We all make decisions based off of our influences, past or fears. There has to be a reason for why we look at life through our own personal lens and a way for us to break the patterns, see the reasons and work for the change we desire.
Today, I dig a little deeper in the soil of the Root System and how it affects our lifestyle and business.
For full transcript, continue reading:
Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Today we are talking about understanding your root system. Now, if you’ve been listening to me for any decent amount of time, you’ve probably heard me talk about your root system at a time or two. But today I wanted to kind of really explain this out. We have a ton of new folks to us and uh, so I think it really helps for you to understand one of the big pieces that we talk about here, especially in Next Level Life, but we talk about it in all the business stuff as well. Um, so kind of understanding what I mean when I’m talking about your root system and what we mean when we’re talking about understanding that and how that impacts you affects you, uh, how it holds you back, how it shapes, uh, how you see the world. Now. Everybody has a lens of how they see the world and it determines how you live every single day. It determines your thoughts and it determines your decisions. Now we have to ask the question, where did this lens come from? Because some of it we adopted voluntarily and some of it was given to us. Your decision-making and your life in my estimation is the sum of what has happened in your past and what you’ve allowed to influence you. Let me say that again. When it comes to how you make decisions, I believe your decision-making is directly based on what has happened in your past and what you’ve allowed to influence. You think about it. Is there a single decision that you can think of that’s not based on either something that’s happened in your past or something that’s influenced you? I asked this, I think it was last year at the Next Level Leadership Live Event, and like everybody like I’s not even falling for that one because seriously, what would the answer be?
Well, Chris, yesterday I ate a burger for the first time. Really? Why’d you do that? Because I’d never had one before. Okay, so not having had one was a decision or part of the decision to have one. Right. Cried every single decision that you think of is going to be based on what’s happened in your past or something or something that you’ve allowed or someone to influence you. Even bad decisions. Now, I don’t believe that people generally wake up and decide, Hey, I want to have a drug addiction, or, Hey, I want to, you know, be a control freak that can’t relax, or, Hey, I want to be abusive. I believe that those are things that happen because of situations. I believe those are things that happen because they’ve been allowed into us. Our decision-making comes from what we call the Root System and it creates what we call, Surface Level Responses.
So like, addiction or like control because of things that have either happened or things that you don’t understand or things that you don’t know how to fix or can’t fix or whatever. That creates what we call these Surface Level Responses. Control would be one of those things. Addiction would be one of those things, those things that we don’t know what to do. So this is how we act now as we go through this. Please understand the one of the core things we say when we start doing a Next Level Life is in this process we make no victims and we make no monsters. That’s not our goal. Our goal is perspective. Our goal is understanding. And if we do not understand this, then we continue to repeat and perpetuate the same crap over and over and over again. So what you’re not going to hear me say is, Oh look, you’re a poor victim,
That’s why you abused somebody. Nope, that is not what I’m saying. But understanding why people make decisions the way they do is key. If you’re going to fix it, if you’re going to change it, if you’re going to do something different. Now, if you’ve never heard me talk about Surface Level Responses or Root Systems, then you’re about to find out and it’s going to provide you with some great clarity. So let’s start with your root system. So to do this, I want to kind of talk about regular root systems. A root from like a vineyard. So imagine that you own a vineyard in your backyard. So there are some things that you need to know about that grapevine. The first thing is there’s what you see on the surface. You see, um, the, the obviously the soil you see maybe, um, some weeds are growing or you see all of those things on top that really only exist because of what’s happening below, right?
The Why in the Roots:
There’s a bunch of stuff that’s happening on the surface that if you just took it for what it was, then it would be confusing. I mean, what is this? How does it even exist? Why is it even here? But below the surface is a network of roots. And normally when we think of roots, we just think of like, you know, a couple of different roots off of a, a plant or something like that. But there is an amazing number of teeny tiny roots that are coming off the main root of that vine. And the purpose of those, that network is that it is pulling up nutrients from the environment that it’s planted in. So what we see above the ground is what’s being produced by what’s feeding the plant below. So you have this network of roots going out and pulling in nutrients that are pulling in minerals, that are pulling in water, that are pulling all this, all of this stuff up into the root system itself and depositing it into what’s above, the fruit.
Uh, we have the leaves that are happening up top that are pulling in, uh, you know, photosynthesis that is pulling in, you know, foods from carbon dioxide and water and all that kind of fun stuff that’s, that’s helping to create, um, you know, in generate oxygen and all kinds of stuff that’s happening inside of these plants. Right? So what’s happening down below, if, if we don’t have the root system allowing stuff in, then everything above doesn’t exist. It will not happen. It will not grow; what’s allowed into the root system. So this is the important part of understanding what’s in your soil. What’s allowed into the root system directly influences the fruit that’s created above ground. Your root system is about understanding what’s in your soil and what influence, what nutrients and information you’re pulling up that’s governing your actions, your thoughts, who you are, how you base your decision, and how you base your decision-making process.
Once you understand that you can continue to cultivate the good and stop feeding the bad, what’s holding you back and causing you pain and frustration and your relationships, your work, your life, you can stop feeding that stuff if you understand what you’re allowing in, if you understand how you’ve been influenced, why you’ve been influenced, how it’s created, these surface-level responses in the process. So what we tend to do in life is focus most on the fruit. You know, the stuff that we see above ground. If we see something is wrong, if we see that somebody has a problem with control, while you just have a control problem, you need to deal with your control. If we see somebody has an addiction, uh, if we see somebody is abusive, uh, mad, angry, whatever that is, then what we do is we try and help them to cope or we try and help them to numb from, or we take it on ourselves and if we’re struggling with something and experiencing something negative in our lives, we might numb from that. We might try and, you know, drink our way out of feeling what we’re feeling or thinking the thoughts that we think or we might try and drown out our thoughts with activity and productivity or, you know, whatever the situation is. We may try to control people so that we feel better about ourselves or we feel, uh, you know, more powerful. We might be submissive thinking that it is our responsibility to make everybody else around us happy. So here are just some examples of Surface Level Responses and I’m just going to give you a handful. We actually have a large list that we worked through, but think of things like:
- anxiety and insecurity
- guilt and fear
- control and anger
- anger and pride
- shame and being critical
- feeling not good enough and jealousy
- people pleasing and defensiveness
- selfishness and perfectionism
- codependency and feeling unworthy.
This is just a small sample of surface-level responses. The thing is, is that surface-level responses are what we call the what. So have you ever thought about it this way? If you’re married or you know, if you’ve ever been with other people, family members, parents, you know, whatever. Have you ever told your spouse, friend, or whoever over and over again what their problem is? Have you ever seen somebody that keeps struggling with the, Oh, I’ve told them a thousand times. I told them that a thousand times. Or if you had somebody tell you over and over and over again, the thing that you’re struggling with. So here’s my question. Did it actually change anything? Most likely not. Why? Because they told you the what. The crazy thing is when somebody tells an addict, “Hey, uh, you know, you’re, you’re killing yourself with the drugs and you’re killing your family and you’re, you know, you’re destroying everything.”
They’re actually very aware of that. They actually know that part. They know what. That’s not the problem. The problem is we know we don’t want to make bad decisions. We know we don’t want to have destructive habits, but we don’t know why we do what we do. We don’t understand why we continue to make that decision. People think it’s just as simple as, well, I’m, I’m just deciding to do drugs today. I’m just deciding to drink myself until I pass out. I’m just deciding to be controlling. I’m just deciding that, uh, you know, I can’t put up healthy boundaries in my life. I’m just gonna allow people to walk all over me. It’s so much deeper than that. Understanding your root system is where you find freedom and healing. When you understand how you got to making the surface-level responses as decisions in your life, why you have those surface-level responses, and why they exist, then you can change doing them.
Understanding how you make those surface-level response decisions and why you make them is where you find freedom and healing. Understanding how you got there. Then you can make different decisions. Then you can choose not to do them. It’s the basis of Next Level Life. When people understand their root system, they go, Whoa. They look at it. They go, Oh my gosh. Now that totally makes sense why I do this now. That makes sense. Why do I keep having this situation or this struggle or this? This totally makes sense. Why can’t put healthy boundaries on this totally makes sense. Why do I feel like I have to control my spouse or my kids or outcomes? So that is what our goal today is to help you to have a greater understanding. So we’re going to talk more about that right after this
Next Level 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.
Now, if you’re struggling with this contentment, regret, or not feeling good enough, which most of you are, if you’re filled with anxiety or your relationships are lacking, don’t keep going through the same motions every single day.
The Soil of Your Roots
So we’re talking about Surface Level Responses and what’s in our Root System and what makes it up. So here’s the thing I want you to understand. When it comes to your root system, I want you to picture the soil of your roots. So you as a person, have these roots that are digging down into the soil. So we’ve talked about having this, this vine in your backyard. I want you to now consider yourself being that vine, right? The deposits that we receive from parents, siblings, friends, teachers, leaders, and so on. Those are what drive our actions and our decisions. Those are what impact us. Those are, those are, that’s the influence that we’ve experienced in life. Those are the things that we’ve allowed into our root system. So think about it that way. As we have been trained as kids. Now again, you know, we, one of the things we say is we, we do not allow victim mentality, but as kids, you are heavily trained by who? Your family, your parents, your grandparents, the people around you, right?
Those that have the greatest influence in your life. So if you have an incredibly controlling mom and a very submissive father, is it surprising that you struggle with dad because he didn’t seem to have a backbone and you struggle with mom because she always seemed, you know, dominant and mad, angry, or you can never do right by her, the training that we receive by that specific situation shapes how we make decisions in life. Now, some of these are very conscious and some of them are not, right? A lot of times what you might see as it, let’s say you had a very controlling mom, what you may see is, is that you may become incredibly controlling yourself because of a frustration that you feel like you could never do anything. Right. And so therefore you try and control every outcome because you couldn’t make one person happy.
So now you’re going to try and control every outcome so that you’re not a failure. You may have felt like a failure to that parent. And so now we need to make sure I don’t feel like a failure anywhere else. And so instead I’m probably going to try and treat people as though they are failures so that I’m not looking at myself as being a failure. Right? So some stuff is conscious, some of it is we understand what we’re doing, not the why, but we can see that we are choosing a bad decision, bad control decisions, or we’re choosing to set people’s reality or we’re choosing to try and control outcomes so that we don’t feel out of control. Some of these decisions are not conscious at all. Like, the funny thing is, is that very few people who believe that it is their responsibility to make other people happy and that it is their responsibility that others are happy.
Um, very few of those folks actually recognize that that’s exactly what they’re dealing with. Very few of them see that they have really bad boundaries. They don’t have any healthy boundaries in life or very few, right? Some of those decisions aren’t conscious at all. They don’t recognize that because what they believe, the conscious decision is, it is my, the lie that they tell themselves, “It is my responsibility to make this person happy”. Folks, here’s something I want you to recognize and understand. What is happiness? Happiness is, get ready for it. A choice. You can’t make somebody happy. “Oh, but I believe that I do. You know, whenever I come around and I’m, you know, I’m a happy person and so I believe that I can make somebody happy because I’m choosing to be happy today”. Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. You can influence. You can highly suggest that they be happy, but here’s the deal:
Every single time the other person must choose to be happy. So, many times we see folks that are focusing on, you know, this subconscious surface-level response. They don’t know why they’re doing it. If I can’t make you happy today, then guess what? If I believe that I did not make you happy and I believe it is my responsibility, then I am horrible. I’m a bad person. I am terrible. The lies that we believe, are lies that tend to be well deposited into our soil, but we constantly pull them up into ourselves and it becomes a belief system that we have. You might have a parent that constantly, um, told you through comments of the things that you do wrong. Like, Hey, you didn’t do this. Hey, this is a problem over here. Hey, you broke my yoke. Hey, you didn’t cook the pasta well enough.
If you have somebody who constantly makes comments and the comments are directed or implying that you’re a failure, then guess what you believe? You’re a failure. The lie that you tell yourself is, I can never do anything right. I can never please this person. I fail all the time at X, whatever, you know, whatever this thing is. And so those influences create these lies and the inference is you failed. You’re a problem, you’re not good enough. Those lies get deposited into our soil and we constantly pull them up into our fruit. They constantly become our belief system, good or bad, good or bad. So if you get really good deposits, if somebody is constantly telling you, and now here’s the opposite. The opposite of that is going too far. Oh my gosh, you’re the most amazing person. Look at how great you are. Oh, you’re such a great leader.
Oh, you’re so phenomenal. Oh my gosh, you’re the best. Oh, you just saved me there. The opposite is you know too much, right? That horrible influence of overdoing it, both of those are coming from people who struggle with insecurity. If somebody tries to insinuate that you’re a horrible person through constantly making comments about you not doing something well and that you’re a failure, it’s because they are out of control. It’s because they are insecure, right? If somebody is constantly blowing sunshine up your skirt, which is a comment that we have around here all the time, look at how absolutely amazing you are. You’re the greatest thing on the planet. Then guess what? You’re having somebody who is really setting your reality well beyond unnecessary and blowing up your ego because they are insecure. So I would consider both of those bad, right? We think the one is really good, but the compliments, but that’s not good.
What does good look like? Quality compliments. Compliments of character. If you’re a parent who compliments your child’s character, when they do the right things and you give them consequences, good or bad, when they make choices, then Hey, guess what you’re going to be instilling in them? Guess what you’re going to be training them with? If I make smart decisions, I’m smart. That’s good. That’s a good thing. If I make bad decisions, I get consequences, which means that was bad. Here’s my character. One of the things, uh, you know, I have had Meg Meeker on the show, uh, last year I believe it was. And Meg and I were talking, I don’t know, a long time ago, a couple of years ago. And so one of the things that I used to do was, even though I would teach adults not to do this with other adults, I would do this with kids.
“Oh, you’re so cute. Look at how adorable you are. Oh, you’re, you’re so precious in your little ballet outfit. Oh, look at your little vest and tie. You’re so handsome”. And I would always compliment how they looked and it was made years ago, and I don’t remember what she said, but something just smacked me upside the head. And it’s like dude, you’re setting the reality of little ones that the important thing is how they look. And she’s like, yeah, don’t do that. Compliment their character. If you want them to focus on and have good deposits, compliment the character that you want, not how they look. Because if you constantly compliment how they look, then don’t be surprised that they’re on Instagram trying to get, you know, a hundred people to tell them that they look sexy or they look attractive or their outfit is great because what, what happens is by training them, what they hear is my worth comes from how I look.
So instead, good deposits actually aren’t on as I’m not saying that you can’t tell somebody they look handsome or attractive. What I’m saying is, is compliment the character that you want to see in your kids. Compliment the character that you want to see in your team members. Compliment the character you want to see in your leaders. Make that be the training that, which is good and quality, that helps them to realize that those are good quality things. If all you do is put negative stuff, negative deposits into their root system, then guess what? That’s going to keep ending up in the fruit. So take a look at some examples of surface-level responses that come from, our root system. Uh, you know, I listed a handful up there. Let’s take a look at real life. You know, things that we see in our families, uh, our friends, and ourselves when it comes to surface-level responses.
Misunderstood Responses: Abuse and Addiction.
Now, we’re going to get into some tough stuff here, right? Two very misunderstood surface-level responses are addiction and abuse. Now you are not about to hear me give excuses. If you’ve been hurt by people that have been abusive if you’ve been hurt by people with addictions, you are not going to hear here’s excuses and this is why they get to be victims. If you hear that in anything I say, you’re not listening. So I’m going to be honest and say that I have seen just about every surface-level response and form of abuse in Next Level Life. We have had folks that have come in that have been, that have had some of the worst physical abuse. I mean just, you know, break your heart, physical abuse. We have had folks, women, and men that have been molested. Uh, we have had lots of women that have been raped, that have come through.
We have seen the worst emotional abuse. We’ve seen pretty much all of it. Uh, we’ve helped folks to overcome a ton of abuse. I, I don’t know of anybody who’s come through that hasn’t had a phenomenal change in their lives and, and, uh, recovery from abuse that they’ve experienced in their past. Now there are multiple forms of abuse. And I’m gonna talk about that in a second. But first I want to start with addiction. Addiction is one of those missed, misunderstood things because we so look at addiction as nothing but a choice. So often we look at people and go, there is no reason why you should be doing this thing. And by the way, addiction comes in many forms as well. Addiction could be drugs, alcohol, could be substance abuse. It could be controlled. It could be setting people’s reality. It could be, uh, it could, there are so many different forms that people can be addicted. But when we talk about what we usually think of is substance abuse. So as we talk about that, what is addiction? Addiction is numbing. Addiction is trying to cope with or numb from something that you’re experiencing. Something that you don’t understand, something that you’re struggling with.
Most people don’t want to be drug addicts. Most people don’t want to numb what substance. Most people don’t wake up and go, I think today’s going to suck, so, Hey, let me take a hit of cocaine. Let me smoke cigarettes, let me drink, let me do whatever. Most people don’t want the addiction. I don’t know of anybody who just looks at drinking and says, Man, I cannot wait until I just drink so much that I have to have alcohol. I don’t know anybody who does that. How do we get into addiction instead? Most people face something and experience something and they’ve probably got a history in their past of seeing somebody else numbing from the problem. Right? If we see, if we see a parent come home after a tough and put back a six-pack of beer and really not engage with the world, then something we understand is, you know, they come in complaining, but they’re man, they’re fine after a few beers, then they’re done.
Or they get worse than what we understand is there’s an effect that happens. We see that having a bad day deserves alcohol, right? How many times do you see somebody get drawn into drug addiction and the reason why they’re drawn into the drug addiction is because this thing is going to help you? This drug is going to help you this, you know, nobody looks at drugs and goes, Oh, that’s just a totally fun party that I will absolutely be in 100% control of myself. Otherwise, why would you do it? Right? If you’re healthy and you know you’re not struggling with something in life. You’re not struggling with problems. You’re not struggling with parents that you can’t deal with. You’re not struggling with a bad situation at work. You’re not struggling with a spouse or you know, a boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, that you’re having problems with.
If you’re not struggling with those things, why do drugs? What part of you looks at drugs and says, that’s really smart? There isn’t one. There’s a part of you that says, I need, I desire, I want to not feel the way I do right now and my understanding is that thing is going to help me. What we tend to believe is that people just choose to do drugs, that people just want to do drugs. That people just desire to do drugs and the truth is that’s not how they get started. When they do, when they get going on it, then the addiction takes over. It helps me. I feel better. I don’t have to have those thoughts anymore. I don’t have to experience that thing anymore. So I don’t want to get too heavily far into this, but what I want you to understand is the misconception that is that that surface-level response is nothing but pure choice.
What people think is that addiction is a pure choice of, “Hey, I just want to do this” not realizing that it’s actually more of a choice of, “Hey, how do I stop feeling this way? How do I stop thinking this way?”If you’re, if you’re struggling with the addiction of controlling people, why? Because you feel out of control. The key is not the surface-level response itself. The why is what matters. Why do I continue to make this decision? Why do I continue to feel like I have to numb? Why do I keep choosing to put something in me that I know is unhealthy and everybody tells me it’s unhealthy, but I can’t seem to stop? Why can’t I stop though? What is addiction? The why comes from the training, the teaching, the influence, the effects, the rejection, and the surface-level responses that somebody else has that has impacted the person who’s choosing the bad, unhealthy decision-making.
People don’t change just because they know what. Hey, you’re doing something stupid. You should stop it. Okay, I’m done. They don’t change just because they know what they need to know, the why. They need to understand where it comes from. Now, as I teach this, here’s what I want you to understand. It usually takes hours and hours and hours for somebody to get to a place of understanding this on their own personal root system. So in a, you know, half hour or so podcast, it’s going to be a little bit difficult to process, uh, and get to this place. It’s, it’s virtually impossible. But I still want you to be processing this afterward. I still want you to be thinking on this. We, it is great to see folks. We, taught a lot on Root System at the Next Level Leadership Live Event last year. Uh, it’s not on this next one coming up, but we did on the last one.
And folks that have come through Next Level Life afterward, they were able to, they had a good chunk of this and they could see pieces of it and could recognize that they needed to understand more. They really got some good information and could see parts of it. But then it was great to be able to spend hours digging into their own personal, root system and helping them to see where so much of this stuff was coming from. So the second misunderstood surface-level response is abuse. Now a lot of people don’t understand that they’re being abused and or that they are abusive. Um, and that’s because a lot of times it’s not something that seems out of the norm. Um, somebody who has become a friend of mine who was a client, uh, back in the day, struggled with a horrid abuse from a stepdad.
And as we walked through his Next Level Life and I was explaining to him, Hey man, you do see that this was abuse. He goes, it was just normal. That was just every day. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, I want to go crack this guy over the head. How do you not see this? And it just wasn’t obvious decades later because it was normal. And by the way, it’s not just physical abuse folks. Uh, probably most of the abuse that we see in Next Level Life, while we’ve seen a lot of physical abuse and sexual abuse, the biggest amount that we see is mental and emotional. We help people all the time that have gone through some pretty crappy, uh, mental or emotional abuse constantly being told how horrible, terrible, disgusting. You know, we’ve, we’ve seen it all. We have folks that come through that have never experienced anything like this that have fantastic lives, but there’s a lot of folks that we’ve also helped that have come from a bunch of junk, right?
The key is to see the signs of abuse and whenever you see that somebody is trying to take control from another person, which again, except for physical control, I can’t make you do anything. I can only highly suggest that you do it. The problem is that if I see somebody that I can highly suggest and they’re going to respond that I’m going to do it. Whenever you see the control being taken, that’s when you can be pretty darn certain that there are some issues when it comes to abuse. Now, the part that is so greatly misunderstood is that abusers don’t just decide to abuse. Somebody who is an abuser and again does not hear, “Oh, this is just an excuse for them and their victims”. Somebody who is an abuser has been abused. Somebody- somewhere or another, somebody who is trying to take control from somebody else, even if it’s not in the same way, has had control ripped from them.
And it could, by the way, it could be multiple generations. There are some of you folks out there that know you came from abusive backgrounds and you know that it’s not just you and your parents, it’s their parents as well, that you, you can see back that there are issues of abuse that have happened. As we talk about this and Next Level Life. One of the things we talk about is what were your parents like when, when they were bringing you up, right? What were their upbringings like? What was it like for them as kids? And usually, your abuse will show up, uh, in that time. If we see abuse with the person sitting in the chair, then you know, from a parent or parents, then usually what we will find is abuse that goes behind that. And again, what I want to say is, is that when I say abuse, uh, it could be so many different forms.
The concept is that ripping of control that taking control from somebody. The bad thing is that it is a bad cycle that gets passed down from generation to generation until somebody decides to break the pattern. The problem there is when, when it comes to surface-level responses, if I struggle in an area and I solve the area by coping or numbing, then there’s a really good chance that that problem is going to show up somewhere else. In other words, if you know, if I solve it a drinking problem because I’m no longer drinking, but I didn’t solve why I was having the drinking problems in the first place, then it’s going to pop up somewhere else. The numbing, the coping will pop up somewhere else. I don’t want you to cope. I don’t want you to numb. I want you to get well beyond the surface, down into the place of understanding why it exists so you can make different decisions, better decisions, so you can actually have healing from that and have a breakthrough from that. So what we tend to see is somebody trying to solve it by, Hey, I had really bad parents or had abusive parents and so they do what we call the pendulum swing where the parent was unhealthy and so they swing to the opposite. I’m not going to be anything like them, right? I’m not going to be controlled by what they did and they swing all the way over to the other side and do the same thing just from a different angle. So if somebody was really heavily controlled as a kid and you know, treated badly or are told that they were terrible or, or it was insinuated that they can never do anything right, then they swing all the way over to the other side and enable the daylights out of their kid. So their kid can never do anything wrong.
They don’t have any chores, they don’t have any responsibilities, and there’s no discipline. And then they raise an incredibly entitled child health would be in the middle. But unfortunately what we do is we don’t want to be like the parent that we didn’t like, that was so abusive or whatever. And so we go do the same thing just from a different direction and we have no clue that we’re perpetuating what’s coming from our parents. It’s going to show up again just in a different way. So parents, guess what, there’s a lot of stuff that you received in your root system as a kid that you’re perpetuating into your kids. There are a lot of crazy things, that we have not stopped the cycle of because we’re just doing it from a different direction and convincing ourselves that we’re not. There is a ton of folks that are in my generation, Gen X that have created really entitled kids because they came from, you know, bad parenting before them tough parenting or abusive parenting.
And so they didn’t want to put anything in place that, you know, made them look like a bad parent to their kids. So the kids grow up without any guardrails. They grow up without any discipline, they grow up without being able to make solid decisions. And so there’s a ton of entitled kids running around and people going, well, I don’t know why. Well, it’s because, um, their parents didn’t do it in a healthy way, so they went and did it from the opposite direction and created the same type of problem, right? The thing is to find that healthy center, you’ve got to find what health looks like and to get there, you’ve got to understand why you’re making decisions the way you do. There are many folks that come through that had bad parents that we helped them to see, Hey, listen, you can make better decisions than training your kids to be entitled. “My kid won’t do this. My kid won’t do that”. Well, what are you doing to fix that? While I’m not going to be like my parent. Okay, so they get no discipline whatsoever. They get no course correction. They don’t have choices and consequences. Then we can’t be surprised that they’re growing up and they have no respect for you or anybody else, right? It’s about finding that health center. Now all of these things make up who you are, how you make your decisions, all the influences, whether it be family, friends, or leadership, it doesn’t matter what it is. All of these things make up your decision-making process. When you understand where they come from, then you can make better decisions. How does this affect your business or your leadership? Well, we bring our root system with us everywhere we go. That’s why it’s vitally important for you to understand you’re not just affecting, you know, Strat Plan gets done. I’ve had one and I’ll never do it again. I had one Strat Plan where the owner of the business would not go through Next Level Life and it was terrible. Everybody was afraid of him. Nobody would speak up, nobody would do anything, and I’m like, Nope, no more. Everybody who goes through Strat Plan, the leader, the owner, and whoever the energy is for the company has to go through Next Level Life. Why? Because they bring them, and there’s incredibly happy. They usually end up sending all of their whole leadership team through afterward. They’re incredibly happy to understand the things that they’re bringing to work every day and how much it’s affecting the whole team and how much it’s affecting their whole business. So that’s why you have to understand you’re bringing that with you everywhere you go.
Now, here’s the opposite side. Even if you had good parents, even if you had the best parents with the best intentions, they might do something that came from their parents that causes a bad belief system. So like unintentionally influencing a child to believe that they can do no wrong, that they are the best in everything, that they are phenomenal, that they are better than. Uh, one of my, one of my buddies, uh, grew up believing that he was the best. He couldn’t do anything wrong. He was the best kid, all this stuff. He was homeschooled for the longest time and then when he went to public school, he found out he was mediocre and then spent a lot of time trying to get back to being this best thing that he was constantly told about and couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get there and seeking man’s approval like crazy.
Right? Why? Because there wasn’t a healthy version. It was too much positive influence. Right? Chris, how can you positively influence somebody too much? While it’s simple, you constantly tell them that they are great and they don’t understand the consequences of bad choices. They aren’t able to make quality decisions. They only make decisions that get them the applause that they are phenomenal and amazing. So yeah, it happens on the other side too.
Why the Importance?
Why does all of this matter? Are you ever going to be perfect? Nope. You’re not. The perspective of understanding why you do what you do is vital for you to move forward in life. If you want to be healthy, if you want to have the best life possible, if you want to be able to deal with situations, have healthy boundaries, and have the healthiest relationships, then understanding why you make decisions the way you do is vitally important to understand where your decision-making process came from, how it was formed, how it was shaped, what you can do about it now, having tools to solve that, having tools to make better decisions. If you want to understand how to get rid of the lies or how to battle them so that they don’t affect you in and again, guide your decision-making process than understanding why is that important. It is the basis of what we teach in Next-Level Life and I can tell you this, change is absolutely possible. Change is not only possible, but when you walk through a program like Next Level Life in a process like Next Level Life and have the tools where you gain the understanding, you gain the why. You understand how you got to where you are, why you make decisions the way you do, and the tools on how to make better decisions than change is not only possible, it’s inevitable. So why is this important?
It’s important because every aspect of your life can be better. Your relationships can be better, your parenting can be better, your marriage can be better, your leadership can be better, your business can be better, and every aspect can be better. That’s why it’s important. So if you are interested in learning more about Next Level Life, it’s not hard. chrisLocurto.com/nextlevellife. Just fill out the information to learn more. That’s all you gotta do. Take that step. Don’t be like the tons of folks. There’s a lot of you out there that have been saying to yourself, ah, I got to do that and I got to do that and I got to do that. You end up here years later and we’re like, Hey, when did you decide to do this all three years ago? What? Well, Yeah, I knew I should’ve been in here sooner, but that’s all right. You’re here now. Let’s move forward. Do yourself a favor, chrislocurto.com/nextlevellife. Just fill out to get more information so that you can take that next step in understanding the why behind your Root System. Well, folks, hopefully, this has helped you today. Take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
