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[Music] let's talk about the many subfields of self-help self-help is an entire industry an entire field and a world really onto itself most people don't even know that self-help is a field or a domain of inquiry or something that you can pursue or something that you can seriously study and for most people just to discover the domain of self-help is already a life-changing event I can recall very vividly the first time that I discovered self-help almost about 10 years ago almost exactly 10 years ago when I walked into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and I discovered the self-help aisle back when there were still Barnes & Noble bookstores in most towns and I remember discovering that and just saying to myself oh my god this is like a whole new thing this is a life-changing thing that I've discovered and it was because I could already immediately see the potential of it because for basically most of my early teenage life and my early 20s up to this point I was interested in self-help type topics like I was interested in psychology I was interested in philosophy I was interested in what happiness was I was interested in being more productive and so forth but I didn't know about the field explicitly I didn't know that there was an entire industry that catered to these types of people who were interested in this type of stuff experts who had studied this stuff for years and then put all their insights into books and you could find all in just one category in the in the book sell self-help section and at a at a book store you know so for me that was a life-changing event because what happens that you pick up one of these self-help books and then that gives you all sorts of new ideas and then you pick up another self-help book and that gets another set of new ideas and there's a sort of geometric expansion that happens where every book gives you some new ideas which sprat off into a bunch of new ideas and each one of those first browse off ten more new ideas and you get more resources more ideas more other subfields to study and then all the sudden you're very deep into this and then your whole life changes five ten years down the road but self-help is a very broad category super super broad so most of you who've been watching me probably now understand that there is this thing called self-help or you could call it personal development you could call it self actualization these are all same words for the same basic category of stuff self-improvement type of advice and material but most people have no idea just how vast self-help is it's both very vast in its breadth and it's also very deep as well and it's useful to break down this broad category of self-help into subfields which is what we'll be doing today I'll give you a long list of twenty or thirty subfields which will help you for doing research for finding books for finding teachers workshops seminars websites videos and so forth it's really helpful to kind of know what all the territory looks like from a from a 30,000 foot elevation perspective then you can direct yourself towards the kinds of material and teachings and research that you need to solve your particular set of problems a really big mistake that people make is they try to oversimplify self-help and I notice that a lot of spiritual people do this people who get into enlightened work they love to simplify self-help and they just say all léo but all that self-help and all that all of it just boils down to enlightenment with enlightenment if I get enlightenment than everything else I don't need to know and this is such a big mistake such a huge oversimplification there are so many problems that people have in life that have nothing to do with enlightenment and while enlightenment is very important and spirituality is very important and consciousness work is very important that's all very important stuff but if you think you can boil all of life down just to that you're in for a rude awakening your life is not going to turn out as well as you think it will there's a lot of very specialized problems that life presents us with that require very specialized solutions and specialized expertise that you will never hear from some non-duality teacher yogi or guru or a carto late or anyone anyone else like that we have to understand is that most teachers become very specialized and they might be very very good and masterful at one particular thing that they teach like non-duality but don't expect them to help you solve all the other stuff in your life that's going wrong and there's a lot of ways that your life can go wrong because there's so many traps so many ways that your mind can deceive you and trick you and there are many different categories in your life that you need to get into order including your career your finances your health and fitness and your education and your relationships and your family I mean there's a lot of stuff here to cover so here's the list of subfields for self-help perhaps the biggest and most prominent one is success productivity and goal-setting for me that's one giant chunk of what self-help is about and this is how probably most people actually get into self-help it's through this kind of thing because most people in our society in first world countries are very stage Orange biodynamic stage Orange they're very success oriented so when you're for example walking through an airport and you're walking by one of those little uh snack kiosks that they have there they have all the snacks and candy bars and bottled water and so forth but then they always have a rack of self-help books right there it's right in front of you you can't walk by the place without seeing those self-help books and one of those usually those are usually the most mainstream of self-help books and a lot of them have to do with how to be more successful had any more productive how to set goals and stuff like this why is that because that's very appealing to most people it's very easy to sell them on success in productivity because you sell it to them as like well I'll pay 20 bucks 20 bucks for this book and I'll get my money back by increasing my success at work by even a few percent if I do that I'll recoup all my money so it pays for itself another big category of self-help sub subfield is law of attraction a lot of books have been written about law of attraction how to use various visualization and affirmation techniques and how to use your mind to to to instill yourself with the sort of confidence that you need to achieve your own goals and so law of attraction is sort of a different perspective on how to be successful and productive in fact the most successful and popular self-help book of all time by Napoleon Hill think and get rich that book has sold tens and tens and tens of millions of copies and I think it's called ya think Think and Grow Rich yeah I think that's what it's called that's just a self-help classic and that's really just one of the various kinds of Law of Attraction books that exist out there there's also the subfield of time management how to manage your time better there's the subfield of career and life purpose how do you find your life purpose how do you get your career in order how do you master your career what are the tricks and tips and mindsets you need to be successful in your career and that's very easy to sell to people because again your career is how you earn money so if I can promise you some tips that we're gonna that are gonna improve your career opportunities you are gonna pull out your wallet really quickly that's something that's just like very practical it's not esoteric it's not mystical it's not spiritual it's just like yeah just help me with my career that's a very easy sell very common entry point into the self-help field another subfield is creativity there are a lot of books and courses available out there that will teach you how to become more creative how to become a better artist how to deal with creative anxiety and fear and various kinds of obstacles that artists and creative people face and that's a really fascinating subfield and one that I'll be talking and shooting some videos about in the future some more because I personally I love being creative I love studying ways how to improve my own creativity but that's not a really a a focus of actualized I work per se there's also the sub field of business and entrepreneurship there are so many seminars and workshops and books and products out there that are created for business people serious business people who are very hard nosed any practical advice in their particular line of business so the advice could be just generic business advice or it could be more specialized or super super highly specialized depending on what kind of business you want to run whether you're a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer or online entrepreneur whatever there's material out there written for you so a lot of people enter from the business side of course also there's a subfield of marketing and sales and marketing sales interesting because you think like well what does marketing and sales have to do with self-help but actually this goes back to the early days of self-help marketing and sales has always been taught alongside with self-help because as it turns out marketing and sales skills are pivotal for being able to develop your own financial independence for being able to be persuasive to be able to pitch your products and services your business if you want to be an entrepreneur or even if you're not going to be an entrepreneur just to be able to be successful in your career and in your workplace you need some marketing and sales skills whether you're doing a presentation for your boss or you're competing with another team at work all of this requires some marketing and sales skills and in general for you to be providing a lot of value in your company and in your job you want to have some marketing and sales skills for example if you're a programmer you might think Auliya but I'm just a programmer I don't need marketing and sales skills right well actually that's why you're not rising up the corporate ladder is because programming skills can only take you so far and how much value can provide but if you want to take your programming skills to the next level you add some marketing and sales skills to that as well and then when you're sitting there talking with your boss in your meeting in the morning it's very clear which programmers in that team meeting have marketing and sales skills and which ones don't because it's one thing to just be talking about programming and coding something technical and nerdy but for you to really be successful in business you need to be able to make sure that your programming actually has marketing value and that it fits in with the sales goal and the marketing goals and that it it all works together to advance the larger goals of your business and since business survives and lives off marketing and sales people who have these skills become the most valued and the most paid in the corporation or if you're working for yourself it's super important to have these skills so there's a lot of material out there that teaches you marketing and sales you do have to be a little bit careful some that can be pretty sleazy some that can be downright blackhat and unethical so watch out who you're getting your marketing and sales advice from and what you're using it for it's very easy to take various kinds of advice from all of these categories and to miss apply it or to use it for devilish evil purposes in a selfish egotistical manner so you got to be careful with this advice make sure you apply it with the right intentions another subfield is leadership and management there's a lot to learn about how to be a great leader and how to be a good manager another subfield is money management there's a lot to learn about how to manage your money properly how to save your money how not to waste your money how to invest your money how to make your money work for you how to hedge against inflation so forth and there's a lot of experts out there who can teach you that sort of stuff again you got to be careful because when it comes to finance business marketing and management of money there is a lot of sleazy people out there who will of course offer you all sorts of schemes for how you can invest your money in their in their operation and get a bunch of money back and you got to be careful about that stuff make sure you're you're getting solid advice not just get rich quick schemes and flimsy gimmicky type of stuff another subfield is dating an attraction this is a very popular one because people generally suck at dating struggle with dating this goes to their core basic need of sex and and intimacy and love and so figuring out how to be more attractive as a man or a woman how to date properly hmm to find better mates that's quite challenging and that can be an entry point for a lot of people into the self-help field also of course there's the relationship subfield which is different and distinct from dating and attraction dating an attraction is about how to just basically find new people meet new people connect with new people and then relationships is more about how to build longer lasting relationships and it's very easy to get good at attraction but be terrible at relationships because relationships require commitment intimacy honesty communication skills all of these kinds of skills that a lot of people who are going to trash actually lack so learning up on relationships is very important and of course everyone has huge relationship problems people are so bad at relationships that there's so much that you can learn from learning and studying high-quality relationship advice there's also the subfield of love how to be a more loving human being which is again distinct from relationships and distinct from attraction and dating and is distinct from sexuality - we're gonna get to sexuality in a minute here but with love most people are not taught how to love what love is I recently released an episode what is love and as you can tell from that long episode there was a lot of detail there and a lot of things that just go completely over people's heads because love is a very advanced topic how to become a more loving human being is really a life project for you and there's a lot of books that you can read that will that will teach you about that and will teach you about the importance of love most people don't even understand the importance of what love is and how powerful love is and how you can use love for example to build a powerful business and to actually earn money and all sorts of things like that people think that love is somehow antithetical to practicality into business and to finances no not at all not if you really understand what love is there's also the subfield of family and marriage how to manage your marriage a lot of good books have been written about that which most married couples never read and then of course the why are you surprised that they get divorced so often of course because they don't really study this it's such an important thing to study if you plan to get married and if you plan to have a family if you plan to have children there's a lot of books that are written about how to manage your family and so forth then there's a subfield of sexuality masculinity and femininity most of us suck at sexuality because we're not taught about sexuality in school because it's a taboo subject we're not taught how to be good at sex we're not taught how to please the the opposite sex or please our partners we're not taught what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman we're not taught how to own our masculinity or if them and our femininity we don't really understand the opposite sex how the opposite sex thinks how they feel and so this becomes a huge sticking point for a lot of people in relationships and with attraction so studying this there's many books many great books written about this and it's really worth your time to study then of course there's the huge giant subfield of health fitness nutrition and alternative medicine all this I call basically health but of course within health there's so much stuff there you've got all those books about proper nutrition which you were never taught about from your parents or from school you've got a bunch of books about how to exercise effectively how to lift weights properly how to do yoga properly if you're doing physical forms of yoga there is other kinds of health issues that arise for people and of course as you get older this subfield becomes more and more important to you and alternative medicine alternative medicine is a hugely powerful powerful subfield with a lot of potential there and most people poopoo alternative medicine until they get a terrible condition themselves which traditional classical Western medicine doesn't have any solutions for and then that's when they turn to alternative medicine they discovered it a whole new world of stuff and it's like your eyes are open by exploring alternative medicine and all the stuff that you didn't know about the human body and the human mind and the connection between those two and and then it starts to lead you down the rabbit hole of spirituality and and so on and just that one subfield right there could save your entire life depending on what kind of problem generally take this entire health subfield health nutrition all that for granted until of course they suffer from various kinds of physical ailments and diseases that come from just going balls to the wall with stage orange with that mentality they become obese they become overly stressed overworked and they get all sorts of subtle ailments and diseases that traditional medicine can't solve and so that's when they start to take their health much more seriously or they do it because they want to look more attractive so they learn how to how to eat healthy and how to diet and and this sort of stuff so they can build big muscles and look sexy and attract attract more more beautiful people into their life that's rather shallow and vain but you know however you get into it it's it's good you start to take yourself your health a little more seriously then there's a subfield of body awareness and disciplines like bioenergetics which is all about becoming more conscious and aware of your body and the mind-body connection as I talked about in my mind in my body awareness episode and and then how do you use and leverage the mind-body connection how do you use your body in order to heal yourself psychologically that's what bioenergetics is about and there's lots of various kinds of of sub disciplines that were created that are analogous to something like bioenergetics which teach you about how to use your body basically to cure yourself of various kinds of physical and psychological ailments there's also the subfield of self esteem and confidence and this is a really important one for most people because most people have terrible self-esteem they have self-image issues they lack confidence they're shy they are meek they don't know how to set boundaries they turn into doormats they get abused by others in relationships they don't know how to assert themselves they don't know how to be decisive they don't like their physical appearance they have some sort of trauma from the past because they were ridiculed or bullied in school or something like that they weren't the cool kids and now you've got these self-esteem issues that are carried with you throughout your whole life and they create a lot of suffering for you so that's a really good subfield to study if you've got that problem another really big subfield is emotions emotional mastery and this subfield is huge there's so much here because this basically is all about the quality of your life and of course we're not taught how to really recognize their own emotions how to deal with our emotions we don't even know how to be aware of our emotions and how to label our emotions properly most people don't even know how to label fear and anger and jealousy and depression and anxiety and all these sorts of things but if you suffer from depression anxiety panic attacks anger jealousy envy fear and this stuff is holding you back then you got to study this subfield and there's there's so much you can learn about your emotions all sorts of various kinds of techniques that you can use to become more mindful of your emotions to specifically focus on particular emotions that are problems for you some people have a problem with anger while others don't so you don't want to focus on anger some people have a problem with depression while others don't so you want to focus on depression but even if you don't have one of these crippling neurotic emotional problems like depression or anger or anxiety chances are you're still very deeply unconscious of your emotions overall you don't know how to label them your emotional intelligence is very low so developing that by studying this field is gonna be life transforming for you and closely related to that is the subfield of shadow work shadow work is about working with repressed aspects of your psyche and of your ego there's a lot to talk about there entire books have been written about it it's basically the work that most psycho therapists do if you go to them they'll help you to do shadow work on yourself pulling up old memories and various kinds of neurotic repressed issues that you have but of course you can also do it yourself and in fact in the future pretty soon I will be really seeing a shadow work episode that will show you how to do it yourself so that's a great subfield because almost everybody has a shadow and that shadow holds you back and even those people who do a lot of spiritual work meditate a lot do a lot of yoga mmm self and choir are really serious into non-duality guess what that will still not solve your shadow meditation alone doesn't generally solve shadow issues which is why it's very dangerous to pursue enlightenment or meditation to the exclusion of all these other subfields pooh-poohing all these other subfields and saying I don't need any of those if you do that what's gonna happen is yes you might become enlightened and you might become a great meditator but you are still gonna have problems with your relationships problems due to your shadow problems with sexuality problems with your health and fitness and so forth problems with your emotions there's also the subfield of addiction recovery if you suffer from addiction problems whether it's porn sex food alcohol hard drugs these can be a source of huge life destroying problems for people and there is an entire category subcategory of self-help that deals with helping addicts to recover and to create a new healthy lifestyle for themselves and there are experts who are really good at that people who have gone through it themselves and you can read about their stories and how they went through the the heartache and all the all the misery and suffering that goes with recovering from some of these hard wired addictions that you've developed there's also trauma recovery as a subfield now this one has to do with people who have been abused molested had various kinds of trauma maybe earlier in your childhood or in your early adulthood maybe you experienced a near-death experience or something something like that some sort of serious disease or injury that's left you traumatized and that trauma now you're carrying it with you and of course chances are that if it was a serious trauma especially early in your life chances are you've repressed it you don't even admit to yourself that you have this trauma and yet it's still there and it's affecting your life and it's souring your mood it's it's making you depressed and it's ruining your emotions and it might even wreck your ability to have and keep a career or to be in a relationship and so forth so this is a huge problem for people and you if you have this problem you need some very specialized expert advice for how to deal with that because dealing with trauma just on your own without any kind of expertise or advice that's really tricky and challenging most people don't know how to do that and you're gonna waste decades of your life struggling with it unnecessarily there's also the subfield of mental disorders people with bipolar disorders for any OCD depression could be a mental disorder for some people ADHD and this sort of stuff and this usually requires specialized knowledge sometimes I have people who will post me comments under my videos or they will even send me personalized emails or messages on my forum and they will admit to me some problem that they have some mental disorder and it could be something rather serious and then they ask me for advice and I'm not really an expert in serious mental disorders but what I always tell them is that if you've got a serious mental disorder just you have to understand that you're not the first person who's had this people have been having this disorder for thousands of years hundreds of years and there are experts and books and material that have been designed and written for just your situation so you don't have to reinvent the wheel you don't have to be in the dark you just got to go and be willing to do the research and find though that's specific expertise that you need on your specific issue right so that's all that that requires don't be afraid don't be worried about it you can solve your problem all these problems are solvable you just got to be willing to do the research and to find the experts who have the knowledge that you need and the solutions that will work for you and sometimes that requires some searching but the good news is that all that information is out there the problem is that most people don't know that this information is out there it might seem obviously I'm like I'm talking about these subfields as though it's the most obvious stuff but you'd be surprised people go 30 40 years suffering from some trauma or some mental disorder or from some emotional issue or some shadow issue or some sexual hang-up they go for for 30 40 years and it never even occurs to them that hey there's an entire subfield of self-help that can help me with this of other people who have gone through this and solved it see on the one hand it's so obvious on the other hand it's not obvious at all if you don't know about it which is why we're going through all this we're covering all the bases here there's also the subfield of personality types this can be very powerful for example you can learn about the myers-briggs personality types and there's a lot to learn there you can learn about the Enneagram and there's various other kinds of personality type assessments and models and schemes that are out there that you can learn you can take various tests and they can tell you about what your personality type is and while of course they're not definitive and they shouldn't be your only tool for understanding yourself they can be very powerful for helping you to understand what type of person you are what your true identity is what kind of career you should have based on your personality type what kind of relationships you should cultivate based on your personality type so that can be very helpful to getting to know yourself especially if you're young cuz when you're young when you're in your teens and and 20s basically you don't know who you are I don't mean metaphysically existentially spiritually I mean you don't even know who you are as a as an ego you don't even know what you like and what you don't like what kind of career you should have or what kind of career you shouldn't have what kind of business you should be in what kind of business you shouldn't be in what kind of women you should be sleeping with and what kind of women you shouldn't be sleeping with and men and and so forth right and that's just because you don't you haven't really studied it understood your own personality and personality is different from your exit existential identity as the absolute consciousness nothingness the stuff that enlightenment reveals personality is is still gonna be there even if you when you're fully enlightened you still have a personality and you still want to understand your own personality there's also the subfield of NLP and hypnosis NLP is neuro linguistic programming I sort of lump these together because both of them are really techniques and tricks that you can use to program your own mind and they can be very powerful there's also a lot there it's a very technical field you can learn various kinds of visualization and techniques and ways of speaking to yourself and even self hypnosis to hypnotize yourself to accomplish work also things in your life to make state changes so you can actually change the emotions you feel in your body based on these various NLP techniques for example and that can make you a lot more productive in whatever areas you want to be there's also the field of religion you can study religion you can study Christianity Buddhism Hinduism Judaism Islam Tantra Jainism Sikhism paganism whatever other kind of isms are out there you can study them all you got to be careful though what I'm not suggesting you do is pick a religion and then become a dogmatic adherent of it well I suggested that you study all religions and that you pick and choose very carefully various bits of wisdom from each tradition because there's a lot of wisdom in all these traditions but also a lot of corruption and dogma and nonsense which will [ __ ] your growth so you have to be very careful and choosy and you also don't want to become exclusive and start to believe that Christianity is is gonna solve all your problems or that it's the one true a way to do spirituality or Buddhism or anything else which brings us to spirituality spirituality is a giant subfield of self-help and then within spirituality there are sub sub fields so spirituality is an important sub for thinking it's not the same thing as religion there's actually a lot of very powerful spiritual techniques which will totally transform your whole life and in fact spirituality is really where you're gonna get your biggest gains in your life if you want to transform your life the most allocate all of your skill points into spirituality you're gonna get a lot more out of it than you will from pursuing success or business or anything else because spirituality is really where you start to address the root existential issues that are governing your life all the stuff that your success in your business and your relationships and all the other stuff that that even if you became successful in you still didn't really solve anything you're still unsatisfied well now that's when you turn to spirituality and you start to research all the subfields of spirituality like non-duality which I highly encourage very good stuff field to study meditation mindfulness also really good one there's so many different meditation teachings out there yoga many different kinds of yoga and I'm not talking about hatha yoga western style yoga I'm mostly talking about various Indian kind of yoga's the old school original meditative forms of yoga like Kriya yoga Kundalini Yoga and others like that there's the subfield of psychedelics which I'm a huge fan of as you know there's also a giant subfield called new age new age / paranormal / psychic abilities and this is a really really deep subfield which has further subfields within it including things like astral projection clairvoyance out-of-body experiences near-death experiences chakras and auras and channeling and healing there's a lot there like a lot there and you'll be shocked at how practical some of those things are and how real some of those things are like you never could imagine under the material's paradigm that usually you're on when you start spiral that when you start self-help all right so a lot of stage orange people who start self-help stay far away from this whole spiritual realm of self-help and from the New Age realm because they view it as just some sort of a delusion or some sort of like a new form of religion but that's really just because they haven't actually studied it they don't really know what it's about but there's so much there and if you're one of these people who has some natural psychic abilities paranormal abilities you're gonna have to do a lot of research into this subfield to start to understand what you're really going through because chances are you're kind of on your own you're different from everybody else around you you're not like your friends you have these abilities but you also don't know what these abilities are they could be freaking you out scaring you you're not sure what to do with them or what they mean you might think you're losing your mind or going insane you might even be on medications that help to suppress this sort of stuff when actually this is an enormous gift but you have to learn how to develop this gift and that's gonna start by you doing a lot of research into these things you know again sometimes people write to me and ask me comments or write me personal messages with this sort of problem of likely oh I experience this weird paranormal thing and I don't know what to do about it and I've been maybe keeping it a secret because none of my friends or family understand but I don't know like is this normal I feel like I'm losing my mind is this right like I started meditating and I started seeing some auras or my chakra activate or some weird thing like this or I started to astral project when I'm sleeping and like I don't know what to make of this am I losing my mind and of course the answer is no you're not losing your mind you just got to do much more research into what's happening with you all of this stuff is just completely standard there's nothing weird about it at all you just haven't been taught about it it's not part of our standard mainstream spiral dynamic stage Orange culture that we're in we're in a very materialist culture so of course our materials culture denies all this stuff which is why it's gonna take even extra work from you to do research into these subfields and if you do you will discover a whole new world of possibilities and people who are just like you who have explored all this stuff we've become experts in all this stuff and have actually channeled all these weird abilities into creating a beautiful powerful life there's also the subfield of shamanism and occult there's a lot of occult teachings out there personally I don't get too deeply into them because I feel like they're distraction I would much rather focus on non duality and and consciousness work but and also because I'm not one of these super psychically gifted people but I can understand how though who are psychically gifted and have certain occult tendencies and are more mystically minded that they can get into that shamanism an occult type stuff and so yeah you could you could research that I just want to warn you that it can become a deep rabbit hole at a distraction in fact this whole psychic paranormal realm this whole New Age realm can become a big distraction from simply pursuing enlightenment and mastery of your everyday world make sure you master your everyday world first master your emotions master your family situation master your career master your finances master the basic stuff before you go chasing occult stuff because I know people who go chasing occult stuff but then their ordinary life is in shambles and then they suffer from that all right so you got to get your priorities straight there's also the subfield of healing and there's lots of different kinds of healing mental healing physical healing emotional healing spiritual healing occult forms of healing paranormal healing abilities that you can develop there there's a lot to healing and people need healing in different ways many people need emotional healing made many people need physical healing many people need spiritual healing so you can read about that and there's many different healing modalities out there that you can learn and practice and find what works for you you know with healing it's all about finding the right fit you got to find the technique that's gonna fit for your particular issue you have and different people like I said need healing in different ways so that's gonna take some research on your part there's also the subfield of psychology there are many books that are written by classic psychologists like Freud and Jung and Reich and Maslow and from and Rogers in all the classic psychologists that have become prominent over the last hundred years some of them have silly ideas some of them have very useful ideas you know you got to be choosy and selective about psychology but there's a lot like for example I got a lot of value from studying Abraham Maslow's work Erich Fromm's work Carl Rogers these are some top-notch psychologists I don't recommend Freud too much you could get some value reading Carl Jung and there are many other psychologists that I haven't really read but you can definitely you know go go into that field and I'm sure there are many cutting-edge new psychologists that are doing psychology today that is great stuff there's there's an entire academic discipline of positive psychology and people like Martin Siegelman and me Hayley Csikszentmihalyi whose author of flow the book flow mmm and Carol Dweck and various other kinds of people who are doing psychological research right now which is more in the new vein of positive psychology which is more practical and you can apply it more directly to your life that's good stuff there's also transpersonal psychology perhaps the best the best best expert in this field is stanislav grof he's in a lot of work on transpersonal psychology and this is where positive psychology starts to move into spirituality and some of this new-age paranormal stuff and so it's like the intersection of psychology and spirituality and New Age stuff these are the higher stages of the spirals this like turquoise level stuff and especially if you suffer from trauma or deep emotional problems you can get a lot of value from transpersonal psychology and the work of stan grof for example alone I released an episode on shamanic breathing and that's a very powerful transpersonal psychology technique and there's many more like that out there so really cool field to study in fact I think it's it's the best branch of psychology if I was going to a university to get a degree in psychology I would get a degree in transpersonal psychology but of course very few universities actually offer this type of degree probably only a handful in the world but they do exist I know there are a few in California that exist not sure about elsewhere in the world it will become more popular in the future though that's for sure over the next hundred years transpersonal psychology will become huge because it's um it's exactly the direction that psychology needs to go the whole problem with traditional psychology is that it didn't factor in the entire spiritual realm and all the insights that you get from consciousness or gayden factor that in so that's what transpersonal psychology does then there's a subfield that's called a lifestyle design this is various kinds of books and teachings which show you how to live your life and a more adventurous and fun way I know Tim Ferriss isn't sort of an advocate of this and there's various kinds of books on how to travel around create a fun lifestyle for yourself become independent financially and then use your freedom to do cool stuff go on vacations go mega bonding around the world and exploring different cultures and cuisines and countries and there's people out there who teach you how to do this so if you're the adventurous type and you want to use self help and your financial freedom to live this sort of fun adventurous lifestyle you can find experts who will show you how they did that there's also the subfield of what I would call technical how to I don't know how else to call this technical how to these are all this how-to books that have ever been written you can go into a bookstore and find how-to books about almost anything public speaking how to be more humorous how to draw how to dress as a man how to dress as a woman I mean there's there's like there's so many how how to books out there in fact the whole how-to book industry there's this our industry that just pumps out these how-to books now a lot of them are very flaky and not high quality but some of them are really high quality you got do your research and find the good ones but uh basically anything you want to learn how to do someone has written a guide or a book or crated a course or seminar for how to do it so you can just ask yourself what do I want to do in my life that I can't do right now or if you're wondering well yeah I want to I want to advance my life in this area here but I don't know how well you just type in how to blank and then fill in the blank with whatever you want to learn how to do and you'll find some kind of solution there now those are all the subfields that I would call traditional self-help and then there are some aspects that I hesitate to call self-help but which are still very important and these would be politics and government educating yourself about how politics and government work that is something that a lot of people are missing these days most people these days they're so passionate about politics whether they're on the left or the right and what I notice is that so few of them actually have any kind of academic foundation about politics they haven't read a single book about politics they haven't read a single book about feminism they haven't read a single book about post-modernism never read a single book about how government works they haven't read a single book about the history of how politics evolved in America or around the world they haven't read a single book about fascism or communism or socialism or capitalism right you got to read about this [ __ ] and this is becomes a big problem for for us as a nation and for us as a globe is because most of our citizens are so ignorant about politics that their version of politics just becomes a religion it just becomes an ideology like capitalism is awesome and communism is evil it becomes just as black and white ridiculous identity politics that's what it becomes so if you're gonna have political opinions at all and if you're gonna vote make sure you educate yourself about how politics really works not partisan stuff I mean like the foundations of politics the foundations of public policy the foundations of government there's a lot of research you could do there a lot of really good books are available also the subfield of philosophy metaphysics and epistemology there's a lot of books that have been written over the years about philosophy and a lot of them honestly are waste of your time a lot of them are filled with [ __ ] but on the other hand partially for me my entire approach to self-help is grounded in philosophy metaphysics and epistemology that's why the material that I release is much deeper and more profound than almost all other self-help teachers out there because it's grounded in something much much deeper much more fundamental it's grounded in the ultimate questions about the nature of reality and about truth the pursuit of truth that's what philosophy is about figuring out how knowledge works these are absolutely foundational topics which are rarely taught in school they're taught very inadequately and because people have such a poor grasp of these topics they're not able to question their own reality very deeply and so any self-help that they do and any kind of even spiritual work they do it's all surface level stuff it doesn't really get to the root of what existence is and so those those problems that are that are that are there in you which are existential problems don't let's never get addressed which is why you can keep doing self-help over and over and over again for decades and still really not resolve your problems because your deepest problems are existential problems they're really metaphysical and epistemic problems but you can't know that until you spend a lot of time studying this up field there's also the subfield of social psychology cognitive psychology and anthropology there are a lot of great books written about these topic and there's a lot of great research being done today and various kinds of universities about various kinds of psychological anthropological studies and experiments that are being done that teach about the nature of the human mind the nature of the brain the nature of culture the nature of societies we're learning a lot about that in the last fifty to a hundred years and new books are coming out on these topics every every year and they're very eye-opening they put things into perspective for you they teach you why mankind works the way that it works why people are selfish why people are evil why people are biased why people are racist why people are religious why people are ethnocentric so forth also a very broad category but still very important is the the subfield of history of science most people just don't have a a good grasp of history and science and by science I mean stuff like you can read up on evolution quantum mechanics relativity chaos theory biology physics like there's so much here that you're missing out on and all that stuff will serve as a foundation for your understanding of all of life and even though it's not directly related to yourself helping your success it's not directly gonna help you to get laid or to earn a bunch of money or to deal with some emotional trauma that you have but what I find is that actually these sorts of general topics are super important in my understanding of reality as a whole and so most of my time actually these days is not spent reading narrowly focused self-help books on how to become more successful or how to take care of some emotional issue they are actually focused on these very general broad topics scientific topics historical topics I love to read about history study history history puts all of mankind's nonsense into perspective by reading history you learn all the traps and mistakes that have happened in politics and governments in race relations in sex and gender relations within science within philosophy you learn about all the errors all the mistakes that mankind has made so that then you don't repeat those same mistakes yourself it's all right there in the history books if you go through all the history books and you read them very carefully you can learn a lot of lessons about how to live your life properly just from the history books and also a lot of people have only knowledge of Western history but not history of the rest of the world because in our schools were not taught the history of Africa or Japan or China or India or the Middle East so people are so ignorant about other cultures outside of American culture and European culture that they don't have the proper context they don't really understand and also if you're only studying history from the Western perspective then you're not you you're implicitly buying into the whole Western paradigm you're not looking at the world from the perspective of other cultures other races other ethnic groups and that's a real shame because the whole point of of learning about all these different subfields is that it opens that you up to new perspectives it gives you more flexibility there are solutions that exist within Indian culture and Japanese culture and Chinese culture and Middle Eastern culture solutions to your problems exist in those cultures and yet you never hear about them because you're so locked into the Western cultural perspective and of course the Western cultural perspective has all sorts of biases built into it that you're not aware of until you start to study other cultures and lastly I would say the last subfield is biographies biographies are important for people who are pursuing self help because in reading a high quality biography of some inspiring human being you get to see what it took for that human being to be come who he or she became like what did it take to become someone like a John F Kennedy or a Gandhi or an Albert Einstein or a Nikola Tesla or Benjamin Franklin or an Abraham Lincoln what kind of leadership qualities were required what kind of trials and tribulations do these people go through what kind of fears do they have what kind of pathologies and neuroses did they overcome what kind of habits that they build how do they do it how did they get their financing for their first business how did they advance their career how did they persevere against all these obstacles that they had right by reading biographies you get insights into that and that shows you that oh these people they were just human beings like me they worked really hard and they worked through all these challenges and look how high they got and that shows you that oh I can do that too and you can actually model your life on some of these biographies they can also inspire you they can also show you what it's like to be a human being with integrity and with a certain set of values with higher consciousness ideals and that can be really good if you're just getting your feet wet with self-help because one of the biggest things that people lack when they start a self-help is they just lack imagination they lack a sense of what's possible with their life right did they lack a sense of vision they'd like a sense of ambition because they've just kind of been living an ordinary life and they've never really thought about how do I build a great life who could I really become in my life but dedicate myself to it if I have a vision if I set some goals and if I have all these subfields that I study I have all these tools at my disposal I can use to become a great human being and really right now is the best time to be alive because at no other time in human history was so much expertise and knowledge available to you so easily so quickly so cheaply as today all of these subfields are available to you 100 years ago many of these subfields didn't even exist so you would be a fool to take this for granted almost anything you want to do in your life someone else has already done someone else has devoted 40 years to becoming an expert in that thing whatever it is whatever problem you think you have that can't be solved someone has already solved it they've been solving it for 40 years and they've been teaching other people how to solve it quickly and easily and painlessly and all you got to do is you got to seek out that expert find their book find their course find their teaching and study it and then apply it that's it it's a very simple solution very simple formula you would be foolish not to take advantage of all this expertise that has existed that people have invested so much time people invest years writing these books packing these books full of the wisdom of 40 years of their deepest experiences and all their lessons and all their trials and tribulations they they extract the best nuggets of that and put that in the book and all you got to do is just read the book and not be lazy so don't take this for granted now most of these subfields notice that I've mentioned up above they're not covered in school or university almost at all school University doesn't just not cover them it doesn't even tell you that these things are in existence and oftentimes it does even worse where it demonizes and it actually dismisses the importance or validity of some of these subfields for example nowhere in academia or in science or in university will they tell you that there's enormous value to be gained from studying the new-age subfield or the spirituality subfield or the emotional mastery subfield or the psychedelic subfield or the mmm addiction recovery subfield or the success and productivity subfield right these are not traditional academic university topics and so what happens is that even if you which university and you fancy yourself a rather educated person ultimately all the topics that are the most important for your happiness and well-being in life and your success all the topics I just listed up above you almost know nothing about them unless you have made a deliberate effort to educate yourself about them by studying these various subfields because you sure as hell were taught this stuff in university or in high school science it's not gonna teach you this stuff because Sciences is worried about very specific types of problems which have really nothing to do with emotional mastery have nothing to do with your success and your ability to handle yourself or your ability to find a sense of purpose in your life see and this way university is really a travesty because the most important topics are not taught and so people spend 12 years going through school and another for six years going through university and they come out of that and they're completely clueless about what they need to do to survive in the world but that is the state of our current education system so that's gonna be that way for a while in the meantime though what you got to do is you guys take responsibility and double your efforts tell her in this stuff yourself the silver lining is that it's much more enjoyable to learn this stuff on your own without having to do stupid homework assignments or essays or reports or any that you can teach all this stuff to yourself and it's gonna be much more enjoyable then school ever was for you so don't be put off by that and it's also super accessible it's super easy it doesn't cost much money you can buy cheap books and get it all done and you get to set your own direction nobody tells you what you got to study you can study whatever you want whatever works best for you whatever you need whatever floats your boat now of course notice that actualize that org doesn't cover all these subfields I tend to have specific things that I focus on with the videos that I shoot although I do try to cover a broad swath the stuff we talked a lot about various kinds of things from spirituality to psychedelics to success and relationships and life purpose and confidence and self esteem and and we'll be branching out even further in the future with future episodes but you have to understand that I'm not going to cover everything don't expect me to be your only source I could create a separate channel about each one of these subfields that I mentioned and I could devote my entire life just to pumping out videos on that particular sub field but for me that's not what I want to do I have certain topics that I want to cover and I also want to introduce I see myself as sort of a person who introduces people to this and then you can go and find more specialized experts notice that no one teacher or school or teaching will ever cover all of these subfields it's way too much this is such a wide domain this self-help stuff most teachers you find will be very very narrowly specialized most spiritual schools and teachings will be very very narrowly specialized so don't be surprised if they're not gonna give you all the solutions to all your problems you've got to be the CEO of your own life don't outsource that responsibility to anyone else because they will fail at it for you you can only do it yourself that means you got to figure out which subfields you need to study and I can't tell you which subfields you got to study that all depends on what kind of issues you have what it was like what your genetics are like and what your interests are like what your personality type in life is like and so forth see and you won't know which of these subfields is gonna have the perfect solution for you like I said some of these subfields have the ability to save your life they are that valuable they are that powerful but the problem is that you don't know which ones until you've delved into each one and gotten a lay of the land and to do that you really gotta like read five to ten books within a subfield just to understand what that subfield is about and how much value it can offer to you many people they look at one of these subfields and they say oh well that new-age subfield that's kind of stupid it's not gonna be very valuable that MN LP subfield oh that's not really powerful that love subfield a who wants to study that that's not going to change my life be very careful about that you got to keep a very open mind I'll tell you this right now every one of these subfields exists for good reason it's not just some fool it's you know woke up one day and said you know what I'm just gonna write a book on some stupid topic some new-age topic and I'll just put it out there just to earn a bunch of money and buy myself a sports car that's not how these books get written usually the way these books get written is that some expert has struggled for decades in their own life going through trauma and problems and not knowing how to figure it out and then finally they figured it out through luck and through study and trial and error and then after many many decades of that and teaching others finally they compiled all their wisdom into this concise little book so it's there for a reason there's not a single extraneous subfield of all the fields I mentioned not a single one all of them are necessary all of them serve a useful function all of them solve specific problems that human beings have encountered by the thousands and millions so if it seems to you that some subfield is stupid and pointless and [ __ ] well that's just your own bias that's your own closed-minded is talking that's what that is so be careful not to judge too quickly there's enormous value in each of these subfields the prob of course though is that you have a very limited amount of time and there's way too many books to read and even way too many subfields for you to explore them all so you got to be a little selective and you got to decide what's right for you what do you need most now to change your life and to kick-start your journey and then over time you'll branch out and explore more and more subfields but also I want to encourage you not just to pursue those subfields which will give you some immediate tangible results like maybe if you struggle getting laid you probably obviously want to go read a book about how to date and how to get laid that's kind of obvious but but go further than that I challenge you to be an explorer and an adventurer explore these various subfields especially ones that maybe normally you wouldn't think would be valuable to you explore them anyways buy a few books from them read them just to see what's possible there you'll be shocked to see the kind of discoveries you'll make that's one of the most amazing things about self-help is say you study stuff that you think is stupid and then you realize just how wrong you were and just how much value there is in this thing now of course you're not gonna need every subfields so don't go trying to just read as much as you possibly can you want to be strategic about what you're reading and what you're studying so keep it to stuff that's gonna be things you can take action on not just read about but stuff you can take action on stuff that will actually engage you and the stuff that engages usually the stuff that you're in your life if you're lacking a good career if you're lacking in finances if you're lacking in health then you probably want to start with those topics but then also explore and branch out into stuff that maybe you normally wouldn't by exploring more of these subfields you're gonna move automatically into spiral dynamics stage yellow because what we're doing here by studying all these subfields is we're getting such a diversity of perspectives so many perspectives about so many facets of life that we're not going to be able to stay in our rigid one perspective view of the world that we had before before we started all this research so which subfields are the best for you well hmm it very much depends on you but I'll give you a few that I think are really good for newbies to start with so firstly success in productivity and goal setting that's a really good foundational one secondly is self-esteem and confidence because so many people have problems with self-esteem and confidence and because that's a very generic problem that if you a problem there that's gonna carry over into everything into your relationships into your career into your business into your own feelings about yourself and about your life also emotional mastery that's absolutely essential for everybody because your emotions run your entire life and if you're suffering in your life then it's all emotional it's not factual it's not objective it's purely emotional all suffering is purely emotional and also I recommend studying relationships because chances are you have plenty of relationships in your life or you want to form high quality relationships and we are not taught how to relate properly to other people especially within intimate relationships and the last subfield is spirituality spirituality like I said has the possibility of completely transforming your life and that's where you get the deepest growth is when you start to get into spirituality but with spirituality the problem there's they're sort of a pea a cost to that the payoffs of spirituality spiritual work is huge huge payoffs but the downside is that it takes time it takes time for spirituality to start to bear fruit probably takes a few years of work or you do a lot of work but you don't see a lot of results and then the results start pouring in so I recommend you start investing in that early so you can get that first few years that first few unproductive years out of the way and then you'll be enjoying the fruits of your work so we're going to end this with a homework assignment and the homework assignment is very simple what I want you to do is I want you to pick three new subfields that you don't have a lot of experience in out of those that I've mentioned above and I want you to commit to purchasing three books from each one of these three subfields so we're totally gonna buy ten nine books of course you're gonna want to research these books and find three good books from each of these subfields so that's your homework assignment now I'm not saying you have to necessarily read all these books I'm just saying I want you to do some research into it and then to buy them and to have them sitting on your bookshelf or on your office desk looking you in the face you don't have to read them per se just have them there and just by having them in by purchasing them already you're gonna gravitate towards picking one of those up and reading it just that small step and then you know by reading that one book in that book you're gonna find exercises techniques ideas resources other book recommendations that that book talks about various kinds of references and resources and then it's gonna start to flower and geometrically lead to new stuff and then that one book will lead to three more books and those three books will read the three more books and so on and so forth and then before you know it you'll be a neck-deep and all sorts of self-help stuff and you will have all sorts of solutions and possibilities for your life that you never had before that's one of the most amazing thing things to me about studying all these subfield when you study them deeply enough and broadly enough eventually you get to the point where you feel like any problem that will arise in your life you're gonna have a solution for even if you don't have it in the back of your mind already you know where you can go to find the book that will have the solution because you already know all these subfields kind of in a broad sense not in a deep way just in a broad sense you know that they're out there so you know that if you have some trauma you know where to go to fix your trauma if you have some weird New Age mystical experience you know where to go to find out what the solution to that is if you have a problem while you're meditating you know where to go to find a solution to your meditation problem if you ever get depressed you know what to do and this is the exact opposite of what most people in society have most people in society are so lacking in expertise and in in information that when they have a problem they don't even know that there is a solution to their problem and they live with their problem for 10 or 20 years sometimes for their entire life suffering this problem when the solution was just sitting there in a book that they never knew about so do that homework assignment and if you need ideas for books check out my book list where I have over 200 books that I review and a lot of my favorite books are they're rare type of books that you don't really find anywhere else for those of you who already have the book list I would challenge you to actually not just pick nine books from my book lists because probably you've already done that I would challenge you instead to branch out and do a little bit of independent research by yourself into three new subfields that I mentioned and find three new books that are not on my book list for yourself because you need to teach yourself how to not just get books for me but um but also discover them for yourself and I will be updating my book list in the future with more new books I've been reading quite a lot of great books lately which I'll be adding in the months to come I usually try to update my book list twice a year and I've already updated it for free for those who purchased it like I think five or six times at this point so lots of free updates with lots of new books I I think I've added over 50 new books to my book list since I first released it and all the new books that I'm adding are usually higher and higher quality books than the ones that were there at the very beginning because I'm getting much more choosy about the books that I read and and yeah I'm just mind my standards for what counts as a high quality book has changed a lot in the last two or three years because as my knowledge base grows I get a much deeper understanding of what a good book is and what a bad book is and you will develop that sense as well as you read more and more alright that's it I'm out of here please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualized org that's my website you will find the book list there the life purpose course there my blog and the forum where you can go and talk about all this stuff and the final thing I want to end on is this a little story from tenth grade when I entered tenth grade I deliberately wanted to challenge myself by taking some really difficult AP classes advanced placement classes that were offered at my high school before that I was just taking sort of the easy classes and in tenth grade I just said you know what I want to challenge myself so I enrolled in like three AP classes and one of them was AP European history and that was the hardest class I've ever taken and it was probably the hardest class in my whole school we had a really kind of a tough teacher and he expected a lot from us and also because the topic is so broad there's so much to to European history to learn and and anyways so I was struggling through this class for the whole year and I kept taking tests that my teacher would be giving me in preparation for the ultimate AP exam that comes at the end of the year because the whole the AP class is to prepare you for the AP exam that you need to pass in April or in May around that time so the whole year we're preparing for that and I keep taking tests and writing essays for my teacher and I keep just like bombing these tests and just doing very poorly on them even though my teacher is a really good teacher you know he writes entire whiteboards full of notes and I'm sitting there copying down all these notes and studying all this stuff but I'm still like I still might my grasp for European history was so poor and I just couldn't understand you know why I'm struggling so much in this class and I think I ended up getting a three a three out of five on on my AP European history test so I passed the test but ultimately but um mmm it was it was a tough tough tough going for me and then the next year I took more AP classes and I did really good at them and I did really great for for the rest of my academic career but what I learned in eleventh grade after I finished tenth the tenth grade and I struggled so much is that I learned that actually what I wasn't doing the reason I was struggling so much was because there was a European history textbook that came with the class that I didn't read at all that had all the answers in it that had all the history in it and I was looking at that time I was looking at kids around me who were like doing good on their tests and it baffled me like how how are you guys doing good when I'm doing so bad and I don't understand what's wrong so it took me a whole year after the whole class was over to realize that I wasn't reading the book I wasn't reading the book that's it all the answers were in the book I just it didn't click for me that I was supposed to read a [ __ ] book right and you would seem like well Leo that how could that be a move so obvious how could you not connect those two dots but that's exactly how learning is is that it's not obvious until it becomes obvious it's always obvious after the fact and that's exactly how it is with self-help in all of your personal problems so right now if you're struggling with your depression or your anxiety or you're you're not you're struggling with business or your career or your life purpose or you're starting with spirituality and it just seems confusing and you don't know what the answers are and it seems like you'll never get it it seems hopeless but then after the fact it will seem so obvious that's always how learning works so the moral of this story is read the [ __ ] book the answers are all there for you the problem is you're not connecting the dots it's the most obvious stuff that you're overlooking the information is all out there don't just expect that you're gonna get everything you need for this journey from me or from YouTube or from videos it's not gonna happen there is depth and detail that comes within books that you will not get from me lecturing to you my mistake with this European history class was that I thought that just by listening to the teacher lecturing to me that the teacher would teach me everything that I needed to know to pass the test that wasn't the case and it was my mistake for thing that it worked like that that was just a false assumption I had I didn't realize that yes the teachers is lecturing he's a great lecturer and he writes lots of notes on them on the whiteboard and I'm copying it all down in my notebook but that's not enough not enough these actualized videos are not enough for you to succeed on this journey you need to read you need to read the [ __ ] book a lot of you ask me very silly questions about various kinds of personal develop problems you have and what that tells me is that you're asking these silly questions because you haven't bothered to do the reading you haven't bothered to do the homework assignments you think you can just skate by by listening to me while I'm talking and you're [ __ ] playing video games or something and I'm just talking in the background and you think that's gonna be enough for you to master your life get [ __ ] real you're a joker you're not serious about this you haven't realized how important this is to your life what this really means for you how valuable this information is you're still taking it for granted and also a lot of you question me and asking me all sorts of skeptical questions about enlightenment about this and about that Oh Leo how could you possibly know this and Oh Leo how could you possibly know that all you're so arrogant and this and this because you're not doing the [ __ ] reading I'm not the arrogant one I'm not the ignorant one you are there's nothing skeptical or questionable about what I'm saying you don't need to debunk what I'm saying you can just got a [ __ ] read most people don't read it's just that simple if you read more most of your life's problems would be solved it really can be that simple sometimes solutions are just that simple most of your results just come from the fundamentals executing on the stuff that's just basic if you can't discipline yourself to do something as basic as reading I mean how serious are you about mastering your life how serious are you about spirituality how serious are you about creating a an incredible life for yourself you think that's gonna happen for a person who's too lazy to read a hundred books no you're you're completely not seeing the value of this work if you really saw the full value of this work you would be willing to read a hundred books you'd be willing to read 200 books you'd be willing to read 500 books you'd be willing to do anything whatever it takes to get it done that's the kind of attitude you need that's the attitude of a winner is I will do whatever it takes not just listening to convenient videos where I regurgitate everything for you see in a sense I'm doing a disservice by doing that because I'm making you weak and lazy and complacent and taking all this information for granted because all this information that I reveal to you this is information that I've spent years thinking about studying grinding towards you know working my ass off to acquire and for you it's just a one hour two hour episode of just me telling you stuff and it just goes in one ear and out the other and that's it that's it that's not going to be enough to transform your life so get serious do the homework read the books do the research and then stick around for more and that's where you're going to see the magic happen you