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hey this is Leo for actualised org and we are continuing on with the blueprint series which is over 100 of the greatest personal development concepts of all time distilled from over 100 thousand dollars worth of the best seminars books and personable material out there so the concept that we're covering in this video right now is going to be eliminate addictions so what is it why is it important and then let's get into the meat of it and get down to business so what are addictions what is it to eliminate addictions pretty straightforward on this one I think you can tell yourself basically the prescription here is that you want to identify any addictive behaviors in your life stuff that is holding you back from living a positive kind of life and feeling good and taking those monkeys and getting them off your back that's what you should be doing with this concept and why is this important it's important because having monkeys on your back are going to be weighing you down if you have them they're going to be weighing you down from living the kind of awesome life that you want to live and they're also going to be the source of a lot of negative emotions and constant frustration and they're just going to waste a lot of your time and energy so that that's going to take away from all the positive things that you want to create in your life it's really hard to be fulfilled and happy when you have a slew of addictions that you're always engaging in so that's why that's what it is that's why it's important now let's get into the bread and butter of it first of all I want to kind of give you a list of addictions that I think are the most common and the most pernicious that you want to make sure that you are eliminating so if any of these are part of your life you want to take stock you want to get honest about it and then you want to take some steps and figure out a way how to get yourself out of this situation because they're going to be a constant never-ending source of negative emotions and just like a drain of a drain of all your potential energy that it's going into so what are some of these addictions I'm just going to rattle off a big list and I'm gonna have that list down in the article and this is not by any means comprehensive but these are the most common so first television huge huge huge one I think this applies to so many people it's probably the biggest one on the list then we've got other things like gossip tabloids partying compulsive shopping internet browsing websites like Facebook Twitter news negative thinking food porn gambling alcohol and drugs so this is my list of the most common addictions you can definitely come up with more esoteric ones this is not a comprehensive list like I said but you want to make sure that these these are the most common ones that people really use as emotional crutches so let's talk a little bit about what an addiction is and what the structure of an addiction is like I said it's an emotional crutch right so what an addiction is doing is it's providing you with a dirty cheap source of short-term pleasure or immediate gratification against a deeper problem that you have in your life that you don't want to face so example of this maybe you have a sour marriage or relationship and therefore instead of dealing with that head-on and dealing with what might be a potentially challenging situation to to fix that what you do is you mask the problem because you're getting so much emotional pain from that you mask it with an addiction like food or alcohol or drugs or going out and partying or watching TV because that takes your mind off the real problem and it gets you some nice pleasure you know you go out and you have a nice meal or you go out and you drink some alcohol or you go out and you go and you party whatever it is and you do that after after a certain point you do that often enough and it becomes an addiction because it's like a short term hit of pleasure and it gives you a certain dirty high you know you get a dirty high off of drugs we also get a dirty high off of softer addictions like television or the internet or food or even something very soft we should consider something like negative thinking although that's one is actually really holding you back from living that charge kind of life so important to see what's really happening there so if you have a bad marriage if you have a bad job that you hate if you have some bad family situation maybe you're dealing with some medical situation maybe you're dealing with financial problems whatever that is those are usually the core root causes and then the addictions are like the band-aids that you're putting over those so what is the problem with addictions well the problem is that their source of never ending negative emotions and they're also putting you in a low consciousness mode where what you're doing is you're just getting cheap stimulation from the environment right that's the case for example with food when you go out there and you eat and you stuff yourself and you're getting so much cheap stimulation that it's very easy to overindulge and that's the same thing with alcohol same thing with drugs same thing with Internet same thing with television right it's just so convenient it's so comfortable it makes you feel so good in a short term but then what tends to happen is that you just kind of like get in a rut with any one of these things and that's one of the other common underlying elements between all these addictions is that you can over indulge in them and they can really soak up a lot of your energy and a lot of your time you know all the sudden you go down and sit on on the couch because you want to take your mind off the heavy work day that you had and the crappy job that you maybe you have and so you watch the television and then that one hour of television then it's like oh well wow why not do an extra hour because I don't want to go back to my job to thinking about my job so I'll do another hour and all of a sudden that spills over into two hours and then three hours then four hours and all sudden you realize that you wasted your whole Saturday and Sunday watching a marathon session of whatever your favorite show is and what initially was a good source of perhaps entertainment or relief turned into this just like nauseating overindulging marathon and now you wasted so much time and so much energy and you have to go back and face that problem anyways right after the weekend you still have to go back to work and yourself to face it and so what is it happening is that you end up wasting a lot of your life really it's wasting a lot of your life and a lot of your energy and you're doing this on a continual basis on a weekly basis monthly basis and it goes on for months and years and you can really waste your whole life doing this not to mention that you always feel bad about it right because your higher self is still there you can't get rid of your higher self and your higher self is always telling you that you should be doing more that you could be doing more and that maybe you should be facing the real problem and maybe you shouldn't be over indulging so much and maybe you should be using your time more wisely more constructively learning something doing something positive for yourself right basically doing personal growth so your higher self knows this and what ends up happening is you start to develop a lot of guilt around your addiction because you become out of it you get out of alignment out of integrity with yourself because your higher self knows that you shouldn't be overeating and you shouldn't be doing so much alcohol and you shouldn't be watching so much television but your lower self just kind of runs away with it right and that's the problem is that when you get really addicted to something is that your lower self just tends to dominate and dominate and dominate until it totally subdues the higher self even those higher self can never be totally subdued so you still have those pangs of guilt but the lower self just become so dominant that you're not able to accomplish anything in your life you basically give up all your personal power and now you're at the effect of whatever your addiction was and now you're controlled by that thing and you can't think clearly you can't be in a high consciousness state in fact you're the opposite you're in a very low consciousness state because all these addictions they basically reduce your consciousness right when you're getting that hit of food or you're getting that hit of TV or that drug the reason that it kind of feels good is because you can just sit back and totally relax so let go of everything and all of a sudden you don't need to be conscious you don't really need to think you just get pleasure and you just become like a pleasure animal just like a pleasure addict but that's not where greatness is in life that's not the higher pleasures in life right the higher pleasures in life are things like pride creative contribution sense of excitement adventure and growth and pushing yourself and being on your edge and none of that is really what addictions are about addictions are all about being very comfortable being in your comfort zone being so comfortable that you don't want to do anything with your life that can obviously become a real problem if you want to go out there and you want to live a big life like we advocate at actualised org so really addictions are in a nutshell avoidance of doing the real work you know I want you to really sit down and if you're addicted to one of these things think about what are you really avoiding you know if you're eating a lot of food what are you really avoiding with that food is it a bad marriage is it some bad family situation is it the lack of finances that you have and you're struggling to pay the bills is it the job that you really don't like maybe something else right maybe it's some past emotional trauma you're masking with this food or your your lack of willingness to take control and get yourself into shape you know whatever that might be so think about what that food is really masking and the same thing with television what does that masking for you it's a masking a certain sense of boredom a lack of purpose in life you know whatever these problems are these are the real problems and I guess the way you flip this on its head is that you say that these problems are actually interesting problems to solve this is what personal development is is really great at is helping you address these problems right so if you don't have a really good job well we've got videos on the site that will show you how to get a good job and how to create that kind of life purpose that you're really passionate about your job so that you don't need any of these drugs or other addictive things to make you feel good about your job situation and the same thing with relationships you know you got to figure out how to get your relationships in order or whatever else it is you gotta come to face to face with the real problem and do the real work that you got to do you can't keep avoiding it forever or if you do the cost is going to be super super high for you so just recognize what the real costs are you're sacrificing living a big exciting passionate life where you're really fulfilled you're sacrificing all that and a lot of success and personal power just so that you can get a little bit hit of food a little bit hit of drugs get that dirty high going with one of your addictions all right so I think you can clearly see why that's not a good trade-off in the long run right you want to think long term rather than short term all right let me cover this distinction that I have between hard addictions and soft addictions and where you should look out for for which so from this list that I talked about really we can kind of break it down loosely into soft addictions and hard ones and a lot of times people will say well I don't really have any addictions and what they really mean is they don't have any hard addictions so maybe you're not addicted to drugs maybe you're not addicted to alcohol maybe you're not a gambling addict maybe you're not addicted to porn or sex so maybe one of these is not an addiction of yours and in that case you might say that you don't have any addictions but then I would say that there's also these this list of soft addictions that the soft addictions are in some ways more pernicious because with the hard addictions at least it's obvious that you have in addictions it's kind of hard to deny when you're hooked on a drug or you're hooked on alcohol or you're losing your life savings gambling those tend to be hard to avoid for a very long time although people can become pretty good at doing even that but then the soft ones tend to be there and then also society tends to reinforce and say that that's okay you know no one says that being a drug addict is okay but things like television things like being a habitual gossip or thinking negatively all the time or being very judgmental of people or getting hooked on on the internet checking your email all the time checking your email every five minutes or how about checking your Facebook or your Twitter you know this these types of things it's a little bit harder because it's harder to draw that that clear line and say that this is bad because clearly a lot of these things you have to be doing anyways you know using the Internet is a good thing the question is are you using it too much are you using it to avoid doing your real work Facebook and Twitter can be legitimate tools but again are you using them to avoid something and are they really hindering you more than they're helping you same thing with television same thing with food you're always going to need to eat food the question is how much of it are you eating what quality of food are you eating and are you using it as an emotional crutch so the soft addictions I really want you to look out for and I think that for most of you probably the soft addiction categories actually gonna be more important because well if you're really into personal development the chances are that you're already really cognizant about eliminating the hard addictions because the hard addictions are just so nasty and give you so much pain and so much emotional turmoil in your life that you really can't have any sort of fulfillment or success in your life if you have a hard addiction the soft addiction is what they tend to do is they kind of keep you in the zone of mediocrity where you're out there maybe you're you know you're pursuing a good job and maybe you're working on your relationships and you're doing this kind of stuff but you're not getting the results that you know you could be right you're not really living to your full potential and that is because you have these soft addictions and maybe you don't even realize that you've got them maybe you're just watching a little too much TV maybe you're watching a little bit too much news maybe you're thinking too critically and too negatively to judgmentally about things too often and that you're addicted to that so you got to take take stock of that recognize it and then create a plan for how you're going to get yourself hooked off of it so with the hard addictions there's actually again the nice thing about hard addictions is that there's pretty good awareness around it there's a lot of programs that you can go out there there's books seminars audio programs video programs 12-step programs that you can join that will help you to get rid of the hard addictions as far as the soft addictions that's a little bit harder I'm sure you can find or groups for that as well and you can find books and materials on it but it's a little bit tougher and it's a little bit harder to convince yourself that it's even worth a while to get involved with something so serious for soft addiction with soft addictions that tends to really be the domain of personal development right and there you're going to have to probably take that on under your own hands and try to get yourself to work around it so with soft addictions I find that it's really good as a strategy not to aim at eliminating the addiction per se but instead replacing it right so if you're trying to do something like eliminate television as an addiction then the best way is not to just eliminate television and then have that spare time and do nothing with it because when you've got nothing to do you're going to tend to use that time to do what your body and your mind have been conditioned to do and have been have just had a habit of doing so you're going to get back into it so the best thing to do when you're trying to fix one of these addictions especially the softer ones is to replace it replace it with something positive right so if you're not going to be watching TV anymore what are you gonna be doing are you gonna be going on hikes are you going to be reading books are you going to be spending more time with your spouse or even go to the movie so you can be hanging out with your friends some combination of those or one of those is going to be a really good way to channel your attention your energy because a lot of it is about focus right as soon as you find something better something more worthwhile for you to do then you're naturally just because there's only so much time in the day and most of us are filling our schedules so much you're naturally going to start to get rid of the activities that provide at least value for you so if all the sudden let's say you start a business and you used to be a habitual TV watcher now you've got a business going you've got obligations to your clients and you're excited about your business and you're developing it all the sudden you need all the time in the world to focus on your business you don't have time to watch TV anymore so that addiction can almost fix itself and a lot of times that can be the best strategy for fixing those because otherwise it's kind of hard to get leverage on yourself to just stop watching TV but once you've got something really positive in your life something that you got to put your energy towards then it becomes much easier so having that vision and again you know why are we eliminating these addictions in the first place because you have that vision of that kind of awesome life that you want to create and you know that you can't create that kind of life if you've got monkeys on your back so that's part of the larger reason of why you're undertaking this whole initiative all right so pretty simple that's my whole spiel on addictions really take stock be honest with yourself recognize why it is that you have these addictions it's because you're trying to avoid some more fundamental problem in your life so analyze it and then commit to fixing it because the cost of not doing so is really living a big life all right so I'm going to wrap it up there go ahead if you like this like it share it leave your comments I always love to hear what your challenges are and how this material is helping you alright signing off you