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Episode transcript:
Chris LoCurto: There’s one thing we all have in our Root Systems that guides our thoughts, actions, and decisions. More on that coming up next.
Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
So one morning I needed coffee and I took my youngest daughter with me to the 7/11 and she was less than two. And as I went inside and carried her inside her little pj’s and everything and set her up on the counter as I grabbed the coffee pot and I grabbed the big old Styrofoam Cup and started to pour the coffee into the cup while Mickey, Michael is her name, she looks over at the little burner that the coffee pot just came off of, takes her hand and presses it right onto the burner. Folks. I literally dropped my coffee and freaked out, you know, yanked her hand off of the thing as she started to absolutely scream. And I mean she was screaming and literally within nanoseconds all these thoughts ran through my head. I am a horrible person. I’m not worthy of being a parent.
Her mother is absolutely going to kill me. I’m embarrassed on this last piece because, you know, all of these ran through my head super, super fly fast. The last spot I had was I should just take her to Mexico. That is a legit thought that went through my brain during this process. As I’m freaking out, telling myself how horrible of a person I am. Now, I didn’t get any Father of the Year awards for putting her in a place where she could put her hand on a hot plate. That was not the smartest thing on the planet. But all of the other lies I was able to work through and discover that they were lies. Obviously, I was not a horrible person who had just damaged my daughter for the rest of her life. Obviously, her mother did not kill me, so that’s a good thing.
I’m still around. Mickey did not remember this ever happening, although we joke about it, you know, 30 years later….it’s quite funny. I had to work through all these lies. You know, because for a while I still believed that I was such a horrible person for allowing that accident to happen. Once again, not the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But, I am not defined by that one moment. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to live in the lies that we tell ourselves. What we’re talking about today is going deeper into something that impacts all of our Root Systems.
So think about the visual we talked about in understanding your root system. You have your grapevines that are above the ground and down in the soil is that network of roots, that root system that is pulling all of the stuff, the minerals, all the deposits up back into the fruit that is back up above the soil. Now there’s one thing that tends to live in a lot of our soils that gets pulled up through our root system and that is the lies that we believe. Now, a lot of times we have lines that are introduced to us throughout our life where people try to convince us that we are maybe a horrible person, that we’re not worthy, and that we can never do good enough. Um, that we’re never going to be enough for somebody else…that we don’t deserve.
This is one of the ones that just slays me and that is how many people in all of our programs, it doesn’t matter what it is, feel like they don’t deserve to be in one of our programs, whether it’s next level life, next level mastermind, one of the live events, whatever it is. Every time I discover or hear that, it drives me nuts because how did that get planted? But somehow it did. Now that we’re not going to sit here and blame a whole bunch of people for lies that are in our root system. Our goal is to gain as much perspective on what’s there. A ton. Most of the lies that we tell ourselves and believe, we tell to ourselves. So lies are deposited in the soil. We also create a bunch as well. Before we dig into that, I want to tell you about one of my favorite things that we do here at The Poimen Group and then it’s all about understanding your root system to find clarity, more peace, and an incredibly stronger life.
Next-Level Life is our two-day personal discovery experience. It’s a one-on-one personalized event where we guide you through a process to help you discover your root system, get unstuck in life, and to discover what’s holding you back from freedom and peace. Imagine this, what if you could wake up every morning with a clear purpose? What would it look like to have healthier relationships with less conflict? Where would you be in a few months, a year, or five years if you had clarity, purpose, and peace? Probably a big difference from where you stand today. Now I know it’s possible because I’ve been where you are asking myself, is there more? There is and there is a better way, and it starts with Next-Level Life. Take the next step by clicking below
Now, you most likely have lies that have been deposited into the soil of your root system. How do things get into the soil? It can be from situations, it can be from people. All of these things. It’s in a lot of lies. As I said, most of the lies we actually tell ourselves, we create them ourselves. These things shape our beliefs. They shape our decisions and they absolutely shape the actions that we have from them. So here’s kind of what it looks like when lies surface. So if we take an example situation for somebody who probably doesn’t feel very good about themselves, maybe doesn’t feel worthy, maybe it doesn’t feel like they are good enough. If they get the opportunity for a promotion or a role change at work, you know, something that’s going to be putting them into a higher position, a more important role in the business, whatever that is.
Then here’s an example of what behavior in that situation is for a person who doesn’t feel good about themselves or you know, I’m not talking about your self-esteem. I’m saying you really believe that you’re not good enough. An example of behavior would be crazy anxiety, you know, feeling incredibly insecure, you know, feeling like, what would the lie or what are some potential lies behind the behavior. I can’t fail. I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy enough of this. I don’t deserve this promotion. I’m going to screw this up. If I mess up, it is going to brand me a lifelong failure. These are just some of the lies that come behind a situation like this. When we believe lies that we’re not good enough. When we believe lies that we’re a failure, then what happens is we become incredibly fearful of anything that is going to affirm the lie that we believe.
Let me say that again. We become incredibly fearful. We try to avoid anything that will affirm to us the lie that we believe so much so that many people, it will actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will self-sabotage their process. The thing is that whatever you know the situation so that it doesn’t fail when they’re not expecting it, they’re actually controlling the failure themselves, and what happens is it literally affirms to the person, see, you are a failure. See your mom. Your Dad always told you there’s no way you’re going to be good at that. You’re going to screw that up. You know your spouse or your friends told you there’s no way you can be successful at that, and instead of giving it an incredible try, instead of working our butts off at it, we self-sabotage ourselves into the process. All of this comes from the lie behind the behavior, the lies that we believe. These lies control again, they shape our beliefs, our decisions, and our actions. Getting to the truth is not necessarily the opposite of a lie.
Now this is one of the things, this is one of the most important things that we teach at the end of next level life is actually being able to battle through that crap that exists. And so our goal is to make sure that we get to the truth. So the lie of I’m going to fail, I’m going to mess this thing up. I’m not good enough. The truth to that isn’t, I’m not gonna fail. The truth of that is we have to start by discovering why am I telling myself that. Why do I believe that I am going to fail? Why am I telling myself that I’m not good enough? And the truth is, is that something that is also buried in our root system, which takes some time to discover what it is. Something is telling us that our worth comes from our success, which is always in the eyes of other people.
Our value comes from the success that is in the eyes of other people. So if we fail, it’s going to affirm that we’re horrible because we know people are going to judge the daylights out of us. That’s what we tell ourselves, right? So when we dig down inside and we go, what is the real reason that we’re telling ourselves this? What we can discover…an example of this would be that we are absolutely trying to not lose worth to other people or we’re trying to gain worth from other people. In a situation like this, again, built around our accomplishments, built around our success. If you grew up with a parent that you could never be successful for, then what you end up telling yourself is you’re never going to be good enough. You’re going to fail at things, you’re going to fail at everything. So the truth in this is not, no, you’re not gonna fail.
The truth has to become something like your “worth does not come from the opinions of others.” Your worth does not come from your success rate. Now, your worth or value to your business may absolutely be your accomplishments, right? But I want you to stop and think about this for a second. Why is somebody offering you a promotion? If your worth is that you suck and you fail at everything, so you have to get in there and go, I have the truth is I have been successful. The truth is they would not offer me this role if I was a failure. The truth is, that you have to find those truths to battle those lies. And again, almost never is it the opposite of the lie. It’s something that you have to dig in and discover. Now where do these lies come from? It’s very important that we understand that in these discussions, everything that we do here is focused on gaining a greater perspective.
Our goal is not to make any victims. Our goal is not to make any monsters every time we do Next-Level Life that’s one of the first things that we tell people. We’re not going to make you a victim. We’re not going to make anybody else a monster, but we are going to gain perspective so that we can help you heal and replace the lies with truths. So there are many times we actually have to look at situations that have happened, not to relive them, but to gain perspective, to help us to know where the lie is coming from, why the lie exists in the first place. Now, the first thing is we tell ourselves a lot of lies. When we perceive or receive things negatively. We tell ourselves lies. If we think that we’re going to fail at something, we will tell ourselves lies. If we believe people are judging us on something, we will tell ourselves lies.
If we feel like we’re not worthy, we will tell ourselves lies. There is a whole ton of negative self-talk that we can create in our own brains. And the crazy thing is there are a lot of people walking this planet that do not realize they do it. There was a study about how many negative things you tell yourself in a day, and the percentage is just too high for me to even repeat it because I just don’t want it to be true. I don’t want to believe it. Now, I don’t know how they can actually literally track the percentage, but what it does do is get you thinking about how many negative things do run through my brain in a day now. All right, I’ll just share it with you. So the stat is that you have 50 to 70,000 thoughts a day and that 80% of those are negative.
Now, I just don’t want to believe that I’m going to have a negative thoughts about that right now. I don’t believe it. I can’t imagine that that stat is true, but it sure does get me thinking about what percentage the negative thoughts run through my brain. How many negative ideas do I have? Do I think I have 80% negative thoughts in my brain? I don’t. I hope not. But I do know I have a lot. So one of the things we have to understand is how many times are we telling ourselves lies. How many times are we telling ourselves things that we have no basis for? We have no perspective on them, but we are believing them. We’ve all done that. We’ve all accused other people in our mind of judging us and we have no clue if they even are thinking about the same thing we’re thinking about.
So the first place we have to understand is that we tend to be the ones who lie to ourselves the most. Now, many people have other folks that tell them lies and believe it. So you may be somebody who has people in your life, like parents, family, teachers, mentors, not a great mentor, but you know, best friends, neighbors, coworkers, leaders. You know somebody in your life. You might have somebody who is struggling heavily with worth that tends to tell you a lie. I have for many my whole life. I’ve had people in my life that will tell me things about myself that don’t even relate to me, but they will tell me these things to try and knock me down to make themselves feel better. And in the early days, it used to just destroy me because I believed it. And it built a ton of guilt in my life.
And it wasn’t until I realized that the thing that was being said, and I totally disagreed with what was being said, but my people-pleasing personality style just received it all and you know, sucked it all in and just continued to repeat the lie in my own brain. It wasn’t until I actually worked through that stuff and discovered what I was doing and started discovering the truth. Now, little right turn here, the caveat here, right? If you are responsible for the thing that you’re being told, take responsibility. So if you walk into, I don’t know, a conversation and you’re being a jerk and somebody looks at you and goes, you’re being a jerk, take responsibility. You’re being a jerk. They may not have been the nicest in telling you, but look at you. You’re being a jerk in a situation. If you are discussing with somebody that you would like to take a promotion and they go, you know, there’s no possible way you’re going to be able to do that job.
You know, you’re not good enough for that. You know you’re going to fail. That’s the time you have to start asking yourself the question “is that true?” That is what I’m hearing. Truth. So many times there are lies that get spoken into our lives. And the problem is now here’s the crazy thing. Somebody can’t actually make you feel bad. Somebody can’t make you feel unworthy. Somebody can’t make you not be good enough. All they can do is highly suggest that you believe that you are. That’s the problem because the moment we receive it, we are. So if somebody tells you you’re not good enough to take a promotion and you believe it, you receive it, then guess what? Now you are, I think it was Henry Ford who said whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right. Whatever you believe at that moment, you’re right.
If you believe you’re not good enough, then you’re going to continue to walk forward or not walk forward at all. You continue to stand in your same spot or retreat and self-sabotage because the thing you believe is you’re not good enough. So the thing to understand is if you grew up with that person or people in your life that tell you these negative things, again, sometimes it’s expectations from parents. I can’t tell you may be the parent, you may be the parent who has unreasonable expectations of your kid. I was working with one of my team members recently about how they were feeling this pressure that they had to go and do something in their life. And when we sat down, I said, is God calling you to this and are you even built for this? Are you able to pull this off?
The interesting thing is the lie that they were telling themselves was, I’m lazy. I’m not good enough because I haven’t done this thing that other people have done. At the end of the day when they realized that if they did go do that thing, it was going to be incredible stress on their life. And they looked at it through the lens of the truth, not the lies that they were telling themselves. And nobody else had told them this. Nobody else had told them, you need to go do this. It was something that they put on themselves. Once they looked at it through the truth, they realized that is not going to be a good thing for me. It’s going to affect me. It’s going to affect my family. So, you have to be able to take a look at that and see is there is somebody, obviously you most likely are.
So, we’ve already talked about that, but is there somebody in your life, do you have parents that have bad expectations of you? Do you, are you the parent that has unreasonable expectations of your kids? Are you somebody who is always needing control? And you’ve got a great friend who keeps outshining you. So you keep knocking them down and telling them that they’re not good or they, you know, they suck or they’re prideful or whatever and it’s all because you’re struggling with something. So there’s so many different ways that people tell us lies that we believe and sometimes, you know, we’re the ones telling somebody the lie. So you have to see that, the purpose behind it always comes down to worth every single time. And you’ve heard me say over and over and over again, you cannot get quality worth from people.
It doesn’t last very long. There’s only one place to get it. That’s always consistent. And that is from God and the love of God who says you are worthy to him. He proved that with the cross. So why do people feel the need to tell us lies? Well as you come through, our doors, into our event space above the door. One of our clients made this years ago, he was a woodworker and he made this sign that says Hurt people hurt people because that’s one of the things that came out of his event as we were walking through it was helping him to see that he had some people in his life who kept hurting him because of how hurt they were. You have to understand that hurt people, hurt people over and over and over again. As I look back on my life and I see some of the situations that happened, I can actually see that a person was choosing to hurt me because of what they were experiencing.
The truth is those people are believing lies. They are believing the lies that they are telling themselves. So many people come through Next-Level Life feeling like they never measure up to their parents feeling like they’re never good enough for their parents feeling like they’re never worthy enough for their parents, only to discover that their parents felt exactly the same. A lot of the time the parent is telling the kid that they’re not good enough, that they’re not worthy enough. And so they believe those lies. Right? And again, it’s not just parents. This comes from all types of situations in your life, but this tends to be the biggest place only to find out that the parent was believing lies themselves. So these beliefs hold us back from becoming something greater, from believing in ourselves, from becoming a better leader, from taking that new role, from becoming a business owner, and from being at peace.
Fill in the blank. Take a look at the stuff that is holding you back from these lies, this broken belief system. Take a look and list out the things that are holding you back. The other thing I want you to look at. How much energy do you spend every single day telling yourself these lies? How much energy do you spend focusing on the negativity? Think of that. It’s amazing to me how much somebody can wear themselves out with negative self-talk. So if you’re tired today, ask yourself the question, how much of that tiredness is coming from the negative things you’re telling yourself? All right, we’ll be right back after you hear about greater results in your business and leadership.
All right folks, let’s talk about how we can get freedom from the lies and start believing the truths. So weekly action steps. The first thing you have to do is stop believing the lies. Yes, you have to actually fight and battle against those lies. So here’s what I want you to do now. I want you to make a list of all the lies that you are believing that you tell yourself and all the lies that you’ve been told that you’re believing. I’m not talking about lies that you were told, believed, and you haven’t believed it for 10 years. I’m talking about this stuff right now. Some of you are going, well, Chris, how am I gonna know if it’s a lie, trust me, sit down and start processing and you will discover it. This is something, again, in every next level of life as we go through this process, we say here, spend 15 minutes on this right now, and people fill up sheets because they’ve discovered so much stuff, so much negativity, so many lies.
So I want you to write down, make a list of all the lies that you believe right now, and then if they’re not coming from you if they’re coming from somebody else, I want you to put the initials by it as well so you can separate that out. What you’ll discover is by far the bulk of the lies are going to be coming from you. And something that’s good is you will also start to see patterns that develop. You might have specific people who continue to tell you the same lies over and over and over again. If you do, we have a problem. Obviously, you are going to be the one with the most, but if you start to see that, you know, hey, five of these lies keep coming from this person. My best friend, my mom, my dad, my grandmother, my, I don’t know, my, my cousin, my leader, whoever it is.
Then you can start to see that there are some patterns that have developed and this is a good idea to start putting in some very healthy boundaries. Not walls, not boundaries that people can bust through, but some healthy boundaries. The next list I want you to make is the list of why are you telling yourself this thing, right? Or you know, you may not know why somebody else is telling you and that’s perfectly fine, but at least on the ones that you’re telling yourself, write down the why. Why do I keep telling myself this? Why do I feel like a failure? Why do I feel like I’m, I’m always going to be fat? I’m never going to be able to be good enough for a boyfriend, or girlfriend. I’m never going to, whatever the thing is always get to the, I’m not smart enough.
I’m not fast enough. I’m not…whatever it is, get to that ‘why.’ Why are you telling yourself that? Write those ‘why’s’ down. Then I want you to start a new list and this is the list of truths. Write down all the truths in your life. Write them all out. Write down the truth is that God loves you, that you are important, that you’re good enough to him, and that the cross proves that, that you’re not a failure. Failure is a situation. It’s not a person. Failure is your greatest teacher, if you’re ready to learn from it, write down all the things that battle that why. If you don’t have a why, because it’s coming from somebody else, then write down the truth that battles that lie you have to battle the lies with the truths you have to spend time. Now, here’s one of the things that I have to do.
So I’ve been battling lies in my brain for many, many years. In the early days when I first started doing this, it was tough. It took a while. It took long periods of time. It might take me an hour to battle the lies with the truths, right? Until the freaking lie would go away. Nowadays doesn’t take long at all. It can be 30 seconds. It can be sub five minutes, but it doesn’t take long. But one of the things sometimes I have to do when the negative self-talk really gets strong when the lies really get strong is I have to actually shock my brain. Now some of you are going to convince yourself, oh, I don’t have to do this. Well just try it once and see what happens. So sometimes I will go knock it off, stop that. I’ll even sometimes go shut up.
And what happens is it literally stops my negative self-talk in its tracks. But that’s just the beginning because if you don’t do anything past that, they will come right back. If it’s really bad, I’ll stop it immediately. And then what I’ll do is I’ll go into, why am I telling myself this? Why am I experienced in this? What am I feeling? You know, I’ll go through all those pieces and then go ‘aha’, here’s the truth and I will go truth, truth, truth, truth. And I’ll keep saying it until the lies, the negative self-talk goes away, goes away. I’ll never forget after a break up a that I had in my life, I had some friends that invited me to a concert and immediately, immediately I knew these friends and they invited me to a concert. On the day of the concert, there were only a few hours to go, which was not normal for them.
Usually, there was, you know, they gave me a little bit of advance right when that situation happened. I remember immediately going into, you know what probably happened? They probably, you know, offered it to her and they were gonna take her and then probably something fell through. And so now I’m choice number two and I started telling myself these lies. Have you ever experienced anything like that? I started telling myself these lies, and this probably went on for, I don’t know, probably about five minutes until finally, I went ‘knock it off.’ You have absolutely no perspective. You don’t know if that’s the truth and so what if it is the truth? These are people that are friends to both of us. Knock it off. That’s stupid. If you want to go to the concert, go to the concert. But stop worrying about that and stop telling yourself that, especially when you have zero perspectives whatsoever.
That right there, stop the negative self-talk. I was able to go to the concert and have a blast at the concert, mainly because a, I wasn’t telling myself any lies anymore and because it was the Doobie brothers, so very important thing. It was a great, great concert. So do not allow the negative self-talk to keep attacking you. Now, one of the things, and I have to work this out, even with my own team members, sometimes when they’re learning, like when we get somebody comes on board, everybody on the team goes through next level life and there are times that they will be struggling with their own lies. And I will say, okay, what are you telling yourself? They’re like, oh, Chris, I’m battling. And it’s like, okay, what are you telling yourself? And they’ll be like, I’m battling and they’ll get frustrated.
I’m like, tell me right now, what are you telling yourself? I want you to say the words out loud. And they’ll stop and they’ll go, oh my gosh, I’m actually not saying anything. And that’s when I’ll say, okay, you’re not battling. You’re getting bludgeoned. So now go to the truths right now and say them over and over and over again until you win that battle. Now, the last thing to this is if you are having people that are telling you lies in your life, when you discover this, one of the things you can want to do is go attack them. That is not going to actually help. The problem isn’t that they’re telling you the lies. The problem is that they don’t understand. Even if they’re cognizant that they’re telling you a lie, they still don’t understand why. They understand the what. They don’t understand why.
Most people don’t even understand what in this situation. So don’t go crazy and don’t go beat them up. Instead, if you want, share this, you know, have the discussion with them, share this episode with them. But make sure that you are really understanding. All of us have a root system. Every single person has a root system. Honor that and understand, again, hurt people, hurt people. So somebody is trying to hurt you. Understand that doesn’t mean that you become their punching bag. It means that you actually put yourself in a healthy place, a more healthy position, and you stop that from happening. Well, folks, to learn more about how to get this junk out of your life and be the strongest person you can be, make sure you check out our Next-Level Life. It’s our two-day, one-on-one, confidential event where you discover your root system, replace your lies with truths and so, so much more. So to learn more, go to chrislocurto.com/discover and just start the process. Just get the information. Well, hopefully, this has helped you today. Thank you for joining me. I hope it has served you well. I encourage you to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast to help more people join our community. As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
