Why You Feel Stuck and How to Get Out of It

It took me probably 16, 17 years of working on myself and being in self-development before I realized this truth, and that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the idea, yes, the idea of time. Man lives in time, and man invented time. Time does not exist outside of the own construct that we have made in our own minds, and inventing time is our favorite way to play the game of escape. So what we do, I have realized, is we trick ourselves and talk about time and use time as a way to delay changing our lives. And if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I promise you it's going to make a whole lot of sense as we go through it. The idea of it is this. Most people aren't stuck because they don't know what to do. Most people are stuck because they think that changing themselves takes time. Now, if you would have told me this 5, 10 years ago, I'd be like, yeah, it does take time, dumbass. But now I'm looking at it, I'm going, no, no, no, no, no. It actually doesn't take any time to change yourself. And that's what we're going to talk about, is the idea that change takes time is actually completely false. Maybe you've been believing that changing yourself takes time, and maybe this is exactly a thing that's been keeping you stuck. And so when you look at it, the idea of, hey, I'm working on myself. This is taking time. Time is like real seductive. It gives us hope. Yes, we're doing it. We're working on ourselves. Good job, Rob. It gives us hope. But really, that hope is just some counterfeit hope. I'm changing. I'm getting better. I'm working on myself so I can be happier in the future. I'll be happier in the future if I just keep on working on myself. But as long as you keep thinking in terms of tomorrow, then you don't have to change today. Time becomes kind of this like safety blanket that we wrap around our fear. And it says like, hey, keep working on yourself. Sweetie, you're a work in progress. One day, you're going to feel better. One day, you're going to feel happier. But if we're being brutally honest, how many one days have gone by and passed you already? If you've been working on yourself for a while, three years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, it's probably quite a few one days where you're like, one day, I'll feel better. One day, I'll feel happier. And you fast forward five years, you're like, I feel pretty close to exactly the same as I did five years ago. And what you have to understand is that the future becomes this place where we place all of our action because we're too afraid to take action today. Does it make sense? Like we use time as an excuse for why we don't change right now. We use time as an excuse for why we don't change right now in this moment. Think about this. When you are truly in danger, like if your house was on fire right now, or you're standing outside and your child is running towards the street and there's a car coming. What happens? You don't schedule a plan. You don't make your to-do list of how to get out of a burning house. You don't put your vision board together. You don't journal about it. What do you do? You act in this moment. Now, time disappears. And that's what you have to realize. There is only acting from the now. And we will be right back. Hey, if you've ever wanted to be coached personally by me, right now is your chance. I just opened the doors to Mindset 2.0, which is a 12-week system that's designed to help you finally break free from procrastination, to stop overthinking, stop holding yourself back so that you can create the life that you want. But the doors are going to close in just a few days. And the first few people who join are going to get a massive discount plus access to exclusive bonuses that I've never put out before. And so, if you've been waiting for a sign, this is it. All you need to do is go to coachwithrob.com right now. Once again, coachwithrob.com. Or you can click the link that's down in the description. And I'll see you on the inside. And now, back to the show. So, the mind bender of this is your psychological and emotional emergencies that you have of loving yourself more, of fixing your trauma, of becoming a better person. For some reason, we don't put the same amount of urgency as if our house was on fire. And so, we'll say, oh, I'm working on myself. I'll fix them in time. Oh, I'll start meditating in the future. I'll start journaling in the future. I'll start working on becoming more vulnerable in the future because I need to do X, Y, Z first. And this illusion of time is our scapegoat for not changing ourself right now. You cannot change yourself in the future. You can only change yourself right now. So, you have to stop kicking the can down the road. But you have to realize that your fears don't want you to change because change, even though it could be an amazing change, is a threat to the brain. And the reason why is because change is uncertain. And even though you know that you won't die if you become happier, you won't die if you have more joy or more love in your life, you won't die for any of those things, your brain is going, but I don't know. We've never done this before. So, we need to protect ourself. Tell him to do it in the future. Tell him, I'm making progress. And then you fast forward two years and you're in the exact same spot. And so, let's bust this myth that's really poisoning a lot of our growth. And this was poisoning a lot of my growth for a long time. The lie is that this takes time. You don't need more time. You need to be more present. Let me explain what I mean by that. Time doesn't create clarity for you. Time doesn't make you more courageous. Time only delays what you could do right now. And so, we've kind of been sold this linear model where it's step-by-step, kind of like, I can't go to the gym today and wake up tomorrow and be a different person. And so, we think, oh, yeah, like, you know, it's going to take time to lose these 40 pounds, which it will. So, we think our self-improvement's the same. Being a different person is the same. Oh, you know what? I'm going to heal myself over time, step-by-step. I'm going to learn to love myself in phases. You know, I'm going to get the house in order when I finally feel in peace. And so, what I want you to understand is that you don't need a five-year plan to heal yourself. You don't need a planner or to-do list to start loving and forgiving yourself. You don't need the circumstances in your life to change in order to choose to be happy. And I use those words very, like, very particularly. Choose to be happy because happiness is a choice, and you can choose to be happy in this moment regardless of your circumstances. But the trap is, I will change when this happens in my life. Or I will change, I'll be happier when I get this amount of money in my bank account. No, change cannot happen in the future. Change can only happen now. If you say, I'm going to change next Tuesday, when next Tuesday rolls around, it is just another present moment. So, instead of delaying that ---- for next Tuesday, why don't I just change right now? Change happens now. Change can only happen in this moment. And that means, why don't I actually change myself now? The real reason why this is hard, because this is not easy, I will be very honest with you in this, is what I'm saying probably starting to make some sense. But the reason why it is so hard to change in the moment is because it requires immense amount of presence. And that is something that we are getting worse and worse at as humans with social media and with phones. And the fact that humans' attention spans in the past 20 years has gone down 33%. If we want to change in the moment, we've got to learn to be as present as we possibly can. This is one of the reasons why meditating is good, why mindfulness is good, while distancing yourself from social media and from trying to keep busy all the time is a good thing to do. Because if you want change, and even if you believe that you can change, your subconscious is still running half of the programs throughout your entire day. I think the last article that I saw, the most updated article I saw, was Harvard said that about 49% of what you do on a daily basis is autopilot. 49%. So we can try to change, but still 49% of us is still doing exactly what it did yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. Your subconscious will still pull you back into your old programming if you're not radically present. And here's why. The reason why you keep repeating the same things you've done your entire life, your old relationships, you keep falling off of the self-care wagon, you keep chasing happiness as if it's the next goal, not because you're broken, but because you are living in default mode. We all do this. I find myself doing this multiple times a day, and I have to pull myself out of it. I go back into default mode of old Rob. And default mode is a thief. It steals your now. It steals your present moment. And if you're not fixing yourself in the present moment, it also steals your future self. And so change not only takes a lot of action from you, it also takes a lot of presence, like immense amounts of presence. And that presence is so that you don't get wrapped up in your old patterns, to not get stuck and go back into autopilot. So we must become, if we're really trying to change ourself, you can be a different person right now than you have ever been your entire life. And you can carry that through the rest of your day, but you have to be really paying attention that you don't dip back into your old self. You see what I'm saying? It's like, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, one of my favorite quotes is Alan Watts, you're under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. You can change not over time, but in this moment. And so in order to do that, we must be very aware as, I mean, as aware as we possibly can be of every action that we take. To make sure that every action that we take is not from old patterns or habits, but they are the actions that are aligned with your new self. The thoughts that are aligned with your new self in the direction that you want to go in your life. And if you're really thinking about this, it is very daunting. It is a huge task and you will not be perfect, but you will change your life faster than you ever thought possible. What you thought would take a year to get done, you'll get done in a couple months. Why? Because you have five times more presence over the past two months than you have your entire life. And so what I want you to really think about and to kind of bring all this home so you really understand is the only place where all of this happens, like every moment of your life, every moment that's ever happened to you in your past, every moment that will ever happen to you in your entire future until the moment that you die will be a present moment. It will be a moment just like right now. And just like right now. And now this present moment. And so the only place where your peace exists, if you want a more peaceful life, is right here and now. Be more peaceful now. The only time where love and acceptance exists is right now. It's not in the past. It's not in the future. It is if you want to feel love, the only time that you can feel love, right now. That's it. And you can feel it right now. And you can also feel it right now now that we have another present moment. The only chance that you have to live is this exact moment. And the only place where you can change is actually right now. The rest, everything else, is a projection into the future. So what if you stopped delaying your life in saying, I'm going to change in the future? What if you stopped negotiating with time? What if you stopped postponing your peace and postponing all of the joy and happiness? If you want more joy in your life, feel joy right now. Nothing has to happen for you to feel joy. Nothing has to happen for you to feel peace. Nothing has to happen for you to feel love. It is a feeling that arises from inside of you that you can feel right now. It feels like to sit there and be like, man, I know there's a better version of myself in the future. I know there's a more evolved, a more peaceful, a more loving, a more wise version of myself in the future. What if that version of yourself that you want was actually a decision? Right now to be that person. And then an action, one action after another action to just do it. Because change happens now. Now is the only time that change happens. And so think about this for a second. What if you just, whenever you're starting to think about these things, if you just close your eyes for a few seconds, took 60 seconds away from being all over the place and in the Tokyo drifting your life from one meeting to another Zoom meeting, you just take three, four really deep breaths. You just let your shoulders drop. And then just ask yourself the question, what have I been putting off for tomorrow that I could move on right now? What have you been putting off for tomorrow that you could just do right now? What have you been putting off feeling for the future, for later on down the road that you could just do right now? And what if you just said to yourself, I'm not waiting anymore. Not for peace, not for love, not for permission, not for happiness. I'm going to feel all of it in this moment. The best version of me does not exist in the future. The best version of me exists right now. And then every time you catch yourself thinking that changing your life takes time, remember that change can only happen now and time is just something that we made up to just delay our progress. And so if you're still listening, guess what? We're in this present moment together. There is no tomorrow where change happens. There's no perfect moment coming for you. There is only now. Right here, right now, in this moment. Change happens now. So my challenge to you is change your life right now.