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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about uncovering your childhood vows [Music] Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays I know I was feeling like I was missing out on the Christmas spirit this year because I've just been like working a lot meditating a lot working on stuff to get ready to go spend some time with my family so just kind of getting prepared for all that and I didn't really have any time to like go to stores do shopping or any of that kind of stuff so I thought I put on this hat just to get myself in mood you know it's funny this hat I got it last year like a couple years ago I was looking for like the perfect Christmas hat and I went all around Vegas I went to like all these costume stores we have some like amazing all year round costume stores cuz Vegas people party here so they sell like Christmas stuff like year round 365 days of the year and I was looking for the Hat and like they have just like bad hats that didn't fit my head coat pretty big head if you hadn't noticed and I just couldn't find a hat that I liked and at the end of the day I just gave up you know looking for the damn Hat and then finally I just go to a supermarket just to go buy some food or whatever at the end of the day because I was hungry and then I'm checking out and I see oh my god they have hats right there at the like at the checkout counter and it was like the perfect hat and that's what I'm wearing right now so anyways I hope you're gonna have good holidays I hope you're keeping your eye on the ball for 2017 and all the opportunities that that brings to you all the new stuff that you can be doing how you can be growing yourself and developing your consciousness but what I have for you today is actually a very practical episode you know some people have been whining ever since I shot that sage video becoming a sage and put that out there as a vision for you some people been whining is like Oh actual eyes that works not practical anymore all these esoteric mystical topics that I don't want to hear about well look there's still a ton of practical stuff that I'm gonna share with you I'm excited to share hundreds of practical topics but also you got appreciate that just because something's not practical for you right now doesn't mean that it's not super valuable the most abstract wisdom and advice is the most powerful it has the most potential to transform your life but I understand that you do have to work up to it right so we're going to throw you a bone here for those of you who like practical stuff here we go what we're going to talk about here is this concept that I've kind of just come up with for myself that I discovered I don't know I'm sure other people have discovered it too uh is called childhood vows and basically what this idea is referring to is that throughout your childhood as you were growing up and I'm defining childhood very loosely here from birth till about 25 years old so basically your entire young adulthood and teenagers are included as you were growing up there a lot of deep attitudes were cemented in your childhood and in your teenage years and they are locked into your mind and your brain they're wired in there and I'm not just talking about the obvious stuff which is social conditioning of course we know that the human mind gets filled with all sorts of social conditioning cultural baggage religious baggage schooling and all this kind of stuff and a lot of those beliefs are negative and harmful and limiting okay we know that we can discuss that elsewhere and I think I already have but I want to talk about something else let me point out to you that what you did beyond just getting socially conditioned is that you yourself played a big role in shaping your own attitude in your own orientation towards various facets and situations in life and that's what we're going to talk about here so when I talk about vows I mean the vows that you made the decisions that you made and it will become very clear to you as I keep going what exactly I mean by this so what I mean is is that there were if you can recall there were moments in your life which were like Forks in the road and these could have been huge epic decisions or huge catastrophes and traumas or they could have actually been and most of them probably were very minor insignificant situations that happened and then you probably never thought about them for 10 or 20 years but nevertheless there were these Forks in the roads some of them were very major some of them were just very minor but you made decisions and basically you formed an ideological core based on which fork in the road you chose did you choose to go left or right and largely you're not aware of these choices that you've made and so now you take it for granted and you have a certain personality you have certain emotional buttons and triggers you have certain ways in which you are ideological you have certain preferences you have certain values and principles which you uphold or which you move away from and that you react against and what I want to show you is that you are paying the cost for this still for these little sometimes minor Forks in the road decision that you made you created vows around these situations and that now this has kind of rigid lied and ossified you turned it into bone as it were and it's made you rather inflexible and for this you pay the cost right now in your life and let me give you some examples of how just this might work I want to give you a lot of different examples in here I want to play a little bit of a trick on you I came up with a list of examples both from my personal life some of them are and also just random examples that I came up with because one of the ways I like to teach if you haven't noticed yet is that I shower you with examples because most teachers actually don't like to give you examples and then it's very hard to figure out what the hell they're talking about based off the different abstract concepts it seems like philosophy so here's a bunch of examples but the reason I playing this trick on you is I'm not going to tell you which of these are from my personal life and which of these are just random that I came up with why because I keep noticing this problem of people projecting stuff on me like I share something that people like oh now all the sudden I understand Leo's motivation I understand why he does what he does her I understand what he said and why he said it and I understand his ego and I understand his mind and all this and what I want to make you aware of is that you're projecting a lot and you're assuming a lot and I understand that that's fine I do that with teachers too but I don't want to give you I don't want to make your job too easy right because some people get cocky about and then they write me an email or someone's like oh Leo I know I know this about you and I'm very confident that you're this way and I'm like thinking no I'm not I mean you seem to think so but that's not how it really is because honestly through these videos you know very little about me so be careful about assuming what you think you know about me what my motivations are why I do what I do and why I say what I say alright so here are some examples and the first one I'll give to you this is actually true from my life when I was probably ah like five years old back in Russia with my mom and we were like in a sort of outdoor bizarre place and there was a man there standing there eating a like a croissant or some sort of pastry and this was like early in the morning and I was standing I just took a little kid with my mom and my mom she made fun and she sort of judged or criticized this man for the way that he chewed his food so that was the situation right that was the event that occurred and then what did I do I created a vowel around that and my val was that I will never chew food in that manner myself and that was it that was the end of it that was the whole vow extremely minor thing right you would think like oh this doesn't have a large bearing on one's life does it I mean our lives had thousands of these kinds of situations but what I want to point out to you is that I'm not just talking about every situation in your life where you have to make it soon I'm talking about specifically those situations where you actually made a decision to be a certain way you made a decision to have a certain attitude towards a certain thing and there's a lot of variety in this formula which I want to trait by giving you more examples right and the importance of this is that it you then become ideological about it and you want to stick to that vow right and then of course you can become self-conscious you can become guilt ridden you can become judgmental of others or yourself and so forth so I'll talk about more of that when we finish with the example so here's another example here's an event hypothetical a kid goes to school he needs to speak up in front of the class to give a speech or a presentation or something and he gets humiliated that's the event and the vow might be he might vow that from now on I'm gonna keep my mouth shut when I'm around a large group of people that might be his vow now he didn't have to make that vow there were a hundred other possible vows he could have made based on that exact situation or he could have not made any vows at all he could have just kind of like brushed it off his shoulder and just said oh well yeah I got humiliated so wet and just moved on and then it wouldn't have been a big big deal but thirty years later this kid who now grows up and now maybe is um working as a manager in some big corporation he might still be living down this vow that he has to keep his mouth shut when he's around a large group of people and you better believe that effects how he feels how he interacts with his coworkers and so forth and in fact it might become such a big problem that he has to go to therapy spend thousands of dollars to get therapy just to discover that when he was um 13 years old in middle school or whatever that he made this vow and he might have totally forgotten about it right because it was such a thing like yeah I got humiliated but it wasn't like some catastrophe or some huge trauma so you just kind of escapes your mind let's do another event another hypothetical let's say that someone was cheated on this was a guy let's say a guy was dodon in college by his sweetheart girlfriend this was his first girlfriend he got cheated on got his heart broken so then what does he do he makes this vow he says I'm never going to be loyal to another woman and then that's how he lives and that's how he interacts with all future women that he gets into relationships with do you think that's going to create problems for him in his life yeah you better believe it you better believe it and some people might think well leo yeah of course you know if I got cheated all by my heart by my college sweetheart or whatever then of course I too would have made that vow no that's not the case at all that is not always the universal reaction to when you get cheated on is to make a vow that you yourself will now cheat on others there are a dozen other potential vows you could have made or again you could have not made a vow at all it's very important understand that point all right let's consider another hypothetical let's say the event is that you're a kid in school and you get chastised by your teacher for being messy let's say you're in elementary school maybe you have a messy desk a messy backpack the teacher sees this she chastises you for it and the validus this kid makes is from now on I'm going to be a good little boy or a good little girl and that's his vow can you imagine how that can shape his life how significant that can be that one vowel such a broad sweeping statement as I will be a good boy or a good girl from now on that's a huge thing and you might say well Leo but what's the problem with that I mean here he's saying that yeah he's going to be good or she's going to be good so isn't that a good thing what's wrong with that well this goes back to the problem of shoulds and moralization which I've talked about in the past you should go check out those episodes my rant against morality and moralizing specifically because the problem here is that when you put up this valve I will always be the good boy or the good girl I hope you can see how many problems that can create in business in relationships in your interactions with people for example you might now avoid confrontation for the rest of your life because you want to be a good boy or a good girl or you might guilt yourself anytime that you make a mess you might spill the milk as an adult and then you feel guilty about it because you made this vow that you're always going to be good and in your mind spilling the milk well that's just you being messy again and now you have this neurotic reaction in your life where you need to be hyper vigilant about any kind of messiness everything needs to be spot spot clean and perfect and then of course when you get into a relationship with somebody and they don't have that same kind of vow now you've got conflict in the relationship because you're this anal neurotic about everything not being messy but your partner might be a little bit more messy than you are and then you have conflict and then you break up and this pattern can continue for decade and decade and decade and decade see how this works here's another hypothetical let's say you have a kid who doesn't really know much about life and he's watching some movie let's say he's watching Star Wars and in Star Wars there's like Darth Vader and Darth Vader and and Luke Skywalker our fighting forces of good and evil and the kid sees this can you know the movie is quite emotional maybe it stirs up some emotions in him maybe even makes him cry a little bit whatever and then at the end of that movie he says you know what that Darth Vader he was really evil I will never be like Darth Vader I will never join the dark side and now imagine that this kid will live for 50 60 70 years with this vow lodged in his brain of he will never join the dark side he will never do anything that might resemble the dark side now you might say well Leo that's good that's what we want we want to teach our kids not to join the dark side I mean are you say that what he should have done the opposite of that no again you have to be careful here here's the problem with moralization is that when you feed a kid who isn't very experienced about life this idea that he should never do anything resembling the dark side on the surface that sounds great but also now he's going to be guilting himself for his whole life worrying about whether the choice he's going to make in his relationship or in his business or wherever else might resemble something superficial that he saw in a movie and that he might think oh well if I say that thing there if I confront this person here if I need to have a frank conversation with somebody about some thing that maybe that's like me joining the dark side and I don't want that and then that screws him up and he needs to go to therapy and pay thousands of dollars and spend years trying to find the source and the source might be something just as innocent as this try to get it okay good now next hypothetical let's say you have an uncle favorite uncle of yours as a kid and he gets sucked into some sort of religious cult and then you find out about it through the grapevine and your family okay that's the event what's the vow well your vow might be you know what my uncle got so screwed over by this cult that I vowed to defend atheism and rationality I'm going to be a skeptic I'm going to become a scientist I'm going to defend everything that's rational and logical now you might say well that sounds great what's wrong with that but again every time you make a rigid vow like that it creates problems because now you're going to be a rationalist Crusader that's what you're going to be and you're not going to have an ability to to connect with people who maybe are not cult leaders and you have no risk of getting sucked into a cult but as an adult you're going to be around all sorts of people with different beliefs different religious traditions and so forth and now you're going to hold all religions as evil and something to crusade against because of why well because of this one rash judgment you made based on one specific circumstance of your uncle getting sucked into some nasty evil cult you see and you over generalize you went too far your thinking became black and white and now actually what happens is that you commit the very same evil that that cult committed with your uncle because now you're sort of stuck in a cult of atheism we reacting against religion and if you don't think that atheists do this oh boy you haven't seen some of the bloodthirsty atheists and rationalists out there who are more bloodthirsty than many religious people can be a scary thing so watch out here's another example for you hypothetical let's say that you're a kid and you're maybe you're like fifteen years old and maybe you're interested in like starting your own business or something so you're starting a business maybe there's like somebody you want to contact on the internet maybe some mentor you look up to and you contact them and you write them an email you're like oh yeah I want to maybe become a business partner with you let's do a joint venture and here's my idea here's my proposal for what I can do for you I want to work for you something like that right and then what do you get back you get back a rejection email that says no thanks kid not interested boom or maybe even worse than that you get back silence nothing at all and so what you do is you make a vow you say this was so painful to me because it hurts you right it hurts when you get rejected so this rejection by emic via email was so painful that I vow to never reject anyone as cold-heartedly as this person rejected me and you might say well that's good that means the person is now going to grow up to be this nice compassionate good human being oh no oh no no that's not how it's going to work how it's really going to work is that this person will now be neurotic and now be putting up a fake front of compassion so for example let's say somebody applies to his list he grows up now he's like 40 years old and somebody applies to him now for a job writes him an email hey you know sir I would like to work for you yeah yeah yeah right now he reads this email and he thinks back and this has happened on a subconscious level he thinks back - uh when he was 15 years old this happened him and he's like well this this person isn't right for my business like he doesn't have the qualifications I'm reading his email he's clearly not qualified he's not a good fit for my company anymore but I would feel so bad if I rejected him I wouldn't want to tell him no so oh I think I can give him a try let's give him a try let's hire him anyways even though I can't afford to hire him and even though he's not a right fit I'll just hire him anyways because I I mean I'd rather do that than break my vow I vowed to never reject anybody as harshly as he rejected me you know thirty years ago and so then this leads to all the problems that that leads to see see how it works it's very sneaky - this stuff can be very subtle here's another example hypothetical as a kid you're in your car and your parents are driving and then you see a homeless man a bum on the street corner and then you ask your dad like hey what's that what's that guy doing there it's like oh yeah it's a bum that's what happens to you we don't get a good job and then at that point you vowed to yourself I will never become like that bum I must have a good job can you see the kind of problem that creates now you're going to be neurotically stuck on this notion of having a good job and that's going to be a pattern throughout the whole rest of your life that can create all sorts of problems and complications here's another hypothetical your mom's company let's say screwed her over and decided not to cover her medical expenses with insurance when she has some sort of like serious disease and so this created some strain in your family right and there was some anger in your family at the company because they were supposed to pay for it but they didn't because of some technicality okay and you're a kid you're just listening to this you don't really understand the whole situation and you just see that anger directed towards the company and then you vow to yourself I will never work for a corporation ever because those corporations are evil look at what they did to my mom I will never work for operation and then when you grow up think of all the problems that will cause you think of the kind of resentment and it's little subtle passive-aggressive attitude you're going to have towards business in general towards corporations that's going to create problems for you and you're not going to be open to the possibility of maybe a corporation who's actually doing good in the world and offering you a position they might offer you this sweet position and you're what you're gonna do you're going to reject you're saying no that corporation is an evil corporation just like that corporation who screwed over my mom they're all the same and why are you saying that well because when you were young you created this vow this vow is based on very limited world experience and so it led to this kind of black and white dichotomy and now you're using that filter as an adult in a much more complex grayscale world where black and white doesn't apply so well and that creates problems for you and finally I like this example hypothetical let's say your dad was a someone in the community where you grew up who had a lot of status and good reputation maybe he was a very successful business person or just a very successful community leader in your church or something something like that right and you grew up you're a kid you were looking up to your dad and you made a vow because maybe there was some moment where your dad got an award or maybe he got mentioned in a magazine a journal something like that and you know your dad was proud of it your mom was proud of your whole family was proud of it maybe you went to celebrate it and then you made a vow and you said you know what when I grow up I'm going to be just like my dad in fact I'm gonna have more status and more reputation than my dad bit because when you're a kid you think very simplistically about the world and you think like well status and reputation sounds are a great thing what could be wrong with seeking status repete you have no idea about that all the problems and evils that can happen with seeking status and reputation you just see the smile on your dad's face and you think you know what if my dad is so happy with status and reputation from getting his picture posted in a magazine article that I'm going to do the same thing and then as an adult you could use that to justify any kind of evil [ __ ] like you might screw over a bunch of stockholders just to make a good quarterly report doing some sort of shady you know accounting to get a good quarterly report so that then you can get your picture posted in a magazine so you have the status and the reputation even though the way that you acquire that status reputation was a um less than ideal and leads to all sorts of internal conflicts and a breaking of integrity you see or maybe you're just spending the rest of your life chasing status and reputation um Donald Trump alright so anyways you know you see how this works right so what is a vow the way that I'm defining a vows is follow it's a choice that you make about how you will act because the world is a certain way a choice you make about how you're going to act in the future because the world is perceived by you to be a certain way you have to understand that this notion that the world is a certain way there is no such thing it's always a perspective it's always an interpretation it's never the case that the world that you know the way the world is and then that then justifies you acting a certain way those are all interpretive highly subjective highly dependent upon your emotions at a time and your opinions and your ideology you see so what's really important here is I want you to actually go back into the past and recall as well as you can the moments that shaped your life the most and sometimes it's not the most catastrophic stuff sometimes is the little stuff that shapes your character and your personality now you should already start to see what the problems are with having strong vows but let me make it very explicit the problems are fundamentally that they are mechanical as opposed to conscious they are inflexible they tend to be very simplistic and black-and-white which does not work well in a nuanced grayscale world especially the world of adults especially the world of high-functioning individuals right black and white thinking works when you're doing very simple mechanical jobs when you don't have a high ambition we don't have a life purpose mechanical then can sort of work fine although it still leads to problems black and white thinking can soar to get you by but if you want to be a high-performance individual you want to be highly successful you want to be sort of a superstar or a rockstar in your career you want to have a strong life purpose you want to be a leader you want to be a visionary you want to innovate you want to change the world black and white thinking is not going to work it's going to stop you dead in your tracks it's also founded upon very limited experience these vows as an adult you have a lot more life experience you understand that as an adult when you have one of these kind of Forks in the roads you don't make a strong Val the way you did as a kid I mean you still can but not nearly as strong because you have more life experience as a kid it's very easy to misinterpret the most innocent of things right for example a kid writes an email to his favorite role model his role model doesn't respond but the kid doesn't know that hey Dad like if I wrote an email to Barack Obama as my role model as a kid right the kid doesn't know that Barack Obama gets like a billion in a lad a from everyone you know from terrorists that want to kill him to like thousands of school kids so he can't personally respond to all these emails it's not possible right so the kid gets no response but he reinterprets that is like oh that must mean Barack Obama secretly hates me or he rejected me simply because he doesn't understand that the President had to say he's a very popular guy he's probably not going to respond to your email see so that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about and what this results in emotionally speaking a lot of emotional problems come from so a lot of therapy I think stems from this very issue of talking about the need for therapy rather because when you start to feel guilty stressful when you start moralizing to yourself into others you have conflicts with people you become judgemental you create all sorts of rationalizations and justifications in your mind for why the world has to be a certain way this closes you down and it basically just gets you stuck in life because you just kind of like when you're a kid you're this like amorphous blob of water you're very liquid you can move you're very flexible and then as an adult slowly you know that water's like the you're putting that water into a freezer it just kind of freezes congeals solidifies and then just like turns into rock solid stone and then you can't budge it for the rest of your life and then people from their 20s onward are just like these rocks these stone golems who don't have the requisite flexibility the requisite variety or creativity necessary to be highly a highly effective creative individuals who are able to really solve problems and work around complicated nuanced obstacles so that's the problem now our goal in this work self-actualization and consciousness work in general spirituality is to have liberation liberation from all these rules and strictures and to use consciousness instead rather than mechanical rules or mechanical vows or habits and to be flexible that's our goal and to also not be reactive to not be living our life in reaction against something you know if someone hurt you in the past you have to let that go you can't live with that [ __ ] for the rest of your life is going to destroy your life and all the potential that you have it's not going to do anyone any good not to that person not to yourself so this is where forgiveness is a good is a good principle to practice right because so many people are just living their current life their current life what it basically is is just a collection of reaction responses knee-jerk reactions mechanical reactions habituated overtime against all the bad [ __ ] that happened to them that now they're trying to avoid that's how most people live their life and that's a terrible terribly unconscious and terribly a limited way to live your life you don't want that so what's the solution simple its awareness and understanding and for this I got a very practical exercise for you so here it is I got an assignment it's your homework assignment for this episode you're going to set aside 30 to 60 minutes in silence you're going to sit down with several sheets of paper or a small notebook and you're going to try to recall every single decisive moment or situation that occurred to you from your birth up to up until maybe 25 years old right from birth to 25 and you're just going to make a list you're going to brainstorm them sort of in chronological order as well as you can and just get it all out and you don't need to write paragraphs just like short little phrases of like oh um my teacher chastised me for farting in class okay that was one and then another one might be um you know I got rejected by my high school sweetheart okay that's another one another one might be I got an F in math class okay you got an F in math class and then another one might be you know I got rejected from my favorite college okay write that one down you know another one might be you know I order some food and it made me sick okay that's another one right and so just kind of just brainstorm them spit them all out you probably have a hundred or more of these just make a nice long list and keep it short and don't mention what the vows were yet because that is where you're going to apply my worksheet I have a worksheet for you click the link down below download the worksheet there there's questions that you're going to be applying to this list that you generate so generate the list first then apply all these questions and there's two parts to the to the worksheet so do all that and you will have some amazing insight into why you are who you are where personality came from where a lot of your attitudes and habits came from and just that awareness alone can start to release you from the bondage that all these vows and rules have been keeping you enslaved under alright that's it I'm signing off please click that button for me post your comments down below share this Epps with a friend come check out actualize I don't this is my newsletter right here and my website come to the forum check out the forum I just released a a big long article that people seem to like about how to become enlightened called Leo's practical guide to enlightenment so go check that one out there's other cool resources you can find on the forum check out my life purpose course but basically just stay tuned here because hopefully you can see that the information that I'm providing to you here is potentially life transforming and what's really difficult for me to communicate to people is just how life transforming it will be if you just stay on board with this process you take action you do the [ __ ] assignments you watch every single week and don't make excuses about it and just keep going keep going don't let any obstacles or doubts stop you this is a very practical matter if you disagree with things that I say just keep [ __ ] going you don't need to accept everything that I say but you do need to keep going you need to keep educating yourself about the potential that you have that's what I'm going to be focused on for the next year and more as I'm releasing content as I'm showing you not only the techniques for how to actualize your potential but even more importantly which very few people share with you is your full potential very few people even in the self-help field who can give you amazing techniques will actually show you the full scope of your potential as a human being that's extremely rare and one of the reasons is because they don't know even people teaching you enlightened stuff they still don't [ __ ] know what your full potential is see my passion is life is finding what the full potential is of things that's sort of my forte so stick with me and I guarantee that you will discover things about yourself and about life that will blow your mind just absolutely blow your mind so sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more and of course happy holidays you