experiences we have transform not only our perspectives and identity but become our very biology. This phenomenon is talked about by Amy Cuddy in her Ted Talk: “your body language shape who you are”. The emotions you live (“who you are”) also shape your body language.

People with low confidence, low mood, or low self-esteem seldom walk with their shoulders pulled behind and their head straight, the regard fixed on the horizon.

Why does this matter?

Because we need to reframe how we see our body, and look at it as an emotional system. Emotions are chemical, and our body becomes accustomed or habituated to these chemicals. It can also become completely addicted (think dopamine, and think heroine).

This is why overcoming an addiction is so difficult. Addiction isn’t merely a mental disorder. It is physical. In order to change your addiction, you literally need to change your biology. You need a future self with a new identity, a new story, new environment, and a new body.

In his book The Big Leap, Dr. Hendricks explains that when people begin a journey of personal transformation, they will subconsciously sabotage themselves in order to get back to their former self: “Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”

It’s like when you feel you don’t deserve whatever good things that are headed your way.

I personally struggle with that. I have a hard time accepting compliments or “awards” for work done that I do not estimate valuable because “not difficult enough”. I like it hard. It makes me feel like I deserve more than what I get. If it’s not hard, I am not interested in the result, that I will value by its degree of difficulty.

Anyway.

When you begin making improvements in your life, you’re going to subconsciously try to get back to where you feel comfortable.

This is emotional.

If you’re not used to feeling great most of the time, your subconscious will grow uneasy. It will fight back once you try to allow yourself to feel good because it is addicted to the negative emotions of your former self. Because negative chemicals are what literally make up your body.

If you don’t change your subconscious, then altering your personality will be difficult. If you change your subconscious, then altering your personality happens automatically.

To make powerful change in our lives, we need to change at the subconscious level. Otherwise, the change will not be permanent. You could try to force yourself to be positive, for example, but if your subconscious, or physical body, is habituated to negative emotional states, it will default to behaviors that reproduce those emotions.

Willpower doesn’t work for overcoming addictions, at least not in an effective or predictable way.

You are an emotional being. Your physical body is your “subconscious mind,” and the only way to alter your subconscious is by shifting the emotional framework that makes you who you are.

In many cases, the cause of physical pain is not “physical” at all but emotional. Once a person accepts the fact that they have suppressed emotions, and learns to express and reframe them, they will stop misdiagnosing their pain as a physical condition. Of this, Steven Ozanich wrote in The Great Pain Deception, “Pain and other chronic symptoms are physical manifestations of unresolved internal conflict.”

When you change your subconscious, your personality will change as well. Your personality is merely a by-product or reflection of the place you stand at from an emotional point of view.

The untransformed trauma (and the fixed mindset it creates) stunts your imagination. Your future self and purpose are then either nonexistent or extremely limited.

This isn’t what you want.

Think of these for a moment:

• Why have you become who you are?
• Are you the person you’ve become out of choice, or out of reaction to your life’s experiences?
• What would happen if you became the person you really wanted to be?
• What would happen if you allowed yourself to feel good more often?
• What would happen if you stopped avoiding your pain?

The author subsequently goes on a rant to practice fasting and give money to charities – not the amount of money you have, but the amount of money you wish to give when you earn that which you want to earn!

These are supposed to help you change your subconscious because you have a much clearer vision when you fast and are more detached from your emotions, and because by living like the person you want to be, you trump your subconscious into getting it to believe that you already are this person.

This concludes chapter 5. Tomorrow, we will start the last chapter of the book, and talk about the importance of changing the environment.

See you tomorrow!

 

[Deleted78083]

Personality isn't permanent: a summary​

DAY 18

CHAPTER 6 Redesign Your Environment

If I changed the environmental situation, the fate of the cells would be altered. I would start off with my same muscle precursors but in an altered environment they would actually start to form bone cells. If I further altered the conditions, those cells became adipose or fat cells. The results of these experiments were very exciting because while every one of the cells was genetically identical, the fate of the cells was controlled by the environment in which I placed them. —Bruce Lipton, MD

In 1979, psychologists from Harvard designed a house so that it would resemble the 1950’s. They took a bunch of old guys that were young in the 1950’s and told them to just pretend they were in 1950. They couldn’t speak about anything else that happened after 1950 in order to force their brain to be in 1950. The television broadcast games from 1950, and they could read the news from 1950.

Well.

They got younger. Not only mentally, but physically as well.

Those that had come in with canes left without them. Those that couldn’t carry their bags left the experiment being able to carry them.

That is how POWERFUL your mindset is. It can make you younger.

Context Shapes Roles: Roles Shape Identity and Biology

How you treat other people influences how they see themselves. How people see themselves influences their mindset and emotions. And it also impacts their biology.

As we said, human beings are extremely adaptable creatures. As such, we generally default to the roles of our social environment. It takes extreme intentionality and decisiveness not to default to an expected social or cultural role. You become the role you’re given.

Putting yourself in new environments, around new people, and taking on new roles is one of the quickest ways to change your personality, for better or worse. Fully take on the roles you assume, and you’ll change from the outside in.

Now, why do people feel they don’t change? If I take the example of my parents, they will tell you about the same stories at the same time of the year: Christmas, Easter, carnival, summer holidays…each year is an eternal and continual repetition of the year before.

Why?

Because of routine.

The reason why people feel they don’t change is because as they age, they engage less and less into new experiences. Life becomes a routine. You start having less “first time experiences”. You wake up at the same hour to go to the same place to do the same thing every single day. You become emotionally fixed, hence tend to be less open to new experiences, which increases your tendency to be emotionally fixed in a vicious circle.

The situation doesn’t change, people’s social role doesn’t change, and as such, people’s personality remains fixed, because they're not expected to take on new challenges or assume new roles that would change their personalities.

Side note:

This part made me question the idea behind the fact that almost every middle-level managers are assh*les. I don't think, in fact, they are inherently bad people. I think the requirements of the job is making them assh*les.

Question:

• When was the last time you did something for the first time?
• When was the last time you did something unpredictable?
• When was the last time you put yourself in a new situation or a new role?
• Are there clothes in your closet that have been there for over five years?

Side note: the author speaks about culture, but I’d like to add my own 0,02 € on culture.

Culture is not often talked about in the realm of trauma and emotional freedom, probably because in a world of identity politics, ranking cultures based on their efficacy to deal with life appears extremely discriminatory.

However, history tends to side with the fact that culture plays a tremendous role in the development and well-being of people, and as a result, as a society. Sam Harris and Thomas Sowell have discussed these issues, but in order not to do politics, I’ll take another example: Scandinavia.

We tend to think that capitalism developed in Britain at the end of the 18th century, but this isn’t exactly correct. Scandinavian kingdoms already practiced intense economic exchange before the invention of the steam machine. In fact, they started to develop economically when Protestantism spread in the region.

Protestantism wasn’t as big of a religious shift as it was a cultural shift. Catholicism was based on centralization. The Holy text was interpreted by the church which was the ambassador of God on Earth. People weren’t thinking for themselves. They were told what to think at church. Catholicism was a hierarchy at the top of which sat the Pope.

Luther and Calvin disagreed with this idea.

They read the Holy texts and decided it’d be better for people if they were to choose for themselves the interpretation of the scripture. As such, the huge "centralization mindset" inherited from the catholic church and that had been transcribed into society, shifted.

The cultural system abandoned the idea of centralization and decentralized...well, about everything. This process empowered the individual. People weren’t taught how to think anymore, but had to think for themselves. In society, this translated to an increased-freedom for the individual to pursue what he deemed valuable (and guess what it was...).

This newfound freedom enabled the individual to start trading and make money (trade really is an unavoidable consequence of freedom.)

Increased economic activity meant society got richer. This cultural shift partly explains the success of Scandinavian countries nowadays.

This became possible thanks to an original shift of culture, which created better outcomes.

End of the side note.

Culture is often ignored because it seems invisible, but it shapes identity, behavior, relationships, and personality. If you find yourself in consistent environments and consistent social roles, then your personality will show up as stable and consistent over time.

There is a huge volume of literature further detailing how the groups of people you hang out the most with shapes:

• Academic achievement
• Choice of university and degree
• How productive you are at work
• Whether or not you cheat in school and other life domains
• Whether you’re likely to do extracurricular activities and go above and beyond the call of duty
• Whether you engage in risky behaviors such as smoking, doing harmful drugs, and using alcohol
• Your likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviors
• The financial decisions you make and how well you ultimately do financially
• Your chances of becoming an entrepreneur

Since your environment shapes who you are, you need to immerse yourself in an environment that pushes you to become your future self. You need to hang out with people that are who you want to become.​

Furthermore, here are three fundamental strategies of environmental design that you can use to force yourself into becoming who you want to be.

1. Strategic remembering

2. Strategic ignorance

3. Forcing functions

We will talk about them tomorrow.

See you tomorrow!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Black_Dragon43]

This is a great thread (worth GOLD over time), but IMO, you need a better title if you want to attract more eyes. What's the benefit of reframing your traumas, rewriting your past, desinging your future, and breaking free from bad habits?

 

[Devampre]

Awesome thread so far mon-fi!

I will be watching this and answering the questions for myself. Looking forward to what is to come.

 

[Deleted78083]

Pretty good stuff so far. Will follow. Psychology is one of those fields where there has been very few breakthroughs and innovations. Not a whole lot has changed in how we approach the human psyche. Very mysterious and complex.

Psychology is this field where you gonna have 10 theories and all are applicable to a certain extent but no one really knows or understands how nor why.

I have read a lot of these books. But this one is different. It is the first one that I feel takes the whole equation of "self-help" into account. It's not surprising. The author has a PhD in psychology + read about 200 books around the same topic prior to writing this one. I guess he really managed to put each piece together and write this complete "map".

Exciting stuff!

 

[Deleted78083]

I watched an interesting video and it somewhat relates to this topic.

I've always thought of Woody Allen as a creepy, evil guy who made great movies. Turns out, the child molester thing was a lie perpetuated by the media.

Two courts, doctors, and police officers found him not guilty. There was no physical trauma on the child, the child's first report was not consistent with the claim, and Mia Farrow has a history of crazy antics.

But the reason I thought of this thread is because of Dylan Farrow. IF there is no proof that she is molested, which this video seems to prove, then her memory of the trauma was fabricated and believed as real.

Because of her mother's suggestions and the world telling her that she was hurt, she believed it as truth. If so, then she IS a victim but of a different crime.

It's a bit off-topic to this thread but it makes me think of how unreliable our memories can be.

As mentioned by @mon_fi , psychologists believe the past is the bedrock, the foundation of who we are. But what if the past is not as concrete as we thought it was?

I won't comment on this specific case, but the principle you outline is correct. We are constantly changing and reinventing our past. Every time we remember something, we change it. Every time we visit our memories, they evolve. We make them stronger than they are, or not. That is what enables us to change our past and free ourselves from trauma through emotional catharsis.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Madame Peccato]

Just finished reading chapter 2 (pardon me for my snail pace).

My takeaways:
- identity is shaped by past actions, but you can decide your present actions (that will become past actions for your future self), shaping up your identity however you want.
- goals will let you establish the actions needed to reach them
- your current actions are determined by your current goals. If you have no goals then your actions will be uninspired and won't change much day by day
- make crazy choices and observe their outcome. Crazy choices let you enjoy peak experiences, which are needed to develop your inner self.

 

[WJK]

You sure are working hard at this. Is it helping you to clarify your thinking?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.