Stop Doing That Sh*t. Gary John Bishop

      I’m drawing a line in the sand with you right here.

      You might discover that the effort you put into these pages is commensurate with the effort you have put into your life. That statement alone could change a life. Or not.

      Get your head out of the sand (or your navel or wherever you currently have it buried) and make whatever you are reading here make a difference for you. You can do that at least.

       “Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”

       —Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Okay, champ, let’s get rolling.

03

       The Question

       That’s what we call a life. Wanting new; addicted to the familiar.

      The idea for this book began with my asking myself a simple question.

      Why?

      Why is my life the way it is?

      When I looked at my life I could see it was, in certain areas, headed in a direction that I wasn’t particularly happy with. It seemed that regardless of the approach, there was always an inevitability about some areas of my life. My pillowy stomach. My finances. Certain relationships. I mean, damn, I’ve done TONS of growth work over the years and STILL my bank account gets overdrawn? Where’s my Tony Robbins private helicopter/jet/submarine, for the love of God?

      How come I’ve never really made a difference with these areas of my life? It’s not as if I can’t earn money, but how the hell have I seemingly always struggled so much to build it? It’s not as if I don’t know how to get my body in shape, but why is it always so temporary? No matter how much I tried, I would continually go in these cycles of winning, losing, winning, losing, and at the end of it all, wind up right back where I started. There have even been times when I was actually further behind after that real-life yo-yo!

      It made no difference that I knew I kept getting into the same cycle and making the same mistakes. Like you, I’m not a freaking idiot! I can see what’s wrong! However, no matter how hard I tried, it was as if I would eventually be compelled to keep doing the same stuff I had always done, and I was apparently powerless to stop it! What the . . . ? I knew what I wanted to do, but I kept getting snagged by the hook of doing things the same way, going back to old and bankrupt and destructive behaviors.

      You might want to take a breath here and ponder a couple of questions for yourself. Why do you do what you do? Again, go beyond the usual answer you give yourself. Think. If you keep living this way, where is it all headed? I mean really headed? Not some wispy concept of your future but rather a down-in-the-dirt look at where your current actions are leading you. Well? You might find those questions tough to answer, but this is the kind of digging that will release you from your trap of sabotage.

      Earlier, I pointed out that self-sabotage isn’t always the big, extreme things we do to screw up our lives. It’s important to understand that there are millions of tiny ways we are sabotaging our lives every day. You have to see there’s a problem before you can do anything about it. But it’s important to understand that self-sabotage can also lead to very destructive behaviors. It shatters marriages, fractures families, turns people to hard drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex addictions, infidelity, and all kinds of toxic behaviors that trash an otherwise decent life.

      When it comes down to it, no one can seriously fuck up your life quite as magnificently as you can. And you do.

      In my career as a personal development guy, it’s my job to help people have insights that empower them to make significant change in their lives. I’ve seen how very common it is for people to get stuck in cycles of behavior that, in the cold light of day, seem to be in complete opposition to what they say they want. Men and women the world over are trapped in a myopic stream of self-talk and patterns of behavior that keep them spinning in an all-too-predictable life.

      Regardless of the number of times it seems life is on track, it always eventually seems to go off.

       We are all building things only to burn them right back down. And we’re tired of it.

      YOU’RE NOT A CATEGORY

      In looking for a way to get our lives back on track, I read somewhere that what we need is “willpower” or “discipline” or some other generic term (don’t even get me started on “mental strength” . . . ugh) that serves only to help us explain to ourselves the lack of real change in our lives.

      These terms are absolutely useless. They make zero difference!

      What is “willpower,” anyway? A feeling? An emotion? A mood?

      What about “discipline”? Is it thoughts or actions, or is that a feeling too? Don’t give me your bumper sticker answer either, the one that immediately comes to mind. Give it some thinking. Define it. We all use these kinds of words without really questioning them.

      Here’s what I’ve found. When it comes time to make real change in your life, explaining yourself with that kind of shallow thinking makes not one blind bit of difference. I hear it trundled out by new clients all the time—“I just need a bit of self-discipline” or “I don’t have any willpower.” It’s all voodoo! You wouldn’t know willpower if it ran over you with a moped! If you are focusing on that kind of answer, you are doing the equivalent of implying that your car runs on stinky bathwater that costs you about four bucks a gallon and that you get your money from the kind lady at the bank, who sits in the back room making twenty-dollar bills out of recycled Target receipts and unicorn snot. Nonsense.

      For example, if you’re one of life’s great procrastinators (and you might be still pondering whether you are or not), it’s not as if somebody says, “Yep, you’re a procrastinator, take two doses of willpower a day,” and BAM! The whole world opens up to you and off you go, motivated as hell and sucking up life goals like sugar-free bonbons on a Sunday afternoon sofa-fest, is it? The fact that you now understand you will need some sort of self-discipline to overcome your procrastinating tendencies doesn’t actually solve anything. In fact, it leaves you just as stuck as you’ve always been!

      “Aha, Mr. Scottish man, but I bought that self-discipline book, and I’m going to read it . . . next week.”

      *Sigh.*

      That’s right, you’ve now got something else to procrastinate with. And the cycle continues. As I’ve said, knowing a descriptive term for how you live your life just isn’t enough. And if what you know isn’t making the difference for you, perhaps what you think you know isn’t what’s really going on after all!

       Self-discipline is nothing more than doing what you say you will do, when you least feel like doing it.

      In other words, acting in a positive way when you most likely feel negative. When I say “acting” I don’t mean “pretending”; I mean TAKE THE FREAKING ACTIONS! So, if you’re waiting for the energy or positivity or enthusiasm or for your chakra to glow a bold yellow, enjoy the wait. It’ll be a long one.

      What if you are, in fact, not a procrastinator anyway? What if it’s something else entirely? (No, I’m not referring to some medical condition either.)

      I’ll give you a clue. No, I take that back, fuck clues, this isn’t Scooby-Doo. Here’s the deal. There’s no such thing as a procrastinator; it doesn’t exist. It’s a descriptive term. A category. There is only someone who procrastinates from time to time and with certain things. We all poop from time to time too, but you don’t refer to yourself as a pooper, do you?

      “Hello,