The Secret of My Success

The Myth of the Quick Fix - Erin Currin (E038)

• Erin • Episode 38

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🔍 In this episode, Erin shares her powerful journey of self-discovery and personal growth, revealing that tenacity—not quick fixes—became the true secret to her success.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

The Search for Quick Fixes: Erin reveals her decades-long quest to find the "one thing" that would fix her problems, only to discover that growth comes from consistent effort, not magic solutions.

From Defining Problems to Creating Solutions: After becoming an expert at identifying her issues, Erin shares how she finally learned to focus on creating the life she wanted instead of dwelling on what was broken.

The Bankruptcy Lesson: Hear about Erin's journey from quitting her corporate job for her "destiny," losing her house, and what she learned from hitting rock bottom.

The Podcast Journey: 15 years and many personal development programs later, Erin describes how launching this podcast finally brought together all her seemingly disconnected experiences and skills.

Breaking Through Limiting Beliefs: Discover how Erin's Buddhist practice helped her recognize and overcome the deep-seated belief that she was "broken" and unworthy of success.

The Power of Perspective: Through powerful personal examples, Erin illustrates how seeing situations from multiple viewpoints—including her parents' divorce and life challenges—transformed her understanding.

The Tenacity Formula: "No matter how many times I fail. No matter how embarrassed I feel. No matter whether or not any of you give 2 shits about what I have to say. I keep fucking going."

You can find my book - Hate Your Way to Happiness on Amazon here.
https://a.co/d/bZ3bTdZ


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Erin Currin:

But I really couldn't point to any one thing I could attribute my success to. I remember one day I was thinking to myself, yeah, I feel really amazing. I should probably go ahead and get certified in that. And that was when I realized the insanity of the cycle that I had been in. You Erin, hello and welcome to the secret of my success, where we explore what it means to live a fulfilling life. I am your host. Erin Currin, if you're new here, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. If you have been around before and you haven't yet, please give us a like and subscribe. If you feel so inclined, we are a place where you can find all sorts of different conversations and tools about what it means to really grow and evolve through life. One of the things that I discovered over the years in my travels is that I was always looking for the thing, the secret to success, the course, the certification, the experience, the person, the guru, the whatever. And I came to understand a couple of years ago that it wasn't any one thing, because after going and getting various certifications and learning different kinds of modalities and experiencing all sorts of different ideas and philosophies. I really found that I had a richness in my frame, in how I viewed the world, but I really couldn't point to any one thing that was the thing I could attribute my success to. And I remember one day, I was sitting after doing another new thing that was going to be the thing, and I was thinking to myself, yeah, that went really well. I feel really amazing. I should probably go ahead and get certified in that. And that was when I realized the insanity of the cycle that I had been in, you know, with two bachelor's degrees and a Master's, various certifications to my name, years of experience, different personal development courses, from landmark to self discovery to gratitude. 25 years worth of studying and practicing Buddhism reading even earlier than that, about Eastern philosophies and human psychology and how the world and the brain and all of these different things work. I was getting smarter, sort of but at some point I realized I didn't know that my life was necessarily getting better. I was getting better able at I was better able to point to the places where I was breaking down. I could point to the places in my life where I had the particular psychology installed, where I had made the decision that life looked a certain way, or that I needed to behave in a particular way, or that I needed to protect myself, or that I needed to be vulnerable. Um, there were so many different things that I was folding in to the way I was behaving in life, but I still wasn't creating the really massive breakthrough. I wasn't getting the levels of success that I felt like I wanted, or that I should be getting after spending all of this time, money and energy on all of these different philosophies. I remember going to, I think it was a Millionaire Mind intensive weekend that was my, my dipping my toe into the personal development genre. That's how I got started. And of course, you know, they were talking about, if you're working a job, it's just over broke, and that's a limitation, and I took that very seriously. If you're the teacher and you're telling me that my job is keeping me just over broke, fine, I'll quit my job and I. Ended up quitting my job and going into bankruptcy because I quit my job without having a plan. I was able to create all of the spreadsheets to show how this really great course that I was going to create was going to pay for everything and save me and make me all of this money, and it was going to be wild, and it was going to be awesome, and the sky was going to open up. And the moment that I quit my job, I was sitting waiting for heaven to just give me the cheat code for whatever it was. And I actually had a couple of pretty good courses in my mind, the thing that I wasn't doing was I wasn't offering them to anyone because I didn't have the confidence to believe that what I had to offer was worthy. It was valuable that someone would want to pay for it. And what's probably pretty funny is there, if I were to talk to people who had known me from then, there probably were quite a few people who would have paid me precisely because I had studied so much, and I can be so articulate, and I can see how different aspects come together. Fast forward to 15 years later. That's that's a little embarrassing. Um, no, it's not. Thank you. Fast forward to 15 years later, with all of the equipment that I have that I accumulated over the years, trying to build YouTube channels and do my speaking business and all of these different aspects, from coaching to training to you name it. I've been successfully doing my podcast now for a year, and there's a part of me that wants to say that it's not successful because I took a break. The truth is, last year I I just decided to fucking do it. Now, did I really just decide to fucking do it, or was there something else? The truth is, the real answer is, the answer that none of you really want to hear is, it was all of the work that I had done previously, and there were a few new things that I had introduced that were creating some additional momentum, some some extra lift, shall we say. So today, what I want to do is I want to go into some of the aspects of that, because many of you that are listening to the podcast or watching the channel. So far, most of you are people who know me in some way, shape or form, and so I'm assuming that you already know quite a bit about my story. And of course, I really like this podcast to be of service to many, many people, beyond just my immediate circle of known people, and into the world to help people recognize and understand some of the ways that they might be stuck, where they might have their foot nailed to the floor, some of the areas where they could go to work and focus if they have been a knowledge junkie, a personal development junkie, somebody who has been chasing the answer and trying to find The way. It's a myth, the number one secret of my success is tenacity, the fact that I never fucking give up, no matter how frustrated I get, no matter how many times I crash or feel embarrassed or think that it's ridiculous, no matter how many times I tell myself that nobody really gives two shits what I have to say about things. None of that's true. That's all a point of view. Now there are probably very many people out there who really don't give two shits about what I have to say about life. But there are also people that I have regular conversations with who say that I am the voice in the back of their mind that tells them to keep going, that I am that little angel that sits on their shoulder and encourages them now. Well, this isn't to be arrogant or to tell you that, you know, I am the one. There's an expression that I learned several years ago that I think really sums up quite a bit to a third grader. A fourth grader is a god. I don't have to know everything. In fact, as a practicing Buddhist for 25 years. One of the biggest parts of Shakyamuni Buddha's story that most people forget, don't realize, don't understand, is that for the majority of his life he was stumbling through life, he was joining different groups. He was participating in different rituals. He was trying on different schools of thought and different philosophies and different practices. He would sit in the woods and starve himself. He would flog himself. He would meditate for hours on end, whatever the the fad was of his day, whatever the other gurus, the other sages, were doing, he would go and he would try it. He wasn't afraid to to really test things out. And he wasn't afraid to share what he had learned with the people that he encountered in between his forays into the wilderness, his journeys up to the top of the mountain. This is actually the reason why there are so many sutras. There are so many teachings of the Buddha, because two things, one, when the Buddha would come and meet you, he would have a conversation with you based on where you are on your journey, it's what you are able to hear at this moment in time. In the Bible, there's a phrase, He who has ears to hear, He who has eyes to see. What that means is that if I am at a different level in my education in my life experience, I might not really understand what it is you're talking about. If you're trying to explain to me how a rocket ship gets up out of the atmosphere and into orbit, there are certain things that you know, as the designer of a rocket ship that I'm clueless about, and so you're probably going to have to dumb it down for me. You'll have to put it in terms of more common, everyday kinds of experiences that I might be able to grok, that I might be able to grab onto. Dr Joe Dispenza does this in his courses, because when he's talking about cells and receptor sites and all of these chemicals that the body makes and where they attach to the cells, I can say receptor site on a cell. And like you may have no clue what that means. When he gives a description where he talks about a crater on a moon, you already get a picture. When he talks about, you know, a flower opening up, and there are the the pistils and the stamen, the different aspects that are opportunities for the parts to come together. If I were to start to describe to you Legos and and how they click together, those those receptor sites fit together in in certain ways. And it's sort of like those toys that young children have where it's the box with the different shaped blocks, there's the triangle, the star, the circle, the square. Each of those blocks only fits really into one of the holes based on the shape and size. And so if I were to describe a receptor site on a cell, like that child's game, and say, the circle fits in the circle, the square fits in the square, and the star fits in the star. You now have a better understanding of what it might look like. It might be a purely elementary version, but you're going to get there right? And so the Buddha would go around, and he would try to explain the inexplicable to people using language, common language, as opposed to jargony sorts of. Language to try to help someone understand how to get just a little bit closer. Because if you can get a little bit closer, then you can have more of an experience, and that experience is going to help you travel a little bit further down the road. Enlightenment isn't this static state where all of a sudden, when you get there, you're there, and that's it. It is this revelation. It is this experience where you're able to see causality on a completely different level. You can see why when x happens, y is what's next. And it helps you understand that I am sitting in this particular version of my life because of these things that I've done in my past, and if I want to change where I am in my life, it's not out there that has to change. It's in here. I have to change the way I view the world. I have to change the way I look at the hand I'm dealt if we're playing poker, I have to, I have to figure out a different way to play the same hand. I mean, I can wish that my life were different. I can be sad that I grew up a certain way and did certain things and didn't do certain things. Maybe I was emotionally abused or beaten as a child, or if you know, I had parents who, well, my parents were divorced when I was very young. All of my grandparents had passed away by the time I was eight. You know, I used to think, well, that's really sad. I never had any grandparents. Well, I've lately really started to understand, of course, my parents got divorced. Their parents all were dead by the time I was eight, which means they were losing their rocks. They were losing their most essential relationships. They were going through experiences in their 20s, late 20s, early 30s, that I mean it, that's no picnic. And then, of course, to be dealing with, like all, like, one minute, my father thinks that he's going to be inheriting a car dealership, and my mother thinks she's the wife of a car dealer. And the next the car dealership was sold to the partner. And my mom is now married to a police officer. No way. My mom came from very, a very poor family, and she knew she didn't want to continue in poverty, and she knew that police really didn't get paid very much, and there was a high probability that he might end up dead in the line of duty, which no. Thank you very much. And so when you're striving for stability, when you're looking to solve problems from a past, you didn't even know you had from challenges you didn't even know you were trying to escape. Well, then you're going to do certain things that might not make sense to other people, but make absolute sense to you, and if you're never able to really take a look at your life in review and wonder why you make the decisions that you make, that you say, the things that you do, that you believe, the things that you do, about the world, about your family, about Your friends, about yourself, when you have this kind of a frame that's running everything, and you aren't aware that a frame is even present. You're held captive. That is The Truman Show, right? You remember the movie, The Truman Show. In the movie, The Truman Show, Truman doesn't know he's in and in the movie The Truman Show, Truman doesn't understand that he's in a TV show. He's in a sitcom. His entire life is scripted. They are all paid actors, and he is the only person who is going through this entire process believing that this is life. I. There's nothing wrong with the way Truman is living his life, because the way he's living his life is authentic according to what he understands. But the minute he begins to have suspicions about what's really going on, he starts to dig in and he starts to ask himself questions. Well, if this is true, then what would I do differently when he decided to surprise his wife and say, let's go on an unplanned vacation, she's freaking out. Of course, everyone else is because they don't have a set ready for a vacation. It's a completely different landscape. It's something that doesn't exist in his mind. Now, circling back, the Buddha was going through his life, learning and growing and evolving, and one of the best ways to really understand the things that you've learned is to teach. And so as he's going through and he's teaching, he's having conversations, he's engaging in dialog, and he's deepening his understanding both of his experience that like what worked about the experience, but also what maybe didn't work, or the places where he had gotten stuck he he was able to begin to see access to new ways of when he went back in the Next time, going a little bit deeper, going a little bit farther, seeing beyond and understanding the mechanics of the human psyche and the brain and how things work. It's not like there was one practice or one lesson or one session that was the one that got the Buddha where he needed to go. And with me, it was a similar experience. I kept trying to point to the one thing, and I also kept trying to figure out why I would get stuck in a pretty similar place. The reason why I was getting stuck in a pretty similar place was, well, one of the main reasons, and this is where I wrote the book, hate your way to happiness, cultivating self love, even when you feel like shit. I was going into the three day weekends. I was going into the coaching sessions. I was going into the Buddhist practice, and when I would really turn up the heat, when I would really lean into the practice, and I would really use the tools, I was surprised by the shit that would come up. It wasn't pleasant, it didn't feel good. And my first reaction, based on how I had grown up and how I viewed myself, was, here we go again. I fucked it up. I broke it God damn it. I got to go back and figure out what I did wrong. I had no clue that that was exactly how things were supposed to be going. It was supposed to feel uncomfortable, it was supposed to feel bad, it was supposed to feel weird and icky and awful, because I was confronting all of that stuff about me that I had been trying to hide. And so in order for it to heal, it needed to come up. But I kept insisting that I didn't want it to come up. It wasn't allowed to come up. I couldn't show anyone my ick, I couldn't let it get out there. I learned how to do vulnerable shares in such a way that I would really touch people. I got so good at finding the blind spots, at finding the trigger points, at finding the the the reason why I didn't like myself, but I was never able to create beyond that, precisely because, when it came time to actually fix that thing to to shift that behavior, to process that belief and switch it out for something more empowering. I so mistrusted my own point of view that I. Deferred to someone else's opinion each and every time. It's still something that I struggle with here and there, I'm getting much better. It's funny I was, I was talking with my coach on Monday, and we send Marco Polos back and forth during the week, I'll send her a quick video and give her an idea of what's going on in my world, so that when we get onto our calls on Monday, I'm not just vomiting up all of this stuff or sharing excitedly, you know. And I had sent over a video and her response was confusing to me, because I didn't remember talking about fear and anger as much as I felt she was focusing. Yeah, sure, I mentioned it in passing. I was so confused. I went back and re listened to my own video, and then re listened to her response, trying to find the connection. And that is exactly what she pointed to. She said, Well, did you ever consider Erin that maybe I misunderstood what you said? That thought never crossed my mind. It was immediately, oh, wow, look, I even fucked up communicating this. Because I wasn't communicating that I was scared. I was communicating a breakthrough. Instead of thinking that maybe her point of view was a little bit off base, I just assumed that I did it wrong, and that's, that's really like, that's, that's my go to thing. I just assume that I made the mistake, that I am the problem, and that whatever it is that I've done isn't enough. And when you're coming from a space of never enoughness, then nothing is ever going to be enough. It's a bottomless pit. It's exhausting. It's such a frustrating and challenging place to be in, because then no course is ever going to be enough. No coach is ever going to be enough. I'm coming to every call in a deficit. And then even when I do take ground, I discount that ground, because something's going to happen in a few days where I'm going to go see, look, the truth of the matter is you are broken. You are deficient. You are less than I remember, I think it was about a year ago I had an epiphany about an aspect of this, and I remember the word begrudging came up in nature and Buddhism, there are a few of the scriptures that talk about begrudging one's practice. So we we chant as the main focus of what we do. We chant Nam Yoho renge kyo. I dedicate myself to the mystic law of cause and effect. I believe that cause and effect is the law of the universe, and I am agreeing that this is how I'm living my life, and so I'm going to pay attention. And it's a very kind of a scientific thing, like, if x creates y because cause creates effect, then it's pretty simple to solve, right? However, when you have this underlying philosophy, or this underlying belief like I have had for most of my life, that I am bad and I am broken and I am wrong, then it doesn't matter how much sense cause and effect makes, because I can make the same cause that you do, but it's not going to produce the same effect because the law doesn't work on me, which is ridiculous. That's like saying gravity doesn't work on you. And as I was thinking of this idea of begrudging, one's practice like I'm chanting, but I don't fucking want to, and it's not gonna fucking work. And Alright, fine. No, 20 years of practicing like that gets to be a little bit old. I decided to go ahead and look up all of the scriptures on begrudging, and I was reading this one that nature and I shown and wrote, and this is back in, like, the 1260s or the 1270s like we're talking 700 800 years ago. And he was saying, All of this is really amazing, but if you don't believe that it. Going to work on you, then none of it's going to work. And I'm thinking to myself, how the hell did this man, 800 years ago know that I was dealing with this? Oh, wait, I'm not special. Like that is the way the human brain works. It tricks us into thinking that we're broken. It tricks us into thinking that the law won't work for me. It tricks us into thinking that I'm always going to be fat or I'm always going to be broke or I'm always going to be alone, precisely because I am just such an unworthy and unvaluable being that there is not a human on the face of this planet that would want to deal with me that was the context of my Life. That really was the context of my life. And I have several people over the course of my life to thank for pointing me in a better direction, one of whom was a head coach in a coaching course that I took, and I was thinking about signing up for the next level of the course. Well, thinking about I had already signed up for it, it was pretty much just working out the details, and I was trying to work out the details with this head coach, and I said to her, Well, I got so much out of the first level that I know the second level would do me good, but I also know I almost got fired, and I can't afford to get fired, and so in order for me to be able to stay safe and keep my job, I see based on the rules of engagement in the course that I could engage with the course this way. So it's like, there's playing full out, and then there's playing at the minimum level. And I was trying to convince her the playing at the minimum level was what I needed to do. And when I mentioned to this coach, that if I played at this level, that I could have this and that she she now, she nailed it. She said to me, Well, you know, the other participants in the course are going to be playing at this level, and you're going to be playing down here. Is this just another way for you to other yourself? At the time, I really thought that it was a way for me to give myself permission to go beyond because what my old habit had been was to just run headlong into it and then just let everything crash. And so I thought I was being really smart by actually planning ahead and not pissing my boss off and getting fired, and the truth was, I was actually creating a new limiting belief that worked hand in hand with my old limiting beliefs. I wasn't stripping away the limiting beliefs, I was reinforcing them in new and creative ways, and she saw right through it, in that moment, well, not in that moment. In that moment, I felt exposed, I felt hurt. I I was shocked how naked I felt. I told her I would think about it. And then talked with my coach at the time, and we were talking about i. Year end, it was Christmas time, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna work and through the next couple of weeks on this. And he's like, we are not taking any time off, time off. Like, who deserves time off? I don't deserve time off. I need to get this shit handled. And he suggested that maybe that was also part of what she was talking about, where I had to keep running, I had to keep striving, I had to keep trying. So I took the next couple of weeks to meditate and to really look at my patterns and my habits. I took the next couple of weeks to I is to pay attention to how the previous year had gone and why the course is was ending the way it was, because I was disappointed with my performance. Wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed, and in those two weeks, I started to see that it was kind of like I was going into the grocery store and deciding that I was going to eat nothing but salad and veggies and healthy stuff all week, and I was buying all of this healthy produce and coming home and putting it in the refrigerator, and then ordering takeout. And every couple of weeks I had to clean out my refrigerator of all the rotten food and dump it out with the pizza boxes and the Chinese takeout boxes. And I was still staying fat and miserable and unhealthy, and I got to see how I had all of the tools that I needed to be able to handle this, from my Buddhist practice to the things that I had learned through landmark and gratitude and self discovery and accomplishment coaching and all of the different courses and practices and so many really valuable teachers over the years, and I, I at that moment, just decided to withdraw myself from the next level course and to just take a year and integrate, whatever the hell that meant, because I hear people talking about integration, I I have this thing where I'm othering. I can always, you know, get into the next, next level, course, but for once, I was going to stop grabbing on to the next fad, the next personal development self help widget of the day, and I was just going to go back to the refrigerator. That's overflowing with food, and try crafting some recipes and focusing within. Maybe try walking a little bit. Maybe try fill in the blank and I let myself just be I let myself trust that I had everything that I needed and that I would get guidance from the universe, from My angels, from my guides, from my inner being, my inner child, my inner voice from my source, my connection with source, And I did. It was the most miraculous year I could not have planned for the way things went, and some of it seemed like it was, huh. So i i backing up just a little bit when I was trying to figure out if I should get certified in the reconnection to see if that was something that I needed to teach. That was just another one of those points. Points where this is really cool, this one thing is really amazing, and it was not the one thing, because if it hadn't been for the chiropractic care that I had been engaging in with Dr David, and it hadn't been for the Reiki training that I had done with my Reiki master, and it hadn't been for all of the really amazing stuff that I learned at Landmark about human psychology and all of the years of Buddhist study, from reading The Scriptures and sharing in meetings each of these things built one on top of the other to eventually circle around, to be the revelation of my own stuckness, of the box that I had put myself in and from one conversation to another, I was able to begin to put together the pieces of my own journey. If there's an analogy that really wants to come out right now, but I don't have words for it. So what I'll say is, if I keep running at the same wall, just run, run, run, run, run, run. Hopefully eventually the wall will loosen and weaken, or, you know, I could crack my skull. At some point, you might want to sit down, take a break and go, Hmm. Let's take a look and see, do I need a stronger helmet? Do I need a pickaxe? Do I need? TNT? Is there something that I've heard of that I can implement here? Because at the core of every philosophy that I have ever studied been interested in every course that I've ever signed up for, anything that I'd ever connected with was the idea that I can be the author of my own life, that karmically I am where I am because of the views that I have And the choices that I make and that in order for me to create a breakthrough, something internally had to shift for the landscape externally to reflect that back, okay, as I allowed myself to listen to the conversations that I was having with people a little bit differently, as I was able to relieve some of the emotions of sadness, allow myself to grieve for the things that I used to be angry about, not having a better relationship with my mom, and then I let myself just Grieve not having a relationship that I would have wanted, and then I could let it be what it was as I became able to let things be what they were, rather than resisting what I felt they should be, that was when I was able to start seeing things from a new Light, and then when I started to understand that, okay, so if I've been living my life inside of this kind of a lie, that I'm broken and that life is dangerous and that all these people are out to get me, and it's really not true, necessarily. I mean, there might be some people who are out to get me, but it's by and large, not everybody, most of the people that I know, I don't know, I kind of think they're pretty cool, until all of a sudden, one day, I've had too much sugar, and my body chemistry is all sorts of off, and then I'm crying on the couch about what an idiot and an asshole they are, and really nothing has changed with them. I've changed quite a bit. Then when the sugar goes away, I can see things much more clearly. And if that's the case sometimes, then why couldn't that be the case more often than not once there's a small crack in the Fauci. Sod. Of the lies that you tell yourself that gives room for that tiny little seed to drop down into that crack and for that wild flower to grow. Once that wildflower starts to grow, what else is possible? And so tenacity has been the greatest secret to my success, but not tenacity from a I've always got my shit figured out kind of a space. It's not the Gary V I am like the bomb and can do no wrong. It's not a grant. CARDONE kind of a success. I'm I'm not like that. I swagger is not my thing, but I have been able to create tiny shifts over the course of my life that have altered where I am today in in such an all encompassing way that if I were to put me from 30 years ago next to me Right now, I don't think that I would recognize myself. I don't think I really have a clue how much ground I have taken. This is one of the biggest challenges when we're dealing with this kind of a shift or a process, because it's all so subjective. The people around me have seen how amazing I am for years. The last thing I want anyone to ever say to me, or the last thing I would say to you, is you shouldn't feel that way. Well, I do fucking feel this way. I feel this way for whatever reason, and you're telling me that I shouldn't really just pisses me off. So let's just get that straight right now, and you can't help me from there. You can help me question certain things that takes a level of finesse. I wouldn't recommend you go digging around in somebody else's psyche and trying to show them, because when you when you point out something like that to somebody else, generally speaking, they're not prepared to see that kind of an answer, and you're just going to create a fight the way Joe Dispenza talks about it is, and that whatever your emotional level is, that's the level that you are able to put out and accept back. And so if I am in a space of depression or frustration or anger, and you're trying to come at me from a space of hope, not only am I unable to hear you, I'm thinking you're an idiot and an asshole, and I need you to get the hell away from me as soon as possible. And so that one lifeline that I may have had access to now goes away the way Einstein would say, it is a problem cannot be solved by the same level of mind that created it. And so what I encourage you as a listener or as a viewer of this podcast to take away from this conversation is it's a journey. It's a process. It is not an overnight thing. I don't care what anybody tells you. If somebody tells you that you're going to go to this three day weekend, and all of your problems will be solved and you will never have to worry about that concern again. Run the other way, it's a lie. You don't get something for nothing. It takes work. It takes work. It takes practice. It takes dedication. It takes commitment. It takes time. Is it possible to pop? Yes, is it possible? You know, in in nature and Buddhism, we say that, you know, chanting one daimoku, saying that phrase, namyoho, Renge Kyo, one time, if you say it with so much depth of conviction to. Know that you are the epitome and the embodiment of the enlightened Buddha, when you know this with your entire being, then yes, it can pop in a minute. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer to chip away those layers of concrete that we've been laying in over the decades of our lives. When you come down to it, the core of your beliefs, the the very essence of your psychology, comes from your family. They have been telling you things in a particular way, teaching you how life is and what to do in order to be successful or to stay safe. They've been telling you these things for the duration of your life, and for the first 10 years, you really don't have other ideas or opinions to compare to. And so by the time you do get out into the world and you are introduced to different ideas and different philosophies, the stuff that you know is pretty well cemented in there. And so if you were to get started right, then you could probably undo it fairly quickly, because at 1011, 12, you're still pretty malleable. But if you don't start to figure it out until you get into college in your 20s, and even when you're in college in your 20s, you're thinking to yourself, yeah, but is it really true? So this path is a noble path. It is a long, involved path that is well worth everything that you invest in it. Many people even believe that when you finally get to the point where you are able to create that breakthrough and you can begin to see the true creation of your life when you begin to really understand what it means to be the protagonist, to be the hero, to be The author, and things start to really fall in line and work out in those ways that you become so grateful for the journey that you have had as you have had it, that you wouldn't have changed it or had it any other way. For many of you, that sounds batshit crazy, I know, for me, it did, and I'm not going to say that I'm really excited about the life that I've lived. I'm not quite there yet, close, but I will say that the more energy I invest in the possibility of all that whack job, woo, woo, crazy kind of stuff that says that I can write my own ticket, the less I really care about any of that broken life doesn't work. It's not fair. It's dangerous out there. It just doesn't it's not as interesting. Yeah, sure, you can keep playing victim, but why if I told you that you playing victim did absolutely nothing to help anybody else. You yelling and screaming and railing against the unfairness of the system and the injustice of it all, if I told you that that didn't do a bit of good for anyone, especially not for you. If I told you that wrestling with the dark got you nowhere, and that all you needed to do was to cultivate a little bit of light, a little bit of light here and there, just create tiny little opportunities to shift your focus from what's wrong to what's right. Practice by writing a success journal, writing down a couple of wins every week, writing. Down things that you're grateful for, writing down positive aspects of some of the most awful people that you've known in your life, especially yourself, start to offer appreciation to the magic that does exist in the world, because there is magic that exists in the world. It's just a question of whether you've trained yourself to see it. As you begin to teach yourself to look for this magic, the magic will show up more and more. It's almost like being a sommelier, where most of us just drink a glass of wine and go It's dry, it's bitter, it's sweet, it's wet. And then there's somebody who's talking about notes of blueberry with like the grass that grew on the north side of the mountain and hints of chocolate. And there was even a rat that pooped on this particular like blah like you can get to be that person who sees the richness in every single situation in life, but you got to start by drinking the first glass of wine and letting it sit on your tongue for a little bit longer than you would normally like, and go, Hmm, box of wine really doesn't taste that great. This one tastes a little bit better. Start with whatever contrast you have, and explore, get curious. Tenacity is your best friend. Tenacity from the fact that you never give up, fall down nine times, get up 10 keep going, whether it's listening to this podcast or listening to some other positive messages, if it's tarot, even if it seems ridiculous, if it's comedy, if it's cat videos, whatever it is that's turning your energy up, turning your view up, Creating some kind of a of a of a positive, powerful, empowering, sort of a shift, less down, more up, less down, more up, less down, more up. Eventually, I promise you, you will get there. I I am a testament to that. I am grateful for where I am in my life right now, and sure I have my moments where I I'm afraid that maybe it's not that easy, or maybe I'm lying to myself, or whatever those old beliefs are, and then I remember that I fucking love my life, and then I get to talk to really amazing people and share these really amazing conversations out in the world. And yeah, it might seem like the world is kind of off course, maybe a little messed up. Don't give up being a fun, loving, peaceful, generous human being just because somebody else is being a jerk. Do what you need to do to close the door on whatever negativity you think is out there, and cultivate the love that you know the world needs. So, yeah, what's the one thing I would leave you with? Keep Looking Up. Keep looking for the miracles. Find one philosophy, one ideology, one thing that you enjoy or appreciate. And just do that as much as you possibly can make yourself feel good and admit in as many ways as you possibly can. It's worth it. It's absolutely worth it. So we have come to the end of another episode of the secret of my success, where we explore what it means to live a fulfilling life. I am your host. Erin Currin, thank you so much for spending an hour with me. Please. If you have gotten something valuable out of this video, give it a like. If you have not yet already subscribed to our channel, please share this message. We we need to get this kind of positivity out there. It is my commitment that you walk in light and love and you know how amazing that you are. You.