TRANSCRIPT

00:01 Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. It’s the weekend. And here we are. We’ve been out in the water. We’re done some coaching, and it’s time to have a chat to you today about strength and weakness. 00:14 So we’ve covered a few bases, haven’t we already? We’ve shown that in every situation we can be strong and weak. 00:21 It is really tantamount to weakness to say that I want to be strong at work and weak at home, or strong at home and weak at work. 00:32 It’s, we need to be strong and weak. Sport and challenge in each area of life. We talked about agitation, agitation being a positive thing, and agitation being a negative thing. 00:44

What we try to do with agitation is find a boundary where we can work both agitated, which means excited and enthusiastic and committed at the same time. 00:54 Not go to the point of bullying or go to the point of nervous wreck. And we talked about balanced, centered, and calm as being three of the good benchmarks for knowing when you’re in your power. 01:08

Empowerment’s.

Another thing we talked about already about your values and knowing what your highest value is and making sure you link everything to that and making sure you understand that everybody else’s values is not the same as yours. 01:22 We talked a lot about nobody treats you better or worse than you treat yourself. So disempowerment is asking for approval or, or codependency or asking someone else to like you when you don’t. 01:36 And ultimately that’s a really serious piece of work to know that nobody’s gonna treat you better or worse than you treat yourself no matter what you do. 01:45

Next was detach getting detached, which means understanding that anything you can’t see the balance in is running you. If you’re attracted to it, it’s running you. 01:56 If you’re appell from it, it’s running you. If you get elated by something, which is, man, wow, we made it, you’re gonna get depressed by the very same thing. 02:04 Attraction is gonna be breed repulsion. So there’s some sort of basic outlines of what it looks like to be empowered or powerful or strong. 02:15 We also acknowledge that weakness can be called other things. It, it can be called approachability. It can be called negotiability, it can be called listening. 02:25 It, there’s many, many other words that we can use. Instead of the well criticized word of weakness, we can use it open we can use it ne as I said, we can use it approachable.

02:37 So in many ways you can spin the concept of weakness. But today I really wanna talk about something really critical, and that is storytelling. 02:47 Ultimately, if you see the world as X, Y, Z, your actions are already prescribed. So in other words, if you see a person behaving badly, you will be either repelled from it and saying, I don’t wanna be near that person, or you will be attracted to it in wanting to fix it, change it or, or modify it. 03:12 And so the way you see things ultimately becomes the determinant as to whether you’re strong or whether you’re weak. A weak person will see things with an emotional imbalance, and the more imbalanced they have, the more they’ll say the word got to the less imbalanced it will be, should.

03:31 A less imbalanced person will say need. And the less imbalanced person will say want, but they’re still imbalanced. And want is the human heart. 03:41 So when we’re in our heart, quite often we’re unbalanced, but it’s for the greater good and we justify it, but we still haven’t seen clearly what’s going on around us. 03:51 If we move up into the desire to choose to and love to areas of the mind, the higher areas of the brain, then we come to the point where we say, at a point of inspiration, we see absolute balance. 04:03 We see good and bad. And that’s called, for some people, it’s called ambivalence. I see both sides of an equation. 04:10 I see both sides of somebody. And then all we have to do to that is add salt, which is gratitude.

04:16 And we are in an incredible state of strength, absolute strength. We are thinking, not thinking that we’re thinking, we’re not emulating someone else’s advice or trying to copy or emulate some other human being.

04:29 Envy. Envy is ignorance. Imitation is suicide as Emerson would once say. And so we arrive at a good place, but it’s all based on storytelling. 04:40 Now, there are three different stories we can tell ourselves. One is of the past where we say, this happened to me and that happened to me. 04:49 One is of the present. This is happening and this is happening to me. This is not happening. Whatever. And one is of the future. 04:55 This is what I want to happen, and this is what I’d like to happen, and this is what I’m worried about happening, et cetera, et cetera.

05:01 Nothing affects the future story more than the past story. And quite often we modify the past stories to rationalize choices we’re about to make in the future. 05:11 You might say, I want to buy a Tesla, a car with a low environmental impact. And you might tell a story about the past, about how people haven’t cared about the environment and how people have used petrol and how it’s caused wars. 05:24 But that story of the past is simply justifying a decision you’ve made for the future. It isn’t necessarily a wise choice, it’s a reaction. 05:33 So the stories of the past need to be going through the same filter as the stories of the present. This is what’s happening to me now.

05:40 This is what happening to me, right? In this very moment. I’m feeling this, I’m experiencing that Those stories are also in need of some degree of of examination and stories of the future. 05:53 Well, when you say, I’m worried about something or I’d like this to happen, or this is what, what I want to happen, what if your view is wrong? 05:59 What if the glasses you’re wearing need to be cleaned? And so it all comes down to storytelling. Any story that doesn’t pass through filter mesh, number one, the first mesh, any story doesn’t pass through.

06:12 The law of balance is a lie. Now, I think you have to get over the fact that advertising, branding, marketing, promotion at work, good leadership in some ways, absolutely, definitely the concept of engaging others are selling a product. 06:33 Negotiating an argument requires that you do not tell the truth. Requires that you talk either elation, one or positive greater than negative or depression, negative, greater than positive in order to let’s say negotiate with somebody in order to influence their behavior.

06:54 And life is a matter of influence. That’s how we build wealth. And so the Buddha said it, tell them what they want to hear until they’re ready to hear what you want to tell them. 07:03 He’s basically saying, lie, lie through your teeth. Because people don’t want to hear the truth. Now, it’s easy to do, it’s easy to tell the story of the past. 07:13 Let me say, I had a story. I’ve been I I say to people, I’ve been married six time, I’m on my seventh, and a lot of born again people, a lot of fanatical people and who are very structured take offense at that because they’re afraid of it. 07:29 In their own life. I could say I have had seven strong relationships in my life, and that wouldn’t push many buttons.

07:36 They will still push some, but most people would accept that we have different relationships in our life. I use the word marriage to, to deliberately create an outcome. 07:47 And the outcome is an influence. I want to trigger people into some level of awareness of their own judgements and feelings. 08:01 And, and in doing so turt what is anchored down into a reaction. That reaction is what I need in order to get action, in order to get change.

08:13 So we tell stories. We talk to people. We, we, we remember the past in ways that help us manipulate others into behaving in ways we want and to get what we want. 08:26 And that’s an understandable thing. We need to put that and call that acting on the stage. We need to call that performance. 08:32 We need to call that business. We need to call that romance. We need to give it a name.

But if you start lying to yourself, if you start believing the rhetoric, the marketing, the branding, the delivery, if you start believing all these people that are coming on TikTok and doing their 32nd spiel on romance and love and business, performance and trust, you are going to be be going toward a wrong story. 08:59 So the story you tell yourself, the story that goes on in your mind before you speak becomes crucial. Now to tell yourself a powerful story, you must be able to put it through five different filter processes.

09:12 So a story, you’re gonna say, oh, I’ve had six relationships. That’s bad. So if I call, I want it to be felt as being a negative. 09:23 I will say that our marriages and people go, oh, yuck. You’ve, you know, that’s marriage. You’ve gone in, you’ve been married, you’ve got all these things, and then you’ve had to get a divorce and you’ve lost all the money.

09:36 Good, bad, good, bad. Oh, they, they get a, an impression. If I say I’ve had six beautiful, loving, kindhearted relationships with people in which I’ve built business, built them, built family, built the world, written books, traveled the world, introduced myself to millions of people, the story shifts from being one of pain to being one of truth. 10:03 But I also have traveled 300 bed nights a year in hotel rooms, and therefore have not always been around for my children. 10:12 That’s good and bad. And so the story I tell myself must pass through the filter of truth. The first filter is the filter of balance.

10:22 The second filter is the filter of growth that every single story I tell, whether it’s a good one or a bad one, the mission of that situation was to grow me as an individual and improve my power. 10:36 It’s called influence. The third one is that nothing was ever missing. So there’s really no stories that go anywhere. So the third one is a really intense filter to say the concept of gain or loss is just a change of form. 10:51 And that’s really important that your story goes through that filter. The next one is how I see this story, how grateful I am or how resentful I am from this story is something that’s very important for my mental and emotional wellbeing.

11:06 So if I tell a story, I might tell it I’m so ungrateful for this very bad back surgery I had, or I’m so ungrateful for the, for the motorbike accident I had, or whatever it was. 11:18 And I can tell ungrateful, polarized story. It goes down and it, but it does seduce people into having empathy for me if that’s what I want to gain from them. 11:29 I can tell ’em how hard life is and how miserable life is and how hard, difficult life is. And people who are weak will follow that yellow brick road into feeling sorry for me. 11:41 If I tell ’em how great life is, people who need to feel great and wanna feel great earth, who repress their only great, their own greatness will follow that story.

11:50 And if I tell the truth, that’s another thing that I, I could distribute to people. But the most important person to tell the truth to is yourself. 11:58 And so I’d encourage you to sort of think through your stories, because when you walk into a room and you start wanting to fix things at work, change people at home, make it better, make it worse. 12:09 That’s one thing that’s called influence. But the most important thing to remember is nobody treats you better or worse than you treat yourself.

12:17 And if you’re telling yourself lies, if you’re telling yourself brand stories, if you’re trying to seduce yourself, then I think there is no hope on earth of being a powerful influence on others in the world. 12:30 And therefore, no matter how hard you try, you’re always gonna feel weakened in the attempt to influence others. It starts with you, starts with telling yourself a story that has that passes through the filters. 12:46 And the final filter is the law of the one and the many. I’m never given a problem I can’t solve. 12:51 This is Chris. Have a beautiful day. Bye for now.