STOP LYING TO YOURSELF
People come to me with a lot of questions:
“How can I get a girlfriend (or boyfriend)?”
“How can I free myself from the 9-5?”
“How can I get girls to sleep with me?”
“How can I get people to enjoy talking to me?”
“How can I make more money?”
“How can I be more attractive?”
The questions are reasonable. It’s reasonable to want a partner. It’s reasonable to work at a job that’s on your own terms. It’s reasonable to want sexual options. It’s reasonable to want people to like talking to you. It’s reasonable to want to be rich. And it’s reasonable to want the opposite sex to find you more good-looking.
The only problem is I’m not interested in these questions.
These questions are surface level. They don’t tell me a lot. If you tell me you want a girlfriend you could have a million reasons underneath for that. Maybe you’re scared of being alone. Maybe you’re sexually frustrated. Maybe you think it’s what you’re supposed to do. Maybe you’re unhappy and you think a girlfriend will change that for you.
So elaborate. Tell me why.
Oh really? You’re scared of being alone? Interesting.
Now you know yourself a bit better than you did when we first started talking.
But we’re still not where we want to be yet. Tell me why being alone scares you.
Ok great – why?
I see. Why?
Why.
It’s the one word that penetrates every layer of bullshit you’ve created for yourself over the years, and it helps you to see why more often than not what you say you want isn’t what you actually want at all.
Why uncovers the passions obscured by social conditioning and fear. It shows you that many things you think are important aren’t really important to you at all – you have just become numb to them.
Unlike you, why doesn’t lie.
This is important not simply because it’s pretty awesome to be aligned with yourself.
It’s because if you’re not aligned with yourself, you’re actively working against yourself.
Confused?
Ok, ever insisted you wanted to do something but didn’t end up doing it? And you got frustrated as hell afterward?
That’s what happens when you’re working against yourself. Think of it as a computer running two programs designed for opposite things. Inefficiency is an understatement: the result is misery and insanity. And in order to cope with it the impact is you lying to yourself on a massive scale.
Whenever you don’t do something you “want” to do, it’s because your subconscious actually doesn’t want to do it. That you think you do is you lying to yourself.
Incidentally, this is where stuff like unreasonable expectations and negative self-talk come from. And it’s also where mediocrity thrives. After all, if you’re not working 100% towards something, how can you expect to excel at it?
You can’t. And you won’t.
People live their entire lives without knowing their why. But why is always asking to be found out. And it speaks louder and louder, year after year, even if they’re trying to pretend it isn’t.
Only when they’re old and dying can they no longer ignore it. It becomes too loud to drown out:
“Why didn’t I ever find out? Why wasn’t I brave?”
Why indeed.
Dear readers, I don’t mean to be intense or scare you. But you are all going to die.
Don’t live in fear. Don’t live in a lie.
Live in your why.
Love,
Pat
