https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QuqiSL3nDNg
I have no direction or goals in my life at the moment. What can I do to regain my compass in life? Well, you talked about that a little bit in your intro. So there’s this line in the New Testament, which is kind of mysterious, you might say. But it’s really an instruction set and the line is approximately knock and the door will open ask and you will receive seek and you will find and you think well no way that can’t possibly be true, but It’s true if if all of that is undertaken seriously so one of the things One of the things that Tammy and I learned to do when we were trying to adjudicate our arguments and we both tried to abide by that was like if I’m upset with her, let’s say It’s clearly because she’s done something wrong One of the things that I’m required to do is let her know what my conditions for satisfaction are it’s like What do I want and I have to be able to tell her and I might object well if you love me dear You know what I want and people say that to each other all the time and they should immediately get slapped for that It’s just like I’m too stupid to know what I want let alone figure out what you want. You don’t even know what you want. So So it’s good to kind of clue your partner in Here’s what I would now that doesn’t mean once you let the person know that they’re necessarily gonna deliver it But they might especially if you also allow them the luxury of doing it stupidly and badly at least to begin with You know you your wife might tell you when I put some effort into getting ready to go out I’d like you to say something nice We’re still a bit vague. It’s like okay, dear Exactly, what would you like me to say? well that you know, that’s an annoying thing for your wife to have to think through but and it’s annoying for you maybe to have to mouth those words, but You know you you could do it stupid and badly 20 times and maybe get a little expert at it and by the hundredth time you’re like world expert at compliment deliverer and You can encourage her to Pursue her interest in in attire let’s say and why isn’t that a good thing for both of you and so But that’s all Dependent on whether or not you’re willing to let yourself know what you want And that’s all dependent on whether or not you’re willing to ask and so one of the things you can ask yourself And this is very useful is What would your life have to look like in order for it to justify itself to you? And so why would I put it that way? Well your life is hard. It’s full of suffering It’s full of malevolence for that matter. It’s full of malevolent suffering. That’s common for sure and that’s a heavy Burden to bear and you might say well It’s so heavy that nothing at all could possibly justify it and I think that’s not a productive attitude I think if you watch your life you see that there are things that will grip you that do appear to justify the weight of existence and I think you can commune with yourself, which is a form of thought It’s a form of meditative prayer, but that’s a form of thought And the thought is what do I want if I could have what I wanted and? needed What would that look like and you might say well? Why would I associate thought with meditative prayer? It’s like well. What the hell do you think you’re doing when you’re thinking if it isn’t praying. It’s the same thing You you first of all you formulate a question What do I want and? And then you ask it and you might say well who are you asking well you’re asking yourself That would be the classic modern answer. It’s like well if you’re the person with the answer Why did you have to formulate the question? And so what are you doing when you formulate the question and what you’re doing? Really what you’re doing is you’re opening yourself up to revelation and You might say revelation from what and that’s a good question no doubt about it But in some sense it’s a revelation from the ground of being itself. You know you ask yourself a question If I could have what I needed and wanted What would that look like you’ll get a dream you’ll get a vision and it comes to you that’s the most accurate way of describing it it makes itself manifest in the theater of your imagination and and In precise proportion to your willingness to actually formulate the question It’s a rather frightening question you know to to to find out to allow yourself to ask yourself What it is that you really need and want? Because you simultaneously make the conditions for failure clear to yourself and people like to keep that sort of thing foggy and vague so They don’t have to hold themselves accountable. That’s it a dreadful mistake That’s why I wrote rule three do not hide unwanted things in the fog It’s like you should sharpen your aim you should specify your goals Now the price that comes along with that is you’ll know when you fail, but the advantage is you’ll know when you fail You can learn During the season of lent we are called to abstain from luxuries and instead more deeply embrace our faith Co-workers around the office have mentioned giving up coffee alcohol and social media But how about using this time to start building a habit of prayer and meditation? Join me and thousands of others on hallow the number one Christian prayer app in the u.s Hello is helping me maintain a daily prayer routine from now until Easter and it can help you to Download the app for free at hallow.com slash Jordan you can set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way Not sure where to start check out father Mike Schmitz is Bible in a year available on the hallow app for brief daily Bible readings And reflections or pray alongside Mark Wahlberg Jim Caviezel and even some world-class athletes with hallow You can customize a personal prayer plan that works for you and listen anywhere you are with downloadable offline sessions Get an exclusive three-month free trial at hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s hallow.com slash Jordan Now more practically you don’t know Where you’re going or why the person who asked this question, so let’s decompose the problem a little bit I don’t know what to do with my life. Well, that’s a pretty vague problem because your life is that’s a big complex Multi-dimensional thing and the probability that you’re gonna be able to formulate an answer to the question What’s the meaning of my life is pretty much zero? Because well, what do you want a one-sentence answer like it’s a one-sentence question You think there’s a one-sentence answer? That that’s not helpful. And so what I often did practically in my clinical practice And this is useful to know especially if you’re a bit lost as well Where do people derive where do people generally derive their sense of meaning and It’s not that complicated to figure that out and this is also a conservative perspective in some sense while most people need or want an intimate relationship and some family Interaction, maybe that’s children. Maybe it’s with your parents or your siblings, but Zero family interaction is generally not Not part of the optimized human condition Most of us would like to have a friend or two We need a job or a career to To keep body and soul together, but also so that we have so that we’re in harness and we can pull against a weight that that in a noble and productive and generous manner We perhaps need to be engaged in something creatively. We have to take care of ourselves mentally and physically We should adopt some civic responsibility We need to protect ourselves against major sources of hedonistic and impulsive temptation. There’s eight things Like well pursue one of them Start there No, when I dealt with my clients who were depressed unhappy, let’s say The first thing I would do with them is walk them through that analytic process. It’s like do you have Anything in place in any of these domains? Sometimes I had people who were doing pretty good in all eight areas and were still unhappy those people were depressed Technically right because their lives were actually in pretty good order, but they were miserable There was something wrong with them. They were ill in some way that was was lowering their mood Destroying their positive emotion other people would be batting zero on all eight fronts like they weren’t depressed. They just had terrible lives and so Really, you know, I’m not saying that I’m not saying that I’m not saying that I’m not saying that I’m not saying that I’m not saying that I’m not saying that And so Really really and so the what I would do with those people is well look like here’s eight things that aren’t in place in your life It’s no bloody wonder you’re miserable and everything seems meaningless except for the suffering because that’s a meaning too It’s like why don’t we start working? incrementally in a few of these areas and Then we can just evaluate and see if that’s helpful and it’s almost invariably helpful You know and part of that Part of that is Well specify you ask yourself. Well, what what do I need that? I don’t have well, maybe i’d like to have a partner Okay. Well I can’t just leap from not having a partner to being happily married in one fell swoop There’s intervening steps one of the things I used to do with my clients who were lonesome is say well look Have you tried online dating? No, i’m too afraid. It’s like well, no wonder You’re afraid of it. You have your reasons but We could start Small it’s like why don’t you write out a dating profile? Don’t post it Just go online one of these sites and write out a profile. Who are you? What do you have to offer? And what do you want? Think it through write it out come up with a coherent Story about A coherent representation about who you are And then figure out what you want and see how that works we can play that through and then maybe when you develop that in a manner that feels solid to you and reliable and genuine And and you’ve also developed a vision of the person that you’re trying to attract That would help you feel confident in your Happiness if you actually met that person. Well, then you’re ready to go launch it on the site and Talk to the person You know first maybe it’s just text and then maybe it’s coffee and you know There’s incremental ways of doing this and you can do that with all of those eight domains. It’s like get yourself a life and If you have if you’re firing on all cylinders and all eight dimensions and you’re still depressed and this is specific Answer to the person formulating this question if you’re still unhappy you should probably go see someone because you’re probably sick You know if you’ve got all of those If you have all that skill and you have all those relationships and activities in place and you still are suffering an excess of anxiety and pain and insufficient hope and motivation It’s highly probable that something You know that something’s afflicting you that’s in the nature of an illness But if you’re if you have none of those things, it’s like what’s no wonder you’re miserable Misery is the default human condition in the absence of Sustaining meaning just like hunger is the default condition in the absence of of food and you need Productive Engagement productive generous reciprocal engagement in order to provide you with the genuine meaning that sustains you in life and The pathway a lot of the pathway to that is it’s pretty pragmatic and practical you got no friends. That’s likely a problem You’re a creative person. You have no creative outlet. That’s not gonna work out for you No, you don’t you’re lonesome because you don’t have an intimate relationship. That’s a source of pain Those things have to be rectified and and you can do that incrementally and that works so that’s a practical pathway to Incremental improvement and one of the things that’s cool about that because you might be thinking oh my god, this is hopeless I don’t have any of those eight things. I’m also just end it all tonight It’s like and people certainly think that you know, and I’m not making light of it one of the things that’s very much worth knowing is that a lot of positive emotion is dependent technically on the observation On your personal observation that you’re moving towards a valued goal see not that you’ve attained the goal So imagine that you’re in your hopeless situation and you decide well, I’m gonna work on I’m gonna work on the relationship fronts now You develop a vision of what a relationship might be like and you posit that as a promised land Let’s say and then you Differentiate that so you can make incremental steps forward and the incremental steps are small enough so that you actually Take them as soon as you start to take them and you observe yourself moving forward in relationship to that goal Then first of all, you’ll be stabilized on the anxiety front because now you have a purpose that’s finite and defined and Second you have positive emotion because you experience positive emotion in relationship to observing yourself move towards a valued goal So right away, you don’t have to attain the goal in order To be meaningfully engaged you just have to have to be on the pathway forward and So you can benefit from this almost immediately and if you want to do something practical I have a program online at self authoring comm called future authoring that helps people Develop a vision on these eight different dimensions along these eight different dimensions that I just outlined and you could go and do that Do it badly because you’re not going to get it perfect anyways and then Get humble enough to make the incremental steps small enough. So someone as useless as you might actually do them and then Away you go and that works out We use this program for example among For we had students in three universities, but I’ll talk about one vocational college in Canada We had all the students who were going to this vocational college We divided them into two groups They either wrote for 90 minutes about what they had done in the last two weeks in their life or they wrote for 90 minutes About their vision across these dimensions that I described They didn’t have any training No warning except that they knew they were going to participate in the study and no one even reviewed what they wrote and We dropped the dropout rate of those students by 50% in the first year all they needed was all they needed all Was a compelling vision, you know, and that’s that’s what we all need. We all need a compelling vision We’re visionary creatures in in the literal sense We need a compelling vision and one of the things our society does very badly is to encourage people is to let people know that they are Visionaries and to encourage them to develop for themselves a compelling vision It’s very sad that we don’t do that, especially because if you do do that with people the results are Spectacular and immediate, you know, and one of the things that’s been heart-rending I would say for both of us Going around the world talking to people is people frequently stop me on the street and and say The story is In some in some sense archetypal although the details vary in interesting ways I Wasn’t in a very good place. I was suffering and there’s usually reasons for that and then I listened to your lectures Which of course are predicated on the observations of brilliant clinicians and psychologists and so aren’t The ideas aren’t attributable to me. They’re just great ideas. I listened to your lectures and I started Developing a vision and attempting to put my life together and things are way better It’s like what’s so sad about that’s very, you know that’s it’s very pleasing to hear that in one sense because the upside of the story is The improvement right the movement away from the catastrophe but the downside of the story is twofold first of all the catastrophe was there to begin with and second it didn’t take much encouragement to fix it which Brings the question right up to the forefront. Why the hell wasn’t that encouragement there to begin with? Why are so many people dying on the vine for lack of an encouraging word? Because it’s definitely the case that pertains to the mental health of young people and it’s in no small part Because we do everything we can to punish the spirit out of young people We especially do that with boys, but we’re pretty good at you You can’t do that to boys without doing it to girls too in the fundamental in the final analysis because we’re basically stuck with each other so Develop a compelling vision and and one that You’re the one who judges whether or not it’s compelling you want a vision you want a vision you want to formulate a vision Such that you you apprehend the vision you think oh my god if I could have that Life would be worth living Well, yeah, that’s what you want and you might find that you’re actually not that hard to satisfy You know that that what would satisfy you fill you with hope stabilize you psychologically is actually within your grasp and Certainly my experience on the clinical front was that that was the case one of the things I loved about being a clinician I really loved this was that generally My clients who were genuinely aiming up because not all of them were but most of them were the ones who were genuinely aiming up made rapid progress and it was extremely Engaging and entertaining to work with them on that, you know, we’d set goals. I want to triple my salary in three years That was fun. It’s like okay, but sounds like a war. How might you do that? And it was extraordinarily entertaining to plot that out to strategize about it like it was a full-fledged war, you know but a war for something positive and a war that Would benefit the person who won and also the people around them and that’s well within your grasp There’s any number of things that are right in front of you that you could radically improve with the right vision and that would Result in radical improvement and not just for you but for everybody around you That’s just right there in front of everyone and it’s it’s even it’s particularly true If what’s around you is pretty dismal because if what’s around you is pretty dismal There’s just no shortage of opportunity for improvement might be difficult. But man, there’s lots of possibilities sitting there as well so Aim up get a vision man and pursue it and the more of us that do that the better things are gonna be and it would be better if they were better than if they were worse and we’re certainly trying to sort that out on the Cultural front at the moment. It’s like let’s say map a because down is very deep hole And maybe we don’t want to blunder into that again