Your Beliefs Create Your Reality: How to Rewire Your Mind and Transform Your Life | Lawrence Harris

In this episode of Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, I sit down with speaker and mental health advocate Lawrence Harris to explore how our beliefs shape our reality. 

We dive into the power of subconscious programming, emotional patterns, and radical self-responsibility. From childhood wounds to financial blocks, we unpack how taking ownership of your environment, mindset, and emotions can shift your life trajectory. 

Lawrence shares his powerful personal story and practical tools for inner transformation. If you’re ready to move beyond surface change and embrace deep self-awareness, this conversation will challenge and inspire you. 

About Lawrence:

Lawrence C. Harris is a Youth Empowerment Speaker and Author, whose mission is to help teens and young adults rewrite their self-image, overcome fear, and unlock their potential. His journey from self-doubt to self-belief fuels the message he now shares on stages nationwide.

Transcript

0:01

In today's podcast, I talk with Lawrence about how beliefs shape reality, how subconscious beliefs create self-imposed limitations and influence everyday outcomes. We look at the power of self-awareness. And becoming aware of hidden limiting beliefs and emotional patterns can change our lives forever. We talk about radical self-responsibility and taking full ownership for our environment, finances, emotions, and life path, and so much more. Welcome to Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, where we help men navigate modern life, find their true purpose, and redefine manhood. I'm your host, James, and each week, inspiring guests share their journeys of overcoming fear Embracing vulnerability and finding success. From experts to everyday heroes. Get practical advice and powerful insights. Struggling with career, relationships or personal growth? We've got you covered. Join us on Man Quest to Find Meaning. Now, let's dive in.

James: 1:12

Our beliefs create our reality. Good evening, Lawrence.

Lawrence: 1:18

Yes. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, and I'm looking forward to helping other people today.

James: 1:25

Let's discuss that statement. Our beliefs create our reality. What do you mean?

Lawrence: 1:32

So when we think of beliefs, just think, I believe that. One that a lot of people have is, I believe all rich people are evil. A lot of people say that. Now, if you ask them, do you want to be rich? Yes, I wanna be rich. I want to be a millionaire. I want to have this nice car. I want a big house. But if you believe all rich people are evil and you don't want to be evil, you're going to stop yourself from becoming rich because you believe that if you became rich, you'd become evil. Or to make this even more simple, you wake up on the wrong side of bed, you're angry, it's gonna be a bad day today, you'll believe it's gonna be a bad day. So now you're driving to work, you're stuck in traffic. See, I knew it would be a bad day. Now the other person, they wake up and they believe, Hmm, the sun is shining. Today's gonna be a good day. They're stuck in traffic. Instead of them being mad and saying, see, today's a bad day. Instead, they're like, wow. You know, I get to look outside. I can see the sun shining. I can talk to my kids in the back seat. I can call my mom and tell her I love her because they believe it is going to be a good day. Now because one person believes it's a bad day, the other person believes it's a good day. One of them just created a bad day. The other one created a good day. The person who believes I can never be rich proves that they can't be rich because their belief created that reality of not becoming rich. The person who believes I can become rich, will become rich because they believe that they could. Obviously, it's not an overnight process, but if you look at years, in decades of time, your belief will create your reality.

James: 3:30

Uh, a hundred percent. It's um, if you say you're gonna have a bad day, or rich people are evil, you're just gonna self-sabotage yourself. Yes. And, but one thing I is that quite often our beliefs are so hidden that it's almost impossible for a lot of people to find those beliefs without doing the inner work. And that's where it comes in with a got like. Today, just absolute moments ago, I was looking around my house. Everything in your environment creates. Create is basically created from the inside out. I was looking in my house thinking, oh, my house looks a bit cold. It looks a bit bland. But then there's an idea of exploring that, okay, if my house feels cold and bland, then something internally, a belief or something inside me is creating that from the inside out. So now I need to go and explore that and find out where, and then to basically turn it around.

Lawrence: 4:39

Yes, because if. If nobody else made your house messy, you must have made it messy. And then you ask yourself, well, why did I do that? Like it could be as simple as, this is something in my room that you just reminded me of. I had some clothes sitting on the chair, and that's such a small thing. It's just a, some clothes sitting on a chair. But deep down, that must say that part of me isn't fully detail oriented. The money in your bank account, yes, you had to pay your bill, you had to pay for things, but once you pay for all your necessities, that amount of money, something inside of you created that situation. Maybe it could have been the job you're in, or it could have been. Well, we can't blame external things because the external things are the result of something that we are also doing or believe about ourself.

James: 5:38

A hundred percent it's, it's more, I suppose there's the idea that we need to explore almost everything in our life, and then from that point of point, take responsibility. Okay. If I don't wanna be a messy person, how do I change myself internally? Which is probably a mess because yeah, out external's a mess. And then. How can I then take responsibility to start to turn that around?

Lawrence: 6:12

Yes. It's um, what you just brought up right there is taking responsibility of it because the sooner that, and this was something that I used to have a big problem with, I get to point the finger at everyone, blame everyone and everything for how my life was. But the thing that changed everything was saying everything in my life. Is somehow some way a result of a decision I made, and there's a healthy balance you must have with it because you don't want to blame yourself for other people's behavior, but you do have to admit that the money in your bank account, however messy your house is, whatever place you live, all of these things that are within your control. Or that way because of you, it could have been that you are not taking good care of your environment. It could be that you have bad spending habits and you're impulsive, and you try to buy things to feel better rather than actually address the problem, and it can get very. Like you said, it's a very difficult process, but you have to really evaluate everything like that, and that's something that I really wanna get across to people, that you don't blame yourself, but you have to take accountability for everything that is a result of you.

James: 7:44

Hmm. So if I allow myself now just to explore that coldness, I could probably, what's coming to me in this at moment is that probably during, I feel like childhood, I had to have that sense of coldness because there was a almost a defensive mechanism maybe to do with, um, it feels. Like abandonment or rejection. So there was a coldness that I had to protect myself so that I didn't feel that again.

Lawrence: 8:18

Yeah, that's, and that feels like you just went really deep with it. And the funny thing is, a lot of times when we really explore something, it does go back to childhood. You know, something as simple as the coldness of your house. Had something to do with the coldness you had to develop as a kid. The way that we spend money is the result of often how we saw parents spending money and. Then when you look at the data on this, like when it comes to money, typically when you adjust it for inflation, people make around the same amount of money as their parents do, and their parents make around the same amount of money as their grandparents did. And if someone told you that you're going to make around the same amount of money as your grandparents, that doesn't make logical sense because. Back then, they used to make only 15, 20,000 a year. Now the average salary in America is in the 40 to 50,000 range, but when you adjust it for the inflation. It's about the same, and it comes down to this belief of I can only be this level of successful because that's all I know. And anything outside of that is scary. It's unfamiliar. You don't know what to do, so you are, so you default to what you do know and what you do know is the belief that you saw growing up as a kid. But the funny thing about it is when you notice the belief and you ask yourself, is that true? Right? Is it true that I can only make 50,000 a year? No, that's not true because you see people who are making$50,000 a minute, like Elon Musk, he makes millions of dollars an hour. Not to say that you're gonna become like the next richest man in the world, but. There's nothing saying that you can't go from$50,000 to 55,000. It could be as simple as picking up a couple extra shifts. There's nothing saying that you can't go from 55,000 to a hundred thousand. It could just be getting a higher paying job or getting a degree in something, or starting a business or a side hustle. It's hard, but there isn't anything saying for a hundred percent fact that you can't do it. And if it's not a hundred percent fact, it's just a belief.

James: 10:54

Mm. Let's go a little bit deeper on that.'cause I think there's the idea of belief, but then I feel like sometimes people have this level of shame. But if they were to go beyond their parents, they were kind of, they would feel bad or they kind of don't feel worthy to be in their parents' footsteps.

Lawrence: 11:21

Yeah. This is getting, this is going amazing. Like I love these the way you're like digging even deeper into it. Because like you just said, a lot of people unknowingly are afraid of surpassing their parents because as a kid you see your parents as like above you. You know, they're like your, without your parents as a child, you would not have survived. Just on a survival basis. They feed you, they protect you. They put a roof over your head. They put clothing on your back. They make sure you can get from point A to point B safely. Your parents are the reason why as a kid, you didn't die, and you see them as so much above you that you don't want to surpass them because you are not familiar with what's beyond that. Like they're the highest you've ever seen. But in a kind of backwards way, I believe that your parents often want you to go past them. They, they might not say it out loud, but they want you to surpass them. Me and my mom actually had that conversation a couple months ago where she was saying to me that the thing that would make her the most proud is to see me do better than her. Which is a strange thing to say, but it makes a lot of sense. But people growing up, they might have been told that you're not good enough, that you can't succeed, oh, get this safe career. Um, why do you wanna become a business owner? No one's going to come to your bakery if that's what you decide to want to, you want to do. And as a kid you just soak this up and you could be 45 years old and the thing that's holding you back is something that your mom or dad said when you were five years old. So it's really these beliefs from our childhood that dictate our life unless we handle it. Like a belief I used to have a lot was that. I have a speech impediment, so sometimes I talk really fast and my words mix together and growing up people would tell me that my voice sounded weird. I sound funny. I talked too fast, and I was afraid to become a speaker and do this as a career because of the stuff that people said to me when I was like five years old. And the way I got past it was I had to tell myself, Lawrence. Is it true that people won't wanna listen to you? No. It's not true. But you remember when all the people said that they didn't like your voice? Yeah. But there's 8 billion people in the world. At least one of them is going to want to hear what you have to say. At least one. And then one turned into two, and then two turned to four. And now it's a career for me. But had I allowed that belief to keep running my life, I wouldn't be doing this. Even though it's just, it's not a fact, it's just a belief.

James: 14:41

Mm. It's, um, what came to mind when we're talking about the childhood is perhaps for, for me, when I have a child, I'm gonna want to tell them when they're young, the first seven years of their life, that. I want you to do better than me in a nice way,'cause I love you, kind of thing. And almost ingrain that into them as their mentality because then they haven't then got to deal with the issue of, um, I don't wanna surpass my father because of, of shame or guilt or anything like that. I want them to, I want them to flourish. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm, I'm quite happy to do them, to do whatever they want. As long I, you know, as long as I kind of, they surpassed me. So my job, my job as a father would be to help them to become better than I was.

Lawrence: 15:35

Yeah, it's like, um, the phrase standing on the shoulders of giants. The reason why it's so important that kids know that you are meant to surpass your parents is all the stuff I went through and that you went through. You don't want, your kids have to go through that. So however good you were, you want them to be like this, and you want your grandkids to surpass your kids. So it is constant leveling up. That's something that a lot of families teach kids early on who go on to become successful. Like a good example would be the Rockefellers as children. John Rockefeller would tell his kids like, Hey, you guys see all the stuff I built? You're gonna do better than me. He would write them letters every day telling them how great they were. And then you look at, they turned hundreds of billions into even more hundreds of billions. They have so much money that they don't know what to do with it. Genuinely. Or you look at kingdoms throughout history, people from actual like kings and queens. When they were kids, their dad, who was the king, would tell them, you're going to be the next king. You see all this land and all these kingdoms and the conquest and the armies and the gold and the rubies and the sapphires. Yeah, you're gonna have this and more. You are going to acquire the other kingdom too. I did all this. You're gonna do this and more. But unfortunately, in my case, I had the opposite experience where my dad was. No, not really very good to me. And I instead took that and said, I'm not going to be like that. I'm going to be better than that. So in a kind of backwards way, a lot of people who have bad childhoods and go on to achieve great things, they know I'm not going to become like the person who hurt me and they go out to help other people.

James: 17:51

Steve, this is a good point. Now, can you tell us your story please?

Lawrence: 17:57

So, my life up until the age of 15 was very, very chaotic. You know, looking back on it, I've always been a bit of a strange person. And up until the age of 11, I didn't have friends because all the kids just didn't wanna play with me. They thought I was weird. They thought when I wanted to go read a book or watch TV, or listen to cartoons, everybody else wanted to go play basketball. So I got treated like I was the odd one out because I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and that wasn't what everybody else approved of. Then at the age of 12, my dad became abusive to me and my younger siblings, which ultimately led me down a path of feeling like I wasn't even worthy because the people at school don't like me. My dad don't like me, and everyone who I'm trying to get help from, they're not supporting me. Thankfully though, my mom got me into therapy when I was very young. Which helped so much, and as much as it helped, I still just. Had a lot of the beliefs inside of myself about I was never good enough. Nobody's gonna love me. No one cares. And it blinded me to the fact that people did in fact care. My mom and my therapist were trying everything they could to help me. I had friends who were trying to help me. I even had a girlfriend trying to help me, but part of me felt like I just wasn't ever enough. And when I was 15, I was looking into my bathroom mirror. And I just asked myself why, like, why do I feel this way about myself? And all those answers just came bubbling up. It's because of this thing, it because when you were 12, your dad hit you. It because when you were 10 kids at school used to make fun of you. It because when you were 11, nothing you ever did was ever good enough for your dad. And I had to sit there and ask myself. Do I want to keep living my life like this? Is this the path I want to be like? Is this where I want to see my life going? Obviously not. So as part of me going through my own mental health journey, when I was 15, I just decided I'm gonna start making videos about this. I wanna just fire up the camera and start talking into it about my life. About trying to inspire other people, trying to teach them what I know. And over the last four years, it has turned into me getting to travel the country, speaking at schools. Going to mental health organizations and using the things I've been through to inspire other people that no matter how hard their life can get, it can get better. Because I know that when you believe it won't get better, you keep seeing reasons that it won't. But once you figure out how to be grateful for the little things. You start the path of realizing that your life can get better if you gave yourself the opportunity for it to.

James: 21:20

Mm-hmm. Let's go back to when you looked yourself in the mirror. How did that feel when you looked yourself in the mirror and said, why is this happening to me,

Lawrence: 21:33

the easiest word to explain it would be very scary because the truth. You know, there's a saying that the truth will set you free, but before it sets you free, it's honest with you. It's very honest. It's, it's unfiltered. It's the truth. The truth was that part of what kept me just mentally stuck was that I was taking out the anger I had against my dad, onto people around me. I was being disrespectful to my family. I was being rude to people. I was arguing with everyone. I was withdrawing myself. So when I looked myself in the mirror and asked myself why a lot of it was Lawrence, you're doing this to other people because you're not helping. Yourself. You are not taking good care of yourself. And because you are mad at yourself, you are taking that out on people who have nothing to do with it. So it was painful. It was scary. It was dark. It was a lot things, but it was also the truth.

James: 22:48

Mm. So like. Projection, so you are projecting onto others what you were going for because that's, that's a big one I think. Yeah. If you look around, I, I noticed I was in a chat with a podcast yesterday evening and we were talking about when you go out into the world, becoming aware of how you respond to other people is the key to kind of discovering. What you need to, what you can do for yourself. So say for example, you've, you've, you see somebody who's perhaps got a job or got some money and you get a little bit jealous. Perhaps there's some jealousy inside that you need to go a little bit deeper into, which needs to be uncovered. Or maybe you pass somebody who's making you feel angry because of something. And obviously there's repressed anger. That needs to be looked at and dealt with internally. And so yeah, I think the mirror is so honest and I've started doing some mirror work myself. So like it's being able to steer myself into the eye and saying, I love you, kind of thing. Yeah. There's an idea that you could almost get teary because there's part, quite often, there's part of you inside that has never ever heard you tell, you know, never, never heard the words. I love you. Yeah. And so there's these deep, dark shadows which need, uh, need to be looked as much as the nice part to the cells.

Lawrence: 24:26

Yeah. And that's, um, you just brought up such a, you keep bringing up such great points without even realizing, like you're jogging my memory on things I had to do. One of the things I had to do was learn to love the parts of me that I was ashamed of. Like the, the angry parts of me, the selfish parts of me, the rude parts of me, those parts of myself are, they're there for a reason. The anger that's about self-respect, it's about not allowing people to just walk all, all over me because I used to let people treat me very badly because I didn't have respect for myself. So when you learn to love the parts of you that are labeled as dark. You learn to control them. Now you can use them in healthier ways, such as a lot of people, they channel their anger into going to the gym or into music or making art or anything like that. It's just a healthy way to give that part of you the freedom to exist. And when you tell yourself that I love you, a lot of people, they'll. Their throat like closes up. They're like, this is weird. Like, why am I looking myself in a mirror telling myself I love myself? Because you've never done it. You've never expressed to yourself that you love yourself. And when I used to do that, one of the things that rises up is, oh, you're full of yourself. You just think you're all bad. You're being egotistical. Well. Actually being by loving yourself, you actually are able to love other people because if you don't know how to treat yourself well, you can't treat other people good. It's like thinking that once I get a relationship, I'll love myself. But if you get a relationship and you don't love yourself, now you're insecure. When they hang out with their friends, you're angry with them. You're being rude. You're not able to love them because you don't love you. You can't give somebody something that you don't have. And the selfish part of me, that was the one that took the longest for me to accept because being selfish. Is to put your needs first. Now, if you don't put your needs first, how do you expect to be able to provide for other people because you're not even able to provide for yourself. You know, there's a difference between being about yourself and putting yourself first. You know, it's, it sounds a bit. And I put it like this, it can sound a bit grim to most people, but you kinda have to sit and think about it. Your wife, your kids, your family, your friends, your job, everyone and everything. They're here for a temporary amount of time. You might meet your wife when you're 25 and you two live happily ever after. Until you're 75 and you both died together. Beautiful love story. But for the first 25 years, she wasn't there. You were. You're with yourself from the very first day to the very last day. So if there's anybody who you should put first, it would be yourself and your children because they're the result of you. But. When it comes to things like me running a business, I have to leave out of the house with my family and my siblings. Sometimes I leave out at seven in the morning and I come home at eight at night. At first, they used to say thanks to me, like it's really selfish of you to spend so much time out there. We had to have some tough conversations about me being selfish with my time is actually the reason I'm able to help provide for them, because if I don't put my business and myself first, I can't make the money that I then can give to them to help provide for the house, and that's something that. Took me a long time to accept because I don't want them to feel like I'm being selfish, but by being selfish, I'm actually not being selfish.

James: 29:17

Hmm. There's a couple of things that pop popped to mind while you're chatting. The first thing was duality when we were talking about accepting that sometimes we gotta be selfish, sometimes we gotta be angry. And there's that idea that we are as happy, we can be as happy, we can be as evil, we can be, um, selfish, we can be kind. But it's the idea that you have to make the choice. How you respond in a situation. So like you could, you could be as evil as some, like somebody like Stalin or Adolf Hitler, but you could be as happy as the Dharma lama. Yeah. You choose how you are in this world. And then the second thing is this conversation just chatting about a minute ago, about, uh, you going in. With regards to your day from seven till 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM I suppose it comes down to values. What do you value the most? I suppose if you value family, then the priorities might change, but if you value your impact on your service to the planet that Yeah, it di it differs, I think. Yeah,

Lawrence: 30:33

and it's interesting too because sometimes. What people truly want, and this came up in the conversation I was having with them, is they want quality time. They want to be able to feel appreciated. They want you to be like fully present with them, and that doesn't mean giving them 12 hours of nonstop time. What it means is that for the time you're with them, you are with them. You're not at work, you're not worried about work, you're not worried about anything else. You're just here with them. And that means that in order for me to provide my undivided attention with them, I also have to, when I'm at work, do my undivided attention with this and that sometimes, like you just said, the duality of it is. You have to know how to balance between helping humanity and being there for your family, which is a strength position to be in. And then also, like you said too, with the duality of that evil and good side of you, is we all have all of our emotion within us. And if you try to suppress the darker sides of you. They'll just grow there and it comes out in unhealthy ways. Like you might start punching walls, you might start hurting people. You might be really rude to somebody. You might hurt yourself. You might develop an addiction, all because you are trying to suppress an emotion, and you label it as, this is a good emotion. This is a bad emotion. But if you look at your anger. Anger when you use it properly is a really good emotion. Like if somebody breaks into your house, that anger, aggressive, hurtful side of you is a good thing to have, but it's not a good thing to have when you're holding a baby. That's when the loving side of you, it's good to have. So the dark and the light have to exist together. You can't have good without bad, and you can't have bad without good. You just learn how to control and channel both of them as needed.

James: 33:10

I recently did a course called the Sacred Predator. Now that was based on the idea that within us we have, there is the predator. The part of us that can kill, to protect, can, can kill to, to, if we get, if say for example, we are walking down the street and we are approached by some men with some knives, that we have the capacity. If needed to dispatch that if needed. And there's this idea that if you were to, if you suppress these parts like the predator or the the killer kind of side of things, you are unconsciously. These, these parts of you could quite easily come out in certain situations, yes. But you, they'll come out when you don't know about it. Whereas if you are, if you are a conscious of these parts of yourself, you are able to identify when they start to come up and you say, okay, this is happening here. Now how can I, what can I do to feel these parts to deal with these parts? And they don't come out in the wrong way. Yes,

Lawrence: 34:21

it's um, you just made me think about like dogs, like really big dogs. You ever noticed that? Those are the ones that are usually the calmest, but it's the little dogs that are always barking all the time. The reason that I believe it is it because big dogs are aware that I'm a very big dog. They're aware that, hey, I could bite that person's neck in half. I don't want to, I don't have a reason to, but I'm aware I could do it. So I'm gonna just be nice until provoke. And it's the little dogs that are afraid of being hurt, so they're trying to scare everyone and everything away because they're unknowingly aware that I'm not able to defend myself. So I'm just gonna try and scare everyone away. Now the problem comes when people, like you said, they don't address that like sacred killer inside of themselves. So they bottle it all up and it comes out in unhealthy ways. It comes out in them like just, and not even them knowing it, it just, it's like a light switch that just goes off. But when you're aware and you learn how to control it, now you can put that. Into protecting your family. You can put it into boxing classes. You could even direct it into becoming like an a professional boxer like Mike Tyson. He grew up and he was like really angry all the time. He just had so many problems he was dealing with, and if you listen to his interviews, like his old one, before he became like this. Super calm, chill guy. He talked a lot about biting people's heads off and like eating their hearts and taking their health, and he genuinely meant it because he was fully directing all of his aggression into that sport. Now if you meet him, he's like that sacred predator where he's aware that, Hey, I could actually like kill you off of muscle memory. Not even trying to. I don't want to, and I don't have to. So instead, let's just get on a podcast and talk about life advice for a three hour straight.

James: 36:48

Yeah, it's, um, it comes down to the idea that of self-love loving the parts of us that we don't like, or we hate or we want to hide from and bring it onto the surface so that we, so that these parts can be lumped. Accepted, honored and they can become, really become your diamonds. These parts of us can become our parts that can really, really help us to move the next level to grow, to come up with new, new ideas, new ways, new passions, everything.

Lawrence: 37:28

Yeah. And the different parts of us. Like I try to think of people kind of like. Imagine a puzzle. You have all these parts. They're the parts that you like, they're the parts you don't like. They're the parts that just look weird, like, why do I have that part? It's there for a reason. Imagine trying to make a puzzle, but you only use 80% of the pieces. It's not complete. You need to allow that dark side and that light side to come together to be full and. You can't operate at your best capacity if you don't use all of it. If you don't use the angry side of you, the happy, the loving, the hatred, the frustration, the worry. If you don't use all of it, you're not using all of you. And people might be listening to this and they might be asking, well, how in the world is hatred able to be used as a good thing? Hatred for the thing that is bad for you. So think of, in my case, I'll just use myself an example. The hatred of people not loving themself. It's like this concept I have in my head of people not loving themself is a really bad thing, and I hate the idea of people not loving who they are. So I'm going to go out there and use what I've been through to teach other people, guide them, and help them to feel better. Now, another way of thinking of it would be, I hate the fact that this person just broke into my house and it's threatening my family. That is hatred. It is hatred for you putting me and my family in danger and you that hatred to protect them. Or you could think of love. This is a much easier example of how you can use love to achieve things because of how much you love your family. You go out and you provide for them. You get a job, you work hard, you take extra shifts because you love your family and you want to provide for them or worry. That worry if you just let it run rampant, you're gonna worry about everything. What if this happens? What if that happens? But if you control it, you can think, all right, what if someone breaks into my house? I should probably get a security system. So now that worry prevented something from happening. Well, what if I'm walking by myself at night and someone runs up to me with a knife? I should probably learn a self-defense class. Now that worry had become healthy rather than just being unhealthy, but it's going to exist regardless.

James: 40:23

Hmm. It's almost like when you talk about these things, so like say for example, worry. Where did I first start to worry? Hmm? What was, what was going on? How did I feel? What was going on around me? How are people interacting? Because then when we can start to explore, here's going back to the, what we're talking about, childhood and beliefs. If we look at where we first started to worry, that can tell us a lot of clues about what actually happened and actually what do we actually need. Same with hatred. Where did we, when, where did in our life do we start to really, really hate things? And it might have been, you know, you, you, you might have been two and you might, this might rely, rely a bit on your intuition and being guided by more than your head to discover this. So maybe at two years old, you, you, it was tea time, you were hungry, your dad or father started to walk away and he had the food. So you suddenly had this feeling of hate because of perhaps you are hungry and you don't understand that, uh, or your father doesn't understand you're hungry. You don't understand that your father's coming back in a minute, and so you suddenly have this feeling of hate. And so yeah, it's, I think it's kind of allowing themselves to go into that inner child healing again.

Lawrence: 41:47

Yeah. And that's one of those processes that. I tell people that they should always try to journal about these sort of things because when you try to think all this stuff out, like you try to think about all of this, it's going to become so confusing.'cause you're gonna think how in the world, when did I first start learning hatred? Because you might not remember when you were two years old. Like you might not have memories of that. But you remember when you were seven years old and then you journal about it. Like, okay, well what about this experience of my dad walking away with the food made me feel hatred. Like, where did that make me feel? Hatred. And you kind of have to mentally place yourself back in how you thought back then and journal it out. Understand that, oh, it's because I felt like my needs were not being taken care of. I felt invalidated. I felt underappreciated. I felt like I was being abandoned. I felt like I was being neglected. I felt like he was just trying to, in trying to have control over me by restricting access to food. All of this is because he just may have walked away to put the food in the microwave. Hmm. But your child's self didn't know that. Yeah. And you kind of have to give yourself grace for the things you didn't know in order to unpack it, heal it, and give yourself what you needed back then.

James: 43:32

Yeah. It's going back to, um, uh. What I was gonna suggest for people out there listening for, for me, I like to, I don't necessarily like to write it all the time because I find I, I can write for hours. I tend to get a, a audio recorder and I record myself speaking, uh, out loud. And then if you wanted to go a little bit deeper, um, you can use ai, put this into ai. And then they can ask more deeper questions to go a little bit deeper. And as much as I don't like using AI that much, it has its uses. Yeah.

Lawrence: 44:14

And this, that is definitely one of them because it will ask you the questions that you are afraid to ask yourself.

James: 44:24

Yeah.

Lawrence: 44:24

Like to, if you act yourself, what is the part of me that I'm afraid of facing? You're not going to tell yourself the truth because you're afraid to tell yourself that answer, but the computer doesn't, doesn't have an opinion of how you feel about yourself. It just is going to ask you the questions and you might start off with a question like, what makes me happy? It sounds so simple, like, oh, going to the park, hanging out with my friends, watching movies. Okay, but why? Well, I like hanging out with my friends because I feel appreciated with them. Do you only feel appreciated when you're with them, or do you feel appreciated when you're by yourself? Well, I don't feel appreciated when I'm by myself. Why is that? When did that first happen? And now you're getting into that child self. But those are questions that you have to be willing to ask yourself and willing to be honest about. Because you could give yourself a sugarcoated answer, but deep down, you know, you are not telling yourself the truth. You like intuitively know. There's something deeper to this, but the, the a problem I used to have is I would go too deep. I would get into like the subconscious of my child's self, virgin. Where it's just very chaotic because as a child you don't really have the thinking processes to understand the why. How you feel and why that thing makes you feel that way. So you don't wanna over intellectualize your thoughts, but you also do have to be willing to get into the deep, dark, complex parts of it. Hmm mm.

James: 46:30

Chaos.

Lawrence: 46:32

Yeah. So how it's like, um,

James: 46:34

so how does ca with chaos now, how does chaos? Look to you now?

Lawrence: 46:41

Hmm. Well, in my, is kind of like a controlled fire and every day I have to like put out these little fires like my business, making sure I get to certain places on time. These are all little fire that I have to put out. So it's controlled chaos, but. When it comes, like the mental chaos, there's times when I have to figure out like these complex government forms that I have to fill out to go speak at schools. And these are all different for each state and cities towns. So it's, if I wanna give a speech in a different state, I have to fill out their forms for that state and that school. And it's very stressful and that stress kind of builds up like. I think that if I have a plan in my head and it doesn't go according to plan, I get really stressed out by it. I get really frustrated and that frustration just build and build and build. And if I don't catch it like early on, it could like ruin the whole day. Because nothing going to plan. And you start like spiraling and you think this one thing didn't go to plan. Now that didn't go to plan and now everything not going to plan and the whole day ruined. But that's what I mean by you have to like put out the fire before it starts to spread.

James: 48:14

What would happen if you, rather than saying, well, trying to control the chaos. Or trying to control the fires, what would happen if you just allow a new, just to be with that chaos? So there's no, no trying to put them out. Just being with it, being with that discomfort.

Lawrence: 48:35

Hmm. Like sitting with it and reflecting on the, on the chaos.

James: 48:41

So kind of going into the chaos and the discomfort and almost allowing yourself to. Dis become the chaos so that you can kind of, it becomes a ref. It becomes you for

Lawrence: 48:58

reflection of you. Oh, that's a great, that's a great point. Like sometimes I've sat down and I've journaled while I was in that chaos spot and just ask myself, all right, well, here's how I'm feeling. Well, why? Not to push it away, not to judge it, not to solve it, but to understand it. Like, what, what did this chaos trying to teach me about myself? Hmm. Well, Lawrence is teaching you patience. It's teaching you to understand that not everything's going to go your way. Not everything's going to go to plan. And when things don't go to plan, that doesn't mean you have to spiral and get stressed out and just let it ruin your day. You just have to acknowledge thing, didn't go to plan. It is what it is. But tomorrow things can go to plan and I can't control if they do or don't. So when I sit with the chaos and just allow myself to be fully present in it. It teaches me a lot. It teaches me uncomfortable lessons. You know, it's very uncomfortable. But when I get out of the discomfort and I reflect when I'm like, I'm glad I went through that.

James: 50:18

It's, it's, um, loving it, loving the dis, loving the chaos, loving the discomfort. And I think this is a big, a big lesson for people out there is because there's so much. There's so much out of our control in the world that we can't control in any, anywhere. Yeah. But we get caught, we get caught in it, all the news, social media, and you can, you can see it with regards to division in certain countries in most countries. And there's this idea that it's just all this chaos. We're, we're, we're trying to either run away from it, hide from it. We're trying to control it when really it doesn't wanna be controlled. It doesn't wanna be, um, pushed away. It just wants to be accepted, seen, and loved and acknowledged. And I feel as though its discomfort can almost, can be our big in that moment, can be our biggest teacher.

Lawrence: 51:18

Yeah, it does. Because even the thing that we think we can control, we really can't. Like a good analogy that just popped into my head is getting on a bus. So the bus schedule says the bus is going to be here at 7:30 AM every day. Now, will it, hopefully, but can you make it come when you want it to come? No. What does The driver gets stuck in traffic. What if it gets a flat tire? What if the bus just doesn't show up that day? You can't make it show up or even making money. There's nothing saying that you can guarantee that you'll have a job tomorrow. You know, realistically, you should, because you've been working here for 10 years, you've been a loyal employee. You haven't called any problems, but you can't control if your boss wakes up tomorrow and says, yeah, we're gonna fire them. Like I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I'm just gonna fire'em. You can't control that. You can't control the weather. You can't control if your car starts. It started every single day, but today there might be an issue with it that just happened. The engine broke down and you can't get to work. You can't control your car. You can't even control a machine. It is raining outside and water got on your phone. You can't control whether or not your phone is going to get water damage because it just got rained. You can't control that. You can't control how fat your hair grows. You can't control when you die. You can't control when you wake up. You can't control any of that stuff. All you can control, all you can truly control is this, whatever you say, whatever you do. You can only control your physical body. And even that you can't fully control. You can't control how fast your heart beats. You can't control if you just suddenly have a stroke. You can't control how fast your like body regrows itself. You. There's so many things that we think we can control that we can't control, and when you admit that, I can't control that. I can do the best I can, but I can't guarantee it. That's very freeing.

James: 53:56

What if, what if you missed that bus? That bus didn't arrive, so you had to walk to work, and during that walk you met your soulmate. What happens if you lost that job? And then suddenly you were offered a better job with a better pay, with better conditions. What if so, um, you, your phone broke and for two or three days you were able to have a phone free day, days, and so you feel so much calmer, so much more relaxed.

Lawrence: 54:32

Yeah. I've actually had experiences like that before where. The train. I was on a train and it just broke down and we all had to get off and I had to walk like a mile back to my house. It was really uncomfortable. Now, what happened that day was had I got off at the train stop at the same time I normally would've. There was a shooting right there, so I would've probably ended up getting shot. So the thing that was so uncomfortable of me having to get off the train and having to walk home saved my life. Then I've had other times I've lost, um, yeah, I actually have them right here. So I have a different pair of headphones that I lost. Like they, I lost them when I was out fishing and somebody probably threw the case into the river thinking it was a rock. So for that day, I just didn't have headphones. I, I was really stressed because I didn't have my music. I couldn't listen to anything on the train, and I had to listen to everybody having their loud conversations. What ended up happening with the very next day I came to my office and I was having a conversation with the receptionist about how I lost my headphones and about her day. She asked me, by any chance, what kind of headphones are they? She has the exact case that I needed and she never used them. She bought them two years ago and just never opened the box. So that experience taught me that even when things are chaotic, even when they don't go to plan, even when you lose something, it opens the door for you to gain something even better.

James: 56:12

Mm-hmm. And it also gains, allows this to become. In my eyes More present.

Lawrence: 56:20

Yeah, more because sometimes you have to admit, yeah, it, yeah. Like sometimes you'd have to admit it is what it is. This is life right now. This is

James: 56:33

right now, how do you finish off by telling us what is it that you do and how can people get in contact?

Lawrence: 56:43

So the simple answer on what I do is I go, I speak, I write books, and I help mainly teenagers and young adults improve their self-love, confidence, and their mental health because it's a very, very needed thing in our world and the way people can contact me. So if you're intending to contact me for podcast booking or speaking engagements, well, you're in Ireland, correct? Uh, uk. Uk Uh, okay. UK, England. England. Alright, England. Now if by some chance somebody wants to fly me across the ocean and get me a hotel, or you wanna have me on your podcast, you can email me atLawrence@lawrenceharris.com, but promote people. My social medias are Lawrence C Empowers, so that's on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

James: 57:38

So we'll put the, these links on the, uh, show notes and also when we put it, when, when we put it out and the girls on social media, we can link the pages together. Um, thank you very much, Lawrence. Of course.

Lawrence: 57:54

I loved it and I really appreciate how you like cooked the questions and thoughts I had and went even deeper into it.

James: 58:01

Absolute pleasure. It's, uh, it's one thing I I really love doing, um, is to go deep. I'm not a, I'm not really a surface level person. I have to go deep into conversations. Yes,

58:16

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