Stop Doing That Sh*t

by Gary John Bishop

  •You were born as a magic little sponge, open and willing and ready to absorb everything the world was presenting you with.

  •That magic little sponge was thrown into a life it had no say in. Whether genetics, family situation, location, or circumstance, there was nothing you could do about it.

  •You are stuck with whatever you have held on to, from what you were thrown into AND what you established as true. But your established truth is just a perspective; it does not own you.

  All of this combined to give you a dramatic backdrop against which to live your life. A scene that you get to play out every night in front of an audience of one. You.

  If you need to, go back and review to make sure you’re set and ready for what’s next. Specifically, think about what you were thrown into in your life. What are the things you couldn’t control? In what ways have you been telling yourself that these things have shaped you? What established truths do you have about things in your past? Where have you gotten stuck?

  Think of this chapter as a little bridge. It takes us from the groundwork we’ve laid, on one side, to what’s at the very root of your subconscious, on the other. This is the point in the book where we start to reveal the deepest of conversations in your subconscious that drive you to live life the way you do and to be who you have become.

  This is why you can’t break out of your patterns of self-sabotage. This is why your life is in a cycle of BS that you occasionally break out of, only to return. Everything I have talked about has been to get you here.

  You see, there are three pivotal and everlasting items, three fundamental cornerstones of life that came out of that thrown-ness, that arose from that myriad of established truths that became locked in that magic little sponge. Immovable and permanent stains on your subconscious that shape and contort everything you see and everything you hear.

  I call these the “three saboteurs.”

  The three saboteurs are the focal point from which all things must begin and to which all things must return, no matter how far you reach, no matter how great your life could be. You have an internal compulsion to return to them, no matter what damage that might do.

  Let me break down what a “saboteur” is.

  A saboteur is a subconscious conclusion that you made at a definitive point of your life, the kind of indelible mark that stays with you to this day. It will remain with you until the day you die.

  You can shift how you relate to your past, you can free yourself from the weight of your emotional baggage, but you cannot change or erase what you have fundamentally concluded. It just is, and it always will be.

  That might sound like bad news. But the discovery of your unique conclusions might well be just the shift you need to get and keep your life on track.

  I like to think of my saboteurs as my own little lighthouses in the night. When I encounter them, they’re a warning that I’m about to start drifting into my predictable default life. My self-fulfilling prophecy. When I recognize them, I’m able to pivot. When I use the words “awareness” or “self-aware,” this is what I’m referring to. An up-close and very personal relationship to your own wiring; a relationship that gives you in-the-moment options instead of just fate.

  You are guided by these three simple conclusions, and if you look closely enough you will be able to identify yours by the effect they are having on you and your life.

  Your actions are always in alignment with your conclusions. You might not immediately see the pebble drop into the pond, but you will see the ripples it leaves behind.

  CONFUSING CONCLUSIONS

  So, what are these conclusions? How can you start to identify them in your own life?

  By the end of the first two decades or so of life, the formative years when your physical and neurological development was at its most defining, you, like all human beings, had arrived at a set of fundamental conclusions about three things:

  •Yourself

  •Others

  •Life

  These conclusions are each very different, have unique and distinct ways of showing up in your life, and, when combined, are loaded against your potential. They skew everything. Contort everything. And ultimately burden you with the life you currently have. The one you’re trying to change.

  Before you get your knickers in a twist, relax. I’m going to go into each of these three in detail in the next few chapters. In the meantime, consider that every single day of your life you are viewing the world via a small, tightly wound network of your own doing. A constant internal framework that you unconsciously picked up and stored for future guidance. To keep life safe and survivable. The same.

  That’s the paradox here too. That framework is what compels you to get better and improve (and take risks), but at the same time the framework itself needs constant reassurance of its existence because it’s what keeps you safe.

  Let me be a little more agricultural about this. You are in a perpetual state of fucking yourself over so that you can repeatedly save yourself from what fucked you over in the first place!

  Day after day, week after week, year after year, you see yourself in the same way, you see others in a very distinct way, and you see life in the same way you always see it. Talk about predictable!

  Let’s dive in. And let’s start with the saboteur that might hurt the most: yourself.

  08

  You

  You’ve become so fascinated by your own temporary solutions, so seduced by the mirage of the future, that you can’t see it’s an illusion.

  The first saboteur we’re going to dive into is what you’ve concluded about yourself. I call this your “personal conclusion.”

  That’s right, you’ve come to a pretty damning, repetitive conclusion about yourself. There’s an all-consuming whisper going on in the abyss of your subconscious. It runs in the background of your thoughts, humming along, prodding and poking you, enticing you to work on yourself, but eventually returning you to the whisper. And it’s personal.

  This is where your pathway to understanding and finally ending your self-sabotaging behavior begins. Until this point, we have been setting the groundwork with some abstract ideas about how we became the people we are today, but now it has to get real for you. This is the first and most primary conclusion you will need to understand to finally get yourself out of this pattern of sabotaging your life.

  Here’s how your personal conclusion came to be. During your formative years, you inadvertently captured a handful of “treasured” items in that magic little sponge—some you picked up in early childhood, others a little later—about who you are and how you see yourself, your capabilities, and, most significantly, your shortcomings.

  Especially those shortcomings, because conclusions are never positive.

  Let’s get something out the way. Don’t start by telling me your personal conclusion is “I’m freaking awesome!” It’s just not.

  You might occasionally say that to yourself with a dimple in your cheek and an eyeball-piercing glint from those ever so well-polished teeth of yours. Hell, at some superfluous level you might even believe it, but the truth of it is, it’s the shellac of bullshit people tell themselves to “overcome” what’s underneath the surface. It’s a scheme to stomach life, to somehow put some My Little Pony glitter on the immovable density of your most ignored, tolerated, and to-be-improved self.

  It’s a criticism, an internal, repeating criticism of self. The flaw that people are referring to when they roll out the old “I’m not perfect” line to make themselves look good to others.

  The reality is, a lot of people don’t even realize the conclusion they have come to believe about themselves because they’re too busy, too focused, too ensnared in the life they’re trying to build that they never take stock of why they are living this way!

  You’ve become so fascinated by your own temporary solutions, so seduced by the mirage of the future, that you can’t see it’s an illusion. Like the trapped little fish that comes to the su
rface of the tank every time you dangle your fingers above. Every single time, you get hoodwinked.

  Your negative conclusions don’t mean you can’t experience happiness or joy or optimism. We all experience life in those ways too, but what I’m talking about is that “baseline” self, the one on which everything in your life is modeled.

  You don’t walk around with these conclusions constantly on your mind or at the very top of your to-do list while you’re going to the supermarket or getting on a train or spread-eagled on the sofa getting your regular Game of Thrones fix.

  Rather, your conclusion is the Vaseline smear across your view of your day-to-day life, slightly blurring and obscuring everything you see and occasionally coming into view.

  (Unless you’re failing at something. Oh, if that’s the case, then it’s right in your face and choking the life out of you.)

  Your personal conclusion is like a never-ending, never-changing internal guide. It keeps you pegged to the life you have, and it always comes back to mind, no matter how good life gets. It’s kinda like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a while, but eventually, up it comes.

  Of course, the conclusion about yourself is the negative, but you’re also out to make yourself and your life better, so . . . along comes a handy positive every now and again to help you handle it, to temporarily leave you with the feeling that you actually ARE okay, that you’re on track and that this WILL turn out for you, and sometimes the illusion that it HAS turned out after all! Then it comes back. That’s the seesaw of your life right there. That’s the range within which you exist, back and forth, up and down. Two steps forward, two steps back. And that’s how you are wired to live! Right there! Circumstances change, you remain the same.

  In many ways, your circumstances are nothing more than context that your conclusion gets to dance with. Everybody’s working on their circumstances. Is it any wonder the conclusion remains?

  Your conclusion about yourself always begins with an “I.”

  It’s stuff like this:

  “I’m not smart enough.”

  “I’m a loser.”

  “I’m different.”

  “I don’t matter.”

  “I’m incapable.”

  “I’m not loved.”

  Or even all the way down the hole to “I’m worthless.”

  You might identify with one of these or none of these. The question you need to answer is “What have I concluded about myself?” This is the fundamental experience of yourself, the inherent design that you continually try to overcome and yet somehow always end up with again. Your particular conclusion.

  It’s the thing you say to yourself when no one is looking, when there’s nothing to prove, no one to impress. Just you and your thoughts.

  It’s about you. No one else, nothing outside of you or some circumstance you’re dealing with. You. And for you, when all is said and done, it’s the truth of truths when you are pressed by life and no one can tell you any differently.

  For example, if you’re burdened by the conclusion “I’m not smart enough,” all those years of teachers or your mom or your friends telling you that you are smart made no difference. To you, they just didn’t get it. Maybe they treated you like there was something wrong with you, or maybe YOU thought there was something wrong with you! No amount of accomplishment, recognition, certification, knowledge, hints, systems, or praise will release you from the grip of your own conclusion. No matter the prize, you’re eventually left back where you started. “I’m not smart enough.” It’s never enough or, rather, you’re never enough.

  Think about that for a moment.

  Think about that persistent, pressing experience you have of yourself in this life.

  Connect the dots here.

  I’ll help you out with an example of a very common personal conclusion that some people have: “I’m a loser.”

  Now imagine your life with that permanently in the hazy background of your thoughts. Every time you’re pressed, stressed, or fail at something, up it rises.

  “I’m a loser, I just knew it, here we go again, what is wrong with me, why can’t I get anything right?”

  It produces a stream of connected thoughts and emotions, all automatically. The kind of thoughts that bind to that fundamental conclusion. It grows arms and legs, the conversation swells—“I can’t do it,” “It’s too hard,” “It’s too much.” It’s not just a thought or a background noise. When it’s triggered, when it’s loud, you’re in the world of that thing. It controls you.

  Imagine a lifetime of that. Imagine the bone-crushing impact of that when you get fired or your partner leaves you or someone else gets that promotion or your best friend just announces that they’ve nailed that dream job testing organic suntan lotions in Tahiti while you toil away trying to sling thirty-bucks-a-month cell phone cards from the back of your crumbling car.

  Now you can see why positive thinking or personal affirmations of “I am enough” or “I am successful” seem so fake, so fucking useless and weak, because deep down, at the very heart of you, there’s a gnawing pain. You are a loser, and no one can convince you any differently.

  And guess what? Not everyone who has that kind of internal conclusion lives in a van down by the river! No!

  They’re lawyers and doctors and teachers and every kind of “successful” member of society you could imagine. Going about their lives with the conclusion that fundamentally, they are something less, something not quite up to par. Every morning they get out of bed, shuffle into the shower, get dressed, shove some coffee down their throat, and plunge into their usual day. When they get to work, it’s game on, pretending their conclusion isn’t there. Avoiding or manipulating people and situations that remind them of their own conclusion.

  They’re keeping it hidden from view, guarded, pushed out of mind, out of sight. That’s their struggle. The daily battle between their worst self and the limit of what they see as possible, a limit that has been pulled down, shrunk, and diminished over days and weeks and months and years.

  Is it any wonder we have become so resigned to the lives we have?

  “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  You lose sight of when you started doing this shit and why you started doing it, and you get so wrapped up in its drama and significance that you actually believe it to the bones of your being.

  Again, it’s not as if you are going around in life constantly in that dialogue with yourself. It’s more that your life is systematically organized around what you have concluded.

  These are obviously not the kinds of things you’re super eager to tell people about either. It’s not as if you saunter into work and share your deepest fear with your boss while chomping into your second all-natural Amazonian walnut energy bar of the day with one hand and mashing out your desperate-cry-for-help email with the other, now, is it?

  In fact, you have already fashioned your entire being around keeping your conclusions discreet.

  I mean, you have to! What would people really think of you if they knew how you saw yourself? Therefore, you live your life in that constant state of overcoming, of pretending and posting pictures on Instagram of the person you want to be, or at least the person you want other people to see you as.

  Some of you are in so deep, so lost in the Matrix, that you can’t bring yourself to look at what I’m saying. You’re already dismissing it without any real introspection or writing it off because you can’t seem to work this out for yourself.

  This isn’t a movie, this is your real life, and in this case you are both the rebels and the Matrix. It’s all you.

  Try on the idea that your life—how you look, how you speak, where you live, how you live—is all to project a certain image of yourself while at the same time hiding another version of yourself from public view—the one you really believe to be true.

  Are you hard at work keeping your shi
t together to keep your life at a certain level or to get to a new one? For what purpose?

  Why is your success so important to you? What are you trying to overcome?

  I’d argue it’s the way you try to deal with, to somehow handle or wriggle free from, the weight of your personal conclusion, which is constantly burrowing away inside you. The first of the saboteurs.

  THE SCROOGE IN ALL OF US

  One of my favorite books is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. If you’ve never read the book, you’ve most likely heard of the central character, Ebenezer Scrooge. The reason why I love this story goes well beyond the obvious. You see, our old friend Scrooge is a case study in everything I’ve been talking about thus far. In fact, after reading this book, you might well never look at that tale in the same light ever again!

  When Scrooge looked back on his life, he began to experience the discomfort of how he had shaped himself, something that he had always blamed on others. He says: “These are the shadows of things that have been. They are what they are, do not blame me!”

  He couldn’t be with the notion that he had hardened himself, that his cynicism was a self-imposed exile after he lost the love of his life. He had concluded that he could never have love or be loved and built his life around that conclusion. He constructed a reality where he found fleeting joy, a slew of temporary fixes, accruing more and more money, but the conclusion he had made ate away at him day after day. No one could get in, not even his loved ones. He dismissed their approaches out of hand. He could not see what was right in front of his face, as it was a massive contradiction to his own subconscious belief, so he plowed on anyway, perpetuating his own conclusions and denying anything that might be a threat to that reality.

  Just like you do.

  GRAB A SHOVEL, WE’RE GOING IN

  So, what have you concluded about yourself?