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hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm gonna be talking about how no serious growth is possible without training [Music] you if you're not going to train you can kiss all your dreams goodbye the biggest reason that people don't grow and they don't self actualize is simply that they don't train it's that simple training is required for success in any area of life it doesn't matter what the area is business career public speaking relationships sexuality dating health being good at computers socialization sports art crafts personal development spirituality and consciousness happiness and even morality and being a good human being all of these things require enormous practice and training over and over and over again to develop proficiency are you not happy with the results you've gotten so far in your life are you not happy with the results you get from watching this content and doing self-actualization or from your meditation practices or from your spirituality I can almost guarantee you that it's because you're not training nearly enough what is training training is very simple it's the consistent daily focused practice into some field of life it's when you set aside 30 minutes of your day or maybe 5 hours of your day however much time you want a lot here and you run drills specific drills that you design to improve and to practice some aspect of the thing that you're trying to master so whether it's an art or playing the guitar or working on your your taxes or whatever you know whatever you're trying to get good at you can design drills to isolation train those particular things training involves isolating elements of your practice even if you're just focusing on the guitar okay you're focusing on the guitar but then there's there's different chords you want to play then maybe you could practice the different fingering and then you can try drills for getting faster at your fingering and then you know more and more and more little techniques like that which together would add it up create the excellence of playing the guitar or if you're learning public speaking then you can come up with drills to specifically practice different elements of your public speaking like if you want to practice speaking with a loud voice then you can set aside five minutes to drill loud speaking to project your voice you can set up specific drills for how to breathe so that you're pausing the right times and breathing as you're speaking to not running out of breath that's important and then of course you can practice speaking very loudly and then speaking very softly and trying to get that dynamic range in your speaking you see and this applies to any area of your life including your spiritual work and including the self-actualization training also means using theory to fine tune your practice training is primarily practice based you're actually doing something but theory is still important because the theory tells you what you should be doing and how to do what you should be doing properly or how to do it better so in that sense it's important that's what training is it's not a complicated subject this isn't rocket science here but it does require actually doing it and not just thinking about it or talking about it what isn't training this is also important to consider training is not reading books watching videos talking about or thinking about or planning to train that's not training training is when you're actually doing the practice and very importantly what training is not is it is not doing routine work so you might think like well I work at a job at a computer somewhere and therefore I'm training to get good at the computer no not necessarily it depends different kinds of work are different some kinds of work really do involve you training if you're at a company like a startup company where it's just you and a couple of other people and you guys have a big project you're working on and you have to be learning all this new stuff let's say you're a computer programmer you have to be learning all these new computer languages and all these new techniques as you're trying to come up with your you know meet your deadlines that probably does involve quite a bit of training but add a lot of jobs including a lot of computer jobs all you're really doing is you're sitting there and you're doing the same thing over and over again stuff you've done for years you know how to do it by now and you're just doing it over and over again to get stuff accomplished that's the majority of work that human beings do and that's not training because you're not pushing yourself to learn anything new you're just redoing the same old stuff that you already learned so this is all quite obvious and simple stuff but the trick is actually doing it it's hard to actually do this consistently and what's really tricky is getting yourself to do it when you're not required to do it by some external Authority like your boss or your school or your professor or something like that let me ask you this when was the last time that you consciously trained anything think back and we're gonna exclude here any externally enforced training protocols that were put upon you from from an external authority so if your boss forced you to go to some training seminar exclude that exclude school exclude college that doesn't count because there you're sort of in a system would get you to train so excluding all external systems when was the last time that you by yourself of your own initiative using your own self-discipline actually consistently trained anything in your life was it a year ago five years ago ten years ago twenty years ago can you see the problem here for many people it will be years since they actually trained anything and by training here I mean you actually set aside a deliberate time window in your schedule where do you save yourself I'm gonna train for 30 minutes today my speaking skills for example and then you do that tomorrow and then the next day and the next day and the next day and you keep that up you don't just do it once or twice when was the last time you've done that see that's the problem that's why you're not getting the results you want once you become an adult once you finish school and university don't expect anyone to train you this is a problem because when we're in school and in university we get so reliant on sucking from the tit of the university system or the school system that we just expect training to come to us and in school and university it's rather effortless you just have to go to the classes and you get trained and it works to some extent there's problems with it but it works people learn math and reading and writing in history and whatever else they they need to learn but but then what happens after you get out of school see you have no training muscles built up you don't know how to train yourself and so for the most the rest of your life like most people you don't train anything and then you wonder why get the results that you expect or that you see some of the excellent people out there getting here's why people rarely train it's not easy firstly training requires great vision because training is challenging and it's difficult you're not gonna do it unless you're a visionary very basic point but how can you train towards anything unless you have a vision first a very compelling juicy vision of why you're training why the training is necessary what its gonna do for your life you need that vision and I really call that life purpose and that's why I'm very big on life purpose I have my life purpose course that I like to plug for this very reason because without a vision nothing else can happen and how to create the right vision for you that's a very personal matter but also there are a lot of very important principles involved it's a it's a pretty deep topic which is why I created a very long twenty five hour course about it so go check that out but if you already did check it out and you already have your purpose set and you have that great vision now you are in a great position to really get the results but still it's gonna be hard it's gonna be also hard because even after you got the great vision now what is required is enormous self-discipline you have to train yourself to be a self-motivated human being that's rare most people are motivated only by external circumstances by pain by suffering by necessity they will only do stuff when they are backed into a corner that doesn't fly with training because training is not necessary these days our lives are so easy if you're living in a first world country your life is pretty much so II see that you can just go to your nine-to-five job earn a paycheck come home and then do nothing all day and then that could be your entire life and you can just coast like that and once you finish school and university you can find a nice little comfy job for yourself and just coast without learning anything about your job anymore you can find those jobs and see that that requires no self discipline that requires no intrinsic motivation but it doesn't get you a great kind of life it gets you just a very mediocre very basic vanilla kind of life there are no external support structures when you're training no one is really forcing you you have to do it on your own like if you want to train yourself to become good at the guitar who's gonna force you nobody is your parents aren't going to your friends aren't going to your boss doesn't care it's only you only if you care enough will it happen same thing with your spirituality or with enlightenment north meditation your friends aren't gonna care in fact they're gonna actively discourage you which will lead to another reason why meditate or why training is so challenging is because it requires enormous focus you have to really focus on not multitasking but single tasking that one drill over and over and over again avoiding all the distractions of society of your friends of your family of all the entertainment that's out there all the easy stuff that's very easy to to get distracted by all the computer stuff all the internet stuff all the smartphone stuff that you've got going on also training is difficult because training is repetitive and boring at least it is when you first start the first few years of getting your training habit going it's gonna seem very monotonous and it's gonna seem like you're you're losing out on all the joys of going out there partying with your friends and watching TV and playing video games and doing alcohol and weed and whatever see you're gonna feel like you're missing out on that stuff and training by compare it's gonna seem so boring but that is because you need to develop a taste for training which you develop only by doing lots of training the other reason why people rally train is because it involves emotional labor it's difficult you have to actually struggle struggling makes you learn and the whole learning process is much more challenging than just sitting back and watching some Netflix after work training is exhausting it's both it can be physically exhausting depending on what your training it can also be mentally exhausting and probably both which is hard to do especially after you've done a whole day day of work like if you have a your basic nine-to-five job and you want to train something on the side that's really challenging because you just got energy problems depending on your diet and your exercise and so forth you just might not have the energy to do it the other reason people rarely train is because society and marketing discourages training and effort our entire economy is built on the premise that everybody can offer you a quick fix solution which requires no emotional labour or effort or training on your part to get what you want so it's like do you want to do your taxes well just go higher tax guy and he will do your taxes for 200 bucks for you and you don't have to learn anything about taxes no training required or it's like you want to you want to what you want to lose some weight well don't learn and train yourself at the gym like heaven forbid you would do that no instead you just go and you you pay a couple thousand dollars to get some liposuction or whatever and and now you're at the right weight that you like but what for only a couple of months until you get it all back and then you look worse than ever see so our whole marketing system our whole society just discourages people from training it's really the sort of decadence we're living in this decadent era which reminds me of the the era before the fall of the Roman Empire where it was just too much decadence the whole Roman work ethic and many of the Roman values that the Roman Empire was built upon were sort of eroded by the success of those very values you see it under mine itself and that's what success tends to do you get successful then you get complacent and lazy and then you lose all your success as a result training of course means less fun less sex and less drugs which is why another reason why people fail to train because of course you want to maximize your phone you want to maximize your sex you want to maximize your alcohol consumption and your partying and that sort of stuff and like I said already training is an acquired taste it requires a certain maturity to want to train to see why training is important and what are the long-term payoffs that it can have on your life that requires a sort of mature mind that many people don't have these days so how do you get started training well like we already said the first thing you need is a vision no vision no training what can you possibly train without a vision what are you training for how are you going to endure the emotional labor and the monotony and all the opportunity costs that come with that unless you really have a compelling reason for why you're doing it so first what you need is you need to clearly decide on what you want from your life be very specific about it understand what you need to train and why you're training it and if you want to know how to do that well check out my life purpose course that's well that is all about once you've got that down then you need to ask yourself okay so what skills do I need to fulfill my purpose and then you break down the skills like maybe you need some public speaking skills maybe you need some computer skills maybe you need some foreign language skills maybe you need some meditation skills and that is your first step there is to break that down and then after that you need to create drills for each of these so you can go by and read some books about what are the best meditation techniques what are the best techniques or drills for public speaking what are the best ways to to learn a foreign language and so on and then you need to actually set aside time every day in your schedule to actually practice these drills and do it consistently not just once or twice and as you do it consistently you build up momentum and this momentum builds up not over a course of a week or a month this momentum builds up over the course of the years if you're talking about training really you're talking about years of training months of training is too little to accomplish anything significant you're talking about years of training so you got to be mentally prepared for that and then plan for it accordingly and then as you do that you need to also develop a taste for the training process cultivating that taste the first few years of doing it you're not going to have the taste it's gonna take time for you to really develop that especially if you've been out of it for a long time you haven't trained anything for years and maybe decades and that's it that's the basic process this isn't rocket science but if you want results what you got to do now I want to end by talking about the story of demosthenes demosthenes was a Greek statesman and orator from ancient Athens he was considered one of the greatest orders of all time especially in the ancient times his dates were 384 to 322 BC but demosthenes wasn't born this way he wasn't born a great orator in fact as a young child he had great difficulty speaking and you know in the in the Athenian times people would go to the forum and they would speak and they would have public debates and discussions so oratory was a very important skill much more important than it is for most people today today we just type little YouTube comments or post trolls on the internet stuff like that trolling comments which was very different from the ancient times so as a child he actually had a lisp and he had a weak voice and he used to talk in these long rambling sentences that were ungrammatical and made no sense and just confused the hell out of people so people were already put off by his speeches and in fact they made fun of him for his Lisp so he was very discouraged by this but he wanted to really become a great orator that was his life purpose so what did he do when he was an adolescent he actually built for himself an underground room where he went to work where he would study the speeches of the greatest orators of his time but not only did he do that studying he would also go outside he would go to the seashore and they are alone outside the city of Athens he would practice by the seashore and he would drill himself on all the facets of oratory that he needed to master first he would pick up pebbles from the beach and stuff his mouth full of these pebbles so his mouth was pool and now he has these programs when he doesn't know how to talk with these pebbles in his mouth but this forced him to articulate his his speeches so he would articulate every syllable every single words such that he could even talk with pebbles in his mouth next what he would do is he would run along the seashore and recite verses from the greatest speeches so that he could he could speak while running so that he would increases his lung capacity his breath and get that endurance and lastly he would come really close to the cliffs where the ocean waves were crashing into the cliffs with these loud roaring sounds and he would speak and deliver his speech to no one just to the ocean so that he would speak over the waves so he would develop that carrying capacity of his voice and through this process he became the greatest orator of the ancient times I tell you this story because this in a nutshell is what you have to do to get the kind of results that we're talking about here with self-actualization this is your process except of course your details will be a little bit different it will depend on your particular life purpose on your particular domain of mastery what are you trying to master but the process is basically the same now don't mistake training for just being about some sort of shallow materialistic form of success certainly training is important if you want materialistic success but there's a deeper element to training which is even more important training develops character that's why it's so important not because you want to go out there and chase money your cars or a great career I mean yeah you can do that stuff and to some degree that's important you need to have some degree of success in your life but really what you're after is you're after the character that it develops there's something about a human being who is self-made who is able to come up with a vision of what they want to create and then have the mental resources to discipline him or herself to go out there and do it that's a high quality human being that's a human being you can depend on that's a human being who can get stuff done in the world that's a human being who doesn't whine and complain and play victim and make excuses and get into debates and arguments with people over silly philosophical or spiritual topics no this is the kind of human being who's very pragmatic goes out there and does stuff but at the same time has character and when you take this process and you apply it to the most important thing in life which is self-actualization itself and spiritual development that's when you get the the greatest energy of all for example if you apply all this to to your meditation practice or to yourself inquiry practice that's gonna grow you the most into the best and wisest human being you can be if you haven't noticed what's the one column common element behind every great human being think of your favorite actors your favorite celebrities your favorite businesspeople your favorite artists your favorite athletes what's the one common thread training not just training but training training training training training training training their massive trainers that's really the only difference and of course they have the vision for why they should be training so if you think you could go become like them just by training a lot it's not gonna happen unless you have the vision first see they were first extraordinary visionaries which then allowed them to do the training which then got them all the results that they got training is not optional for sages and self-actualize errs if you're young you should be training non-stop by young I mean under 20 years old your whole life at this point your whole adolescence your teenage years should be all about training not having fun and getting into relationships and and doing drugs or anything and none of that stuff it should be nonstop training but even after 20 you should still be focused on training because a lot of people they get out of school University and then all their training stops so really lifelong training is what you're really shooting for but for those who are young in the audience make sure you don't waste your youth not training that's gonna be something you regret the training you do when you're young builds your entire foundation if you miss training when you're young it's gonna be very hard for you to to really make something of yourself in the future because you've already laid such a poor foundation for the rest of your life so that's it in a nutshell let me just tell you that training is the cost of getting things your way in life if you want things to go your way bite the bullet and accept that you're gonna have to train and yeah it's gonna suck at first it's gonna be challenging it's gonna be emotionally difficult you're gonna want to quit it's gonna seem like it's no fun it's gonna seem like man why am I doing this why why is this so challenging how come I keep failing cuz you're gonna keep backsliding it's not just gonna be smooth sailing after you make that there's gonna be a lot of backsliding and back and forth and mistakes and failures but that's where your perseverance has to win out your vision has to support you throughout that whole process which is five it.why vision is perhaps the most important element to this whole to this whole puzzle but you're just gonna have to accept that training is the cost to get things the way you want and if training seems painful and very bad well maybe it's just because you haven't found a vision compelling enough yet to overcome and make those costs worthwhile alright that's it I'm signing off please remember to click the like button for me and come check out actualize that org my website I've got resources there for you to life purpose course my book list the blog the forum more stuff to come and make sure you stick with me next week for more content you