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Chef AJ: Healthy Living LIVE with Dr Doug Lisle on Self Esteem (audio only)
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yeah absolutely hey good afternoon everyone and welcome to healthy living live I am chef AJ and it is my pleasure and honor to bring back by popular to man the first Tuesday of this month dr. Doug Lyall he have not only the co-author of the pleasure trap he is the psychologist at both the mcdougal 10-day program and the True North health center both located in Santa Rosa California he hosts an amazing weekly podcast called beat your jeans you can get it on iTunes and BlogTalkRadio you can even listen live every Wednesday night from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pacific time even call in and get your questions answered or even book a private session with him at his amazing website esteem dynamics org where there's lots of wonderful free audio and video content so welcome back dr. Doug Lyall oh very good good to see you AJ thank you let's just everybody if you are a praying person just please pray that the audio and the visitor video keeps working as well as it's working now and so we're gonna take a little bit different track today we often talk about one of my passions which is weight loss and emotional eating a food addiction but today dr. Lyle is going to talk about one of his favorite topics which is self-esteem so the first question is what is self-esteem why is it important and why are you so interested in it take it away dr. Lyle ah well very good self esteem is is actually quite a bit different than people think others do there's different aspects of the the internal feelings people to have about themselves that have left psychologists pretty confused and leave people confused and so what so let me break this down into what without pictures you can look at some of my webinars that I've done for the MacDougall series and that this will show you some some slots today I'll just use my description so that you and I follow through in my side that what what self-esteem is most fundamentally is a reputation that you have with yourself for making good effort that's actually what's toughest now this is very different than two other things that are that were are easily compute one thing that is easily confused with itself this game is going to be what I call esteem so esteem comes from the French word - value an esteem means to value so it's going to be an important issue for us as a social animal to be valued by other people and primarily there are three sets of other people that we are primarily concerned with being valued by so we are interested in being valued by mates or potential mates were interested in being valued by friends or potential friends and we're interested in being valued by trading partners or potential trading partners so trading partners mean business being a unique creature in the world that survives a great deal by trading their abilities and so human beings naturally want to have something to trade with other people and have them interested in the in making those trades so those are three primary sources of human actually biological success and there's a fourth set of relationships in the world that matters to people and that's family but family differs from the first three because families are not inherently competitive now they can be competitive but they don't have to be competitive so you don't have to necessarily compete with anybody to be some somebody's favorite mother you just are their mother whereas you do have to compete to be somebody's mate or friend or customer or employee so that's a lady - what what we're gonna be focused on is we're going to be focused on three three primary relationships mates friends and trading partner and that when we get esteem signals or signals from those individuals that they value us that feels good so we actually have another word for that process we call it ego the reason why I don't use that word is because that word gets very confused with very negative connotations as well as a lot of psychoanalytic connotations and the word ego gets very mysterious to people they're not sure if it's a good thing it's a bad thing or actually sort of what it is but interestingly enough that word has wormed its way our into our language because it's actually identifying a very important process for people which is esteem so for example let's say some gal puts on a new dress and then she goes to a party and five guys hit on her she'll tell her friend boy that was sure good for my ego well what was that that means if she got a lot of esteem signals that she was valued you applied for five jobs and don't get any of them and you thought you were gonna get them you say boy that was tough on my ego and what we really mean is is that you got negative esteem signals okay so esteem is one thing and esteem is what other people feel towards us and we feel towards them and when we get esteem signals from other people that are positive that feels very good that is completely different than what we call self esteem self esteem is what happens when you have that is the mechanism inside your mind that is a set of essentially internal people that are acting like an internal audience and they are watching you and they are watching your efforts and the internal audience judges you just as real people will judge you if they were watching you and so the internal audience is most concerned with effort and diligence and integrity now that we're doing a good job at what it is that you're trying to do and that that it's job is to give you feedback on that now so you can now see that there's actually two different sources of feeling about yourself one of them comes from outside and so when people give you very positive signals from outside that feels good because those are the real live relationships that we're trying to make exchanges and partnerships with but you have another relationship and that is the relationship that we're gonna call that you have with yourself but you have a strange relationship with yourself that your internal audience is essentially not you they're judging you you are something different that you are what we're gonna call yourself that's the real you there's actually taking actions and making decisions the internal audience doesn't take any actions and they don't make any decisions they're just watching them but what they can do is something very important which is to send you esteem signals and when they send you esteem signals like they're disgusted with you because you're not doing a very good job that's gonna be what we call low self-esteem and it's the opposite of pride okay whereas when you do a very good job and your internal audience watches you no one else in the world has to be watching well the only person that needs to be watching is you and when your internal audience observes that you're longing very hard and working very diligently it will send you a feeling of respect okay that's what we're gonna call that self-respect and we're also gonna call that safe okay so that's there's only one way to get that and the only way to get it is diligent excellent effort now self-esteem mechanism is pitiless unfortunately a lot of my friends in psychology believe that when people are very down on themselves and that they are that they're having a lot of negative self-talk that they think that the solution is to try to figure out how to talk differently this is a this is a massive conceptual misunderstanding your internal audience cannot be argued with your internal audience is a passive bunch of people sitting inside of you watching your Poots you can't argue with them they're just basically saying what they think is true based on the efforts that they watch okay so way to cause yourself to have higher self-esteem is thought to have great victories you don't need great victories great victories are necessary to get esteem but they are not necessary to get self-esteem self-esteem comes about only through diligent excellent effort and it really doesn't care whether or not you were successful or not all that it cares about is whether you make diligent excellent effort this is why I now do we care about the outcomes and whether other to be excluded that's a theme that's a whole different emotional experience these things feel very similar because when people give us very positive esteem signals it's exhilarating because that is the whole point to us doing hard work in the first place is for other people to value us but along the way we have built into our nature this fascinating device that we're gonna call self esteem the self esteem is the process of the internal audience sending esteem signals to ourselves okay now the reason why this is so central to weight loss health appearance eating disorders everything else under the Sun the reason why this is so important to understand people are mystified as to you know AJ and I have I've had many discussions and she's had many questions and a lot of consternation about all the the people that she's attempting to help and guide and many of the worries about so called emotional leading and everybody's chasing their tail thinking that the reason they act self-destructive leaves because they've got deep emotions no but you're very confused if this is what you're thinking you're misunderstanding the source of the negative emissions the negative emotions are coming from your internal audience that's watching you do a mediocre job the internal audience is observing that you do self-indulgent things like eating a piece of cake okay and when it watches you do this it then sends a signal of disgust to you so you feel mediocre about this and guilty and because you you recognize that you've sabotaged yourself now the question is why did you do it in the first place did you do it because you were having a negative emotional response from something else probably not when you actually watch people do self indulgent things they're generally not doing them behind negative feelings they're doing them because they're getting a signal from their instinct Amit says this is the most valuable behavior we could possibly do because there's rich food in the environment and we crave it and we're gonna eat it and it's gonna feel good and the reason why that's true is because you've got a billion years of evolution telling you that you should eat the richest food in the environment and if you do that it's gonna feel really good because we're gonna give you a signal in your direct sensory biology that tells you you just did the right thing the problem is is that your internal audience recognizes that you did not do the right thing because it's as smart as a modern human and it actually is watching you and it's observing the decisions that you're making so when you do a self destructive or self-indulgent thing like this now I'm not telling you this is the worst thing anybody ever did of course it's not but the internal audience recognizes that the person has done something that is not admirable and is ultimately destructive to long-term esteem staking goals it basically says you just set us back and we're trying to lose weight we're trying to get healthier we're trying to look better we're trying to become more competitive in in the social dynamics of life and so as a result you just set us back a step because of what you just did and so now a person has emotional reactions to this that are unpleasant okay and then there's dynamics that take place from there where the self will basically say well for get it okay because I tried and I'm not good enough for you internal audience so just watch me now kick over the table and eat the rest of the pumpkin pie okay so that's that's another dynamic that I call the ego trap that is the driver of actually determining self-destructive behavior now so this is now what I want to do with people when we start any goal whether it's I want to go to medical school whether or not I want to learn how to dance the tango whether or not I want to make the NFL whether or not I want to make a million dollars or whether or not I just want to lose weight look good and be attractive for my mate or to find a mate as a result of my increased attractiveness that I might find appealing whatever the goals are that people are setting what I'm interested in is psychologists is not the esteem I understand that all people dream of these things Aristotle said 2,000 years ago there are three wishes for every man an inter städel because he's 2,000 years ago he didn't say woman as well but he meant everybody three wishes for every men are to be rich excuse me to be to be healthy to be rich by honest means and to be beautiful okay if we look at what those three things are it means to be healthy is the most fundamental wealth that there is because you're designed by nature to attempt to survive so of course health is the is the fundamental linchpin of all other things that are valuable to us to be rich by honest means means valuable that's why he said by honest means in other words if you are rich by honest means it means that the village no matter how small your village is and how many seashells that means you have relative to other people or whether today it means you have a billion dollars what you're attempting to do is to try to be valuable to other people now monetary signaling isn't the only way to be valuable but it's a way that is obvious to the world and so for we respected and are interested in it and we seek that and so that is it's not the only ma it's not the only goal in his career but it's an important goal little screw for many reasons many people would love to do work I met a woman once that really wanted to be a singer and so she did a lot of singing attempting to make a living ingots and won a small bar in Portland she was actually paid twenty dollars I had to come in and sing and that was really it wasn't a lot of money but the fact that the owner was willing to pay her in order to sing was an important esteem signal to her and so it would have been nicer if it was 120 okay so to be healthy to be rich by honest means and to be beautiful Aristotle recognized that people try to would like to be appealing to others in order for others to want to touch them and so this is this is part and parcel of incredibly important Drive in humans for esteem now although I recognize that this is what people these are the types of things that that interest human beings and this is a great many goals are directed at this as a psychologist I'm interested in a completely different goal I'm interested in self-esteem the individual that comes to me is interested in this team dr. Lyle how can I get a date dr. Lyle how can I get ahead in my career dr. Lyle how can I lose weight so I look better doctor wanna get through school these are all very totally legitimate goals but as a psychologist I'm actually not interested in those goals I'm interested in the self esteem of the individual and in the process of them learning that the majority factor in their happiness will not depend upon whether or not they reach those specific goals the most important their happiness will come about when they learn that the most important part of the process is earning self-esteem from their internal audience every day okay so this is why so many weight loss programs fail and so many people throw in the towel and they regress and that's because what they were interested in and they were focused on was esteem they were on self-esteem this isn't naughty it just means that it slipped their notice self-esteem is not meant to be a conscious thing that we see it's meant to be an unconscious guidance process that helps us on the way to winning esteem in the in the free market place against our competitors okay however from the standpoint of clinical psychology the most important thing that we can do is psychologists or counselors or friends or for you as you seek to gain traction and and a sense of of accomplishment and happiness that will come from pursuing your goals what you want to do is focus on self esteem rather than a scheme and this is how we do it what we want to do any any competitive goal whether its weight loss getting into medical school you know becoming an opera singer no matter what the goal is all goals have what we're gonna call fundamentals so they have fundamental actions that you require that you do them and those fundamental actions require repetition in order to get better at them so let's suppose that you want to be a very successful real estate agent so you go to a seminar and they say how you're gonna get rich and you're cool and you're gonna drive big cars to sell fancy houses and all you gotta do is believe in yourself and think big this is ludicrous this is totally ludicrous this is not our achievement works and yet what this is is this is junk food for the mind human imagination can imagine such things and you can imagine being Tom Vow on your yacht with a bunch of bikini clad women clamouring all over you because you can learn how to buy and sell real estate at Tom vis seminar and in 90 days you're a millionaire just like the people they show on TV this was a this was a hilarious infomercial it was very successful about 25 years ago it was so ludicrous I never forgot it okay the on now what is it that we're going to do instead we're not going to be enticed by this kind of creampuff psychology we're not going to also get seduced into thinking that the reason why were self-destructive is because of deep hurts that have taken place in our past that we can blame somebody else for and that that's the reason why do we are now helpless in the face of temptation and challenge and that it's somebody else's fault and we need to sit and while our therapist does macrame and simplify sympathizes with our plight week after week after week to the limits of our insurance policy this is ridiculous okay the way to manage these problems is to understand that self-esteem does not require victory okay does not require awards it does not require adulation from anybody self-esteem requires one thing and it requires your internal audience observing that you mean business and that you are working very hard at the fundamentals no matter how poor you are at them okay the self-esteem mechanism and the most important insight of my career is that esteem is dynamic that is why my website is called esteemed MX and that is the reason why it'll be the title of my book but I'm not writing all this team dynamics okay the important thing to realize is that you're low self-esteem does not have to do with quote self-talk that goes sideways as money my cognitive therapist friends believe does not have as a result of bad messages you got from childhood the way my dynamic their friends believe it has to with what has been happening very recently in your life over the last several days in the last few weeks has to do with how diligently you are attacking the problem of executing the fundamentals on any goal that's important to you if you take whatever that goal is weight loss playing the guitar okay learning how to cut hair better being a surgeon getting in a Medical School trying to get your kids have cleaner clothes before they go to school whatever it is that you are seeking to improve and we are seeking esteem signals from other people whatever those goals are the most important part of the process is for us to break down the fundamentals that are required to improve in this area and to make a list these are the targets these are the daily practices that we're gonna try to do and we're not gonna have 42 of them we're gonna have half a dozen of them and what we're gonna do is we're gonna have a little check sheet that you're gonna make and you can if you're like me and you can't do anything on a computer then you do it by hand and you Xerox it because that's how I do things if you're tech savvy then have a fancy computer file that you can print them out or you actually do it you know I don't know how you do it you make an app out of and put it on your iPhone if you know how to do that but the point is is that what we want to do is we want to break down any goal that's worth pursuing into fundamentals our job is to attack those fundamentals to set aside time and energy each day and then we're gonna do those fundamentals and we're gonna have a little check sheet of some kind that we're keeping track so on December the 4th 2017 I began my pursuit of X whatever X was maybe you want to be a great guitar player and you fill around with it and you really want to do this and you think that it would be very good for your esteem because you think that other people would value you and you would get great feedback from this but you procrastinated and fiddled okay well today is the day to settle down and say okay am I gonna do this or not going to do it let's put some energy behind this process and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put energy behind the process by having little boxes that indicate the little fundamentals that we're gonna do now there may be some things in the way like maybe you need to go get a teacher or maybe you need to go online and get a you can't afford a teacher so we're gonna get an online program that shows you how to play the guitar but you're watching it won't do it you're gonna have to get yourself a cheap guitar and you're gonna have to actually practice over and over again what they are showing you and then as you do this and you put in the energy we're gonna find that you're gonna get there so no matter how lousy you are to start you are going to get better with practice repetition is the mother of skill nothing else is Michael Jordan did not learn how to be Michael Jordan by walking on the court being six foot six and he could jump out of the gym that's not enough okay he had to put in thousands of hours of Decade practice to get good at his craft that is true with anybody that does anything well at all it's true of anybody that does something mediocre so if you've got a nikkie mediocre dentist that dentist put in quite a bit of time he just didn't put as much time as in somebody else do now what I'm interested in is the self esteem that goes along with dedicated breakfast so in one day this is that this is the bummer the first day that you actually put in an hour that's something that's important and really focus and try to do the best you can your self-esteem mechanism will not reward you very much for that because it's not impressed the audience has watched your effort and it's drugs with shoulders the first day that you actually go wire-to-wire and do a good job on your diet your self-esteem mechanism the needle won't move very much but after day two it'll move a tiny bit and i've day three I'll move a little bit more and by 10:00 it will be moving dick by the time you put in seven to ten days of dedicated excellence around your diet or workout or guitar you will find that your internal audience is watching this process this is if they're outside people and outside people watching you dedicatedly work very hard for a week or two on something start to say this is no joke you're really putting in some effort aren't you and that's the exactly what your internal audience is gonna signal to yourself it's gonna say wow you're really working at this okay now the that is self esteem and that self esteem is is not limited yet can it all it is also very perishable in other words it will go away if you don't do the practice and it will come back if you do so the self esteem which is a major component of human happiness is actually bizarrely the only thing that is substantially under your control when it comes to your happiness major components of your happiness suck and frozen up that's okay when my voice is coming through the the the most in the most impactful and dramatic impact on your happiness is going to be esteem signals from other people you can't help but you're designed by nature to be looking for success and when you get that success there's nothing to like it but there's also nothing like the steady quiet internal signal from your internal audience telling you that you are doing an excellent job no matter what the world is giving you for feedback okay so this is why the real key to success in anything whether it's weight loss physical fitness whether it's any kind of skill development a business anything understand you might see including searching for a mate the job is to do job well and let the chips fall where they may and as you do the job well your self-esteem mechanism will give you at least a picture back as it will continue to give you the message that it respects you and respects what it is you're doing okay all right AJ so I know I think you can ask me questions anything that's come along and yeah absolutely about your well I've been taking notes and one of the things that you said many years ago when I first heard you speak at one of the MacDougall Advanced Study weekends was that a self-esteem was an important predictor a female's weight was an important predictor of her success maybe even the most important and so my question is is well have two questions on that which came first the chicken or the egg so in other words did she have low self-esteem which allowed her to become overweight or did being overweight caused her to have self-esteem and then the second part of that question is one of the things they say in show business is you can't get a job on Broadway so you get a til you get a job on Broadway and if if losing weight will increase one self-esteem that is a very slow process so how do they stay motivated when it could take a really really long time for others to notice their efforts well when you heard me years ago you were hearing me Club the scientific literature and so you weren't having me described this in Doug Lyall talk okay so what I what you're hearing me say is that in the self-esteem literature the biggest predictor for females is their weight now from Doug Lyall talk I would say that what they really mean is the number one predictor of esteem so the feelings of esteem that a woman gets from the world are best predicted by her her physique than by anything else and that's the big deal in other words she has very powerful feelings that come as a result of the signals that she gets from other people but her self-esteem is something different self-esteem the highly perishable feeling has about their self-respect from how well they are working on their personal goals self-esteem is does not take months and months and it does not require victory of other people giving you any positive feedback self-esteem happens completely independently of what anybody else says about anything and it has entirely to do with your own internal audience watching your efforts this is the beauty of this and this is the incredible importance of it you ask how do you continue to be motivated when you don't get any positive feedback from other people when you go from 260 pounds to 250 - the answer is mm-hmm self-esteem mechanisms and knows what you did to do it so every day that you are working diligently I but want to know that we can tell that she's losing five ounces a day and she's lost five ounces a day she's now down she started at at 279 pounds she's now at 195 that I said this weekend so she's down to 84 pounds it's taken her about seven or eight months to do it and so when we when we now look at look at what's happening every day she's down five ounces five ounces is about the amount of water that's in a Dixie cup so I basically showed her a Dixie cup and I said that's how much fat you're losing each day okay I was kind of exciting for her to think about that just everyday she's scooping off one Dixie cup with the fat now what's keeping her motivated is not people huddling around her saying wow you are down you're really losing a lot of weight no that happens from time to time when people haven't seen her for a while but what's actually motivating her is the feeling that comes from the internal audience watching her own discipline knowing that she is chaining together excellent behavior that is going to result in her being more competitive by next summer okay so now at 195 pounds she feels you know pretty pretty excited she's still not getting positive feedback from other people in terms of her being attractive if she knows she's on her way doing things the right way and every day that she does an excellent job she feels the feeling of being one step closer with tremendous self respect and self regard that comes from doing things in an excellent fashion you're she's happy okay she's not exhilarated the way she will she might be when some man that she finds handsome flirts with her next summer okay that's its own thing but what she will feel today is the happiness which is a peace of mind and knowing that she's doing an excellent job she's the only one that needs to know okay and and so that that's how it is that that we go about sustaining excellence required to do very big things as you need to know that you're working hard and you're doing a very good job at the little fundamentals that are required that's terrific I I believe I once heard you said that exercise is actually a way we can increase our self-esteem is that true and how does that work it works because exercise is something that you cannot give back so you can give back a day of eating really well you can blow it with with a coconut cream pie at midnight but if you exercise that day and you put in a good solid half an hour of exercising you can't give that away you did it and there's no taking it back you can't uh nexor sighs so that's why exercise is a special and very useful component of the self esteem mechanism and that's why I encourage people actually to exercise daily not three days a week we want to exercise daily and exercise moderately now you don't always have time but that's why we have a little check sheet so that we've got a check sheet of things that we're wanting to do every day and we're not gonna get everything done on that check sheet of all of our fundamentals but we want to get 70 or 80 percent of them done and so a month from now we want to look back at a set of Chuck sheets that we can see all these checks that we did and every day we know we're checking and checking and checking these boxes once and it because remember the system is watching us and it's saying this is no joke you're doing an excellent job and we can also see from month-to-month improvement so there's no question if you want feedback and you're trying to learn how to plug in the guitar then for goodness sakes record yourself today and then come back a month later after you've done a bunch of fundamentals and you put in an hour a day for 30 days and then listen to yourself 30 days from now and see if you're better in the same way this is why I encourage people to weigh themselves but monthly intervals as opposed to any other time because I don't want them getting demoralized with all the movement that takes place in human weight around hormones water weight fecal material and glycogen storage so all have people upset that they gained a pound from Wednesday to Thursday you did not gain a pound from Wednesday Thursday that is not possible a human being cannot gain a pound of fat from Wednesday to Thursday they can gain 16 pounds of water from Wednesday to Thursday and we've seen that happen at the center when people were very sodium sensitive coming off of water fast and then they went to San Francisco and did what we told them not to do which is to eat cheese fondue in a French restaurant in 24 hours later their eyes are swelling shut because they are they're loaded with water as a result of their sodium sensitivity so we've seen that happen but even then the person has not gained any fat okay so you do not gain fat in a substantial quick fashion you also do not lose fat in any substantial quick fashion so when people are excited that today I lost a pound but and let's see what happens tomorrow and then tomorrow I didn't lose a pound and then Thursday I gained a pound oh that's terrible and then Friday I lost two pounds none of that is true it's all wrong okay bi if you're doing an excellent job on weight loss you're losing a few ounces a day and it's too small to be detected by the scale the and so the way we measure this is once a month so I have people if your goal is weight loss to to take three consecutive measurements three days in a row at the beginning of a month like now in the morning and you're gonna average them and that's our baseline and then a month from now thirty days from now we're gonna do it again now in between I don't care about weight what I care about is the fundamentals I want the internal audience watching you execute an excellent program and then thirty days from now we'll check and we will see what your diligent effort bore for fruit and we will find that if you did a good job and you're overweight that you will have lost some weight and then on we go with the program there's so self-esteem is what I want I want people to understand that there's only one way to get self-esteem and it's not by winning a prize because that's esteem the only way to get self-esteem is by earning it and you have to earn it through doing an excellent effort you don't have to do your very best possible effort you have to do an excellent effort you got lives you've got a lot of competing goals and demands for your time but if we're trying to improve this life you've got an area in your life that says you know what we should really be improving in this area of life this is a handicap we are getting negative feedback here we're unhappy as a result of this area so that means we need to look at that area and look at the fundamentals about what it's going to be required to break those that problem down and to start by having success or starting at making progress the the key variable here is that progress causes happiness not victory progress causes happiness and that's a fantastic thing for us to know all you need to do is to work diligently start having some progress and your nervous system will reward you beautifully that is the beautiful groove did so many people get in and you should hope we living get into a nice beautiful groove and they are happy long before they get any accolades from anybody else that's the thing that we need to focus on well well that's fantastic and so many people are loving this and loving you dr. Lyle we have two fairly similar questions so I'll ask them both for it and I guess it comes under the umbrella of is there's like a correlation perhaps between people-pleasing and self esteem Tracy says what is the difference between being a doormat and not sweating the little things she's often told she doesn't stand up for herself and then kind of in a similar vein Elizabeth says how do we regain self-esteem in a place which people are used to interacting with our former low self esteem itself okay this is again P the second of them and I am immediately sensing a confusion between esteem and self esteem mhm so the person is saying look other people have given me negative feedback you know it's been hard on me I don't have a lot of confidence and so how am I going to raise my self-esteem in an area where people have some some low impressions of me and they give me low feedback the answer is the feedback they give has nothing to do with your self-esteem it has to do with your esteem esteem feelings of esteem you have what I'm gonna call an esteem meter inside of your head that stands between yourself as you and your internal audience the esteem meter is a device that's designed by nature to be sensitive to two sets of data data from your internal audience sending it to the esteem meter and data from outside people sending data to the esteem meter so outside people say I think you're kind of lousy and ugly and second-rate and no good and I don't we are very interested in having you and the coalition or dating you or anything else the bad feelings that happen inside of you for feedback like that that is esteem you're getting negative esteem signals the internal audience sends its own signals it does not simply echo what other people say the internal audiences job is not to echo what other people say the internal audiences job is to generate assessment of your effort that's its job its job is to give you feedback on your effort as if it is outside people watching you so reading go are the lists of what other people have said about you and what they are saying about all the bunch of people no matter what other people say or what they say about your process the whole player is your boss as best you can understand it and and that's that now it may you still may have many unpleasant situations let's suppose you're somebody that's a hundred pounds overweight and you've made the mistake of telling other people what it is that you're up to and you get nothing but negative feedback oh no that won't work no you need to do a lap band like my sister no what you need to do is do fen-phen no what you need to do is do you add khun's no what you're doing won't work you can't eat carbs like no you don't know what you're doing and you can't be a vegan that's terrible oh it's my brother-in-law's or the doctor he says it's awful okay forget it don't tell anybody else which are up to only people that might be supportive and then what your job is to do is to have a check sheet of the fundamentals that you need to be doing and then you start doing them and after one day your internal audience says I don't really care and I'm not impressed and the self-esteem that you're hoping for will not be there on day two it's not gonna be there on day three it'll start to sprout up like a little tiny you know watermelon plant that you planted just barely starting to sprout out of the soil but after ten day this is raw little it's on its way okay poppy Nakada or insurance will be watching the diligent effort and beginning you lost the feed back every day it does damn oh he stuck that crazy diet yet oh you need you Atkins let me tell you what you ought to do let me give you some tapes from Tony Robbins out how you think beautiful I forget it her job is to stick right but you were practiced and know that Schiphol yeah an accomplishment comes from repetition of five minutes and so does self-respect self-esteem okay now the first person asked me a slightly different question so did you absolutely she said Tracy says what is the difference between being a doormat and not sweating the little things I often get told that I don't stand up for myself that I should not let people talk to me like that it's their problem if they try to you it's their problem if they choose to use vulgar language I'm not the classy police I don't just I just don't engage with them okay so this is a completely different issue that doesn't have anything to do with this so this has to do it sounds to me like this is a person that is probably conscientious and maybe pretty agreeable and you get pushed around in a lot of social situations for better more disagreeable and as a result of that they feel the feeling of being taken advantage of or being essentially intimidated in one fashion or another and this is a different problem than the problem of self-esteem this is the problem of essentially the self assertiveness in the face of conflicts of interest with a that's a that's a whole different discussion for a different okay thankthank you down you're loud Pamela has I think feelings hey hello yes I'm here can you hear me oh okay sorry I think we had a little glitch it is it okay to ask a question dr. lout yes go ahead okay great cuz Pamela just posted what advice would you have for someone who's internal audience has very high expectations is there a way to recalibrate your internal audience yes the internal audience will be recalibrated by the check sheet so you Rica you you set the check sheet up for what you know to be the fundamentals that are associated with making improvements and success in that arena and then you start working at those fundamentals and your internal audience will expect you to be better than you really are the but what the internal lot so the internal audience may be a little surprised and disappointed that that you're not as good as you thought as it as they thought you were however your internal audience were very quickly recalibrated sexpectations and it will be observing your effort this is a the notion Hey so there's a little big very best job to move flat tires on one side of the shop to the other side of the shop and they're kind of hard to roll and you watch him roll those things and sometimes they they spill and you he's having a hard time stacking them straight but you watched those diligent efforts as he tries to do that you have nothing but respect for the hard work now you recognize that he's not the most coordinated getting okay and that's okay you absolutely give him a pass on that because what you care about is this attitude in his effort and your internal audience may have a disorderly high expectations from from from basically an interaction between your genetics in your life history people think that you are great and they may have given you great feedback it's they refer to your enchiladas expect greatness and as a result you've been procrastinating and fiddling around because you don't want to disappoint the internal audience and beat in front of yourself okay so as a result people will fiddle around and not dig in and just start somewhere and make an effort however if you do if you identify the fundamentals make a check sheet and start working the internal audience very well may observe that you're not the genius that you know it thought you were that you're not the great Leiter or the great poet or the great whatever singer dancer actress whatever genius in other words the internal audience may very well have to face the fact that it overestimated your abilities and then when you actually started working on the project it's coming a lot slower than we thought it was going to okay that's fine all you have to do is put up with that short-term period of recalibration the internal audience will never give you negative feedback for hard work even if that hard work results in very poor outcomes relative to what it thought it look at you in the same way that you have a very compassionate pity for that kid your internal audience will have compassionate pity for you and say son of a gun we thought you were genius but it turns out you're not a genius you're not the second coming of JD Salinger after all even though you had written a great essay that you got an award for in high school they're not looks like you can't do it that easily you can't snap your fingers and come up with Thatcher on the ride okay fine but let's see what you can do and as you do the very best you can your nervous system will say hey I respect this hard work and that will give rise to the self esteem process of the feeling and it will also give rise to a recalibrated inter alliance that will never again have those expectations high they'll be gone and now you'll be back down to a reasonable set of expectations that all the stands between you and a steady dose of self esteem is dela Jennifer well that's that's very inspiring that our self-esteem is more dependent on our progress not not victory because that that if that makes us want to try that it's the diligent excellent effort and not the outcome yes you know AJ this is precisely what Eastern philosophy has been aiming for thousands of years okay this is this is the the double-talk that you'll hear on the Buddhist is that they can't quite sell it to us because you can't sell it to a westerner that the outcomes don't matter okay so you just can't the truth is we want to win mates we want to look good we want to be successful ie Aristotle said it we want to have victories and you cannot stop that process that's natural so you can't Buddhist your way out of that but the bottom line is is that the Buddhists have a half of the puzzle beautiful and that is that what they're saying is try to quiet down your internal fascination and focus on the outcome and try to do an excellent job at the process okay we cannot be all process because we are aiming at outcomes but in this society and the way we tend to people naturally tend to think is that they're aiming too much at outcomes without appreciating and understanding the important components of the process and so if you if you slow down don't skip steps do excellent work you will get a benefit that you won't see coming which is that very quickly in a matter of days your self-esteem will rise and you have an excitement in what I call an adventure in the achievement and that you know I tell people you've got 50 pounds to lose if you do this right then then don't be interrupt because you only get to do this journey once because you're never going back ok so every 5 ounces that you say goodbye to you that you earn enjoy the excitement and the pride that comes from doing this job well because later on there'll be a different challenge which is to to go on to new things and more interesting things or different things because this chat will be behind you and you'll be on your way to something different that that's terrific I think you know I don't know if you are familiar with a poem called the race dr. Lyle it's a very famous poem about a little boy that ran a race but he kept falling down and he actually came in last but he got the standing ovation for finishing the race I think that's sort of what your your explaining now I think I love this poem poem so much yes that it's the effort that really matters not the outcome so and and we all can make an effort and that's what's really inspiring about what you're talking about beautiful everybody's asking about this check sheet we have to make our own check sheet right it's not something that you give us right yeah there's a check sheet called the target sheet that I talk about in the slow fast way yeah my god this starts to do on that if I sent that to you before yeah I have that so I can share that check sheet but I thought but not everybody's goal is weight loss they could create their own check sheet for the glyco that's maybe you know something else that's exactly right I reached client that I work with we have a different check sheet and it's nice starting at different places and so and we modified cheats as we go along but that's you know if we're a writer we're gonna start down with a writer's chippy and if we're if we're trying to get a PhD in philosophy it's a different sex trades ah so yes absolutely but that notion is the fundamentals okay if you have time one more question and then guys if you have personal questions you can always book a session with dr. Lyle at www.samhsa.gov/dtac have anything to do with what we heard from parent that was hard on us growing up or a negative spouse we may have been for been with for years no and I actually I don't believe it okay I have personally never seen self-esteem not rise dramatically within a week or two diligent effort so self-esteem will not rise with me ah pretty in terms of effort it won't even particularly rise with sort of so so out okay effort self-esteem will rise significantly if it's if it's low remember it's not low because of little achievement it's low because of low effort you can have low self-esteem spectacular achievement talk to milli vanilli okay so this is you can you can be a beautiful person getting all kinds of accolades and know that you're a Leo of what you're making of your life and so you know the this is so the question is is an interesting one but it's a theoretical one and it's one that I have never run into I have never run into somebody that I've I've never run into low self-esteem ie self-disgust feelings as opposed to pride I've never run into that in someone who is making diligent ex efforts on a consistent basis okay the self-esteem mechanism simply works according to this mechanics that's independent of the fact that you can you could have a lot of negative feelings coming in from signals from other people that can be damn unpleasant even while your self-esteem is rising self-esteem is defeating are not the same thing okay all right dr. Lisle do you think they'll ever be a book about this subject that will help us if I can get out of my writer's block well I think what you should do is have a check sheet and then just do some diligent excellent effort that is beautiful there are well thank you so much again for being here dr. Lyon thanks all of you guys for watching another episode of healthy living live I'm chef AJ and I make healthy tastes delicious
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