Dhru Purohit Show - #209: Get Out Of Your Own Way

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Welcome to The Big Idea of the Week! On today’s episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to us about how to get out of your own way by letting go of struggling. In this episode we dive into: -The difference between a struggle and a challenge (1:01) -Understanding the blessings that come through difficult moments in our life (5:16) -The power of acceptance  (11:59)  -Being okay with not being okay (21:38) Also mentioned in this episode: -Blessing in Disguise? https://www.meditationhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/en/en4_12_01.jpg -Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey - https://greenlights.com/ -Eckhart Tolle - https://eckharttolle.com/ -Clarity & Connection by Yung Pueblo - https://yungpueblo.com/ For more on Dhru Purohit, be sure to follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, on Facebook @dhruxpurohit, on Twitter @dhrupurohit, and on YouTube @dhrupurohit. You can also text Dhru at [phone].  Interested in joining Dhru’s Facebook Community? Submit your request to join here https://www.facebook.com/groups/2819627591487473/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, Drew Brod here, host of this podcast with another big idea episode of the week. Big idea episodes, if you're not familiar, are where I present a thought, a distinction, or an idea that's radically improved my life for the better. And today's theme, because each week has a theme, is how to get out of your own way by letting go of struggling. That's today's topic. and I have three reminders, three reminders from three different authors and teachers that I'm going to be presenting on today's episode all to support you in the process of letting go of struggling.

Okay, so let's start off. What do I mean by struggling? Well, a great way to jump to that topic is for me to read a piece that I wrote a few years ago that I've shared with the podcast before, but it's always good to have a reminder. So this piece is called struggle versus challenge. Struggle versus challenge. A struggle is a burden. A challenge is an opportunity.

A struggle is, I can't wait for this to be done. A challenge is I can't wait to see where this goes. A struggle is being in one place, but needing to be in another. A challenge is fully being where you are, not needing anything. A challenge is fully being where you are, not needing to be anywhere else. A struggle is, how can I get out? A challenge is, what more can I give? A struggle is resistance.

A challenge is acceptance. Think about something important to you that you're working on improving, a relationship, a project, a goal. Now, think about the energy around the thing you picked. are you in a struggle or are you in a challenge? On the surface, a struggle and a challenge look like the same thing. They're both tough things to go through. The biggest difference, though, is the energy around them. Plain and simple, a struggle is a challenge that is filled with resistance. I'm going to say that again, plain and simple, a struggle is a challenge that is filled with resistance.

Now, question for you, is there something in your life that you're struggling with? And could that struggle be turned into a challenge? It can happen. All it takes is a mental shift. So that was a piece that I wrote a few years ago called struggle versus a challenge. And I hope as you've listened, you can take away a few important themes on that piece. First and foremost, a struggle is resistance. It's resistance.

So let's take a tough workout, for example. Somebody going through a tough workout and feeling like they haven't worked out in a long time. And there's two mindsets that you could be in. You could go through a tough workout and feel like, shit, this is hard. I haven't worked out for years. What if I don't do a good job? What if I'm not good enough? What if I can't show up right?

What if I'm doing it wrong? What if I mess up? What if I miss the next workout, even though I'm doing this once? That is resistance. Resistance is you're in one place, but you're needing to be in another. And often when it comes to letting go of struggling, that resistance is a mental, is mentally related to our sense of time. When we're in the present moment, we're in a state of acceptance.

We're here. We're just doing this one workout. We may not know what comes in the future. We can't control what's already happened in the past. It's already happened. We're just here with our focused attention. on this moment in this workout that we're doing right now here. So the opposite of acceptance is resistance.

It's needing to be somewhere else when you're right here, but you want to be somewhere else. And mentally, that's often in the past or in the future. So acceptance, which we're going to be digging to deeper with some of these three quotes and teachings that I have from these three authors today, which, by the way, some of the authors that I'm going to be quoting from are young Pueblo, who is the pen name, which is the pen name of an author named Diego Perez. He has a new book out called Clarity and Connection.

And we have him on the Drew Proet podcast coming out next week. So it's a good teaser for some of the content that we'll get into with him. We also have a quote with Matthew McConaughey, whose book is called Green Lights. And he has a really great passage in his book that actually has everything to do We have acceptance. And lastly, we have one of my all-time favorite authors. The only person that I ever really wanted to meet my entire life, and I'm lucky that I was able to meet him.

And that's Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now and a New Earth. We have a great few passages from him on this topic of acceptance. So let's jump right in now that we've set up the conversation about how struggling will cost you so much in life. and make things more challenging. Let's jump into our first quote that we have, and that's from Matthew McConaughey, and it's all about not putting our experience in life,

different experiences we have, not putting them on a pedestal. So here's the quote from Matthew McConaughey, and then my director's cut commentary right afterwards. So Matthew says, the problems we face today eventually turn into the blessings in the rear view mirror of life.

In time, yesterday's red lights lead us to green lights today. All destruction eventually leads to construction. All death eventually leads to birth. All pain eventually leads to pleasure. In this life or the next, what goes down will come up. It's a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. persist, pivot, or concede. It's up to us, our choice every time.

Powerful. Well, if you haven't read Green Lights, I listen to it on Audible. It's fantastic. Matthew McConaughey, Green Lights. It's not just an actor who's coming out with a book. Matthew McConaughey has some deep life lessons and really wisdom that he's accumulated over the years that he's put into these different passages. and I love passages that are told through a story of somebody's life,

and Matthew McConaughey has lived a very, very interesting life, to say the least. So when I read this quote from Matthew McConaughey, one of the first things that came up was a Zen poem, a Zen poem that's pretty well known that I pulled up here from a website called MeditationHealth.com, and they had an illustration of it that we'll link to in the show notes. And I want to read this poem out, and then I want to give you my director's cut commentary of this

poem and Matthew McCona Hay's quote. So the poem starts off with, I don't know if it's a poem, if it's a story, whatever it might be. So it starts off with scene one. An old man and his son worked on a small farm with only one horse to pull the plow. One day, the horse ran away. How terrible sympathize the neighbors. What bad luck. Who knows whether it's bad luck or good luck, the farmer replied. A week later, the horse returned from the mountains leading five wild mains into the barn. What wonderful luck, said the neighbors. Good luck, bad luck, who knows?

Answered the old man. The next day, the son, trying to come home on one of the horses, fell and broke his leg. How terrible. What bad luck the neighbors exclaimed. Bad luck, good luck, who's to say? The farmer replied, shrugging. Then the army came to all the farms to take the young men to war, but the farmer's son was of no use to them because of his leg, so he was spared.

Good luck, bad luck, said the old man, we will see. So that's in a shortened version of this Zen story, I could say, or fable, not poem. that I feel so relates to this quote from Matthew McConaughey's book. You know, what I got from this quote from Matthew McConaughey's book, and I feel like the teaching that comes from this lesson is, what goes up will come down. So the things in our life that we put on the pedestal of good or bad experiences, right? So that classic quote, which says,

tis nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so. So that classic quote, which I forgot who said it, maybe Descartes, that is a perfect example of so many things happen to us in life on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. And our mind wants to project onto them whether or not those experiences are good or whether or not those experiences are bad. And often when they're bad, right, usually we're happy when they're good, when they're bad or we perceive them to be bad, is when we find ourselves in a state of struggle. And what Matthew McConaughey is saying here is that all destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth. So we don't know.

We don't know yet. We can't fully know if an experience is all good or all bad. I'm sure you've seen in your own life that some of the best things that have happened to you came out of sometimes some worse things that happened to you. You might have met the love of your life after a really bad and tough breakup. You might have accelerated or made progress in a business or a goal in your life after some other failure that's there. So we never know what good comes from, quote unquote, what bad.

And we have to say open to it because when we don't, and this is the moral of the story when it comes to Matthew's quote, when we don't, we find ourselves stuck in the past or projecting in the future. And whenever we're in that mental capacity, we are in a state of struggle. And struggle takes so much energy. It takes so much time. It takes so much mental focus away from what we're doing.

Going back to that initial example, when we're so worried about whether or not we're going to make it for a future workout or we've failed so many times in the past, so are we going to fail again? we end up taking our attention away from this moment, and we end up self-sabotaging and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because our attention is all the way in the past or all the way in the future. And when we try to decide in advance whether situations are good or whether they're bad,

we end up tainting the lens instead of being open to what the experience is trying to teach us. So the next time you're going through something in life, and it doesn't work out your way. Be like the farmer who takes a step back and says, good luck, bad luck, who knows? It's just an experience that ended up happening and I just need to wait and see and show up the best way that I possibly can.

That is the moral and the lesson for Matthew McConaughey's quote over here from the book, Green Lights. Definitely check it out. Let's jump into our second quote. And this is from the author Eckart Tolle. We have two quotes. we're going to be putting them together and then I'll share with my director's commentary, directors cut commentary afterwards.

So Eckhart starts off and says, as soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolves. And life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present moment awareness, whatever you do becomes embedded with a sense of quality, care, and love. even the most simple action. The second part of the quote goes, whatever you are, be there totally.

If you find you're here and now intolerable, it makes, and it makes you unhappy, you have three options. One, remove yourself from the situation. Two, change the situation. Three, accept the situation totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of the three options,

and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. What I love about this is that in Eckhart's book, A New Earth, which is one of my all-time favorites and was on Oprah's Bookless Club, a fantastic book, Eckhart talks about the three true states of action. When we're fully present, we have three possible states that we can be in. Enthusiasm, joy, and acceptance. I want to focus on acceptance a little bit,

because this is what these two quotes are about. As I mentioned earlier, the pathway and the road out of struggling is acceptance. It's to realize like this is where we are, even if we don't like it, this is what the situation is for the moment. And by the way, a lot of people think that acceptance means you are just throwing your hands up in the air and you are surrendering in a negative way and saying, okay, whatever, this is just my life. I'm just going to accept it.

That is not true. That's actually called being a victim. When you're a victim of your circumstances, you focus on the fact that, woe is me, this always happened to me, I have no power, I can't do anything to change it. And in fact, acceptance is the exact opposite. Acceptance is, okay, the situation is maybe not the best. I don't want this and I need to change it. For example, there's been times in my life where I barely had any money in my bank account

and I needed to really figure out my act and figure out what I was going to do next. So I looked at the situation and said, I understand how my past actions got me to this place and I made some bets or I tried to do some things or get a job or do whatever was there and it didn't work out. So what do I want to do from here? I tried to make this business grow. It wasn't growing. Now what I want to do.

And when you step into that state of acceptance, you can take a step back and say from 30,000 foot and say, okay, this is the situation. This is the reality. This is what's going on? Now, what do I want to do? Just like Matthew McConaughey said in his quote, do I want to persist? Do I want to pivot or do I want to concede? And the truth is in life, we're going to do some version of those three all the time when we run up against a roadblock. We're not always going to be able to overcome it in that moment.

Sometimes we're going to have to pivot. Some of the best and most amazing companies that have been founded came. out of an idea that didn't work. Twitter was one example. Slack, another billion-dollar company that's out there, started off as them trying to build a game, trying to build a really cool game. That game wasn't working out,

so they created a chat system to make it easier to communicate about the programming, languaging that all the developers were working on in the building of the game. And in that process, when the game wasn't working out, they took a step back and said, this game isn't going to work. We don't think it's going to ever work.

right now, what can we pivot into? What can we make out of our action and efforts? And they realize this thing, Slack that they had created, which I don't think was called Slack at the time, was an incredibly powerful tool and that millions of businesses could eventually end up using it. And it ended up becoming this billion dollar business that a lot of companies, including my own, have benefited from. So going back to the farmer, there's so many times in our life where something isn't working out. And we're trying our best. We're giving our all. But instead of struggling, and remember, struggling doesn't mean that everything is going to come easy. Struggling is, I wish it would be better and it isn't.

I wish it would start working out. Now, I am working on a new company and I'm going through a little bit of a challenge with one of the product formulations. Sure, I'm hopeful and I want it to work out. That's different than wishing and constantly looking back to the past and over analyzing decisions that I made or didn't made that brought me to where I am right now. Instead, I say, okay, this is where the problem is and this is what we're going through right now. Do we want to pivoting? Am I open to pivoting if I find a different roadmap for me and my team to take this product to move forward in the future? And like all situations in life, so much of that goodness that we end up creating comes out of the fact that we were struggling or something wasn't working out in the beginning.

the part about Eckhart that I wanted to highlight here is acceptance is really about this. You know, I have this additional quote from Eckhart that I'll read out. Acceptance means whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means for now, this is what the situation is, this moment, and this is what it requires for me to do. and so I'll do it willingly. So much suffering in life happens when we resist. And resistance is struggle. Instead, if we just accepted the situation, said,

you know what, this is a shitty situation. It's not a favorable situation. It's not maybe what I want, but I'm going to accept it wholeheartedly. So now I can take action. Now I can lean into it, and I don't have to spend as much attention, wishing it was different, I can take action and make it different.

Who do I need to call? You start asking different questions when you lead into acceptance. When you're in resistance, you're like asking questions like this. Why is this happening to me? What did I do that caused me to fail? Why didn't I have more support? You ask disempowering questions when you are in a state of resistance and a state of struggle. when you're in a state of acceptance, you ask empowering questions, right?

How can I get out of this situation? Who could I call that's been through this before? That's a powerful one. So often in life, especially when we're struggling, we think that we have to figure everything out on our own. And no, we can reach out to people, even strangers sometimes who have been through what we've been through and get advice from them.

Who knows? Somebody might have advice that could completely have you look at situation differently and have it move more favorably in the situation you want it to move towards. So these are all examples of how things change for us when we start asking different questions. But to ask different questions, we need to be in a different state. It's the difference between struggling and acceptance. Here's another example that Eckhart talks about inside of the book. For example, you probably won't be able to enjoy changing the flat tire on your car. at night in the middle of nowhere and in the pouring rain, let alone be enthusiastic about it.

But you can bring a sense of acceptance to it. Performing an action in a state of acceptance means you're at peace while you do it. That piece is a subtle energy vibration, which then allows you to flow into what you're doing. I see this time and time again. Anytime I'm working on something in my life that isn't coming naturally and is new. Like when I first started this podcast and nobody was listening. I could have been a state of struggle. Why aren't people listening, you know, shouldn't I have been further along, reanalyzing the past, projecting into the future. What if nobody ever listens? None of that shit is helpful. What is helpful is, what is helpful, excuse me, is asking different questions, being in a state of acceptance. How have other people

achieve success when it comes to their podcast and putting it out there? What makes for a great interviewer. What are the things that I can control that I can spend my time on doing? What are the things that I can't control that I really should not be worried about? You know, the moral story with Eckhart's quotes that I just shared is acceptance is the pathway of letting go of struggle. Is there something in your life right now that you're resisting? Even if that's something is something that happened to you years ago, decades ago, are you still resisting that thing? And how much freer would you be if you simply stepped into acceptance instead of resistance?

Let's go to quote number three. And this is from Young Pueblo. This comes from a new book of his called Clarity and Connection. And he's going to be on our podcast next week talking all about it. So stay tuned for that interview. So the quote from his book, which is so beautiful. beautiful and so simple is a little write-up article poem however you want to say it and i'll start off by reading it being okay with not being okay does not make things automatically better i'm going to read that

again being okay with not being okay does not make things automatically better but it does stop you from adding more tension to an already difficult situation. Being okay with not being okay helps you let go. If we really talk about going from struggle to challenge or resistance to acceptance and ultimately not struggling with something you're dealing with in life, this is such a fundamental important truth because there are challenging situations that we've find ourselves in in life. There are times where we're not okay. And this isn't a podcast about just be okay with everything. It's all fine. Just pretend it's fine. That's called spiritual bypassing. No. Sometimes things are not okay. Sometimes we do not feel okay. But in that moment,

we have to recognize something very important. And I have a weird analogy that I'll share here that highlights this thing. I remember being in high school in health class, and they were really trying to encourage people to wear their seatbelts. So they invited this healthcare practitioner in. I think it was a nurse. And she was saying, you know,

the reason that we want you to wear seatbelts is because really when you get into an accident, there's two accidents that happen. When you're in your car and you break all of a sudden because, you know, you're approaching another car and you're about to get in an accident, there's two accidents that end up happening. The first accident is when your body hits, for instance,

the steering wheel or the windshield. But there's a second accident. When you're moving at 60, 70, 80 miles per hour, or even faster, that also means that your body, but its own internal organs are also traveling at that same speed. So if you hit another car or a wall or a tree and you're all of a sudden brought to stopping,

not only if you are not wearing your seatbelt, does your body get thrown out, but when you eventually hit something like the steering wheel, your internal organs like your heart, kidney, liver, everything else inside of you, your lungs that were traveling at 100 miles per hour, all of a sudden slam into the second accident, which can often be worse than the first accident, and those vital organs end up slamming up against your ribs

and ultimately into the steering wheel or whatever else that you're dealing with. And that second accident is really the reason why we wear seatbelts. I mean, really, you cannot separate the first accident from the second, but the bottom line that they're saying is that it's often the second accident that can cause just as much, if not more damage to ourselves and ultimately lead to us dying, unfortunately, which is why kids always make sure to wear your seatbelts. What the hell does this have to do with this quote from Young Pueblo?

Well, when you're okay with not being okay, you prevent a second accident from happening. Let's say you find yourself in a situation where you love somebody and they tell you that they don't feel the same way and they want to end the relationship. That might be the second, that might be the first accident, right? So that's the first accident. Somebody tells you something that you don't want to hear and makes you usually not feel the best, which is they want to break up with you. Okay, that's one accident. that's a very tough situation on its own. But the second accident,

which is just as harmful, if not more harmful, is every day when you beat yourself up by rethinking the past and imagining the worst case of the future, I'm never going to meet anybody. What if this was the love of my life? I'm never going to feel better again. I'm always going to be heartbroken. I'm never going to be able to do X, Y, and Z.

When you beat yourself up every day because you're not okay with being not, okay. Instead, if you look at the truth of the situation, something crummy happened. Somebody broke up with you. And that sucks. It sucks to be broken up with. But if we can every day slowly process and put out the idea that can I okay, can I be okay with being a little sad here? I'm not going to ruminate on the past. I'm not going to project out the worst case scenario in the future. But I'm just going to give myself a little bit of self-love. and kindness in this moment where I'm feeling a little sad out of the grieving of the loss of this

relationship or a loss of a family member or whatever else it might be. When we start to freak out because we're not okay with being not okay, that's when we spiral downwards and make the situation worse. You will always make the situation in your life worse when you're not okay with being not okay. It's a real paradox in a way. It's a paradox because it means can you be okay with the fact that you're a little sad right now? And by the way, that's okay. We don't need to resist it. Anybody who had gone through a challenging situation in life may not be okay in that moment. And that's all right. That's okay. It's okay not to be okay. We don't want to indulge in it.

We don't want to think about worst case scenarios. We don't want to spy. ourselves into a sense of anxiety. And by being okay with not being okay, just as Diego Perez, young Pueblo says, it doesn't automatically make things better. But what it does do is it prevents you from stopping, from adding more tension to an already difficult situation. I see so many people stop their positive habits in life. I see so many people give up on projects that they care.

about when they encounter a challenge in life, when they're struggling because they keep on going down the pathway of struggling because they're not okay with the fact that they're not okay. So they start doing all sorts of different things. Well, I wasn't good enough anyway, so let me quit on everything that I care about. Well, nobody really liked me anyway, so I'm not going to spend time putting myself out there or investing in my health or work on being a better person. No, you went through a hardship and it sucks and you feel sad and we need to give you a little bit of love for that. We need to make sure we invest and spend time with people who can lift you up and we need to support you in the process.

We don't need to pretend that everything is okay and okay. It doesn't matter if somebody broke up with me. I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm just going to go back to everything else that's there. No, you might be sad. But can you be okay with being sad is the question. And especially let go of not being okay because you're not.

not okay. Sometimes life is shitty, sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes we can't change it. But can we in that moment practice being okay with not being okay? Give yourself a little love. Put your hand on your chest as past guests that have talked about being self-critical have talked about. Put your hand on your chest and just say, listen, the situation. It's not the best and it might even suck a little bit.

Or listen, this situation sucks. But I'm here for you and I want to remind you, you're an incredible person. And you can show up in life in any way that you want to. You might give yourself some words of affirmation that might relate to the situation. You know, I cared about this person or I love this person and I'm sad that it ended. You know, and then you decide. You decide how you want to go from there. do you want to pivot?

Do you want to concede? Do you want to persist? But whatever you decide, let go of the struggle. Be okay with not being okay. A tough workout is tough. But when you accept it, a whole different shift in your mentality happens. This is Drew Prode here with another big idea episode of the week.

you enjoyed it. It's all on the concept of how to get out of your own way by letting go of struggling. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to ask you for a favor. Share it with a friend or someone that you think could benefit from it. If you want any of the links to some of the things and the books that we mentioned in the show notes, feel free to click on the description of the podcast and you can find everything there. Drew Prod, signing off. I'll see you next week.