How To Stop Being A Victim

Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org and in this video I want to tell you how to stop being a victim.

The Most Important Video Of Them All

All right. Let’s talk about what it means to be a victim in life, and how to stop being a victim. This is such a critical point. In fact, this video is going to be my most important video. Of all the video that I’ve shot so far this is going to be the most important.

This is actually the fifth time that I’m re-shooting this entire video and that’s because every time I shoot it, even though the video comes out pretty good, I need it to come out amazing. I need to make this point strongly because I know that this video has the potential to transform people’s lives the most if they listen to it. That’s because so many people are not getting the results they want in life because they are playing the victim and they are not taking responsibility for their life in the way they need to in order to have a foundation from which to do personal development.

That’s what I want to cover in this video. I’m going to go into a lot of detail, very important detail, to build the case for why you are being a victim and why you need to stop doing it, how to stop doing it, and how to take control back of your life. If you’re stuck in your life, if you feel like you haven’t been getting the results you wanted, if you feel frustrated in any area of your life, this is most likely the reason why.

It’s because you’re behaving like a victim, you’re thinking like a victim and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it. That’s what’s so dangerous and crippling about victim mentality. I want to help to turn that around for you. It’s very important because I personally know people, people that are close to me, people that I’ve come into contact with, they’re not going to get anywhere in life if they keep thinking the way they’re thinking, like a victim thinks.

I read a lot of comments on my YouTube videos because I’ve shot a lot of video already so I have a lot of comments from a lot of people, and sometimes I will see people who are really, really stuck , who have a real problem in life. Maybe they can’t get that girl or boy they want for a relationship, or maybe they’re struggling with their finances, or their business, or their career, or their health, or whatever else. You can just read a comment from a victim and it’s going to have victim energy soaking all through it.

When I read that and I start to talk with these people, try to give them advice or have a debate with them, it just becomes more and more of this piling on of stories and excuses and rationalizations and blaming and complaining. With this going on, they’re not able to move forward and take the action necessary to get the results they really want in their life. The worst thing about it is they really believe that they’re stuck, when the only thing that’s keeping them stuck is their own thinking. It’s a really dangerous thing because it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy this victim thinking and that’s what we want to end right here, right now, today.

What We Mean By ‘Victim”

What is a victim? A victim is somebody who gives away control. When we say that you’ve been victimized, or she’s been victimized, or he’s been victimized, what do we mean? We mean that something happened to that person against his or her will, and that he had no control over that situation, no ability to respond or react to it, it just happened, and now here she has to live with it and suffer through it and there are no options. That’s the cards that that person was dealt. That’s what we mean by being a victim.

The foundation of all personal development is to believe that you have the power and ability to respond and to create any kind of life that you choose. Now while this might sound very nice on paper, in reality, it’s a challenge. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to live and embody this principle.

If you think that this video is just targeting people who are total victims, total pessimists in their own lives, then you’re mistaken. I can guarantee that if you’re frustrated in any area of your life no matter how small, the reason that you’re frustrated there, the reason you’re not getting the results that you want is because you have victim thinking if not across your entire life, then in a specific point in a specific narrow area of your life and that is something that needs to be worked out.

Therefore for me, now, after I’ve done many years of personal development, I don’t have overarching general victim mentality. I used to have a lot of that. I’ve worked a lot of that stuff out of my psyche, but now I still have victim energy in pinpointed areas in my life. I always have to be on the lookout for those, I have to be careful to find those and to pull them out by the root.

That’s what I want to encourage you here to do today. Whether you’re depressed, or if you’ve got anger control problems, or if you’ve got major frustrations with your health, or your relationships, or you’re just pessimistic thinking type of person, then this video’s for you. If you’re just a person that has a pretty decent life, but then isn’t getting the results he or she wants in one specific area like career, or finances, or health or relationships or anywhere else, then this video is also for you.

What I want to do at the end of this video, I’m going to give you a list of signals that a victim will use. These are going to be words and phrases that the victim will say to him- or herself in order to reinforce their victim thinking. This can be a very powerful tool for identifying victim thinking within yourself and also within others, by just knowing these labels, and just knowing all of these labels are just playing in and creating more and more self-deception within you.

We’re going to go into all of that. Like I said this is the foundation of all personal development because what I’m advocating in this video is a very radical thing. What I’m talking about here is taking one hundred percent responsibility for your life. One hundred percent.

The Fundamental Question

There’s a really fundamental question that you have to ask yourself when you sit down and really think about how life works and what you want out of your life, when you sit down to try to design your life, when you sit down to try and do personal development. Here’s the question, who is ultimately responsible for the quality of your life? Who is that?

Is that your parents? Is that your family? Is that your environment? Is that the country you grew up in? Is it your friends?

Is it your co-workers? Is it your boss? Is it your husband or your wife or your kids? Is it that girlfriend or boyfriend that you’ve got? Is it your genetics?

Is it the economy? Is it the political climate that you’re living under? Is it the media? Is it society?

Is it entertainment? Is it Hollywood? Is it the news? Is it your own genetics? Is it your own history? Is it how you were raised?

What is responsible for the quality of your life? If you answer anything but ‘me’ to this question, then you’re thinking like a victim and you’re going to get the results that a victim gets which are not very good results and you’re going to feel the emotions that a victims thinks or that a victim feels, and those are not very pleasant emotions. What I’m advocating in this video is something very radical. It’s going to be something that you’re not going to want to accept.

What I’m advocating here is taking complete, utter, one hundred percent responsibility for everything in your life that ever happens. That means that all these other factors that I’ve just listed off, that those are not going to be used as excuses, or as justifications, or as stories, or as any kind of obstacles for you to create the kind of life that you want.

What does this really mean to take one hundred percent responsibility? I want to really drive this point home. There are six areas that I think are really critical for us to take responsibility in.

Success And Failure

Most of us get the first area really easily. The first area is success. Most of us will take responsibility for our own successes.

How about that promotion that you got? Of course you get a promotion you’re going to take responsibility for it. “Yeah I got a promotion, I worked really hard, I earned that promotion through all the studying and the work that I did, that I put in to get that.”

Maybe the relationship that you got, maybe you worked really hard to make that relationship work so you could take some responsibility for that success. “Yeah I worked really hard to make this friendship work” or “I worked really hard to keep this marriage together”, so you’ll take some responsibility for that.

That’s good, but of course, that’s easy. Maybe the relationship that you got, maybe you worked really hard to make that relationship work so you can take some responsibility for that success. “Yeah I worked really hard to make this friendship work” or “I worked really hard to keep this marriage together”, so you’ll take some responsibility for that.

That’s good, but if course that’s easy. That’s the easy thing to take responsibility for. What’s the hard thing?

The hard thing to take responsibility for is your failures. That’s the next area that you need to take responsibility for is your failures. What about all the situations where you’re not getting the results that you want in your life?

What about that weight that you try to lose but it didn’t work? That diet you went on, that didn’t work. That gym membership that you got, that didn’t work. What about that relationship that was dysfunctional, that didn’t work.

What about the lack of money that you’re having? Something’s not working there. What about the negative thinking that’s going on all the time in your head, the worrying, the anxiety, the fears? Something’s not working there.

Failures and failures happen, but what a victim does is a victim will blame others and situations for those failures rather than take responsibility for him- or herself. So that’s the second area is failure.

Emotions and Accidents

The third area is emotions. Man, this one’s big! I have a video about how to master your emotions which goes into a lot of depth about how to master responsibility specifically in this one area alone, because most people do not get this part right in their life either.

They believe that emotions are caused by the external environment, either people will cause emotions or situations will cause emotions. That promotion makes you feel happy or getting fired makes you feel sad, or having a breakup makes you feel depressed, or somebody saying an insult to you makes you feel angry.

In fact, you’re the one who’s generating all those emotions so you have to start taking responsibility for all the feelings that you have in your life and not be putting those on other people or other circumstances that are out in the real world. That’s area number three. Check out my other video on that which will go into a lot of depth.

Area number four is accidents. This is where it starts to get a little bit freaky. When I say taking a hundred percent responsibility for your life, I mean everything. I don’t just mean the obvious stuff like promotions and getting angry at people and failing at a job or failing in a relationship, that’s pretty obvious stuff. I’m talking also about accidents.

What does accident mean? That means that if you go to work and you lock your house but then you come back and you find that your house has been burglarized then you’re responsible for that, even though you locked all your doors. That means that if you’re sitting there at a red light on your way to work and you’re sitting there at a red light just minding your own business waiting for the light to turn green and someone rear-ends you, crashes right in the back of your car out of the blue, that you are responsible for that. That means that if you invested some money in the stock market and the stock market crashed, if the whole economy collapsed, you’re responsible for that.

This is a little bit radical and you might say, “Leo, why would I take responsibility for that kind of stuff? I mean that stuff’s not in my control is it?” I’ll get to that in a second, but you need to start taking responsibility for even the stuff that is seemingly out of your control, because the bottom line here is what is in your control is how you’re responding to the situation in the present moment. We’re going to talk a lot more about that in a second.

Circumstances And Relationships

The fifth area, area number five, is circumstances. The circumstances of your life. What does ‘circumstances’ mean?

Circumstances means stuff like the family that you grew up in, that’s a circumstance of life. The country that you live in now, that’s a circumstance of life. How about the genetics that you had when you were born? That’s a circumstance of life.

How about the amount of money that you have now in your bank account? Or the political system that’s in power in your country? These are all circumstances.

Most people really like to use circumstances as reasons for why they can’t do what they want in their life, why they can’t create what they want in their life. This is where we nip this in the bud, it’s right here by saying that you take responsibility one hundred percent for all the circumstances too, accidents and circumstances.

Lastly, the sixth point is relationships. This is a very huge area. A lot of people are miserable in their lives because of the low quality of relationships that they have, whether with their friends, spouses, bosses, girlfriends and boyfriends or whoever else, family, all of that stuff.

The reason that’s happening is because how much do we like to point the finger at the other person when something’s not going right in your relationship? Almost every time we do that and that’s a huge problem. Every single relationship that’s making you feel frustrated, it’s making you feel bad, you’re completely responsible for that feeling and you’re completely responsible for the dynamic that’s going on between you and that other person.

These are the six areas. If you take responsibility for all these plus anything that’s left out by these six areas, so anything that’s left over you have to take responsibility for that too. If you cover all of that then you’re going to be good. That’s going to set the foundation that you need to really do the personal development work that you want to do to create the kind of life that you want to have. Now, if you refuse to take responsibility here then you’re going to experience a lot of suffering and bad results.

Natural Upward Progression

What I want to do is I want to show you a model of the possibilities that you have within personal development. I see a lot of people in life, what happens is that they’re born, they go through their early childhood years, then they get into their teens, the go through school, then they get into college and during that time, they have a pretty natural upward growth like this in their life. Upward growth of progress, personal development. It’s just pretty natural.

Then, after about twenty-one, what tends to happen is that natural growth starts to plateau, starts to level out and it plateaus. For a lot of people that plateau just keeps going and going and going and going for decade, after decade, after decade until they’re dead. That’s not even the worst case scenario. I see a lot of people what happens with them is not only does it plateau, but their personal development and their results in life, they actually start to decay after twenty-one so it gets worse, and worse, and worse and worse.

For me, personally, my expectation is always at least what I want to have in my life is a linear upward growth like this. From the year that I was born to the year that I’m going to be dead, I want it to be like this, a straight upward slope like that. That’s kind of what you would expect life would be like. You’re growing, you’re growing, and you just keep growing.

It doesn’t work out that way for most people because once they get out of school and once they get out of the family situation they kind of just get stuck in life because a lot of those mindsets and a lot of that conditioning just kind of gels, and congeals and basically hardens and then that is the trajectory that then they carry throughout their life. For me that’s a very sad thing. I would hate to live a life like that and I hate to see people and I see a lot of people who are living those lives that have plateaued or are decaying.

Actually, over the last five years, if I really think about it, then my progress, it hasn’t just been a linear growth it’s been an exponential growth. Every year I’m building up myself with new mindsets, new techniques, new ways to think about the world, going out and taking lots of action, generating the results that I want to generate and then those inspire me even more. Those motivate even more. Those empower me, literally empower me because I’m creating tools that will then allow me to have new capabilities.

What happens is I experience exponential growth. To me that’s what I want out of life. I want exponential growth. It feels so amazing. I want that for me and I want that for you guys.

The Personal Development Model

Let me show you the model. This is kind of the model that you could go through if you really wanted to, if you really took the personal development stuff seriously. So at this end of the spectrum, we’ve got a spectrum here, at this end we’ve got victims. We’ve also got at this end low consciousness or total unconsciousness.

At this end of the spectrum, we have high consciousness or maximum possible consciousness for you as a human being. Then we’ve got various degrees of consciousness along this spectrum and various stages of life, various stages of personal development. I want to cover four stages.

Stage number one is victim thinking. A victim believes that they don’t have much control in life. What the victim often feels is a sense of frustration and a sense of apathy.

A victim doesn’t even want to start taking action because they believe that they don’t have the ability to succeed. They believe that there are obstacles and roadblocks that are insurmountable that it’s simply impossible and that they can’t do it, and so this is where they are. The problem is that a victim is doing all this unconsciously.

He doesn’t really understand what’s going on here. He’s not even making the choice to be a victim, it’s being almost made for him by default. Nevertheless this choice is being made and it’s very, very crippling. What’s most scary about it is that a lot of times people just don’t see that they’re doing it.

A Step Up From The Victim

If that’s the lowest possible consciousness, then what’s one step up from that? If you get a little bit more consciousness and you evolve from a victim, where do you go? You go to stage number two. This is what I call the fighter. This is the victim, this is the fighter.

What is the fighter all about? The fighter is all about conflict. It’s conflict energy. It’s this idea that we live in a dog eat dog world.

The world is harsh, reality is harsh. I need to fight for my survival. I need to fight to protect my family. Always, always needing to fight, needing to compete.

It’s believing that life is a zero sum game and that if I win then somebody else has to lose, and if somebody else wins then I have to lose. So there’s this constant tug of war, or this constant clashing. That’s conflict energy.

You probably know people like this. People who are angry a lot. People who are combative. People who really get in your face. People who get very easily frustrated with life, feel like they have to go out there and slave themselves in order to succeed, slave themselves in order to be happy. That is a fighter.

Although a lot of this fighting energy and this conflict energy can be very nasty, very unpleasant, especially if you have friends like that or family like that, it’s very nasty to be around people like that, but essentially you could make the case it’s actually better than being a victim. Why is this? Because at least the fighter believes that he or she has some control.

The victim believes there is no control. The fighter believes that there is control but he has to really work very hard for it and he has to take back control from other people in order so that he can have it. That’s the fighter stage.

Now we move up even further along the consciousness spectrum. We move from the fighter and we start to gain more and more responsibility. As we move away from the fighter and once you take quite a bit of responsibility you get to the phase which I like to call the creator.

What is the creator? The creator is someone who realizes that life is what they make of it. The creator is someone who realizes that yes, even though there are obstacles and challenges in life, that every single obstacle has some sort of work-around to it. Everything that is blocking you in life can be made to either dissolve or it could be made to be coped with, to be dealt with, to be made at peace with, to be happy with.

The creator is all about creating the kind of life that he wants and that’s because he’s taken more responsibility than the fighter and the victim. The difference between the fighter and the creator is that the creator is really focused on putting out, making stuff. Making stuff with his life, making stuff with his business, making stuff with his career, making stuff with his health. Whereas the fighter is always fighting stuff. He’s always fighting his own health, he’s fighting his own nature, he’s fighting people at work, he’s fighting people in relationships.

The creator doesn’t believe that fighting and competing is the best way. The creator believes that it’s much better to just focus on what you want to create and leave the competition for others if they choose to do it, but not engaging in it yourself.

The Final Stage

Then there’s the final stage. This is an advanced stage that very few people ever reach. If this should be the aim of personal development for you, in fact this is the vision.

This is my vision for you. This is what I want you to be shooting for. This is why I want you to be watching my videos and to be working on yourself all the time, doing the hard work to get here.

What is this final stage? This final stage, I would call it being at peace. Even better than being a creator is getting here.

This is maximum consciousness and what happens here is, it’s very funny it’s almost like you go full circle because when you’re at peace, you no longer believe actually that you have any control at all. That’s where it goes full circle. Just like the victim believed that he didn’t have control, the person that’s at peace that’s just being and existing, he’s simply in existence.

He is a creative person, but he almost believes like he has no control over that creation process. It’s almost like life force is just flowing through him and doing the stuff that it does and his job is simply to get out of the way, remove every single element of resistance within himself to this life force and then life just carries itself out and it rolls very, very smoothly.

It’s hard to believe that this is actually even possible, that this is actually even possible in life. It is possible for every human being, it’s just that you’re a victim and you’re all the way over here, or you’re a fighter over here, it’s hard to see all the way to this end. Hard to see that this could be true, but it is true, it’s just difficult to develop to. It takes a lot of work. It’s not something that happens naturally and spontaneously.

I want you to be shooting for this. Let’s not worry too much about this right now, because our main objective here is to just get you from the victim to at least the fighter, but really, the creator. I want you to be a creator in your life. Substitute victim energy for creator energy and you’re going to be doing really good. That’s going to set you up to then move up to better and greater things.

Taking Responsibility

I mentioned six areas in your life that you should take radical, one hundred percent responsibility. Some of the stuff that I mentioned that probably didn’t make a lot of sense to you was stuff like accidents and circumstances of life, and maybe relationships too.

One thing you might be wondering here, you might say, “Leo, all this sounds really good in theory, but you’re telling me to take responsibility for a car accident that I didn’t cause. You’re telling me to take responsibility for my genetics which I had nothing to do with. You’re telling me to take responsibility for who my parents were.

“You’re telling me to take responsibility for what my name was when it was given to me. You’re telling me to take responsibility for that asshole who insults me or that person in my family who’s very negative and is abusive towards me. What on earth are you thinking?”

Let’s make a distinction really clearly right here between responsibility and blaming. I’m not trying to get you to blame yourself and to be hyper self-critical and negative about you. The objective here is not to say that you are to blame for your genetics, you are to blame for your bad relationships, you are to blame for all the abuses and injustices that you’ve suffered in your life and all the accidents that were unfortunate.

What we really mean here instead is we mean responsibility. This means how you respond in the present moment. A lot of people and especially victims will tend to think, “Leo, I can’t move on because of all of this negative stuff that happened to me in the past. I had bad relationships, I had a bad family, also these dysfunctions, various unfortunate things happened to me, how can I get over that?”

What you fail to realize there is that problems in the past, the past itself, it doesn’t actually exist. The only way in which it can exist is it exists in the present. The past is couched in the present. In order to even be thinking about the past, in order for the past to be holding you back, you have to be thinking about it in the present moment.

You Have Control Over The Present

That’s where you have control because you always have control over your reactions. You always have control over how you interpret a situation. You always have control over how you want to choose to act despite what has happened to you in the past. If you’re conscious you have this option.

Many victims, they believe they don’t have this option because they don’t see it because they’re unconscious. They don’t want to see it. They don’t want to believe that they have the ability to respond in the present moment however they choose despite how difficult it is.

So even though you were abused, you can respond to it now in a different way. You choose how you’re going to respond. If you want you can create a whole story about it. If you want you can label yourself a victim. If you want you could say that you have been served an injustice and you can go about the rest of your life thinking that you can’t get better results because of all the stuff that’s happened to you. That’s one option.

Another option is to say, “I don’t want to do that. I want to create my life. I want to have a happy, amazing, successful life. I want to have an extraordinary life. I want to self-actualize. I want to grow and I’m not going to let anything that has happened to me in the past hold me back.

“I’m not going to let anything that’s happening to me in the present hold me back. I’m going to choose the most resourceful interpretations of my circumstance as I possibly can and I’m going to take complete responsibility right now for everything. I’m going to choose how I react so that if I’m sitting there at a stop light and someone crashes into me, and I had no control about that, at least I have now control over how I’m going to think about that car accident. I’m going to have control about how to react to that car accident.

“I’m going to have control over my actions going forward. If I was born in a poor country, a country that didn’t have all the opportunities that some of the first world countries have, then I’m going to take responsibility for that. Even though I can’t go back and change that, even though that is what it is, I can respond to it right now.

“I can choose to think about it in an empowering way right now. I can choose to shape my future right now. I can choose to move to a different country. I can choose to try all sorts of different options to change my circumstances, and if I can’t change my circumstances, if I fail at controlling this stuff, then I still ultimately have choice, because even the things that I can’t control, I can control how I think about them, how I deal with them. I can control how they make me feel by choosing which thoughts I think.

“Through this process, either I will create the circumstances of life that I want, or I’m going to fail to do that, but I will create the happiness that I want. So either way I will win.”

The Paradox of Personal Development

That’s how a creator thinks. Very different than a victim. It can be a hundred and eighty degree shift, a paradigm shift, which is why it’s very important for me to talk about all the details in this video because I want to hit it from different angles.

If you’re a victim then just telling you one little tidbit of information here, tidbit of information there, it’s not going to do much for you because your brain has gotten really, really good, with the stories, the excuses, the blaming, the complaining, the whining. It’s got really good at that. Your brain is one of the most amazing mechanisms for creating excuses. It’s like an excuse creation machine. It will create excuses and stories and justifications for just about anything to keep you from going out of your comfort zone to pursue something bigger and greater.

Your brain will do that so you have to become more and more conscious about how much self-deception is going on here. Self-deception, self-sabotage, manipulation of you by yourself. You almost can’t trust yourself. It’s kind of a paradox of personal development that on the one hand you have to trust yourself a lot to get good results in life, but on the other hand you can’t trust yourself at all.

A victim cannot trust himself, but once you move out of victim to creator and into the peace category then you can trust yourself completely, but that’s going to take some work for you. Right now if you’re heavily, heavily soaked in victim mentality, then you have to be very careful about how you trust yourself. Even the things that you’re saying to yourself as you’re watching this video, all the excuses and counter points and counter arguments that your brain is coming up with just automatically by listening to me.

To every point I’m making you might be making a counter point in your head and saying, ” Oh, but Leo, what about this? Oh, but Leo, what about that?” That right there is what I’m talking about. You’ve got to be really careful about that because that’s keeping you stuck.

One thing that’s really important to understand is why do victims want to stay victims? Why do people become victims and become really stuck in that? For me it’s baffling because when I see it in other people and sometimes I’ll go and I’ll talk to them and I’ll try to explain what’s going on there, but then that person doesn’t want to listen.

In fact usually when you tell a victim that he’s being a victim, what does he do? He doesn’t just say thank you and then just change. Usually what happens is that person gets defensive, that person gets angry and frustrated with you then he’ll start blaming you for accusing him of all this negative stuff.

Or, he’ll start saying, “You don’t understand I actually am a victim. You don’t know what it’s like to be me. My life is so miserable, my life is so hard.” All these different excuses and stories start coming up.

What’s really scary, all these excuses and stories, they seem incredibly real. They seem very real, very tangible, almost inevitable in the victim’s head. That’s not actually the case.

From Victim To Exponential Growth

In fact, I can think of about four areas in my own life where I’ve gotten massive results, massive personal growth, the most personal growth that I’ve ever gotten. Those were all areas where I was a victim for a long time. What happened is I had some sort of epiphany or realization that I don’t have to be a victim anymore and then my results skyrocketed because I made a critical decision to say that no more victim-thinking. As soon as that happened, all the bad results I had vanished.

Where did this happen for me in my life? One of the places that happened for me is my education. When I was going through high school, I wasn’t really good academically, but then something triggered in me when I was at the end of ninth grade when I finished my first year of high school. I got really focused on education and then the next three years through high school and through college I just studied really, really hard, focused really hard on academics.

In many ways that has set up an amazing foundation for me now the work from, the hard work that I did back then. That didn’t happen until I made a very clear decision in my mind that I wanted to focus on my education. That’s the earliest I have of that.

Then, at the beginning of college the next thing that really happened for me is, I don’t know if you know this about me but I used to be overweight my whole life since I was a kid. I was sixty five pounds overweight and I was that way through all of school and early college.

Then in the middle of college I really had an epiphany there that I could get fit, that I could be responsible for my own health. I could get that taken care of. That was very challenging for me to accept that mindset, that I have control over this, that I can take full responsibility because I was very much a victim about my weight and my health and my eating habits.

When I did that my health completely turned around. I lost those sixty-five pounds in five months and I was able to keep them off to this day which has been probably about eight, nine years now. So that was some big result for me.

The ‘Dream Job’

Another area where this really happened for me is with my career and my work. The first job I got was ‘my dream job’, the job that I really wanted for me since I was a kid, but then I got it and I realized that it really wasn’t the job that I wanted. I was frustrated and miserable with tat job.

I was also really angry at the world too. I was angry at the world because I had all these amazing ideas, I wanted to be a game designer and I actually was working as a game designer. I was working in the studio and I had all these amazing ideas for the games I wanted to create but then I started getting bitter at the world because I saw that to create these games I would need capital and money.

I would need millions of dollars to fund some of these projects and ideas that I had, but I didn’t have any money. I had like five or ten grand in my savings account and that’s it. Not enough to do anything. The company I was working at, I was barely able to make ends meet so I wasn’t saving away any money.

I just saw that if I kept going with this company and doing what I’m doing even though it’s a great job, a great opportunities I would never build the capital that I need to build to create these ideas that I have. I thought that I really had amazing ideas and so I started to really become toxic inside because I had these amazing ideas but I thought the world was not letting me express them. That was becoming very problematic and miserable for me. It was ruining my relationships at work, it made it really impossible for me to work.

What I had to do was literally one day I just had to realize, wait a minute, I actually have control in this situation. All these obstacles with money and opportunity and business problems that I see out there, those are there but I can take them on as a challenge. I can decide to take it on as a challenge and go out there, work really hard and find the tough solutions that I don’t have right now. That’s what I did.

Within a few months then I quit my job, started an online marketing company and that business to this day has generated over a million dollars of cash profit just from that, that one point of taking responsibility. I clearly know that if I did not have that decision point and I did not take responsibility there then I would have stayed stuck. I would have continued to become more and more toxic and miserable and my life instead of having the exponential growth that it’s having now it would have plateaued and in fact it would have started to decay because of that toxicity would be building up inside me.

Dating And Relationships

Then the final area in my life where I took a lot of responsibility was with dating and relationships. I was extremely bad, as bad as you could possibly imagine a guy being with attracting women, understanding how women work and getting into relationships. I was horrible at it.

It was late in my life. I was already twenty five, twenty six when I just started to really take responsibility for this problem. I remember again it was a very specific moment where I took responsibility for the fact that I control my sex life, I control how attractive I am to the opposite sex, I control what kind of relationships I get in. I get to control who I’m going to be with in the end.

When I did that, my results with the opposite sex skyrocketed as well. Did a lot of hard, hard, hard work to make that happen, but man, that resulted in some of the deepest personal growth that I’ve ever gotten, it’s by doing that. That was extremely challenging for me. It was harder than losing weight, it was harder than studying, it was harder than starting a business.

These are four areas personally for me. I’m sure you have some in your own life. Stuff where you really had to overcome a big challenge, a really big obstacle and specifically you had to tell yourself. “I have to take responsibility now. I can take on the challenge.”

This leads us to the point that I was making earlier is why do people become victims and stay victims? It happens because it’s fucking scary. It’s scary to admit to yourself that actually you’re responsible for all of it.

Why is that scary? Because that means that you have to now work. A lot of work has to go into you, a lot of personal development has to happen. That’s tough stuff, that’s not easy. People want to stay in a comfort zone. They need to start thinking radically different though to start becoming a creator.

If you’re really stuck with a tough obstacle like you don’t have enough money to start a business, or you’re just miserable with the opposite sex and relationships, or you’ve got health problems or anything else, then the problem is that the current way of thinking that you have going is not going to be enough to get you to where you want to go. You probably tried it but you keep hitting your head against the wall.

So what does this mean? Does this mean that this wall is there and it can’t be broken down? No, it just means that you’re not capable of it right now given your growth level.

Imagine that you have a rating of your personal growth from a one to a ten. If you’re faced with a level two challenge and you’re a level one human being in terms of development, then the challenge is going to be greater than you are so you’re not going to be able to surmount it. This will make you think that this is an insurmountable challenge, but there are many people who are level three or level four or level ten human beings who easily step over this challenge. It’s not even an obstacle for them at all.

Why is that? It’s not because the challenge is any different, it’s that they are different. It’s not that they were born different, it’s that they developed themselves to a higher level. They are more resourceful, they are more capable, they are just more developed.

The Best Tool For Overcoming Challenges

This is what I love about personal development, it’s that it’s the best tool for overcoming sticky challenges. Maybe there’s a challenge in your life right now that you could overcome with your present level of development. There are plenty of challenges like that in life so that’s great you’ll overcome those, but there’s also challenges in your life that are so big you can’t overcome them.

Maybe you’ve got a level eight challenge and you’re a level two person, that’s a very big gap. That’s not something you’re going to be able to hop over. That’s something you’re going to have to really work on yourself to raise yourself higher and higher and higher until you start to become a level four person, level five, level six, level seven, level eight, then you get to level nine all of a sudden that challenge stops being a challenge.

Raising yourself on this scale, that’s not easy work. That’s really hard fucking work. Really hard. The amount of work that I had to do to get myself the education that I wanted, the exceptional education that I got, ridiculous quantities. I’m talking thousands and thousands of hours of hard work. A lot of emotional labor goes into that. Most people don’t do that.

The results I got with my fitness and my nutrition and losing all my weight, ridiculous quantities of emotional labor and challenge went into that. I had to be extremely honest with myself, extremely brutal. I had to really not kid myself, not bullshit myself, break down my ego to achieve the results that I achieved and to maintain them, to really lock them in. That was really challenging to do. That’s not something the average person wants to do.

With my business, same exact thing. Incredible amounts of hard work, emotional labor went into making that succeed because the only reason it succeeded was because I grew myself a long with the business and I continue to do that right now.

With my relationships, that was the hardest thing for me. The amount of time and energy that I put into that was so ridiculous that most people would not believe what I went through to make that happen. It makes me emotional just to think about it. Literally I would invest thousands of hours doing this, studying, going out there, practicing, just to learn how to get that one girlfriend that I wanted. Really hard, really massive action goes in here.

This is the problem and this is also the solution. The problem is that you’re not taking enough action if you’re a victim. If you’re a victim in life you need to take massive action. The only way you’re going to take massive action is by believing that you can and also cutting out the excuses and the blaming because as long as there’s excuses and stories, there cannot be any action.

I’m not talking about a little bit of action, sure you do a little bit of action. No, what I’m talking about is massive, fucking action. Massive action.

Most victims they go out there and they try some stuff and they say, “But Leo I tried that, it doesn’t work. I went to the gym, I worked really hard it doesn’t work. I tried meditating, I’m depressed but I tried meditation and I’ve tried it five times and it doesn’t work. I don’t have a lot of money, I went out and I submitted twenty resumes and it didn’t work, I didn’t get a good job. I tried really hard at studying, I’m really bad at math and I’m really bad at this and at that subject, I tried studying really hard a couple of times and it just doesn’t work for me.”

Or, “I really tried to improve my health, I tried to improve my nutrition, but that doesn’t work for me either.” It doesn’t work for you because you’re not taking massive action. You’re going to say, “Leo, I took a lot of action.”

Don’t Underestimate The Amount of Action Necessary

No you didn’t. You think you took a lot of action. You didn’t actually take a lot of action and you didn’t take that action effectively. When you take effective massive action almost any obstacle will crumble before you or you’ll find a work-around, but your brain doesn’t actually know how much action is necessary.

We always underestimate how much action is necessary. We always think to ourselves that things that make us feel good. We like to tell ourselves that we’ve already taken massive action when in fact you haven’t done that at all.

That’s why it’s good to be around really exceptional people. That’s why it’s good to have mentors. That’s why it’s good to have role models in your life. That’s why it’s good to have people who are way, way, way better than you, because when you see them taking action, when you see the way they think when you see the way that they work, how hard they work to achieve their results that they get, you start to realize, “Damn, that guy is taking massive action. I’m a pussy. I’m not taking any action at all compared to that guy.”

You’ve probably had moments like that in your life where you see somebody getting results and you go, “I wonder how they’re getting such massive results in this area of their life” and then you go and you talk to them a little bit and then you do a little snooping and then you realize, “Oh shit. That guy is taking so much action. The lengths he’s going to to get the results that he gets are incredible. Incredible! I don’t think I could even do that.”

You’re right, you can’t do it right now, but you could build yourself up and that’s what I want for you here. I want you to cut out the excuses, and the whining, and the blaming, and the story making and be very honest with yourself. Really say fuck it to the ego and say, “You know what? Fuck the ego I want results in my life. I want happiness in my life.

“I’ve only got this one life I’ve got to make it happen and to do that I’m willing to take massive, massive, massive fucking action on this problem, this challenge that I’ve got. I’m going to hit it from every single angle, every single direction until I find a solution, or I find a way to cope with it, to deal with it, to be happy with it. Either way something’s going to happen, something’s going to work for me.”

That’s how a creator thinks. Do not trust yourself. Do not trust your brain in telling you that you know how much action is necessary to be good at what you want to be good at in life. Do not trust your brain to tell you that you’re doing enough because I can guarantee you that you’re massively underestimating how much needs to be done to be good at the things you want to be good at.

Victim Labels

The thing that I want to leave you with here is I want to leave you with a list of phrases that victims will use to speak to themselves and to other people. This is stuff that I hear in the comments sections under my videos all the time from victims. This is stuff that I hear from people who are really stuck in life. This is what keeps the stories and the excuses in place.

I want you to really look for which of these you use yourself and in what areas of your life do you use them, because when you can start to identify this negative self-talk, this victim self-talk you can start to then say, “Oh okay, that’s where I’m being a victim” and then you can start to say to yourself, “I need to take much more massive action right there, much more massive action right here.” Or, “Maybe I need to learn a new technique, a new strategy.” So it’s not just about working hard, it’s also about working smart. You need to work hard and work smart at the same time.

Here are the labels.

“I can’t”. This is probably the biggest and the worst that victims will say that to themselves and to other people. “I can’t. Leo, I can’t do that. That’s not me. How can I? I can’t!”

Next, “It’s impossible”. Another really big one. “It’s impossible, that can’t be done! I can’t start a business. I can’t lose that weight. That’s not possible. Some of these things, maybe they are possible, but this thing right here is not possible”.

Next, “it’s too hard”.

Next, “Life is unfair”. “Leo, isn’t the world evil, isn’t the world bad? How can we be happy in an evil and bad world?”

Next, “I must, I need to, I have to”. “Leo, you don’t understand, I have to be doing this, I must be doing this, I need this.” There’s nothing that you need or must or should do in your life. All that stuff is up to you, but a victim will believe that they have to do stuff. It’s a big trap.

Next, “Leo, I’ve never done that. You’re telling me to go out there and do this crazy thing? I’ve never done that. You’re telling me to go do some public speaking? I’ve never done that. You’re telling me to go and start a business? I don’t know how to do that, I’ve never done that. You’re telling me to go start working out and working on my nutrition, I don’t know how to do that. You’re telling me to do all this personal development stuff, you’re telling me to meditate? I don’t know how to do that. I’ve never done that before.” Well, time to learn. That’s why you’ve got a brain.

Next, “What if I fail?” “Leo, what if I start a business and I fail?” “Leo, what if I trust that guy in a relationship and he abuses my trust and I fail in that relationship?” “What if I go to the gym and I fail?” “What if I meditate and I fail?” “What if I watch your videos and I fail?” You know how that goes: if at first you don’t succeed, you try, try again. That’s why massive action is required, because there’s going to be massive failure.

Next, “but it’s his fault”. “Leo, you don’t understand all this stuff is nice but there’s this one guy, it’s all his fault. He’s not letting me”. Or, “This one girl, it’s her fault.” “It’s my wife’s fault”. “It’s my husband’s fault”. “It’s my girlfriend’s fault”. “It’s my boyfriend’s fault.” Blaming other people. Remember we talked about this? This is a huge, huge obstacle for victims.

Another one, “Leo, I’ve already tried that”. “Leo, I’ve already tried meditation. I’ve already tried to diet. I’ve already tried the gym. I’ve already tried starting a business. I’ve already tried submitting some resumes for a better job. I’ve already tried public speaking. None of that stuff works”. Massive fucking action. Take more action and it will work for you. You massively overestimate how much you’ve tried stuff. Most people they haven’t really tried stuff. They’ve tried stuff once or twice. Sometimes you need to try stuff a hundred times before it works, a thousand times before it works. You need to have the persistence to do that.

Next, “never” and “always”. Victims love to talk like this, “That will never happen” or, “this always happens”. “I always get bad luck, I always fail. I never get any luck. I never succeed. I never get it easy. I never get a break”. Watch for those.

Next, “I’ll try”. “All right Leo, I’ll give it a shot, I’ll try it out”. “Sounds good, I’ll give it a shot. I’ll try it.” “I’ll try to start a business”. “I’ll try to lose some weight.” “I’ll try to work on my depression.” “I’ll try a little bit of meditation. I’ll try it”. How far do you think you’ll get if you keep trying stuff?

How about this one? “Maybe” or “I think”. “I think that could work”. “I think I’d like to be passionate about my life”. “I think I’d like to have a nice wife or husband”. “I think I’d like to lose some weight”. “Maybe I’ll lose some weight next year”. “Maybe I’ll set a goal for my business next year”. “Maybe I’ll earn a little bit more money next year”. “Maybe”.

Next, “I’m not good enough.” “Leo, but how am I going to do that? Build a business? I don’t know how to build a business.” “Study really hard? I’m not good at studying.” “Relationships? I suck at relationships. How do you expect me to do all that stuff?” “Grow myself, do personal development? I don’t know how to do that. I can’t do that I’m not smart enough. I’m not capable enough. I’ve got some sort of limitation”.

Next, “Leo, there’s no point. What’s the point?” “What’s the point of doing all this hard work? What’s the point of growing yourself, developing yourself? Life’s so pointless. It’s all going to be bad in the end anyways. We’re all going to die in the end anyways, what’s the point?”

Next, “It’s too much effort”. “Leo, okay, I get what you’re saying. You’ve got to work really hard to get the results you want, but I don’t want to work that hard. You’re telling me to take this massive action to improve this area of my life. I don’t want to do that, that’s too much work. Why would I want to work so hard to be happy?”

Next, “Leo, that’s all great for young people, but it’s too late for me. If I saw this video ten years ago, maybe it would have done some good. If I saw it twenty years ago, maybe it would have done some good. Even if I saw it a year ago, maybe it would have done some good, but now it’s too late. It’s too late to start a business. It’s too late to lose the weight. It’s too late to go back to school. It’s too late to be smart. It’s too late to do personal development. It’s too late to start meditating.” It’s never too late.

Next, “Sure Leo, all this sounds great. It’s easy for you, easy for you Leo. You’re doing this professionally. You had a head start. You had a good childhood. You had this, you had that. I don’t have all that stuff. I have the following list of disabilities and handicaps and incapabilities. How am I going to do it?” That’s why you grow yourself the way that I did. I didn’t have all this stuff, I worked really fucking hard to get it.

Next, “But how?” “Leo you’re telling me all this stuff and it even sounds good. I got really excited about it the other day and I really drew up all my goals and I had this big vision for what I want to be and how I’m going to accomplish all of this stuff. I’m going to have this amazing relationship. I’m going to lose all this weight and I’m going to have this ton of money coming in from my business, but then I sat down to think about how I’m going to actually do it, I don’t know how.

“How am I going to do it? It’s not possible. How am I going to do it?” That’s called doing research. You go out there and you look for role models, you read books, you study, you watch more videos, you go through a process of trial and error. Again, massive fucking action, and then you’ll know how. Until then, you have to trust yourself.

So that’s it. I know this is a long video, but there’s a lot to be said on this topic. What I want to leave you is just with a recap. The takeaway from this video is very simple.

Right now all the stories, all the excuses, all the blaming, all the whining, all the complaining stops. It stops right fucking now. You decide to take full responsibility for your life, one hundred percent, no more blaming of anybody or any other circumstances, but taking full creative authority over your own life. In the end the quality of your life is only determined by you, your thoughts and your actions. That’s it.

Wrap Up

All right, this is Leo I’m signing off. Go ahead, post me your comments down below I’d love to hear from you. Like this video, click the like button for me. Please share it too with a friend. The more these video are liked and spread around, the more free content I can keep releasing.

Finally come and sign up to my newsletter on Actualized.org. It’s a free newsletter right here. You can go and subscribe, you get some nice bonuses. Really what is important about subscribing is that you get to stay on track with all the stuff that I’m releasing. I’m releasing new video and content every single week so that you’re staying on track with your own personal development.

This is not something that happens in one day. This video maybe it, hopefully, it triggered something in you, got you all the more motivated, more inspired, more clear about the way you want to move forward in your life, but that’s not enough. One video’s not going to do it. You want to stay up to date. You want to be constantly growing.

This is not something you do as a chore. This is something you do because it’s exciting. I love personal development. To me this is the most fun and interesting and passionate thing in my life and I want it to be that way for you because personal development is your life.

You get to construct whatever kind of life that you want. If you accept that you’re a creator then you want every tool and possible mindset that you can have to create whatever it is that you want to create. I want to help you create everything that you want in your life, from relationships, to business, to money, to inner success, to happiness, to fitness… Anything there and in between and all round.

I want to help you do that with the various advanced mindsets that I’ve discovered in my own journey to understand this stuff. I had to go through a lot of the victim thinking to get to where I am now and I still have work to do. I’m working on myself every day and you should be too. Sign up and that’s what you’ll be doing.