Lessons - How to Stop Letting Other People Control Your Life | Melissa Ambrosini - Bestselling Author of Mastering Your Mean Girl

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In this lessons episode, discover how stillness and self-awareness can help reveal a more meaningful sense of purpose, understand why intuition becomes clearer when life slows down, explore how taking responsibility can break cycles of blame and limiting beliefs, and uncover how challenging the inner critic can create greater confidence, alignment, and personal growth.

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How do you find that purpose?

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Because I know I don't have a secret for it because I still do things that are a lot of high effort things that I feel like I could be doing something differently or something that's more in line with what I should be doing because that's what gives me energy.

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So how do you find your purpose?

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How did you find your purpose coming out of the hospital?

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Because I want to unpack that and I want to teach people what to look for so that they can find theirs in their life.

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I love this and I teach this and my Audible original book is called Purposeful.

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And I get asked this question a lot.

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And one thing that I'm very passionate about helping people do is find their purpose and live it and share it with the world.

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Because I believe that we're all here meant and we're all meant to do that, to share that with the world.

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Because we all have gifts.

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Everyone has a gift and our role is to share that with others.

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And that doesn't mean we have to become a bestselling author or a podcaster or speak on stages.

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that could literally be in your community.

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That could be the, you know, being the best mama, or the best father, or, you know, teaching the local community how to sew or play the piano, whatever it is.

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We just need to let go of the ideals of what we think it should look like, and just come back into our heart.

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So for me,

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How you find your purpose is, well, okay, let me just start by saying one other thing first.

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How I live my life and run my business now, it's all built on intuition.

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So everything that I do, it has to be a full body hell yeah.

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So if an opportunity comes to me and it's not a full body hell yeah, it's a no thank you or not right now.

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And I find that opportunities come to us and they get presented to us and we might take it because our mind is saying, this is a really good opportunity.

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This could be your purpose.

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Or what about this?

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Or what about this?

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But if we just took a moment to close our eyes and tune in with ourselves and our intuition and said,

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Is this actually true for me?

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Your body, your whole essence, your whole soul will tell you whether this is right for you.

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You'll feel it in your body.

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You'll go, yes, your body will say yes.

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I don't know if you've ever had an experience, and I'm sure you have, where you've just done something and then someone says, well, why did you book that trip to Hawaii?

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You're like, I don't know.

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I just did.

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Like, I just booked the trip and I just went.

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Like, something was just telling me I have to go.

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And...

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I've had that experience many times in my life.

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I have too, but I feel like people don't have, I feel like people need help with the self-awareness to understand what that feeling is.

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A hundred percent.

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So how we tune into that feeling more is we have to get quiet.

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This is why a regular meditation practice is so powerful.

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Because if we sit and close our eyes and get really quiet and still for 20 minutes a day, what you do is you allow that intuition to rise to the surface.

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Right?

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and the downloads to happen.

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But if we are just go, go, go, achieve, achieve, achieve, run from one thing to the next, there's no quiet time.

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There's no time to hear that intuition.

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So this is what most people do is they just go, go, go.

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They are constantly moving from one thing to the next and any gap that they get, we fill it with social media and our phones and the dinging and the pinging.

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So there's no gaps throughout our day.

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for stillness and quiet.

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So this is why I'm such a huge advocate for a regular meditation practice.

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20 minutes twice a day is what I do first thing in the morning and then in the afternoon.

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And in those moments, that's when I really can hear my intuition and what's bubbling up and what's on my mind and what's maybe causing me a little bit of stress and what's flowing really

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This piece comes before the purpose piece.

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Because if we can't hear our intuition, how are we meant to know what the next step is?

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So I want to encourage everyone listening to sit and to...

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get still and quiet.

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And that might just be 10 minutes.

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It doesn't matter.

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You know, five minutes first thing in the morning, 10 minutes first thing in the morning.

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If you can do twice a day, awesome.

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But just start there because you will then be able to hear your intuition and feel your intuition so much more.

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That is the first piece.

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And then people say, okay, I'll do that, right?

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But then what's the next step?

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How do I find my purpose in life?

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I have 10 steps that you can do in the book.

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Another thing that you can really do is in those meditations, at the end of your meditation, ask yourself the question, what really lights you up and what would you do for free

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for the rest of your life.

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And if you get really honest and ask yourself those questions, some amazing things will come up.

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I know school teachers who did this exercise and she realized that she didn't want to be a school teacher.

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She wanted to teach piano.

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You know, when she asked herself, what would I do if I wasn't getting paid and something that I could do for the rest of my life that would really light me up?

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She was like, I want to teach piano.

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That's what I want to do.

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And so she did.

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She quit her job and started teaching piano.

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So when you have that space, the stillness, and you can ask those questions, things drop in really quickly.

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But like I said, so many people don't even give themselves that opportunity to sit.

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So that is one of the first things you can do.

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Create that stillness, that space.

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Ask yourself those questions.

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What would I do?

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If I wasn't getting paid and I could do this forever, what is the answer that comes to you?

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And if you're still stumped and you have nothing flowing to you, you can go back to your childhood.

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And I talk about this in Purposeful.

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Go back to your childhood.

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What did you love to do as a child?

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Was it singing?

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Was it dancing?

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Was it painting?

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Was it making things?

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Your childhood leaves clues.

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So go back to your childhood and maybe ask your parents as well.

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What did I love to do as a child?

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Because there's going to be clues there as well.

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So that's just some things that you can do.

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If you are wanting to find your purpose and then, you know, you can check out Purposeful.

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I've got 10 other steps that also support that, but they're a great place to start.

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Talk to me.

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One thing that I noticed that you reinforced a few times on the works that you put out, it's responsibility.

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So speak to me about responsibility, why it's so important, why you speak about it so often, how it's impacted your life, why it's even a point that you think you have to mention it to people.

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What's the reason or the rationale behind responsibility and how does it impact you?

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Okay, so the reason why responsibility is so important is because, let me first tell you a story.

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When I, back in October 2010...

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From there, I went on such an inward journey.

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I started meditating.

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I started doing yoga.

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I changed my entire diet.

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I studied energy work, which is acuenergetics.

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I went fully headfirst into the spiritual and personal development world.

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I attended every seminar that I could.

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I read every self-help book that I could.

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I got mentors and coaches and I did kinesiology and all of these things.

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I became obsessed, healthy obsessed.

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And what I realized was my relationship with money was not true to me.

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It was my relationship with money.

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My relationship with money was not actually my story.

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It was my dad's that I was holding on to.

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My relationship with people, partners, they were just stories that my parents had passed on.

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So I wasn't actually living a life that was true to myself.

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And I started blaming my parents.

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I'm like this because of you.

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I have these limiting money beliefs because of you.

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I have these relationship beliefs because of you.

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I have these health beliefs and I have these health issues because of you.

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And that, that is literally what he said.

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And it was a really challenging time.

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Like it was very hard.

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And I realized that, you know, my parents would say to me, we did the best that we could.

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We did the best that we could.

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We did the best that we could with the knowledge and the understanding that we had at that time.

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And absolutely they did.

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So who am I to blame them?

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And that kept me in victim mentality.

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When you blame other people outside of yourself, it keeps you in victim.

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But every time you point the finger at someone else, there's three fingers pointing right back at you.

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And what I realized was I needed to take responsibility for how my life was unfolding.

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And when you take responsibility, it's quite empowering because then you can make the shifts.

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You can make the changes that are in alignment with who you truly are.

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And so I took responsibility.

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I rewrote my money story.

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I recreated my money story.

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I recreated my relationship story.

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I rewrote my health story and I took responsibility.

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I got healthy.

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I started having abundance in my life and I started experiencing relationships beyond my wildest dreams when I took responsibility.

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And so there's no amount of pointing the finger at anyone else and blaming anyone else that is going to get you where you want to be.

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So just remember that every time you point the finger at someone else, there's three pointing right back at you.

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And when you take responsibility, you get out of victim mentality and you take ownership of your life.

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And then that is when things can change.

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That is when you can live in alignment with who you truly are and have the life that you truly desire.

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The other things that I want to go into, and there'll be shameless plugs for your books, but I think it's interesting.

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So when somebody writes a book, there's two in particular.

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So there was the Mastering Your Mean Girl, and then there's Comparisonitis.

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And there's also another one called Open Whiting that's more focused on relationships.

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So the two that I wanted to focus on, they're focused on mindset topics.

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So you very purposefully chose to write two particular books on different mindset topics.

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So Mastering Your Mean Girl.

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Of course, there's a funny title, but it applies to anybody, but it's about inner critic, right?

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And that negative self-talk.

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And then you spoke about comparisonitis, which I'm assuming is...

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Keeping Up With The Joneses and comparing yourself to everyone else out there.

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So why are these the two books you wrote?

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Why are the inner critic as well as the comparing yourself to everyone else?

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Why are those the levers that you feel that people should pull?

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Why was that the focus for what you wanted to put your time into?

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Because that inner critic inside your head that I call the inner mean girl, or you can call it your inner bad boy, whatever, you can call it whatever you want, the inner critic, the ego, Bob, Mary, it doesn't matter.

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What matters is that every single human being on this earth has an inner critic.

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Every single person.

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Some just a lot louder than others.

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And me, back in October 2010, mine was very loud.

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And prior to that, very, very loud.

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She would say things like, you're not good enough.

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You're not smart enough.

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Who do you think you are?

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You're too fat.

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You're too thin.

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You're never going to get out of debt.

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You're never going to meet the guy.

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You're never going to find your soulmate.

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You're worthless, etc.

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That voice, every single person has, right?

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And what I realized was when I began on my journey, I was doing all of the external things.

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I was doing all the physical things.

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I was eating well, so I changed my whole diet.

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I was eating well.

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I started hanging around more inspiring people.

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I changed what I was doing for work.

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I started meditating.

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I started doing energy healing work.

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I did all of these things.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.