June 22, 2022 • 27 mins
One of the hallmarks of any healthy relationship is trust. But that also includes the relationship with yourself.
How many times have you had a career reinvention that you've put on hold because you didn't trust yourself to make the right choice? How many things have you not created in the world because you didn't trust your instinct or vision? Maybe a relationship because you didn't trust your internal picker, so you ran away or sabotaged it even though it was a healthy relationship?
What is it that's holding everything back?
This week, we go deep and Dan is going to talk directly to your inner child to help you get to the root of your self trust issues so you can finally create more time, money and freedom. Plus you'll get the counter-intuitive strategy to stay connected to your creativity and inter-guru.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of the hallmarks of any healthy relationship is trust,
but that also includes the relationship with yourself. And how
many times has there been a career reinvention that you've
put on hold because you didn't trust yourself to make
the right choice. How many amazing books, screenplays, ted talks
(00:23):
have not been given to the world because you didn't
trust your instincts, your vision, or your voice. How many
relationships romantically have been sabotaged because you didn't trust your
internal picker, and so you ran away when you met
somebody who might have been healthy, that that tried to
love you, you didn't believe that it would stick around.
(00:45):
What is the thing that's holding everything back? Is that
that we have a societal confidence deficiency? Are we all
just a neurotic, paranoid mess. This week on Life Amplified,
we are going to go deep and I'm going to
talk directly to your inner child to help you get
to the roots of your self trust issues so you
(01:05):
can finally create more time, money, and freedom. And I'm
gonna give you the counterintuitive strategy to help you stay
connected to your creativity and inner g rout Welcome back.
What is an amplified life It's having amplified relationships with
people who support and encourage you to be your best.
(01:25):
It's having amplified energy to conquer the challenges of the day.
And it's having an amplified career, one that's meaningful to you,
the world, and your bank accounts. I'm Dan Mason helping
you discover your calling and create an amplified life on
your terms. This is the Life Amplified Podcast. Everyone who
(01:50):
comes into my coaching practice wants the same thing. We
want more time, we want more money, we want more freedom,
particularly the freedom to do meaning will work that's aligned
with our soul's purpose. But for some reason you come
up against an internal block. Some people tell me it's
a lack of motivation, that they just don't have to
(02:11):
discipline or the commitment to make themselves do the things
that they know will create the wealth that will create
the success. Why do we do that? Though? What ends
up happening here is we just fall into patterns of sabotage.
And I don't even like the word sabotage in my
coaching containers because nobody has ever woken up in the
(02:32):
morning with your list of goals and said, gee, how
can I f this all up today, So it's not sabotage.
What it is is a set of protection patterns that
we're using to keep ourselves safe. We're trying to keep
ourselves safe from emotional annihilation, rejection, failure, and this is
how it manifests when we don't trust ourselves. Do you
seek reassurance and advice from other people instead of tuning
(02:55):
into how you feel about a situation or an opportunity
in your life? Do you solicit opinions from other people
around you when there's an important decision to be made.
You might be a person who just postpones making a
decision altogether, so you procrastinate. On some level. It's easier
for you to sit in an energy of uncertainty or
(03:18):
not knowing, rather than facing the fear associated with making
the wrong decision. Some of you are avoiding tuning into
your needs and desires altogether. You're going to numbing or
dissociated behaviors. You're scrolling on Instagram, You're doomed scrolling on Facebook.
You're having a few glasses of wine at night, you're
binge watching uh. You know, the new season of Stranger
(03:41):
Things is a way to not be present with those
desires and that urge that's coming up within you to
live your purpose. Uh, there's also some of you who
are ruminating on the past. You're obsessing over whether you
should have taken a different path years ago, rather than
realize in the only place that you have the power
(04:02):
of the resources to create the life that you want
is in the present moment. A lot of times we're
quick to believe negative opinions of ourself and for my
spiritual and wooboo folks, you know who you are. Sometimes
when you don't trust yourself, how often do you start
waiting to consult your oracle cards, your angel cards. You're
(04:24):
waiting until you talk to your psychic or your spiritual healer.
You know, there's a lot of people are like, oh, Dan,
I can't start my book or I can't quit my
job right now because Mercury is in retrograde, and you
know that my psychic told me now is not the
time to sign a contract or make a decision. I
used to fall into that trap a lot. I actually
forced myself once to launch a coaching program, a group
(04:47):
program in Mercury retrograde, just so I could have the
success improved to myself that the astrology has nothing, nothing
to do with my ability to generate um. But all
these at the end of the day, we're talking about
the symptoms, and really there's one core reason that you
don't trust yourself, and why I'm going to give you
(05:10):
something that might blow your mind right now. It usually
comes down to this, and I have coached people now
across eighteen countries, But when you don't trust yourself, it's
secretly that you're afraid that if you were to feel
totally happy and satisfied with your life, your motivation to
do things might actually dissipate and eventually vanish. This is
(05:34):
such a pattern that's come up, and especially in some
of my group coaching containers this year, we're having this conversation.
People who don't trust themselves are terrified of feeling good.
They're afraid if they feel good over time, like really
every day waking up feeling good, that their motivational drive
will disappear. And why is that such a survival threat
(05:56):
to people? Why at a primal level are we afraid
of losing our motivation. If you're like many high performers
I coach, it's because you were taught that your inherent value,
your worthiness your ability to be loved was all about
being motivated, striving, and achieving. You grew up in some
sort of environment where love was conditional and it was
(06:19):
handed out freely. If you made the honor roll, if
you were a star athlete, if you you know, excelled
either on the football field and cheerleading student government, that
that was the path to achievement. You gotta be motivated,
you gotta work hard, you gotta study, you gotta you know,
master the s A T the a c T. You
gotta get into a good college. And somewhere in there
(06:40):
we learn that love is the reward that we get
for doing, and that we don't get it for being.
So this becomes the conundrum for many people who don't
trust themselves. If you allowed life to get too good,
if things were just no more problems and you lived
in the flow of life in a state of ease enjoy, well,
(07:01):
then what I might not even be motivated to create
a next level, and therefore I'm not worthy of love.
So this shows up a lot in corporate America, and
it shows up with a lot of my entrepreneurial clients
because they will do everything in their powers subconsciously to
keep themselves in a stress and anxiety loop. And what
(07:23):
will that look like? It means like, even though you
create so much success you climb that next ladder in
your career, you can't seem to escape your problems. Maybe
you're crushing it at work, but you can't really find
that love and satisfaction and you're in the intimacy that
you want in your romantic relationships. Maybe you're doing really
well at work, but you can't beat your addictions and
(07:44):
those compulsive patterns. A lot of times, for many people,
they will plateau income wise, so they'll just barely make enough,
and they always seem to get to one certain level
no matter what they're doing. Uh. And even when you're
making more money and you get a promotion, then you
start spending money because you sort of stay in this
(08:06):
loop of just barely having enough. But when we stay
in the money pattern, there was there was actually just
a new study that came out that one in three
households where people are making two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year or more are still living paycheck to paycheck. Now, yes,
it's inflation and there's a higher cost of living and
the price of goods and services? Is it an all
(08:27):
time high and gas is high? But do you think
that maybe there might be something driving that that a
quarter of a million dollars for some people just isn't enough.
The money is going out as quickly as it comes in.
And this one shows up with a lot of high
performers too. You forget about your biggest successes in life,
but you persistently dwell on your worries. So why are
(08:51):
all these things we're talking today about, how these are
all symptoms of not trusting yourself? And this is a
quote that totally rattled me when I saw this from
Eader Shattered. He says, you don't trust yourself because you
weren't always trustworthy. Now we're going to go back to childhood.
We're going to talk about some of that inner child
work today. You don't trust yourself now because you were
(09:14):
born into a world where you learn not to trust yourself.
You were pretty much conditioned and indoctrinated into a world
that made you do things that you don't want to do.
In some cases, growing up as a child, you had
to do things that no human would want to do,
things that you couldn't even that you couldn't be trusted
(09:34):
to do without being coerced. Now we can look at
this in terms of big tat traumas. There's a lot
of homes where there was abuse going on. There's a
lot of times when you grew up in home where
you had to lie for your family, particularly if there
were patterns of addiction or alcoholism, and you didn't want
to do that, but you had to keep up appearances
for the world. But even beyond the bigger traumas, and
(09:57):
we're not here to diminish that at all, I want
you to think about the smaller ways that you learned
not to trust yourself, and all the things that you
were forced and coerced into doing without having a rationale. Y,
you have to study hard, you gotta put all your
money away in the piggy bank. You gotta eat your
vegetables every day. Growing up, for me, it was you
(10:19):
gotta eat your Brussels sprout. Stand And this was back
in the days when Brussels sprouts were just a boiled
mess on a plate. Brussels sprouts had gone through a
glow up because we've learned about oh, balsamic vinegarrette, turkey, bacon, feta, cheese.
But as a kid, I'm like, why do I want
to eat this boiled ship? Now? I don't want to
eat this? And I was told, well, you have to
because I said so. You know, the adult world is
(10:41):
forcing children to take all these actions that they don't
want to do. Think about this. Your parents, your teachers,
a church, uh, your superiors all like forcing you to
do the right things and not the things that you
don't want to do. And We're not here to bash
any of this. And I'm not even here to say
(11:02):
that that's necessarily wrong, because haven't we all had the
experience as adults where we reach a certain age where
we realize, oh wait, some of those adults growing up
were actually right. Maybe I should be doing a better
job of saving money. Hey you know what, maybe I
shouldn't eat pancakes for dinner every night. Maybe I need
(11:23):
something green on my plate. And as you grow into
an adult, you start to create your own rationale, right,
you realize that there are benefits to discipline and the
structure in your life. Where there's a moment where we
realize that focus, commitment, finishing the things that we start
are actually good ideas. But underneath all of this right,
(11:49):
you're battling with your inner child. Because the inner child
learned that to be structured and disciplined was not to
have agency, was not to have choice, and on some
level it wasn't to have fun. So the problem arrives.
And look, this happens for many people later in life. Sometimes,
(12:11):
you know, it's fifty sixty year old clients of mine
who come to this realization. Right, they know that they
want success, but they're not doing the things that they
should do to create it. So why don't we trust ourselves. Well,
you're new to this place, right, Like you're wanting all
the things in your life. You want the wealth. But
the child inside of you, your inner child, as years
(12:34):
of experience rebelling against all the ship that you were
coerced into doing as a child. You know, there's a
child that the inner child says, no, I don't want
to do things because I have to. And the minute
that adult you, future you, says now we probably should
save and have an investment portfolio, we should probably stop
(12:54):
drinking wine five times a night. Inner child has checked out.
It's going, uh, no way, f you. I want my freedom.
So a lot of times those of us who are
resistant to structure and we're not doing the things that
we should do. It's because there was a part of
us subconsciously that that that equates structure with a lack
(13:16):
of freedom, and then it just starts to get worse, right,
because we try to manage these parts of ourselves by
doing the same the same tricks and coercion tactics that
the adults in our life used on us growing up,
but we try to do it to ourselves. We create
artificial reward systems. Right, how many times have you said, well,
(13:37):
I'll take myself in the shopping spree if I lose
that fifteen pounds and eat healthy, or hey, if I
work really hard and start my business, then I'll go
take myself on that vacation or the cruise that I want.
There is a whole industry right now of these apps
that are essentially to do lists that are the gold
(13:57):
Star shortlist for adults, and they rarely ever work. The
habit tracking apps they don't work because the more that
you're trying to coerce yourself to do the things that
you have to do, the more the inner child rebels.
So that part of you that used to hate the
adults for trying to control them. Now you're in an
(14:19):
internal struggle because you secretly hate yourself. You're lashing out
and saying, hey, I just want to have some more fun.
So rather than sit down to write your book, rather
than sit down to start your your business plan, rather
than meal prepping on a Sunday, you're blowing off the afternoon.
You're playing video games your day, drinking at a bar,
(14:40):
You're eating all the junk food, maybe watching uh binge,
watching TV shows that you love from twenty years ago.
And that's the cycle that we end up in. The
inner child doesn't want to do the things that we
know we should do. We try to force it by
placing more structure, and as a response mounts, the inner
(15:01):
child rebels harder, and then we get into more irresponsible behavior.
And then the end result in all this is that
we don't trust ourselves because every time we say that
we're going to do the thing that we're going to do,
every time we say that, oh my god, next month,
I'm going to start the meal plan, or Hey, I'm
going to start waking up earlier and working out every day.
(15:23):
Hey I'm going to I'm going to enroll the first
three clients in my new coaching business that I want
to start on the side, but we don't follow through.
You're just taking a little more money out of the
self trust bank, and you don't trust yourself at all.
So what is the solution. Here's the counterintuitive solution to
the problem. Give your inner child the thing that it
(15:46):
always wanted. Give your inner child the thing that it
believes that it has to sabotage your life in order
to steal a little bit of in the moment. Give
your inner child the thing it doesn't trust you to
provide because you've never really had it. What is it?
Fucking fun? Joy, good times, a sense of play, Rather
(16:11):
than trying to delay your gratification and making it making
it contingent upon getting more results in your life down
the road, rather than making fun the reward you get
for doing the right thing, how about you cultivate more
of it in the present. And I want you to
think for a second, how was it responded to in
(16:34):
your life when you wanted to spend too much time
having fun as a child growing up? For me, like
I remember in eighth grade, I junior high I got
really into basketball and I wanted so bad to play
on the junior high basketball team, and I went out
for the team and I made it. But my mom
would never actually let me go to the practices, which
(16:57):
is problematic when you're on a sports team. If I
didn't do the right thing, if I didn't say the
right thing to my mother, anytime a chore wasn't done,
she would make me come home. So I end up
missing half the practices in junior high, which is one
of the reasons I rarely played. Well, okay, look, the
real reason I didn't play is also I wasn't an athlete,
and I kind of sucked at basketball, let's be honest.
(17:19):
But it didn't help me that I never got to
go to any of the practices. So that fun, that connection,
that sense of play that I would have gotten with
my teammates with organized sports was always taken away from me.
Uh when I wasn't doing air quote the right thing
is I grew up and I got a little bit older.
In high school. I always found the Spring Musical that
(17:42):
was my thing. I was like the acting that was
the acting door who always had the lead in the
Spring Musical. And it would never fail that I would
get about a third of the way through the rehearsal process,
and I would be so it up. It's the one
thing that kind of kept me going in high school
when we were having a lot of problems at home
and my Aaron's marriage wasn't great, my mom's mental health
wasn't great. But it was always held over my head
(18:05):
that like literally my directors would have to call my
mom on the phone and and beg her to let
me continue to stay in the play. So this idea
of fun for me, it was always something that was
never really safe to have. It was just going to
be taken away from me anyway, and my life became
(18:26):
about having to obey. It became about having to conform.
And when I look back on that a lot right now,
understanding my mom's mental health challenges, part of the reason
my mom wanted to control so much to kind of
keep me in the house with her is because she
was lonely. My dad was working all the time, she
didn't have that connection with her husband, and she started
looking to me, the oldest son, to hold space for her,
(18:49):
to be that safe masculine presence in her life, which
is actually the complete reversal of what a healthy parent
child relationship should be. The parents should be providing safety
for the child, not the child's responsibility to keep a
parent feeling emotionally safe. But this comes up with a
lot of my clients. Now, this is that's just some
examples from my life. I have a client right now
(19:12):
who grew up literally, at like age nine or ten,
working in a sweatshop environment. Her dad got sick at
an early age. Her mom was working in these factories
and working in a sweatshop and taking the children in
just to create more money and more hours to keep
the family afloat. So play was never even on the table.
(19:36):
Wasn't a safe thing to have. You couldn't have play.
Your duty was just to work to keep the family afloat.
Another one of my clients grew up in a family where,
and this is a conversation we've been having this year,
grew up in a family where, at age ten or eleven,
she started getting sold out by her parents to become
the go to babysitter in the neighborhood. So on Friday nights,
(19:57):
she's staying in a house by herself at age eleven,
babysitting like three year old kids, and never had that
experience of a sense of play, and the money that
she was making wasn't even hers. Some of that money
had to go toward the family, right, So there's this
whole feeling that my money is not my own, which
as an adult manifested. And hey, she started making a
(20:20):
lot of money in corporate America, multiple six figures, and
then she would spend it the minute that it came
in because she was so afraid, oh my god, I
got to spend this on me before somebody else takes
it from me. So even though you know it's a pattern.
We were talking about the new study that said, you know,
people making over a quarter of a million dollars right
now one in three or still living to paycheck to paycheck,
(20:40):
there's some internal programming going on in there. It plays
out in a variety of ways and so many families.
I don't know what it is for you specifically because
we haven't spoken yet, but if you're inner child never
had a safe environment to play and work, and achievement
became way to get to love and in some place,
(21:02):
a way to get to survival or safety, you're going
to repeat that as an adult, and you're going to
be in this push and pull of wanting to do
the right thing, wanting to put more structure and discipline
into your life, and at the same time wanting to
rebel and and just give a middle finger to structure
and discipline. So where do we go from here? Right?
(21:26):
What becomes the answer? How do you begin to put
more play into your life? This is something for me
that I'm actually getting back to after a couple of
years of lockdown and facing a lot of challenges that
many entrepreneurs were, of having to pivot and having to
get creative and different offerings, and and holding a lot
of space for supporting my clients. One of the big
(21:47):
realizations that I had this year is I wasn't doing
a great job of still creating a sense of play
and fun in my life living in in lockdown for
two years with me and a dog in a city
that I had pretty recently moved to. When I came
here to San Diego, I didn't have like that social
support around me. I was very focused on keeping my
(22:08):
business going because it was the only thing that felt
like it was in control in my life. But over
the last two years I had lost all connection to
that sense of play. So one of the big commitments
in my life that I'm making to address that play
is actually getting back into performing. Um. I went for
the first time ever in my life. I've always done
community theater is just an outlet as an adult, right
(22:31):
we're just doing some little local theater productions. Last night,
for the first time ever, I went to an audition
at a professional theater in San Diego, which I was
totally intimidated by, and my ego had all these reasons
why shouldn't do it? Oh, Dan, you should really be
focused on your business. It's a weird time in the economy.
(22:52):
You need to be innovating and working hard. Even up
until like thirty minutes before I left for the audition,
I was ready to cancel it. But I went last
night and I did it, and I'm proud to say
I got a call back for the show. So I've
got my callback audition for a professional theater next week.
And for me, it's not It is literally nothing more
(23:12):
than a sense of adding fun into my life. And
when I walked into that audition last night, it was
the most joyous and fun and playful and alive that
I've actually felt since before the pandemic, which for me,
I knew I was in the right place. So this
is what I want you to think about in your life.
What are those pathways to joy for you? Because it's
(23:34):
been true in my business the whole seven years that
I've been an entrepreneur, the more fun I am having,
the more money I make. Even last year when things
were still sketchy and we're coming out of lockdown, the
three most profitable months of my business were the three
months I was going to the horse races down the
road at del Mar Racetrack three days a week, which
(23:56):
some of you are like, what the hell, Dan, how
could that possibly be fun? But that is a way
I connected to my dad and grandfather. Growing up seven
and eight years old, I would go to the horse
races with them, So I started doing that last summer.
Is a way just to get out again and something
that I enjoy. I realized that's like a nine year
old man hobby whenever I walk into a racetrack and
(24:18):
the youngest person there. But going there and doing that,
my business was making record income in those months. So
the question for you, if you want to build more
of a sense of self trust the ideas that you have,
got to get your inner child on board that doing
the things that you need to do moving forward. Placing
(24:39):
more structure, more discipline into your life isn't also going
to further shackle you from having joy, connection and play.
So what is the thing that seven year old you
would be lit up to do right now? I don't
care if it's finger painting. I don't care if it's
(25:02):
chalk drawing on the sidewalk. I don't care if it's
going to a dance class or what it is that.
Think about what is that for you? What is seven
year old you trying to do? As you allow yourself
to have more fun, you'll stop self flagellating, you'll stop
beating yourself up that you're not doing enough, that you're
(25:24):
not working hard enough. It's interesting, like for a lot
of people, even in self development, like once they go
on a personal growth path, then they have to become
the best at self development. Right, instead of having fun,
they're looking for another coaching program or another seminar, another
retreat to go to. So then that just becomes something
else they have to be good at. Right, It's no
(25:46):
longer a sense of enjoyment, it's just something that's that
you're showing up for out of a sense of obligation
and duty. So to recap today, if you want to
stay committed to your goals, you've got to get your
inner child on board, because there is a part of
you that equates structure with lack of choice, lack of agency,
and lack of fun. Build the fun into your life first,
(26:10):
build the fun and play in and as your inner
child starts trusting you to show up for it, to
give it a safe environment to be fully expressed, you're
going to realize that those internal blocks, the procrastin nation,
that doubting your intuition, the seeking the approval of other people,
will start to dissipate. All right, If you're listening to this,
(26:34):
be sure to screenshot the podcast uploaded to Instagram. Tag
me at c sc Dan Mason, and be sure to
share what is your commitment? What are you going to
do to embrace more play into your life? I love
you so much for listening, and I think that this
is an important message for many reasons right now. Uh
Number one, there is so much drama and negativity in
(26:56):
the world and on the news. I think one of
the sees ways that we can all release the pressure,
valve and just self regulate is to embrace that childlike
sense of play in our lives again, If we could
allow ourselves to build more safe connections with people who
are like minded, rather than scrolling and arguing with strangers
(27:17):
who don't believe the things that we believe, you're gonna
find that you're going to regulate so much easier. So
and if you need some additional help to work through
those internal blocks, trust me, if you want to make
that inner child feel safe, it is really good to
have some support to help hold you accountable and to
have a safe coaching container to facilitate that moving forward.
(27:38):
You can get more information on my coaching programs by
going to my website Creative Soul Coaching dot net. In
the meantime, turned down the volume on your negativity, turn
up the volume on your purpose so you can live
life amplified. Talk to you next time,
One of the hallmarks of any healthy relationship is trust,
but that also includes the relationship with yourself. And how
many times has there been a career reinvention that you've
put on hold because you didn't trust yourself to make
the right choice. How many amazing books, screenplays, ted talks
(00:23):
have not been given to the world because you didn't
trust your instincts, your vision, or your voice. How many
relationships romantically have been sabotaged because you didn't trust your
internal picker, and so you ran away when you met
somebody who might have been healthy, that that tried to
love you, you didn't believe that it would stick around.
(00:45):
What is the thing that's holding everything back? Is that
that we have a societal confidence deficiency? Are we all
just a neurotic, paranoid mess. This week on Life Amplified,
we are going to go deep and I'm going to
talk directly to your inner child to help you get
to the roots of your self trust issues so you
(01:05):
can finally create more time, money, and freedom. And I'm
gonna give you the counterintuitive strategy to help you stay
connected to your creativity and inner g rout Welcome back.
What is an amplified life It's having amplified relationships with
people who support and encourage you to be your best.
(01:25):
It's having amplified energy to conquer the challenges of the day.
And it's having an amplified career, one that's meaningful to you,
the world, and your bank accounts. I'm Dan Mason helping
you discover your calling and create an amplified life on
your terms. This is the Life Amplified Podcast. Everyone who
(01:50):
comes into my coaching practice wants the same thing. We
want more time, we want more money, we want more freedom,
particularly the freedom to do meaning will work that's aligned
with our soul's purpose. But for some reason you come
up against an internal block. Some people tell me it's
a lack of motivation, that they just don't have to
(02:11):
discipline or the commitment to make themselves do the things
that they know will create the wealth that will create
the success. Why do we do that? Though? What ends
up happening here is we just fall into patterns of sabotage.
And I don't even like the word sabotage in my
coaching containers because nobody has ever woken up in the
(02:32):
morning with your list of goals and said, gee, how
can I f this all up today, So it's not sabotage.
What it is is a set of protection patterns that
we're using to keep ourselves safe. We're trying to keep
ourselves safe from emotional annihilation, rejection, failure, and this is
how it manifests when we don't trust ourselves. Do you
seek reassurance and advice from other people instead of tuning
(02:55):
into how you feel about a situation or an opportunity
in your life? Do you solicit opinions from other people
around you when there's an important decision to be made.
You might be a person who just postpones making a
decision altogether, so you procrastinate. On some level. It's easier
for you to sit in an energy of uncertainty or
(03:18):
not knowing, rather than facing the fear associated with making
the wrong decision. Some of you are avoiding tuning into
your needs and desires altogether. You're going to numbing or
dissociated behaviors. You're scrolling on Instagram, You're doomed scrolling on Facebook.
You're having a few glasses of wine at night, you're
binge watching uh. You know, the new season of Stranger
(03:41):
Things is a way to not be present with those
desires and that urge that's coming up within you to
live your purpose. Uh, there's also some of you who
are ruminating on the past. You're obsessing over whether you
should have taken a different path years ago, rather than
realize in the only place that you have the power
(04:02):
of the resources to create the life that you want
is in the present moment. A lot of times we're
quick to believe negative opinions of ourself and for my
spiritual and wooboo folks, you know who you are. Sometimes
when you don't trust yourself, how often do you start
waiting to consult your oracle cards, your angel cards. You're
(04:24):
waiting until you talk to your psychic or your spiritual healer.
You know, there's a lot of people are like, oh, Dan,
I can't start my book or I can't quit my
job right now because Mercury is in retrograde, and you
know that my psychic told me now is not the
time to sign a contract or make a decision. I
used to fall into that trap a lot. I actually
forced myself once to launch a coaching program, a group
(04:47):
program in Mercury retrograde, just so I could have the
success improved to myself that the astrology has nothing, nothing
to do with my ability to generate um. But all
these at the end of the day, we're talking about
the symptoms, and really there's one core reason that you
don't trust yourself, and why I'm going to give you
(05:10):
something that might blow your mind right now. It usually
comes down to this, and I have coached people now
across eighteen countries, But when you don't trust yourself, it's
secretly that you're afraid that if you were to feel
totally happy and satisfied with your life, your motivation to
do things might actually dissipate and eventually vanish. This is
(05:34):
such a pattern that's come up, and especially in some
of my group coaching containers this year, we're having this conversation.
People who don't trust themselves are terrified of feeling good.
They're afraid if they feel good over time, like really
every day waking up feeling good, that their motivational drive
will disappear. And why is that such a survival threat
(05:56):
to people? Why at a primal level are we afraid
of losing our motivation. If you're like many high performers
I coach, it's because you were taught that your inherent value,
your worthiness your ability to be loved was all about
being motivated, striving, and achieving. You grew up in some
sort of environment where love was conditional and it was
(06:19):
handed out freely. If you made the honor roll, if
you were a star athlete, if you you know, excelled
either on the football field and cheerleading student government, that
that was the path to achievement. You gotta be motivated,
you gotta work hard, you gotta study, you gotta you know,
master the s A T the a c T. You
gotta get into a good college. And somewhere in there
(06:40):
we learn that love is the reward that we get
for doing, and that we don't get it for being.
So this becomes the conundrum for many people who don't
trust themselves. If you allowed life to get too good,
if things were just no more problems and you lived
in the flow of life in a state of ease enjoy, well,
(07:01):
then what I might not even be motivated to create
a next level, and therefore I'm not worthy of love.
So this shows up a lot in corporate America, and
it shows up with a lot of my entrepreneurial clients
because they will do everything in their powers subconsciously to
keep themselves in a stress and anxiety loop. And what
(07:23):
will that look like? It means like, even though you
create so much success you climb that next ladder in
your career, you can't seem to escape your problems. Maybe
you're crushing it at work, but you can't really find
that love and satisfaction and you're in the intimacy that
you want in your romantic relationships. Maybe you're doing really
well at work, but you can't beat your addictions and
(07:44):
those compulsive patterns. A lot of times, for many people,
they will plateau income wise, so they'll just barely make enough,
and they always seem to get to one certain level
no matter what they're doing. Uh. And even when you're
making more money and you get a promotion, then you
start spending money because you sort of stay in this
(08:06):
loop of just barely having enough. But when we stay
in the money pattern, there was there was actually just
a new study that came out that one in three
households where people are making two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year or more are still living paycheck to paycheck. Now, yes,
it's inflation and there's a higher cost of living and
the price of goods and services? Is it an all
(08:27):
time high and gas is high? But do you think
that maybe there might be something driving that that a
quarter of a million dollars for some people just isn't enough.
The money is going out as quickly as it comes in.
And this one shows up with a lot of high
performers too. You forget about your biggest successes in life,
but you persistently dwell on your worries. So why are
(08:51):
all these things we're talking today about, how these are
all symptoms of not trusting yourself? And this is a
quote that totally rattled me when I saw this from
Eader Shattered. He says, you don't trust yourself because you
weren't always trustworthy. Now we're going to go back to childhood.
We're going to talk about some of that inner child
work today. You don't trust yourself now because you were
(09:14):
born into a world where you learn not to trust yourself.
You were pretty much conditioned and indoctrinated into a world
that made you do things that you don't want to do.
In some cases, growing up as a child, you had
to do things that no human would want to do,
things that you couldn't even that you couldn't be trusted
(09:34):
to do without being coerced. Now we can look at
this in terms of big tat traumas. There's a lot
of homes where there was abuse going on. There's a
lot of times when you grew up in home where
you had to lie for your family, particularly if there
were patterns of addiction or alcoholism, and you didn't want
to do that, but you had to keep up appearances
for the world. But even beyond the bigger traumas, and
(09:57):
we're not here to diminish that at all, I want
you to think about the smaller ways that you learned
not to trust yourself, and all the things that you
were forced and coerced into doing without having a rationale. Y,
you have to study hard, you gotta put all your
money away in the piggy bank. You gotta eat your
vegetables every day. Growing up, for me, it was you
(10:19):
gotta eat your Brussels sprout. Stand And this was back
in the days when Brussels sprouts were just a boiled
mess on a plate. Brussels sprouts had gone through a
glow up because we've learned about oh, balsamic vinegarrette, turkey, bacon, feta, cheese.
But as a kid, I'm like, why do I want
to eat this boiled ship? Now? I don't want to
eat this? And I was told, well, you have to
because I said so. You know, the adult world is
(10:41):
forcing children to take all these actions that they don't
want to do. Think about this. Your parents, your teachers,
a church, uh, your superiors all like forcing you to
do the right things and not the things that you
don't want to do. And We're not here to bash
any of this. And I'm not even here to say
(11:02):
that that's necessarily wrong, because haven't we all had the
experience as adults where we reach a certain age where
we realize, oh wait, some of those adults growing up
were actually right. Maybe I should be doing a better
job of saving money. Hey you know what, maybe I
shouldn't eat pancakes for dinner every night. Maybe I need
(11:23):
something green on my plate. And as you grow into
an adult, you start to create your own rationale, right,
you realize that there are benefits to discipline and the
structure in your life. Where there's a moment where we
realize that focus, commitment, finishing the things that we start
are actually good ideas. But underneath all of this right,
(11:49):
you're battling with your inner child. Because the inner child
learned that to be structured and disciplined was not to
have agency, was not to have choice, and on some
level it wasn't to have fun. So the problem arrives.
And look, this happens for many people later in life. Sometimes,
(12:11):
you know, it's fifty sixty year old clients of mine
who come to this realization. Right, they know that they
want success, but they're not doing the things that they
should do to create it. So why don't we trust ourselves. Well,
you're new to this place, right, Like you're wanting all
the things in your life. You want the wealth. But
the child inside of you, your inner child, as years
(12:34):
of experience rebelling against all the ship that you were
coerced into doing as a child. You know, there's a
child that the inner child says, no, I don't want
to do things because I have to. And the minute
that adult you, future you, says now we probably should
save and have an investment portfolio, we should probably stop
(12:54):
drinking wine five times a night. Inner child has checked out.
It's going, uh, no way, f you. I want my freedom.
So a lot of times those of us who are
resistant to structure and we're not doing the things that
we should do. It's because there was a part of
us subconsciously that that that equates structure with a lack
(13:16):
of freedom, and then it just starts to get worse, right,
because we try to manage these parts of ourselves by
doing the same the same tricks and coercion tactics that
the adults in our life used on us growing up,
but we try to do it to ourselves. We create
artificial reward systems. Right, how many times have you said, well,
(13:37):
I'll take myself in the shopping spree if I lose
that fifteen pounds and eat healthy, or hey, if I
work really hard and start my business, then I'll go
take myself on that vacation or the cruise that I want.
There is a whole industry right now of these apps
that are essentially to do lists that are the gold
(13:57):
Star shortlist for adults, and they rarely ever work. The
habit tracking apps they don't work because the more that
you're trying to coerce yourself to do the things that
you have to do, the more the inner child rebels.
So that part of you that used to hate the
adults for trying to control them. Now you're in an
(14:19):
internal struggle because you secretly hate yourself. You're lashing out
and saying, hey, I just want to have some more fun.
So rather than sit down to write your book, rather
than sit down to start your your business plan, rather
than meal prepping on a Sunday, you're blowing off the afternoon.
You're playing video games your day, drinking at a bar,
(14:40):
You're eating all the junk food, maybe watching uh binge,
watching TV shows that you love from twenty years ago.
And that's the cycle that we end up in. The
inner child doesn't want to do the things that we
know we should do. We try to force it by
placing more structure, and as a response mounts, the inner
(15:01):
child rebels harder, and then we get into more irresponsible behavior.
And then the end result in all this is that
we don't trust ourselves because every time we say that
we're going to do the thing that we're going to do,
every time we say that, oh my god, next month,
I'm going to start the meal plan, or Hey, I'm
going to start waking up earlier and working out every day.
(15:23):
Hey I'm going to I'm going to enroll the first
three clients in my new coaching business that I want
to start on the side, but we don't follow through.
You're just taking a little more money out of the
self trust bank, and you don't trust yourself at all.
So what is the solution. Here's the counterintuitive solution to
the problem. Give your inner child the thing that it
(15:46):
always wanted. Give your inner child the thing that it
believes that it has to sabotage your life in order
to steal a little bit of in the moment. Give
your inner child the thing it doesn't trust you to
provide because you've never really had it. What is it?
Fucking fun? Joy, good times, a sense of play, Rather
(16:11):
than trying to delay your gratification and making it making
it contingent upon getting more results in your life down
the road, rather than making fun the reward you get
for doing the right thing, how about you cultivate more
of it in the present. And I want you to
think for a second, how was it responded to in
(16:34):
your life when you wanted to spend too much time
having fun as a child growing up? For me, like
I remember in eighth grade, I junior high I got
really into basketball and I wanted so bad to play
on the junior high basketball team, and I went out
for the team and I made it. But my mom
would never actually let me go to the practices, which
(16:57):
is problematic when you're on a sports team. If I
didn't do the right thing, if I didn't say the
right thing to my mother, anytime a chore wasn't done,
she would make me come home. So I end up
missing half the practices in junior high, which is one
of the reasons I rarely played. Well, okay, look, the
real reason I didn't play is also I wasn't an athlete,
and I kind of sucked at basketball, let's be honest.
(17:19):
But it didn't help me that I never got to
go to any of the practices. So that fun, that connection,
that sense of play that I would have gotten with
my teammates with organized sports was always taken away from me.
Uh when I wasn't doing air quote the right thing
is I grew up and I got a little bit older.
In high school. I always found the Spring Musical that
(17:42):
was my thing. I was like the acting that was
the acting door who always had the lead in the
Spring Musical. And it would never fail that I would
get about a third of the way through the rehearsal process,
and I would be so it up. It's the one
thing that kind of kept me going in high school
when we were having a lot of problems at home
and my Aaron's marriage wasn't great, my mom's mental health
wasn't great. But it was always held over my head
(18:05):
that like literally my directors would have to call my
mom on the phone and and beg her to let
me continue to stay in the play. So this idea
of fun for me, it was always something that was
never really safe to have. It was just going to
be taken away from me anyway, and my life became
(18:26):
about having to obey. It became about having to conform.
And when I look back on that a lot right now,
understanding my mom's mental health challenges, part of the reason
my mom wanted to control so much to kind of
keep me in the house with her is because she
was lonely. My dad was working all the time, she
didn't have that connection with her husband, and she started
looking to me, the oldest son, to hold space for her,
(18:49):
to be that safe masculine presence in her life, which
is actually the complete reversal of what a healthy parent
child relationship should be. The parents should be providing safety
for the child, not the child's responsibility to keep a
parent feeling emotionally safe. But this comes up with a
lot of my clients. Now, this is that's just some
examples from my life. I have a client right now
(19:12):
who grew up literally, at like age nine or ten,
working in a sweatshop environment. Her dad got sick at
an early age. Her mom was working in these factories
and working in a sweatshop and taking the children in
just to create more money and more hours to keep
the family afloat. So play was never even on the table.
(19:36):
Wasn't a safe thing to have. You couldn't have play.
Your duty was just to work to keep the family afloat.
Another one of my clients grew up in a family where,
and this is a conversation we've been having this year,
grew up in a family where, at age ten or eleven,
she started getting sold out by her parents to become
the go to babysitter in the neighborhood. So on Friday nights,
(19:57):
she's staying in a house by herself at age eleven,
babysitting like three year old kids, and never had that
experience of a sense of play, and the money that
she was making wasn't even hers. Some of that money
had to go toward the family, right, So there's this
whole feeling that my money is not my own, which
as an adult manifested. And hey, she started making a
(20:20):
lot of money in corporate America, multiple six figures, and
then she would spend it the minute that it came
in because she was so afraid, oh my god, I
got to spend this on me before somebody else takes
it from me. So even though you know it's a pattern.
We were talking about the new study that said, you know,
people making over a quarter of a million dollars right
now one in three or still living to paycheck to paycheck,
(20:40):
there's some internal programming going on in there. It plays
out in a variety of ways and so many families.
I don't know what it is for you specifically because
we haven't spoken yet, but if you're inner child never
had a safe environment to play and work, and achievement
became way to get to love and in some place,
(21:02):
a way to get to survival or safety, you're going
to repeat that as an adult, and you're going to
be in this push and pull of wanting to do
the right thing, wanting to put more structure and discipline
into your life, and at the same time wanting to
rebel and and just give a middle finger to structure
and discipline. So where do we go from here? Right?
(21:26):
What becomes the answer? How do you begin to put
more play into your life? This is something for me
that I'm actually getting back to after a couple of
years of lockdown and facing a lot of challenges that
many entrepreneurs were, of having to pivot and having to
get creative and different offerings, and and holding a lot
of space for supporting my clients. One of the big
(21:47):
realizations that I had this year is I wasn't doing
a great job of still creating a sense of play
and fun in my life living in in lockdown for
two years with me and a dog in a city
that I had pretty recently moved to. When I came
here to San Diego, I didn't have like that social
support around me. I was very focused on keeping my
(22:08):
business going because it was the only thing that felt
like it was in control in my life. But over
the last two years I had lost all connection to
that sense of play. So one of the big commitments
in my life that I'm making to address that play
is actually getting back into performing. Um. I went for
the first time ever in my life. I've always done
community theater is just an outlet as an adult, right
(22:31):
we're just doing some little local theater productions. Last night,
for the first time ever, I went to an audition
at a professional theater in San Diego, which I was
totally intimidated by, and my ego had all these reasons
why shouldn't do it? Oh, Dan, you should really be
focused on your business. It's a weird time in the economy.
(22:52):
You need to be innovating and working hard. Even up
until like thirty minutes before I left for the audition,
I was ready to cancel it. But I went last
night and I did it, and I'm proud to say
I got a call back for the show. So I've
got my callback audition for a professional theater next week.
And for me, it's not It is literally nothing more
(23:12):
than a sense of adding fun into my life. And
when I walked into that audition last night, it was
the most joyous and fun and playful and alive that
I've actually felt since before the pandemic, which for me,
I knew I was in the right place. So this
is what I want you to think about in your life.
What are those pathways to joy for you? Because it's
(23:34):
been true in my business the whole seven years that
I've been an entrepreneur, the more fun I am having,
the more money I make. Even last year when things
were still sketchy and we're coming out of lockdown, the
three most profitable months of my business were the three
months I was going to the horse races down the
road at del Mar Racetrack three days a week, which
(23:56):
some of you are like, what the hell, Dan, how
could that possibly be fun? But that is a way
I connected to my dad and grandfather. Growing up seven
and eight years old, I would go to the horse
races with them, So I started doing that last summer.
Is a way just to get out again and something
that I enjoy. I realized that's like a nine year
old man hobby whenever I walk into a racetrack and
(24:18):
the youngest person there. But going there and doing that,
my business was making record income in those months. So
the question for you, if you want to build more
of a sense of self trust the ideas that you have,
got to get your inner child on board that doing
the things that you need to do moving forward. Placing
(24:39):
more structure, more discipline into your life isn't also going
to further shackle you from having joy, connection and play.
So what is the thing that seven year old you
would be lit up to do right now? I don't
care if it's finger painting. I don't care if it's
(25:02):
chalk drawing on the sidewalk. I don't care if it's
going to a dance class or what it is that.
Think about what is that for you? What is seven
year old you trying to do? As you allow yourself
to have more fun, you'll stop self flagellating, you'll stop
beating yourself up that you're not doing enough, that you're
(25:24):
not working hard enough. It's interesting, like for a lot
of people, even in self development, like once they go
on a personal growth path, then they have to become
the best at self development. Right, instead of having fun,
they're looking for another coaching program or another seminar, another
retreat to go to. So then that just becomes something
else they have to be good at. Right, It's no
(25:46):
longer a sense of enjoyment, it's just something that's that
you're showing up for out of a sense of obligation
and duty. So to recap today, if you want to
stay committed to your goals, you've got to get your
inner child on board, because there is a part of
you that equates structure with lack of choice, lack of agency,
and lack of fun. Build the fun into your life first,
(26:10):
build the fun and play in and as your inner
child starts trusting you to show up for it, to
give it a safe environment to be fully expressed, you're
going to realize that those internal blocks, the procrastin nation,
that doubting your intuition, the seeking the approval of other people,
will start to dissipate. All right, If you're listening to this,
(26:34):
be sure to screenshot the podcast uploaded to Instagram. Tag
me at c sc Dan Mason, and be sure to
share what is your commitment? What are you going to
do to embrace more play into your life? I love
you so much for listening, and I think that this
is an important message for many reasons right now. Uh
Number one, there is so much drama and negativity in
(26:56):
the world and on the news. I think one of
the sees ways that we can all release the pressure,
valve and just self regulate is to embrace that childlike
sense of play in our lives again, If we could
allow ourselves to build more safe connections with people who
are like minded, rather than scrolling and arguing with strangers
(27:17):
who don't believe the things that we believe, you're gonna
find that you're going to regulate so much easier. So
and if you need some additional help to work through
those internal blocks, trust me, if you want to make
that inner child feel safe, it is really good to
have some support to help hold you accountable and to
have a safe coaching container to facilitate that moving forward.
(27:38):
You can get more information on my coaching programs by
going to my website Creative Soul Coaching dot net. In
the meantime, turned down the volume on your negativity, turn
up the volume on your purpose so you can live
life amplified. Talk to you next time,
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