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hey Leo here for actual eyes dorg and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to get started with self actualization a [Music] while back I released an episode called the big picture of self actualization where I talk about the high level components of what self actualization looks like and what you're actually doing when you're growing one of the biggest problems that newbies face when they get into personal development or self actualization is that you read and hear about various techniques and then you get so engrossed in those techniques that you don't have a big picture understanding of really what you're doing and really why the techniques are working and so you can't really judge which techniques are very powerful ones which ones are weak or shallow ones and so that's why the big picture is very important so if you're new to this go watch that episode first but also at the end of that episode I promised that I would talk about the practical level the low level so that was the high level this here is the continuation of that but now the low level so what does it actually look like when you're taking action on the high level what techniques and methods are you using to actually make it real to embody it that's what I'm going to talk about here I'm going to give you over 40 different self actualization techniques before I do that though let me tell you this because the reason that I'm even shooting this episode is because more and more I keep hearing from people this problem of Leo you have so much content you have hundreds of episodes which one should I watch tell me what order I should watch them in should i watch that video first then this one or this one and then that one tell me how to do it I want a simple 1 2 3 step formula for how to develop myself well when I hear this I chuckle because it's rather silly you are supposed to be the architect of your life how the [ __ ] am I supposed to know what's right for you and what order you're supposed to read books in and watch videos in I don't know what's wrong with your life I don't know what your goals are I don't know what your vision is I know virtually nothing about you and neither do you that's the problem you see you have to be the architect of your life you have to plan it out and design it for yourself that's in essence why you're alive at all and why you have any brain or sense of consciousness so that you can do that do not shirk your responsibilities and try to get other teachers or people to do this for you to live your life for you you might as well ask me to have sex with your spouse for you leo if you have sex with my wife that's basically what you're asking me when you're asking me leo which video should I watch in which order that's your job it's not my job that's where life is delicious is it in the in the designing and architecting of it you come up with the vision because you have total freedom of what you want to do with your life you come up with the vision you then research all the material all the tools at your disposal all the techniques that are out there and they're very easy to research these days with the internet and all that and and then you go out and you come up with a plan for which tools and techniques you're going to be using to realize your vision you see that's what a hero is doing on the hero's journey you're supposed to be carving out your own path nobody can tell you what your path should be because you have unique problems unique challenges unique genetics a unique family history you had a unique childhood all that stuff shapes your desires values challenges limitations and obstacles and some techniques will work for you what others won't there's a massive amount of techniques when it comes to self actualizing on overabundance more then you will ever have time in your entire life to explore but nevertheless for a newbie it's good to get a broad overview of what all these techniques could be or a good chunk of them so that you know what your options are because when you're first starting off your options are very limited just because you know nothing you haven't studied anything so that's what we're going to correct here let's start sharing some of these techniques with you and then because there's no overabundance don't think that you need to use all these just a handful of them just five out of these forty can transform your life completely so don't think you need to go super broad although it is helpful to go broad just so you get a better sense of the options because frankly you don't know which of these techniques will resonate with you or not one of these techniques might work really well for me but then for you it falls flat and then vice versa something works great for you but then for me it doesn't work because it doesn't fit my personality type you see so what I'm getting here are like Lego blocks building blocks that you're going to use to construct your own creation so let's begin the list firstly we have life purpose and this list is in no particular order although life purpose I think is one very very important component of self actualized life purpose is about taking your career and turning it into your greatest passion and your work of art life purpose is about finding something really meaningful for you to be doing with your work not just a nine-to-five job but the most meaningful thing you could be doing the biggest and most important impact for you that you could be having on the world how you could be contributing to humanity in whatever way you want that to be whether it's business art or whatever and then working to master that field that domain and getting a really good sense of what mastery is the process of mastery then applying that to your career so that you're making a living in this world and you're waking up every morning and you're excited in your passion about what you're doing with your life compare that to the way most people work which is that they hate their job they grind through it and then their emotions and their their level of passion excitement for growth and for development reflects that and it's very poor life's purpose is very important because it gives you a sense of fuel or motivation which is really high-quality and long-lasting because one of the biggest problems you're going to face with self-actualization is that you're going to really struggle with motivating yourself you can a yo-yo up and down you're going to fall off track a lot the way I found to fix that is through life purpose and I have a whole course on that so at over 25 hours of videos that explain how to find your life purpose the next technique is reprogramming your subconscious mind I'm developing about a course about this as well because it's also a pretty deep topic there are various techniques you can use affirmations visualizations and so on to get at the root of the subconscious beliefs you hold about lies and many of the patterns that keep fueling many of those behaviors that you want to stop your subconscious mind is responsible for most of what you think and most of what you do learning how to reprogram it how to reprogram various fears insecurities that you have this is such a deep topic that I need to create a whole course on it but a very important one another technique is meditation which I've covered a lot with various episodes go check out all my episodes about meditation start a meditation habit I think it's one of the most important habits that you can install in your life when you start to self-actualize daily meditation without ever skipping and making a commitment to meditate for the rest of your life without missing a single day that's personally a commitment that I've made knife stuck to it for about 3 or 4 years now without missing a single day so it can be done and it's completely life transforming another method all point out which is kind of a maybe a sub section under meditation is specifically mindfulness meditation with labeling I have an episode called mindful meditation which I think that very few people have really capitalized on where I described a very formal specific technique of meditating with using these labels see here feel so that you can deconstruct your entire sensory field into sights sounds and feelings both inner ones and outer ones and this is absolutely fundamental if you want to get to the advanced levels of this work because you need to start to break down all the concepts and fantasies that your mind is creating and one of the most effective ways I found to do that is through this mindfulness with labeling method because your mind is just too tricky and it'll completely delude you if you think that you're just going to rationalize your way through some of these things you're not you need to actually deconstruct your very experience of reality so that's a super powerful one I've also talked about concentration practice in the past I have a whole episode on that where I distinguish concentration from meditation there are subtle differences their concentration is very important especially for most people these days because our concentration is so shitty because of the way that modern technology affects our brain cell phones internet YouTube and all the sort of stuff so your concentration is so bad that you cannot even sit down and self inquire for five or ten minutes it's terrible it's terrible you cannot focus on anything you can't contemplate you can't self inquire you can't meditate you can't think about anything for even five minutes straight you don't have any focus and so that robs you of a lot of avenues to self actualize so build a concentration practice speaking of self inquiry that's another one self inquiry is like the ultimate method for how to arrive to truth both deep levels of relative truth and then also absolute truth self enquiry is a method for enlightenment and I have talked about it in the past I have episodes about it I have even guided self inquiry for you so go check out some of those another method is contemplation which is yet different from meditation and concentration and self inquiry and I talked about contemplation in my contemplation episode so go check that out contemplation is hugely important if you want to get to the deepest levels of this work because what needs to happen is that you need to contemplate all of the stuff that I'm talking about for yourself and derive the answers for yourself and not just believe me or anybody else you need to see why these things are true for yourself that creates a lot of growth that's not something you want to outsource another method is journaling journaling i think is actually a awesome method for newbies you can start with just five to ten minutes of journaling every single day it's very easy just get a notebook get a pen a paper whatever sit down and just start to write about what do you want for your life what is bugging you what's frustrating you what's keeping you stuck what are your greatest fears what are your biggest frustrations in life what's your vision for life what do you want out of life and that's where you can start with journaling and then if you want you can take journaling much deeper and you can do it for hours at a time you can really introspect you can contemplate and self inquire while you're journaling on paper that can be a powerful method you can also do self coaching you can do self therapy in your journaling you can go back into your past you can analyze your own childhood your history problems you've had in the past you know goals and desires for the future so that's a really great technique another technique for you is learning the theory I mean this is just so fundamental that you wouldn't even think of it as a technique but learning the theory means reading listening and watching reading books listening to audio programs courses watching courses audio or video programs DVD programs and so forth and this is critical for newbies because when you start you don't know what your options are you don't know what's right what's wrong or how to do anything imagine if you try to do surgery on a human being without having any theory about the human body it would be a catastrophe it would be fatal and that's basically what happens with most people when they try to do personal development is that they they lack the sufficient theoretical foundation for being able to guide themselves and see their own blind spots and so they fall into a lot of traps and they make a lot of mistakes how do you correct that reading listening watching a lot of it hundreds of hours thousands of hours of it I've been reading listening and watching every single day for many years now and I still don't feel like I have sufficient theory to know everything that I feel like I need to know in order to guide myself to the kind of life that I want to have so that's how much theory we're talking about we're talking about at least a college bachelor's degree worth of theory at least four years of hardcore studying at least and maybe even a master's degree worth or maybe even a doctorate that's what we're talking about if you really care about living to your full potential in life it takes a lot of theory because uh in a sense you are you not only do you need the right theory but also you need to fix a lot of the bad theory that you've been stuck in programmed with from childhood and from school and from society see so you've got you got twice the challenge ahead of you with theory because a lot of the fear you're going to be reading is not even going to be able to stick in your head because you have so much negative opposite theory which is you know leaving your cup so full that you can't fill it with the right theory another method is taking notes so as you're learning the theory I hope you're taking lots of notes because you're going to be developing a repository over the years of hundreds of pages of notes of all the juiciest wisdom and insights and techniques that you find through your studying in your theory the note-taking is very important you can't assemble all this information in your head there's too much of it it's too nuanced and complex it's not going to work you need to be taking notes reading notes studying your notes over and over again really you know the way that you would if you were going to be an A student in college another technique for you is buying and doing courses there are an amazing amount of really high quality courses that are available these days online and in DVD form in CD form and audiobook form and so forth these courses will transform your life but you have to find them and then actually do them and of course you have to buy them a lot of newbies are so cheap that they're afraid to buy a hundred dollar course a 200 dollar course a thousand dollar course we are really in a magical era right now the era of the internet and a lot of information available and a lot of incredible courses you can find courses for how to fix your relationships nutrition or exercise for yoga for meditation for enlightenment for building your career building your business for marketing I mean it doesn't stop there are at least a hundred courses available right there on the internet for any one of these facets of your life that you want to master and they contain very valuable wisdom that would take you decades to discover on your own so they're really worth it another method is researching books courses and seminars so not only do you need to be doing research into the theory but you need to be doing research into the research which things do you need to be researching which books should you be reading which courses should you be looking at which seminars should you be attending all that takes time to research that stuff to plan it out if we're talking about courses or seminars these usually take a week or more to complete that's a solid week you need to plan out put on your calendar you got a budget yourself some of these can cost a thousand dollars or more you got a plan your air travel Hotels all this sort of stuff needs to be plan an advanced purchase and so forth that requires lots of research another method for you is studying various spiritual traditions Buddhism yoga Tantra Hinduism Christianity Islam Judaism what I mean there's there's so many spiritual traditions out there ones that you've never even heard of which contain a lot of juicy wisdom of course they also contain a lot of [ __ ] and Dogma which can easily lead you astray so this point is tricky which is why I spend a lot of time in my content talking about epistemology because I don't want to tell you something like oh yeah Buddhism is all true just go with Buddhism because it doesn't work that way it's a lot more nuanced and complex there is no one true teaching out there most of the teachings are 90% [ __ ] and delusion with 10% of some good wisdom in there and you got to know how to figure out and distinguish the wheat from the chaff which is why I talk a lot about epistemology because that's what you need to understand to be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff another method for you is seeking out masterful teachers we again are alive an incredible time right now where the world is interconnected like never before and there are incredibly competent expert teachers available in any domain that you want to learn anything from whether it's business relationships sexuality diet nutrition enlightenment consciousness work whatever there's a teacher for it and some of the most masterful teachers are the most unknown and if you just bother to do a little bit of research and you have the desired initiative you can go find these masterful teachers and you can meet them face-to-face you can get inspired by them you can take their courses in seminars you can buy their books you can take their programs you can sit down with them face-to-face you can get coaching from them you can pick their brain you can even come there apprentice or a volunteer for them or even an employee and learn all their secrets you could also find very popular teachers but also take the time to find the rare teachers the ones that are not very popular because someone like Eckhart Tolle you're probably not going to get face to face time with them but you can find a teacher just as masterful as that car totally or even more so and you can actually get face to face time with it and a lot of times those teachers aren't even that expensive and they exist all around the world and they fly around all around the world doing workshops and stuff so seek them out there's nothing quite like getting the deepest wisdom directly from a master face to face it's totally different than just hearing it from a video another method is to attend workshops retreats and seminars this is life-changing stuff just one workshop one good retreat one good seminar will change your whole thinking on a subject whether it's business enlightenment or whatever and there's a again hundreds if not thousands of these available you got to research them plan it out pay money for them yes they do usually cost a couple thousand dollars for high-quality workshop or retreat or seminar but then again they can save you years of going down the road the wrong road the pasta retreats are amazing this another technique I have for you here they're specifically powerful for developing your mindfulness and your body awareness and also fixing reading problems that you might have solo retreats is another technique I have for you I release an episode recently about my solo retreat in Arizona solar retreat is just basically you for a week or for 10 days sitting by yourself isolated in a cat on a couch somewhere for 12 hours a day doing nothing or meditating or self inquiring maybe journaling but basically doing nothing without any distractions without any social media without any internet for a whole week this is life transforming stuff just one or two of these retreats will give you several years worth of grow in one week that's how powerful they are also psychedelic retreats are available you can go to Peru and you ayahuasca retreats there are various psychedelic retreats in Mexico in Canada even in the United States there's a Santo dime a church where you can drink DMT legally there's all sorts of Native American Indian traditions peyote ceremonies and so forth so there's a lot of stuff like that available and a lot of it is totally legal so go check that out do the research pay the money go travel do this stuff it'll be life transforming stuff for you or you can do psychedelics by yourself which is the second technique I have for you here under psychedelics trip by yourself in a responsible manner specifically for personal development reasons for spiritual growth reasons learn how to use psychedelics properly and man um over the last year I've had just some of the most incredible life-changing experiences on psychedelics absolutely incredible and my growth has has skyrocketed ways that I can't even explain to you from these psychedelics so that's a hugely powerful tool of course psychedelics are not for stupid people psychedelics or for very responsible careful wise people you have to know how to do them properly I have episodes that I released in the past that talk about specifically how to do psychedelics for personal development so check that out another method I have for you is ending unconscious relationships a lot of newbies cannot even begin to grow themselves properly and to start to live out their life purpose or do any of this kind of other work because they are mired in very negative toxic dysfunctional relationships specifically family relationships and intimate relationships and bad old friendships some of these relationships can be salvaged and some of them cannot you need to be able to distinguish which is which and after a certain point cut out the toxic ones because they are robbing you of all your potential in life you do not deserve to stay in any kind of relationship which is robbing you of your highest potential of your consciousness and of your ability to self-actualize even if it's someone very close to you that that's just completely wrong and all that's going to do is going to turn you into a bitter dysfunctional person yourself and you're not going to do the world any favors by becoming that way so watch out cut those out of your life and then the second method I have for you regarding relationships is that some of your relationships are salvageable and in those what you can do is you can learn how to communicate properly and you can learn how to let go of your ego in relationships what that means is that you start to identify all the ways in your relationships that you're using your relationship for selfish needs for your selfish sexual needs for your emotional needs for your need to be loved for your financial needs you know for your physical comfort needs all of this is a lot of selfish egoic [ __ ] which is toxifying your relationships and it's not doing you or the other person any real service so letting go of your ego means identifying where you're being dishonest where you're being manipulative where you're scheming where you're doing all this stuff in your relationship just to satisfy your own ego and letting that stuff go that's a huge Avenue for growth right there which also leads me to the next technique which is radical honesty there's a book by Brad Blanton I think yeah Brad Blanton called radical honesty worth the whole technique that he describes is a is just being radically honest with yourself and with other people and just by doing this and by being more honest a lot of the stress and neuroses and dysfunction in your life starts to melt away even physical ailments like depression and anxiety and so forth heart disease even can melt away when you start to be honest because you keep so many lies and secrets you hide so much stuff from everybody in your life including yourself that it produces a heavy toll on your body and on your mind another method I have for you is making new friends and I don't just mean friends to have fun with I mean making conscious friends who are into higher class and stuff like self-actualization most of your friends were made unconsciously by accident in school in college maybe at your workplace now what you need to realize is that now you actually need to make conscious friends which takes a lot more work and research but the upside of it is that now you have friends who are actually aligned with your values aren't holding you back and these are friends who are maybe building businesses they're entrepreneurs friends who are into proper nutrition friends into yoga into meditation into enlightenment surround yourself with at least a couple of these friends you don't need tons of them you don't need a dozen friends just one or two high consciousness friends is all you really need to start and you'll experience a big boost in your own motivation to to grow and then of course the flip side of that is cut out any friends who are being lazy drunk going partying every night dance or should cut those friends out because you don't need those friends anymore you're gonna know you're going to lose them anyways because the things you're going to be thinking about and doing they're not going to have any interest in and good riddance another method for you is NLP NLP means neuro linguistic programming I haven't really talked about that much in the past but it's a pretty deep field there's a lot of NLP techniques which are basically various kinds of visualization techniques and sort of pseudo hypnosis techniques where you which you can use to reprogram your subconscious mind you can use it to instill better beliefs to rewire old beliefs old patterns to boost your emotional state and so forth so you can research that and structures use some of those another method is shadow work and what shadow work is is basically identifying the repressed aspects of your psyche how you judge people why you come angry your deepest fears your deepest neuroses stuff that you've repressed so this is basically therapy in a nutshell but shadow work to me sort of implies that you're doing it yourself rather than just going to a therapist you're actually sitting down and you're working through your own stuff you're trying to surface stuff that you've repressed about yourself how do you do shadow work well um I have an episode plan about that for the future too there's another set of methods that's very promising and this is what I would call the various collection of new-age methods these include things like lucid dreaming astral projection hypnosis Reiki perhaps acupuncture you know chakras there's there's a lot of stuff that you know goes on in the new-age circles and a lot of this stuff is very legit as far as how it can grow you and how it can shift your emotions and your entire relationship to life so all these techniques are pretty pretty involved so they take reading and research I myself have only skimmed the surface of some of these I haven't really had time to go very deep on them but there's a lot of potential there which is not to say that they're all completely true and then I agree with all their metaphysics and all the new AG stuff that comes along with it there's a lot of dogs when it comes with it so I'm not saying all that is true necessarily but I think the technique can be very therapeutic and valuable so if you can stomach the wow factor there's a lot for you to discover there and if you're one of these rational peoples scientifically minded people who cannot stomach the wow factor well I suggest that you drop that [ __ ] drop it right now you need to have an open mind when you're doing personal development you need to put your skepticism to the test you can actually test out the techniques a lot of the techniques that you think are woowoo and New Age and are just for hippies and won't do anything for you these are some of the most powerful and life transforming techniques available and you're really doing yourself a disservice with your closed-minded rationalism just drop that [ __ ] and actually put this stuff to the test another method for you is cleaning up your diet sounds basic but it's extremely important going paleo going vegetarian going vegan you know there's a lot of different diets out there raw food diet I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of which ones are better than others for me cleaning up my diet has been a process of over 10 years layer after layer after layer of you know throwing out bad foods and bad habits I was fat for most of my life I was so fat that if you saw a photo of me you would not even recognize me people ask me for my photo this was actually I was fat before the the age of smartphones and digital cameras so I don't actually have any digital photos my mom has some physical photographs I'll have to ask her to send me some so I could maybe post that on my blog or something so you can see but yeah you won't even recognize me from that photo it's that bad I was so fat um it's just terrible and it affected my energy levels it affected my self-esteem and my confidence it affected my sexuality it affected me in so many negative ways and I was really really addicted to food and that for me has been in a sense how I got started with self-actualization even though I didn't know it at the time is that I was just so tired and so disgusted with myself with all the food that I was eating and I had no idea about the right theory what the right food is I didn't even know that this food that I was eating was destroying my body I didn't know any of that and I just had to kind of pull myself up by my bootstraps and and fix that over time and I'm still continuing that process just this week I made another effort to clean up my diet even more because I'm seeing just how important nutrition is for my ability to self-actualize especially to get to the very advanced levels you need to have very clean nutrition you need to put the right fuel into your body this means learning about what the right nutrition is and there's a lot of nutrition theory out there which is quite complicated to sort through a lot of contradictory information is out there so you got to do your research and then committing to some kind of diet changes and then making those changes finding good recipes mastering those recipes and then just making it habit in your life with the kind of [ __ ] diet that most people eat forget it just forget self-actualization you're just not going to be able to do some of this stuff you want to do some sort of astral projection and you're eating a [ __ ] diet no it's not going to work you want to what you want to meditate you want to do yoga this [ __ ] is not going to work for you given the diet that you eat you see it's just not going to work it's all just going to be theory for you you're not going to have enough energy to sit up and do the stuff you need to do which of course leads us to the gym physical exercise as another technique and hatha yoga hatha yoga here is just the kind of yoga that you see in Western gym classes the physical poses that can be great for your physical body can release some energy blockages and so forth so that's good there's also of course the real yoga old-school yoga by which I mean pranayama Kundalini Yoga basically its various exercises specific very specific exercises for ways of breathing and body postures and positions and mudras and mantras that's used to send energy up your spine to purify the chakras or energy centers in your body and then that can lead to awakenings that can lead to all sorts of physical healing a lot of psychological baggage can be released through this sort of yoga so this Kundalini Yoga can be a very powerful technique which leads us to breathing you need to learn how to breathe properly you probably think there's not much to breathing properly because you're always breathing but actually your breathing is very shallow it's very poor there are so many breathing exercises that I want to share with you that can just utterly transform how you feel not just in your body but they'll actually trap form the way you think as well because your breathing is critical to your physical well-being your energy and vitality and also to your thinking process to your psyche it's all interconnected and we're not taught in the West how to breathe properly nobody teaches you this in school another method for you is holotropic breathwork that's a very specific shamanic deep breathing technique which can lead to mystical and psychedelic like experiences and can release tons of emotional baggage that's something that I'll talk about more in the future but the very powerful technique another technique for you is body work energy work and reichian therapy which is not to be confused with Reiki Reiki is different from Reiki and therapy but what this is about is this is about doing work on your physical body these can be special body exercises special breathing exercises that you do physically which release there is blockages because personal development is not just something you do mentally in your head but also a lot of it is residing in your body especially the interface between your your body and your emotions that is largely physical and you can do years of talk therapy but not get at that stuff so that's where these exercises can be very powerful another method for you is developing body awareness just awareness of what your body is how it moves and how you hold yourself a lot of people have very poor posture they have a stress and tension that they carry around in their back lower back upper back shoulders from which you have all sorts of problems you can have physical diseases and ailments you have limitations with your energy you can have thyroid processes there's so many different problems that come from lack of proper body awareness and how you hold your body and I have a book on my book list that specifically deals with just becoming more aware of your body that might seem so basic but actually because it is so basic you aren't doing it you're not actually aware of your body and that leads to a lot of problems in your life you're not even aware of yet another method I have for you and this one is especially important for newbies is cleaning up your information intake by which I mean eliminating television phone internet YouTube stupid comedy shows news politics blogs gossip tabloids garbage music that you listen to all of this stuff is going straight into your mind and it's the most low consciousness lowbrow disempowering and negative crap and extry it's extremely addictive and it pushes all of your low consciousness base buttons in your mind you have to stop this [ __ ] cut it out cold turkey most people these days are so addicted to this that they don't have time in their life for any self-actualization work at all they can't even pick up a book and read it for 30 minutes because they're so addicted to television or to the internet or to their phone I was a very important aspect of my life is cleaning up my information intake without that I simply could not be doing what I'm doing right now actualized or could not exist because otherwise I would be playing so many video games all day next which is closely related to this is eliminating hard addictions by hard addictions I mean things like junk food drugs coffee alcohol smoking shopping pornography video games many people don't even consider some of these things hard addictions people eat junk food or video play video games they don't even think of that as a hard addiction well I categorize that at the heart addiction and there's a lot more of them I have a whole episode called overcoming addictions which talks about that overcoming addictions is very important for newbies because if you're doing all this you have no time you're completely distracted from any higher any kind of higher consciousness work because look you're just bouncing like a pinball from junk food to drugs to coffee to alcohol to smoking to shopping to pornography to video games and you're just doing this every single day every single week of your life there's no room in there there's no possibility for a meditation practice there's no possibility for yoga there's no possibility for reading books you know there's no possibility for going to a seminar because when you're addicted to all this stuff a seminar or meditation looks so boring to you that it's just impossible to do it see you're completely overstimulated this needs to stop and that will probably take you years to cut out all these terrible addictions but those are just the hard addictions the second point and method under addictions is the subtle addictions and these are in many ways even more challenging the hard addictions because these addictions are so subtle and so socially acceptable and they're so sneaky and tricky that you don't even know you're doing them and even once you realize you're doing them you don't even know how to begin to stop doing them so what are some examples of soft addictions theorizing judging chasing success chasing love chasing validation perfectionism being right all the time morality arguing and debating criticizing and the list goes on and on I'll shoot a video soon in the future about dealing with subtle addictions but this stuff is very tricky and it's very important that you stop doing these things because all these things are holding you back from self actualize it another method for you is getting more life experiences whether that's through travel going out being in nature camping living in different City interacting with new interesting people having deeper conversations with strangers you know because you need more source material to see the complexity and nuance in life to see all the different options that are available for you most people because they don't do any of these things they don't have a lot of life experience they can't get motivated to really live a rich life they're just sitting playing video games all day and drinking off to porn because they haven't seen how much richness and amazing stuff there is out there to do and what some amazing people are out there doing another method for you is building socialization skills and dating skills this is something that I've spent a couple of years really hardcore doing in my life because I've had terrible socialization skills deeply introverted fearful of people anxious around people social anxiety so all this stuff and terrible with women terrible with Attraction terrible it's sex so all this stuff required a lot of effort and unworked for me and there's a lot of theory available online about how to learn to socialize and how to learn to date another method for you is finding healthy forms of relaxation and entertainment that's tricky because almost all forms of relaxation entertainment that you know are these highly toxic kinds that I've mentioned already up above which are addictions really so finding healthy ways to do that whether it's some kind of sport or being out in nature or meditation or whatever that is for you that's important another method is just getting your affairs in order a lot of people are living such a disheveled lifestyle they're disorganized dirty they have bills to pay they have obligations to their family to the work to their boss you know that it's just like you have all your affairs old tax returns that aren't finished and it's like you have all this [ __ ] that is just like weighing you down and not giving you any space no emotional space no mental space nor enough time to focus on inner growth so you need to handle those affairs set up automatic systems so that those Affairs don't keep nagging you in the future for example with bills set up automatic bill payments so that you're not worrying about paying your bills every single month that frees up a lot of mental energy and time which you can then use to grow yourself rather than worrying and running to the post office mailing checks and all this kind of crap just complete waste get that [ __ ] automated and not just your bills but try to automate everything like that that you can in your life so the logistics of your life are very clean and run very smoothly which brings us to the next point of minimizing your lifestyle I have a whole episode called lifestyle minimalism which talks about this the problem again is that you don't have enough time in your life just to sit and to do nothing your calendar is way too full you're doing way too much stuff at work with your kids with your friends just like constantly doing stuff all the time your calendar needs to be mostly open with nothing to do but just sit on your couch to reflect to contemplate just to soak in life the very mundane aspects of life that you're running away from with all this activity another method for you is finding a quality life coach or therapist and working with them one on one especially if you make over $50,000 a year it makes sense for you to work with a life coach or a therapist if you're very young if you're a teenager if you're still in your very early 20s if you make less than $50,000 a year it doesn't really make sense for you to to work with the life culture a therapist because it's just going to be too expensive and not worthwhile but if you make a good amount of money it's a really good investment they can really help you to figure out your sticking points and the last method that I'll give you is neurofeedback training this is a new technology relatively speaking and I haven't talked about it before but I will in the future I'm really excited about the potential of this technology because it can be used to cure a lot of very serious stuff from depression to anxiety to phobias to HD ADHD OCD and other stuff like that anger issues migraines there's a lot of stuff that it can potentially cure and also can be used to to meditate very effectively so that's something I've been experimenting with and I'll be sharing soon with you in the in the future what neurofeedback basically is that you actually take electrodes attached them to your head physically and then you do various training routines that train your brain to fire in the right ways and to synchronize various portions of your brain which is different by the way from binaural beats so if you listen to some of those binaural beat programs those can also be effective but they are nowhere near as effective as true neurofeedback training so I'll talk about that in future and that does it that's the list over 40 different techniques here now admittedly I just glossed over them and you're probably wondering Ali Oh tell me how to do one of the how do I do yoga how do I begin to do neurofeedback training how do I begin to do shadow work where do I start you start with just research don't expect any one person to tell you how to do all of these techniques this is a very big challenge here right we're talking about an extremely large domain self-actualization or personal development in the way that I think of it encompasses so much stuff that I have yet to meet a person even a deeply enlightened master who knows even a quarter of the stuff that I was talking about you're going to need to go to experts Hut for all these different things to really learn about them properly and and I don't know all this stuff either you know I'm always doing else while always doing research and I'm always releasing new content I'm always exploring new stuff because that's basically what I'm doing is I am going through my life researching this stuff the stuff that I need in order to grow to my full potential so you're probably wondering well where do I start how do I start to self-actualize yes there's research but then still where do I start let me give you a simple little formula if you're totally new to this the way that you start is just by sitting down locking out a couple hours of time with a journal and the first thing you want to do is just to make an assessment of your life where are you where have you been where are you going where do you want to go consider your options what's available to you how much money do you have how much time do you have what's holding you back what are your biggest fears and sticking points what do you really want out of life what if you tried that hasn't worked what have you tried that has worked and so forth and really deeply think about this especially you need to get clear about what you really want out of life what is your vision for your life what are you trying to construct if you have no vision you're lost and then start making a plan about how to get to what you really want and do this seriously like this is the most important activity in your life not just a sign little tangent and then keep returning to your plan on a daily basis and even if you're not working on your plan actively like let's say your plan is to quit your job and to find your life purpose okay that's great but you're probably not going to do that right now because you need to hold down your current job and you need to figure it figure stuff out it's going to take months for that to to really work so you got to keep returning to your plan though and looking at over strategizing thinking about it exploring various options start doing the research and then that's basically how you start and then you can take all these different techniques that I have and then it's pretty easy to see that oh hey you know if my plan is that I want a new career well maybe I should go to a career seminar okay or maybe I should do the life purpose course okay and if your plan is that you want to pursue enlightenment and become more conscious okay well then that means you got to read some books about that you got to go to some seminars you got to practice the meditation techniques build your concentration practice you know all that sort of stuff and this isn't rocket science it's pretty common-sense stuff let me tell you for newbies what I think are the five the five most important things the most important is to have a juicy vision you need to have a compelling positive long term reason for what you want to create with your life what is your life about and that starts from really recognizing it you're going to be dead soon and this is your one and only life so what do you want to use it towards what do you want to accomplish what does your highest potential look like and to get really clear about that vision and to really drill it into your mind program it in there because otherwise you're simply not going to be able to motivate yourself to stop all your addictions quit eating junk food quit watching TV quit playing video games start meditating how are you going to do this stuff if you have no long-term compelling vision you cannot accomplish these things through negative motivation just because you want to avoid some bad stuff in your life it's never going to work that way and if you want to know how to build a juicy vision that's what my life purpose course is for the second thing that's very important for newbies is theory lots and lots and lots of theory hundreds thousands of hours of theory because you do not know what is right to pursue in life unless you've done all this theory you don't know what the options are for how to pursue the right things either because you haven't studied enough theory and you don't know any of the traps the many many many traps that you will fall into if you just try to do this by the seat of your pants without the right theory I'm talking about thousands of hours of theory to help you with that that's why I have my book list it has thousands of hours of books data you can read but not just books you also want audio programs courses seminars and so forth the theory is critical like I said before you can do surgery on someone unless you really understand theoretically all the aspects related to surgery that's why doctors spend eight years learning how to become doctors the third thing is removing addictions and distractions this is super super important for newbies I think that this is one of the biggest things that holds newbies back so identify what those are for you some of them you may not even consider addictions or distractions yet that's going to take consciousness for you to realize that so get to work and start cutting those out because they're holding you back so much fourthly is installing some small healthy habits meditation cleaning up your diet daily learning every single day learning something new as far as theory goes and then a cup doing a couple of retreats a year if you could just put those pieces right there into place in your life you're going to be on a really nice trajectory with this work and then fifthly I'll say the most important thing for newbies is glimpsing nan a go at consciousness this is actually not a newbie thing it's a rather advanced thing but I think it's so important for newbies because once you get a taste of not a go of consciousness a whole new world will open up for you you will have a much greater deeper vision for why you're doing self-actualization before you witness not to go consciousness your self-actualization is going to be very shallow and materialistic it's going to be all about getting a girlfriend or finding a spouse or having a good relationship or being successful or having a bunch of money but that's really just the tip of the iceberg of self-actualization getting a glimpse of not ego consciousness whether you do that through meditation or through yoga or through a breathing exercise or through psychedelics when you get first real juicy glimpse of it then you see the light and at that point you understand that this is this is the most important thing in your life and this becomes not just a side hobby this becomes everything that your life is about and then you become real serious about it and then you start to grow in leaps and bounds so lastly let me just give you a couple of pointers about how this process works this is a lifelong process this is not something that you do for a month or for a year to fix one problem in your life probably the biggest trap that newbie states with self actualization is that they rush it and they try to do too much too fast and then what happens that they get disgusted disappointed they experience an ego backlash they fall back even worse than they were before they they throw their hands up and they say look all that self actualization [ __ ] obviously doesn't work it's just [ __ ] it's all new-age Pollyanna ideas and theory and then they just go back to living their old kind of life to avoid that what you do is you need to think long term you have a long term vision 5 10 20 years into the future you need to make changes in your life with baby steps baby steps usually means change one thing at a time if you're working on meditation do that for a month or two or three and then when you get some success move on to the next thing maybe your diet and do that for a month or two or three and then move on to the next thing and through baby steps that's going to work you to focus on consistency rather than quantity of result what's most important is consistency your quantity of results especially at the beginning the first year or two it's not going to be super great you need to have the foresight to see that this is a long term investment that you're building in yourself and that you need to build the foundation of the skyscraper before you can erect the actual skyscraper that means you have realistic expectations for this process and not get seduced by any kind of marketing material out there that's promising you magic pill solutions magic enlightenment magic business in a box ideas magic marketing schemes magic get Rick's get-rich-quick schemes magic solutions to your depression or to your addictions there are no magic pills in this work except for maybe five Meo DMT which truly is a magic pill but that's a matter so yeah that's that's the biggest trap that you're gonna fall into it's just this problem of consistency and this problem trying to get too much done too fast you got to remember that the rewards of this work are so incredible that you don't need a lot of result a little bit of result every single month every single year dunk consistently will produce a more amazing life than you ever imagined possible in five or ten years that sounds bad for you you don't want to wait that long well that's one of the things you can have to work on is that you you have been imprinted with all sorts of unrealistic expectations by our culture and a marketing system and lastly and perhaps most importantly is you have now heard and seen the path this is what your life is about if you watch my high-level big-picture intro to the self-actualization and you watch this episode here you've seen the path you now know what it looks like from a big picture level and sort of a medium picture level the biggest danger now is that you forget this path and that tomorrow you wake up and you go back to your old routine and you make no changes you make no commitments you make no you just go back back into your old habits and you forget about this entire thing that's the biggest danger so now what you need to do is you need to keep this in your mind you need to write this down put some sticky notes on your bathroom here whatever to remind yourself that you've found the path and then now all that needs to happen you just start to take your first step your second step your third step and follow through on this path and remember that the first two years is the hardest because your results are going to be small your follow-through is going to be shaky and you're going to be very tempted to fall back into your old routines and that's something you have to resist all right that's self actualization for newbies in a nutshell I'm down here click the like button for me push your comments down below share this up with a friend and lastly come to my website right here actualised org check it out I have resources for you their courses book lists forum my blog with various insights and new stuff that I'll be releasing in the future so stick around with me for that and stay tuned for more actualized videos you