The Resilient Mind - The One Thing That Held Me Back - Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Tom Bilyeu is a highly influential entrepreneur, speaker, and thought leader renowned for his expertise in personal development, mindset mastery, and health optimization. He co-founded Quest Nutrition, one of the fastest-growing food companies in America, celebrated for its focus on healthy living and innovative approaches to nutrition. After selling Quest for a reported $1 billion, Tom shifted his focus to helping others unlock their potential through his media company, Impact Theory.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with The Icons by Motiversity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXi_ZdT8sQY&t=131s Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The One Thing That Heled Me Back with Tom Bill you. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Before Quest started, you were in a dark place in your life for a period. And so all of this stuff about mindset existed back then too, but maybe you weren't able to embrace it the way you are now. Where were you at then? And what flipped the switch?

I talked earlier about the, you have this thing called the psychological. immune system. And the psychological immune system is going to give you reasons why that failure is not your fault. And the bad thing is that it focuses you outward, right? Like, oh, it's their fault. They did this. They're holding me back. The world doesn't want me to succeed, whatever. The good thing is it actually stops you from beating yourself up too much. And so if you can learn that, oh, wait a second, I need to value myself for something, but that something does not need to be being right. And so instead, if I switch it to I'm going to build my self-esteem around identifying the right answer, now all of a sudden you actually can have a growth mindset.

You can be focused on getting better and improving and just learning because when you realize that you've made a mistake, it's actually exhilarating because you're like, whoa, I can run the physics of progress, I can get better at this thing and make this incremental improvement. And so that was life-changing for me. And so, of course, it wasn't like, oh, line in the sand, my life was bad, now my life is good, but it was line in the sand, I'm not making progress, now I'm making progress.

And so that day really did. And I remember the whole debate that I had with myself. That day was like, oh, this is like the first day of the rest of my life. I'm no longer going to value myself for being good, smart, right worthy. I'm going to value myself entirely for being willing to stare nakedly at mine adequacies, figuring out what I need to get good at. No bullshit, what would it take to achieve my goals, and then I'm just going to do that. And I'm going to do it knowing that success cannot be guaranteed. So I have to find a way to love this even if I were failing. And that becomes the magic cocktail. It doesn't mean that you ever stop wanting to win. Like, I'm still very much motivated to win, but I'm not devastated when I lose and I'm optimizing for the struggle.

So in the struggle, when I'm not sure if I'm going to win or lose yet, I'm still having fun. I mean, all of that sounds super logical, right? But so many people are caught, like not at the logic part, but at the emotional part, where it's like my brain gets this, but something's happening inside of me, that I'm just feeling like I'm at arm's length from what I'm trying to achieve. So how did you go from, like, and maybe you weren't there, but, you know, emotional? Because I think that a lot of people are listening to this thinking, cool, I want to achieve my dream. Maybe it's not happening as fast as I wanted to.

I'm in an emotional spiral. How do you go from emotion to logic? where now it feels like there's a pathway out here. Don't. Don't try to get out of emotion. Stay in it. Live with it. I love it.

Just recognize that you're having a biological experience. Nature has hardwired your brain in a certain way, and not all of those emotions are useful. The problem is people think if they feel it, then they need to embody it and they need to act it out. I am highly skeptical of my emotions. So if I feel angry, I'm like, should I be angry?

Like, is this going to be? useful and so I have a rule in my life. I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't have a relationship with reality. I do because the only things that are going to move you towards your goals are things that are both true and optimistic. If it's not true, then you won't make progress because you, the definition of true is the thing that allows you to better predict the future. And so, and the way that people are going to react or the way the world's going to react, whatever. And so to make progress towards your goals, you need something that's true, but you also need it to be optimistic.

So I'm checking myself against my emotion. I'm going to have a negative emotion because that's what nature needs, right? Nature's trying to keep me alive long enough to have kids that have kids. Nature's not trying to make sure I enjoy my life. Nature's not trying to make sure that I achieve my goals. Nature has one goal and one goal only. Make sure I stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids. Now, embedded in all of that is my need to serve the community,

my need to improve myself, my need to do hard things, like all of it. But once I know, that's the evolutionary, motivation. Like that's where that's coming from. So now I'm like, okay, I need to understand how the brain works. I need to understand what the emotions are. I need to understand what triggered the emotion. And so while I'm being a little bit tongue and cheek about, no, go ahead and stay in your emotion. The reality is I'm just trying to understand my emotions and then go, okay, how much of this emotion is useful in terms of moving me towards my goal. And then the exact amount of that emotion that's useful, I'm going to use it and move forward. And then when you hit the point where it stops being useful,

then you're going to stop doing it. And I'll give you a fascinating example from my marriage. This was one of those moments where my wife, on a dime, changed my behavior patterns. It was amazing. And you know the story. The funny thing is, I don't know what you're about to say. I've said it so many times, but you're going to immediately be like, oh yeah, I should remember that. I was so I have a real real insecurity around my level of intellect and I was just complaining and complaining and complaining and complaining about my intellect

and finally my wife goes complaining isn't sexy insecurity isn't sexy and I was like oh I was like wow it's really not I don't say that harsh you don't be and I quote insecurity is not sexy and but was it harsh or was it like look babe

harsh it was it was the verbal equivalent of grabbing me by my, no, no, no, I mean this to the letter of everything I'm saying. It was the verbal equivalent of grabbing me by my collar and punching me in the nose. And I was like, thank God for this woman. Because she didn't say it the first time, I complained. She didn't say it the second or the third or the fourth or the tenth or the 20th or the 50th. But around the hundredth time, she's like, you do understand. Like, this is not moving you forward. this isn't sexy, which is precisely what she knew I needed to hear. And I was like, thank you. And so that made me realize saying this, because one of the things I find most joyful in life is the way that

she looks at me when we're alone and I do something cool. And I live for that. That's incredible. And so when she said that, I was like, wow, yeah, like I've really, I'm not looking for you to uplift me right now. I'm looking for you to woe is. me with me. And that's not useful. It doesn't take me towards my goal. And so it was really cool. Now, my wife makes me feel loved in the most extraordinary ways possible. That's seriously advanced class. You can't tell somebody that message unless you have loved them so completely and elevated them so many times and made so many deposits in that bank that that thing was received as like, damn, that was exactly what I needed to hear. And so that kind of thing can be very, very, very,

very powerful, but you have to understand how you can get in your own head. You can be leading yourself down a destructive path. You need to pattern interrupt that. You've got to be thinking, what's going to progress me towards my goal. So being concerned about my intellect is useful to a point, right? It makes me take things more seriously. It makes me go, hey, I'm not Elon Musk smart. So I'm going to have to like work harder, work differently, surround myself with intelligent people. So it makes me do those things. But the second it becomes corrupt, and now I'm diminishing myself, that's where you have to pattern interrupt. And so my wife gave me all the grace in the world to recognize it myself, to, you know,

try to lift me up. No, babe, come on, like you're one of the smartest people I know. She's very kind to me. And she gave me the space to try to process through it. But when it was just like self-evident, I was never getting to the other side without some sort of cold water to the face, she said it. And because I have that rule in my life that I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goal. What she was pointing out is by believing that you're not intelligent enough

to accomplish your goals, you're not moving towards your goal. So you need to stop and you need to stop now. And I was like, word, I do. And that was so true. And again, I want to contextualize this. If you've been an asshole to your partner for five years and you say this, this is just another tally in the asshole side. But if you are there, like we were just having this conversation yesterday and she came in the room. I live with her. We work in the same house. we live with. I see this woman almost 365 days a year. I must see 362 days a year. I mean, it's literally absurd. She walked into the room and I lit up. And she was like, you do that sometimes where you will light up at the sight of me. And I'm like, yeah, because it's so ingrained

in my nervous system that you're good. You make me feel good. You uplift me. You make me feel like the best version of myself. You look at me like you've. think I'm extraordinary. And all of that, 22 years in, my nervous system is just like good thing, right? And so when I'm surprised and this good thing walks into the room, I'm like, whoa. So I say all of that. So people understand, you can't just go around saying the hard thing to people like that. Like, you have to earn that moment. But because she had earned that moment, it was so perfect. And you need those reminders to only sit in the negative motion, emotion. as long as it's effective.

Because once it becomes corrosive, you've got to stop it, even if you think it's true. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes.