Where Do I Start?

[Jamie]

Hi,

I'm new here. I found out about this after coming across some videos on Youtube. This has really hit home with me. I feel like I'm at rock bottom. I spend my days breaking promises to myself that I'm going to turn my life around. I have struggled with journaling, typing, writing etc my entire life. I'm more than 100 pounds overweight and off work because of it. I was in a 12 step program for 11 years and relapsed about a year ago. now I spend my days smoking pot and worrying about world events. I'm extremely irresponsible with especially with money and paying  bills. I recently sold the house I inherited from my father that I let get run down because I couldn't take care of it and moved to a brand new place that is farther away from family and I'm blowing the money I have left foolishly. I have a great idea for my career but I have stopped working on it completely even though my family completely depends upon me because I am the sole-provider. There has been a several deaths in my family, including my youngest sister's suicide a couple months ago. My childhood included physical, sexual, mental, and emotional abuse.  Now, I find myself often in rages and yelling and lecturing my wife, my son and step son with long-winded guilt trips and anger outbursts. My poor habits have affected my wife. She has bipolar and has gained weight too.. It isn't always like this. We do have some good times together and are very much in love. But I have cheated and she knows. I also struggle with pornography but for the most part have lost interest in sex because I feel unattractive. I also have ADD and have just started back up on my prescription although I have never had a period in my life in which I have been able to get myself to take medications properly. I don't really have any friends and I don't really seem to want any. On the outside it seems I have my life together and I am a good father and provide everything he needs and spend good quality time with him, but inside I feel like a bad person, and worse, I feel like a terrible father and husband. I just don't know where to start.

[Saarah]

@Jamie If we simplify it all down you've identified problems of:

- motivation and commitment to improving your life

- Being overweight

- drug addiction, some porn addiction 

- poor spending habits 

- not following your career aspirations or work 

- serious emotional issues related to your past, feelings of low self-worth

- Relationship strains

- Dealing with ADD and taking medication 

- Apathy in forming any friendships 

And all this really seems to be getting you down and overwhelming you... Where do you begin? 

Well, it's great you identified everything, sometimes people even struggle with that part because they've learnt to ignore their real feelings 

- I think the first thing to do is to challenge any limiting beliefs you have. That can make the biggest difference between deciding to take action and just giving up completely. Sign up to Leo's newsletter to get a log in, and if you log in from his site you get access to 20 videos that help you challenge your limiting beliefs. That will be a step in helping you with keeping the commitment and motivation to improve your life. All his normal videos too from YouTube will start training your mind to think differently the more you expose and actively listen to them.

- The second step is entirely up to you which is just to focus on one of these problems at any given time. If you try to improve them all at once, you'll be too spread out and ineffective. A useful tool to help you decide where to begin is a quadrant. The quadrant consists of the following four headings:

- Important, urgent (e.g. Something is important like your career, and it might also be urgent if you're struggling to provide for your family, which means this needs your most immediate attention)

- Important, non-urgent (e.g. forming friendships and a support network may be important, but it's not urgent for you right now) 

- Not important, urgent (I don't think you have any issues that are not important, but you probably do a lot of things in your spare time that fall into this category. For example, if theres something like a sale on, that means it's urgent, but it's not important to buy an item, then you're spending your money and that relates back to your poor spending habits, or you could be doing other things you haven't mentioned which distract you from focusing on improving your life, these things need to be eliminated! 

- Not important, not urgent (Again your problems are all important and don't fall into this category but if you're doing actions in your life that fall in here, eliminate them) 

Since all your problems fall into the first two categories, from there it's personal choice of which problem to focus on first, based on whatever seems to be the most pressing and over time go down the list 

Then it's just a matter of once you've picked a certain issue to improve, or even two at a time if you can manage, choose the effective tools you need, you can begin with psychological tools, meaning the help from videos on Actualized and implement practical actions that will help. 

One hugely important tip is to track your progress with something or your taking action in something, every single day, if you don't you will easily forget, or slowly move back into old habits moving straight back to square one, invest in your life with a vision of it being a long term process. You mentioned struggling with journaling but it could be something much easier, I use checklists for example. 

Always turn back to that first point of motivation and commitment, do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, to keep up with this process emotionally. That could mean repeatedly listening to certain videos from the limiting beliefs category or the videos about being inspired with self-actualization work that are on the YouTube channel. 

 

[Time Traveler]

My recipe:

1) Jogging / walking (every other day for 30 minutes)

2) meditation (starting with 5 minutes a day)

Hope this will raise your awareness  a little bit and then you will be ready to move further.

Edited July 10, 2016 by Time Traveler

[99th_monkey]

pick one and start there

[Time Traveler]

I had a mathematics teacher long ago. He used to give us tricky  trigonometry problems and when nobody has an idea where to start he would say:

"If you don't know what to do, do something !"