That Time I Ran From The Law And Fled to Chiang Mai Thailand

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Have you ever wanted to run away from life?  In 2015 I was feeling so overwhelmed that I fled the country and ran away from being a lawyer! I told no one where I was going and fled to Thailand to be alone and save myself from having a breakdown. It was one of the best things I had ever done.  I went to Bali, Indonesia, then Chiang Mai, Thailand, and finally Calcutta, India for a month and told no one.  In this podcast I’ll share what I did, I’ll talk about the awesome travellers I met, and the life changing lessons I learned along the way.  Most people say you should always confront your problems and have the courage to keep getting up when you get knocked down.  They’re wrong.  I learned that one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to run away from your problems and find happiness elsewhere.  I did and it worked out great!

How NOT To Absorb Other People’s Problems

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As an empath or sensitive person, do you find yourself always taking on other people’s problems?  I don’t mind just listening to their problems; I mean you actually mentally and emotionally bear the burden of other people’s problems as if they were your own!  You find yourself stressed, anxious, and tired. Depending on the time of job you have, your personality and shouldering other people’s problems all of the time can crush you. Today I discuss how to separate how you can be involved in helping solve a problem without bearing the weight of that person’s problem.  Ultimately, it will help you live more peaceful when you realize that it is not your job to be responsible for other people’s problems.

Selfish, Unavailable, and Unreliable: Empath Survival

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My New Year’s Resolutions for 2020 are simple: I plan to be selfish, unavailable, and unreliable. For an empath, f you implement these changes into your daily routine, you will gradually start feeling a levity unlike any other.

Part of being an empath means you always put everyone else first. We are innately people-pleasers.  I’m tired of that stuff.  Yeah some people say how it makes me beautiful.  Screw that noise!  Living in a big city like LA, if you’re a people pleaser you’re seen as a sucker and people will steamroll right over you, taking advantage of you.  My turn!  Next time I see one slice of pizza left, I’m going to take it, and stuff it down my mouth.  Each man or woman for him/herself!

The Word NO Is A Complete Sentence

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True story: the word NO is a complete sentence. As empath’s or highly sensitive people, we have a tendency or disposition to always be people-pleasers. Accordingly, whenever someone asks us for something and we don’t want to do it, we have a hard time saying the simple word NO. For an empath, saying NO is more of a negotiation, instead of an absolute or emphatic statement. Why? Because we are so concerned with offending the other person or pleasing them to make them happy, that we avoid using direct language to turn them down and try to negotiate declining the offer. Unfortunately, this ends up backfiring, as we usually get convinced to do what we ultimately never wanted to do in the first place.

So what do I mean about saying “no” becoming a negotiation? Let me give you an example. Let’s say someone asks you to go to a concert downtown. You have literally zero interest in going for a variety of reasons. First, you dislike the music of that particular band, second, the tickets are $200 each, and third, you’re working that day so you would have to get home from work early, get ready, and then spend another two hours trekking downtown in heavy traffic. Basically you’d be exhausted by the time you arrived to see a band you have zero interest in seeing.

But here’s the problem with the average empath: when our friend asks us to go downtown, we don’t say “NO”. Instead, we dance around the response. Example, instead of simply saying “no”, when asked whether we’d like to go to the concert, we answer “I’d love to go, but I have to work that day and I’d never make it on time.” Or we say something like “thanks so much for the invite, but the tickets are really expensive.”

Do you see the problem with answering like this? What you’ve told the other person is that you’re actually interested in going, except for a few things which can easily be overcome. Especially if the person you’re talking to is a friend, which obviously they would be if they were inviting you, you have now done is open the door to negotiating. The problem now is that with regards to your “I have to work” excuse, is that what are you going to do when your friend tells you – “hey don’t worry about getting there late, there’s an opening act and the actual band won’t actually get on stage until much later, so voila, you’ll have plenty of time to get home from work and get there in time to enjoy the show. I’ll even pick you up and drive us down!” or, what are you going to say if they respond by saying “don’t worry, fortunately the band is having a second performance the next day which is a Saturday when you don’t have to work. Great you’re coming now!” As you can see, you just fucked yourself. Because now, if you come up with an alternate excuse, it will make you look like a liar, or a flake.

In the second part of the example where you said you couldn’t go because the tickets are too expensive, what are you going to do when your friend starts trying to strong arm you into going by saying “it’s only $200, the band rarely comes to town. Stop being so cheap – you never go out and enjoy yourself anymore. It’s not much money.” Or what if he says “don’t worry about the tickets – I have an extra one and you can have it for free! What time shall we head down now that you can come?”

As you can see, you just fucked yourself. Because now, if you come up with an alternate excuse, it will make you look like a liar, a cheapo, or a flake. Or all of the above. The problem is for an empath, you don’t want to hurt your friend’s feelings by telling them that the band sucks and you have zero interest in going, so you struggle to find your voice and speak your mind. You’re almost obsessed with people’s feelings and not hurting them or causing conflict so you always speak using wishy-washy language to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes. The curse of an empath. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Ironically, the less you stand in your own power and speak your mind, the more conflict you will have because everything will become a back and forth dialogue as people perceive you to be a pushover, wishy-washy, and easily convinced. What’s worse, is by nature, your type of personality will attract more and more people who will try to sell you things and convince you to do things. You’ll find yourself a mark or target for telemarketers, solicitors at your front door, and anyone else who can sell you anything. You will attract the exact opposite of what you want because you’ll effective be what blood is to a shark when it comes to people. Trust me when I say, strong people who speak their minds have fewer people approach them for things in the first place.

I could give you countless examples, but here’s one of my favorites from recent memory. I was in Tajikistan in Central Asia. Along with a group of 10 others, we were standing in the town square looking around. Of course, being a town square, it had its share of beggars. Despite all of the other tourists around me, one of the beggars, a young girl, perhaps around the age of eight or nine years of age, ended up coming up to me asking for money. The problem is, despite me ignoring her, she wouldn’t let go. She was relentless. Tugging on my shirt, trying to reach into my pocket. I kept trying to walk away and she wouldn’t stop. I finally started yelling at her as I reached my boiling point after TEN minutes of this harassment and she still wouldn’t stop, even when I walked into a nearby store in an attempt to shake her. Guess how many of the other members of the group had this happen to them? NONE. Because of my personality at the time, which certain people can deduce through my energy, this young girl despite being homeless, knew who from the group she could target. Don’t worry, I didn’t give her a dime, but it pissed me off unnecessarily. Do you find yourself in these weird predicaments whereas your friends don’t?

Even at my law practice, a couple of the people that work for me are gangsters. No literally, but from a personality standpoint, as kind as they are, they don’t put up wish bullshit from anyone. They’re tough as nails and accordingly, their energy probably helps communicate that to people. Running a law practice means having clients trying to unfortunately coerce you into doing things you don’t want to do all of the time. But guess what happens when a client wants to try to pull one over on us? Even though the client’s point of contact would always have been one of the ladies working for me, they’ll do their best to jump over that firewall and contact me when it comes time to ask for some outlandish thing. Notice how they don’t even try to approach the people they should be approaching? They try to skip them because back then my energy was that of someone that would have a hard time saying NO. They knew without asking that they would hit a brick wall if they were to ask anyone else for the same favor from my law firm so they would ask me instead.

If you find yourself always being asked to do things and for things all of the time, it means that yes, you may be kind and reliable, but believe it or not, it also could mean that people perceive you as weak.

How do I know all of this? I used to be THAT guy. In fact, I still am that guy, but fortunately I have made leaps and bounds in the last year. By standing up and finding my voice more consistently and saying NO, the only regret I have had is why it took me so long to do it. I reflect on how many shitty situations I found myself in because I would say “no, and here’s why”, instead of simply “no”. In fact, I’m bewildered about what was holding me back all of these years. Seriously, no one was going to beat me up if I simply say NO. An annoying telemarketer is not going to jump through the phone and stab you if you say no and hang-up. Speaking of telemarketers, I actually used to listen to their spiel. I remember when I was living in Toronto, one called me once to do a survey, she said it would take around five minutes. 15 minutes later, I was getting agitated, and asked her if we were almost done…she said no, there are still around 25 questions. Like an idiot or a prisoner of the phone, I begrudgingly answered all of her survey questions. What was I thinking?

In retrospect, all I was thinking of was about how not to offend this random voice on the phone who is getting paid. Does this sound like you? Someone who is always lawyering against yourself for why you should appease others? Stop. NOW.

When you can’t say “no” with confidence, people will perceive you as weak. They will take advantage of you. They will mistake your kindness for weakness. You will bang your head agains the wall why it is you keep finding yourself in the same situation with the same losers always attracted to you and wanting ridiculous things from you.

HOW TO SAY NO

Here’s how: just start. Start experimenting with saying no. It won’t be perfect at first. While you find your footing, perhaps you’ll find yourself sounding like a dick, maybe being too abrupt with people. That’s okay. It’s about finding your voice. Those that know you and those that matter will understand the change you’re going through.

The key is to always be mindful of being both thoughtful and civilized when you say “no” to people. Let’s go through some examples.

A telemarketer calls, asking if you would be willing to participate in a five minute survey. You’re already busy eating supper and don’t feel like holding your phone to your ear. Simple response: no thank you, not interested. Hang-up. In this instance, you can be a bit brash because it’s just a telemarketer and there’s nothing to negotiate – you’re not doing their survey. Don’t say any more than that or wait for them to respond. Your time is PRECIOUS. Every second you spend after you so “no thanks” is wasted time that you can never get back.

2. Your best friend asks you to pick-up their kid from daycare because they have to work late. You have other plans which you can’t cancel and it’s so late that you would be the bad guy to the other person with whom you had plans. You just can’t do it and you know that your best friend has other options or arrangements she can make to get her kid from daycare.

Your response should NOT be: “No.” And then hang-up. Remember, with people that matter, and even those in public, you should be thoughtful and civilized. Your response might look something like: “Sorry Jane, I can’t pull it off. You know I would do it for you any other time. Definitely try one of your other options.”

Now let’s caveat something here – friends help friends. If you know your friend would be screwed, ie lose her job if she didn’t stay late, or she literally has no one that can also pick the kid up, then help out if you can. If you have to rearrange plans, then do so. But don’t make it a habit. I have unfortunately found, especially living in a big city like LA, the more you help people, the more they keep coming to you for every little thing and start losing respect for your time.

I see it every day as a lawyer. Someone will hire me to file a bankruptcy. Next thing you know they want me to create their business’s financial statements (totally not my job). Then they want me to start giving them business advice. Mentally they try to tie everything together: I’m their lawyer for one element of their finances so therefore I’m their lawyer for anything and everything related to their finances. This used to happen all of the time. People will do the same thing to you as well. The more helpful you are, the more they’ll want from you. When you finally stand up for yourself and say “no”, they’ll get mad at you for not being good ol’ reliable you anymore.

On the other hand, if you had become less accessible, and tempered your helpfulness, you’ll find that the same people will start to respect you and your time more. When you say no, they won’t be as butt-hurt and you won’t be as pissed off for having to wrestle with saying no or why that person is asking you for things they could to themselves.

Remember – thoughtful and civilized.

3. Another example: your friend is always asking you for favors. They always need to borrow money. They’re always asking you legal questions every ten minutes throughout the day. They’re always texting. As I mentioned, the more responsive you are to people the more they’ll want from you.

Another way I have learned to say no without saying “no”, is to not be overly responsive. If someone who is always calling calls, even if I am free, I purposely won’t answer the phone. Same with clients that always email. Some want to have a back and forth conversation with you over email. Again, even when I’m free, I simply won’t respond. That person that calls all the time? Don’t answer. Let it go to voicemail and then call them back several hours later, or the next day. It creates space. It gives you higher value. Same with email – email was not designed for having a conversation. Reply to your emails once or twice a day. Create that space so people understand you’re not a 911 service. Being less accessible is another way of saying no, in a roundabout way. It helps people learn how to respect your time. If you keep building up your expectations for others, they will be expect exactly what your building.

The more people you don’t want to rely on you start to try to use and rely on you, the more unreliable you should be come, specifically with those people. Or on the other hand, just say no. Remember, do not offer an explanation of excuse for why you won’t do it. Just be nice and reply over time to them so they learn to respect the boundaries that you are creating. Remember – people will treat you as bad as you let them and if you set no boundaries, you can’t complain when you get treated as someone with no boundaries.

4. Your friend Jason asks you to “borrow” money.

Does your friend Jason want to borrow money? I’m not referring to a responsible and trustworthy friend that needs to borrow some money one night because he legitimately forgot his wallet at night. I’m referring to that one friend that we’ve all had growing up who is always broke because he’s a lazy bum and has made a living off of living off of other people’s hard work. When that guy calls asking to borrow money, it’s times like that you can be a dick and say “no”.

One of my favorite stories is an EX friend, who we’ll call Jason. I don’t know why, but I love telling this story. Perhaps because it’s one of those that I look back upon as a new person and wonder how I didn’t have the strength to tell him to fuck the hell off at the time. I’m sure we all have those stories.

That asshole used to want stuff from everyone, all the time. Since high school, he had always treated his “friends” as people he could make a buck off of. He was, and still is, a user of people. Granted, we all use each other to some degree, but this guy gave nothing in return. I remember I invited him to visit me in Mexico when I was living there at the time. Looking back on it, likely he had invited himself, but whatever. My friends in Mexico were some of the greatest quality of people you will ever meet in your life. They were beyond family. And because Jason was my friend at the time, my Mexican friends showed my friend “Jason” around town, letting him party with them etc. In fact, one of my best friends decided to organize a trip to Mazatlan and even welcomed my friend into his villa, treating him as though he was one of his best friends as well. We had a good time. We had a great time. But it wasn’t long before he was asking people, or even my friends, for stuff. A cigarette. A peso. When he returned home, he thought he was a king, bragging to everyone about the stuff he did in Mexico and the people he knew that were connected down there. In reality they didn’t even know his name.

The money issue with him got worse as we got older. A single year later, we all went to Miami for New Year’s. I was trepid about going because of the fact that we were going to take bus from Ottawa down to Miami – yes, that ended up being about 32 hours in a sitting position. It was literally torture. Anyway, despite the fact that we only had four days in Miami and Jason had convinced us all to go, within about 24 hours or being there, he had already run out of money. It was me and three other friends and those three other friends were MY friends and only knew Jason through me but weren’t that close with him. Despite the fact that we were all on a budget back then, he still had absolutely no qualms about asking people for money, selfishly not caring that it would take away from the enjoyment of my friends’ vacations.

The last straw for me was when, a few years later, he asked to “borrow” $10,000 from me. Let me put this into context. He was as lazy as they came. He sat around, watched TV all day, his bedroom littered in McDonald’s wrappers that hadn’t moved from the same spot in months. He never got a job just because. Meanwhile, I had a full-time job, was always studying to write my LSAT test for law school, and was trying to get a business off the ground. I always remember that one night. I had just finished paying off a line of credit I had used to help fund the business I had slaved away at. It took me months and months to pay it off since I wasn’t earning much at the time and was trying to earn my stripes but doing things the hard way and not getting my Dad to pay for anything. But after lots of blood, sweat, and tears, I finally got it paid off. I accidentally let slip in a conversation one night with Jason that I had a line of credit with a bank, which they had extended to all of us who were doing our MBA.

As soon as I let that information slip out, the phone went silent. But through that silence, I could hear the gears turning in his mind. In an instant, I knew that I had made a mistake by disclosing my line of credit. And then it started …. “heyyyy Neil….you know what….could I borrow $10,000 from your line of credit?”

I kid you not. This fat oaf who was too lazy to do anything, got into a big discussion about how I should give him $10,000 and he would give me a bunch of shitty trash jewelry his Mom had given him. He tried to convince me that he would pay me back and if I didn’t, I’d have his junk as collateral and I could pawn it off. I pictured how pathetic it would be, me driving all around Toronto, trying to sell garbage to recoup $10,000 to pay back a line of credit that I had just finished paying off. This turned into anhour-long negotiation. I proceeded to end the conversation and said I would think about it. He ended up calling me relentlessly for the next week, no doubt, trying to rip me off. Because I was such a pussy back then, I just avoided his phone calls, too afraid to just tell him an empathic NO. When I finally talked to him after he had called a hundred times, he tried to make me feel guilty for avoiding him. In reality I was too much of a pussy back then to say no. I think this new version of me wouldn’t have not even said, no – I would have just called him out for being a selfish pig and hang up on him.

To this very day, Jason, even in his forties, still doesn’t have a real job, and believe it or not, still tries to “borrow” money from people. How embarrassing. People generally won’t change, but the good thing is that they can stimulate you to change….for the better.

It’s situations like this though where it’s perfectly fine to not only say “no”, but to say “FUCK NO”. How I wish I could go back in time and tell Jason to go to hell for even asking me for such a ridiculous favor. He would have never paid me back. Be strong. Say no. People that borrow money are the biggest red-flag kinds of people you should look out for. In these situations, especially with those that you don’t know very well (or even if you do), say no, You don’t even have to be nice in those situations with the couching your “no” with nice and fuzzy language around it. Just say “no” and end the discussion. These kinds of people will come back for more and more and more and they’ll know to target you, each and every time. I have countless friends, and even bankruptcy clients who just couldn’t say not to people that leached off of them.

I don’t know what it is about humans and money, but for some reason, when you open the door to lending certain people money, those same people will just keep coming back to you over and over and over again.

CLOSING

So there you have it. Several ways in which you can stop being a “yes” man and start saying “no”. You’ve been a people pleaser far too long. The fact that you’re listening to this means that you are ready for change because you’re tired of getting taken advantage of, and quite frankly, abused. But believe it or not, if you reframe it, it’s not other people abusing you; it’s YOU abusing YOURSELF! Imagine, at any moment, you could stand up for yourself and say “no”, yet you don’t. Isn’t it therefore you torturing yourself by letting people ping you around like a pinball with their requests?

You don’t have to go full-dick mode, and just go around yelling “NO” to people abruptly. The goal isn’t to piss off other people and alienate your friends and family. Given some of the techniques, start off using the techniques that fit your personality. For example, if you’re an extreme people-pleaser, start off with gradually avoiding calls from people that you know are calling you for favors you don’t want to perform. Become less reliable to those whom you don’t want to rely upon you anymore. Don’t answer the phone if you’re busy. Don’t feel compelled to reply to emails as soon as they arrive. CONTROL THE PACE.

You don’t have to make decisions on the spot. You are allowed to be thoughtful, and by thoughtful, I mean you’re allowed to contemplate whether doing someone for someone would be in your best interest or not. If someone asks you to do something and you’re not sure – tell them so – I’m not sure, but I need to think about it. If they pressure you for an answer right away, then tell them no. STOP committing to things because it’s more convenient for the person asking you than it is for you. Do you realize how crazy that is?

Gradually, as you find your voice and start stretching your comfort zones, you’ll be more comfortable saying “no” on your terms. It’s not always going to be comfortable, but trust me, over time, it will be more rewarding than you can ever imagine.

Just the other day I had a crazy potential client come to a friend’s office. He wanted to argue with me about the law, and dictate how the legal process would go, even though he isn’t a lawyer. He was aggressive, unreasonable, and rude. The old me would have stressed myself out dealing with his toxic energy and irrational behavior, and I would have still taken the case. It seemed like he wanted to argue with me about everything, and it seemed like he was interrogating me. It’s one thing to ask someone questions to see their qualifications; it’s an entirely different thing to interrogate someone. When I realized he was just an absolute dick I did something that I had never done before.

The new me closed my books, stood-up, and walked out of the meeting while he was mid-sentence in one of his delusional diatribes. It was the most AMAZING feeling I have had. My way of saying no wasn’t even to say “no”, I’m not taking your case. I just got up and left instead of wasting more of my precious time on a nut-job. As I drove out of the parking lot, I got a tingling feeling and felt overcome with self-love for what I did. My only regret was how I wasn’t protecting myself like this earlier in life.

Remember, the two most important things to remember as you go through this journey is to be thoughtful and civil as the case merits. Above all though just remember: the word NO is a complete sentence.

How To Cleanse Bad Energy Before It’s Too Late

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So it happened again didn’t it?  Despite all of the lessons you’ve learned, hundreds of hours of YouTube videos, Podcasts, and self-help books, you still let someone through your front door that sucked the life out of you and now that that person has found your magical teat to suckle off of, you can’t get rid of them.

You’re left drained, your eyes feel heavy, and you need to do a reset to get your energy back. If you don’t properly recharge or cleanse, you’ll end up becoming what you hate by being a jerk to your loved ones in an attempt to steal their energy to replenish your own.  It becomes this vicious cycle – someone has taken your energy and now you’re subconsciously trying to take someone else’s.  No wonder people like lawyers end up getting divorced so much – they probably do emotional drive by’s on their spouses on a daily basis.  if you wonder why you need so much alone time, then this is why – because you are trying to protect yourself from further emotional turbulence and you need this time to heal.

In any event I want to use this episode to talk about ways in which to recharge your batteries and reset your mood and essentially cleanse the toxic energies that you have absorbed.  What will be different though, is that as the modern-day hippy that I am, I don’t really believe in all of these gem-Stones that you have to rub all over your balls.  I also don’t believe in planets aligning in order to dictate your life such as I don’t think you have to wait for Mercury to be in line with your anus before you can help yourself.  I also don’t think you need to risk burning your house down by burning incense and sage thereby setting off the fire alarms sprinklers and making things smell funky for your neighbors – something especially true if you live in an apartment complex.  The reason I do not believe in all those things is because those are all externalities and I truly do not believe that you need external material objects in order to heal yourself. Because once you start relying on these external things then what happens when you don’t have access to them? For example I live in Los Angeles and I’m pretty sure if I go to Trader Joe’s or Ralph’s or Walmart I can’t just find Sage so I can burn it.  Does this mean I have to run around town looking for sage or perhaps some sort of particular Quartz stone before I can begin the healing?  And what if there is a worldwide shortage of Sage – does this mean I can’t heal myself?   Nope, of course not.  The power to heal and cleanse oneself is within our self.

So here are some ways that I have found effective to help myself recharge my batteries.  Hopefully you find some use in them.  

2.  Make sure to give yourself some alone time everyday especially on a day when someone has taken your energy from you.

If you live with a roommate or you live with your parents or are married or whatever, then you may not have your own little cave to spend some time outside of the house where you can be alone. Especially in a big city like Los Angeles, it can sometimes be difficult because no matter where you go there are people around. But despite the crowds and big cities there are usually some places you can go to find some space.  A good place to do this might be a city park where you can sit on a bench and have at least a little bit of room with no one that knows you around.   Another place to get some alone time could be a public library.  While people may be there, at least they’re quietly doing their own thing which creates a very pleasant and healing environment.  I always love the smell of libraries.

While it is important for you to be alone, I think it’s even more important that you’re at least away from people that you know including friends and family.  At least when you’re alone in a park or library then you’re not around people that can try to use you as a conduit for them to use you to dump their dark energy.  The more you can put yourself in an anonymous place, the better.  When I’ve had a tough day with emotional terrorists giving me their junk it never ceases to amaze me how I can literally feel my body relaxing and detoxifying when I finally get to be alone in my man cave with no one to talk to me.  It’s amazing how tense the body can get without realizing because it happens so gradually.

For me, after feeling the anxiety and stress in my chest, when I go to my man-cave or dungeon and lie down, I can feel the negativity evaporating.  The pressure and weight I feel on my chest literally starts evaporating….I can breath easier, my mind stops racing with negative thoughts or dwelling on nonsense.  Find your special place in your house, or even buried away in the corner of some coffee shop.  And oh yeah – turn off the ringer to your cell phone so no incoming calls or text messages disturb you.

2.  Listen to music

Start playing your favorite songs.  I love pop duet ballads and top 40 pop.  I’ve especially found Coldplay songs quite relaxing and recently Alan Walker’s songs lift me up.  From Coldplay, I love Everglow, Hypnotized, and Fly On as all of those songs bring me back down and bring me memories and energies which help push out the negative stuff.  Alan Walker’s songs like Alone, On My WAy, and Darkside always lift me up because they make me feel like I’m on one of my travel adventures in some remote part of the world where I’m anonymous and untouchable.  Another one that is not pop-music but very soothing is by Deva Premal called Aat Guray Namay. Check out the website for some of these songs as perhaps they’ll strike a chord with you as well.  Regardless, music is subject so play music that you know will sooth your soul and bring back good memories, no matter how old.  Doing this will help distract your mind from whatever toxic shit you’ve been ruminating about and put some good vibrations into your mind and body.

3.  Read a novel.

READ?!  No one reads anymore, right?  Of course they do and if you don’t, then try it.  I stopped reading fiction novels for years, but after a trip to Bali last year, I stumbled upon a novel called “The Hard Way”, by Lee Child.  It’s about a character named Jack Reacher, which you may have heard about since they made a couple of movies based off of the character with Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher.  Anyway, amazing books and a year later I think I’ve read almost 15 of them.  They suck you in.  The point of reading these fiction books is they stimulate your imagination which is important because that means they distract you and make you use other parts of your brain instead of dwelling on whatever it is that is making you feel low-energy.  

It takes some getting used to if you haven’t read in awhile since a lot of us have turned to peering at our cell phones for an instant fix of reading and maybe have ADD when it comes to having to read an entire story.  Try it though.  And seriously if it’s that much of a struggle, get one of these audio books and listen to the story at night before going to bed.  

Hell for that matter, turn on a podcast which is a mystery or a story – there are plenty of them.  I’m not going to go so far as to start binge watching Netflix series because frankly I don’t think they’re as good for mental stimulation as reading a book or listening to a story since you’re not triggering your imagination as much since the visuals are already provided for you.  Listening to a story on a podcast or audio book is a great way to have your brain think about other things and cleanse the crap your mind has accumulated.  You start thinking about other things and if you’re listening to a mystery, it starts making your brain begin to try and figure out the mystery.  Try it!

Although not necessarily a mystery, a podcast I highly recommend is called Serial which is a real story about a high school kid that got thrown in jail for the murder of his ex-girlfriend.  It became the most-listened to podcast in history and the story within garnered national headlines and prompted  the legal system to reconsider the case and potentially get the accused out of jail.  To date, it was the most addictive thing I have ever listened to.  Give it a shot.  

4.  Go for a walk

You may have heard this as one of the most common things to do to cleanse you of bad energy, but take a walk.  Many pundits talk about taking a walk in nature, like taking a hike.  Here in Los Angeles there are surprisingly tonnes of hiking trails in the hills and mountains.  I say surprisingly because this is such a dense city, you wouldn’t think that there was anywhere where you would find nature in what’s otherwise a concrete jungle, but you would be very wrong.  Regardless of where you live, there are usually options and if you have to drive a bit to get there, so be it.  Walking in a forest is more special because you absorb better air and good energy from the plants and trees around you.  It may sound hokey but it’s real.  I always remember secluding myself in a beautiful villa in an unpopulated part of Ubud, Bali a little over a year ago.  My place was at the back of a rice field, at the edge of a small cliff facing a jungle.  There was literally nothing around.  I swear I had my psychic superpowers return to me in just a couple of days of being there.  My memory sharpened and I was able to perceive things that I had stopped perceiving.  For example, one day I had a feeling my Mom had fallen down and no one was there at the house.  My Mom had NEVER fallen down before and had no health issues.  Sure enough the next day I called her and she told me she had fallen.  

I’m not telling everyone to fly to Bali.  But if you can’t find a forest, then go to a local park.  If you’re not able to even go to a local park, I’ve even found just taking a walk outside of your house or office can make a huge difference.  I’m always amazed at the things I notice when I take a walk that I don’t notice when I’m in my car driving by the same places.  Just get outside.  Even take a walk around the block for 10 minutes.  A friend of mine was always stressed at work.  She would work long hours in a pressured environment for weeks and months on end.  I found out that she didn’t even get up from her desk for lunch – she would literally eat lunch at her desk, meaning she would be sitting down for hours and hours in the same place.  I urged her to get up and go somewhere for lunch.  Take a 15 minute break and go to across the street to Dunkin Donuts for a French honey cruller.  Just break up your day and get outside!  She started doing it and immediately within the first few days her stress levels went from 100 down to about 60.  Cleansing is about distracting the mind and finding energy from the outside.

5.  Steal it from someone else.

Yup, you heard that right.  If you need a cleanse, that means someone in your day stole it from you at some point.  I guess this isn’t really cleansing so much as it is taking back what’s rightfully yours, but I thought I would throw it in this podcast since as empaths we tend to run away, hide, and curl up into the fetal position if someone attacks us.  

Why not steal the energy back?  One caveat though:  AVOID doing an emotional drive-by on a loved one or innocent bystander because then you become just as bad as the emotional terrorist or ET as I like to call them.  Instead, why not be a dick right back to the person that stole your energy?  Avoid getting into a back-and-forth fight – it’s more about standing up to that person and letting them know that you won’t tolerate their behavior.  It does wonders.  I’m still working on how to do this and it won’t work every time, but I’ll give you a recent example.

I had a client come in for a consultation for a bankruptcy.  Right away I could tell his energy was one that was very stressed.  Unlike most people, surprisingly, those needing to file bankruptcy feel like crap, but generally are pleasant.  This guy however was really taking it badly even though in reality the portrait of his situation was not that bad compared to most.  I requested some very simple document from him that I would need in order to do his case.  Not long after, he began calling multiple times a day and emailing, as though the voicemails he was leaving weren’t enough.  He wasn’t even calling with any questions, but instead just to give me useless updates on his own status of collecting documents.  For those of you out there that have never used a lawyer – you don’t need to call us to tell us what you had for breakfast.  This kind of behavior is why many lawyers charge hourly fees – not so much because of the money but to mitigate clients from abusing our time.

I’ll fast forward a bit, but when it came time for him to come in again, actually sign the retainer and pay me to actually start his case and represent him, he began throwing a fit when I asked him for documents that he did not bring (even though I had told him various times that I needed them).  He did an emotional drive-by on me, complaining about how ridiculous this process is and wondering why I hadn’t finished his case yet.  Hey dumb-ass, you haven’t even paid me, nor have you given me your documents, so how the F am I supposed to do your case?  By psychically knowing your personal information?

Anyway, I could feel the tension.  He slammed the folder I gave him closed and began walking out of my office saying he would have to come back to get all of these ridiculous documents.  The old me would have ate his energy and been agitated.  And trust me, with his energy and behavior, I did eat some.  But I did something different.  First, I made it clear that I can’t keep meeting him for free – sign the retainer, pay me, and you can bring back the deficient documents later.  He didn’t have any issue with that, but I still felt unsettled and I started to stew internally about what a dick this guy was and my mind started going down a bad path.

So here’s what I did:  a couple of hours later I called him.  I said John, I didn’t like my meeting with you earlier today.  I’m the guy helping you, and you’re attacking me as though I’m the one that put you in this situation.  I can put up with a difficult situation as I realize that’s part of the job, but in reality if you’re going to be borderline accusatory with me, and spew such negative energy, then I’m not the lawyer for you.  You made it seem like I gave you bad instructions when in fact I didn’t.  I used to put up with bad behavior from clients but I don’t anymore because I’ve grown up a lot over the years and I’m an empath so I have no interest in absorbing negative energy because it’s just going to make me resent you and not want to help you, which is the opposite of the type of relationship I need to have with my clients.  So if it’s going to be like pulling teeth and arm-wrestling you for very simple documents and information requests, then you should come back to my office and pick up your check and find someone else.

BAM.  THERE.  I gave him his energy back.  And guess what happened?  He spent the next five minutes apologizing, wondering how he became this way and became the client from hell, attacking the very guy he needed help from.  He promised he would behave better and said he would show it through his actions.  It got better:  the next day he went to my office and even though my paralegal hadn’t even interacted with him, he personally approached her when I wasn’t even there and apologized to her for being such an asshole.  

That day when I made the call to him to tell him all of this, I immediately felt 100% better.  I was starting to stew a little bit since I had absorbed his negative energy, and was starting to feel negative.  Instead of letting it perpetuate and going to bed with it, I called him and gave it right back to him.  And you know what?  IT FELT GREAT and I didn’t think about him for the rest of the day.  I wonder how many fewer gray hairs I would have had I started practicing this earlier on in life.  Better late than never.  I suggest when someone does this to you, try it.  Be completely honest and just tell them to F off in the nicest of ways, setting limits.    

Be really careful here.  I think a lot of people in high pressure jobs like medicine and law end up getting divorces and have terrible familial relationships because they unleash the bad energy they’ve absorbed upon their loved ones when they get home – whether that’s upon their husbands, wives, or even children.  This can be the start of how abusive relationships form.  People need an outlet so try to give that negative energy somewhere and to someone else, whoever is around that they know won’t push back.  We often do it to our loved-ones because they don’t push back.  Monitor yourself to make sure you’re not doing drive-bys on your loved ones and messing up the relationships that matter meanwhile preserving the toxic ones at work or wherever, where the negative energy is emanating.  

6.  Meditate 

You’ll hear this over and over and over.  I am still struggling to meditate although I’ve been trying for the last couple of years.  I think just the act of trying is a good enough start.  There are plenty of apps you can download on your phone such as Simple Habit and Headspace which will give you a guided meditation and perhaps make the process easier since it puts you on a schedule.  While I haven’t used Headspace much, I do use Simple Habit and what I like about that one is that you can choose the guided meditation based on the kind of issue you’re experiencing, such as stress, anxiety, depression, or if you just had a hard day at the office.

I think the problem I have had with meditating is that when things are going well, I stop doing it.  I can find the time to check Facebook twenty times a day, or browse the internet for nonsense for 20 minutes, but I find an excuse not to invest 5 minutes of time in a guided meditation.  There’s a quote I once read that stuck with me:  if you’re so busy that you don’t have even 20 minutes to meditate, then meditate for an hour.

Try it!

CONCLUSION

There are lots of other things you can do to cleanse and replenish your energy.  If you have your own technique that you’d like to share, send me a message and I’ll be happy to include it in a future episode.  I suggest finding something that works for you as everything doesn’t work for everybody.  What is even more important though is that you do this regularly, even daily so that you keep your cup full.  Often we get so caught up in life that we don’t realize that have anything left unless it’s too late.  We end up lashing out at everyone around us, and getting sick very easily because we’re under so much stress.

If you start cleansing and make it part of a daily routine, it will help you to keep shining.  While I don’t believe that you need to stick Mars in your anus to feel good or burn your house down with sage, at the end of the day, do what works.  Everything is worth a shot, but just like you should protect your time, so should you also protect your energy.  At the end of every day, think about how you feel, and take action to regenerate so that your cup is brimming at the start of every day and hopefully even by the end of each day.

Put Yourself First Or Get Hurt Like Kevin Durant

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After watching the NBA Finals in which the Golden State Warriors squared off against the Toronto Raptors in a best of seven series, I was prompted to do this impromptu episode when the Warrior’s star player, Kevin Durant, severely injured his leg.

Kevin Durant was a unique player – not because of his almost 7 foot height, andand not not only because he was an amazing basketball player, but because of the fact that he was actually very sensitive to what other people would say about him even though he was a major celebrity.  Kevin injured himself about a month before the Finals and could not play.  Perhaps succumbing to the pressure to play again in order to save his team from elimination, he ended up playing.  From everything we knew it seemed like a bad idea in that he wasn’t ready to play.

He ended up playing.  I cringed every time he had the ball.  Sure enough, not long into the game, he ended up tearing his Achilles heel, perhaps because he was injured and playing when he should not have been.   In this episode, I explore how giving in to what other people want can ultimately lead to your demise.

Good luck and best wishes to the kind soul known as Kevin Durant.

Time Is Your Most Valuable Asset | Guard It Ruthlessly

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What’s the one most valuable thing you have and can never replace, that you paid nothing for, protect the least, but let people take from you for free even when you don’t want to give it away?

TIME.

We spend so much of our lives accumulating assets, material things, whether that includes your latest electronic gadget, your house, or your car.  What do you do to protect those things?  You buy an insurance plan for your phone in case it gets lost or stolen, and a case for your phone so it doesn’t break if you drop it.  You protect it.  You pay for a car warranty, wash your car, and do regular maintenance on your car so it lasts as long as possible and looks good.  You protect it.  You buy home owner’s insurance, perform regular maintenance, clean your house, and renovate it.  You protect it.  You put your money in a bank, and other valuables in a safety deposit box.  You protect them.

If anyone tried to take your phone, car, house, or money, you’d be pissed off, angry, fight them if necessary, and cause a ruckus to guard against anyone taking these things from you.  Even though all of these things are replaceable, you would never let anyone take them away from you without a fight.

But your time on the other, you give away without a second though.  Especially as an empath or highly sensitive person, time is something you give away freely and let people take from you, even when you don’t have it to give, or don’t want to give it.  Because you’re so concerned with what people think, you let people take as much as they want from you in the interest of likability or not offending the person taking your time.

Think about it.  You’re giving away your most valuable gift for FREE.  If you keep doing this, you will end up frustrated and angry with yourself for not putting a stop to this terrible habit now.  When you initially get frustrated with the person wasting your time, you eventually realize it’s your own fault and you wonder why you didn’t put an end to people stealing your time.

WHY IS TIME SO PRECIOUS

Not that this needs much elaborating on, but let’s face it, you only get this one life so from the minute you’re born, you’re living life on a countdown timer.  If you think of an hourglass, as soon as you’re born…hell, as soon as you’re conceived, the sand in the hourglass is only flowing from the bottom to the top.  While you can do certain things to prolong your life, like eating healthy, and staying peaceful, no matter what you do, that time will run out no matter what you do.

Time is so precious because you can literally never replace it.  Ever.  If you crash a car, you can buy a new one.  If your house gets destroyed in a tornado, you can buy a new one.  When you give away your time, it’s never coming back.  Ever.  It is the only irreplaceable commodity on earth.  When you waste time on something, you can’t get it back.  If someone knocks on your door to sell you their religion or to sign you up for a fake after school program, then wants to sit down with you for half an hour to discuss it even though you already know your answer is a resolute NO, you can’t later rewind the clock and get that person to give you your time back.

I actually think time is even more precious for a couple of additional reasons beyond the simple fact that it is irreplaceable.

You don’t know how much time you had.  If you died tomorrow, but then at the gates of heaven were given the chance to have one more day on earth, can you imagine what that day would look like?  Would it start with a Big Mac and large fries at McDonald’s, and end like a scene out of the movie The Hangover, when they went to the red light district in Bangkok?  No, not that part where Stu realized he had made love with a ladyboy….

What would be all of those crazy things you would do and how would you maximize your time?    Maybe your day would be spent simply curling up on the sofa with your family, watching movies all day and eating ice cream.  It doesn’t really matter what you would do because all that would really matter at the end of the day is that you were maximizing your time doing what YOU wanted to do, however that satisfied you.

So what makes time even more valuable is the fact that we don’t really know how much time we have.  I remember going to my friend’s, girlfriend’s funeral several years ago.  All of her friends were lesbian bikers, so it was quite the diverse crowd.  Nonetheless, the son of the person that died gave his speech and I always remembered one line out of it in particular.  He said “the problem is that we always think that we have more time”.  His mom had died suddenly so he hadn’t a chance to say goodbye.  It struck a chord with me because he was so right – we keep putting off things we want to do until tomorrow.  Telling your parents you love them, or pursuing your dreams…anything really.  

Because of this fact that we never know when things will end, it makes time even more precious.  This doesn’t mean that we have to maximize each day with balls to the wall activity, but it does mean where we put our time and who we spend it with should be taken much more seriously than many of us currently do.  I’ve seen cancer survivors who were diagnosed to die, end up living a long and prosperous life.  I’ve also seen people who have chain-smoked for 40 years, eaten hamburgers and fries every single day, live into their late seventies.  On the other hand I’ve known seemingly healthy people die suddenly at the age of 38 because of a massive heart-attack.  You just never know when things may come to an end, and this uncertainty adds to the preciousness of time.

The other reason I think time is even more valuable than we realize is because as you get older, time moves faster.  I’ll talk about this in more detail in a future episode.  But regardless, for those in their teens or early twenties listening to this, time is moving at a different speed than it is for me.  And for someone in their seventies or eighties, time is moving even faster for them than it is for me.  I always remember an interview I saw on 60 Minutes a few years ago where they interviewed centenarians.  The interviewer asked one of them, what surprised them the most about living into their 100s.  They responded that what surprised them the most is that they had to brush their teeth every five minutes.  What they meant by that was time was moving so quickly and days were passing so quickly that it was like they were performing their nightly and morning rituals every five minutes.  Days were passing by in the blink of an eye.

For those that are much younger, like in your teens or whatever, don’t assume that you can discount what I’m saying because you’re still in your teens.  When I say that time moves faster as you get older, it doesn’t mean that once you hit 40, time suddenly accelerates.  The whole perception of time moving faster is something that happens gradually with each passing year.  If you’re not appreciative of this, you will be.  Whether you like it or not.  

I always think back to being a kid when I would have summer break.  In Ottawa, summer break would essentially be from around the second or third week in June to the first week in September, giving me a little over two months of vacation.  Those lazy summer days, playing Dungeons and Dragons or Monopoly with my best friends Tony, Jess, or Stefan, were awesome.  But what I also remember is how long the summers lasted.  Those two months lasted an eternity and were the perfect amount of time.  Now when I think of two months, it’s a joke.  The days are passing so fast I mix up what I did last week with the week before.  Does two months seem like an eternity?  Hell no – two months passes as fast as two weeks these days.    

I disagree completely when people say that by the time they’re in their late forties they’re middle-aged.  Middle implies that you’re half-way through your life-span.  If the average life expectancy if someone is 77 years old, I actually will say that you’re probably middle-aged by the time you’re 30.  The reason for this is because even if you lived to be 77 years old, the next 47 years of your life after you turn thirty will go by much faster than your first 30 years.  Did I lose you yet in the math?

Basically it will feel like time is moving much faster so you will burn through the next thirty years of your life significantly faster than the first thirty years.  For these reasons I really believe time is much more precious, especially as we get past our thirties since time starts to fly.

HOW TO GUARD OUR TIME

  1. Don’t make yourself so available.  I used to always make myself available for everyone.  I still do, to a fault, but am diligently working on changing that.  If I had a list of ten things to do in one day, I would find that at the end of my day I would have completed like one out of ten things.  What the hell was going on?

Well, I would wake up and have my tasks set.  Before I could even get out of bed though, my phone would be ablaze with text message emergencies or phone calls from people needing things.  Being the people pleaser I was, those new requests would somehow turn into new items on my to do list, but they would push my previous to-do list items down.  Basically the incoming tasks would take precedent over the previously scheduled tasks.  From a list of ten things, the new three things would become numbers 1, 2, and 3, instead of 11, 12, and 13.

What I’ve noticed is that, especially for an empath but true for most people, the more you take on, the more people will give you.  If you work a regular job, it’s the same.  And there’s nothing wrong with working hard and taking on more things as hard work and dedication can help you get promoted in your job, help you get raises, etc.  And that may be all fine and dandy, but outside of work, a lot of us have a habit of just taking on anything and everything that comes our way, always pushing our own needs and tasks down on the list.  However, when you prioritize any and every incoming task over the other things you already have to complete, you end up making someone else unhappy somewhere else and what you also do is make yourself unhappy in particular yourself.  

What you need to start doing is putting those new tasks at the end of your list.  By taking on everything and putting them as priority tasks, you end up creating unreal expectations for everyone and when you can’t fulfill those expectations, it actually hurts your reputation instead of helping it.  If you’re at work, someone will eventually think you’re unreliable because you were not able to get something done on time.  If it’s in your personal life, then you’re going to disappoint a family member or friend.  The upside is that hopefully they won’t rely on you again (which can be a good thing for you).  The downside is that you’ll probably end up getting frustrated with your friend and yourself.

The best thing to do is to, if you’re going to accept a task, let the person know that you have a full schedule and you won’t be able to get to it until next week or whenever you think you can comfortably do it.  That way when you are able to finish it early, no one can say you didn’t meet your promise.  You also set the tone that you’re not some servant ready to jump every time someone asks you to jump.  What I’ve noticed with these tasks people give you, whether at work or in your personal life, more than half the time it’s something that person can do themselves.  Since you’re the easy softie, they end up asking you since you’re Mr. or Mrs. Reliable.  In my job as an attorney, I’ve had people want me to get their bank statements for them from the bank which they could easily get on their own online (even as an attorney, it would take hours and tonnes of paperwork for me to get bank statements), or have me get their paystubs from them, when they could simply contact their HR department.  My favorite is one potential client that got mad at me that I wanted to meet her at my office instead of downtown that same day (there was no rush by the way).  Since I was more of a pushover back then, I actually even caved a bit and even suggested we meet in Sherman Oaks, which was half-way, to which she got pissed off.  Not to get on a high-horse, but I’m not a home delivery service.  You do hear about attorneys making house calls, but those are for big personal injury cases.  It’s not regular that an attorney spends an hour and a half in traffic just for a face to face meeting, unless they’re billing a client, which this was not that type of client or case.

Stand your ground.  Set your day in stone to a degree.  Unless it’s family or friends that genuinely need help, be careful with taking on tasks that other people can do themselves.  What I started doing was answering my phone less, or taking longer to return calls from certain people.  Eventually they realized I wasn’t their 911 service.  For an empath, you have to do this to protect yourself otherwise you will continue to be taken advantage of, over and over, and over again.  Some of the people you will attract couldn’t care less about you or your time as long as they can use you to please themselves.  How selfish people can be never ceases to amaze me.  It’s up to you to guard your time ruthlessly

2)  Don’t feel compelled to answer every phone call and text message.

In that same vein, some of us have this mentality of jumping whenever someone tells us to jump, or answering our calls whenever the phone rings, no matter how busy we are.  Me included over the years.

A couple of things about cell phones – they’ve really made things easier for us, but they’ve made things more difficult for us at the same time.  People think it means we can be accessed at their will and for sensitive people, we often feel compelled to answer even when we either don’t feel like it, or we’re busy.

My favorite is when people call me multiple times.  They’ll call, I won’t answer, they’ll call again seconds later, I still won’t answer, and they’ll call a third time.  None of those times do they leave a voicemail and unless they’re complete idiots, obviously I can see their missed call on my phone thanks to this incredible invention called Caller ID.  In some cases I’ll get so frustrated I’ll answer the phone out of breath, exasperated that the person won’t fuck off or just leave a voicemail.  That’s a failing on my part which I am getting better at.  These days when someone does that, unless it’s an emergency (it is literally never an emergency, it’s just people with obsessive or narcissistic personalities that do that), I purposely don’t call them back until the next day.  If they call a fourth time, I add them to the “block” list on my cell phone.  You’d be surprised, or not, how long my blocked callers list is on my cell phone.

Too often, we want to be at the beacon call of the people calling us.  Whether they’re friends or clients.  By doing so with the wrong set of people, we set unreal expectations that end up frustrating ourselves, and giving power to the people calling us, as though we are subservient to them.  When you finally don’t answer quickly because you’re pissed off, they hold it against you.

I used to have this client that for some reason would call me twice a day about his bankruptcy case, asking how the case was going.  Just so you know, once a case is filed, nothing happens – we just have to wait for a hearing date and then we wait again a few months for the Court to sign off on the paperwork.  There are no updates in 95% of the cases.  Despite having explained this to the client a couple of hundred times, he kept calling me daily.  No matter how much I told him not to call, he would call.  But what was WORSE is that I would always answer.  I was less self-aware back then.  I remember I finally went to Hawaii on vacation where the time zone was some hours behind Los Angeles.  I told the client to NOT call me as I was on vacation.  Sure enough, the morning after I arrived, sleeping in the hotel room with my other two friends, my cell phone goes off at 6am with the client calling asking for an update.  It wasn’t until I became more savvy that I realized that people like that probably have personality disorders.  Fortunately those days of that happening are no longer since I’ve been able to set expectations and be much, much more firm with clients.

Remember – your cell phone is for YOUR convenience, not the convenience of the person calling you.  

3)  Learn to say no.

This underscores everything.  Especially true for empaths and highly sensitive people, we tend to have a hard time saying no to people.  No matter what the favor is, or who is asking us, we’re afraid to say no.  Even when we’re stretched thin and that guy that never does anything for you when you need it, now calls you for a favor, you’re hesitant to turn him down.  Or tell him off.  Not being able to say “no” more often can be fatal for empaths.

I highly encourage you to watch the movie Yes Man with Jim Carey.  It’s about a guy that says no to everyone and everything.  Then one day, he ends up saying yes to everything because he realizes he’s been missing out on life.  I think happiness is somewhere in between.  When we have to consider other people’s feelings all of the time before we say “no”, it can be very problematic to the quality of our own lives.  Think of all of the decisions, tasks, and things people ask from you every single day.  And instead of thinking about whether you want to do something or not, how often do you find yourself first calculating in your mind all of the metrics of whether it would upset the other person if you said no, would it make other people happy, what would happen if you said no, and in last place of the decision making process, do you finally ask the question to yourself of whether you really want to do something.

Do you realize how crazy that is?  Let me get this straight – it’s your life and it’s your job to make yourself happy every day, but you consider everyone else’s happiness before you even get to your own.  Remember something very important:  it’s not your job to make other people happy.  If someone doesn’t like your decision then that’s their problem.  You’re not a court jester or a clown.

I challenge you to try for one week the following:  whenever you have to make a decision or someone asks you to do something, ask yourself FIRST, “do I want to do this?  Is it good for me?  Do I have time?”  That should be the end of your analysis. If the answer to these questions is yes, then go right ahead.   

You should NOT be considering “will this person like me less if I say no?  Will I lose them as a friend or will they get mad at me?  What will happen or how will they figure out this problem if I don’t say yes and help them?”  I’m not saying to never help anyone when it’s inconvenient or anything like that.  Friends and family are important and sometimes you just have to help them when it’s not convenient.  But you’d be surprised how often we’re trying to please people that really have nothing to do with us.  Are you about to buy a house with a realtor but you’ve changed your mind at the last minute?  Go ahead and change your mind.  Don’t worry about whether it will upset your realtor.  Did you hire me to file a bankruptcy for you but later realized you don’t want to do it anymore?  Who gives a shit what I think – call me up and tell me you don’t want to go ahead with it.  PLEASE YOURSELF FIRST.  SECOND. AND LAST.

You will suddenly find yourself with more time on your hands to invest in your own projects and hobbies.  Even if you just want to get more sleep, you’ll find you’ll have that time instead of being a robot running around at the whim of everyone who asks you to do stuff.  Just say NO.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH OUR TIME

Whatever. The. Hell. You. Want.  I didn’t put this together to preach about time being valuable so therefore you need to be productive every second of every day, living balls to the wall, climbing mountains, and starting billion dollar companies.  I actually think you should do with your time whatever the hell you want, doing whatever the hell makes you happy.

What matters is that you are doing what YOU want to do, and not what SOMEONE ELSE wants you to do.  That is a huge distinction.  

Especially for empaths, highly sensitive people, and other people pleasers, we have a habit of not doing what we want to do, but doing what we think other people want us to do, or doing what we think will make us happy.  It’s one of the worst habits you can have in life.

Specifically for those of us that have a bad habit of doing this, I urge you to be selfish with your time.  I’m not saying to be a jerk and be selfish, nor am I saying to be pushy and force your will upon others, much like others have probably been doing to you for years.  What I am suggesting is to make decisions that please you first. 

Examples?  Let’s say you only have two weeks of vacation a year off of work.  You’ve had your heart set on going to Cancun for years and now is finally your chance to go..,you’ve saved up your money, you’ve researched your dream resort, and you even learned a bit of Spanish … “dos cervezas por favor”.  Your dream is finally about to come true!  Mexico here I come!!!

Oh oh, wait a minute though.  One of your friends wants to join you, but he doesn’t have enough money, and he’s already been to Cancun.  Instead, he starts trying to convince you to go to Miami.  The trip will be cheaper for him, and you’ll have an even better time he claims.  C’mon, let’s go to Miami.  As though it were up for negotiation, you go back and forth on the merits of Miami versus Cancun.  You finally buckle, and decide to go to Miami, giving up your dream trip with the precious little vacation time you were allotted from work.  The trip, no doubt, ends up sucking because you realize your friend needs to borrow money from you every  step of the way, and wakes up at noon, always wanting you to go to the restaurants he wants to go to, and the clubs he feels like seeing.  You come back home angry with your friend, but mostly angry with yourself for not having followed your heart and done what you wanted to do with your time.  Sound familiar?  Once again your penchant for being a people pleaser ended up screwing you.

What you should have done in this situation is simply state you’re going to Cancun and if your friend wanted to go, then he could tag along.  By him going on your trip, he actually made you go on his trip.  Not only did he waste your money, but he wasted your time and you’re the only one to blame.

When making decisions involving your time, ask yourself if it’s convenient for you and is it what you really want to do or is it what someone else wants to do.  For many of us empaths, not only do we have a hard time saying no to people and have our own plans and time hijacked, but we also are a magnet for people to approach us to steal our time.  I swear, I could be standing in a group of fifty people, and I will always be that one guy that is approached by some random guy trying to sell something and chat me up for for twenty minutes about some garbage I have literally zero interest in.  

Just the other day I was standing in line at the CostCo food-court.  It was lunchtime and there were probably 25 people in line.  Some guy not in line, walks up to the line from the opposite direction, eyeing everyone down.  His eyes not-so-coincidentally lock onto me and he approaches me in an enthusiastic voice asking me what I did for a living as though we’re at some social gathering even though I’m just waiting in line to buy a Caesar salad.  Right away I don’t want to talk to this guy – he had obviously approached me to sell me something so my guard went up.  Not only that, but now everyone in line is watching and listening.  He tried to engage by complimenting my suit and asking if I had a job and what I did for a living.  I kept my answers short hoping he would fuck-off, but he wouldn’t go away.  Of course, he eventually got to the punch line in asking if I wanted to “earn” extra income, presumably with some nonsense pyramid multi-level marketing scheme.  You gotta love it – I just finished telling him I’m an attorney.  Not that we all make a lot of money or anything, but I’m not exactly in a profession where I need or want to be selling Amway on the side.  

But I just want to illustrate that as an empath, you have to be extra cautious with your time since you are especially vulnerable to having people take advantage of your time.  You are a mark for salespeople, random people who want to do emotional drive-bys on you, people who need favors, run errands, talk about their problems, etc.  I’m not suggesting you become anti-social, or a dick that doesn’t want to help anyone.  What I am saying is to cut-off people who want you to do things when they would never return the favor to you, and if you can’t cut them off, then at least say NO.  What I’ve learned is the more I’ve said no to people, the more people have respected my time, and interestingly, the less random people have approached me in the street and in public to waste my time.  Just because someone has a table set-up outside of the grocery store seeking donations to their kid’s school doesn’t mean you have to stand there and listen to their spiel for five minutes when you’ve already made your mind up that you’re not going to contribute.  Or if a telemarketer calls, don’t wait for five minutes while they give you the story about why you need to donate to whatever it is they’re asking.  At my parents’ place even on the do not call registry, they probably get upwards of 10 calls a day.  My Dad actually listens to them, and then is probably too nice in declining because half the time he enters into negotiation with the telemarketer to justify why he doesn’t need to contribute or buy their product.  These days I just simply hang up.  

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. The point is, save your time from these time-thieves so that you can use it to do whatever you want.  If what you want to do is eat sour cream and onion chips and watch TV, then do it.  But at least you’re doing it because it’s your time and you want to do it, not because someone else wants you to do it.

CONCLUSION

For those that have been struggling with never having enough time because they’re always doing everything for everyone else and not enough for themselves, now is the time for you to change.  BE SELFISH WITH YOUR TIME.  One of the great things you can do to be successful in life is to be generous with your time, but being generous with your time means you have that time to give in the first place.  If you’re always busy running everyone else’s errands, driving two hours to San Diego instead of meeting half-way because it’s convenient for your friend and not you, then you’re not being generous with your time, you’re just being stupid with your time, and you’re flushing it down the toilet.

It is true that you should volunteer and help people etc., but you won’t be able to be generous with your time if you’re not guarding your time and being selfish in a way that preserves it.

Think of it.  When you give away your time to something you don’t care about or someone you don’t want to give it to, you’re literally giving away something that you can never replace.  TRULY the most valuable thing to a human besides their health.  You can replace money, gold, diamonds, whatever it is you think is valuable.  You can NEVER replace your wasted time.  An hour here, an hour there…it’s adds up over a lifetime.  Even at my age, and I’d like to think I’m not that old, the only thing I really regret is wasting my time.  I wish I didn’t go on trips with certain people just because they asked (even if didn’t really want to go).  I wish I didn’t drive all over the city meeting people just to appease them when they could just have come to my office.  But instead of being frustrated, the important thing is to turn the regrets and wasted time into lessons – once you do that then that time is no longer a waste since your grew from the experience.

It’s funny.  We buy alarms, video surveillance systems, and locks to protect our houses.  We lock our cars, turn on their alarms to protect our cars.  We preserve and save our money and when the bank charges us an extra 50 cents in bank charges, we get pissed and fight them to get the charges reversed so you can preserve your money.  But yet when it comes to those precious minutes and hours every day, we let people take our time from us without a second thought.  We fail to see the time we have is far more valuable than any car, house, or bank account you will ever have.  The only problem is that you need to start acting like it!

You have one life to live.  Guard your most precious gift ruthlessly.

 

How Stress Is Silently Killing You | The Frog In Boiling Water

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Have you heard the story about the frog that died in a pot of boiling water?  He was alive when someone put him into a nice cool pot of water.  That person then put the pot on the stove, reassuring the frog that everything was going to be okay.  The frog trusted the person and didn’t think much of what was going on.  When the person turned on the stove, the frog didn’t notice much difference in the water’s temperature until it was too late and he had boiled to death.

What had happened?  Apparently with small adjustments in temperature, as the water got hotter and hotter, it got so hot it began boiling.  Because of the frog’s ability to adapt, it did not realize that the water go to such a hot temperature that the water’s temperature became unsurvivable.  The frog died from the heat even though it could have jumped out of the pot at any time and saved itself.

You’re the frog and the water represents the stress in your life.  Much like the frog, as humans, we are good at adapting to our changing environment.  What inevitably happens though as we get older and have more responsibilities, is that the pot of water we are in called “life”, can become increasingly pressured, and hot like the water.  Since it can happen gradually over a period of months and years, we simply take on more and more, thinking we can and are handling everything okay.  Until one day we wake up dead at the ripe young age of 50 because of a heart attack from all of the stress we put our bodies through.  Does this sound like you?

Today I want to talk to you about how to figure out if you’re under so much pressure in your life that you’re headed down a path of self-destruction, whether you realize it or not.  Today I want you to start examining your life as a pot of water and my goal is for you to pay attention to whether or not the water in your life is close to a boiling point without you even realizing it.  If you’re alive, which you are if you’re listening/reading to this, it is not too late to make changes to save yourself from yourself.  I still opine that stress is the number one killer of humans here in the western hemisphere and I believe being vigilant over our stress levels is even more important than being vigilant over our diet.

Without further ado, let’s see how hot the water is in your life before it’s too late.

PHYSICAL CHANGES

Your body is always trying to speak to you.  If you’re not attuned to your body you will miss the subtle, and then later, not so subtle cues your body is giving you.  The more stressed you are the more you will find your body changing until the effects are irreversible or have manifested in illnesses you can’t cure.

Skin and Hair

While you may not think you’re overly stressed, you may in fact be overly stressed if you find your body giving you subtle hints.  Subtle hints include things like your skin condition.  Do you find yourself getting pimples or other forms of acne even though you’re way out of your adolescent years?  Don’t ignore this.  Stress can trigger the right chemicals in your body which can cause acne regardless of your age.  If you think they are just temporary hormonal changes that will go away, while that may be true in certain instances, don’t overlook them by assuming it is that.  In fact, take a look at what is going on in your life or what started to go on before the acne flared up.  If you can identify something that triggered it, that thing is probably something stress related and you need to get rid of it!

I had a friend who had acne as a kid (join the club)!  It went away when he was about 19 years ago.  Fast forward twenty years later, at the ripe age of 39, he started getting acne again!  He was exercising regularly and also kept a very healthy diet free of fried foods and sugar.  Yet, there it was – big pimples popping up on his face.  He, like me, was an attorney, so appearances mattered given that he had to go to Court as well as meet clients etc.  He couldn’t figure out what was going on.  People told him “well, you’re turning 40 soon so it is just hormonal changes”.  Personally I thought that was BS as your body doesn’t know when you’re turning 40 years ago.  Everyone’s body ages differently.  The body doesn’t know what 40 is.  Your biological age is different from your calendar age.

Anyway, the poor guy tried everything from changing his diet to different topical treatments.  Eventually, after about six months, the pimples subsided.  Occasionally one would pop-up, but not like before.  I took a step back with him to analyze it.  He had assumed it was just a temporary hormonal change.  I suspected otherwise.

Let’s examine his situation in a bit of depth:  when we reviewed his timeline, it seemed obvious what was really going on.  He was gradually getting stressed out of his mind and didn’t even realize it. Immediately before the acne started, two major life events occurred:  first, he had his first child.  Second, his in-laws had moved in with him and his wife to help with the baby.  On top of this, add sleepless nights, as well as managing a law practice.  This poor guy had been getting overloaded with stress and didn’t even realize it.  I remember him talking about the pressure of having people live at his place and how he felt responsible for all of the people under his roof.  

About six months after the baby was born, the wife returned to work, the baby went to daycare, and the in-laws left.  Around this time, the acne disappeared.  Coincidence?  Not in my opinion!  He had gone from having a fairly quiet life to having a number of pressures, major ones.  Maybe because of the kind of work we do as attorneys, he didn’t notice the extra pressure and stress he was under.  He was like the frog who didn’t really notice how hot the water was getting with all of these things that had landed in his life.

In reality, it was likely his was body being poisoned by stress, and the stress was manifesting in pimples.  Sometimes I wonder if we get pimples on our face so that we can see them and react sooner, since our face is the first thing we see in the mirror.  

Other physical changes include other skin issues such as rashes or hives you don’t normally get, or the exacerbation of pre-existing skin issues.  Perhaps you have mild exzema but now it suddenly is way worse – it could be you’re under too much stress.  I really think the skin is one of the biggest mirrors of stress.

Next look at your hair.  The biggest one is the color and quality.  Did you go from having a nice jet-black head of hair to having grays pop-up at an alarming rate?  For those that know me, yes, I am talking about myself!  I went from having about 10 gray hairs at the end law school to having them pop-up like mushrooms in the first year of being an attorney.  I took them for granted, not realizing the pressure and stress of being a lawyer and dealing with knuckleheads was injuring me physically.  Look to see if grays are showing up.  The more stressed you are, the more the hormones produced from the stress can deplete the melanocyte stem cells that determine hair color.

The other big one is if you notice hair-shedding at an alarming rate.  When I lived in Toronto, I went through a big hair-shed.  I thought something really bad was going on.  I went to a number of doctors, and none of them could figure it out – they all just said it was probably male-pattern baldness, and since I had such a thick head of hair, to be honest I don’t think they even believed me.  I had to use some logic, which was that no one in my family was bald, nor do people who a pre-disposed to baldness lose so much hair so quickly as was happening with me.  After a hundred hours of self-research I realized I was going through something called telogen effluvium wherein when you go through extreme stress, many of your hair follicles go into a resting phase and your hair sheds significantly.  Fortunately, there is much more data and science available on this phenomena now versus twenty years ago when it first happened.  It gave me pause, and taught me to be more relaxed about things and avoid stressful situations otherwise it would happen again.  And guess what?  It has happened again several times since then, always triggered by stressful events.

I have a friend who recently quit practicing law after she had an entire clump of hair come out in the shower, leaving a bald patch on her head.  Medically this is referred to as alopecia where stress can cause a bald spot on your head.  Stresses that cause this are usually from significant surgery, but the emotional stress can be so high that it triggers it as well.  Imagine that for a minute:  you can stress yourself out so much that it has the same impact on your body as major surgery.

Fortunately for my friend, Instead of ignoring it, she realized what was going on and decided to get the hell out of law to save herself.  She did the right thing.  You have to listen to your body instead of persevering forward.  Not surprisingly, after she quit, the hair grew back and she’s never looked better!

Take it to heart – even if you think you are going to go bald from a genetic predisposition, don’t help accelerate it by stressing yourself out.

Colds

If you went from getting a cold once a year to suddenly getting cold symptoms every few weeks, then you’re experiencing too much stress.  I’ve heard that stressing yourself for five minutes can knock your immune system down for up to FOUR hours.  Think about that.  Five minutes of stress.  For those of us living in LA, you just need to be driving for five minutes to experience five minutes of stress.  What we don’t realize is that our body is always fighting off viruses floating around in our bloodstream.  When you get stressed, those viruses can take over.

I didn’t put two and two together for quite some time.  When I first started working at a big bankruptcy law firm, I was seeing upwards of 20 new clients a day.  This was during the financial meltdown in 2009 and I would get to the office at 9:30am, and not leave until around 5:00pm.  While the hours didn’t sound bad, consider, I didn’t even get a break to eat lunch since there was a constant stream of new clients coming in.  Not realizing I was an empath at the time, I would go home exhausted, but not just from having talked non-stop for eight or nine hours.  When they put me in charge of my own office in Glendale, I remember getting very sick after my first day with the flu.  I hadn’t had a flu in over 12 years at that point!  There was no coincidence.  

Even after I returned from the flu, I gradually found my neck incredibly sore, more and more each day to the point that I couldn’t turn my head.  In addition to this, I started developing a phlegm issue.  Out of nowhere, phlegm was building in my throat to the extent that I couldn’t even speak for more than 30 seconds without having to go to the bathroom to horck out a giant load of phlegm.  When I quit, all of these bizarre physical conditions more or less vanished.  Unfortunately, as my own practice got busier, I started getting more mild colds.  One occasion sticks out in my mind – I was doing a favor for another attorney who was out of town.  I was doing what was called a “special appearance” for this attorney, wherein I show up to Court on his behalf to ask for an extension of time, or “continuance” as we call it.  Usually a fairly straightforward process that takes a few seconds.  For some reason, that day, everyone before me was also asking for a continuance.  The Judge was steadily getting more and more pissed off.  By the time it was my turn to ask for a continuance, she decided to take out her pent-up wrath on me, and berated me for asking for a continuance (even though about 20 people before me had just done the same thing).  It literally made me want to quit being a lawyer then and there.

I proceeded to go home, shell-shocked, and had an immediate illness something between the likes of a cold and a flu for the next four days.  Coincidence?  Nope.  The stress had made me sick.

My point is simple – if you find yourself getting constantly sick, it means your immune system is getting suppressed on a regular basis.  This means whether you realize it or not, your living in constant stress.  Time to re-examine what’s going on and figure out how to get rid of that stress.

Tired

Do you feel tired all of the time?  You’re probably stressed out.  You are juggling so many things that you don’t realize the stress is wearing you thin and causing you to be tired.  

You hear about chronic fatigue syndrome.  Everything is a “syndrome” these days.  My favorite syndrome is restless leg syndrome.  They label things syndromes so they can conveniently create a pill to sell to you for a small fortune.  If you’re finding yourself always tired or exhausted despite sleeping for enough hours every night, then your mind and body may be under stress whether you realize it or not.  You don’t feel tired for no reason barring some other ailment, you may be shouldering stress from some sort of source whether it is family or work-related.

Neck Pain & Headaches

One thing I noticed when I was stressed was that I started getting neck pains.  Basically, I started having trouble turning my head because of neck stiffness.  While I had never been rear-ended or had whiplash before, I can imagine that what I was experiencing was what whiplash felt like.  In reality, it was muscle stiffness from the stress. 

This was of course, back when I was working at that big bankruptcy firm, and seeing countless clients every day.  I didn’t think much of it at the beginning as at first I figured that perhaps I had slept in an awkward position.  When the inability to rotate my head only decreased over time, I started realizing something was wrong.  As it was the first time it had ever happened, I was clueless that it was stress related.  I had seen movies before where people would get massages and the masseuse would tell the client that the client felt really tense and had knots in their neck and shoulders.  I never really understood what that was until the stress had caused this tension in my neck and shoulders as well.  

When I finally quit – you can imagine, the neck stiffness went away.  It was amazing how bad it was getting.  Can you imagine that stress can affect you so much that you can’t even turn your head?  It’s all of that negative energy getting stored in your body.  Not surprisingly, it happened in my neck, right at the base of my brain stem.

For others, if you’re experiencing headaches you may also be under stress, especially if you’re not the type of person to get headaches.  The mild or extreme headaches you’re experiencing are just another symptom of your daily routine and the stress manifesting itself into your physical reality.  

EMOTIONAL CHANGES

If your stress is building but you don’t realize it, just take a look at your behavior.  Do you find yourself getting short-tempered with your loved ones?  Perhaps you don’t enjoy the things you used to enjoy?  Or maybe, you’re like Shawn Michaels back in the 90’s when he left the WWF for awhile because he “lost his smile”.  If your personality is changing, it could be stress related.

Snappy

The easiest way to know this is that people are finding you really short-tempered.  Little things that you used to be able to tolerate, now get under your skin very quickly, causing you to get angered.  Instead of things rolling off of you like water off a duck’s back, that same water drowns you in emotion.  The driver that cuts you off makes you want to kill someone instead of just giving him a like honk on the horn.  When the cashier at El Pollo Loco gives you the wrong order for the tenth time in as many visits, it makes you go loco and berate them for screwing it up instead of just asking for them to fix it.  If you’re not normally like this, then you’re likely stressed as hell and don’t even realize it.  Like I said, these things can build bit by bit until it’s too late.

As an empath, I’ve been on the receiving end of this throughout my life, especially from those with narcissistic personalities.  When someone would have a bad day, even though I had nothing to do with their “bad day” and in fact I was their friend or sympathetic ear, they would occasionally lash out at me because I was their easy target to release their negative energy.  That stress energy has to go somewhere so why not give it to an empath who is a sponge?  Regardless, I’ll use this as an aside to let you know that when you recognize someone is in a bad mood and you’re an empath, stay the hell away from that person otherwise you’re asking for trouble.

For me, I use a cat as my metric.  Not my kittens at my parent’s place because they’re amazing, but this other cat that lives at my place.  It never ceases to test me.  From the moment I wake up, it is harassing me, trying to trip me, scratch my cupboards, chairs, you name it.  The cat is relentless, trying to get my attention.  Normally, I can put up with it.  But when I start reacting with hostility because the cat refuses to learn or adapt to my demands to stop scratching things, I know that I must be stressed and it prompts me to re-evaluate what is really making me mad – is it the cat or something else gnawing away at me.  The cat has become my mirror.  When I identify that something else is causing me to be this way, I can self-counsel myself to chill out and meditate or do whatever I need to do.  Think about the things, and people around you that are suddenly receiving your ire.  It could be you’re overstressed and don’t even realize it.  

More Alone Time

When you’re stressed you will require more alone time, or decompression time.  When you’re stressed your body is being damaged and accordingly needs more time to heal.  Being around people doesn’t help you heal usually so you end up wanting to spend more time alone.  Be careful though – if you’re spending so much time alone that you’ve become isolated, cutting off friends and family.  Do this long enough and you can become anti-social which over the long-run isn’t the most healthy thing for you.  

If you went from being the life of the party to being a loaner in a short period of time, something is wrong!  Take a step back to find what’s grinding you down.  I see some of these lawyers – they’ve aged beyond their years.  You can’t crack jokes with them as their minds are always somewhere else.  It’s like their joie de vie has gone.  If you were to look at their histories, they’ve gone through multiple divorces and have a hard time holding down relationships.  I refuse to believe they were always like this.  I myself having dealt with the stress of this profession can tell you that years of this can really change you, and not for the better.  Catch yourself before it’s too late!  

Depression

This is an easier one to diagnose. Unless you’ve always suffered from depression, if you have chronic stress, you’ll find yourself feeling depressed.  Instead of looking forward to the great things in life everyday, instead, you’ll have a woe-is-me attitude worried about what bad shit is going to happen during the day today, and again tomorrow.  It’s like you don’t see any positive future anymore.  

If I’m not mistaken, I once heard the definition of depression was the “inability to see the future”.  I’m assuming they meant the inability to see a “positive” future.

Think back to when you were younger and were excited for summer break, then the next grade, or going to university, or that summer abroad program where in real life you were probably going to spend your days and nights drinking and hoping to hook-up.  What happened to all of those exciting things you had to look forward to in life?  Well they are still there!  They’re all around you.  There’s always so much positive stuff to look forward to in life and if you can’t see it, then you may be depressed, your vision clouded by the anxiety of the stress you’re secretly enduring.  Depression is a serious topic.  I won’t even venture into the different levels or types of depression on this podcast.  Aside from not being qualified to do so, it is a very serious subject considering how many people commit suicide every year.  If you think you may be depressed and it seems to be getting worse, seek help from friends, family, and professionals.  Many people worry about the stigma of seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist but whether you realize it or not, it has become fairly commonplace for people to have a counselor.  

Depression, unless due to something situational like a death in the family or relationship break-up, can be caused by the crappy lifestyle you’re living from the stress every day.  If you have to wake up to a day full of deadlines at work, or shitty relationships that bring you down, then these things are distracting you from the reality of a bright future that is probably right in front of your eyes.  If you’ve become depressed without anything significant happening in your life, it could be caused by stress creeping up on you.

Anxiety

Anxiety comes in many forms.  A couple of definitions including, a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.  Or, a nervous disorder characterized by a state of excessive uneasiness and apprehension, typically with compulsive behavior or panic attacks.  I’ll let you Google it yourself if you’re not sure what anxiety is.

I remember when I had a couple of psycho ex-clients try to terrorize me last year.  It caused me some sleeplessness for sure, but it also caused something else I had never identified before: anxiety.  My body was feeling strange things that it had never felt before.  I would find my fingers trembling a bit when I would think of the terrorism from these losers, and I would be very edgy.  I can’t say I ever had a panic attack, but I did feel something in my chest, like a tightness or heavy weight on my chest.  I’m pretty sure I was having anxiety.   I was definitely excessively worrying.

A friend of mine is an accountant, otherwise known as a CPA here in the United States.  She goes through tax season every year, and contrary to popular belief, that’s not just a few weeks a year.  Tax season for a CPA in a public accounting job means that tax season is something like seven months per year.  Anyway, for three months in a row, she’ll work long hours.  And by long hours, I mean she’ll work until about 8:30am to 9:00pm, including Saturdays and sometimes Sundays.  She won’t even leave her desk for a break or a walk around the block for endless hours.  Compounding that is the fact that millions of dollars of clients money and their taxes have to be accounted for with perfection otherwise mistakes can cost the clients lots of money, and possibly her, her very job if she screws something up.  The pressure is intense and goes on for months.  Sometimes she would have to have some drinks before bed to sleep.  Recently she ended up having severe stomach pains and headaches, unsure of where they came from.  On top of that she was getting significant pressure on her chest and was constantly worrying.  Not surprisingly, her health woes manifested into a uterine issue that required surgery.

She’s a great example of how your job can take a physical toll on you.  Her body was self-destructing, and she had tremendous anxiety.  She didn’t even realize it was being caused by the rigors of her job, even though every year she was going through this same song an dance.  The timing of her health woes though were always occurring like clockwork during tax season.  This was no coincidence.  Her job was literally killing her.  My larger point though is that she was experiencing anxiety but didn’t realize it was due to the pressure from the job she had.  Because it was stress that was aggregating over the years and getting worse every season, she didn’t realize the pressure or toll the stress had taken on her body until it was almost too late.

Anger & Frustration

For me, I notice that when I get stressed, I get angry and frustrated very easily.  The first time it happened to me was when I was working my first law job after graduating, at what was at the time, the biggest bankruptcy law firm in the country.  They had offices all over the country, and this was during the financial meltdown back in 2009.  The business model was set-up more like a sales business than it was a law practice.  There were days where I would see 23 people in one day.  I never realized it at the time, but I was gradually becoming really frustrated and pissed off with little things outside of the office. 

Examples?  The terrible LA drivers became even worse in my eyes and gave me some serious silent road rage.  Dealing with customer service people at companies was more of a nightmare than usual.  People walking slowly in front of me in a store would really get under my skin.  My favorite is when in a crowded store, someone walks super-slowly to the entrance, then completely stops dead in their tracks to either make a cell phone call, or contemplate life, completely ignoring of the ten people behind them trying to get into the store.  Yeah…welcome to LA.  

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had been absorbing all of this despair and negative energy from the bankruptcy clients coming to my office.  They were all spilling their energy onto me about their dire financial problems.  While at the office I was calm and collected, I would be a bundle of negative energy ready to explode outside of work.  Especially as an empath who hadn’t realized it at the time, I had been literally absorbing the negative energy surrounding these people’s lives and my body was desperate to unleash it somewhere.  Because it was happening so incrementally, I didn’t realize my anger and frustration was from the clients at my job.  For months me and my parents seriously couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  I even thought of doing hypnotherapy to figure out if something traumatic had happened to me as a child that I was suppressing.  It took me years after I had quit that job to realize that my anger and frustration was as a result of absorbing bad energy and also from the stress that comes from life.  

Now I monitor myself and when I notice myself frustrated or easily angered, to take a step back and chill out, take a vacation, or reduce my workload.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it.  While you’re too busy trying to earn a living to actually live, then you especially should pay special attention to your body both physically and mentally.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily routine.  As you get older, you know how time passes faster and faster.  In this passage of time, it’s easy to overlook the warning signs.  It’s easy to think these little things that we’re experiencing are just temporary.  

We feel neck pain and dismiss it as having slept awkwardly.  We keep getting colds, and we figure it must be cold and flu season (even though it’s the middle of summer).  We don’t want to get out of bed in the morning and are easily irritable and we just assume it’s because we’re tired.  Little do we know, if they remain unaddressed, these symptoms often get worse and worse until one day you find yourself in a medical predicament that is potentially irreversible.  We figure that heart attack or cancer is just as a result of genetics, meanwhile perhaps the daily stress you’ve put yourself through over the course of years and years has finally manifested itself.  The problem is while the pot of water we’re living in keeps getting hotter and hotter, we continue to treat the symptoms instead of realizing that the water is getting so hot that it’s burning us to death.

Don’t wait until it’s too late.  Take time out of your day at least once a week to really listen to your body.  Ideally listen to it every day to feel anomalies.  Talk to your loved ones and friends to see if they think you’re acting differently or appear downtrodden.  Stress in my opinion is the number one killer in this world as it causes people to turn to other toxic vices to deal with it.  Remember, if you keep waiting and shrugging off your stress, you’ll end up like the frog in the pot of boiling water.

How To Be More Attractive To Everyone | Be Your Own Perfect Ten

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In society these days we are obsessed with perfectionism.  We either seek it in ourselves, but more often, we seek it in others.  This usually extends beyond just other people, but reaches into the products we buy and the things we do.  Ultimately, we end up pursuing things that don’t exist – illusions.  Things can always be better, and people can always be smarter and better looking.  You may think this episode is about letting go of perfection.  You would be wrong!  Today’s episode is actually endorsing the pursuit of perfection, but pursuit of perfection within ourselves, and within the confines of our own limits. 

Yes yes, I know we always preach about being limitless, but hear me out so you can understand the context of what I mean by “limits”.  

Too many of us, especially in the dating world, look at others that they perceive to be better looking, more educated, taller, or whatever, and think because they themselves lack those certain traits, that they operate at a disadvantage.  For example, if your version of a 10 out of 10 person is a 6’ 2” tall, handsome neurosurgeon, and yet you are shorter, chubbier, and less educated, you will perceive yourself to be less than a perfect 10 and feel inferior.  Similarly, by deifying certain characteristics that you specifically cannot or will never possess, you will walk around always feeling less, putting yourself at a disadvantage, and ultimately you will exude these feelings, thereby amplifying your low self-esteem and lack of confidence.  It becomes a downward spiral because you are what you think you are, and people look at you the same way you look at yourself.  If you think less of yourself then others will think less of you.

The best example I hear is when guys describe a girl as being flawless, the epitome of perfection and that she’s a perfect ten so will only date a guy that’s a ten as well.  They then cry me a river about how a girl like that wouldn’t date them, despite the fact that the guy themself has three university degrees from top schools, is super-intelligent, comes from a good home and has a great personality.  They fail to see that the real catch is staring at them in the mirror.

I’m here to tell you that you can be a ten, no matter what you currently think of yourself.  And the way to do this is to take what you are and make it the best of what you are.  Stop dwelling on what you don’t have and what other people have.  

Here is how to elevate yourself to being a perfect ten and attract the person you want, the job you want, and the life you want.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

1.  Work with and improve what you got.   

Face:

When I say make yourself your own perfect ten then that’s exactly what I mean.  Let’s say that you think your appearance is ugly.  Don’t accept that as your narrative.  Do something about it and make what you have as good as it possibly can, so even if you perceive yourself to be less attractive than others, and in your own mind a 5 out of 10 (I’m only using this 10 scale for narrative purposes btw), make yourself the best 5 imaginable.  

If you don’t like your appearance do something about it.  Now don’t get ahead of me – I’m not suggesting to go out and get plastic surgery, fill your lips with fat so you look like a duck, and get so much botox that your eyebrows blink every time you open and close your eyes.  What I am saying is work with what you have.  There are many things you can do.  Get a hairstyle that flatters your face.  Groom yourself.  Pluck those hairs from your ears as well as the ones sticking out of your nose.  Shave – and yes that goes for you girls and guys!  If you have blemishes like acne, there are lots of options to treat your pimples and clear up your face.  The point is – take care of your face as it’s the first thing people look at!

And yes a quick note about surgery – if you think there is something very out line with your appearance and it is a medical condition you can fix with a minor surgery and improve your quality of life then go ahead and do it.  If your teeth are crooked and you are self-conscious of your smile, then fortunately these days there are economical options like Invisalign as well as smile direct club to straighten your teeth. Just don’t make this about making you look like someone you’re not.

Body:

So you’re overweight.  That is usually the biggest gripe from people. They think they’re fat and therefore unattractive, even if they do have an attractive face. On one hand if there’s nothing you can do about it due to medical reasons, then focus on wearing it well by wearing the right clothes that flatter your body-type.  On the other hand, do something about it!  Get a gym membership and force yourself to go.  Lose that weight and you’ll find your self-confidence will gradually increase with your body’s appearance.  I know for many of us, going to the gym, or getting into a regular exercise routine is tough, especially if you have a busy job or have a family to attend to.  Do what you can, but do something!  Even if it means walking for 20 minutes each day.  I don’t assume everyone out there listening has money to throw around, but even if it is expensive, invest in a personal trainer or find a friend that will go with you to the gym.  These little things will help motivate you to go work out even when you don’t feel like it.  I can’t speak for everywhere, but where I live, there are many Crossfit and other gyms with structured workouts like F45 where you have someone pushing you for a set amount of time. 

I’ve been going to the gym and working out since I was in high-school.  I’ve taken breaks here and there but generally have been fairly consistent.  Even after all of these years I can honestly say that I don’t enjoy going to the gym.  Lifting heavy weights, and breaking a sweat doest not give me greater satisfaction that sitting on my sofa and watching a new Netflix movie.  Despite that, I force myself to go and I don’t regret it.

If you’re trying to get more muscular as a guy, Invest in some healthy dietary supplements to give you an edge in your work out and see what happens.  Even CostCo sells vegan protein supplements for a reasonable price. 

One thing I have found is investing a bit extra in a nicer gym or cross-fit workout center.  By doing so, it incentivizes you to go more frequently since you’ll want to make sure you’re getting something for all of that hard earned money you’re spending!   I was originally signed up for a Bally Fitness gym and it was kind of run down.  I still go into the routine, but when I joined a fancier gym called LA Fitness Signature, while it cost more, it was such a nice facility that it made having to go a lot easier.  Now I’m debating stepping it up a notch and going to the Equinox which is pricier at over $100/month, but the reality is, I believe that investments into our body is some of the best money you can spend in life.  

Dress better.

Regardless of your physical appearance let’s move on to your dress.  I live in Los Angeles where while outside of the city the perception is that people are materialistic and always dressed to impress.  Let me let you in on a little secret:  by and large, the majority of people don’t dress very well.  When I go to court I see people (not attorneys mind you), but their clients dressed in flip-slops, shorts, and torn t-shirts.  Generally most girls are wearing yoga pants.  If you want to see people dress up day to day, check out cities like Madrid or Barcelona.  

Regardless of where you live though, put a little bit extra effort into what you wear.  If you’re familiar with stores like Macy’s, Ross, Marshall’s or TJ Maxx then you know you can “dress for less”.  Instead of wearing a beaten up t-shirt and shorts, put on some nice khakis and a polo shirt.  Get rid of those flip flops and put on some shoes as girls definitely notice shoes.  Ladies, dress in a way that makes you feel comfortable and confident.  Wear colors that compliment your skin and eyes and embrace your personality.  

Guys and girls, wear some properly fitted clothing.  For a slim guy like me, it was always a hassle as clothing was somewhat baggy on me not to mention that I wore irregular sizes which were hard to find.  Those days have passed.  I suggest you invest in some more form fitting or slim fitting clothing.  It gives you a more polished look.  If they fit you, dump those old suits and get more slim-fit suits that give a tailored appearance.  

Don’t forget to smell good as well!  Buy some cologne and perfume!  Don’t go overboard with the smells as the wrong fragrances can turn people off, but do smell good when you go out. When you take care of your appearance it shows you care about yourself and when you care about yourself, other people will notice.  People respect those who respect themselves.

2.  Advance your intellect.

If you’re reading/listening to this then you obviously have the capabilities of expanding and enhancing your intellect.  So much emphasis is put on appearance these days that what gets lost in the shuffle is the intellectual side.  If you didn’t notice, being a nerd is actually cool these days.  

I don’t think things like this in life have to be mutually exclusive – that is to say if you’re investing in your appearance, then you shouldn’t only focus on that.  Or if you’re a super-intelligent being, then you shouldn’t only focus on that and ignore what you’re wearing.  Being well-balanced in life is critical to personal success.  If you only focus on appearance, then you might attract superficial people.  Working on your intelligence puts in you in a position to meet people more along the lines of who you are as a person.  

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you invest $300,000 into another university degree at the ripe age of 50.  What I am suggesting is to pursue some of your interests at a deeper level.  If you like wine, then don’t just drink it, but learn about it!  How is it made, what are the different types of grapes, what the hell is a bouquet?  Take a class at a local community college or just borrow some books.  Immerse yourself in subjects that are of interest to you.  Join some meetup.com groups to meet people who might know more than you about a subject, and at the same time learn from them.

Little by little, you’ll expand your knowledge base.  When you talk to people, you’ll have more depth of certain subjects than other people and this will help you stick out in the minds of others.  They may not remember want you said, but they’ll remember the confidence with which you spoke.  Even on occasions when I haven’t combed my hair and have dressed like a bum while outside, random girls who have crossed my path have always asked if I’ve had a lot of schooling “because you sound educated” and they usually pursue the conversation with me.    In other instances I’ve found people attracted to the fact that I use words that are more than two syllables when I speak (hey I’m in LA where the bar is low, but I ain’t complaining!)

My favorite way of advancing my intellect is to travel as many of you already know.  The things I’ve learned and knowledge I’ve accumulated from around the world can’t be taught in any textbook or learned by watching any YouTube video.  While I don’t go around talking about my travel tales, when I show up to events or get-togethers, people always think I’m like a unicorn showing up since they think I’m usually floating on a boat down the Mekong River most of the time.  They can’t wait to hear about my stories and adventures.  

Frankly you don’t even need to be expanding your intelligence with the goal of meeting someone.  Just do it for yourself.  It’s nice being able to tap into your own knowledge base as it helps you analyze things and situations without having to consult Google search on your cell phone.  Overall it makes you a much more interesting person who will have more in common with more people.  

3.  Aura

While we spend time talking about physical appearances and intellect, I think one of the most important aspects of becoming your own perfect 10 is perfecting your own aura.  Yes, this is the same aura that I’m referring to in the name of the podcast, and the reason I named this podcast “Everglow” in the first place.  Everglow is referring to the glow that we all emit and this podcast is about improving your aura or glow.

I didn’t realize the important of this until fairly recently.  Our aura is that halo or glow that you see around religious figures in their paintings.  We all have one, for better or for worse.  People who are negative thinkers or who are depressed, usually have a darker aura or cloud around their persona.  If you’re a sensitive person, then you can feel this.  On the other hand, people that are happy, upbeat, and have a positive outlook, often glow!  When these people walk in a room, they command people’s attention and their glow is what makes them attractive over and above the smell of their perfume or the fit of the clothes they’re wearing.

I’m sure you’ve noticed people like this.  You’ll be seated in a crowded restaurant with lots of people coming and going.  Then, for some reason you’ll notice someone walk in that everyone in the room is staring at.  Their smile and presence lights up the place.  You can’t take your eyes off of them and neither can many others in the restaurant.  On the surface there isn’t really any one thing about them that stands out.  They’re not necessarily dressed to impressed or wearing any flashy jewelry, nor are they the biggest or tallest.  But there is something about their energy or aura that makes people gravitate towards them.  This is their aura.  On the flip side, people with dark auras don’t really get much attention.  We pass by them all of the time but never pay them a second look because their aura is not attractive.

Now let’s forget about other people’s auras and focus on yours.  Have you ever taken some time to consider what kind of energy you’re putting out?  When you walk into a room, do people look at you?  And when they do, are they looking at you with crooked looks or are you constantly met with smiles?  Use the way people perceive you as a mirror to see what kind of energies you’ve been putting out. It’s easy to think we’re okay and thinking properly, but it helps to look outwards every now and then and use strangers are your personal consultants if you will.

Start taking a closer look at your thoughts.  Monitor them.  Are you generally getting frustrated with little thing like terrible drivers and rude people?  When you’re in public, people can pick up on this and want to stay away from you if they perceive you to be an angry or frustrated person.  While you may think you’re the coolest cat in the yard, that means nothing if that’s not the actual energy you’re radiating.  Trust me – you’re not going to be turning any heads if you’re constantly brooding about the asshole that cut you off in traffic or the neighbor who selfishly parks his car in the middle of the street, blocking everyone else.

People with great and bright auras such as these mystical religious figures, have positive and bright auras because they don’t dwell on the negative and they don’t tend to absorb people’s negative energies.  I’ve always noticed how photographs can really show people’s auras.  I remember visiting India about thirteen years ago.  It was a magical time for me and everything seemed to be surreal.  When I got back to the States and looked at the photographs of one set of my cousins however, I noticed that there was a darkness about their auras.  

I’ve noticed the same with me.  When I was hiking to Everest Base Camp, out in the wilderness with no negative energies (okay there was one guy in our group that was a bit of a dick, but overall he was manageable). I felt at peace.  I was also absorbing the beauty of the nature around me.  Normally back home, with the stress of my profession and living in a crowded city, I usually looked like crap in my photos.  I looked beaten up, and tired.  Pictures of me during my trip showed a separate story altogether.  If you visit my blog, you can see some of these before and after photos.  The difference is startling.  Even when I got back home, I still had that vacation glow, or everglow as I like to call it and yes, my pictures still looked totally different.  Now, when I would walk in a room or a restaurant, people would look at me and smile at me.  

What had changed?  My aura.

Meditate

Mediate?  Huh?  Oh no, not another one of these modern day hippies telling me to mediate.  I don’t have time for that BS.  If you can’t find 10 minutes to meditate today because you’re too busy, then meditate for one hour.

While you’re wondering what the hell meditating has to do with being your own perfect ten, the answer is: everything.  The best possible you is one that is calm, and not easily angered.  It is one that is attractive on the outside, but more importantly, even more attractive on the inside,  But how do you fix the inside?  We already talked about our individual aura’s.

Let’s talk now about your internal monologue and being calm.  I will tell you that aggressive, angry, or negative people aren’t naturally attractive to others.  Their disrupted mental state is repulsive to your average person as it shines through your aura and people generally want to be around happy and positive people.  People like feeling good.  If they get the inkling that they won’t feel happy around you, then they don’t want to buy what you’re selling.  On the other hand, if you’re in a great mood, and are a calm, and peaceful person, people will want to align with you since most people want to feel those positive emotions that you’re feeling.

So how do you achieve that calm demeanor?  Well, meditating is one such way.  It will help you be more at peace over the long-term.  Putting the premise of this podcast aside, when you are a calm person, it will help you overcome and deal with everything else in life.  Living in a big city can be overwhelming.  There are fights to be had every day of the week.  From the moment I pull out of my driveway, I’m bombarded with reasons to get pissed at people.  Even just pulling out of my driveway, people try to drive around my car while it’s 90% out of my driveway.  Going down my street, someone starts driving at me head-on because they’re either a complete moron or on their cell phone or both.  I could spend my whole day fighting with people over little things.  The only one who would lose every fight would be me.  Because those little fights take my energy and the energy needed to glow.  The asshole on their cell phone that almost crashes into me – no matter how much I scream and honk, he’ll still be doing the same thing five minutes later.  

Meditation isn’t a perfect solution.  You are still a human being and you’ll still feel emotions.  Things will still piss you off.  What learning to meditate will do however, is help you to not react as much to those circumstances and externalities that arise.  Basically the BS of daily life will roll off your back like water off of a duck’s back.  It takes practice.  Years of practice.  In fact, it never ends.  But at the end of the day, this calmer, less-reactive version of you will pay endless dividends in all aspects of your life, including your walk towards being a perfect ten. 

CONCLUSION

So there you have it.  A good starter list for two you can be your own perfect ten and start attracting other tens into your life.  I’m not just referring to that hot guy or girl at the bar…does anyone even meet people at bars any more?  Anyways, I am referring to you perfecting yourself so that you can attract the perfect ten of everything in life:  jobs, relationships, experiences, whatever.  

To recap:  work on your appearance without going overboard and making yourself look artificial.  Clean up those blemishes that you’re self-conscious about.  Get a new haircut that flatters your face or makes you feel good.   If you’re too skinny or overweight for your liking, start working out and eating healthier.  All of these years later, I still don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I do it.  It doesn’t mean I don’t indulge in my burger and fries once a week.

Go out and expand your mind.  Learn new things.  It will be a lot easier if you focus on things that you’re genuinely curious about.  If you have interesting things to talk about and have depth of knowledge, that’s more attractive than even your physical appearance.  Learning more will give you new outlooks on life and literally change the biology of your brain.  You can only gain.

Focus on the internal attractiveness as well by working on your aura.  I want you to ever-glow!  Work on your exterior aura so that you shine wherever you go and people can’t help but be magnetized by your presence without you even opening your mouth.   You can help do this by learning to mediate to maintain your inner-peace and preserve your good energy instead of wasting it on the daily grind of life.  

 

Yes, yes, some of you may be thinking “nothing in life is perfect”.  I disagree.  Everything in life is perfect in its own way.  By working on facets of yourself, you’re just refining the perfection that already exists.  For those that want to debate with nonsense like “nothing is perfect”, stop wasting your time with semantics and cliches.  This is about self-improvement, so improve.  Stop sitting around wondering why things aren’t changing in your life, if you’re the only thing that’s not changing in the equation of life.  

The Modular Lifestyle | How To Live Cheap & Flexible

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Do you want to live a flexible life but still get the bills paid?  On my latest episode I discuss how you can live what I call a “modular lifestyle” where you earn income on your terms when you want, so you can have more control of your time.  By driving for Uber, freelancing on Fiverr, or renting out to AirBnb, you can make income without having to commit to one single job.

Life isn’t lived by working from 9 to 5 behind a desk, staring at a computer screen.  Live cheap, travel cheap, enjoy life!