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hey this is leo for actualize.org and in this video what i want to talk about is i want to talk about the differences of doing personal development doing it professionally and doing it kind of as a layman personally so what is this distinction well the distinction is this when i was starting off it was really clear to me that when i was doing personal development i had some doubts so i went out and i bought one of those tony robbins cds and don't get me wrong i love tony robbins i don't want to bash him or anything or say anything bad but one of the things that immediately came to mind for me one of the objections was well sure he can get the results because he's doing this professionally whereas i'm the layman i'm just going to buy one of these cds i'm going to read one of his books and how can i expect to get the same kind of results as he's getting right so that was kind of an objection that i had when i was starting this whole thing off because i said well i'm not a professional person a personal development guy i'm not out there running seminars and i'm not out there coaching people and i'm not out there teaching people and i'm not getting paid for doing this stuff because i think there is a difference and it's important to recognize that there is a difference between when a professional gets results and when a layman gets results so this can apply in other areas besides personal development for example what kind of results does a professional athlete get versus someone who plays a sport just as a hobby or just for recreation different results right a professional tennis player is going to get totally different results than a weekend tennis player who plays tennis at the country club same thing goes for golf you know what is tiger woods able to get what kind of results versus the kind of results you're able to get if you play golf once every two weeks right kind of different there's a different level of commitment there there's a different level of of drive there's a different level of practice that is going into this and i think the same applies with not only sports but also applies with uh pretty much anything in life where you're a professional that's one of the perks of being a professional is that when you're choosing what you want to be professional in is that you can choose something that will also give you other payoffs besides just money right one of the nice things about being a professional athlete is that then you are athletic and you get nice body get nice energy you get these kinds of things one of the nice things about being a professional like actor is that you get to be out there talking to people you get to be charismatic you get to express your emotions you get to be good at expressing emotions and then that carries over into your personal life and i think one of the benefits of being someone like tony robbins or myself who's entering into this field is that you get to well you get to study personal development and that you get to get a professional level of result rather than a layman level of result but i don't want that to discourage you because the reason i got on this topic is that i was really thinking about you know what can a layman expect to get from this stuff versus someone a professional like myself who does this for a living and i think the difference is that yeah you have to understand that when someone like tony robbins is getting amazing results in his life the reason he's getting those is because he's fully invested in this thing and the scope of what he's doing is much larger than just taking a single book and reading it and it's much larger than listening to someone's seminar and don't get me wrong he does those things i do those things but you have to go above and beyond i think with personal development though there's a case to be made more so than with other endeavors in life like sports or business or anything else is that it's almost a must for everybody the question is are you going to really commit yourself to it and decide that you're going to go all in and really undertake a lifelong mastery of personal development or are you just going to kind of dabble in it or do it unconsciously because you know what most of us are doing personal development on one level or another the only difference here is right now if you're watching these videos or if you're reading books stuff like that we're calling it out right we're bringing conscious attention to it and we're putting words to the stuff that's happening anyways because if you take any person anywhere that doesn't even know what personal development is has never heard of it they're still undergoing growth and they're still learning things about themselves it's just that that process when it's made conscious it can be a lot more effective and it can be ruthlessly effective and it can give you some amazing results and when you're struggling through it on your own and you've got nobody who's kind of helping you along or giving you advice and you've got no one to bounce ideas off of you don't have a book to read that will give you some helpful hints and tell you where you shouldn't go the directions you shouldn't go and tell you the good directions to go and gives you various techniques when you don't have those things then you're kind of figuring it out on your own and that's almost like if i wanted to become um an engineer or if i wanted to master any other profession right if i wanted to become an engineer and i had to figure out everything from scratch without building or tapping into the the the vast amount of wisdom that has already been accumulated by humanity in the field of engineering over the last couple thousand years then it's going to be a big uphill battle right it's going to be hard to create an engineer from scratch so to speak where if i don't study textbooks on physics and mechanics and mathematics and all this stuff and engineering ideas then it's going to be very hard to develop yourself as quickly and as efficiently as you would if you go to school for that kind of thing which is why school is so great with personal development though here's the thing it's different than than other things because i'm not going to sit here and make the case that you should become an engineer if engineering is not your thing nor should you become a professional athlete if being a professional athlete is not your thing and of course i'm not going to say that you should be trying to be running seminars and coaching people if that's not your thing don't go that route because there's a lot of specific training and practice that you have to develop in order to be an effective coach in order to be an effective seminar leader an effective writer blogger whatever so that's not your goal for sure but what i am encouraging you to do here is i guess to take a better a higher option with more commitment than what i see some people doing with personal development some people with personal development what they do most people is they'll read a book once in a while maybe they'll buy a cd course and they'll try to fix one little problem here one little problem there and that's okay that's better than not doing nothing but what i think you need to really do if you're going to get into personal development even if you don't do it professionally is you still got to commit to learning what personal development is and learning the principles and really becoming a student a lifelong student of this stuff so what does that practically mean and i kind of had an intuitive understanding that this is something that has to happen in order to get big results because when i got started i knew that reading one book was not gonna be enough in fact when i first picked up uh a tony robbins book or it was actually uh wallace waddles uh the science of getting rich when i first picked that up that was my first self-help book and i that just kind of opened my eyes to some of the possibilities of improving my my health and improving my my business and improving my my abundance and improving my finances what i saw there was that this was not going to be fixed by one book that i would have to really commit and then i would have to start studying this stuff and at that point i wasn't planning to do this professionally at all i got into into that idea many many years later but already when i first read that book i already understood that you know what this is something that's going to take um more initiative than i originally thought and it's not going to be just a one book type of deal this is going to be something like i'm going to be reading a book a week i'm going to be maybe reading a book a month i'm going to be uh studying this stuff for the rest of my life a because well this is these are live top these are life concepts that are going to be applicable forever right so you don't want to outsource something like knowing how to live life well knowing how to get fulfillment out of life knowing how to be successful these are things that you really want to take into your own hands there are certain things in life that you can outsource effectively and so other things that you don't want to outsource because outsourcing them and trusting them to other people is going to create problems i think personal development is one of these things so that doesn't mean you have to become a professional in it but that doesn't mean that you have to have an understanding of it yourself kind of like with taxes uh here's an example that we can drop on right you can easily outsource your uh your tax account and accounting nowadays to either a cpa or you can even get one of those quick book quicken programs or turbo tax or tax hack one of those and it'll do your taxes for you real quick and that relieves you of the burden of having to go and learn all the tax code which is changing all the time it's complicated it's boring right and so a lot of people will prefer to outsource their taxes i mean that's what i do i don't know really much about taxes i don't want to know much about taxes for me that's a burden for me learning that stuff is just a pain in the ass it's changing all the time and i have better things that i can be doing with my time and my energy so i'm happy to pay 50 bucks for turbo tax to do my taxes for me and that's fine that tends to work for me pretty well and it probably does for you with taxes it's okay to do that because taxes are not that important if you can get a program or an accountant to do them accurately for you then you can forget about taxes and your life is not really going to be affected and you don't need to sit there and learn the tax code but personal development is different it's in a different league because nobody can live your life for you nobody can make this important life decisions for you nobody can can do the self-evaluation that you need to know that you need to do to get to really know who you are so that the actions that you're taking in your life are really aligned with what you ultimately want and they're going to lead to the fulfillment that you're going to get right and nobody can ultimately go out there and build your willpower muscles for you build your prefrontal cortex nobody can eliminate the negative thinking and the the the petty chatter that's going on inside your mind that's preventing you from from taking action or it's creating self-sabotage in your life nobody can go out there and really motivate you not on a consistent basis someone come and can come in there and kind of give you a boost but nobody can give you consistent level of motivation so these sorts of things these are what come with personal development right and that's why i think it's important to undertake this this thing and to commit to it because nobody can do these things for you and you want to be able to be the master of your own life and you want to be uh developing self-mastery as i call it so that's where i think something like personal development differs from learning the tax code is that you have to kind of bite the bullet and say you know what this is something that i have to do anyways and that if i don't do it then i'm going to be going through and i'm going to still be facing all these challenges i'm still going to be facing all the decisions that i have to make in my life i'm still going to be facing uh relationship issues and i'm going to be facing issues at work with my career i'm going to be facing issues with my business i'm going to be facing issues with my finances i'm going to be facing issues with my inner game like for example getting demotivated getting discouraged losing focus having negative beliefs and limiting beliefs and negative self-talk so all of these things really nobody else can fix for you but yourself and sometimes it's really nice to be able to be your own guide because you don't always have someone there guiding you i'm here and i can provide you with cool principles and concepts and advice but in the end you want to be your own guru so to speak and you want to be able to coach yourself and you want to be able to be resourceful and make strong decisions and handle all the things that i've just been talking about for yourself and the way to do that is by undertaking this process of self mastery and personal development that means that you're going to be studying this stuff that's why i'm creating a lot of videos is because i'm trying to target an audience of people who are not just going to come to me for one bit of advice but who want to do this on really as a lifelong journey for themselves and what i think is really cool personal development is that you can do that and still do other things so you don't need to dedicate your whole life to this this is just something that you do almost as a hobby right just like you can have the hobby of playing a little bit of a sport on the side you can have a hobby of playing a musical instrument or doing this or doing that these are things you do they are not the core center of your life so but they still give you a lot of payoff and i think that's really what you need to do with personal development is make it a hobby of yours for me i started by making it a hobby and it was a hobby of mine for a couple of years and i was getting good results and then for me for my own personal reasons it was something that i really enjoyed doing so i made the transition from hobby to career out of it and make a business out of it but that's definitely not something that's right for everybody that's not right for most people so for you though i think making it a hobby is important don't make it a one-off thing just like almost you would do with your fitness and your nutrition i think those are also things that you really need to take control of you can't really outsource your nutrition and you can't outsource your fitness these are also things and you can lump them in with personal development but i tend to think that they can almost be separated out because for example learning how to keep yourself fit learning how to go to the gym and building a habit of it and knowing which exercises to do and the same thing with your nutrition really studying nutrition and knowing what foods are healthy for you and which are not and the reasons behind all that those are things that i found to really get my nutrition into shape and to get my fitness into shape i really had to go out there and learn those things i couldn't just say that i'll go to the gym and then maybe have a personal trainer that will be the master of my fitness routine i had to really get in there and read books i had to go watch youtube videos i had to to study i had to experiment talk to other people see how they do stuff and only then did i feel like i got a really a good sense of understanding about fitness to the point where now i feel like i have a lot of control over my fitness and which i think is really a nice thing and i did that also with my nutrition as i started studying nutrition not because i wanted to be a professional nutritionist or even because i loved nutrition i didn't it was just because i knew that to get my nutrition handled to really know what's going on there i had to study that stuff and the way that it started was not that one day i said oh i'm going to become really an expert in nutrition it kind of started to build slowly over years so at first i just wanted to get into shape and start eating uh avoid like the worst foods and then slowly i got a little bit more and more interested in it and the interest kind of built and built up and built up and built up until the point where i ended up doing a lot of research and then i discovered i had some health problems that might be related to nutrition so that got me into it a little bit more doing even more in-depth research and at this point i feel like i've got quite a bit of knowledge about nutrition in fact i've randomly talked to uh to nutritionists out out and about as i'm walking around and doing stuff and socializing sometimes i run across nutritionists and i'm kind of shocked it kind of makes me makes me chuckle to myself when they start talking to me about nutrition and um i can spot some of their or i can spot uh inaccuracies in what they're saying or i can actually converse with them and dispute with them and they're supposed to be the professional nutritionists and i'm supposedly just like a hobbyist i'm just doing it for myself and i sometimes feel like i know more than they do about some of these things so the point there being is that that's a good example of what i want you to be doing with personal development is i really want you to ask yourself is it worth it for me to make this a hobby and by hobby i mean this is something that you're going to be doing consistently it doesn't mean you do it every day but it's something you do periodically and you do for the rest of your life and i think what's great about personal development is that you can make it into a hobby and then it becomes really fascinating it becomes fascinating to read all these books it becomes fascinating to watch these videos and go to a seminar once in a while and to talk with people about uh best techniques and best strategies for creating an awesome life for yourself and it it's also good to spend some time thinking about it right not just receiving and soaking in information for me or from a book but actually spending your own time sitting there and digesting it maybe taking some notes maybe sitting there and contemplating about these different things and maybe you have different opinions about how to do personal development than i do or that some book might tell you to do and sitting there and trying to figure this stuff out i think there's a very strong case to be made that it's worth to make that investment both because it can be really fun and exciting but also because this is something that pays huge pays huge huge dividends for you down the road because when you understand personal development when you understand the principles of creating a successful fulfilling life well i can almost make the case you know what is more important what is more important for you to be doing in your life than to be understanding how to live a happy life a successful life and exciting life i mean to me that's what i love and that's why i committed myself to personal development both as a hobby and as a career is because to me that is one of the most important things in life is to figure that stuff out you know if you want to have a good life then you probably want to start thinking about some of the principles that go into that and doing a little bit of studying studying there is really really good so but back let's go back to the original uh question that i had when we started uh this video and that was about can you get the kind of results that a professional would get you know can you get the kind of results that tony robbins would get or even the kind of results that maybe i'm able to get and i think that you don't need to do that much personal development and to get those amazing kind of results i think that even if you just do personal development as a hobby you can still get really big big big payoffs and that of course it's nice the more time you are able to put into personal development then obviously the more you're going to get out of it just like with anything else in life so are you going to realistically be able to get the kind of results that tony robbins has gotten probably not because you know what tony robbins had to do to get those results i mean he read hundreds maybe thousands of books you know he went to uh dozens and dozens of and maybe hundreds of seminars he talked and interviewed people that were like the best in the world like high performers people that you could never even get access to like uh you know really high paid business executives and ceos and world leaders like nelson mandela and world presidents and uh and like high-paid actors so these are people that you wouldn't even really be able to get access to as a layman i can't get access to these people so that's kind of like one of the perks that he has of being this big hotshot personal development guru is that he is a celebrity and he gets access to celebrities and it's always nice to be able to pick the brains of high performers because you can learn a lot just from that process and so i mean those are just a few of the benefits that he has that you're really not going to be able to match in what you're doing they're not even things that i'm able to match and i'm still doing this stuff as a business and as a career and of course he has many other advantages over all of that so you can't quite match that so you're probably not going to get the kind of results that he's gotten but then again do you really need those kind of results i mean he's literally made like hundreds of millions of dollars and his success is like phenomenal through the roof maybe one of the most successful individuals alive today out there so those kind of results are of course atypical as they say and you're probably not going to get them although if you really want them go for it but that still doesn't mean that you shouldn't do personal development and that there's no no benefit that you can do that you can get from doing it on a smaller scale right and i don't think you need to be doing it uh professionally to get those big results i think actually the most important element of doing personal development is not to get caught up in in the theorizing the philosophizing that can happen and especially when you start doing this stuff professionally you really get involved with the theory a lot and sometimes even to the point where it's detracting from your ability to go out there and take action for example there's actually some detriments to being in this thing professionally because if you're doing this as a hobby that means what you can do is you can go out there and you can see what the professionals have uh have kind of distilled for you you can grab those golden nuggets and then if you want you can really focus yourself and go out there and take a lot of action execute execute execute and put all the pieces together in your life and you're going to start getting massive results and it's going to be awesome and you can do that relatively effectively whereas if you decided to make this a career of yours one of the problems that you would run into is that all of a sudden you need to start bending over backwards and jumping through hoops because as a career there's all these things that you have to do that are not necessarily at all related to your own personal development right for example me standing here shooting this video i had to spend hours and hours and hours figure out how to do this practice how to shoot these videos buy the right equipment spend a bunch of time figuring out how to deliver these messages how to post it online how to make everything look professional and doing that didn't really improve my personal development so much if i would have spent that time actually hammering out some of these principles that are for example in my blueprint then i would have gotten better results and actually because i am doing personal development i'm delivering a lot of this content obviously i'm studying a lot of this content so i'm reading tons of books i'm interviewing people i'm talking with clients i'm analyzing my own results and on one level that's really great because it gives me a lot of awareness and it gives me a lot of knowledge but on another level it's also problematic because sometimes again just doing those things doesn't mean that i end up mastering myself really what i'm practicing when i'm doing that stuff is i'm practicing my profession and that's very different than actually mastering myself so even though someone can go out there and give a deliver a great seminar or someone can go out there and deliver a great speech about personal development and can tell you exactly what you got to do that doesn't mean that they're able to do it themselves in fact it's very easy for me to go out there and say okay look here are the top 10 things that you need to do in your life to create an awesome life for yourself or to become super rich or to have an awesome relationship or to have an awesome family life or here are the 10 things you need to do to run an awesome business and just because i tell you those things does not mean that i have those things in my life and that does not mean that i'm feeling those things i'm getting and i'm reaping the benefits of them those are two different things and it actually took me getting into personal development professionally just over the last year is when i started to realize this because initially i thought that those were more there's more overlap between those two things than there actually are just because i become a really good blogger or i become a really good writer or i become a really good speaker or i become a really good coach does not at all mean that i myself have my own life handled i can easily have crappy relationships i can easily have horrible nutrition i could easily not be going to the gym i could easily be lazy and be slacking off i could easily have a bunch of negative thoughts going through my mind all the time i could be frazzled i could be over stressed i could have a horrible work-life balance i could have all these things and still deliver an awesome video to you in fact a lot of times that uh that can that can kind of be a tendency is to actually fall into that right and that's where you get kind of this hypocrisy effect that sometimes you will see for example you have a preacher on tv like a televangelist and he'll be telling you that you're sinning and that you're doing this wrong and that wrong and you're breaking commandments and that you need to repent and then that that preacher that televangelist get gets caught doing uh exactly what he was preaching you not to do so that's the kind of hypocrisy effect that you get and the reason you get that is because it's actually pretty easy to go out there and preach it's not hard i mean if you want to right now you can go into a book and read 10 principles or 10 10 things that are important to be doing and then you can read 10 things that are that you should never do and then you can go out there and you can preach to someone you can preach to your kids you can preach to your friends you can preach online you can gather a bunch of people together and charge them and create a seminar and teach them this stuff but then you wouldn't be living it yourself and it would be very easy to actually do that and people would still listen to you because it's hard for people to see whether you're doing it personally it's hard for people to see whether you're feeling the effects of the development so for me when i got into this i kind of realized that this was a problem and one of the things that i committed to when i started is that i really have to walk the talk and that if i'm out there researching these principles i need to really be careful about not just getting into that preacher mode where i'm telling people what to do and not doing it myself because i didn't really care about the hypocrisy of it what i really cared about is uh is for my own for my own health because i think i would uh i'd really be devastated if i was preaching all this stuff and i was teaching people how to get their lives in order and then my life uh 10 20 years from now ended up being in shambles and i couldn't manage a relationship or i had finance problems or i had uh health problems related to my nutrition and my exercise so all those things i feel like you know the reason i got into personal development was to really improve myself and to get my life to the point where i'm excited and really engaged and fulfilled and i'm living a big life and then from there i kind of thought well it would be really nice to help people do the same because i i feel like i have a talent for it but i always need to keep my mind both on the fact that i'm doing this as a profession and i'm also doing this personally for me so for me there's actually uh my energy my attention is kind of split and i think that's what has to happen if you undertake personal development professionally but that's almost kind of a downside right that's one of the downsides of doing it professionally so the nice perk for you doing this as a hobbyist is that you don't need to worry about that and that you don't need to worry about that hypocrisy effect you don't need to worry about putting your energy towards writing articles and shooting videos and learning all this stuff and then learning how to communicate it which is a really big factor not only do you have to learn it you have to learn how to communicate it which has nothing to do with really applying it in your life it's just about the mechanics of communication and that can take a lot of time and a lot of effort so you don't need to waste your resources on that if that's not your thing and you can just focus on improving your life right if you're already running a successful business in some other industry that's great keep running that business and just take the principles and the ideas that i'm talking about here and look for ways to go out and directly implement them you can study some of these principles and if you're curious about them go ahead and study some of these topics you know if you're curious about visualization you hear me talking about it maybe go out there and pick up a book and study visualization or if you're curious about life purpose and you want to know more about how life purpose works so that you can get a little bit you know squeeze a little bit more out of that concept for yourself that's a good concept to study and i can show you some books that you can read or maybe give you some programs that you can look into to help you out with that but really what i want you to do is i want you to take the golden nuggets and then go and apply it so that your life is made better by these concepts don't just study visualization go out there and visualize the things that you want use it to get you the results that you want don't just study life purpose go out there and create an awesome life purpose for yourself improve your life purpose with this with these principles and ideas that i'm showing you and that's what i want you to be doing across all levels and that kind of wraps up my thoughts on the difference between doing personal development professionally and as a hobby ultimately i think the thought that i want to leave you with is do you want to pursue this as a hobby or do you want to not pursue it at all because the thing is if you don't undertake this as a hobby then i can promise you that you're going to struggle a lot and you're going to reach points in your life where you really wish that you did so i want to encourage you to think about that ask yourself that question think about it and if you do want to take it on as a hobby i think that's awesome that's why i have a lot of these free resources out here for you is because i want to get you to buy into this idea that it's a cool hobby and if you want to take it further you can and just see where it goes run with it see how it improves your life take it on as a hobby try it on for a year and see what kind of results you get and if you like it continue forward and you're going to build curiosity it's going to become fun for you and i'm here to get you motivated about it i'm here to share the greatest ideas that i know and i really want to get you excited about this because if you're a hobbyist then i'm here to serve you all right so this is it for me i'm signing off go ahead post your comments i love hearing from you let me know what you think about this topic and if you would share it with your friends share it with people that you think would benefit from this material all right this is leo signing off you