Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast, Episode 31. Self-help Self-improvement Systems Not Getting Me Anywhere. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to the series in the footer of the website, bipolarexcellence.com.

This is tragic, how deep, I think, most of us go down the rabbit hole of, of just, just pursuing self-improvement and all the, the self-help books and webinars and seminars and booklets and reports and coaching sessions.

And it’s, it’s like an evil necessity in a way. You should be pursuing self-improvement.

You should want to take ownership of your problems by pursuing self-help methods of, of li of living. You should be doing all of that. I have for decades and, and I still am.

But couple problems arise eventually. Either nothing’s changing, which was in fact the title of this post or man, I’m not even really sure how to phrase, how to, how to put this together. I’m gonna regroup.

I know this much. I’m gonna do, gonna chunk this out and see what I get inspired to say as I go. There comes a point where you gotta act. I know that’s a, a. That’s a biggie. You get, you can get stuck in the sport of self-helping and self-improving.

You read about it. You take courses, you could even get coaching in it. You can pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. But if you don’t act on anything any of these people are telling you, well, now it’s like, It’s a form of masturbation.

You’re just enjoying the pursuit of consuming self-help knowledge. I believe most people are guilty of this. If. If going the other way, taking action hasn’t, hasn’t already born fruit or, or even occurred to them.

You know, I think people get afraid. People are afraid of change. We all are. I’ve mentioned it before. We crave homeostasis. We don’t want ups. We don’t want downs. We want everything to stay in the middle.

When somebody suggests something has to change in you, the first thing that resists is your ego. I’ve often described the ego as the little man in a boat. And it’s the conscious self. It’s the person who’s talking to you right now. It’s to you who you are as you’re listening to me.

It’s who it’s, it’s who we are, that dis that explains ourselves to the world. And that explains to us how we should interact with the world. It’s a construction. It’s a construct.

Your ego is the result of a bunch of decisions you’ve made as a kid to stay safe in a world, run by adults. As you get older, you forget that these rules are made up by a kid. And now you’re an adult. You’re living as a kid in a, in a self-created bubble of protection that only worked when you were a kid.

It does not work as an, an adult. And you are no longer aware that that’s the case.

You’re an adult now. You’re full of confidence and you think you got your shit together, even if it ain’t working out right you, you feel like you’re doing the best you can. And of course you are. But there’s a, there’s a quiet, hidden rule set from childhood that that’s powering everything you do. And most of it no longer works in your adult world.

Tons to be said there, but we’ll leave it at that. That is your ego. That construct that makes you who you are, your beliefs, what you feel is right and wrong. How you live your life, how you describe yourself, how you interact with people, that’s all your ego.

And any bit of it can be changed at the moment that you’re ready, become aware and ready to change it. It’s not real.

That ego is directing your entire life. And you think that’s all there is to yourself, if you haven’t learned about what I’m about to say next. Your subconscious, is the better part of you. The incalculably stronger, deeper part of you.

And it is the ocean that the little man in the boat floats on top of.

The fun part is you cannot directly contact your sub, your subconscious. The ocean. Your subconscious can bring you anything you want. It’s the most powerful thing about you, but there’s a way of reaching it that you have to become aware of. And it’s not direct.

It’s, it’s how you talk to yourself. It’s, it’s more a way of how you manage your ego that lets the subconscious make itself be known, or helps you bring into being what you actually want in life that’s good for you.

You can’t direct the subconscious, you can’t tap into it and have a talk with it in a way that makes sense.

It doesn’t think the way your conscious mind thinks. It doesn’t comprehend life the way your conscious mind does

The key is to get your conscious mind out of the picture for brief amounts of time during the day. And for most people, that’d be some form of meditation. Now I offer a beauty of a meditation service in a free 11 page PDF over on bipolarexcellence.com. I give away this report it’s called Is Bipolar Disorder a Gift? You get it by signing up to my newsletter.

When you see the meditation that I, I offer in there, and see more inside that report, what my life was like and what it became, you’ll learn how to get the little guy in the boat to go silent, so that the ocean of your subconscious can let its answers just kind of bubble up like steam bubbles from below. Pop into existence. And you can just watch your life change.

So no matter how much self-help and self-improvement study you’ve done, your ego is still in charge of deciding what to do with it.

You have got to get your ego to go quiet. Not distracted, not listen and think about other things, but to go quiet. That takes meditation. Now I’ll tell you right out, I’ve said it before the meditation I use is centerpointe.com that they gotta thing called Holosync.

But if you get that report that I offer, it’ll explain, possibly even better than I’m doing now, why I chose them and, and how it fits into everything else I offer people. How it enabled me to use all the self-help and self-improvement systems that I paid for. How to put ’em in the use, how to weed out the wheat from the chaff, how to make sense of it all and how to find better systems.

The usage of all these self-help things is good. It’s necessary. It’s part of the learning path. They’re not wrong. You’re never wrong in that. At least you’re doing something even if, even if you’re not acting on, on what the systems share, the learning isn’t is of course valuable.

But if you’ve been doing it for a while and nothing’s come of it, you probably have a block in place that’s keeping you from acting on any of it. And it’s because of your ego. You’re gonna find nothing in your life changes until you can get your ego to change. And to do that, you have to turn it off. And the easiest way to do that’s with Centerpointe.

The guy that made Centerpointe, Bill Harris, he died a few years ago. He was incredible. And it was one of the things that I was most grateful for with, with the, I had, I had mania still, when I found Centerpointe. I still had a strong, I, I think I was even, yeah. Yeah. What am I saying? I was still bipolar. I was, it was on, it was game on that’s right.

But I was on the, the, the side of the, of the path where I was starting to try to figure out what to do about it. I didn’t find them until I had got good with the fact that Western medicine couldn’t help me. It came after that and I was fighting for my life.

Bill Harris could talk for hours on the tiniest little topic in all that it was that he offered. And he used to, he had these long audios and he had long, I mean, long newsletters that they don’t have anymore.

You’d have to go. You’d have to look it up on way back machine. You can find evidence of any website and, and they take pictures of websites at different times, and you can, you can see the website like it was back then.

If you want it bad enough, and you gotta want it, find his newsletters. I think it was called Brain Chatter.

One newsletter might take four to six hours to read. He had 130 of them. From what I remember, I read ’em all. It took me months. I would spend anywhere from four to 10 hours a day, minimal, reading just those newsletters.

And I don’t remember much of anything cuz it was very in depth, very complex, very ethereal, all about the deep inner workings of the mind and the spirit and Bill’s journey to get to where he was as a sane and successful business person, helping people in 180 some odd countries, blah, blah, blah.

I absolutely loved Bill. I loved listening to him, to him talk. He was just a dude for all that he’d succeeded at and done. And he was very accomplished in many areas.

He started out as a hot fucking mess. He started from that point to then go on to create Centerpointe. That resonated with me as a bipolar person.

Like I’m a hot mess. I like what this guy’s saying and how he’s saying it.

I, I hope for some of you I’m doing that right now. I, I hope my tone and my word choices and everything. I, I hope you’re like, yeah. I hope I stand out from, from the crowd. I don’t really wanna be lumped in with most self-help GU gurus.

And I don’t see myself as that anyway. I’m not, I mean, just a talk about it makes me feel like an asshole. But I’ll be viewed that way by somebody cuz you stand for something. And I’m, I’m partly this.

The nightmare I crawled out of and the ways that I use self-help and self-improvement systems to do it. Shit. It’s why you’re listening to me now. It’s why I’m not dead. It’s why I’m not in prison, which is probably where I would’ve died. I got as close to that as happening as you possibly can, without it actually happening.

Thank God I didn’t go. But there’s a reason why you’re not, not getting anywhere with all these systems. And you are the reason. If you don’t address that, nothing you attempt to do is gonna work.

You might be able to bull your way through it. Just put your big boy, big girl pants on and just shove forth against, against your own desire to not wanna shove forth.

You, you could, you might even succeed. I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be that hard.

There’s one more self-help thing I want you to try. There’s there’s Bill. And something, I don’t talk about much. There’s a, there’s an offshoot, a student of Bill’s. I, I actually spoke to this man at length on the phone many, many years ago. Very super nice guy.

He’s not against what Bill did. He just found a version of it, and this is all technology based, he found a version of it that he preferred. And he created something similar to Centerpointe called, iAwake. I never got that deep into using anything that, that I bought from him, really. I just kinda stayed a Bill Harris guy.

Not, not, not in any Dick dickheaded sports team fan way. I just, whatever. I was with Bill and I just stayed with Bill. But I, I love what the other guy’s all about and I feel bad. I’m blanking on his name. It’s John something. Super, super nice guy.

And, and if, if you, whatever you see on Centerpointe doesn’t, doesn’t gel with where you’re at, try iAwake, cuz they’re very similar, but they’re not the same ,both in approach and how the technology works. Similar. Very similar.

Could be some help waiting for you there. And then what you’ll find is all these programs you’ve studied and immerse yourselves in, the information will become useful.

It all had been worth it. You have not done wrong up to this point. You haven’t. Just, if it’s been a lot, it’s been some years, you are in the way of yourself. That needs to be cracked. And then all this stuff that’s sitting in the warehouse of your mind becomes a useful resource almost as if it’s brand new.

You’ll know what to do when the time’s right after quieting the little man of the boat.

All righty, guys, can’t wait for this next episode. I got a lot to say about that as well. It was exciting times. See ya.