Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] I tell you that moments and messages like this are the reason that I love my job, I love God, I love people, I love all kinds of things. But the things I get to talk about when I do things and series like this is what I love. I love to teach people to overcome. I love to teach people to live definitely as children of God, but also as owners of their lives, to take responsibility and ownership, to take charge. And I know that resonates with some people. I received just like heart wrenching, heartwarming, exhilarating email from a young man who, based on some of the things that he's been learning and listening to, took some very, very bold steps in his life last week to just step into the sea, to confront difficulties, to take a even if versus what if attitude and make something different for him. So I know that it resonates. I also know that it doesn't resonate with everyone. And I talked about that last week. You know that some people see no need for self improvement. I don't get you, but you don't. Okay, so that said, other people don't see themselves in messages like this. They say, well, I am, I'm confident, I don't struggle with those things that you've been discussing. And I said last week, you know what, if that's you, fantastic. That's amazing. Go do something with it for good in the world, for everybody else. Don't hoard those gifts, they're not very common.
[00:01:40] Also, by the way, there are biological features that give someone more confidence than others. Did you know that this is not necessarily a learned skill. Only people are wired a certain way neurologically for more confidence.
[00:01:55] So don't get too haughty if you consider yourself, you might have an advantage.
[00:02:01] But listen, if that is a description of you and I give you free reign to go get coffee and go read anything but a self help book, don't do that.
[00:02:14] It's not really what these things are for, are for people like me.
[00:02:21] It's not for me. It's for people like me who still every day struggle with the difficulties of this life and interacting with people and being confident and strong and courageous when life gets difficult.
[00:02:37] And you know, I'm talking to an important group today about really practical things about our subject matter. But I want to describe this group to you, okay? Hey, Rabbi, listen, good messages on confidence, real rah rah stuff. They should call you Rabbi Rah Rah. That would be great.
[00:02:57] Keep waiting for you to of course QUOTE joshua1 9. Every good sermon has to have that in there, be bold, be strong and courageous. Go do it. But here's the problem, Rabbi. It's all good stuff, you know? And for me, though, it's not that easy.
[00:03:16] I'm just like, I'm not bold and courageous. I don't know how to be bold and courageous. And you can talk all day about how I should be or what I ought to do and how it's good for me, but I'm not. And nothing you've said really spells out any way for me to actually take practical steps to do that. You tell me ways to think, which is very important, by the way. Then there's another group that says, great, bold, courageous, fine. Guess what? I've done it. I've done it. And I failed miserably at it. And I felt like a total and absolute fool.
[00:04:02] I have been confident and you can talk all day about it, but guess what? When it doesn't work for you, when you try and you really step out there and you fall flat on your face and you still remember the feelings of what that feels like, it's not so easy to come in and hear a little feel good message about, go out there and do it.
[00:04:25] So today I'm delivering on a promise that I gave you to make this as practical and applicable and doable for your daily life as it can be. Because what I really know is regardless of the people who got off the couch to go get coffee because they're super confident or left the room, you still need it. You can't lie to me. We're human beings. We all have the same kind of brain.
[00:04:51] And you'll find out today that your brain is pretty important when it comes to this.
[00:04:58] So I want you to learn, because in that process, we come to know the answer to the question Moses asked, which is, who am I? Or we come to develop the skills to say even if and what if?
[00:05:13] And that changes you, and it changes the people around you in your immediate circle, and it changes. Actually, dramatic as it may seem, Sabrina said it, we bring good to the world. When we do good, we battle evil. And being these ways helps you be more good. To use bad English.
[00:05:34] God willing, our eternal reward is really what we're working here for. But I want to talk about this system Bill Walsh is. Anyone know who Bill Walsh is? Very famous football coach for The San Francisco 49ers. A champion coach. A coach of champions. A champion coach. He wrote a book. He actually had a phrase. He wrote it, turned it into a book that called the Score Takes Care of Itself. Okay, the score takes care of itself. In other words, all he's saying is it's the system that creates the result. If you consistently follow the system, the outcomes become predictable. You win every day because you have systems in place. He argued that when the fundamentals and day to day processes actually get perfected, the results, that is the scoreboard, the wins, those happen because you've put the system in place. The score takes care of itself. And listen, by prioritizing execution and systems, the pressure of needing to win, having a victory every time, is just replaced with, I know what I'm doing and I keep doing it now. You don't win every time. You can't always win. You lose. Sometimes in this, we make the wrong choice, we back up when we should walk forward. We try and we fail.
[00:07:06] But you know what's really interesting? We have this Torah portion this week that we're reading, which is mishpatim. Do you know what the Torah actually is? It's a system.
[00:07:16] The Torah is a foundational system for life. It's no different than that. The score takes care of itself. If you do the things that are articulated in the Torah, guess what happened? You'll still fail. Do you know what the Torah makes account for that? When you fail, you will still fall short. But the system, you go back to the system and back to the system.
[00:07:39] God built a system that we're supposed to follow, and it leads to goodness in life and in the world. So listen, let's talk about a system that, when implemented repeatedly, predictably changes your trajectory, both in your thoughts and your outcomes. And speaking of thoughts, I realize that I am very much a broken record about what I'm getting ready to say. I say it a lot. I say it at least a few times a year in messages.
[00:08:11] What you tell yourself changes your life, your mindset and your life. What you tell yourself changes your life.
[00:08:24] Which speaks to last week's messages.
[00:08:27] When I talk to you about who do I think I am? Your voice and God saying, who do you think you aren't?
[00:08:34] Who do I think that I can. Who do you think that you can't?
[00:08:42] And I can tell you that the ability, the truest definition of being confident and courageous in the life you have has to do with the ability to silence the noise. And I'm not talking about the critics, and I'm not talking about everything external. I'm talking about this noise right in between your ears. You learn to silence and manage that noise to silence your own mental chatter. But listen, here's a Key point, to execute your system, your system needs to run subconsciously. And I'm gonna talk to you just a minute about the subconscious system. Your system needs to run subconsciously, without conscious thought that it becomes a default wiring. Let's talk briefly about your brain.
[00:09:31] God's supercomputer. There is no AI it's gi. It's genuine intelligence. Your brain generates more electrical impulses in one day than all the phones in the world combined.
[00:09:48] The brain produces enough power to light a 20 watt light bulb.
[00:09:54] Your brain processes information faster, though very differently. It's not apples to apples, but your BR processes information faster than the world's most advanced supercomputers. It's called an exaflop. If Blake were in here, he knows what an exaflop is. An exaflop, a billion billion calculations, something like a quintillion per second surpassing even the most powerful AI. That doesn't mean your thoughts. It means everything that your brain is doing.
[00:10:29] Your brain has around 86 billion neurons, each with connections. Which means that there are more connections in your brain when you consider neurons and synapses than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If you started counting your neurons and connections and all that, if you started right now, one second per neuron synapse connection, 2700 years later, you'd finish up.
[00:11:04] Your subconscious mind produces about 11 million bits of information. Do you know how much your conscious per second? Do you know how much your conscious mind can handle?
[00:11:20] 11 million. For your subconscious, your conscious mind. Take a guess. Throw a number.
[00:11:27] 40.
[00:11:29] It's a good number. The number for completion. Complete failure if you don't learn to manage it.
[00:11:36] 11 million subconscious, 40 conscious. This means that the majority of your decisions or actions are happening automatically when, without, before you're even aware of them.
[00:11:49] Thus, if you build a broken system, guess what? It's happening on some level, without your control. It's your default operating system, and unless you reprogram it, it will continue to produce the output that is currently being manufactured.
[00:12:08] Now, if your system is perfect, if you've got the master, great. Teach it to others. I already told you that. If not, listen up. Let's talk about that automatic funct what it often looks like for people. In other words, I want to dissect the system that many of us have built into our thinking or how.
[00:12:29] Why inexplicably, we choose to use our supercomputer this way. Let me introduce a term I learned from a book called the Confidence Code. Sort of strange. It's a Great book, by the way. Code of Confidence. I hope they don't think I stole that from them. Maybe I did, subconsciously.
[00:12:50] It's an interesting book that I read because it's about women and confidence. And I wanted to understand the female mind and the challenges of the female mind and confidence. So I read this book for women about confidence. Guess who learned the most? The man reading the book about women's confidence. It's a fantastic book. These people are. If you're a conservative Republican, you won't like their political lean. I could care less. That could teach you everything you want to know about confidence, male or female. Anyway, they introduce a term called gnats.
[00:13:29] Now we live in Georgia.
[00:13:35] Nats I learned about at Zachary Eisner's first football game that was down south of what we call the gnat line in Georgia. I had never heard of something so ridiculous until I went and sat in the football stands south of the gnat line and experienced an absolute nuclear attack of gnats at every orifice on my head and swatting and trying to watch a football game.
[00:14:13] These aren't the kind of gnats I'm talking about.
[00:14:16] However.
[00:14:18] However, these gnats are absolutely way more dangerous and annoying than that stupid bug.
[00:14:29] Negative automatic thoughts.
[00:14:33] Not gnat Nats.
[00:14:37] Negative automatic thoughts.
[00:14:41] They, for some reason buzz around more frequently than positive thoughts, and they multiply at lightning speed in your supercomputer. Now, listen here. We have a thought that occurs in our mind, followed immediately almost by a negative one. Here are some examples. I should pray more, but gosh, I'm tired.
[00:15:02] Maybe I'm just not as faithful as I should be.
[00:15:06] I feel like I should volunteer more at the synagogue. But what if I'm not good enough? What if I don't have enough time? What if I don't do it right? I've lost my patience with my child today. Am I failing as a parent?
[00:15:18] Other parents seem to have it all together. I'm just trying to survive and I'm not doing good.
[00:15:25] I should ask for that promotion. But what if they think I'm prideful and they end up firing me?
[00:15:32] I want to start my own business. But what if I fail? What if I embarrass my family? Negative automatic thoughts.
[00:15:41] Anyone ever been attacked by gnats?
[00:15:45] Don't raise your hand. I know the answer. Of course you have. Given those statistics about your brain. Imagine the brain power we can harness. Imagine what our supercomputer can do and ask yourself, why would I program it that way?
[00:16:02] I'm the One who gets to decide the follow up thought.
[00:16:08] There's a second though. There's a baffling way we choose to use our God given miracle skull device. It's another example from the animal kingdom.
[00:16:23] How was that?
[00:16:28] Do you know what that was?
[00:16:31] If you know what it was, it was an effective communication strategy.
[00:16:36] Cows. Do you know what cows do with their cud?
[00:16:42] They ruminate. I'm not a dairy farmer, so don't hold me to this exactly, but cows chew cud for about eight hours a day. A cow will spend about 40% of its day chewing, regurgitating, swallowing, chewing again. That's about 30,000 jaw movements for a cow. Okay. Cows have a four compartment stomach. The cut is digested multiple times, comes back redigested. Listen. Now compare that information with the inexplicable tendency to do the same thing with our thoughts, but not good ones. We don't ruminate on good thoughts.
[00:17:23] The missteps, the failures, the shortcomings, the who am I to or why would I have ever thought. And just like could chewing ruminators, we revisit the negative thoughts, we puke them up again and then we redigest them. Sorry to be so graphic.
[00:17:42] Chew it again, send it back down for more digestion. But listen, here's the difference. Cows are smart enough to use rumination for good.
[00:17:52] They actually get nutrients every time out of that. We don't.
[00:17:59] We just keep chewing and digesting. Unlike cows, when we mentally ruminate, we're extracting stress, we're extracting anxiety and self doubt from our thoughts. We're chewing on a lack of confidence.
[00:18:17] How do you think that affects your ability to confidently do any challenge? How do you think that affects your ability to step into some new challenge, much less to step into something new? Studies show that excessive rumination increases the risk of depression up to five times.
[00:18:37] Listen to that.
[00:18:39] Chronic rumination, it's a predictor of stress related disorders. Insomnia, heart disease, constant activation of stress hormones. Because you're.
[00:18:54] How was that? That was my stress rumination imitation.
[00:19:02] Now to be fair, there is a natural component that in many ways our brains must be wired for some of this. We don't just float around Kumbaya happy. Your brain is designed to protect you. It wants to keep you alive. So dangerous things. Your brain has certain natural reactions, obviously. And actually though the negativity bias that your brain can sometimes put out means that we naturally cling to negative situations that may have potentially caused us harm before. And sometimes your subconscious will bring that rushing into you and there's one other really important way that rumination can come up for us, pun intended. That is the things that people have told us about ourselves.
[00:19:52] Particularly damaging are those hurtful things that maybe our parents told us, our kids, our boss, our spouse.
[00:20:16] A memory of what someone told you four hours ago or four days or 40 years ago may be surfacing regularly for us. And it creates a unique combination of gnats and rumination, which is a deadly combo to confidence. I'd love to, whatever, I'd like to, whatever, but I could never do that. You know what I remember what so and so said. I remember what I remember. And the bad part is, gosh, is that really how I am? I had been working on that. I thought I had gotten better at that, but if they see me that way, then, well, gosh, I mean, I guess I just won't.
[00:20:53] That's how gnats and rumination work together.
[00:21:01] Unconscious memories. So since I've talked about, though, gnats and cows, let me illustrate one other amazing animal kingdom thing. It's actually insect butterflies.
[00:21:14] I'm not talking about the pretty ones that fly about with pretty colors. I'm talking about the ones that you feel in your stomach when there's a situation that's occurring or about to occur, or you have to do something you don't want to do. You have to step into something. You're nervous, you're scared. Those kind of butterflies, God made us this way. Did you know that? Now, again, I'm not a dairy farmer. I'm not a NAT line expert. I'm also not a physician. But again, let me tell you a little bit about those feelings in your stomach. Do you know why you get butterflies in your stomach?
[00:21:52] It's adrenaline, it's epinephrine that causes your stomach to behave in a certain way. When you perceive of a stressful or exciting situation, your brain signals the adrenal glands to release epinephrine. The hormone produces gets your body ready for rapid action. Blood flow redistributes, causes blood vessels in the digestive system to constrict. That that redirection means there's less blood in your stomach. You can feel nauseated, but you can definitely feel that it's a reminder the butterflies are shifting priorities. They're preparing you to flee or fight or perform at your best.
[00:22:46] It's a reminder that your body is wired to respond to stress, physical, emotional, by redirecting resources where they're most needed.
[00:22:55] But let me relate this once again to our thoughts. Those butterflies, when they Occur. And there's. I'm not talking about when you have to.
[00:23:03] It's the old Jerry Seinfeld line. The two things that people are most afraid of. Dying and public speaking, which means speaking at a funeral, is like the ultimate fear or something like that. Anyway. Butterflies. I had butterflies in my stomach yesterday when I spoke at Angel's funeral because I'm in a empty. I'm in a empty. I'm in a unfamiliar place. I'm not a Pentecostal. I really was not able to get up there and give that kind of message, and so I was a little nervous about that.
[00:23:39] Butterflies. Everyone feels them.
[00:23:44] Those butterflies offer you a choice of what to do next.
[00:23:49] What's actually happening is an amazing thing as you move into what I would call performance mode. Not that this is not a performance. That's not. But you understand what I mean. You've got to do something. You've got to perform.
[00:24:06] You have this God given, supernatural dose of let's do it waiting right there to tap into. But for most people, rather than recognizing that as an amazing thing that's happening in their body, they're supercharged and ready for action. Instead, they're saying, omg, I'm freaking out.
[00:24:27] I'm so nervous.
[00:24:33] I can't do this. I don't want to do this. Why do I have to do this? What is this? Why is this?
[00:24:41] Well, one amazing consideration relates to rumination and gnats. We are so conditioned to recognize that feeling as something negative. Because a lot of times when you start to feel that there may be something bad that has happened in the past, you may have had to step out into something and been sort of embarrassed. You may have had a conflict with somebody and you felt that feeling and it didn't go good. Subconsciously, again, when we feel it, our brain can say, ooh, get on guard. Something bad's coming.
[00:25:14] I'm nervous.
[00:25:17] But listen, it's the system. In other words, if we expect the worst, when we experience things like that, and we do, is that crazy? It actually is crazy. And here, I'll tell you in just a second. But here's the amazing news about the brain that God made for you. He made it for you. He made it for you. It didn't come out of a slug that morphed its way out of the ocean and somehow became your brain with 86 billion synapses. God made it for you. And here's what he did when he made it. He made it possible for you to rewire it.
[00:25:56] You can rewire it Neuroplasticity and it gets, has gotten like super popular and overplayed and the actual power of neuroplasticity, but it's a real thing that you can rewire your brain and change the way you think. You can literally and figuratively change your mind at any age.
[00:26:24] You can teach an old dog new tricks. They're just very stubborn.
[00:26:29] You can reprogram. You can create the system that you need to overcome. And the thing that makes this appropriate for a synagogue service, a religious type of teaching. Why is he doing this kind of stuff? Cause God made it and God wants you to use it because God wants to see you excel into your highest created potential. And you can't do it with a broken system.
[00:27:00] So it's very much about God and his desire for your life.
[00:27:08] Every one of these ideas, gnat and rumination and butterflies, they are choices.
[00:27:17] They are choices. We don't get to control the thoughts we have. We only get to control the reactions we have. See Victoria Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning. If you want to verify a very powerful story of that. We don't get to control the thoughts that come into our mind. We only get to choose how to respond to them. And my friends, your system for dealing with life, not. No, no, not dealing with life, excelling in life is built on your choices. Every single thing we talked about, the gnats, the rumination, all of it. The fear, the self doubt, every bit of it is program programmable. It's a system that you either allow to run wild on default, reinforcing negativity, or you take control and rewire it for confidence, for courage, for action. And the crazy part, most of us run a broken system without even questioning it.
[00:28:17] It's just the way it is. You know, I hate that phrase.
[00:28:22] It is what it is and it will be what you make it. Doggone it.
[00:28:33] How the thoughts and ideas got there sometimes is not your fault. This was something in the confidence code that I read. Your neural tracks will lay down memories in response to patterns that are created in childhood based on how your parents treated you or others perceived you.
[00:28:51] Think of it as a cement highway that can create knee jerk responses in the future. We let gnats buzz in unchecked, swatting at them but never eradicating them. I learned something. I think it was from Wesley Jones. This is going to make my message run even longer. I learned something from Wesley Jones that works with gnats. If you have gnats around you, if you put your hand above your head, they Will go to your hand and leave your face alone. I've done it multiple times now. What's ironic about that? You have to go to a higher level to let go of the gnats.
[00:29:37] I'm not making it up. Try it. If I'm wrong, blame Wesley. But it has worked for me before.
[00:29:44] It's a system. You run it on default, you reinforce the negativity. Or if you take control, listen, we chew.
[00:29:54] We let gnats buzz. We misread our own body and the potential that it presents to us. The things that God built into us that signal our ability to tackle incredible obstacles. To remind ourselves that every time we fall short we're ignoring a massive memory bank of wind.
[00:30:17] Wins in your life, not losses.
[00:30:21] But if a system can be reframed, aren't you glad that it can? He's given us the power to do that. With prayer, with intention, with dedication, with repetition, with action. You can reroute the highway. You literally lay down new roads in your brain and that changes your outlook, and that changes your life.
[00:30:43] And we should. Because here's the truth. If you let the gnats multiply, they will. If you ruminate on failure, your brain will assume failure as your identity. If you interpret every anxiety nerves as fear, you will live small. But you flip the system around, gnats becomes. No. I'm reinforcing positive automatic thoughts. I'm reinforcing positive automatic thoughts. You can't. That takes. That takes conscious awareness.
[00:31:13] Okay, I said we're being very practical. This takes conscious awareness. You can't let 11,000 subconscious thoughts run against your 40 conscious ones. You have to be conscious of what road you're walking down. There's a term in the military, it's probably all over the place, called sa. Situational awareness. Right.
[00:31:37] Wherever you are, know what's going on around you. Read the room. Know if someone strange is around. If you're in a restaurant, know where the exit doors are. This is civilian situational awareness. But guess what you need Mental essay. You gotta have situational awareness for what's happening between your ears. And when. You have that thing that said, well, I could, but I remember when. No. Nope.
[00:32:03] That's what that is. That's a subconscious program. Nope, we're rewriting this.
[00:32:08] It's a lot of work, and you don't have to do it.
[00:32:14] But don't schedule counseling with me.
[00:32:20] I'm just kidding. You can. We can talk, and then when you come, I'll tell you all this.
[00:32:27] But when you start down a thought road is This a road I really should walk down. Do I want to be on this road? I don't have to be on this road. There's another road right there, and it's actually got a lot of good stuff on it. I'm going to walk down that road. Instead of ruminating, we rehearse our wins. We think about the positive things that we've accomplished. We do this. How. How ignorant is it to rehearse our own failures and shortcomings? Think about it. But do we do it? Of course we do it.
[00:33:02] Last time I did this, that happened. Oh, I could never do that. Because this. Whatever. Ruminate all day if you want to, but do it like a cow.
[00:33:15] When you recognize yourself ruminating and creating scenarios that have not even happened yet, then I want you to do this one thing. Wherever you are. I don't care if you're, you know, visiting the Baptist church with your mother or whatever, I want you to do this.
[00:33:45] You do that enough in public, you'll stop ruminating because you'll be in a padded cell and ruminate like a cow.
[00:33:59] Cows ruminate, and they get the good stuff out of it. Get the good stuff. Man, I despise this way of thinking. This is also rumination. When someone says, me, I'm just an old, dirty, nasty sinner.
[00:34:16] Ain't nothing without him. I'm just an old, dirty, nasty sinner.
[00:34:22] Are you?
[00:34:25] You may sin, you may have sinned, you may still fall short and sin, but is that the identity you attach to yourself?
[00:34:39] I just. I think back. I got in trouble once for imitating this country voice, but Dave's in the room. I can do it. Oh, I can't do it. I can't do it. Melanie told me I can't. So listen, here it is.
[00:34:52] I think back on, you know, I think back on where he brought me from.
[00:34:57] Well, listen, maybe that's part of your problem.
[00:35:01] Maybe you should start thinking about where he's bringing you to and then walk that way.
[00:35:12] Just take a step, start walking that way and ruminate on some good stuff. Mmm.
[00:35:18] Instead of butterflies and fear, listen. Instead of. You hear what I say here on Saturday, but you do it. And I laughed because my mom gave me a little scolding, because she said, thanks a lot for the message. All week, all I've been hearing is, even if. Even if. Cause my dad is holding her accountable, and I'm sure she's holding him accountable, too. But no what ifs, no what ifs, no fear. Even if. Even if believing, taking a Moses, a nakshon a Yeshua way of thinking. You don't eliminate fear, you reframe it. That's what it is. You don't erase failure. You use it as a launchpad. You don't wait to feel confident. You act. And confidence follows. Now listen, I don't care. I could talk all day about this. All day. I read a book called the Tools by a guy named Phil Stutts. He's got a very foul mouth and he's a psychoanalyst and whatever, but he's a brilliant psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know. Anyway, the Tools. But here's something that research has shown and this is something I want you to implement. I'd like you to do the cow thing too, because I think that'll help you.
[00:36:36] But when you feel a feeling of anxiety, when you feel butterflies, do you remember what I told you was the physiological cause of that? Adrenaline, Right? Epinephrine. Do you know that the same feeling you feel when you're scared to do something is the exact same physiological kind of thing that you feel when you're getting ready to go on a two week cruise with your family or you're getting some new thing that you've been waiting to get. It's the same thing for good or bad. Here's the tool. When you feel a feeling of anxiety, when you feel this, there is something you say, you don't have to do it like real out loud for everybody, but when you feel these feelings, you say this. Bring it on, I'm excited. It sounds so stupid, I know, but bring it on. I'm excited. And if there's a real. If a real fear, then you add to that. I love fear.
[00:37:42] And I know you feel like you're having. Being hypnotized and having your mind warped here or something. But listen, I'm serious. When you feel it, it's the same kind of physiological thing. And when you tell your system that you're building. No, that's not fear, that's excitement. Bring it on. I'm excited. I love fear.
[00:38:05] Try it.
[00:38:09] I do it. And you know what? I did it yesterday when I was having to step into a situation. I've spoken for 20 years to thousands and thousands of people. But it doesn't matter. There's still that opportunity. Bring it on. I'm excited. I love fear.
[00:38:33] All right, let me wrap us up here.
[00:38:40] It's not self help in the sense that Romans talks about being transformed. Philippians talks about fixing your thoughts on what is true. Noble, right? Pure, lovely, admirable, you know what that is? Build that kind of system. God's saying, where you don't have gnats, where you don't have negative rumination. Corinthians, the most famous one, right? Take every thought captive, okay? God gave us the ability to do that. But having said this multiple times, I'll say it one more time. Having the tools won't build the house.
[00:39:13] And God's not going to build it for you. He's just not. He'll walk with you. He'll empower you. He actually already has. He will strengthen you. He won't do the work. So we make a plan to recognize these things that confront us. And when they show up, we stop doing them.
[00:39:31] We change course. We build a new system. Well, you make that sound very easy.
[00:39:38] I never said it was easy.
[00:39:40] I just said it was necessary. There's a difference.
[00:39:45] But if you think about it, it's really not that difficult. When we realize that everything about us is not actually our fault, there are many things we can blame our parents for.
[00:40:02] That's not an effective strategy. There are truly people who have affected your life. I happen to have the best parents that ever walked on the planet, so I'm of course joking with them. But there are people who have negatively affected your life, and they've left scars, they've left damage, they've done things. It's not all your fault. If your system needs rewiring, that's okay. It's not a defect.
[00:40:28] Or that you've made some really bad decisions. I'm sure of that. I know I have. Shh. Be quiet.
[00:40:37] But honestly, honestly, listen to me. You could stop today.
[00:40:44] You could stop negative behaviors today.
[00:40:48] It's your choice.
[00:40:51] Well, it's not that easy. It's your choice. Whenever you're ready to start. It doesn't mean you don't fall back. It's your choice. And the most powerful thing. What I love about this, as sort of a control freak, what I love about this is you can do it yourself.
[00:41:09] You don't need anyone else to help you do it. You can be in control of it. You can do it yourself.
[00:41:20] So I just say this confidence isn't a feeling, it's a habit. And every moment is an opportunity to program the habit that will dictate the rest of your life. If it's not naturally part of your wiring, it could be difficult. No question about it. What happens if you fail? You probably will fail because you don't win all the time.
[00:41:41] And so as much as you may be frustrated with me, for this. The email went out and said this is the conclusion of the confidence code that was a failure because we haven't talked yet about failure and you're going to fail.
[00:42:04] And failing is the number one way to lose your confidence in the short and the long term. So next week we'll conclude the Confidence Code with a look at the losses and how to live Shabbat Shalom. I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you're subscribed to our channel. Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch. Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Macon, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with Shalom Macon.
