I’ve Hit Rock Bottom, But I Want More For Myself

What to do if you feel you’ve hit rock bottom but want more for yourself and your life.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a 22-year-old viewer from Canada who says he has hit rock bottom, but wants more for himself. He has worked a series of dead-end jobs and gotten fired from some of them because he said he stood up for himself. His limiting beliefs are getting in the way of him taking action and moving towards creating a life and lifestyle that he is proud of.

The email perfectly illustrates the type of dis-empowering mindset to avoid that keeps most people stuck in a life of quiet desperation and mediocrity. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

I got an email from a 22-year-old guy from Toronto, Ontario, and he’s hit the proverbial wall, if you will, or the metaphoric wall. He’s got to a point in his life where he’s just like, “It sucks so bad where I’m at. It can’t get any worse. The only way to go from here is up because obviously I’m so low.”

Typically these kinds of incidents happen in our lives and throughout our lives when we realize that the way we’ve been living, or maybe the job we’re working in, or the relationship that we’re in, or the peer group that we’re associated with, just doesn’t serve us anymore. In other words, it’s holding us back. It’s getting in the way of us reaching our full potential.

This particular guy, he’s got a real short email, but he’s in a place where he’s not really doing what he loves for a living. He’s young. He’s only 22, obviously, but some of the things he says in his email, he’s like, “I don’t have any skills or talents that I know of.” When you say something like that to yourself, “Well, I got a bad elbow. I got tennis elbow. I don’t have any skills or talents,” that’s a story. That’s a belief about yourself.

So when you say, “Well, I don’t have any skills or talents,” guess what? You don’t have to do anything to develop any skills or talents, and you get paid based upon the value that you bring to the marketplace. If you have convinced yourself of a limiting belief that you don’t have the skills or talents, then you can’t do anything to fix it. Therefore, you are powerless to shape and change your destiny.

As Tony Robbins said, “People are going to act consistently with how they view themselves to be,” and it doesn’t matter, “Whether the view is accurate or not.” So in this case, he’s not happy with what he’s doing for a living, but he’s told himself the lie that he doesn’t have any skills or talents. If he doesn’t have any skills or talents, well there’s no point in trying to develop your skills or talents because you don’t have any.

It’s kind of like the dudes in the Red Pill community. They don’t have any self-awareness. They don’t want to take any personal responsibility for their bad choices or their failure to vet bum bitches in the past and then to cope, they just say, “Well, this is modern women. They’re all like this. You don’t understand, Corey. You don’t understand girls my age,” even though I continue to date girls that are their age, like come on.

It becomes learned helplessness. When you live a life of learned helplessness, then everything becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re stuck in one dead end job after another because you’ve convinced yourself there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. This is your lot in life. You’re just going to have to deal with making minimum wage jobs. Or like in this case, he’s making $19.50 an hour, and that’s Canadian dollars.

So he’s going to continue to act consistently with his beliefs until he gets a pattern interrupt or somebody like me comes along and says something harshly, because when you say something harshly, especially when there’s a lot of truth in it, it’s the kind of thing that makes people go, “Oh, I can’t believe you said that.” So we’re going to go through this short email because it’s like, what do you do when you find yourself in this place where you’ve hit rock bottom and you’re just miserable with what you’re doing and you don’t see any way out of it?

You got to remember, inaction breeds fear and doubt. Taking action breeds confidence and courage. The more you do nothing, the worse you’re going to feel about your life. Like the dudes in the Red Pill community, they’re always so negative and they’re so angry, because they’re frustrated because they convince themselves that it’s out of their control. Their life, their destiny is out of control. It’s because “All modern women are screwed up” and well, “That’s just the end of that.”

So they’re still angry and frustrated because they’re still not getting what they want, but their beliefs about their situation and their lot in life or “modern women” keep them from doing anything to shape and change their destiny.

Viewer’s Email:

Hey Corey,

I’ve been watching for a little over two years now and have read your first book around 10 times either through Audible or physical copy.

Well, you can read the book a thousand times, but if you don’t apply what’s in it, it’s not going to help you anyway. It’s just learned helplessness. Reading a book doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t solve your problems. Taking action does. Nobody’s coming to save you. Nobody’s going to fix your life, and quite frankly, most people don’t give a shit anyways because they’ve got their own problems to worry about.

There’s probably people that you know that are glad you’re not doing well, because you not doing well makes them feel better about their shitty lives because they’re not doing well either, but at least you’re not doing better than they are. So there‘s that.

I’m a 22-year-old male from Toronto, Ontario and I feel like I’m at rock bottom. I recently got a job which pays 19.50 CAD an hour and it’s decent but I really want more from life as I feel like I have lots of potential but not the success I want or feel like I deserve, just worthless part time jobs where I don’t even get respect just verbal abuse.

He’s pretty convinced of this belief about himself. Let me read this part again, because it illustrates his belief. “Just worthless part time jobs where I don’t even get respect, just verbal abuse.” If you think that way, if you believe that about yourself, you’re going to continue to seek out those jobs. If you’re not happy, if you’re not really enjoying your work, the reality is as a man, you should take pride in your work, even if it’s a shitty job, because sometimes you got to do things you hate in order to eventually do what you love.

First and foremost, I think it’s great you read my first book 10 times, but have you read Mastering Yourself? This whole book is all about how to align your life with your true calling and reach your full potential. It’s got my whole autobiography, my life history, the jobs, the careers, the businesses that I’ve had, all the ups and downs creating this business and how you approach these things in life. My whole idea was to put my life history in here was to show people how long it takes.

I’m 53 years old, and most great things take 10 years or more to really become good at it. When I look at this and the fact that he’s 22 and I wrote about this in Mastering Yourself when I was right around the same age, I was 21, 22 years old, and I was hanging out with my roommates, one of my good buddies from college, and his sister, who she had broken up with her boyfriend a few months before. She moved in with us, and then she started dating a guy that she dated for a few months in between one of the breakups with her boyfriend that she lived with for, I think it was like 4 or 5 years at that point.

I remember when she broke up with her boyfriend for good the second time, she ended up calling this guy. They’ve been together ever since, by the way. They had kids. Their kids are grown now. It’s amazing how much time has gone by. I remember I was like 21. I just turned 22, and I’m living with my friend. She’s over there with this guy that she was dating. He was older than us because we’re 21, 22, and he was like 27, 28, and his dad had a successful business that he was in the process of putting his son in charge of.

He’s doing well. I remember he drove up in his Toyota 4Runner and what we thought was really cool at time is he had a phone in his car. Not one of those brick phones, but he had a phone mounted in the car. I thought, “This is cool.” This dude had his life together. He was hungry. He was excited. He was fit. He was in shape. Obviously, my friend really loved this guy. Ended up marrying him. So far, they’ve lived happily ever after.

What impressed me about him is that all of us, we were young. I was tending bar at the time. I was still going to school. My other friends, her brother, same thing, he was taking classes, dropping classes. We were just partying and goofing around. “Hey, we’re young. We got our whole lives ahead of us, right?”

What I admired about this guy was that he had his shit together. He was getting after things. He was hungry. Granted, he was learning to take over the family business, if you will, and he grew it way beyond whatever it was before, but he was sharp. He had his act together. My friend really loved and admired this guy and respected him and looked up to him.

I got to hang out with him and got to know him, and he inspired me. It was just kind of one of those moments where, just like the same age that this dude was, I realized life is passing me by. In the next 12 months, most of my high school buddies are all going to be graduating college. I’m 22, and I didn’t even end up graduating until I was 25. So it took me a whole other three years, almost twice as long to get my four year degree as everybody else.

Hanging out with him inspired me to go get an internship and start getting some experience in the construction industry, because I could recognize that I was getting older, my friends were getting older and all my high school buddies were going to school full time and we’re all about to graduate college in the next year. Here I am. I’m barely halfway through two years of almost a four year degree, basically.

I started to recognize that I’m falling behind. I’m kind of slacking, and I wanted more for my life. I wasn’t happy with that. I wrote about in Mastering Yourself, there was a time when I first started tending bar when I was 21 for about three, four months, I was thinking, “Man, I could do this full time. Maybe I won’t even finish school. I’ll just drop out and just do this. This is a great living.”

Hell, I was making more money than my dad was making. I’m tending bar and my dad’s managing, I think, a linen supermarket at the time? And I’m making more money than he is. I thought, “What do I need to get this degree for? This is great.” After about six, eight weeks, I was like, “Man, tending bar really kind of sucks.” It’s good money, but I got burned out very quickly on it. So I got refocused and more serious about school.

That’s around the time where I came across Tony Robbins, because he had infomercials on at that time, he had the 30 Days Personal Power program on. I went through it and it was like a tape or CD you could get, and you just listen to it on Monday through Friday. You listen to one.

When it first started out, you got to exercise, maybe takes you two minutes to do. As the month goes by and you continue to listen to these CDs, and then he has the exercise for you to do at the end of it, each day they got a little bit longer to where towards the end of it, you’re doing exercises where you might spend an hour or two.

What’s interesting is it builds incrementally. It starts out really easy, because success is making progress, and you do this exercise, you’re like, “Wow, I made some progress. It was really quick to get through it,” but you do more in depth things as you go through it. It helped me recognize what I was doing and recognize the same limiting beliefs that I pointed out in this guy’s email. I had similar ways that I thought about myself, and I realized I’m sabotaging my own success because I’m convincing myself of a story that’s simply untrue, but I’m acting consistent with the story that I’ve created for myself and my life.

At the time, it was preventing me from doing the studying and really taking the time I needed to do to pass some of the really hard classes that I was in. It was just easier to put off the homework. “I’ll do it next weekend. I’ll do it the weekend after.” “You know what? Our first test is coming up. They let us drop one test over the semester if we get a bad grade. So this would be the one test I’ll drop,” and the next thing you know, I’m halfway into the semester and I’m a month and a half behind and there’s just no hope of catching up.

I ended up dropping the class, losing the money on it. Obviously, my parents were happy about paying for classes. It got to the point where my dad was like, “I’m not paying for any more class. You keep dropping these things,” and my attitude was like, “Fuck you, dad. Well, I’ll pay for college out of my own pocket,” and so I did that.

He was surprised because at that point he’d given up on me. He didn’t take me seriously. He didn’t think I was ever going to finish school. He’s like, “Why should I keep wasting my money to pay for these classes when he’s dropping half of them?” Which I can understand.

My dad after that, he says after that first semester he’s like, “Well, what do you mean you had to pay for it? I didn’t mean I wasn’t going to.” Well, he basically told me he didn’t want to pay for any more classes. “I want to get my degree. I told you I was serious. I was going to do this and you didn’t believe me.” He says, “Tell you what? When you get your report card, I will reimburse you for the classes that you take and you pass successfully.” I was like, “That works.”

I eventually graduated college when I was 25. Got my degree. Granted, it’s three years behind everybody else, but I was already working and had more experience. The one thing I did do was that construction internship that I got, it was unpaid for about a month, five weeks or whatever. Then Hurricane Andrew hit and we got loaded up with 45 homes, 115 condo units down in the Cutler Ridge area. We had all this work and I’m like, “I need people,” and they hired me full time, so I cut back on my bar shifts.

The point being is that you get paid based upon the value that you bring to the marketplace. At that point, I had taken a bunch of classes in construction management and I was good with my hands. Obviously I had an understanding of how to build things, but I didn’t work in the industry doing the day in, day out things. So what did I really have to offer a company? I had my excitement, my enthusiasm and the fact that I was going to school and I was majoring in construction management.

I got a job, it was an unpaid internship, as a project estimator. I was estimating construction costs, which was things that I was learning how to do in school anyways. After proving myself for a month that I was going to show up on time, I was going to work, I was even willing to work for free, then I had all this other work because of Hurricane Andrew, then they gave me a full time job. So I took it.

Sometimes those are the kinds of things you have to do, but I knew what I wanted, where I was going. I had a passion for the things that I was majoring in. This guy hasn’t figured out yet what he wants to do with his life. When you tell yourself that you’re just having to take these worthless part time jobs, what’s your plan?

What is your plan to get beyond these bullshit part time jobs? I didn’t like working as a bartender or a waiter, but I did it for three, three and a half years, because it was good money and it made up for the fact that I wasn’t making a ton of money working in the construction industry because I didn’t have my degree yet. I didn’t have any experience. What could I really offer to them?

It was after working in the industry for several years, for that particular company, I worked for them for about a year and a half now. I had a year and a half of experience in managing jobs, running jobs, bidding jobs out and dealing with the building department. So I had expertise. I had grown my reserve of knowledge, and I had developed my gifts, my skills and my talents by working originally for free.

Now I had a year and a half of experience, and then I went to a general contractor developer that was in Fort Lauderdale because I had experience now. Then they gave me a job and I was making more money working for them than I was working at the last job and they were doing bigger work than the first company I was working for.

Eventually, because of the contacts that I made in the construction industry through school and the relationships and the friendships, I got to know the CEO of Centex Rooney back at the time, I knew his son because we had class together. We hung out, drank beers together. Really cool dude.

I knew him and indirectly knew the CEO of the company. My marketing manager was also one of my professors at FIU or the marketing manager, I should say, of Centex Rooney. Then the scheduling manager was also a professor there. So I had three people. The scheduling manager, with the second company that I worked for, did some consulting work for us on the schedule. So he knew my work ethic from classes and working in the industry.

When I went to these guys and I said, “Hey, I want to work for Rooney. I want to work at a Disney job. I want to work on these big multi $100 million plus jobs,” and they had the Coronado Springs Resort at Disney World coming up. At the time, it was a 300,000 square foot convention center, 2,000 hotel rooms. They had a replica of a Mayan pyramid. If you ever go to Disney World, stay at the Coronado Springs Resort. It’s an amazing place. It’s just really incredible with Disney’s Imagineers come up with on those things. That was a two year project.

I got the job because of the contacts I made in college and proving myself. Over time, I got the experience in the industry to where by the time I was going to work for Rooney, I already had almost four years of experience in the industry at that point, and I now qualified once I got my degree, I could sit for the General Contractor’s exam, which I did, and I pass that. It was a process. Success is a process, and reaching your full potential is a process.

The point being is that you’re going to want to apply yourself at things that you enjoy, ideally that you love and you enjoy, because it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like playing. I was full of enthusiasm. I was very excited back then. I couldn’t wait to learn new things. I couldn’t wait to experience new things and get on with my life. I knew what I wanted. The book, which you can read for free in the member’s area, Mastering Yourself, has the process that I went through.

There’s also some videos on my YouTube channel, Discovering Your Purpose, that I did with Chunky and the rest of the girls that you can see. You got to come up with a list of all the things you love, you enjoy, that you’re excited about, and then find a way to monetize those passions.

In other words, the things that you love, you enjoy, that you’re most interested in, what kinds of careers, what kinds of jobs are available that will enable you to do those tasks and get paid for it and also learn. The more you learn, the more you grow your reserve of knowledge, like getting four years of experience in the construction industry and developing your gifts, your skills, your talents.

I was very detail-oriented. I was good with numbers. I was good with math. I understood construction mechanics and how things fit together. I was mechanically inclined. When I was a kid, I was always taking stuff apart. So working in this particular industry really enabled me to excel and do well because I was hungry and I was excited about the work. That’s the important thing.

In this guy’s case, he’s working a job that just sucks. It’s hard to get excited about a job that sucks, but if you know two, three, four, five years down the road, what you ultimately want to be doing and where you want to be 10-15 years from now, then that gives you hope. That gives you something to strive for. So this guy is literally at the same place that I was 31 years ago. I can understand his mindset, but he’s got to get serious in applying himself at things he’s interested in, that he’s excited about.

It would behoove him to read Mastering Yourself and follow the plan that’s laid out in there. I’ve got stuff in Mastering Yourself about how to negotiate salary, how to get any job that you want, all the techniques, all the strategies that I’ve used over the course of my life to shape and change my destiny, make multiple million dollar businesses that have done very well over the years and provide a nice living for myself and the people that I care about.

You can do the same thing, but you got to apply yourself, because nobody’s going to come knocking on your door and give you the perfect opportunity. You got to figure out what you want, WHY you want it, and then have emotional compelling reasons WHY you want it. You have to have a strong enough WHY, that you want something.

Hanging out with my friend and his sister and her future husband and the fact this guy was just hungry, he was getting after it and he was so much more mature than us because we were just screwing around, tending bar, waiting tables, going to class, going to school part time, and the rest of time we’re just out partying, getting drunk and goofing off, chasing girls, whatever, which is what people tend to do.

The fact that this guy was an example and he already had his act together and inspired me to want to be more like him and to try harder and recognize it, I’m almost 22 at the time, I was like, “I need to get serious about my career, my job, my mission, my purpose in life and what I’m going to do for a living. I need to get serious about this,” because years are going by.

At that point I was four years in college, and I barely had two years out of the way because sometimes I would take 2-4 classes a semester. Sometimes I would just take a semester off and not take any classes. So that created an internal pressure that caused me to move forward towards the things that I wanted.

So you’re going to have to do the same thing. Success is a process, and you have to commit to the process. In order to feel happy, in order to feel like you’re successful in life, you’ve got to see that you’re making incremental progress. For me back then, I was getting classes done and checked off and out of the way that were part of my degree.

Plus, I was gaining experience. After I had worked for several years in the industry, I knew how the industry worked. I learned how to manage jobs. I learned how to run jobs. I learned how to bid jobs. I learned how to get them done. I learned how to negotiate. I learned things that enabled me to get paid more because now it was more valuable to the companies I came to work with.

In this case, if this guy just goes from one crappy $20 an hour job after another just because of what it pays, what’s he really going to learn if he’s not passionate about the work and he’s getting upset, he’s getting mad, he’s not doing anything about it? You got to think about how to go from where you are to where you want to be. Again, I lay it all out in Mastering Yourself.

I’ve been fired from two previously for standing up for myself. I’m really tired of these dead-end jobs and want to know a path to make it to the top.

Well, it’s all laid out in Mastering Yourself. I can’t believe you’ve been following me for two years, and you haven’t even gotten around to reading that book. You’ve got to be serious about your success. When I was your age, one of the other things I was also doing was reading biographies of famous people, successful people, reading books of other people that had accomplished these things so you could learn from them, what they had done, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

I don’t have any skills or talents (that I know of) or even schooling as I did very poorly in high school and never cared (I’m enrolled in criminology, but it makes me miserable) and I want more for myself.

My apologies if this email is long but some nights this shit keeps me up.

Thanks in advance coach you never fail to put a smile on my face 🙂

Bob

Well, you shouldn’t be majoring in something that makes you miserable. That’s a waste of time and money. If you believe you suck and you’re destined for crappy, crummy things, of course you’ll stay enrolled in criminology because it totally lines up with your belief about yourself that you deserve to be miserable. If you deserve to have your dreams, then you’ll be like, “This sucks, but hey, this is a temporary stepping stone to get from where I am to where I want to be.”

The first and foremost thing you should be doing is reading Mastering Yourself. Then you should be watching the videos on How To Discover Your Purpose. There’s a whole tab of those. There’s a whole playlist on my YouTube channel that you can follow along and do the exercises there for yourself to help you figure out what your purpose is. Then once you have all those things down on paper, then you’re going to look and see what kind of jobs and careers line up with your passions and the things that you’re most interested in, and then figure out how to get into it. Maybe you do an unpaid internship or something like that, or maybe there’s a degree that’s required.

The only reason you should go to college is because the degree is going to enable you to learn what you need to learn to get your foot in the door and get a job in the industry that you’re passionate about. Just like what I did, I started as an unpaid intern in the construction industry, proved myself, and then I got more responsibility, got an actual job, got an actual paycheck, and it grew from there. Because I was passionate about it, I worked harder than most people. That’s why I was able to learn a lot really quickly because I was really excited about what I was learning about.

This is why it’s super important to pick something you love and you enjoy because it’s going to be hard. You got to remember, it’s going to take 10 years or more to get from where you are to really where you want to be. When I look at when I started, when I was 18 years old, until I got to the point where I was in the real estate industry and was doing really well, I would say the best years, when things really started doing well, was when I started at 18 and it was like 31 to 34 or 35. Those were just great years before the market went the other way.

If you look at the amount of years, that’s basically 15 years from the time I decided I wanted to major in construction management, until I had my own company that was just killing it. It was about 15 years.

When I look at when I started doing to what I’m doing now, I started when I was 36. That business, it’s about exactly 10 years ago that I got off my dad’s couch and got my own place, moved back to Orlando and started doing well. If you look at from the time I was 36 to now, I’m 53, it’s like same thing, 15 years. You really get to the point where things are doing great.

It’s not an overnight thing. Success doesn’t happen overnight to most people. It’s a long process and you got to think in terms of decades. As Tony Robbins says, “We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.” It takes a long time. It’s all laid out in Mastering Yourself, but you’re going to have to do the work. Nobody’s coming to save you.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.