Stop Avoiding And You Earn Real Anxiety

I had to tackle shame in order to have the privilege to take on anxiety I had to overcome shame in order to even have the opportunity, the privilege to work on my anxiety. and I’m not a deeply anxious person by any means, but I do have anxiety, and my anxiety is something that

if I ever was going to or wanted to, which I do and I will, achieve some of the ambitions that I have in life, then I must be capable and competent in overcoming anxiety. It is important for tangible high output because your emotions cannot prevent you from taking consistent action and following through.

and because of the work that I’ve done on myself so far in my life, I am keenly aware of shame. I’m very conscientious of it because I’ve consistently brought my awareness to it and where it shows up in my life and the way I feel it and the way it presents in myself physiologically, socially, emot- like all the things that are in the equation of shame in my life, I’m very conscious of now,

all of this helped me recognize how important shame actually was for me, how much of a limiting factor it was in my life. But I didn’t realize that

Until I was in my early 20s probably, which is funny because I had all these experiences growing up that were clearly shame-driven or insecurity, right? I would suck my belly in so I looked thinner when I was younger, even when I was super low body fat, which was pretty interesting, right? I would be probably low teens body fat-wise as a competitive soccer player, and I would still do that,

Because I was self-conscious of my body because of shame

you would find me playing RuneScape or other video games or watching YouTube when I was seventh grade through whoever, who knows how long into probably high school or early college because I was avoiding. partly sometimes because it was fun or funny, but a lot of the times because I felt some emotion.

many times of which were shame

And something interesting happened when I became what I would consider to be, a near master of shame, of the experience of it. And I’ll explain what I mean by a master of it in a second here. But something interesting happened, which isI became significantly more conscious of shame-based actions and behaviors and statements and things that existed in the world

that I wasn’t previously aware of as, as having a relationship with shame

For example, this one time I was dating this woman,I told her that the reason I was so confident that… Wow, how beautiful this place is. The reason I was so confident that I would never go back to some of the consumptive behaviors that I had overcome, that I started when I was younger, like scrolling my phone or, just like dopamine-seeking behaviors or pornography, these kind of things.

The reason I had left them in my past, or the reason I was so confident I would continue to leave them in my past, was because I had committed for the rest of my life to working on them. For the rest of my life, I plan on, I planned on, and I continue to plan on bringing my attention to these things. now that I have control over them, the awareness I bring to them is very small.

It doesn’t require a significant amount of work. Except for sometimes it rears its head and it’s like, “Wow, I have this urge. I have this, this desire to scroll my phone,” right? Or to watch pornography. Like that, that urge can still come up, but I’m so conscious of it and I have these check-ins that

the likelihood that these things actually get acted out are so small now

because of this commitment that I made. I committed that for the rest of my life, I don’t want these behaviors to hold me back. And the way I know best to do that is by committing for the rest of my life to work on them in some form or fashion or capacity. And I vividly remember this woman looked at me and she said ” Well, if it wasn’t a problem anymore, you wouldn’t have to do that.”

And immediately I looked at her, and in my head I thought, “Well, we’re not gonna date.” Right? Like, in what world would I bring a potential partner into my life whose Sorry, we experienced a fall with the phone What I was saying was, In what world would I continue to date someone who could be pr-pr-potentially a partner for me in life, whose first thought, whose first acted out action to hearing someone say, “I am committing to the rest of my life to increase the likelihood that I will act in a way that is positive and healthy and aligned with the man that I wanna be.”

their first reaction to that is passive-aggressive shame, Like, bye-bye. No chance. No chance. That makes… It– Come on,

And the reason that is shame-based is because what the implication is there, the unspoken words, that’s why it’s passive-aggressive, is if you were that type of person, you wouldn’t have to do that. If you were healed, you wouldn’t have to do that. If you were strong, if you were capable, if you…

Whatever it is. If you were the person you thought you were, you wouldn’t have to do that behavior. And to that I say, good luck. that is not how you change extremely conditioned behavior or just behavior in general.

So that’s one example. another example that comes up that a lot of people don’t recognize is the gamification of a lot of platforms or, like, 90-day challenges, because what happens is you set yourself up in a world where likely you would have to engage in dramatic environmental or lifestyle change in order to engage in the full 90 days, this full thing.

Like, you have to change who you are, and it’s very unlikely that people do that. And since it’s unlikely that people have a tendency to actually establish dramatic change in their life, they will fall off track. And what happens when we fall off track with a challenge or a streak? We feel an emotion.

That emotion usually is or is associated with shame. And it’s important to note here that shame isn’t inherently bad. If you know that that’s coming, and you’re capable of moving through that experience, you can turn the experience of falling off track into data that you collect and then use to- change the behavior in order to create that longer term behavioral change.

But the experience itself is you’re still setting yourself up for shame, right? it was by becoming a master of this experience that I recognized these patterns that were going on in the world around me, and I became keenly aware of it. And now I avoid like the plague people who consciously or unconsciously induce shame in me.

Not because I can’t handle it, But because why would I want that in my life?

And something interesting is that when you become keenly aware of things, you create extreme emotional awareness over a specific experience, like an emotion, like shame, and you become very competent at handling it, is you become emotionally resilient to that thing,

and you become able to act, to take action regardless of that. And so that’s what happened with me, is I became extremely emotionally resilient to shame. I still feel it, right? I’ll still feel the experience of shame, right? It still shows up. I’m still human. I just handle it really well.

And what I did is I actually basically reprogrammed myself such that when I feel shame, when I experience shame, I have changed my way of thinking of it. I have altered the way I respond to it by positively reinforcing a shit ton of action, positive action.

That’s how I wanted to operate. When I feel shame, I want to go out and do things. I don’t want it to lead to avoidant or consumptive behaviors like it used to. And so over the course of a decent amount of time, that’s what I trained my mind to do. When I feel shame, I take action.

like exactly in this moment, right? I feel shame in this moment, genuinely. Speaking into the camera like this, there are people around, like there’s things that come up in me. It’s not a comfortable experience for me. And as I’m doing that, the voices in my head are saying, “Good, you must continue. You must continue to do this.”

So that is the conditioning, that is the way I train myself to respond. That is emotional resilience for me with respect to the experience of shame. What happened when I did that? Oh, well, I started taking a shit ton more action. Well, now that you have a shit ton more action, I am allowed, I have opened up the opportunity, the privilege to experience anxiety,

this is how I freed myself from shame and gave myself the privilege of experiencing genuine anxiety. And I’ll explain, what that means right now

the premise of it is pretty simple. I turned one of my most primal negative experiences into fuel for action. And in doing so, what do you think happened? I took a lot more action, regardless of the shame, instead of avoidant behaviors. And so what happens when you take significantly more action regardless of how you’re feeling? Oh, you start to accomplish a lot of things. You start to put things out there in the world that you once were ashamed of yourself for doing or were too ashamed in order to do And, and what happens when you’re now putting a lot more out there?

You can fail, right? And so anxiety was always there. But now that there weren’t coping mechanisms that were piled on top of the experience of, of anxiety, now that it wasn’t covered up by other things like shame, it gave me the opportunity to experience it on a more consistent, real basis.

It allowed for it to come to the surface, not just in the extreme moments, right? And a common experience for people is there is a lot of anxiety, right? Just present from plenty of things that are going on in life. but they won’t feel it in its full intensity a lot of the time.

They will have this chronic kind of underlying feeling of anxiety That’s not all-consuming, but it is still consuming ’cause you know it’s there. You’re like, “If I stop moving, if I do the thing,” like it’s not like I’m actively going into panic attacks all the time, but like, yes, I feel this anxiety.

For example, it rears its head when you have a deadline that you’ve procrastinated. You had shame, you fed the negative feedback loop, you ended up procrastinating, scrolling your phone, watching YouTube, playing video games, doing whatever it was. You feel more shame. All of that negative feedback loop is on top of the anxiety that was there until it’s deadline time and you’re like, “Oh shit, I haven’t done the thing.”

Anxiety. opport– or big events, you have to speak. You have a moment that allows it to show up, out of the surface like a volcano that was covered by the rock of the experience and of the coping mechanisms. It was always there, but the dull, constant cover-up of other emotions or of undesirable behavior or poor decisions.

Ooh, poor decisions. you chose the comfortable shit. You chose the comfortable job. You chose the comfortable partner, the comfortable family, the comfortable life. Comfortable, comfort isn’t always bad. But you chose things that shielded you from ever possibly failing.

Ooh. Now that’s a gnarly one, right? That’s when it truly comes out

Those are the moments when that underlying experience that you had covered up, that’s when it comes up and you have to experience it. it doesn’t happen all the time. It’s only when these big crisis moments or big deadlines or whatever the thing is occurring. So it’s every couple months, it’s every couple weeks, maybe it’s every week, whatever it is,

But it’s showing up only in the moments where it’s allowed to show up by forcing its way through this wall of coping mechanisms and poor decisions, but then what happens when you release the coping mechanism, you release the avoidant behaviors, you release the shame, or you become extremely emotionally resilient for it?

Well, all of a sudden there’s nothing to hold it back. Oh, fuck. Right? There’s nothing holding it back now. It can come up whenever it damn well pleases. It doesn’t need a crisis moment. It doesn’t need you to procrastinate anymore. Why? ‘Cause you’re not really procrastinating anymore. Ooh, what a gift you have just given yourself to experience genuine anxiety on a more consistent basis because you did the work to overcome the consumptive or avoidant behaviors or the other significant emotions that you were experiencing that were covering it up.

Oh, what a privilege that is, Because now you have no reason. you’ve removed the shame,so now you are pursuing your potential with no apology and full fucking force, which means you genuinely have the opportunity to fail And that is an oh fuck moment.

That is, oh, I can literally feel it right now. It’s the tension in my shoulders, chest. It’s in my forehead right here. It’s a fatigue, like a genuine fatigue, it happens when you realize you aren’t where you wanna be in life, or you haven’t lived up to the place where you expected yourself to be in life

Where you put effort in and actually fucked up. Like you actually, you moved through the hard things of the shame or the other emotions and the avoidant behaviors and actually put effort in, And you actually messed up, right? By trying, not by not trying.

Where you hit a limit, that’s anxiety. Ooh, and what a privilege that experience is. I’ve gone through some anxious moments recently myself in the past month and a half, quite a bit of stress, And what a privilege it is not only to see this beautiful view and share this with you, but to experience that

To sit in that experience of putting all that you have into something and to continue hitting a wall that says, “You shall not pass And that experience can be anxiety unless you say these words, which is, “What a privilege it is to feel the fear sinking in my stomach to feel the weight of trying your best and not living up to your expectations.

Actually trying and actually not living up in those moments. and this is where the privilege comes up, What an opportunity it is to take that anxiety and the pit in my stomach and turn it into fuel that moves you forward, just like I did with shame and using shame as fuel to take authentic action, ‘Cause when I removed the shame, I expressed myself more honestly, just like I’m doing right now.

This, once again, like this stuff, honestly, I am not comfortable right now speaking about these things. It’s interesting, it’s like an interesting mix where I’m, I’m comfortable talking about the subjects, but in front of a camera? No. I feel shame right now talking about this, like I said earlier.

the experience is still present, But in the back of my head, I hear the conditioning that I gave myself, which is there’s nothing wrong with me for feeling that shame. It’s just an experience. And I’ve positively reinforced myself to say, “All right, I feel this way.

I feel this shame. I must continue. I must continue to express myself.” So yes, I still feel it in this moment, I promise, in those places in my body I told you, It just doesn’t deter me anymore. just like the anxiety no longer does. At least significantly less.

That one still can get me sometimes. And that is where emotional resilience comes from, to feel it in your neck and your forehead, and to recognize it, and be conscious of it, and say, “Yes, it is there, but no, it will not prevent me from taking action.”

and that is where I believe genuine emotional resilience is born. It’s born from your ability to walk into the world of your internal self and to face up to the monsters that exist, right?

The monsters of the shame, the monsters of the anxiety, and to tame them not just into submission, but into something that you can actually use to create momentum as if you’re fucking riding these monsters now. so that they carry you into the unknown that they once prevented you from seeing or protected you almost in a weird way from even being able to see or experience.

Which in a sidebar is the experience of numb comfort When you feel like you have numbed yourself into a place of comfort, that is what that experience is, ‘Cause you are not expressing yourself genuinely, you’re not pursuing the goals or the dreams. You’ve allowed those things to tame you, and you feel numb

And so instead of that, you tame the monsters and and you ride them off into the unknown, That they once prevented you from seeing. And regardless of the result, regardless of what the unknown looks like, because there’s uncertainty out there,

That is where the heroes are made, in my opinion. Out in the world, beyond the fence, beyond the gate, beyond the gatekeeper, in the world of uncertainty,where the strong emotions, not in this fantasy world that I’m talking about, but like in the real world, cause you to feel physiologically potentially like ill.

or the ones that used to drive you to your phone or to your laptop or to the late nights or to whatever your consumptive behaviors are, and to say, “Enough. I’m done with that. Let me see the unknown. Let me be in the unknown. Let me be in the place where people make fun of me. Let me be in the place where I put myself and my ideas and my actions with all of the fucking human force of my soul onto a platter and show it to people and have them say, ‘I don’t like that.’”

That’s where the heroes are made

At least that’s what I think

So with that, if you’ve made it this far with me, I would love if you would join me on this journey. If these are obstacles that you resonate with and would like to have mastery over, such that they don’t hold you back from pursuing your goals and your dreams, such that you don’t consume the avoidant behavior, you don’t go to your phone, you don’t procrastinate, you don’t go into your thoughts and overthink as a way of coping from the thought that you might fail or the thought that it won’t be perfect.

if you want to join me on that journey, there’s a link in this description to book a call with me and talk about these things. And I want you to know that I am on this journey with you.

I have the tools and resources to support you to go toe-to-toe, face-to-face with these emotional experiences, with these practical experiences, with the phone, with the urges to deal with it, and to move through them, and to take the actions that you wanted to take. So if that’s you, feel free to book a call with me.

regardless of if that’s you and you’ve made it this far, I would love if you would like this video, follow or subscribe to this channel, and share this with one or two people that you think it might resonate with or help. Because part of my lifelong journey is dedicated to helping people in these kind of positions, and the more people that I get this message to, the faster I am able to help those people, and I would be deeply grateful if you would share it.

So with that, I hope you likewise are watching a wonderful sunset somewhere, and have a great day. Peace.