Being attached to outcomes – results or reactions that are outside of your direct control – causes more suffering than just about anything else you’ll ever encounter.

Tragically, you’re doing this without needing to!

In this podcast, I explore the concept of having an emotional attachment (a hopeful expectation) to results that you prefer, and why this is both unnecessary and unhelpful when it comes to building self confidence.

We’ll explore how to live with integrity and pursue your goals without hoping that things will go “well” and being able to enjoy the process rather than depending on winning.

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Full transcript (unedited)

All right, and the recordings going, we are ready. Welcome along well, and anybody else who shows up live to letting go of outcomes, one of my favorite topics of all time. You know, I often think that integrity is is merely a daily battle with with neediness, and their neediness is essentially not your enemy as such, but your training tool for developing confidence. Your ability to develop confidence depends on your ability to win the battle with neediness, and before I even go into this on everyone to understand that, you know, neediness itself is not a bad thing. It’s what keeps you seeking food and shelter and all these things that keep you alive. The difficulty is neediness just doesn’t turn off after you’ve got your survival needs met. It just keeps going and attaching itself to stuff that you don’t actually need to survive, and quite often, stuff that you cannot control. So we’re going to look at that today, and we’re going to just close that up. We’re going to have a look at what it means to let go of outcomes, a term you’ve probably heard a lot of if you’ve been involved with brojo, and how this relates to confidence. We’re going to try and break this down, and I’m going to look at it as honestly as possible. I’m going to talk about why being attached to outcomes has benefits as well as weaknesses, and while letting go of outcomes, there is a cost to that as well. Some things will hurt when you do that. I’ll start with a quote. This is from Seneca, the stoic no person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have. I don’t want you to take this one too literally, because personally, I don’t believe it’s in your power to not want things, but I do think it is in your power to react to wanting things you don’t have in a way that’s helpful to you, rather than in a needy chasing kind of a way. But the stoics firmly believes that you always have everything you need to have a good life, no matter how much you actually have, that the poor person and the rich person have equal opportunity to enjoy their life. That’s a very strong stoic tenant, and that actually having a lot by other people’s standards does not guarantee any form of good life. That you can be miserable while being famous and rich and powerful, and we’ve seen plenty of evidence that. And you can be happy, if you want to use that word, while being a poor nobody, as long as you know how to live, and that’s what we’ll be looking at today. I want to start by talking about a big realization I had, because the letting go of outcomes has been one of the biggest things to occur to me in my life. This concept primarily because I spend most of my life very, very, very stuck in a pattern of chasing outcomes. It was like an endless race that I was in. So I used to chase all sorts of outcomes, like money. Wasn’t too big on money, but I definitely wanted more than I had approval was a huge one. I spent most of my time chasing approval, and sexual gratification was a part of the approval that I tried to take Chase. I had this kind of vague definition of success was kind of career based, but it was also a lifestyle idea that I was chasing a kind of fantasy of the future. Dan, who everyone looked up to, and even just positive thoughts and pleasurable emotions, I tried to chase things that would make positive thoughts happen, make pleasurable emotions happen. And then one day, I can’t remember exactly when this happened, it was some time I know I was working for the Department of Corrections at the time. And I think at the time, I’d become really stressed with kind of with working with criminal offenders who you want great outcomes for them, but they just don’t behave very well. You know, it’s really hard as a probation officer to be trying to help someone, and you do your very best, and then they just go fuck it and do whatever they want anyway. I came to realize that trying to control them was was really pointless. I could do my best, but it didn’t actually guarantee anything. My best was sometimes not good enough. And I had this realization first, it was about working with these guys and knowing that I couldn’t control. Call them. But then I started to notice the spread throughout my life, and I started to question it. I started to ask myself, Why? Why do I pursue things that I can’t control? Why am I so obsessed with pursuing things like I’m just gonna message come through there. I’ll come back to that in a second. Henry, cheers. You know, essentially, I came to the point there’s, there’s no reasonable explanation as to why I pursue things that I can’t control. I mean, it seems like the most reasonable thing in the world, like it seemed like a good idea to go for money and go for approval and try to get laid, try to be successful and try to feel good. But I don’t know. I didn’t. I couldn’t pinpoint why I thought that was a good idea. It’s a belief that I’d carry through my whole life without ever questioning, and it was very hard to question because I surrounded by people who also didn’t question it. But eventually I got down to this clear realization that I don’t know where I got this idea from, this idea that it’s worthwhile to pursue these things. Keyword there being worthwhile. One of the reasons I started to question this is because I actually started to get a lot of these things. I was killing it by my standards of the past, you know, and yet my quality of life, my sense of worthiness, was unchanged, and that’s what really made me start to question it. If these things are really worth pursuing, why don’t I feel much better about it? What’s going on there? It got even worse when I started meeting people who are really winners by society standards. I met people who are rich, I met people who are famous. I met people who are guys who are really good with women. I met people who are in positions of power, because I used to work with government officials. And I even met a few MPs and stuff. And when I looked at them carefully and got to know them carefully, I noticed there was a pattern, which was, they were still unfulfilled, they were still needy. And many of them, not all, but many of them, were lacking in the confidence. You know, there was a millionaire I knew, one of the richest guys in New Zealand, and he still drank himself to sleep every night. You know, there were politicians who were some of the most powerful people in the country, and yet they’re still worried about what everyone thought of them. And they were never satisfied. They were so ambitious. You know, I met guys who would take, like, three girls home every week, three different girls home, but it was never enough for them. I always wanted more. I was watching all this going that’s my future. If I do well at what I’m trying to do, I end up like that. It seems like I’m going to get more needy rather than less, and it’s neediness that bothers me the most. So one day, I realized that this idea of pursuing something that’s out of my control created a hole inside me. It created this kind of unfulfilled need. So one day, I simply decided to lower the bar. You know, I wanted to see what would happen if I only pursued things that I could entirely control, which led me to the most difficult question of all is, what is it that I can control? Because that list got smaller and smaller the more I looked at things and tried things, and at the end of this, we’ll get to what it is I figured out that I can control. But this is where I’m coming from. Here, if you’ve been pursuing outcomes your entire life. And if you’re a human in today’s world, you probably have been. You ask yourself, Is that working for you, that very basic question, the idea of pursuing all these things that you’re being told are good, to pursue money and approval, all these things that you can collect and collect and collect, and there’s never enough even trying to get good thoughts and get good emotions. Has that worked for you, that pursuit you know, are you enjoying it? Is it blissful days? Are you happy with yourself? Because most of the people who are honest with me when I dig into this, the answer is no, not yet. Or more likely, I’m briefly happy, and then I get needy again. It’s amazing how often I’ll be talking to a guy, especially when it comes to like, say, meeting women, and he’ll go out there, and he’ll start living with integrity, which we’ll talk about today, and he’s loving it until it works and some girl actually likes him, and then he gets needy again. So we get this thing where actually the winning destroys the love of the game, sort of thing. When you actually get what you want, he just instantly filled with neediness. Keep it to make it better. So we’re gonna be looking at it today, where the messages, how do you? Henry says, In your opinion, why the society sees see men as failures if they don’t have sex on a regular basis, or don’t have a sexual partner. I don’t know actually, given that the human race is significantly overpopulated, it seems unusual that we would commend someone for having a lot of sex, but I’d say, basically, hold on. I’m just gonna mute, yeah. I’d say my first guess is, essentially, it’s about this very outdated picture of masculinity, that masculinity equals viral. So the more sex you have, the more of a man you are. It’s a weird measurement, because anybody could pay for sex, for example, and have a lot of regular sex, but they wouldn’t be considered a winner. So the terms and conditions are very unusual and kind of contradictory. But in regards to your question, I think the more important question is, why do you care if society has this opinion? Because we can’t control society’s opinion. I mean, society isn’t even a thing. It’s just a bunch of individuals, but your perception that you’re seen as a failure if you don’t have sex on a regular basis is actually your perception of yourself. You agree with society standards, you might say. And what we’ll be talking about today is setting standards of your own, whereas if, even if everyone else thinks having regular sex is a success, you don’t have to agree with that. And what you’ll find as soon as you don’t agree with that, it stops being true. We’ll get to that later. But to answer your question, honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know why putting your penis inside of a lot of women is seen as some remarkable success. You know, maybe because it’s hard to do, but there’s plenty of things are hard to do that you don’t get rewarded for, like Plumbing. All right, let’s move on. Let’s start with some definitions, because I’m going to use the word outcomes a lot, and I want to make sure we all know what we’re talking about when I use this word, because it may have different meanings for each person. When I talk about outcomes, one of the main things I’m talking about is instant gratification. So outcomes are going to be a range of different things for each person. There’s some things that I’ll consider to be an outcome that you wouldn’t be interested in, and vice versa. What really matters is how the outcome makes you feel. So when I say outcomes, what I’m talking about is something that gives you instant gratification. It feels good immediately when you receive it. That’s all I mean by an outcome. You like it happening as soon as it happens. And now I’ve got some examples here. So there’s there’s outcomes that are measurable by others, the things that other people can see, money, sex, status, winning, competitive activities. This is when you’re successful by measure that is external. And then there’s internal outcomes, which are a bit more complicated, but it’s like you might consider the emotion of happiness to be an outcome, like you’ve won or you succeeded, if you’re feeling happy, even feeling of confidence, can be seen as a as an outcome. Pride in yourself can be seen as an outcome. The removal of pain often feels pleasurable, so that could be seen as an outcome, and a sense of validation, like you’re a good person in the eyes of others, a belief that that’s true. I’m just going to be muted there, and now you guys will be able to add to this. I want you to actually stop and think about what are outcomes for you, and if you can share them in the chat box, what you feel instantly gratified receiving. You know, for me, compliments was a big one. I used to get an instant wave of pleasure if someone complimented me and said I was good at something. I said they liked what I did, or said they liked me, especially, sex was a huge one for me. It was an interesting one because sex was also fraught with a lot of anxiety for me. So there’s lots of parts of sex that I didn’t physically enjoy, but afterwards, I. When I realized I just had sex, that I could tick a box that said I just got laid, then I’d get an instant gratification. You know, I remember when I first lost my virginity, I was smiling for like a week because I’d finally lost my virginity. The sex itself was like 30 seconds of confused chaos, but afterwards, the pride I felt and having no longer being a virgin, you know, I I call that an instant gratification. Money was one for me, but not so much having money because I just spend and I was crap with it. But like getting a pay rise, suddenly having an increase in money, and even to this day, that’s one that I have to be careful of. I get a big payday. I can become needy. What about you guys? What comes to mind when you think of the ones you’re attached to? Henry says making a girl laugh at your joke? Oh, how could I forget that one? You know, being funny was a huge one for me. I used to, it used to be, actually, my main one, that’s, that was my main drug was making people laugh. I was the funny guy, and I could, I could have people rolling around in tears, and I’d just be soaking it up, just bathing in this feeling of pride and validation. So once you get to, you know, either well on this call or just in the next few weeks. Notice what it is that you get an instant high from an instant feeling of gratification. And notice how it can be doubled internally, whereas you can feel happy and then feel gratified that you’re happy you know, or feel you know, avoidance of pain, like you walk away from something that’s difficult, like going to the gym or asking someone out, and you feel that relief, and you consider that a win, you know, but validation is a big one as well. So if those are outcomes, what does it mean to be attached to outcomes? What is neediness? Well, I’ve thrown in a few things here to help us understand neediness, because neediness is complicated. It’s not just a basic feeling. There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? But neediness of feeling that kind of aching, gnawing urge to go and get something. What is that attachment outcomes is where the success and failure that measurement is determined by the outcome, by the instant gratification. So if I tell a joke, that joke is a success if people laugh and it’s a failure if they don’t, the joke itself is kind of irrelevant. It’s all about whether or not someone laughs If I do a good job. It only matters if I get paid well for it or complimented for it. If I do a good job and nobody liked it, it’s considered a failure. So an attachment outcomes is where the outcome determines success. If the outcome is what you hoped you would get, you consider yourself successful. And if it’s not, you consider yourself a failure, no matter how you got that outcome. Okay? You your enjoyment of life is determined by outcomes. So if you feel bad about yourself because no one’s laughing at your jokes, or you feel bad about yourself because you don’t have much money, or you feel bad about yourself because you don’t look particularly good, and then you feel good about yourself. Of all those things change. That means your enjoyment of life is determined by outcomes, where the way you behave, there’s, you know, there’s no real joy in how you behave. It’s all about what it gets you. That’s an attachment to outcomes. And already you might be starting to get a sense of how uncontrollable attachment to outcomes is, how uncontrollable your life and enjoyment of life is if you’re attached to outcomes, you know. And this is why attachment to outcomes and integrity don’t work very well together at all. The process is undermined by failure. So even if you did something that’s aligned with your integrity. You know, if you did the right thing by your standards, if you’re attached to outcomes and you don’t succeed to get the outcome, you’ll write it off. You might have done the right thing, but you won’t care, because you didn’t get what you wanted. And it goes the other way too. You might do something that’s really against your values, something that’s, you know, by your own standards, just awful, but it worked, and you feel validated. And so you can see how people can get into really harmful, nasty behavior that they later feel a lot of remorse about. I mean, I worked with criminal offenders for a long time. There’s a group that’s a. Attached outcomes to the extreme. You know, when you meet a guy who’s willing to beat up an elderly lady to take her money, you might think, Oh, he’s just a psychopath. He doesn’t feel a thing. But the truth is, most of them do feel it. Most of the guys I worked with, they had a lot of guilt. You know, they they were eaten alive by the actions that they took. They really were not proud of themselves. There’s a lot of low, low, low self worth in the criminal world. Very few of them are actually unfeeling psychopaths. Most of them are just guys like us who really lost their way, and we can really attach. I mean, drug addicts are such a perfect example of someone attached to outcomes. All they care about is feeling high, they will destroy their family. They’ll destroy their whole life. They’ll lose all their friends. They’ll rob and steal and even kill just to get high. As long as they get high, they consider themselves to be on track, you know? And that’s that’s what attachment outcomes is. You don’t care who you crush to get what you want. I was like that when I did my pickup artist stuff, a manipulate woman, I would break hearts, I’d leave people on didn’t matter, as long as it got me laid. But of course, this guilt about living this way would build up over time, and that’s what eventually got me to change, was I felt too bad about what I was doing to people. So we see in that last point, integrity is compromised if the outcome is threatened by it. So you get to this point if you’re attached outcomes, and you get to this crossroads where you have to choose between integrity, living by your values, being honest, or getting the outcome. You’ll choose getting the outcome, you’ll sacrifice integrity. You’ll choose it over you. You know you’ll lie to get money or to get sex. You know you’ll you’ll hurt someone to get validation, like you make a joke about someone at their expense just to get a laugh. These things that you’re actually not proud of, these things that you would hate if someone else did it to you. Know it’s against your values, but when you’re attached to outcomes, when you’re really needy, you’ll often make the choice of the outcome. You’ll prioritize the outcome over your integrity. And this is why I think letting go of outcomes is so important, because in your chase for outcomes, you lose yourself. You lose what you stand for. You lose your ethical guidelines. You lose who you are. Become an identity that’s pursuing an outcome rather than the real you, whatever that might be, one of the reasons you’re probably here or listening to this is because losing who you are doesn’t feel very good. Works pretty well for psychopaths, but most other people suffer. Okay, accidentally the two slides, but yeah, the only thing we’re adding to this is the intention is to get the outcomes. Primary intention is to feel good now. So you might be trying to also live by your values, but outcome is the primary it wins. So what’s the harm in this? We’ll look at the pleasures of it too. We’ll look at what’s good and bad of both attachment outcomes and letting go of them. Addiction cycles, being attached to an outcome, especially attached to the good feeling that the outcome gives you briefly, is the beginning of an addiction in simple terms. We’re talking about releases of dopamine and other neurochemicals that give you a brief, unsustained good feeling. And then when that good feeling goes away, what’s called the reuptake and the neurochemicals are taken back by the brain, the good feeling goes away and you actually feel worse. And when it comes to alcohol, this is called a hangover, there’s a kind of pain period after the good feeling, because the good feelings been taken away, and it’s in that period that people often try to get the good feeling back and an addiction starts. For example, maybe you’ve been sexless for a long time, you know, and it’s kind of a painful experience, but no big deal. But then you get laid and it feels awesome, but then two days later, you’re feeling even worse than before you got laid. You can’t figure out why, so you try to get laid again. That’s how an addiction begins. You start pursuing an outcome with a single minded kind of blindness, until it becomes an automatic pattern, until it becomes a neuro pathway that’s very hard to get off once it gets started. So we just go back someone in the chat box here. What if your outcome is more of an. Internal achievement, is that a good thing? That’s a question from Henry. What we’d say here is they got the idea of good thing and bad thing. We’re just going to look at whether or not it’s helpful or harmful. And secondly, when we talk about internal achievement, we’re going to define that later today, there’s a difference between internal achievement of, say, just feeling happy and feeling good, which is what most people get confused by. I made someone laugh that made me feel good. Therefore it must be a good thing to do. We’re going to look more at internal achievement being an ability to enjoy the process of something, even if the outcome doesn’t go the way you want, if you enjoy that, then you’re in control. But we’ll get to that later. So hold that question in your mind, Henry, because we’ll try and answer that one later. So more about the harm of attachment outcomes. This one can speak directly to you guys. Neediness is repulsive. It’s amazing how many guys are trying really, really hard to do well socially, and it doesn’t work. Why? Because you’re trying really, really hard to do well. People can feel that. You know it when someone comes up to talk to you and they’re trying to get something from you, you can feel it most of the time, can’t you unless you’re naive, you know they’re trying to get something you don’t know how you know it. It’s just a sense and immediately makes you defensive and want to get away from the person. Well, if you’re desperate to get laid, that’s how you make everyone feel, and then that’s why your dating life isn’t working out well for you, but it goes beyond just sex. When we look for friends, we don’t want someone who’s going to drag us down, who’s going to suck value from us, so we’re not going to spend much time with someone where we can feel that they’re needy for our approval and needy for our validation. And I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that you will one day be able to turn neediness off. You won’t, but you can learn to deal with it in a way that it doesn’t repulse people. We’ll talk more about that soon. But essentially, your attachment to outcomes. The metaphor I often use is chasing soap in the bath. If you guys have ever had had a bath and you got a block of soap, and it drops in the bath. As you try to grab it, it like squirts away from you. The harder you try to grab the soap, the less likely you are to catch it. That’s what neediness is like. The harder you go for an outcome, the more it seems to run away from you, the faster you chase the faster it runs. And so often the case, the harder you try to get something, the harder it is to get it. Neediness is like that, and it translates in so many different things. If I’m needy for a promotion at work, I come across as annoying and whiny and begging, and I’m more likely to lose the promotion to someone who’s confident and cool headed. It seems like the promotion runs away from me, even though I’m the one in the office going for it the hardest. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes you’re faster than the thing you’re chasing, and you do catch it, but even as soon as you catch it, the next thing comes up and you’re needy about that, and that thing’s a bit faster, eventually it’ll run to you. Covert contracts. This is specific to social world. When you needy, you don’t give unconditionally, especially love. It always comes with a price. People become a means to an end for you, rather than the person himself or herself being a pleasure. It’s what they can give you that’s pleasurable. They become like a vehicle that delivers an outcome to you, which means you don’t really have a connection with them. You’re just using them to get outcomes. Took me a while to really face up to this with my old social life, is that I was using people as laughing heads. You know, I was using them as a way to like make I’d make them laugh, so it made me feel good. I was using them to get laughter. It’s not a friendship that’s not a connection, and I never told them this, so it was all covert. Everything I did was conditional, but I didn’t tell you what was conditional. You didn’t know that I was using you, and I wondered why I felt so isolated. Well, it’s pretty hard to feel connected to something you’re using. It’s hard to feel connected to a source of outcomes. It’s easy to feel connected to a person, which we’ll talk about later. One of the other harms is the pressure to succeed actually negatively affects your performance. This lines up with the idea that neediness is repulsive. The more pressure you put on yourself, the worse you perform. There’s been some I’ll try and cite it later on. There’s been a great few studies lately on how much better people perform when they’re having fun. On, it’s been the longest. For the longest time, there’s been this huge assumption that if you if you’re stressed and pressured, if you’re going hard and trying hard and serious, that you perform better. But you know, very recent studies have shown that this is probably untrue, that actually enjoying something and really getting into it just for doing it as well creates high performance. And this is true of like high performance, athletes, musicians, even business owners. The ones who love the work more than they love the outcomes are the ones who do better at it, you know. So if you’re pressuring yourself to succeed. You’re pressuring yourself to get an outcome. You’re actually less likely to get the outcome than if you weren’t trying to get it and were trying to do something else. In my own life, the way I saw this was about trying to get a girlfriend. The harder I tried to get a girlfriend, the more single I was when I finally started just enjoying connecting with people and and didn’t care about being single. Suddenly I had multiple girls to choose from as a girlfriend. It’s like I’d been pushing them away my whole life without realizing it. As soon as I stopped pushing they all flowed in. I’ve seen similar things happen with money and even health. I stopped trying to get something and start working putting my F and energy towards something else. The thing I was trying to get in the first place comes to me one of the huge ones. And I think the the main, the main point that changed my mind around this was that the enjoyment of the process is ruined by the end result. And what I mean by this is, even if you’re doing really well at something, there’s a failure going to happen. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. At some point you will fail. The thing will end. Whatever you know, great sex has to come to an end. At some point. Great relationships have to come to an end at some point. Great jobs, you’re going to fail at some point. And what happens is, whatever you enjoyed about that gets ruined by the failure. Have you guys noticed that Tobias, called the heuristic availability, essentially, we remember things more clearly the more emotional they are, and more recent they are, the easier something is to remember, the more weight we give it. So if I’ve been in an amazing marriage for 20 years, and then I have a rough divorce for six months, it’s not the marriage I remember. It’s the divorce. And actually, I actually will measure the relationship based on the divorce, rather than the 20 years of good times, and this is what attachment outcomes does to you, it’s how it ends that matters. Even if it was good for a long time, if it bad at the end, all you know is that it was bad when you’re not attached outcomes, as we’ll talk about later, then something ending just ends. It doesn’t ruin it for you. Still treasure the memories, but your brain is actually wired when you’re attached outcomes to destroy good memories or to hide them behind the most recent and painful ones. And you guys will notice, as I talk to like nice guys and stuff with my coaching all the time, when they look back over their life, all they can remember is the point where the good things ended. They have very poor memories about what they did well and what they enjoyed. The biggest problem with attachment outcomes in terms of confidence is that your self worth is in the hands of uncontrollable events and other people’s opinions. Basically, other people get to decide whether or not you have confidence. And I think that’s argument alone against attachment outcomes. If some this was, I mean, you know what this I’m going to call this one as being the main point for me when I first started my self development journey. I’ve told you this many times before, the question I asked myself is, how could I be confident if there was no one else in the world, no one to give me approval, no one to love me, no one to validate me, how could I love myself? That was the question I sought to answer, and it was based on what we’re talking about. I realized I was so attached to other people’s opinions, other people approval, that my confidence was in their hands. They got to decide every day if I felt good about myself. Just by reacting to me. All they had to do to destroy me was give me a bad reaction, and I didn’t like that. I felt very powerless. It’s like any dickhead can come up and ruin my day. That doesn’t seem like a good way to be living. I seem very fragile and you’ll you’ll have this too. Maybe your bank account gets to decide if you’re having a good day or not. You know, maybe the amount of respect you get at work decides whether or not you have a good day. Don’t you wish that that didn’t get to decide? That? Wouldn’t it be better to develop a system where no one else gets to decide? How much confidence you have, but when you’re attached to outcomes, you’re giving the confidence to the outcomes. You’re giving it to money, you’re giving it to sex, you’re giving it to approval, giving it to power and status. You might even give it to your own emotions, and say, All right, emotions, you get to decide if I like myself or not. Anxiety. Guess I don’t like myself today. It’s not an awesome system. Is it? The real addictive problem with attachment outcomes is there’s never enough that good feelings don’t last. There’s always a better outcome waiting over the next horizon. No matter how great it was to get laid. There’s always more sex waiting for you that you should now pursue. No matter how much money you have, you’ll never have all the money. There’s still more money you could have. There’s still bigger things you could buy. There’s still a better lifestyle you could earn, no matter how much you get promoted, even if your CEO, there’s still the size of the company could get better. There’s still the Ranger. Your power could get more. And the trouble with attachment to outcomes is it doesn’t turn off once you reach the goal. It just resets the goal. You’ll have noticed this. There’ll be things you have in your life now that you once thought of were a dream. You know, I remember being like a teenager and going, God, I wish I could drive. I just want the freedom of being able to drive. Do you think I appreciate driving now? Fuck no, it didn’t last, right? I mean, when I was a virgin, I was so important to get laid. Do you think getting laid once put an end to that? Fuck no, I made it worse. You know, I after my first girlfriend, I went for about three and a half years without having sex because of my neediness, and I often wished I’d never had sex, because then I wouldn’t have known what I was missing out on. I was more hungry for just because I knew what it was like to once hold on to it. But no matter what I got, there was always a better. There was always more. Quite often, you’ll notice your brain does this to you get something, and your brain straight away ruins it by going, I could have been better. Could have been this could have been there. Should have been this should have been there, even though it was the goal that you had, you know. And in the end, it’s all meaningless. You’re just on a treadmill chasing a carrot that’s in front of you just out of reach. Every now and then you get to have a bite of the carrot, but then you’re back into the chase. Until what? Until you die? What’s the point of that to chase until you die? I know your brain is telling you, hey, once I get the outcome, that neediness will go away, but evidence will tell you otherwise, every outcome you’ve ever got has not done shit for your neediness. Most of the time, it just aggravates it after a brief high. So once you notice this is chasing better outcomes all the time. Has it ever worked for you? It’s a shorter list, but I wanted to give some credit. What are the benefits of being attached to outcomes? I don’t want to pretend like I don’t want to be too biased here. Well, it gets you high. It’s good to feel high. I’m not saying it’s good for your general life, but it’s good in the moment. I say dopamine high. There’s actually hundreds of neurochemicals, and it gets pretty complicated, but hormones and other chemicals get released when you get an instant gratification and it feels nice, and there’s no necessary right or wrong in this, but that’s one of the benefits. So you get a lot of highs. You know, one of the things that’s come into my life, to be honest, with letting go of our outcomes, is I don’t get those highs as often anymore. It’s rare for me to get, like, a thrilling sense of validation or or kind of that high you get when you win and get something. I don’t have that much in my life anymore. My life used to be filled with that in between periods of misery. And now I’ve got none of the misery and none of the highs. I’ve found a sort of different plane to live on with exceptions, of course, nothing’s perfect approval from society. You’re surrounded by people who think attachment to outcomes is a good idea, and so when you actively pursue it, they’ll pat you on the back, don’t they? When you say, I’m trying really hard in my career, people say, good, good. You should be you tell your mates that you got laid. They’re like, Yes, excellent. That’s exactly what you should be doing with your life. With your life. You know, you show people how much money you’ve got, or show that you got the promotion you’re more powerful now, or show people that you’ve finally got a six pack of ABS, they’re going to pat you on the back and say, good boy, that’s what you should be doing, because they’re all doing it too. Some of them will even envy you as a form. Of approval. I say I wish I was like, you or fuck you for being so good at stuff. And you’ll be like, Yes, I’m on track. I’m a good boy. And that’s in itself an outcome, isn’t it, for some of us, we chase the other outcomes, mainly to get this one. So the rest of the world will say, yes, you’re doing the right thing, good boy. I question, come on. Henry asks jealousy result of attachment to outcome. Short answer, my opinion, yes, jealousy is a threatened feeling that now comes going to be taken away. I don’t think it’s possible to experience jealousy unless you want to keep something that’s just my theory on it. There’s some great videos on YouTube about something called retroactive jealousy. It’s worth having a look at, specifically about jealousy, about the past and things like that. But your jealousy, it’s very hard to feel jealous when you don’t have any attachment to outcomes. Jealousy is a natural human emotion, and while I go on about this, it’s important for me to note that becoming completely unattached from outcomes permanently is not possible. We’ll talk more about this later. This isn’t leading up to a point where you should not care or want anything. You won’t be able to get there. It’s too inhumane. But Jealousy is a sign. It’s a light on your dashboard saying hey, you’re attached to an outcome. Here it’s letting you know about it. What you do about that? Information is up to you, but most people follow jealousy with neediness. You know, they’ve become suspicious, paranoid, clingy to try and satisfy that jealousy, feeling whereas people who are unattached to outcomes will realize that the needy in that moment and share that neediness and let it go, let go of control, which we’ll talk about later. More benefits to attachment outcomes, sense of security and accumulating things. People attached outcomes tend to collect. They collect money in their bank account. They collect notches on the bedpost. They collect stuff. People attached outcomes tend to be hoarders of different kinds, because it’s not just keep getting the outcome in the first place. It’s keeping it. You might keep a friend around who’s not a particularly good fit, but they always laugh for your jokes, and it gives you a sense of security to know you’ve got this friend who will always laugh. It gives you a sense of security that you’ve always got their money in. Got that money in your bank account and so on. And maybe this is at the heart of it all. Attachment to outcomes is about fear, about trying to create a sense of security that you’re not going to be harmed, that you’re protected by a collection of of of highs. Attachment outcomes can mean relief from pain and suffering in brief ways. You know, it’s it’s harder for me to deal with stress now that I don’t take drugs. Back when I was taking drugs every time I got stressed, I could just smoke some weed or get drunk or whatever. Now I have to actually go through pain and suffering. I can’t just delay it. Of course, it’s an illusion that you actually get full relief, because you’re just delaying it for another day and accumulating it. But it was easier back in the day for me to smoke some weed and forget my troubles, whereas now I have to face my troubles and deal with them. That is harder, definitely, and you can have a sense of control and power, at least when you’re succeeding when you’re attached to outcomes. So if you’re good at getting the outcomes you’re attached to, you can create this kind of false confidence. And I want to talk about this a little bit, because a lot of the times you worship and admire people because they’re good at getting the outcomes that you want to get, and they appear to be very confident. For the longest time, I believed that this was a thing too. I was like, well, as long as I get as good as they are at getting outcomes, then I will feel a constant sense of confidence. You know, if I am the rich guy who all the women love, who’s powerful and listened to and respected and looks great. As long as I keep that up, I should feel good, right? The problem is that is twofold as one is most of those people are faking how good they actually feel because they want to believe that getting all the outcomes all the time is everything that’s cracked up to be. And even if they aren’t, they’re still dependent on the outcomes, and it’s only a matter of time before the outcomes are taken away. You know, you look at some of the greatest celebrities who have just fallen from grace. You know, they had all the fame and the wealth and the power, and then they just kind of lost it, like. Macaulay Culkin right home alone, that guy was killing it, and then he just couldn’t get any more high, so he went to heroin, and then, boom, he’s lost everything. Now he’s a fucking mess. You think of people like Robin Williams and other people who they have everything on paper, and yet they still commit suicide. So the idea that being good at keeping the outcomes and getting them will somehow last as an illusion. The only people who really genuinely feel satisfied by being good at things all the time keeping the outcomes are probably psychopaths, because they don’t have sense of meaning and connection. They don’t have that part of the brain. They live in their highs, you know, for them, that is fully satisfying. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as I often emphasize, I don’t think there’s anything wrong being psychopathic, as long as you’re not like skinning people and collecting their toes or whatever. But you can’t have a meaningful, deep connection if you’re psychopathic, and becoming attached to outcomes can actually create a false sense of psychopathy, like I experienced when I was doing pickup. I started to really objectify women, where I really didn’t care how they felt anymore. I lost my empathy. I was so attached to just getting their laughter and their vaginas that they just became a source of laughter and vagina. To me, you know, they weren’t people anymore. I trained myself out of feeling for them. I remember this was one girl, like I was just so obsessed with having sex with her that eventually I did it. And it turns out she had, like, a huge crush on me. But to me, she was just, you know, I’d already, I had already fucked her. So, you know, all feelings or interest in her died immediately, and she went to, like, two or three weeks of torment as I ghosted her and avoided her. The text just got even longer and just full of heartbreak. And I just remember reading them going, I should feel something about this. I didn’t. I just felt awkward and didn’t want to see you later on, when I reviewed that, I had so much guilt, I’m like, How can I just destroy a person just so I could put my penis inside them? That’s that’s not the guy I want to be. But because I’ve been so attached outcomes for so long, I trained myself to stop caring about people and just to start seeing them as a source of outcomes for me, and that’s why you can get quite controlling and manipulative. You can let your integrity go because people stop mattering to you. So that was probably a pretty biased view of the benefits of attachment outcomes. So what does it mean to let go of outcomes? What does it mean to it mean to be unattached? We’ve looked at what being attached means. Let’s look at the opposite. Well, remember being attached, the primary intention is to get the outcome. Well, being unattached means that the primary intention is the process and the integrity. It’s how you went for the outcome, not the outcome itself that matters. Results become like a icing on the cake. If something also goes well, it’s like, Yeah, lucky me. But if it doesn’t, as long as you lived with integrity doesn’t matter. You know, if I’m honest and courageous and vulnerable on a date, the girl likes me at the end of it, that’s awesome. But if she doesn’t, it’s okay. It’s I didn’t need that for it to be a rewarding experience. So when I say being unattached, it doesn’t mean you don’t care about outcomes at all. It means you care about process and integrity more than you care about outcomes. They said the primary intention is process is the integrity? Is you living by your values, whereas being attached outcomes, you living by your values, is more like the icing on the cake. If you can be done, you will, but if you need to sacrifice it to get the outcome, then you will do he says, You gave her a lesson to let go. Suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Just someone needs to mute there. Yeah, sometimes I used to tell myself, Oh, at least I taught her a lesson or whatever. But it didn’t really take the sting out of it wasn’t mean to be unattached. There is no success or failure in being near going outcomes. There’s just experience. You know you either lived by your values or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, it’s just something to learn from. And if you did, then it feels great. So the learned or you feel good about yourself. You kind of can’t lose in that situation. There’s no winning or losing. There’s just experience, whereas being attached outcomes, it’ll. Depends on whether or not you go or you’re going for eventually, what happens after you practice living in this way for some time properly, your enjoyment of life becomes determined by the effort and your intentions, by what you tried to do and why you tried to do it. If that’s on point with your values, and you feel rewarded no matter how the outcome goes. And you know, as opposed to being attached to outcomes where your effort and your intentions are irrelevant, it’s really down to whether or not you won. Now this is this can go. You know, when I talked about attachment outcomes, I said basically, your integrity gets no credit if you didn’t get the outcome. Well, when you’re letting go, outcomes get undermined by intention and effort. So if you can, so with you’ll notice, like, when you, when you become a, you know, we’ll say attached to integrity, rather than attached outcomes. You’ll you’ll not enjoy your win if you didn’t, if you lost integrity to get it. Like, if I lie and someone has sex with me, and I’m trying to live with integrity, I’ll feel bad about that sex, you know, which, interestingly enough, happened anyway, even when it was attachment, attached outcomes. It just happened later on. But these days, if I get what I want, but I had to sacrifice my values to do it, I feel bad about it instantly, and I often try to correct it. There’s no enjoyment in the win. However, the upside is you can enjoy a loss if you maintained integrity. You know somebody might reject you, but you feel good about yourself because what you’re doing was something you’re proud of. You might go for the promotion over and over again and not get it, but you’re proud of yourself for your determination, your unstoppableness. And this isn’t black and white. Of course, you can have disappointment and upset about losing the outcome, but it won’t last like it does. When you’re attached to outcomes, you’ll be able to quickly come back to, hey, at least I did the right thing. We’ve been able to see this with David Greer. You know, he’s been working on his career lately, and he did a post recently. We’ve sort of noted that he’s done repeated attempts and keeps getting knocked back. And it did hurt, course, but then afterwards, he looks at how he did and he’s proud of what he did. And so the end result is that he’s proud of himself, right? It’s a delayed gratification, not an instant one, so many, yeah? So that’s what it means to be unattached. Is essentially that integrity first outcome, second doesn’t mean there is no outcomes and no interest in them. It’s just they are in second place. They are sacrificed for integrity. Let’s be fair. Let’s have a look at what’s the harm of letting go of outcomes. What’s the harm of being unattached? Well, when you’re attached outcomes, everyone pats you on the back for being a chaser. When you’re not, you’re going to get a lot of shit from people when you start telling people that you know money is of less interest to you and you didn’t get laid on the date, but it didn’t matter, because you had a great connection and so on. When you start talking in this way, people are going to see you as kind of not fitting in. At least some people will, hopefully people on brojo won’t, but some people will you’re surrounded by people who have really been conditioned and programmed to chase outcomes, so when you stop doing it, it’s going to be uncomfortable for them. So you’ll be seen as a bit of a rebel or weird, you know. But you can always tell them to go fuck themselves No, but it’s important to point out, like when I first wanted to start my coaching business, having no business skills, and it didn’t go well. It’s not like I lost friends, but they always had negative things to say about it. You know, it made them uncomfortable that I was doing this thing, that I wasn’t playing the game, that I was sacrificing a great paycheck to become dirt poor, just so I could do what I loved. You know, they really didn’t like that. They kept trying to advise me against it. Got really annoying. Now, yeah, it didn’t harm them at all. There was no ill effects for them and me being a coach. It just meant maybe they had to, you know, it’s harder for me to buy a round of beers or whatever. But that wasn’t what bothered them. What bothered them was that I wasn’t on plan anymore. I wasn’t doing what they did. They didn’t like that. Being unattached means you have to deal with difficult emotions in the short term. You can’t just get rid of them with a bit of Facebook or drugs or making someone laugh. You have to deal with stress and anxiety and confusion and frustration, you have to work through them properly and learn what caused them and deal with the problem. It’s easier in the long term, because you could become much more emotionally resilient. You know, I became very emotionally fragile during my time at being attached to outcomes. But. Because I was just like highs and lows like a roller coaster, because I never actually learned how to deal with emotions properly. I was just avoiding all the uncomfortable ones all the time, and no experience. If you have to work through difficult emotions without guidance or without crutches, without being able to just get an instant high, it hurts at first, but in the long term, you become anti fragile. You become somebody who is not destroyed by motion or owned by the other harms is less instant wins. You’ve got to delay gratification. You know, the good times come later. You have to earn them. You don’t just get to push a button. And you know, you go from like just quickly making someone laugh to over a long period of time, developing a quality social circle that feels great and you never have to make them laugh. But that takes longer. There’s more pain in the build up to that, and the wind comes much later. So there’s a chat box. Next is audio drop. Okay, no worries, Nicole, hopefully the recording will catch up. There’s more confrontation deliberate pain, as I call it confusion. There’s more times where you choose to be pain, be in pain when you let go of outcomes. You know, let go of outcomes means, often to have a confrontation or a conflict with somebody, to have an uncomfortable conversation, to rock the boat. It might mean, you know, if I want to let go of the instant gratification that comes from just sitting on the couch smoking weed, I might have to go to the gym, you know, and have the pain of a workout. I had to choose that pain. That pain wouldn’t have happened to me if I didn’t choose it. When I let go of outcomes, I’m going to choose pain quite often instead of running away from it and stress, confusion, frustration, this will happen probably more frequently for me, because I’ll be pushing myself to live with integrity, which creates all these new, unique situations for me to deal with. When you’re attached outcomes, you just go on autopilot. You just set the goal, try to get the outcome, and then you just follow that goal. When you’re living by values, there’s nothing to follow as no autopilot. You got to make an effort all the time. You have to choose here and now what’s the right thing to do here and now, of course, you become more skilled and better at this over time, but you don’t have, like, a clear reason, a clear thing to chase, a simple plan every time, what it means to live by your values is different every second of the day, you have to learn how to adjust and adapt. You have to be focused and conscious present, and it’s harder to do than just okay, I’m gonna try and get laid now turn off my consciousness and just follow the plan. Right? Think about how many people in their jobs go to work every day without real consciousness. They’re just going there, following the script. Because one time, ages ago, they said a goal to get money or to keep a job or whatever attachment, and they’re never really present at work. They’re just following the script, waiting for the day to end, or when you’re unattached outcomes. Each day of work matters. Each day might be your last. Any day you might turn up to and go, You know what? This place doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m out. The goals can change at any point. The real kind of harm in letting go of outcomes is what you really letting go of is control. You’re giving up and going with the flow here. You’re letting life just be instead of trying to force it control it. And it’s terrifying. You know, it feels more controlling to try and swim up river. It feels like you’re doing something more productive than if you just lie on your back and just let back and just let the river take you somewhere. But being letting go of outcomes is about that process of lying on your back every time you notice yourself struggling upstream, but it will feel like you’re losing control. You’re gonna let other people react to you however they want. You’re gonna let your passion decide your career. You don’t know where that’s going to take. You might lose you some money. You know you can let your guilt push you into exercise and eating healthy. You don’t know where that’s going to take. You just giving up control to your integrity. You’re letting your values decide how to act, and then the rest of the world just do what it wants. Can be scary. Henry says people might see you as a weird person. Absolutely kills your. Go, yeah, like I said in the sort of the first point, you won’t fit in well, but you’ll also, especially as you make the switch, if you’ve been someone who’s mostly attached to outcomes, and you switch to being mostly letting go of them, people are going to react to this change. They’re going to say that you’re different. They’re going to be confused and maybe even frustrated by your behavior. You know, if everyone’s talking about how well they’re doing with their jobs, and they come to you and you say, I don’t care about money, thinking about what, that’s weird. It’s gonna make them uncomfortable. But I should point out and long term, this will help you. This will help you polarize people when you end up being surrounded by people who are on board with letting go of outcomes. But I won’t lie, I think they’re quite rare. It’s hard to find people like that, but they’re out there for one of the reasons we started, bro, Joe. Now let’s get to the point that I’m most biased about the benefits to letting go of outcomes, the benefits to being unattached, unless it’s not already clear, confidence and quality of life is now completely controllable. No one can hurt you, nothing else can hurt you. Now that’s not 100% true. Of course, you’ll you’ll never be completely controllable, but as much as a human can control their own quality of life, this is the way to do it. I think, really importantly, a point that we don’t talk about enough is that you now become capable of unconditional love, capable of connecting with something like a passion, hobby or whatever, or someone without them having to give you any outcomes without any conditions. It’s a different kind of love, one that I’ve only learned how to experience in recent years. I’d often considered myself to love or be in love with things in the past, but only recently have I known what that’s like without conditions. I had moments of it. Like I used to love playing music, and there’d be times where just playing the music itself was enjoyable, and that was, like, often some of the best time in my life. But even then, that was sort of based on the idea of it would contribute to the outcome of me being seen as a guy who’s in a band, and that’s cool, you know, whereas, just like just yesterday, I started doing some drawings and cartoons, because I’ve always wondered if I’d enjoy that, and I got lost in it for like an hour, fully enjoyed it. And I probably never show those cartoons to anyone. They’re not going to go anywhere, probably I just like the drawing. So you become you become capable of loving something fully without barriers and limits, which is huge for relationships. I can’t even describe what it’s like to be in an unconditional relationship where you’re allowed to totally be yourself, and they are too. They don’t have to provide you with anything, and you still love them anyway. Huge one is if you’re someone I’ve put here no neediness, but if you’re someone who can manage your own neediness and doesn’t need outcomes to manage it, you become infinitely more attractive as a sexual partner, as a friend, as a work colleague, everything somebody who’s got their shit sorted is so much better to be around than somebody who’s trying to take value from you. You become that person. A lot of people think of themselves as unattractive, but what they don’t realize is they’re simply needy. I mean, we’ve got a population of 7 billion people, obviously like each other, right? And the standards aren’t that fucking high. I remember I used to go to prison to visit guys, and I’d say them meeting with their girlfriends, and they were quality. I see this like serial rapist and the Mongrel Mob with this girl who’s not only beautiful, but when I met her and talked to her, she’s intelligent and witty and she’s got her life sorted, I’ll just be like, How the fuck did that happen? Well, one of the reasons this happened is because that psycho is also non needy. I’m not saying you should be psychopathic, but it’s one of the reasons psychopathics, psychopathic people can be quite attractive, is because they know how to turn off neediness. So when you can, when you can learn to take care of your own needs, which is a much more accurate way of putting it than saying not be needy, then you’re not pushing people away, and once you stop pushing people away, they have a chance of liking you, and more people like you than you could possibly imagine. A huge one is you can actually enjoy life without needing to succeed. You won’t. You won’t need outcomes to for life to be enjoyable. You can go a whole day without winning and still feel like a good person. You can tell the joke that no one laughs at, but it’s still funny for you. You know, you can do a job that doesn’t pay very well, but it’s still very satisfying. You can, you can enjoy life without anybody else getting to decide, without your outcomes getting. To decide. Now, a lot of the reasons people are attached outcomes. They have a belief I need to be to be motivated, which we’re going to talk to at the end of this. But when, when you actually motivate yourself based on living by values, you’ll find that motivation is not dependent on success. And when it’s not dependent on success, it’s easier to sustain like it’s very easy for me to keep showing up and do coaching sessions, even if I’m tired or depressed or just had a fight with my girlfriend or anything, I can still show up and coach even when I’m broke, I can show up and coach. Why? Because I don’t need to be winning at life to be motivated. I’m motivated by this urge to live with integrity, which calls me to go and do the shit I need to be doing even when I don’t feel like it. It’s easier to sustain that type of motivation. It’s not emotional motivation. It’s more mental. Rather than needing to feel like doing something because I’ll win it, I’m driven to do it at an irrational level, because it’s the right thing to do. Doesn’t matter how I feel. It’s like more important than how I feel. A huge one here is that, you know, neediness is really the source of the not good enough story, because you always want more than you never have enough, which means you aren’t enough. That’s how you develop the not good enough story. But if just living by values is enough, then you can be enough any moment you want, anytime you want to feel like you’re enough, you just say, what would it mean to live by my values right now? And you do that thing done enough feeling enters you, fills you. You’re complete. So I love doing these webinars. It’s such an easy way for me to live by my values. I’m being honest, being courageous with some of the stuff I share. I’m trying to, you know, give to people. There’s so many of my values that I live by when I do these webinars that all I have to do is show up and do them, and after for the rest of the day, I feel good about who I am. You know, there’s no finish line pressure. I don’t have to do a certain number of webinars. They don’t have to make me a certain amount of money. I’m not trying to get to a kind of finish line of webinars. I just show up for each one and do it. There’s no future moment needed for me to be satisfied. Yeah, and a huge one is that even when things end badly, when the final outcome of something is a painful one, you don’t lose all the good stuff about it. You know, if you’re not attached to outcomes, a relationship can end, and you can appreciate the relationship for what it was. You know, talk to Mike wells about this. He’s, you know, he’s had a lot of long term relationships that are finished, but he’s able to appreciate them. Now, even though a lot of them finished kind of badly at the beginning, you can have a job that you end up getting fired from, but if you enjoyed the job while you were there, it doesn’t matter that you got fired. It’s just a small moment. It’s not the whole moment. If you’re living by your values, you uh, excellent point by Henry here says in the pickup artist guidebooks, they tell you to become not needy. I found it hard to understand because chasing women itself is a needy behavior. This is what pickup does, is it tries to copy the behaviors of people who are naturally confident, which means it tries to copy what it looks like to let go of outcomes instead of actually letting them go. And that’s that’s what you just identified, is the main like negative feedback loop and pickup, is you’re trying to let go of neediness so that you can get what you’re needy for doesn’t work that way. How can you possibly do that? It’s impossible, right? So when it comes to letting go of outcomes, we’re not talking about a tactic, a trick, that you play on your mind so that you can get the outcome. We’re talking about actually letting it go, being willing to lose, really willing to lose, not so that you can win in the future, but so that you can enjoy the process. Okay, I really got to emphasize this. Letting go of outcomes is not a trick so that you can get the outcome now, just so happens that you will get more outcomes once you become non needy, but by the time you’re non needy, you won’t give a fuck that you’re getting more outcomes. So there’s still no reward in there in terms of getting the outcome we’re gonna get practical on this. You know, at the start of this, I mentioned that I had a realization about I need to focus on what I can control. I need to lower the bar of what I’m chasing until everything I’m chasing is controllable, and this is the list, and I’m here keen to hear from you guys as well, any thoughts that you might have to add to this list, but this is the kind of the five main things I noticed that I can control, first off, and most importantly is my behavioral reactions to thoughts under my. Emotions. Now, I can’t control my thoughts and emotions. They just occur to me. There’s a lot of very, very faulty advice out there saying that you can control your thoughts and your emotions. It’s simply not true. Psychologically speaking. There is some influence you can have on emotions, but the initial arising of an emotion or a thought happens beyond your control by the time you’re angry, or by the time you’re aware that you’re angry, you’re already angry. By the time you’re aware of a thought, the thoughts already occurred. It happens to you. So you cannot control that process, right? And even if you stop and force yourself to have a thought, the very decision to stop and force yourself to have a thought happened to you. Okay, but what you can do is, when a thought or an emotion comes up, you get to decide how you’re going to react to that in terms of what you do now, you might not be able to change the thought of the emotion. You might not be able to turn it off or make it more pleasurable, but if anger comes up, I’ve got a choice between doing some push ups or working on a project that requires some motivation or punching someone in the face. That range of options is available to me. I don’t have to choose punching someone in the face or yelling at my girlfriend or fuming and sitting there and suppressing I can choose to do something healthy with it. So one of the first things, when you know the reason I’m talking about what you can control is because letting go of outcomes is really letting go of what you can’t control and focusing on what you can so noticing the thought and emotion you have and then deciding what you’re going to do about it is a much better thing to try and control than thoughts and emotions themselves, your reaction to them, not the creation of them. Second one here is my efforts to initiate an action, but not the completion of a goal. So I can try my best to go to the gym, but I can’t control whether or not I even show up and do my full workout, or had the strength that I had yesterday, or any of the completion part of it. I can just show up and get started. I can go start a conversation with someone, but I can’t control how well that conversation goes, and I’m not even going to try. I just got to show up and start it. I can’t guarantee that my coaching business will last through the ages, but each day, I can show up and do whatever actions are available to me to do that day, to maintain the business. I can reach out to someone. I can initiate a contact with someone. I can start a webinar. I can’t, like, you know, people come and go from webinars all the time. I can’t control whether you stay here and listen and participate. But I can do the webinar until I can’t do it anymore. That part I can control. So when it came to, like, journaling and stuff and measuring myself, I really started to focus on, did I try to do the right thing, the initial part, not complete it, but start it. Not saying, Did I go for a 5k run, but did I start running? Did I put on my shoes and leave the house? Because that’s what matters. You know, that’s the bit I can control. I can’t control how much energy I’m going to have and how well I’m going to complete a task, but I can always control whether or not I start the task a third point here, and probably the most important, my attempts to live according to the principles of my integrity, my attempt to live by my values. Now, I can’t control the reactions of other people or the rest of the world. So I can try to be honest, but I can’t control whether or not you’re going to like what I hear what you hear. But rather than trying to control what you can hear, I just focus on trying to be honest. Rather than trying to make you like me, I focus on the value living by the value of respect. Rather than trying to become an expert on something, I just focus on being curious about it and trying to learn. So my trying goes from trying to get something to trying to do something to the limit of my ability in that moment and to make sure that that thing is something that aligns with what I currently know as my values. And a sidestep of that is that as I do these things, I constantly try to enhance my understanding of what my values are. If I do something and I feel bad about if I feel guilty, I check in and do I feel guilty because other people reacted? Or do I feel guilty because deep down, I feel it was the wrong thing to do? I answer that question that further and answers my understanding my values that I can do. I can control my reaction, I can control my attempt to act. I can control whether or not that action is aligned with my values. And then from this, I can learn more about my values and therefore better guide my future actions. And that’s what it’s like for me now. Like living by my values when I first started doing was a very conscious pro. Says, I’d think through like, what would a confident guy do? And I try and do it these days, it’s very automatic, because I’ve really trained myself to know what my values are. When a situation happens, I kind of automatically know what the right thing to do is now, and every now and then I get taught a new one, but most of the time I’m on track, so I’ve had to train myself I can, I can control the resetting of my intentions. That’s an important point for a neediness, my initial intention, my initial reason why I’m doing something, might be needy, because it occurred subconsciously, like I might start telling a story to a girl to make her laugh, and I didn’t realize when I first started telling the story that I’m just trying to get a laugh. But as I’m telling the story, I become aware of it, and I can reset the intention. What I mean is I can change why I’m doing it. So it doesn’t mean I necessarily have to change my behavior. I just need to change why I’m doing it. So I go from doing it to make her laugh to doing it, to be honest. It might change the nature of the story a little bit. It might leave out the punchline, you know. It might mean that I don’t look her in the eyes and when, when the funny bit happens, to see if she laughs, I just let go of that, you know, I might be doing I might be stuck on autopilot at work, and just suddenly realize I’m stuck on autopilot, so I just shift my intentions. What could I do to be courageous right now and make my why about courage? And that might mean I just keep doing my work, but it might also mean that I put down the task I was doing and choose their harder tasks that I was procrastinating on as reset the intention to be aligned with my values. And the last point, I can’t prevent neediness from occurring. It happens too subconsciously for me to control it, but when it comes up, I can notice it and I can let it go. We’re going to talk about how to do that next. But what I really want to emphasize is your neediness does not control you. You can’t stop it from happening, but you can let it go. And really, when we talk about letting go of outcomes or letting go of neediness, we’re talking about a consistent process that recurs over and over again throughout your life. Might need to do it every day, but needness comes up and you are there it is again, and you do something to let go of it, not like you just turn it off forever. That’s not going to happen. You’re a human, not a fucking robot, right? I still get neediness come up, don’t get me wrong, but I handle it differently. Now, instead of trying to get the outcome to drown out the neediness, I go directly to the neediness, to let it go often, by letting go of the outcome itself. The funny thing is, is when you do something that lets go of the outcome, when you do something that makes getting the outcome impossible, at least in your mind, there’s no need for neediness anymore, because your neediness is right. Well, I can’t get that anymore. I give up, and then you’re free. We’ll talk about that now. So the real question, how can we remain motivated to even get out of bed in the morning and do stuff with our life if we’re not chasing outcomes? And how do we let go of those outcomes without losing our motivation? A key one is to keep resetting your intentions. I often talk about reality checks with my clients, which is every hour or two, you have an alarm that goes off on your phone to remind you to check in with your intentions and to live by your values. You might have a reminder that says, What does it mean to be honest right now? Or are you being courageous in this moment? Or are you giving respect to yourself right now? How would you give respect to yourself, anything that reminds you what your real intentions are. And you can look at what you’re doing and go, am I doing this for values, or am I doing this chase an outcome? And if you are chasing an outcome, you can reset to values. And what I mean by resetting is I put here like offer up a sacrifice to the God of integrity, deliberately lose to live by your values. Now it doesn’t mean that you intentionally fail. What it means is you do something of integrity that will kill the outcome for you. So let’s say I’m making a girl laugh on a date and making her like me. My brain says if I’m honest with her, she’ll stop liking me. So a sacrifice to the God of integrity would be to now be honest with her, to choose honesty over her, to sacrifice her to my integrity. You know, I’ve had this, and probably the most likely way this comes up for me now is if I’m talking to a potential new client for coaching. And I can tell they’re sort of not right for coaching, but maybe they’re rich. I’m like, oh, you know, this could be good money for me. So that neediness comes up, and as I’m talking to them, these like, make them a client, they’re so rich. And when I notice that happen, I go, No, my intention is not to get rich. My intention is to live by my values. Yes, so sacrifice that client to my values. I’ll say to a client, you know what? Based on our work together, as much as I’d love to sign you up because you’re clearly Rich, I don’t think I’m a good fit for you, because you didn’t take the action after last session, you didn’t get seem to get much out of the session. Maybe we should find something else for you. I kind of sacrifice that person. I choose my integrity over them. I reset. That’s really letting go of an outcome, like you are holding it and you let go of it, not a tactic. I’m not saying this to the client, so they’ll sign up. I’m really saying goodbye to them. I’m really choosing my honesty over them, because I know from experience that if I am honest with somebody and they’re a good fit for me, I’m not going to lose them, so I don’t need to worry about it. A great one is to show your intentions when they’re needy. To call out manipulation neediness, it neutralizes it. If you can tell someone how it is that you’re manipulating them, then you’re no longer able to manipulate them. You let go of your control. So if you’re with a girl and making you laugh, you say, You know what? I just totally told you that story to make you laugh, you know, just make me feel good about myself. You can be playful with us. You don’t have to be like, I’m a needy fucking loser. You just be like, Look, I just totally made you laugh, just for my own benefit. Right? Then I’ve been trying to work on it. Totally did it to you just now. My bad, just call it out. You know, I gotta do this with my girlfriend all the time, because I’m like, terrible for giving, like, unasked for advice. So she’ll be having a problem, and I’m in guy mode, and I’m like, Well, I better solve this problem, because it makes me uncomfortable. So I start giving her advice, and giving her advice, telling her how to live your life. And then I catch myself. I’m like, fuck, I’m doing it again. And I’ll say this to Him, like, Oh, I’m doing it again. I’m fucking trying to control you. You know what you do, what’s right for you. I’ll stop trying to control you. Or I might say, Look, I I can’t listen to this problem without trying to solve it. You best go talk to your girlfriends about it. This is one of those girl to girl problems. I can’t handle it. I’ll just call it all out. I’ll neutralize my ability to control her by letting her know that I’m trying to and it’s such a fucking weight off my shoulders when I say this, I’m like, Ah, being needy and trying to control you. It’s just like, Ah, I don’t actually have to do that, that’s nice, then I can actually listen to her. I wasn’t really listening to her before. It’s just trying to find a way to control her. Another way to do this is give anonymously and give freely. If you’re someone who can’t give unconditionally, make it impossible to receive or get a reciprocation for your gift. You know, write someone a nice note and just give it to them and walk away never to see them again. I did this for a while. I go up to like girls that I found attractive and just tell them how I felt. I just say, you know, I saw you, and I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve seen all day. Just made my day to see you, and then before they could even react, I’d walk away. I didn’t even get to see their reaction. I just gave to them for free and then left. Not only is this a great low pressure way to learn how to initiate conversations, because you really don’t have to stay in and make it work, but I started to learn how to enjoy giving without needing a reciprocation, how to give unconditionally. You know, you can do favors for people. Like, one of my favorites is to, like, do referrals, like, recommend somebody to somebody else. Yeah, the person I’ve recommended doesn’t know I’ve done it. There’s all of a sudden they get an email from someone that they have a good connection with. You know, maybe I get mentioned, maybe I don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing it like I’m connecting people, because I wish someone had done that for me once. So I’m doing it. I’m giving this one’s more of a philosophical point this fourth point, which is looking for the shortest path. What I realize is that chasing outcomes is like the long way to get to somewhere. When I’m chasing money and financial security, it means I’m going to money so that I can then get to security. It’s like a two step process, when I could go straight to security, when I want to experience I don’t know, love or confidence, I might go through approval to others, or through sex or through validation to get to that sense of love for myself instead of going straight there. Now this is a bit higher level, like, what does it mean to go straight there? But the point I’m making is, you can ask yourself a question, if I’m using money to make myself feel secure, what would it mean to just go straight to secure? What can I do right now to make me feel more secure about myself? Maybe I could do something courageous so that I know I’m a braver person. Maybe I could put myself in a difficult situation that I have to solve so I can develop my problem solving skills and become more adaptable. You know, if you find that you’re really attached to money, ask yourself, How can I become someone who could survive being broke to really like. To go straight to that security feeling that you’re looking for, but to get it from yourself and not from money. You know, if you’re always getting approval from others, go, how can I give approval to myself so I don’t need others to do it for me? How can I go straight there look for that shortest path, which is often about letting go of some other outcome so that you can develop an inner skill or a philosophical viewpoint or a pattern of thinking, or whatever, this process I often do, I think I’ve already really talked about, which I call switching. It’s like what I mentioned before. I notice I’m trying to control my girlfriend as I check in as a behaviors happening, I can feel neediness, perhaps, or frustration or anxiety, all those warning signs that I’m attached to outcomes. And I’d look in and go, is my primary intentional focus? Outcomes or integrity? My trying to live by my values, or am I trying to get something? And if I notice, you know, I think I’m trying to get something. I basically try to switch to integrity. Okay, what would it mean for me to have integrity right now? What would the switch be? What thing would I do right now? What I wrote in the notes here was guess and go with integrity. Sometimes you don’t know what it means to live with integrity. Well, if you don’t just guess, you know, just guess sometimes it just means walking away from a situation until you die. Sure what living with integrity is, but just making that switch, you know, Henry’s brought up a lot of questions about about neediness here. And rather than trying to stop neediness from happening, just when it does happen, switch, switch to integrity. You know when you notice yourself trying to make a girl laugh, switch to being honest, or switch to being curious about her and let go of having her and just get to know her and said, and one of my favorite ones is to hand over control, like I said before, attachment outcomes is ultimately about a sense that you can control things. So one way to train yourself to be okay with letting go of outcomes is to deliberately let go of control. Let people decide for themselves, you know, let them do whatever they’re going to do without trying to stop them or give them advice or help them in any way. Let them know what you’re doing so they can make decisions, you know, like, let’s say you’re in a shop and you’re haggling for a deal with someone. Let them know how much money you have exactly, so you can’t, like, trick them into thinking you have less. You know, if you know someone who’s going to do something you think is stupid, just let them do it. Just give up. Go fine. Fill your boots, even though you’re really compelled to, like, control them and make them, you know, live the way you live. If someone, if you text someone and they don’t text you back, just delete their number. So it’s up to them now to get in contact with you. Just hand over the control to people. Once you’ve done your part, once you’ve lived with integrity, give the outcome to someone else and then move on to living with more integrity. Stop trying to control how other people behave and deliberately give it over to them. And that is us. Let me just aim that. I still got a couple of you here. Those my thoughts on letting go of outcomes, this idea of stop trying to win and achieve and beat everything else and just be a person that you can be proud of, even if no one else notices Any final thoughts or questions from you guys before We sign off. Unmute you want to talk? Okay? Do you anything from you guys, mate, I’m good. Look, this is a big topic, and it’s a tough one. Tough one. One of those ones is easy to talk about. It becomes like a buzzword on you just got to let go of the outcomes. And people actually lose track of what that means. It means deliberately losing the outcome. It means letting the person not like you. It means letting your boss promote someone else over you. It means letting go of anything that would have been manipulative or controlling, and instead going, I’m going to choose to do something that I’ll be proud of, not an achievement, but an action, a behavior, to control those small things that we can control and to focus all your attention on there, you know? And I hate to say this, in my experience, this is better for outcomes, ironically, but that’s not the reason to do it. If you behave with integrity and you let go of other people liking you, more people are going to like you, but that’s not why you do it. You. You know, if you pursue what you really want to do to serve the world, the kind of action that you love, and you try to turn it into a business, you end up building a career that’s really great for you in the long, long term, but that’s not the reason to do it. Letting go of outcomes means treating life like you’ve only got a week to live and you want to be proud of yourself before the end comes with today’s actions matter the most. What you did and why you did it, not what you got from it. That’s my thoughts. I have started to share, though, if you don’t mind, yeah, listen, on last weekend, we had a South festival kind of thing in Auckland here, like a hobby workshop, and then I came on Thursday, and then I had A long workshop. And then at night, we had a social dance. And then my aim, my mission, was, I want to connect with people as many as possible. And then the good one was so I met this girl, and then she just moved from Hamilton, and then Theo is just totally newbie. And I just told her, like, she’s got really great smile. And then she makes her really look attractive to me. And then, and at the same time, I was making a joke that she said she’s a beginner dancer, so she actually makes me feel better, so I don’t have to feel immediate by her. So she was kind of laughing about it, and then we joke more and more. And then I got this instant gratification, of course, you know. And then before I left at the end of the night, I kind of like after her Facebook name, and then she kind of like she was kind of hesitate, probably, and then I found her on Facebook, and then so I asked her as my friend. But I still haven’t got friend approval or anything right now, so I felt like, oh, you know what, there’s nothing I can do about it, but at least I have done my mission. We just try to connect with people Exactly, yeah, so we can see how neediness comes in and out of that story. And that’s normal. So when she approved of you low, instant, high, and there’s a kind of attachment again, and you can keep letting it go. What I’d suggest to situations like that, that’s a great one for letting go of control. So let’s say you really like your dancing. You say to her, Hey, come find me if you want another dance, you let her decide. Or you say, Oh, here’s my here’s my number. Text me if you want to catch up for a dance sometime, you let her decide. Yes, this isn’t like something. You have a rule you have to live by forever. It’s more of a thing, like, if you feel neediness, then just let go of control, so that you have to come back to integrity. You have to be doing it for the reasons to connect, not the reasons to get her or whatever. Even like, the goal is great to try and connect, but the idea of try to connect with as many people as possible, it becomes like an outcome. There’s now a number attached to it, whereas, to try to be as honest as I can be all night long, that’s something still under your control. You might connect with no one, but you can still live by their goal. You know what I mean. So just you gotta keep like refining and tweaking the goal until nobody else can fuck with it. Nobody can interfere with it. Nobody can stop you being honest. They can’t stop you from connecting with people, but they can’t stop you from trying to connect, just dialing like, lowering that bar until you’re like, everything about this goal is controllable. Nobody else can interfere with it. There’s nothing anyone could do to stop me, you know. And then when it works, as it does, and you feel that high, just go up. There’s that high. I’m not going to be tempted back into neediness. Just let it go again, you know. And you can even say, you can be like, you know, you laughing at my joke makes me like you even more. So now I’m just gonna, I’m going to back off before I start hitting on you, come and find me if you want another dance, and you walk away. Ironically, this is also a very attractive thing to do, but that’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it to really let her go. When you walk away, it might be the last time you ever see her and you let that happen. Does that make sense. I do quite often. You know, there’s a client I really want to work with them. Fuck this. Be awesome. And then I just say to him, Look, if you want another session, just email me as let him go. You know, it’s hard to do, but as soon as I do that afterwards, I’m like, I just made sure that that’s. Session was only about me coaching, because I usually go of any further outcome of it. So even if I was needy during the session, I’ve now, like redeemed it. I’ve now made it so that session was definitely just giving, because I just turned off my ability to get an outcome. Turned off my control. So even if you’re really needy during a process, you can kind of fix it by letting go of control at the end. And then you’ll know, like, Hey, I had a big battle with neediness during that process, but at the end of it, I let go of control, which means I only lived by my values. You know, you’ve always got that ability just let it go. It doesn’t mean you can’t pursue, actively pursue goals and stuff. We’ve actually got a call with some bro joke or beast mode where I talk about actually, really pursuing outcomes, but doing it after you’re okay with losing them, get to a point where you really have let go of control, and then pursuing outcomes becomes something different, becomes like a fun challenge rather than a need. But I ultimately say to someone, if you’re needy about your goal, let it go until you’re not needy about it anymore, then you can pick it up again. The neediness isn’t going to help. Excellent. Alrighty guys, Shall we wrap it up there? Send the recording through soon enough, and appreciate you guys being on the call and staying to the end. And yeah, I’ll see you guys all for the next one, or maybe not. I don’t know. I let go. You show up if you want to. It’s up to you. Cheers, anyway, I’ll see you guys soon. Thank you. Cheers.

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