Name: The Oldest Hustle in the world
Uploaded: 2017-07-26T14:01:12.000Z
Duration: 3 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Amanda was a 17 yr old high school junior

Past simple

that I met a couple of years ago in Palo Alto.

Gerund

She came to my office after finding out one of her friends

had texted something nasty about her to their other friends.

and she wrote down the thought: “everyone hates me”.

And she bought into this idea 100% as true

as a result she felt sad and worried, anxious, frustrated, and hopeless.

We had a look at some of the distortions that might apply to this thought.

One of them was "black & white", or "all or nothing thinking"

...since it was unlikely that everyone hated her.

She could quickly see that she had some friends who were still on her side.

She could also see that “hate” was probably a strong word

and she suspected that this particular girl may have been mad at her for something else.

Another distortion she could identify was mind-reading.

This is the idea that you can “tell” what others are thinking,

These errors in thinking are called distortions because they distort the truth.

And like any good illusion, there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere.

That’s why they’re so easy to believe.

The important thing is, it’s a con, and one that we do to ourselves.

For Amanda, it was her distorted thinking that created an illusion that upset her,

She’s wasn’t upset that her friend had sent that text,

she was upset with the thought that she had created as a result --

When she could remove the illusion, she was able to see the reality of the situation.

You’ve already seen how language is important.

The words with which we describe the things that happen in our lives,

and the world in general, have consequences.

In his book, The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz says your words are your power to create.

They create a story for yourself, which then becomes a reality.

It’s another way of saying it’s a self fulfilling prophesy.

When we talk about ourselves in a negative way, we can do so much damage.

In Ruiz’s words; “like a sword with two edges,

your word can create the most beautiful dream,

or your word can destroy everything around you”.

When we say; “I’m a bad person” we start to act like a bad person,

because this is the story we believe about ourselves and so it becomes a reality.

Sometimes out loud, sometimes just to ourselves, under our breath or in our own heads.

Sometimes we’re so used to it we don’t even pay any attention anymore.

But at some level, these thoughts, these things we say about ourselves and the world

get absorbed into a story that we buy into, 100%,

and they become the “reality” of who we are as

These things we tell ourselves, they seem real, and we buy into them so much,

that it never even dawns on us that these are just stories.

Stories that we can either choose to agree with or not.

So if you feel bad about yourself, the exciting news is, you’re about to figure out why.

And you can change that story if you want to.

And when you discover the stories you tell yourself about yourself are not true--