Beyond the Grind: How to Escape the Self-Improvement Trap

Most self improvement advice works until you're chronically burned out. The exact discipline and hustle that saved you in your darkest season eventually becomes the cage that keeps you exhausted.

In this episode, I reveal the self improvement trap and break down the four distinct stages of personal evolution. I share my own story of hitting wall after wall while chasing success, and how to navigate the messy spaces between who you are and who you are becoming.

What you will discover in this episode:

• Why using willpower to solve burnout is like stepping on the gas when your car is stuck in the mud
• The hidden danger of survivor fuel and why proving your worth always ends in exhaustion
• The shift from self improvement to self realization and what true surrender actually means for high achievers
• How to navigate the disorienting space when your old identity crumbles before your new life appears

Transcript

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The problem with the self-improvement industry is that the very thing that can help us get out of one stage of life can become the thing that helps prevent us from getting into another stage of life. Okay, so today I'm going to be talking about what I call the self-improvement trap and then how to get out of it. And the way I'm going to be talking about it is the four different stages of self-improvement from my own experience and what I've helped other people get through. And hopefully this will give you some context and some understanding of what stage that you're in and then how you can transition from the stage you're in to the stage that you want to evolve into. And before I get into this, I don't want you to use this as a rigid framework. This doesn't need to be another to-do list. This doesn't need to be making you feel like you're not exactly where you're supposed to be. The sole purpose of this episode is so that you understand fully where you are and you can accept that with open arms. And then make sure you know where you're going to be going to next. Your transformation is inevitable as long as you don't get in your own way. So with that being said, let's get into stage number one, the victim. So the victim is interesting because it's where all of us typically start. The victim is when we're completely unconscious in our life, meaning that we do not understand our true nature. We don't understand that we create our own reality. And a lot of times we are dealing with really hard circumstances. For me, what that looked like was I grew up with divorced parents. I got diagnosed with a rare tumor at 15. I got buoyed in school. I dealt with addiction at a really young age. And all of that stuff was completely out of my control. And so it's really normal in this stage to feel like life is out to get you and that the world is happening to you as opposed to for you. And a lot of people, unfortunately, kind of stay stuck in this stage their whole life. They stay stuck as a victim. And what happened to me is I made a transition from this stage to what I call the warrior. And how the transition happened was I was in rehab for 89 days inpatient. And I had this deep sense of connecting with myself for the first time, really, my entire life. For the first time, I was out of survival mode. I had been removed from the same circumstances and environments that were keeping me stuck and sick. And I had this realization that I wanted to take control of my life. And so I went from this kid who was not ambitious, who wasn't disciplined, who didn't really have any sense of direction to the exact opposite, which was I'm going to take control of my life. I'm going to outwork my current circumstances, and I'm going to make something of myself. And so this is the origin story of probably every single high achiever that I've ever met. And so this is when we choose to go from a victim to a warrior. And so what tends to happen in this warrior stage is we go from life is happening to me to life is happening for me in some ways. So we tend to take control of the things that we can take control of. And that leads to typically a lot of external success. For me, what that looked like was I started working at this nutrition supplement company, and I also joined the Marine Corps. And I adopted this hustle and grind mentality. So the mindset here is I'm going to be successful no matter what the cost. And the fuel that is used in this stage to propel us to success typically is fuel like not being enough, trying to prove myself, anger, shame, fear. It comes from a place of proving energy, what I call survivor fuel. And what tends to happen is it's really powerful at first, but then eventually it becomes corrosive and destructive over time. And so this can help us with really getting out of hard circumstances. For me, it got me out of poverty. It propelled me into success. I learned a ton of skills and a lot of things in my career. And it got me through some hard times, which was great, but eventually it started to become more painful than helpful. And that's when you know that you're about to transition into stage number three. So one thing when it comes to the warrior stage is that it's more tricky than the other stages. And the reason why is because up to this point, as we have become the warrior, we've relied on our own willpower and pushing energy, masculine energy, in order to create the results that we've wanted in our life. And there gets to a point where it stops working. And people do typically one of two things when it stops working. It's either they double down, which is what I did. So when I started to feel burned out and I realized the way I was doing things wasn't working, that's when I started to take stimulants and push myself even further and even harder, which is the same thing as when your car is stuck in the mud and the wheel is spinning and pushing the gas. It actually makes the car more stuck. But because I was taking artificial chemicals, it gave me the illusion that I was moving forward and it made me feel like I was making progress when in reality I was just going in a circle. And that's what the self-improvement trap is it's it's when no matter how much effort you're putting into something, you feel like you're continuing to be stuck. So much so to the point that you can't even put in the same amount of effort that you used to, which is a huge hit to your ego because up to this point, you've kind of defined your worth and your success towards how hard you're able to work, how much you're able to accomplish. You're looking to your external reality for validation. So you're looking for the tangible stuff. And typically what we need to do in order to maintain that is abandon our internal state. It's abandoning our emotions, the way that we feel. This is where the fuck your feelings work harder mentality comes from. And this is kind of like the David Goggins, Alex Ramoses, which, hey, if they're happy in that stage, that's great. More power to them. I know for me, it just was a means to an end. When I started to transition from this stage was when I almost ended my life when I was 25 years old. I remembered I had just quit my job because I couldn't do it anymore. I felt hopeless. And before I ended my life, I heard a voice in my head that said, Do not end your life before you know what it's like to really live it. And for me, that was a very dramatic wake-up call. So typically, this is when a spiritual awakening happens. You can call it a spiritual awakening, you can call it identity crisis. You have this ego death and this realization that you are not living the life that you're meant to live. And a lot of times this phase is really scary because it requires you to go from having a really solid sense of ego self, thinking that you are your accomplishments. And for me, I thought I was just a district manager, I was just a marine. You go from this binary way of thinking to actually exploring the undiscovered multidimensional parts of yourself that you left behind in the pursuit of success. And so this is when you start to go against societal norms, and then you start to transition into what I call the seeker. And that's gonna be stage three. This is really, really complicated a lot of times when we first start because we go from this very black and white way of living where all we have to do is push harder and endure more pain to make the progress we want to a very uncertain way of living. And so the goal is we have to transition from outer work, which is just gonna cause burnout if we continue to do it, to inner work. So we go from external success and we shift to emotional fulfillment, which requires us to kind of let go of some stuff happening in our reality. I know for me, when I transitioned this stage, I was broke. I was living with my friend in Missouri because I couldn't afford rent. And it was just this really messy, uncertain time. And I was forced to really explore the parts of myself that I had abandoned. And what this practically looks like is I started to explore my belief system. Why did I burn out? Why do I feel like money is hard to make? Why do I feel like people don't like me? I started to do this inner work and I realized that a lot of beliefs that I had developed as a kid was not a true reflection of who I actually was. And so instead of defining success solely through external means and metrics and external validation, I started to define my success through how fulfilled I was, how much I lit up doing the things that I was doing. And so we have to go from borrowed certainty to self-trust. And so that requires learning how to regulate your nervous system. It requires figuring out what your true value system is. It's more of a rediscovery of who you actually are as opposed to pushing towards another goal. An analogy I like to use for this too is imagine your true self is the flame of a candle. And imagine the survivor self you had to create was a lid to that candle. And you've lived your whole life with this lid on top of your flame. What eventually is gonna happen is the flame is gonna lose its oxygen and it's gonna burn out. And a lot of times the way we deal with burnout is we think that we're not disciplined enough, we think we're too lazy, which is just a protective mechanism in our brain. In order for the brain to continue to live out the survivor identity, it's gonna tell you stories like you're too lazy, you're not good enough, which is actually just making it harder to get out of that stage, right? And that's where this self-improvement trap happens. You try to hustle and grind your way out of the hustle and grind paradigm, which is very much so where a lot of people are stuck right now, even if they're successful. And so what has to happen is we have to learn to take the lid off. We have to rediscover who we actually are outside of that conditioning. So it's not about self-improvement, it's about self-realization. And that's when we start to really connect with our flame again. And what tends to happen is temporarily our results and our external world start to crumble. And this is where a lot of people freak out. A lot of people see their world start to shift and change, and they try to grasp onto things they can control. And that's why they get stuck in this self-improvement trap because this stage of the seeker is not about control, it's about surrender. Okay, I think a lot of people who are high achievers, we hear the word surrender and we freak out because we think it's just us sitting on the couch, meditating, eating potato chips. And that is not surrender. What surrender is, is taking consistent, aligned action, but then detaching from the outcome. So it's action without control. That's what surrender is. And that is the name of the game for the stage because it's all about learning to trust ourselves. It's all about not looking to our world and our circumstances for validation. It's about learning how to validate ourselves from within. It's about taking action because we are feeling alive as we take that action, doing things that we really truly light us up, as opposed to just doing things as we feel like we should do them. Right. So you know that you're in the seeker phase if you're starting to value emotional fulfillment over just external results. And so if you really learn to embrace this, if you embrace healing your nervous system, changing your mindset, if you start to really build this relationship with yourself and connect more with yourself, that's how you don't go back to the hustle and grind paradigm. And then that takes us to the next phase, which is what I call the integrated self. So the integrated self is when you learn to kind of dance between external and internal. So it's understanding that you can aim for goals, you can have results, you can have discipline, all of that stuff is great. And that's actually healthy for us, but it's merged with emotional fulfillment, alignment. It's about taking action from a place of integrity and building your life in a more holistic way. So instead of this binary way of thinking, saying, in order for me to have a successful business, I have to sacrifice my personal life, you start to realize two things can be true at once. You go from black and white, which is a representation of fight or flight mode, which is dysregulation, to multidimensional ways of thinking. It's when your parasympathetic nervous systems online, you're in a powerful state of being, and you create from that place. And now you're being fueled, instead of being fueled by fear and shame and guilt and anger, you're being fueled by purpose and love. And that's not to say that you're not going to experience negative emotions, but it does mean that you've surrendered to the fact that these emotions are going to happen. You're allowing yourself to process these emotions, and you learn to dance between the head and the heart. The heart is intuition, creativity, fulfillment, life force energy, feminine energy, reflection, introspection, internal world. And then masculine energy is devotion, goals, external focus, taking action, doing it, making sure that you're accomplishing things. And this is an ongoing process that's going to happen the rest of our life. Sometimes what happens is depending on where you're at in your evolution, you may transition between the seeker and the integrated self, or the seeker and the hustle and grind self. Like maybe in your relationship, you've learned how to be more integrated, but in your business, you're learning how to be the seeker. So it's not just a one-shoe fits all here. But yeah, those are going to be the different stages of self-improvement. And I hope this demystifies the self-awareness trap. And maybe this puts more practical words to what it really means to do inner work and to come more into yourself and to connect more with yourself. I know for me, I'm kind of in this in-between stage between seeker and integrated self. I feel like some days I'm really nailing it. And then other days I feel like I'm back to square one. And just know that growth is never linear. And instead of focusing so much on self-improvement, I really encourage you to focus on self-realization because there's nothing about you that needs fixing. Really, what the whole game of life is in my perspective is coming back home to who you really are and to your actual true self. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with anybody that you feel like it's going to resonate with. Would love for you to write a review, like, subscribe, all the things. Thank you guys so much. And as always, you deserve to stop surviving and start living. Until next time.