Crafting Your Ideal Self Story A Powerful Tool for Change

Crafting Your Ideal Self Story A Powerful Tool for Change

D Brent Dowlen: [00:00:00] Have you ever had your phone or computer just completely lock up on you? I mean, it just stopped working and you had to forcefully reboot, reboot it. You held that power button down until it forced it to completely restart from a locked up state because nothing else would work. That's called a hard reboot.

And I won't bore you with the details of what's happening there. After years in the IT sector, I know that went pretty well. But have you ever considered maybe doing that figuratively with yourself? Hit the reboot button to get back on track. Now I know that doesn't sound much like a Christmas Eve episode, but I promise it is.

And on this episode of the Fallible Man podcast, you'll learn how to build your own reset button so that you can have that trigger to pull whenever you need to snap yourself back on point. My name is Brent and we help men live in alignment with who they want to be in the men they want to become. Let's get right [00:01:00] into it.

Now, obviously this is not as easy as just going to bed and getting up the next day, right? Otherwise we'd all reboot every day and you kind of get a restart, but you don't necessarily get a system reboot. Now, if you've never actually dealt with a hard reboot, Like it is a force reboot. The only step beyond that is to completely flatten the system and install a new system.

This is a hard, hard, hard force reset. You lose anything you haven't been working on kind of thing. Now, waking up every morning is kind of a reset for the day, but it's not a real hard reboot. Now, I've been doing this for years. This is a practice I have, and it helps me to get a good look, like a hard look at my year and my goals in the previous year.

And what I achieved and what I didn't achieved and where I fell off track in a completely objective manner. [00:02:00] I completely called myself out and practice some tough love of myself to get me back right on track for the coming year to where I want to go. Now, Christmas to me is my primary heart reset time because it's a gift I give myself every year.

Now, let me be really clear here. This is not a bunch of negative self talk where I beat myself up with an eternal External internal tongue lashing that I would punch another guy for talking to me that way men are particularly critical with themselves to a negative extent and often have negative dialogue going on in their head all the time and We've had shows entirely just about that because this is such a massive problem for most men And they beat themselves up and this just serves to demoralize and tear you down.

There is nothing constructive about a negative dialogue going on in your head. Like just, just [00:03:00] no, none, nothing constructive comes out of it. And us guys are really nasty about it. Like I said, so that is not what we're talking about with this. This is a constructive, emotionless, data driven review to identify issues and pivot accordingly.

You see, I have taught you guys about setting goals, and maybe some of you guys are really good at setting goals, and that's not where you need help. I've talked extensively with you guys about setting realistic goals and how to achieve those goals, and so that's not what we're talking about. I have goals, right?

I have goals in the year, just like you, or I wouldn't share those things with you or advise you on that because I am a goal setter, but this is a time to constructively look at those. Objectively look at those, emotionlessly just review the data and go, Hey, Dallin, you got a track here or, Hey, [00:04:00] you really, I mean, you, you did great here, but you dropped the ball on this other thing entirely.

It isn't a beat myself up. It's a let's take a realistic look at it. Now, that may seem like a odd Christmas present to you guys, but I'm also the same guy who in the past Uh, I dropped my gym membership this year. We've just had a lot going on and I wasn't able to go as much as I wanted to, but I'm the guy who trains myself for birthday squats most years.

I don't do it every year anymore, but I train myself for birthday squats most years. And you can find that on my old channel. That's pretty nasty. That's your body weight. Once you pick it up, you do however many reps you are. And that's your birthday present for the year. So like this year I would have done 45.

reps at 285, uh, without stopping. So, or I should say without putting it down. So I have a weird look at Christmas. I know, but to me, this is a huge gift to myself [00:05:00] because this is permission to look at myself in nonjudgmental way and say, here's the good, here's the bad, here's the ugly. And reset, we need to refocus, but this is something I've actually trained myself to do just like a train birthday squats.

If you've been around the show before, then you may have heard me say that we can program ourselves like a computer. It's one of the things I talked about in my birthday episode. If you missed that episode, uh, 45 things, I know at 45, I wish you knew it. 25, go back and check that list out. It's very listicle style block and our podcast or whatever.

It's one of those. But. Uh, I I've had some compliments on that, but that's one of the things I talked about is one of the things I wish I had known earlier in my life is you absolutely can program yourself a lot like a computer, if you understand the way your human brain processes things. Now this isn't some wooshy wooshy BS, but [00:06:00] actually.

Legitimate scientific, not like for us, those were the government studies, but actually peer reviewed studies along with a much larger sampling of anecdotal evidence that you can find to back up those studies as well. From varying levels of successful people. I program my children to sleep better. I got a lot of crap for that.

I programmed my head to get ready for the gym. Even when I don't want to go to the gym, I programmed my brain to go into work and productivity mode. And have improved my own efficiencies doing so. This reset is an early part of that programming for me is something I program myself to do. Now it doesn't take some lengthy degree or any kind of initials after your name to be able to do this.

You've likely done it for years, just not necessarily intentionally. Today, we're going to help you become intentional about it because there's a lot of value of this. Because I don't just do it on Christmas [00:07:00] on a really great year where everything's going really smooth. I only do this for Christmas on a really rough year.

There are years where I will do a force hard reboot. Multiple times in the year because I'm just falling off track in so many ways. So this is a forced hard reboot, but it's actually programming your brain to allow you to do that. You may think it's easy, but to actually get into that objective mode with yourself to where you're okay, analyzing your weaknesses and your problems and your mistakes, And your wins and rearranging the program that actually takes a little bit more.

If it was simple, everybody would run perfectly all the time and you would have no problems and you wouldn't need podcasts like mine, where we talked about improving your life because you would just be on track 365 days a year. But that is not the case because [00:08:00] most people have not learned to program their brain to have the objective moments to do the analysis.

And that's what we're going to help you with. When you're programming the human brain, it requires a catalyst for you to associate with the desired action. For me, my yearly catalyst for my hard reset is reading the blog post on T Nation called Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Bob written by Chris Sugar.

Chris is the chief content officer and one of the top guys over at T Nation. And I absolutely love reading this post. Apparently it was originally released back in 2000. I don't think I've been reading it that long, but I have been reading this every year since 2007. I actually have a printed copy of it that I keep close to my desk.

Besides having it bookmarked, uh, on my web browser, I've been reading this every year since 2007. Now here's the thing, right? While the [00:09:00] post is primarily about health and mindset. For whatever reason, it actually started sparking a deeper introspective moment with myself when I read it, something about it really spoke to me and helped put me into that right frame of mind.

To really objectively process my life. It became less of an article and more of a story. I wanted to be able to tell about myself and see myself in. It was a conversation I wanted to be able to have with other people when people asked about how I was doing. Now, I can spark this deep introspective thought process where I objectively take a full look at where I am, how I'm doing, where I'm going, make adjustments anytime I read it because it has become that momentary trigger.

And like I said, on a good year, I might read it once on a [00:10:00] rough year. I've read it, you know, four times, five times in the year, because at any given moment, I can jump to that article. And my brain goes into this mode of a hard reboot, where I just go, look at the programming, look at the programming, look at what you're doing, which right, this is the trigger point.

Now it took me a while to realize what I had actually done with this and how it worked. But once I did, I started replicating it to program results. for myself in other places. Now I'm far from perfect. I don't have everything figured out and I do have a lot to work on still, but I do have getting back on point figured out really effectively.

And if you can do that at will, if you can teach yourself to really snap back onto point, then it clears a lot of resistances and [00:11:00] issues along the journey. So today let me share with you how you do this in your life because that's why you're here. This is my gift for you for this Christmas. First, you have to understand how to program a human, which is really not hard to do.

And if you think it sounds odd, the media has been doing it to you for years. You are programmed every day. That's really what effective marketing is, is programming you to have a specific desired reaction when presented with a specific stimuli. So this is like, there's, there's billion, there's a billion dollar industry.

You just haven't put it to work for you necessarily. So this is how simple it is. Number one, you have to decide specifically what it is you want to do. What is the reaction? What is the. action that you want yourself to take when you start to program yourself. Do you want to make yourself tired? [00:12:00] So you go to sleep easier.

Like I program my kids to do, which I highly recommend to any parents with young children. Do you want to trigger an introspective moment? Like I do with this article, or maybe you need a little motivation going to the gym. You have to be very specific with the desired outcome before you start programming yourself.

Or it doesn't work. This isn't like a broad blast. This is a, I want this to happen when I do this, right? The second thing is you have to pick a trigger or triggers. When I was training my kids to sleep, I had multiple triggers spread out over 30 minutes to ease them into this. So it wasn't like just a slamming them into a different place.

Mentally, I didn't lights and have them watch one last show with us from the same series. These are visual triggers, right? Lower the lighting. And we watched the same series night [00:13:00] after night at bedtime. And that's when we watch it is when it's time for bed. They had to stop playing with whatever they were doing and cuddle up next to my wife or myself.

So they were tactically and haptically triggered. And it's also an olfactory trigger because your kids assume, assuming you're a decent parent, your kids. are actually relaxed by your scent and olfactory triggers are really powerful. Then they progress to actually start getting ready for bed, right? Brush the hair, brush the teeth.

I have daughters, so they have to brush their long hair, uh, kiss both of them long hair. But this involves tactile olfactory. Uh, there's an action involved with it that they're taking to process through a taste with the toothpaste. Then we turned on the same soundtrack, auditory sensation or auditory [00:14:00] stimulus.

And had our songs and prayers. Now this is a 30 minute sequence that still works with my kids at 10 and 12 years old. In fact, we've been doing it every night of their lives. And so our whole household actually gets sleepy during this process. Now here's the key. If you combine triggers across multiple senses, you have a greater chance at success.

And the third part of this is a repetitive outcome because at first it's not going to be instinctive. You're not going to have this outcome. You have to program this outcome, right? So, you need to decide what that is, number one, right? You need to set up the triggers, and then you intentionally need to have the same outcome after it happens every single time.

With repetition, you can actually program yourself for anything in life with these twelve, with these three steps. My twelve year old is currently using this tactic to train herself. To [00:15:00] stay focused better at school to help her stay on task and to stay Attentive because she is bored I use this the same tactics to be more productive when I'm working and has been Highly effective in increasing my output.

So to hit the hard reboot However, you need one more element and this is what took me a while to figure out with this blog post Merry Christmas, Bob that I was reading every year. What you need, the one element that separates the full hard reboot from the rest of programming yourself to do something is you need a story.

More importantly, you need your ideal outcome story. Decide who you want to be. See that person in the mirror. Do they inspire you? Do they motivate you? Do they make you want to be them? Because this is [00:16:00] that person's story, his story, your story. Your future story. See, that's, what's so powerful about Merry Christmas, Bob.

That's why it got to me. I could see an obtainable goal that I wanted to reach when I read it. I imagined it was me having this conversation with some of my old school buddies and stuff like that, because when I saw them, all of us were getting unhealthier and unhealthier, right? I could see. What I look like at that party.

I can see what I didn't want to look like in that story, right? Bob is there's two characters in the story. And it's a conversation between a guy and Bob, and Bob is overweight, slob, out of shape, eating unhealthy, lethargic. He's everything I didn't want to be. And I could see that. And I could see the main character, who is Chris in the story, and I could see that's what I wanted.

That's physically, [00:17:00] health wise, what I wanted. And it could be my story because it was obtainable. And I can't tell you I, how many Christmases I've been in the gym, many, many, many, many Christmases you have found me in the gym, largely due to that story. I love the feeling of being that way. I love the feeling I get when other people kind of look me over because I stand out.

It's not just the beard and the goatee or the beard and the Mohawk. I'm a fairly large man. I'm not like bodybuilder big. I'm not a huge guy, but I'm definitely a bigger guy. And that size stands out. When I step into a room with a bunch of people who aren't in healthy shape or aren't actively saying stronger or bigger, right.

And I love that feeling for me. That's just me. That's something I like. You don't have to like that and that's fine, but that is what really dialed me in. and made this [00:18:00] story work for a hard reboot for me is I identified with who I wanted to be and could see clearly who I didn't want to be and could envision this happening with me, like this actually being a legit party, like me actually being in that situation.

So for you to have this hard reboot, that's what you need to do. You need the three steps of basic programming Really, really, really simple stuff, guys. So to get that hard reboot, that's exactly what you've got to do. You need to decide what story you want to live, make your ideal self, the focal character of the story, make him someone you look up to and other people do too.

Then have him interact with the other direction. You don't want to go think of it as the two wolf story. If you've been around the channel are around the manosphere. I hate to use that term. You've probably heard of the two wolf story, right? Every old has been credited as an old native legend. You know, everybody's got two wolves [00:19:00] inside of him.

And the one that you feed is the one that wins. Right. They're always at war. Well, this is a two wheel story. So here are the two people I could be. Right. And that's what I saw in Merry Christmas, Bob. I saw who I wanted to be, and I saw who I really didn't want to be. The outcome I dreamed of, the outcome I didn't want to become.

And I'm, I'm not. Pulling your leg. I literally want you to write a story. It is so easy. Please don't use chat GPT to cheat It is so easy to do guys sit down with a notebook sit down on your computer Have this conversation with yourself You see stories speak to us at a deep will deeper level than almost anything else.

They convey things We would never really normally say to ourselves out loud Your heart craves stories. It's part of the human nature of as old as mankind. Our story holds our hopes, [00:20:00] our pains, our desires, our devastations, our losses, our wins. It's how we reconcile the world and everything in it to ourselves and make it all make sense.

Stories are the language of mankind's heart. Men, women, all of mankind's stories are the The language that our heart speaks, and that's why this gets so powerful. So you decide your outcome. I decided I needed a heart reset. Well, I didn't decide that I've decided with everything else. I programmed myself with this one kind of fell in my lap and that's why I learned how to do this.

But you decide you're going to use that as motivation for a heart reset, right? That's what you want. You want to be able to click yourself objectively into this mode of looking at yourself objectively. without massive judgment, without emotion and just getting yourself back on track by [00:21:00] evaluating and having that introspective look at your own life.

That's the outcome, right? Figure out what the trigger is. For me, Merry Christmas, Bob. I'm telling you, your ideal trigger is this story you need to write for yourself. Write the story of the man you want to become. Who he is, What he lives like, what is his life is like, and honestly, like the Merry Christmas Bob story is perfect.

Like I said, it's a conversation between two people who know each other and only see each other at the company Christmas party, right? Or at a company overlapped Christmas party. And Chris is telling Bob exactly. Bob's like, well, what do you do? Why do this? Well, what does that mean? Oh yeah. I always wanted to work out.

Chris just unloads like this is who I am. This is what I do. And it's because of guys like you, right? Have that conversation with the person you want to be being the [00:22:00] central character of that story. Talking to the person you're trying to make sure you never become. All of us have that in our hearts. All of us have the ideal person.

We, we desire to be that. We imagine ourselves to be that we secretly fantasize about becoming that we're afraid we'll never get there. And all of us have the guy we're trying not to become for some people, that's their parent because their parent was a horrible parent for some people. That's a friend's dad are.

It's somebody else in their life, an uncle, uh, somebody you happen to know, right? You just looked at them and went, God, I never want to do that. Put that story together. Be this person explaining to this person why you're this way instead of this way. That is the key. And every time you read that story, [00:23:00] you're then going to choose to take an introspective moment and see if you're aligning with that direction you want to send yourself together.

So here's how it all comes together. Take your story, connect it with a yearly, bi yearly, quarterly, monthly Put on your calendar, whatever date. I actually recommend starting with it being a monthly thing you do Schedule yourself some time every month because practice is how you make this happen. It takes repetition.

I've been reading this story since 2007 so Practice is how it does it So I recommend doing this once a month for the first year and then once every other month for the second year To the point where by the third year, anytime you read that, this is what's going to happen. This is not a quick fix. So put it on your calendar, drink something pleasant.

When you read the story, you could also have a candle. If I [00:24:00] did drink your choices and smelly, right? I've got coffee. It's my drink of choice. So have your drink of choice. Right. Then you get that taste and smell, right? Have it on paper or notebook or on a computer or tablet where there's a physical physical interaction to connect with the story, have a sound track.

Experience has taught me, make sure it's not something you want to listen to the rest of the time, because that really screws it up. Read the story with your desired outcome and your undesired outcome and have them interact and have your desired outcome, tell your undesired outcome, why they're there and why that's so much better.

And then think about where you need to adjust from there. If you make this a habit once a month for a year, then decreases once every other month, you will create the neural pathways that will trigger [00:25:00] this automatic introspection. Anytime that you read that story, you know, that's what you're really doing is you're building neural pathways.

The trigger, I do this, therefore, this is what happens next, right? This is human programming at a very basic level. I've been doing this through mine, with mine for years. Some years I read it once, some years I read it three or four times. But every time I do, I see immediate recalibration that gets me back on path.

It's not even a functional choice anymore. It is programmed in my brain. I read this. I immediately, I lost, I read it yesterday, getting ready for this, uh, for this episode and I read it yesterday and like, it actually knocked out the rest of my work for the next three hours. [00:26:00] All I did was just deep, deep dive into my year and the ups and downs and what I need to fix and what I need to change.

And it's not even a reading it to as an intentional choice. But I don't even have a choice now. My brain just automatically starts to go into infected mode and analyze my goals in my life and everything else. Whenever I read it, I actually lost three hours of work last night. Because I was prepping for this.

I see an immediate recalibration and I see immediate improvements every single time because I programmed myself to have this occurrence. Reaching goals consistently. Isn't a short game. You have to train yourself if you want to win more than you fall short. It's one of the reasons that the book atomic habits was so powerful and it's still a top 10 bestseller or whatever.

Is [00:27:00] because the author put it down into a place where people understood, right? Micro habits is how you build big habits. Big habits consistently is how you win. It's human programming is computer programming on humans. That's what micro habits are into major habits. That is why it was so effective is it teaches you how to start to build.

Bigger habits through starting with smaller habits. This is the mental hack that goes with it. This is not something I learned reading atomic habits. This is something I learned through my own experience. And then I saw an Atomic Habits explained differently, but very similar, same idea. I know this doesn't seem like a Christmas episode to some of you, and that's fine, but this is a Christmas present for you from me.

This is one of my most well guarded secrets. This is my ace in the hole. This is [00:28:00] how I bounce back from failure after failure, after failure, after falling short. I don't have all the answers. I've never pretended to have all the answers. That's why it's called The Fallible Man. But I'm really, really, really good.

At getting up when I'm down, my old wrestling coach, Mr. Hample would have been very proud. This was part of his wrestling coaching. Is we practice this all the time. We'd spend 20 to 30 minutes every practice getting knocked down and having to escape and get back up, getting knocked down over and over again, from both the up position and the down position in wrestling, our partners would knock us down 10 minutes solid over and over and over.

And we had to get out and escape. And start over again, 10 minutes on each side. It was insane. We had a near perfect season. Almost every year. We rarely ever lost a single mat. We had a [00:29:00] lot of wrestlers go on to division one schools and everything had to do with this resilience because our coach taught us how to get up no matter how hard and how often we got knocked down, I actually attributed a lot of my success in life.

To that wrestling coach back when I was 12 years old, because this was a valuable lesson I learned then is how to get back up. This is part of my story. Merry Christmas, Bob is a big part of my story. It is part of how I get back up every time. This isn't a quick slash solution I'm giving you guys. I'm sure you can go buy a quick solution on Tik TOK and get an AI assistant that's going to do the work for you.

But if you're smart enough to know the six minute abs is complete bullshit. Then this is actually for you guys. This is a power secret learning to stop trigger reset. [00:30:00] Look objectively at will, right? Decide I want to set reset because I see something that is wrong, forcing yourself in that reset. So you can recalculate and pivot and recover and get back up.

That's a superpower. I hope you take this gift to heart. It will absolutely change your life.

Merry Christmas from our family here at the Fallow Man to you and yours. I pray you have a safe and wonderful Christmas and can be with the people you care about. If not, it's probably not much consolation, but know that you guys are always close to my mind. Even if you don't know it or know me personally, I spend so much of my time in this rabbit hole trying to think of ways that I can help you make your life better.

Because I really think that you as a man are the key to making the world better. So you're on my mind whether you get to be where you want to be or not. Like I said, it may [00:31:00] be hollow constellation. I cannot believe it is Christmas Eve and that tomorrow is the big day. So enjoy your holiday, be better tomorrow because what you do today, I'll see you on New Year's Eve.

David McCarter: This has been the Fallible Man podcast. Your home for everything man, husband, and father. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a show. Head over to www. thefallibleman. com for more content and get your own Fallible Man Gear.