There’s Only One Thing You Need To Do To Work On Yourself
The reason why all of the hustling isn’t effective
You can spend your whole life reading, listening, watching, or philosophizing about your life and how to “improve” it, but if you don’t do what I’m about to explain, then none of this effort will matter.
“Just work on yourself”.
When people say this to you, what exactly are you supposed to work on?
What is it about self-improvement that has become so unhealthy?
You’ve taken this “work on yourself” approach because you see yourself as some kind of flawed, broken person — If you can find the problem, then you can improve like a skill.
For example, playing the drums is simple. You hit the drums with wooden sticks and call it a day.
However, for every instrument, if you want to play at a level that most people would consider “good, you must practice.
I love Destiny 2, a first-person shooter video game.
I’m not an expert at it, but I’m also not a total scrub.
My muscle memory is good enough to go on a long hiatus and play well again.
I had to spend months or years playing to improve my skills in the player vs. player mode. It wasn’t like one day I just jumped in at peak performance.
I had to “work” at it. There was action involved. Trial and error. Hours of getting my ass kicked to stop making mistakes that got me killed.
Yet, you can’t take this same mentality with your own life and expect improvement.
We hardly stop to ask ourselves what it means to improve. Does it mean:
- More money?
- More success?
- Better relationships?
- Finding a life partner?
- Getting fit?
What metric do you use?
Truthfully, there is no concrete answer. Improvement is subjective.
Modern society has been flooded with self-help. Many of us believe we need to be fixed.
The consensus is that when you experience a life-altering event you need to “work on yourself” to overcome it and find happiness again.
The realm of self-help/self-improvement needs an end goal, otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to sell their self-help content.
It encourages people to feel like they should be doing something to improve their life situation.
The reason why letting go is the only thing you need to do
Before I met my ex I was very depressed. I had a lot of dark, negative thoughts about my life. Sometimes I thought about what the world would be like without me.
I can’t give you a clear, step-by-step method for how I’ve overcome some of my darkness. I wish I could. This article would be so much easier to write.
One thing I can remember: I stopped listening to some of the dark thoughts in my head. They were no longer serving me, so it was time to let go of them.
Now this doesn’t mean my life was any better than before, but I didn’t feel as depressed.
It wasn’t about:
- Positive affirmations
- A gratitude journal
- Forcing a certain emotion (this is what people mean by “work on yourself”)
By the time I met my partner, there was at least enough room in my heart for me to love someone. Years later I would come to learn that there are still so many beliefs that aren’t serving me.
A few years ago I was knee-deep in a pyramid scheme called Amway. Self-help was a huge aspect of this organization. The problem was self-improvement was merely a means to an end — getting rich.
In Amway, it wasn’t about re-framing your mindset, rather it was concentrated on doing more, being “better”, and filling your mind with positive affirmations.
Like the people in Amway, if you approach self-improvement from an angle that you’re broken and not good enough, you’ll never improve.
With this mindset, there is always a new goalpost to hit.
If you think you’re not good enough, then the work will never be good enough.
Most people don’t see themselves as good enough. They “work ”on themselves to feel better, but it’s like “getting ready to get ready, to get ready”.
At what point would you be able to say “This is good enough, I’ve worked on myself, and I’m ready to embrace life again”?
It doesn’t work like that. You can wait your whole life for that to happen, but the day will never come.
How do you relinquish old, limiting thought patterns?
You have to let go of your limiting beliefs, but how do you do that?
After the breakup with my ex-fiancé, I did as much research as I could to prevent it from happening again.
I learned that human behavior is indirectly influenced by past trauma.
Most of our prior trauma originates from childhood and adolescence.
I developed a list of 8 relationship red flags that I noticed are mostly caused by childhood trauma.
When we’re kids, we don’t have a full grasp of how the world is, and we don’t have the perspectives that we have now that shield us from a lot of terrible things.
As a young kid, I didn’t fully understand that when my mom left for work during the day, that she wasn’t leaving me forever. As a grown man, I might often feel sad and lonely — the same way I felt decades ago.
Trauma can manifest in a few different ways:
- Triggered emotions
- Recurring thoughts
- Relationships repeated with different people
The things she and I did to each other were partially out of our control. Our beliefs about who we were as people shaped our behavior in a relationship.
You have to understand that the voices and the programming imprinted in your mind don’t have to stick around. You can choose to drop it.
Letting go means ego death. This means that if you truly want to work on yourself, you must start questioning every single belief you have because chances are they’re built on lies and flawed thinking.
In my weekly newsletter, I discuss mindset changes you can make for a fresh perspective on life.
To suffice, it’s not about adding or improving on what’s already there. You can’t build upon a weak foundation.
If you’re ready to let go, you must identify your limiting beliefs.
In my story, Modern Society Has An Unhealthy Obsession With “How to” and “What now?”, I dive deeper into the idea of probing what’s running us.
To isolate them, you have to start an interrogation. Stop coping with your circumstances for 5 minutes and ask the voice in your head why you do what you do.
- Why do you feel so lonely?
- Why won’t you take action? What’s stopping you?
- Why do you feel you aren’t good enough?
Asking why loosens the grip on the beliefs, and it will bring more attention to what’s running your life.
Some final thoughts
One of the first things we can do to live more peaceful, happier lives is to understand that there’s nothing more we need to do.
It’s not about improving, getting better, doing more, and stressing ourselves out from living up to a standard that every other person has unconsciously agreed to.
Once you’ve set a few limits to what you truly need to do, you can let go of the need to hold on to beliefs that aren’t working for you anymore.
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