TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO
Hey, how are you? It’s Michael Fiore and I want to welcome you to park four of the Make Him Worship You program and this program is actually all about you. We’re not going to talk about men too much in this program at all, we’re going to talk about women. We’re going to talk about you and we’re going to talk about how to make you love yourself more, how to make you accept yourself more, how to let you be actually happy about who you are and how you’ve been doing in your life.
Before we do that, though, a really quick recap. Now, so far, we have talked about how expectations ruin relationships, Prince Charming, The List, The Bachelor, how all of these ideas are as toxic to romance as porn can be to healthy sex. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a great man, it means you need to realize who and what a great man actually is. It’s not what you’ve been told by romance novels, and movies, and Ken dolls you played with as a kid. We also talked about the emotional life of men, how most men are lonely, emotionally cut off, and very sad. And we’ve talked about how making a man worship you is about awakening and recognizing the powerful masculine part of him.
This lesson is all about letting go of guilt and shame, realizing you’re doing a good job, and learning to love yourself. In order to do that though we need to talk about the difference between guilt and shame. If you’re like most people, certainly I used to live my life this way for the first 38, 39 years of my life, you kind of don’t really know the difference between guilt and shame. There’s a woman named Brene Brown, she has written several books on guilt and shame over the years, I think she kind of keeps doing the same thing over and over again. But I have to say, when I first read one of her books, six, seven years ago, it kind of changed my life. It kind of changed my life by showing me the difference between guilt and shame.
Because up until that point I really saw myself as a fuckup. Every time I made a mistake, every time I did something “wrong”, I would attack myself. I would say, “Michael, what is wrong with you? You’re a piece of crap. You don’t deserve to have anything good in your life. What kind of person would do what you did?” Whatever it was, it could be anything. It could be forgetting to take the garbage out. Whatever it was, I would feel this massive amount of shame. So the difference between guilt and shame is, guilt is about what you did, such as a little puppy saying, “I fucked up. I pissed on the carpet.” And shame is about who you are, “I’m a fuckup.” Look at that polar bear right there, look how horrible he is feeling about himself.
For instance, say there was a dog, and that dog peed on the carpet. The dog is a puppy, he’s a little tiny puppy, he peed on the carpet, it is totally valid to criticize that dog, to hit the dog with a tiny little newspaper, whatever else it is, and to say, “You’re not supposed to do that.” To say to the little puppy, “Hey, you know what? We don’t accept that kind of behavior here.” But how would it feel if you were kind of going to that puppy and saying, “What is wrong with you? How dare you pee on the carpet?” The puppy is a puppy, he doesn’t really know any better, does he? Nothing wrong with that puppy, he just made a mistake and it’s totally fine for him to feel guilt about that.
But it’s kind of useless for both us and for him to constantly be feeling shame about it, isn’t it? If you just kept told the puppy, “What is wrong with you?” You’re going to have a pretty messed up dog by the time it gets older.
The thing about shame is that shame is a useless emotion. Shame, there’s been studies on this, mostly by Brene Brown, about the effect of shame on people. In reality, it does not actually do what most people who use shame think it’s going to do. I was raised Catholic, so I know a little bit about that feeling of shame, that feeling of not being good enough. But in the real world, using shame to try to change someone, man or woman, never actually works and just causes anger and resentment. As our little sad LEGO man says, “Strangely, being told all the ways I’m not good enough just makes me believe I’m a piece of shit and should give up.”
If you are shaming either yourself or the man in your life, you are actually just taking away from his or your own self regard lowering who they are, taking away their pride, taking away their power. It is totally fine to say, “Oh my God, you should feel guilty about flirting with another woman, doing whatever else.” But if you’re shaming him and saying, “What is wrong with you,” it’s only going to lead to misery in your relationship. Same thing when you are shaming or criticizing yourself.
The thing about shaming criticism is it’s almost always an expression of the criticizer’s feelings of not being good enough. This is where we’re going to talk a little bit about a problem I see that is actually more or less unique to women, and doesn’t really seem to apply to men. Men really do not do this to themselves, or to other men in their lives. Most women really kind of seem to have this idea in their head that, “I need to criticize you the way I criticize myself and hold you to the same impossible standards I set for myself.” Because most women really do seem to set impossible standards for yourselves.
Most women I know feel like they’re supposed to be the perfect mother, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect employee, the perfect wife, the perfect woman, the perfect friend, and if you are not perfect in all of these ways, if you are not Wonder Woman, then you are a failure. I will be punished by myself or by the mommy mafia because women can be brutal to each other. Women really beat themselves up in ways that men do not. Most men I know do not actually wake up every day feeling like we need to be perfect in every single role in our lives. Most men are actually kinder to themselves and are actually kinder to each other, and are more willing to let each other know they’re doing a good job and getting their pride from just one area, from being a dad, from being good at your work, whatever it is.
So a lot of women, I feel like, have this kind of narrative going on in your mind, whether it’s conscious or not. That narrative is, “Hey, I beat myself up, I hold myself to this horrible standard. I have no free time, I give and I give, and I give, and nobody appreciates anything. I need to be perfect at everything or I’m a failure in every single possible way. How dare he just sit there and watch TV and seem totally okay with himself when I can see so many ways he needs to improve and change? I need him to sacrifice to prove that he loves me.” This seems to be an idea that I see over and over again in women. This idea that, “Hey, I’m supposed to be perfect, and that means you’re supposed to be perfect too. If I am not perfect, I feel like I am a failure, and I’m not good enough, why don’t you feel the same way?”
But really, in my opinion, the solution to this is not to bring men up to the same level of self-criticism that most women go through, but to allow women to feel like you are good enough without being perfect all the time. So that you not feel all this shame all the time about who you are. This feeling that you are failing all the time. Maybe you can feel a little bit guilty for not being at every single one of Timmy’s soccer games, but it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad mother. It just means that you’re a human being who is actually really, really busy, and has a lot going on. That difference between guilt and shame. Guilt, it’s okay to do something wrong as long as you feel bad about it, and try to make amends in some way, say, “I’m sorry.” Et cetera.
Now, let’s talk about how to do this, let’s talk about how to kind of start letting go of this idea that you need to be perfect or there is something wrong with you, or you are a piece of shit. Sorry about the swearing, seemed okay when I made the slides. How do we actually help you to forgive yourself for not being perfect so that you can then forgive the men in your life for not being perfect as well, so that you can both be on a level where you can celebrate what is great about you, and kind of let go of the things that you’re not doing “perfectly.”
The first thing I want to teach you how to do is to change your performance expectations of yourself. A lot of people, both men and women, fall into a trap on this. Say you’re at work, and you have a “list of things to do that day.” You have say 10, 15, 20 different things, you need to check your email, you need to make 15 phone calls, you need to get a report done, you need to do this, and you also need to make sure that Timmy gets his homework done, you need to go to Timmy’s soccer game, you need to do this, you need to do that.
All you’re going to do by having this huge to-do list is cause yourself to, A, feel really bad about yourself if you don’t achieve every single thing on that list, and B, probably not get much of anything done at all, because what a lot of people do is they fall into paralysis when their to-do list is too big. How do you choose what is the highest priority on that list? How do you get anything done? But just like the Grand Canyon was kind of worn down over centuries and millennia by tiny drops of water, getting something done is actually a matter of doing one thing, and then doing the next.
Instead of having a list of say 47 things you’re supposed to get done that day, have one or two. Have a tiny little to-do list that fits on an index card. To-do today says that, make to-do list, check off first item. Pick one or two things that are hopefully relatively high priority, do them, check those off your list, feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. You can feel good about yourself for accomplishing everything on your list. What I found in my own life is if I have one or two things on my desk I need to do, and then I do those two things, I usually find myself moving on to other projects and feeling really good about it instead of beating myself up.
Focusing on success, and building off it feels great and is actually much more effective as far as being productive than having a huge list and failing at it. By the way, this will also help you figure out what actually needs to be on your list, and what is just a way to punish yourself doing things that aren’t actually that important. Again, you don’t need to be perfect, you don’t need to be perfect in every single category of things you do.
Number two, learn to love your imperfections. Like I said, Wonder Woman does not exist, Gal Gadot, she is great in that movie, she doesn’t exist. I will tell you right now, men do not want a perfect woman anyway. We want a woman who knows who she is and loves who she is. Men love all sorts of women. The perfect woman doesn’t exist, and by the way, she wouldn’t want us anyway. It’s kind of a weird way to explain this, if you haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons, and you probably haven’t, but in D&D, when you are making a character, you get to assign different traits to different parts of your character.
There are six categories. It is strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. The thing with D&D is, it is pretty much impossible for you to have high traits in all of those. If you want to be say a warrior, you’ll probably have a really high strength, but you might not have the highest intelligence, et cetera. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and it’s really only possible to be great at one or two things. Use the, “I like myself game,” I gave you back in part one, focus on what is already awesome about you instead of spending all of your time focusing on what you’re “not good enough at.” You are great. If you focus on your strengths, your weaknesses will take care of themselves.
Three, remember, worrying is an illusion of control. It is totally normal to worry, there’s nothing wrong with you for worrying, but life really does take care of itself. Even if the world ends tomorrow, worrying about it now will just ruin your last good day on earth. I used to be a tremendous worrier about everything. I had so much anxiety going through my head, this feeling that I had to control things. What I felt was this weird feeling of guilt sometimes, this feeling that if I didn’t worry about something, that was kind of out of my control, that I was somehow failing to hold on to it. I was letting go of my responsibility. But in the real world, if you could have an ability to actually control something, worrying about it is simply a waste of time, and a great way to make yourself miserable.
Four, spend mandatory you time at least two hours once a week, and it is sacred. This is incredibly hard for most women I know to do. Because it seems to be a woman’s instinct to give, and to give, and to give without ever actually giving yourself the care and feeding that you need. I want you to block off on your calendar two hours once a week, let your family and friends know that time is yours, put yourself first for once, seriously, the people who love you will be happy that you are willing to take time for yourself. Like I said, generally speaking, these impossible standards that women hold themselves to are not impossible standards that their husbands, their boyfriends, or their kids actually demand of them. Most people I know, most husbands I know, most boyfriends I know, actually would really love it if the woman in their life would be a little bit more selfish sometimes so she could be happier.
Number five is to observe the self-critical voice in your head, but realize, it is not you. You don’t have to be a victim of your thoughts. As Joyce Carol Oates says here, “Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the self see the self with any objectivity?” We’re going to get a little psychological here for a moment, and dive into a few concepts from psychology that I find kind of studying for a while.
There’s a thing called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, it’s a very popular therapy for people who are dealing with things like bipolar, that I have, as well as other mental illnesses, et cetera. The thing about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that it teaches you to observe your thoughts as opposed to reacting to your thoughts and thinking that your thoughts are you. When people are dealing with depression, they really have these kind of six things that kind of come up in their minds all the time, there’s a few more maybe as well.
There’s self-abstraction, which is drawing conclusions on the basis of just one of many elements of a situation. There’s minimization, where you’re downplaying the importance of a positive thought, emotion or event. This idea that you are useless, inadequate, a failure, even when good things happen. Personalization, this is my fault, attributing personal responsibility for events which aren’t under your control. A good example of that actually is when people who are superstitious think, “Hey, if I hadn’t worn those socks on that particular day, my sports team would’ve done even better.”
Or the arbitrary inference, which is drawing conclusions when there’s a little or no evidence. Magnification, which is making a mountain out of a molehill, and blowing things out of proportion. And overgeneralization, making sweeping conclusions based on a single event. We can dig into those more a little bit later on your own. But these three ideas, these ideas of you not being good enough over and over again is really causing a lot of problems in your life.
There are really kind of two voices [inaudible 00:15:32] in your head at any given time. As Daniel Tosh here says, “I have voices in my head, but they’re all speaking Spanish, and I have no idea what they are saying.” It’s really easy to think that the random thoughts that are going off in your head at any given time are kind of you. For me, I usually have some kind of song going off in my head, I have these thoughts that are coming up where I remember something that happened from 20 years ago, I have that incredibly critical mind, so I have critical voice in my head as well.
Let’s talk about the difference between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is the mind where you are actively thinking about something. The mind that is a very strong voice in your head, where you’re, say, doing something difficult. Say, if you are multiplying 14 by 27, doing math, rating something, something where you are consciously trying to make something happen. The conscious mind is the things you choose to think about.
The unconscious mind is that other part of your mind. The part that has thoughts kind of come up out of nowhere. Things that say like, “Nobody likes me, I’m a failure.” Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. Songs in your head. Whatever it is. The cool thing is, you can actually learn to observe your unconscious thoughts the way you would observe animals in nature without engaging with them. These thoughts are generated by your monkey mind, you can control your thinking by engaging your critical conscious mind. So, say for instance, that you are sitting at your desk at work, and you’re thinking about something that happened with your family, and you are having shame go through your head, where you, say, missed the soccer game, and that voice in your head is saying, “You are a bad mother, how dare you miss the soccer game? Your kid is going to be all messed up when they get older.” Et cetera.
That is your unconscious mind saying that. What you can do in that case is take a step back and say, “Hey, that is my unconscious mind speaking, not my conscious mind, the mind that is really me.” It’s a skill that can be developed over time. The idea, again, is not to try to block thoughts, and not to try to beat yourself up for having thoughts, but to be able to take a step back from those thoughts, when you need to, observe them, and realize that you don’t need to engage with them, and they are not automatically true. Just because a thought comes into your mind, does not in any way mean that it’s true.
Number six is to transform shame stories in your mind into guilt stories instead. And forgive yourself for what you did, instead of beating yourself up for what you are. Again, we talked about this before. The difference between guilt and shame. Shame is useless, and shame is toxic.
Now, really quickly I want to talk about this idea of free will versus free will disillusionment versus determinism. This can get a little bit chunky, and might not even be the right thing to talk about in this particular program, but I kind of want to get into it anyway. The brief version of this is that free will, as we tend to imagine it, science has kind of shown, does not exactly exist. This idea that you have overwhelming agency, or you can make choices at any given time, or you are the one who is responsible for everything you are doing, is not really true.
There have been scientific studies that have been done that show that oftentimes when we think we are making a decision, when we think that our conscious mind is making a decision, actually that mind is simply justifying what your unconscious mind has already done. One study in particular, they hooked people up to an FMRI machine, and they had them making a choice between, say, a red ball and a blue ball. They showed that actually the unconscious mind fired, and even the muscles in their hand started to move well before the conscious mind made a decision.
The key to this is that you didn’t choose to make the mistakes you made, which means you can forgive yourself. This actually was a really big concept for me, I have a a lot of things I have felt guilt and shame about in my life. But the idea here is really that because you did not choose the genes that you have, and because you did not choose the way that you have lived your life, the environment that you have been in, you did not really have free will about what you have done. Much like when we talk about the dog before, we talked about the dog who pissed on the carpet, right?
Now, if you had a dog who was just abused its entire puppyhood, basically, or it was told over and over again that was something wrong with it, “What is wrong with you?” Over and over again, or it was physically abused, would you shame that dog for later on having some psychological issues? Would you shame it for not having good self-esteem? Would you shame it for never learning to not piss on the carpet and to be anxious all the time? No, of course you wouldn’t. Because we are all being trained by our lives.
We are really mammals, and we are being trained our entire lives to react certain ways. You do not choose the unconscious thoughts that come into your head, you do not choose the emotions that you have. Emotions are chemically based. Anxiety is chemically based. Depression is often chemically based. Those chemicals that are in your brain, which you did not choose, are what is actually impacting every decision you make. I made many, many mistakes back when I was undiagnosed with the bipolar that I deal with, that I would never make now that I’m in a more stable place.
Now, personally, I was able to forgive myself for many of those things by realizing that, “Hey, you know what? It wasn’t really my choice to think that way and to act that way.” Even though you are not dealing with anything as severe as that, I hope the same thing applies to you. You did not choose the chemicals in your brain, you did not choose how intelligent you are, you did not choose anything about that, so you are not really responsible for the mistakes that you have made.
There’s a really cool concept, I love this concept, by a guy named Jonathan Haidt, and it’s called The Elephant and The Rider, it’s a way to illustrate the real difference between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, and how they interact. The idea is that the elephant is your impulsive mind, it’s your unconscious mind. It’s the mind that say, if you were an elephant, the cliché would be that elephant sees a mouse and it freaks out, because it’s an elephant, it can’t help it. It’d be the same mind that say, if we see a snake, or something that resembles a snake, that causes our blood to start pumping, our anxiety to go up, it triggers our fight-or-flight reflex because, traditionally, millions of years ago, a snake generally meant death.
The idea here is that the rider is your conscious, verbal thinking brain. The voice in your head that you control. The voice in your head that it’s much like the voice that I’m using to talk to you right now. That rider is the will power, it’s your will power essentially. It’s your ability to control yourself. The thing with the rider is, the rider is really small compared to the elephant. If you got on the back of an elephant and tried to make it do something, it’s only going to do that if it’s been trained to follow your instructions. It’s only going to do that kind of if it wants to.
The rider does not have the ability to really control you in the moment. It only has the ability to nudge forward in your life. Which means that when you’re in the moment, making a decision, it is not your conscious mind making that decision, it is your unconscious mind. Your conscious mind only has the ability to kind of hold on to the elephant, and hopefully make changes later. For instance, say that you find out that your boyfriend cheats on you. That would very, very quickly cause all sorts of emotions to overwhelm you, and you would, for instance, probably get very angry, you might attack him, you might insult him, et cetera. That is not your conscious mind doing those things. That is your unconscious mind reacting based on shame, based on things that happened to you when you were a child. It’s not “your fault.”
That doesn’t mean that you want to keep acting that way, but it means you want to learn how to forgive yourself for that, and how to use your conscious mind to start training your elephant to react in a different way. Like for instance, I talked about this briefly already, with mental illness. When I was undiagnosed, and unmedicated for my particular mental illness, I found myself doing things like yelling at people who were parking in front of my driveway, I was actually on several occasions out there screaming my head off, like a maniac, at people just for parking in front of my driveway, for the pizza place that’s next door.
I hurt people I loved in many ways. I was incredibly cold to them, I was incredibly narcissistic, and selfish. I lacked empathy and the ability to be there for people that I love. And I was very narcissistic, as I said. None of this was a choice. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me a meat computer with messed up chemicals, just like you. We are essentially meat computers with messed up chemicals.
What this all really means is that you can forgive yourself because it wasn’t your choice to mess up, but you still take responsibility for your actions, and alter your environment and train your elephant to behave better in the future. The reason that you have acted the way you have in the past, where you have acted irrationally, where you have panicked, where you have been mean to people, is not because there’s anything wrong with you, it’s because you have not trained your elephant yet. It’s because you have not created the situation where you could be your best self. It’s because you have not learned what I’ve been trying to teach you in this program. Mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.
Number seven, screw something up on purpose and marvel at how nobody hates you and the world didn’t end. This is kind of a fun experiment sometimes. It’s actually something they do sometimes for people who have OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, where they let them kind of have this situation where, “Hey, instead of touching that wall three times before you walk out the door, how about you don’t do that and see what happens?” Pick something minor to actually mess up. Be 15 minutes late for something, give a typo in something that you wrote, and see what happens. See how the world does not end. Maybe somebody notices it, maybe it makes somebody minorly angry, but it has not made the world end, and it has not made you into a horrible person.
Number eight, develop a growth mindset, and be kind to your inner eight-year-old girl. There’s a great book by a woman named Carol S. Dweck, PhD, called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, how we can learn to fulfill our potential in parenting, business, schools, and relationships. And it is a great book that I highly recommend, especially if you are a parent. The core idea of mindset is the difference between the growth mindset, and the fixed mindset. The fixed mindset, I think, is actually much more common in our world, especially with kids these days.
The idea behind the fixed mindset is that failure is the limit of my abilities. I’m either good at something or I’m not. My abilities are unchanging. I can either do it or I can’t. I don’t like to be challenged. My potential is pre-determined. When I’m frustrated I give up. Feedback and criticism are personal. And I stick to what I know. An example that Carol uses in the book is around math, for instance. Say, there is somebody, a little kid, who takes a math test, and gets a good grade on that test. Say, their parents say, “Wow, you’re really good at math.” Or gets a bad grade on a test, and says, “Hey, you’re not good at math.”
People in that mindset do not understand the idea of being able to change, or to get better at something. People with a growth mindset have an idea in their head that we can actually change, and get better at something. Failure is an opportunity to grow. I can learn to do anything I want. Challenges help me grow. My effort and attitude determine my abilities. Feedback is constructive. I’m inspired by the success of others. And I like to try new things.
The growth mindset means that you do not find a failure as a failure at all. You see it as a temporary block on the path to success. Say there is a kid who did a math test, and didn’t get a very good grade on it. If they have the growth mindset, and they’ve been trained the growth mindset, instead of saying, “I’m bad at math.” They would say for instance, “I need to study harder.” If they got a good grade on the test, a parent who understands the growth mindset would not say, “You’re good at math.” But would say, “Hey, Jimmy, you must have worked really hard.” Focusing on the idea that through effort you can become better, you can get in better shape, you can be smarter, you can actually raise your IQ with work.
The key with the growth mindset is you haven’t failed, you just haven’t succeeded yet. A great example of this, of course, is Super Mario Brothers, or a movie like Groundhog Day, or Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie, it’s kind of based on video games. The thing with Mario, on Super Mario Brothers, is you go forward in level, if you fall in a pit, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it just means that you have to use your next life to try again. If you lose all three of your lives, it just means that you have to go back to the beginning and try playing the game again. If you keep trying, and trying, and working, and working, eventually you will get through the level, eventually you will succeed.
This idea that you are not a failure, you just haven’t succeeded yet, if you can apply that in your mind, you will find yourself not only accomplishing more, and like getting more done, and getting better at things, but being a lot happier too.
Number nine, realize you get to make the relationship that works for you, not what your parents or society expects. That means you define what success is. It is so easy to fall into the trap of seeing these great, amazing relationships in movies, and on TV, they’re usually lies, by the way, and saying, “I need to have that relationship. Love and success only mean one thing.” For instance, my wife and I, one brief thing about us, that we decided really early in our relationship, is that we don’t like sleeping in the same bed. If we sleep in the same bed, we both don’t get much sleep, and we both kind of wake up miserable the next day. If you’re not doing something exactly the way that you think it’s supposed to be done, that doesn’t matter as long as you and your partner are actually happy.
So important, liking yourself, and creating a life outside of your husband or your boyfriend will help wake him up to the amazing woman he has and doesn’t want to lose. You want to get to the point you want him but don’t need him. Here’s your assignment. I want you to, each night, take five minutes to keep track of your wins for the day, no wiggle words. Then do the same for the man in your life. What did he do that made you happy? If you can’t find something, you aren’t thinking hard enough. Three, set a short to-do list for the next day. Pick one thing that isn’t actually important and get rid of it.
Four, practice saying no to one request a day. Doesn’t matter what it is. And five, realize you really are acceptable, that you’re not alone, and that everyone feels the same way you do. Also, please, see the tools and supplementary material below. Move on to the next slide deck, or in the next video, where we talk about respect and how to feed his masculinity. Thank you.
