Core Stories: The Most Underrated Way to Change Your Life (Identity Shifting)

there's a saying it's not the thing it's the thing behind the thing you ever noticed that in your life it's not that you procrastinate it's the fear of it going wrong causing you to put things off it's not that you're scared of relationships it's that you're scared to get your heart freaking ripped out from you put in a doggy bag while it's still beating like that scene in Dumb and dummer an alltime American classic we call that movie a film it's not the thing it's the thing behind the thing and in this video we're talking

talking about the stories you tell I can't tell you how important this subject is for you and once you see how it's affecting you I'll talk about a film strip of your life we're also going to talk about core stories and where they come from most people are running on three four and that's it that's literally the thing behind the thing controlling your whole life and of course I'll give you a question or two of how you can fix it we're just going to get straight to It smash the like button subscribe if you're not

already here the term Li liting beliefs a lot got to fix your limiting beliefs you know it's all a mindset game man it's all what's going on up here I know you've heard that haven't you here's why that's wrong you work in three layers your thoughts are on the outside this is what we'll call beliefs if I can just believe in myself enough you know I'll take the actions to build my business or if I can just have better thoughts then I'll feel successful or content with where I am but it's not the thing it's

the thing behind the thing what's behind thoughts I'll tell you emo emotions not to be confused with how I dressed in middle school or the music selection that's still on my Spotify to this day I haven't grown out of you know this to be true take driving you ever gotten in your car when you're in a bad emotional state your thoughts are really different why is that guy going so slow he's he's so dangerous why is that person driving past me like a maniac they're so reckless your emotional state of being stressed causes your thoughts

and your actions to change see your thoughts are like files on a computer and your emotions are the folders that they are stored in so if you change your emotion what you notice is that your thinking changes as well it's not the thing it's the thing behind the thing now there's one extra layer and this is the whole video we're talking about here just take a guess what is this first layer what is it what do you think this is your core story also could be called your identity your self-image your self viw the most

important thing why does rewiring limiting beliefs not feel effective why does positive thinking feel so hard when we're in such a low Vibe it's because most people they go from layers 3 to 1 they think if I can just change my thoughts then my emotions will change my story will change and maybe sometimes that's true but the fastest way you can change your entire identity in your life is to go from the inside out go from level one to three when you change your story your emotions change and your thoughts change as well before I

get to these charts why don't we briefly just touch on what I mean by stories this is how since the dawn of humanity information has has been passed down it's literally how our brains evolve to store informations not with just like ones and zeros like a computer not with just linear thinking okay that's absolute fact and logic those are all tools we kind of developed how we developed is through passing down stories orally before written language it was passed down around a campfire big son come make warm movies tell me the last movie you watched

tell me like the factual things that happen happen probably can't but if I ask you to just summarize the plot the story of it what genuinely happened genu generally happens you can probably do it think of the Lion King think of the Matrix think of Lord of the Rings think of Harry Potter the reason those sell billions and billions of copies views and tickets is not because of the factual little scenes it's because of the overarching story and so in your life have you ever questioned the story you're telling yourself about you let's keep going

on how your brain works cuz this is very important are you getting this I hope this is making sense you're essentially right here okay now when you come out of the womb you're a blank slate I know there's parenting and kind of your environment but for the sake of this video You're a blank slate something happens related to money and you notice that like okay money then another things happens about money and you link that to the previous thing and then the next thing all in this chain till you get to your beliefs about money

now in this moment same thing in relationships something happens in middle school or childhood and you store that information you get into your next relationship you start linking that information to that person is is what we call a projection you're projecting your past experience onto that person even though they're totally different then you have a third thing maybe you got your heartbroken and now you have relationships that are either positive or you're just in fear of recrea creting what has happened to you in the past the chain of events same thing with fear same thing

happens how you view your life what is happened in your life that went wrong you link that back to core stories and lastly your self-image about you there's a Jesuit saying give me a boy till the age of seven and I'll show you the man give me a boy till the age of seven and I'll show you the man why does therapy Hound so hard on your childhood my child happened in the past why am I going back to it like why why are people so obsessed with their childhood well it's because your childhood is

this level one the first things that happened to you the age of seven of how you developed your core stories here that project outwards to your now stories this is powerful stuff speaking of stories is it cool if I share with you uh maybe we'll have time for a couple one I got from Michael Singer is one of my favorite books guys the untethered Soul um this I love this book inside and out and it has a beautiful story about core stories of where a woman gets stabbed by a giant Thorn right there it's a

thorn in her arm every time she touches it there's pain there every time she goes to lay down there's pain so what does she do well instead of taking the thorn out so she can go on with her life she Associates so much pain to that thorn that that would just be excruciating to look at it and to deal with it so she constructs her whole life around not touching this Thorn she gets a bed where she can only lay on her right side because if she rolls on her left side o that's too painful

she used to love fashion and now she doesn't wear half the dresses that cover her arms all of them have to be sleeveless so they don't touch her thorn she used to dance now she doesn't dance she avoids it because she doesn't want to touch that thorn in her eyes she constructed this whole life out of safety to avoid pain but has she really avoided pain or has she just made her life more painful because everything she does has now become about this thorn in her side her life has started to suck the fun out

of it because she's so concerned about where this Thorn is and not touching it obviously that's a story not fact but I think it really Rings true for us that these core experiences we have are the Thorns that stay with us and instead of dealing with them removing them we just let them linger there and we construct our whole life to avoid it you know I'll give you a personal story on this when I was 8 years old I was in a math class in elementary school and everyone got called up to do multiplication tables

on this big chalkboard and it was okay you do the ones so 1 * 1 is 1 1 * 2 is 2 1 time Etc threes fours fives all the way up to 12 maybe you did this yourself now I got the 11s 11 * 3 is 33 11 * 6 is to 66 I didn't know that trick it was so hard in my mind I I was trying to add up like okay 11 + 11 that's the next one it took me so long and the teacher wasn't very supportive um and everyone kind of

started laughing cuz it took me like 5 minutes and everyone else was done for the last couple minutes now as an adult now if that happened we just maybe we'd laugh it off and sit down and it wouldn't stick with us but because I had no prior experience because I was eight years old because I was so like new to everything in the world it stuck with me and for the longest time I thought I was Dumb and I was not good at math that was the thorn the story I told myself I'm just not

good at math I'm not good with numbers now I carried that belief around and constructed my whole life to avoid numbers and I got into college ended up failing some classes almost didn't graduate because of that belief I'm not good with numbers then what happened I graduated and got into the world of business and being you know an entrepreneur and having my own business and I real realized that numbers are just data and I started looking at numbers and started getting so much information from them ha if we cut this we save this and a

penny saved as a penny earned where else can I cut and I started just playing with numbers and I realized I loved numbers I realized that story wasn't true I realized that I was actually good with numbers they made sense they're binary they don't have any emotions they're just ones and zeros what's there to be afraid of so my story of math trauma which is a real term a lot of people pick up was not true and by questioning is that really true am I really bad at numbers or is that just a label I

picked up in a story that projects out to my now Story by questioning that one core story I was able to break through to the next level here's another angle on this subject with your life it CU you might be like well cark I look back on my life and that really did happen I really did get my heartbroken I really did fail at business and lose a ton of money I really did have something terrible happen in my life this isn't just a madeup Thorn it's a real thorn that I have and I'm not

here to tell you to Discount all the trauma or the pain that has happened in your life and write it off and just think positive I don't think that's healthy I think that can actually suppress and repress things down deeper we're not talking living Lulu land here okay this is where the film strip comes in where here's you in the past and all these are like scenes in a movie that build and build and build till you get to you in the current moments you now psychologist will say say there's two primary types of stories

you can tell yourself about your life the first is how most people view it this is a contamination story where you know when I was 27 years old and that one screwed me over and my life has never been the same thanks to that guy I had such a good thing and I lost it and I messed it up and I threw it all away I made a bad decision in my teens and I'm now a bad person forever and I have to live with that that is a contamination story okay and your life won't

get any better if you're telling how your life changed because of one event one scene in the movie and it soured the whole thing up until now I can tell you what the next movie strip will look like and it's not going to be very good but then there's a second type of story and this is a Redemption story some people call this a commitment story something bad happens and you used it to grow and redeem yourself and now you can build from that and totally redeem yourself isn't that the kind of story We Love

hearing we love seeing that we love seeing growth and people publicly change their opinions and admit fault when they were wrong see a commitment story is when you change the meaning that's the million-dollar question what does this mean there's no better story on this than one you're probably familiar with but it's like an the most extreme example of this we can have is Victor frankl's man search for meaning it was written by Victor Frankle who was a psychologist who was in uh ALS schwitz you know one of the Holocaust camps talk about the worst thing

that can happen to anyone and he saw people who lost their meaning and they literally died inside and they lost their will to live he was able to create so much meaning from negative events I'm going to make it through this because I want to write a book and make sure it never happens to anyone ever again now I'm not saying and you can do it too and that's easy to be fully honest I don't know how many of us could find that level of meaning in such hell there's someone with literally hell on Earth

finding such strong meaning in the story he was going to tell in the vision of his future here that he didn't let it break him talk about the epitome of meaning making willpower and grit talk about perspective you know the way we use trauma today is like it was so traumatic like my Uber Eats order took an extra 20 minutes and now I I like don't want to order Uber Eats anymore Victor Frankle taught it's not what happens to you it's what you do with it that's what stoicism teach that's what Buddha teaches that's what

all core philosophies at their core teach is that you are always in control of not what happens to you but your response to it you are 100% responsible responseable the ability to respond to whatever happens and that 100% responsibility lies in the stories you tell yourself about where things went wrong about what's going to come next you can react and live in a reactive state and that's the easiest thing to do just reacting to things you know someone cuts you off in traffic what do you do you flip them the bird you speed up you

try and get even that's reacting the hardest thing to do is respond someone cuts me off in traffic maybe they're in a rush my friend just had a kid and that was the story okay they literally were like on the way to the hospital and he had to pull over cuz his wife was in labor in the back seat he catches the baby in his hands and delivers their kids if you had seen him going 90 M hour driving like a maniac you would be like what screw that person what is he doing he's drunk

and it's only 9:00 a.m. dude chill but if you respond you're able to change the meaning and have a more charitable response to whatever is happening here's something that's very inspiring I find a lot of uh inspiration from the concept of neuroplasticity with your mind so your neurons literally fire and wire together uh that's hebb's law neurons up fire together wire together and get habituated just like you have habits in the morning you know you wake up and maybe you grab your phone first thing that's a habit um or you go make coffee first thing

in the morning that's a habit and you know this people are obsessed with habit changing because it changes their life but at first changing the Habit is really hard why is that hard it's because your neurons have literally linked faster connections and they literally formed together this is actually an image right here of neurons connecting so when when you're learning information about thing a and thing B and you make a connection of how they're related your neurons are like little spider webs and your brain is the spider weaving them together and they connect that is

what learning is it's forming those connections and sometimes learning is breaking those connections that aren't true so neuroplasticity you can form these new connections by just going back and changing the meaning maybe my next growth isn't learning something new it can be but often times it's unlearning things that aren't true true and things that aren't true about myself or where things went wrong or the story I'm telling myself and then you can rewire and create new stories and new identities that's how it happens there's also where humility comes in this might be a weird turn

in the video but I I want to throw this in here because it's important some people's stories are inferiority oh I'm less than others or I'm too young or I'm not as talented that's very common that's like low self-esteem some people's stories are of superiority I'm better than them I'm chosen I'm special I'm above people or they look at what they have and they use that as evidence of why they're better and those stories can hold you back as much as the inferior inferiority stories let me tell you they can shut you off from otherwise

good relationships they can close you to experiences that you think are beneath you they can keep you in this confirmation bias of why you're right and there's no growth and it makes you stagnant man there's a ton of growth in humility and that is a lesson I've learned this year more than any other not trying to be better than others you know not trying to pursue status at all costs understanding that we all have the same worth as humans and that your money or your status doesn't Elevate you or make you better than people it

means you're further ahead in a game but it doesn't mean you as a person are chosen I find this in the spiritual Community you know um it's not without flaws in the self-improvement community it's not without flaws some people use inner work as a superiority Flex well once you start doing the inner work that I've done you're just not as spiritually evolved as me the irony in that is that is from a place of superiority and ego story of why I'm better than others cuz I'm chosen the universe speaks through me and not other people

now you're probably thinking well Clark give me the coffee shop exercise like what do I need to take my journal to a coffee shop in journal on to really apply this and here I'll give you I'll simplify the entire inner work in one question that you can ask I can't because whatever it is I can't because if you want a juicy nugget to dive into and do some inner work you ask yourself that question I can't make money because and you'll find the story level one I can't find love or get in a relationship or

trust people because and you'll find maybe three two maybe one I can't get myself to stop procrastinating because often times a core story there is fear-based I need to uphold an image I'm scared of rejection I don't want it to go wrong I don't want to admit that I'm not as far ahead as I thought I was going to be I can't because if you got the coones to sit down and ask that question I promise you your next level of growth is going to unlock and all of this is fear-based and what you find

about fear is that most of it is not true fear is just a negative visualization that's it um it's just seeing what could happen and assuming that it's going to go wrong what's so funny about fear is that nine out of 10 times maybe 99 times out of a 100 your fear doesn't come true and you don't even remember the times where you were afraid of something and it didn't go that way you don't like give yourself credit for that you just kind of ignore it and then you move on to the next fear and

the next fear and the next fear I can't because blank realize that 99% of the time those fears actually never happen and this takes a lot of self-awareness this takes a lot of guts to ask cuz it's painful to realize dude I've been telling myself a contamination story for like a decade 5 years oh man so let's recap what we learned I hope this was useful if it was useful let me know in the comments and uh give me your biggest takeaway there's two types of story there's commitment and contamination stories and most people are

telling themselves the first your stories are at the core of your emotions and your thoughts you need to go from levels 1 2 and three not 3 2 1 you don't change your thoughts so you can have better emotions so you can tell yourself better stories it's much more effective and efficient and all inner work gets to story changing so you feel different so you think different remember that your thoughts are files and your emotions are like the folders they're stored in so when you change the folder the files can change as well you can

delete them and then they're gone or you can create new ones and understand that you have core stories most people are running on four main categories money love fear and their self image and if you want to see where you are give me a boy till the age of seven and I'll show you the man as the saying goes It's more effective to not just go after your now but to do inner work which is what this is called and trace it back to where you picked up these sort are they really true fact check

them just like I did with my math story just like the woman did in Michael singer's book The untethered soul with the thorn making sure your whole life isn't just a construction to avoid pain and that my friend is one of the most important videos we can talk about hope this was useful let me know love you see you in the next one stop settling start living see you hey guys oh big golfs huh all right well see you later