Hey, everybody, welcome back. You're doing absolutely fantastic. Here you are in Section 10. So we're just about halfway through. You're doing fantastic. I'm going to tell you something that I know about you, even though I don't know much about you.

It's that you're a winner. How do I know that? Because 80% of everybody who's going to drop out has already dropped out. There's very few losers here. I'm telling you. How do you when you go out there you search for information.

And when you finally find a treasure like this, you don't let it go. You don't quit partway through you don't quit halfway through. I'll tell you a story. I was actually buying some books. I found this really cheap bookstore in New Hampshire. And they would sell the books for maybe 25 cents 50 cents, so I would grab a bunch.

I knew what all the good self help books were and I Found one on physical and sexual abuse. And I'm flipping through it and all sudden these Polaroids drop out. There was like three or four of them. And this woman was horribly beaten. And apparently, she went old school, she took some Polaroids. These are the early selfies right?

She took them in the mirror. And you could see how her face was just brutalized. And she had one where her arm was just all gouged up. And she took it to remind herself, that she needs to do the work, to not forget to turn this situation around. So I took those in one hand, I'm flipping through the book, and I noticed you had about two chapters in maybe about 30 pages. And you know what she did, she had the secret of how to turn her life around.

She had the perfect book really, for how to make that happen. She taken visual evidence to try to motivate herself. And then about an hour into reading the book. She quit and she sold it for about 10 cents. Don't ever do that to yourself. Okay, speaking of which, this is a very sensitive section.

So I hope I don't say anything that makes anybody feel discomforted, you know, or is if I'm taking this lightly. You know, this is a very sensitive area. A lot of people are the way they are, do the things they do. That's the name of the course. Right? Because they have old wounds.

They have a history. And the first thing I want to tell you that people falsely associate with their history and their old wounds. That woman who was brutalized, she is not her wounds. That is something that happened to her. She can move on, she can start her life again, and she doesn't have to carry it forward. And I'm going to tell you, the vast majority of people don't, but there's a certain population that they say, Oh, you know, I paid such a high price for this.

You know, it cost me so much. Here the words price cost. We think when things have a price or cost that they have value. No, a beating does not have a value. A rape does not have a value. It has zero value.

Please don't be offended by that. But it has zero value. If I went out in the street and said, I'm going to sell you a raper beating, how much would you pay me for it? I guarantee you, nobody would pay you for it. They pay you to get the hell away from but it's not worth $1 your pain. Horrible as it may sound to some of you has absolutely zero street value.

It has no value whatsoever. Drop it, let it go. I'll tell you a story. I was at my what they call a culminating experience when you get your master's or sometimes when you get your bachelor's, you know you'll have a last set of classes. I was going to Norwich University and we're spending the last you know literally two days 48 hours there. And we're doing the set of classes on the second day.

We're just kind of doing a roundtable, we're going around, we want to talk about, you know, why we did our master's program and what we wanted to achieve with it and why it was valuable. And, you know, kind of our lifetime plan or five year plan, and what we're going to do with it. Well, when it got around to this older lady, I was fascinated. I'm like, Why is she so old and she's doing this course. She was like, 6062, but let's call it 60. I'm like, she's only got, you know, three to five years to use this, you know, unless she's going to go into retirement years.

She's never going to get her money back for it. Maybe she just did because she's fascinated by subject I don't know. So I'm perked my ears up. And she tells this, you know, horrible story of you know, had a bad childhood. And, you know, my parents were very responsive to me. And I was sexually abused a couple of times between the age of like, six and nine.

And, you know, she just never, ever got over. So she took a bachelor, she went to four years at university. And she said, You know, I thought, you know, I had tried different therapies and those types of things, and it just didn't work for me. I said, I'll go to school, and maybe I'll learn something that will be the secret that will help me get past this. And she said, Well, that's what I'm doing the master's program, too, because the bachelor's didn't work for me. So I said, Well, I'll take another four years, you know, I'll go to a higher level that's got to be with all the good answers are right.

And hopefully, I'll find something. So my question to her was, did you She looked really sad and almost became tearful and said, No. I said, Well, here's my suggestion. Start your life over. She's like, What do you mean? Well, you're at this point in your life, you draw a line in the sand, you say, Today's the first day the rest of my life and you move forward.

You leave the past. The past and you move into the future, do over. I said Bill Cosby used to have a little joke that he used to tell. And it was about, you know, just playing stickball with the kids. But I always remember this one little phrase he said do over, he said, You know, sometimes you're playing stickball with the kids playing baseball and the ball, you hit it right down on the line, nobody can decide, is it in? Is it out?

And the kids just can all agree on one thing. Do over. Okay. And you play it over again. He said, I think a lot of people in life deserve a do over. I think you deserve one.

So you got to say to yourself, do over and start your life fresh. There was the first half This is the second half. And here we go. She's like, Oh, you can't do that. I said, No, no, you don't understand. It's absolutely doable.

She's like, absolutely not. You can't do that. I'm like, No, no, sweetheart, you don't understand. It's absolutely doable. I'm not asking if a person can do it. Millions of people have done it.

I've done it. I'm not asking you if it's doable. I'm asking you to join us. I'm asking you if you'll do it. Oh, you can't do that. Yeah, I didn't make the sale that day.

But hopefully I planted a seed in leadership realize that is actually at the core of everybody gets better. I don't care what therapy style you use. You have to start over. I'm going to tell you a phrase that a patient gates may said, What's the best thing that you ever learned when you were in the intensive outpatient program? Me? He said, I think you said it, but it might have been somebody else, Mr. Paul, but somebody said it.

And they said, the past isn't getting any better. Because I thought I was going to come here, and somehow I was going to hear something, learn something you were going to say something in my past was going to be healed. But I didn't realize the most fundamental truth of all. Yesterday is not getting any better. The past never changes. Matter of fact, I read a phrase it said The past is the perfect preservative.

It never changes. There was even a little, like biblical quote, this power is denied even unto God, the ability to change the past. You can't change it. That's not my law. That's life's law. So all you can do is move on, and every successful person has moved on.

Nobody has healed their past. That's a bunch of pop culture. BS. That's all it is. It's rubbish. So what am I trying to tell you here?

That a lot of people get locked into this mold, they falsely associate with their history and their old wounds. But the past is the past. You are not your wounds. Your wounds were done to you. You did not cause these things. I never saw anybody that came into my office and said Paulie have a horrible history of physical abuse.

Yes, Mr. Paul, I beat myself every single day. And I have a history of rape. I raped myself three or four times. It was horrible. I still can't get over it. What?

Of course not. You don't do these things to yourself. These were done to you. They are not part of you. They tell me a boatload about the person that did these things to you. They're evil.

But it tells me absolutely nothing about you. except you're strong. You're survivor, and you sought out help, which means your damn genius. That's all I know about you. That's all that tells me. It tells me it happened.

It was horrible. And it's over. Last thing it tells me I know, job one you need to move on. Your past does not equal your future. Now let's look at one of the biggest secrets of psychology and it shouldn't be it said Suffering is the pain that we hold on to. And you'll see how this links in in a minute.

The strangest thing is that patients don't seem to want to let go of their pain. Like I said it has. They think it has value. They've had it a long time they're used to it. They falsely think that it's part of them. It isn't.

They sometimes get secondary gains from this, you know, every time you know, something goes wrong, they got an excuse. Well, I had a poor childhood or if you grew up my house, you'd do this to you know, it becomes some kind of secondary gain, or I can tell a story, and people feel bad for me, you know, I can tell myself this story. And this will explain a lot of things that I don't really want to take credit for that are bad in my life, that maybe I need to take credit for and change. So there's a lot of little secondary gains. There's a million of them I don't know what it is for you or the person that you're thinking of. I'm not necessarily, of course, in this course talking about you, you know, we're trying to figure out why do people do the things they do could be you could be somebody else.

So suffering is the pain that we hold on to. So I told a patient I said, suffering is like a hot potato. If I throw a hot potato T and you catch it, what causes the suffering? So well, potatoes really hot? know, what causes the long term suffering? When I toss you the hot potato?

If you want to cause long term suffering with a hot potato in your hand? What would you do? I said, it's easy, Mr. Paul, just hold on. Yeah. Matter of fact, even after a while, it would cool off, wouldn't it? Yeah.

So you'd have to reheat the potato right? If you want to real long term suffer make it last year after year after year. Yeah. So would you do so? I don't know. Mr. Paul.

Yes, I've microwave it and Put it back in my hand. Yeah, you'd recharge it literally. How do we recharge a painful memory by thinking about over and over and over again, by rehearsing it in our mind by playing the tapes over and over in our head by making it big and bold and bright and emotionally intense. Otherwise these things fade over time. He said cheese. I never thought of it that way, Mr. Paul.

So let's go the most important part. If you want the potato, stop burning your hand, have you solid? said Oh, that's easy. Just let go. So yeah, easy to say a little hard to do. But it's kind of like meditating.

It's not that hard a mental trick. But you just got to kind of find you got to tune in and find the right frequency. So it's not hard, might take you a few days or a couple of weeks, but you'll tune it in. You figure out how to let it go. And that'll be the end of it. All suffering, I don't care if it's anxiety, depression, bad childhood, whatever it is.

Suffering, mental pain and anguish is the pain that we hold on to solution, let it go. Now, here's a good technique for kind of understanding this at a little deeper level, and also how to let it go. There are two times that don't exist. The first one is the past. People that are trapped in the past, have the illusion that the past actually exists, that it has power in the present. It doesn't it's the past.

If I said, show me one thing from your past, you couldn't. Because everything that's now exists in the now you can even go grabbing an antique and say, oh, here's something from the past. I said no, no. In the past, it would have been brand new. Why are you showing this old piece of crap. In the past, it was brand new.

So to show me the past and the present, you have to show me this brand new piece. You can't show me an antique. That's an old piece of crap. In the present, that's not a piece of the past. He went through the past, but it's not in the past. It's not the past, get it, your memories start in the past, you've refreshed them, recharge them, you read them in the microwave, but they're from the past, in the past is an illusion.

It's a story in your head about something that happened. And it doesn't exist. It existed at the time. It does not exist now, except as a memory as a story in your head. Go, let it go. Here's the other way.

People torture themselves. With another time, that doesn't exist. It's called the future. They worry about things. They predict things being the same. They worry that things are never going to get better.

You know, they do all these things. The past in the future don't exist. We need to let them go. And let me show you why. Let me show you what exists in the past and the future. that's causing Pain in the present.

Now, again, these are illusions. But it's a pretty good illusion because you're creating it. So you can dig into your past, find old pain. And just pour it out around you and roll around in it. You can do the same thing with guilt, regret, failure, anything from your history, all your old disappointments and just feel god awful. You can choose to do that it's a mental skill you have and you can choose to do.

You can take images from the future. imaginings is what they are, they don't even exist. And you can pour those scenarios, those fake stories all over yourself and have worry anxiety, fear, failure, disappointment, all kinds of sense of loss. You know, people worry about aging, all these types of things and ruin your now. So mentally, you're grabbing things In the past, imagine things from the future, pouring them on your now and just destroying your life. Your brain can actually do this, because it has a mental mechanism.

You're supposed to use it for good. This is using it for evil. You're supposed to be able to look into the past. Find wonderful times that can make you feel good just thinking about them in the now and enjoy them again, wonderful. You can also remember times when you didn't do things so well in the past, remember how to do them better. And make your now and your future better by using these skills and being proactive.

So that's great. You can also remember all your talents and use them and then now to make your now and your future better. You can use your ability to look into the future to see a brighter future, feel more optimistic about it. See things working out. So you have comfort and security in your now You can also think about potential problems. Be proactive, solve them, and then feel good now that you can solve them and not have to have them now and not have to have them in your future.

That's how you're supposed to use it. The brain is a tool. It's a dumb animal. You tell it to use it the wrong way. It says Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am.

I'll get right on that. And very beautifully does that. And you get the problems that you see here in this slide. If you say no, I want to use it. The second way Mr. Paul was talking about says Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am.

I'll get right on that. And it helps you helps you helps you. And you're now and your future gets so much better. You have to decide how you want to use your tools, your gifts. Remember, the brain is a simple tool. It's like a hammer.

He doesn't care. If you take that hammer. The Hammer does not care if you grab it and use it to beat yourself over the head and destroy your life up to and including killing yourself. The Hammer will never Bitch whine or complain or object, it just does what it does. Or you can take that hammer and you can build the home of your dreams. The Hammer doesn't care.

Your brain doesn't care. Be very careful what you ask your brain to do. That's your lesson for today and I'll see you in the next section.