How to Find Yourself if You are Lost

Do you ever feel like you have a massive struggle of not feeling like you're enough? Like you don't matter, like you're not important, like the world would be better if you weren't here? Let me tell you that I actually understand that deeply, and I want to tell you a little bit about my story and how I got to that place. I also want to share with you some of the ways that I overcame that feeling and that emotion.

Let's be frank. It's a dark, dark place to be, and we live in a world where our self-worth, our self-value, and the narrative of who it is that we believe we are is measured against stuff and things. And it's not that stuff and things aren't great—because certainly they are. I mean, glasses are stuff and things, shirts, clothes, our cars, our homes, even the phone that you're probably watching this on right now.

But we've tied our identities so deeply to that idea and that notion that we've forgotten how to allow ourselves to be okay with who we are. And I've certainly fallen victim to that. That's something that has impacted my life. But where did it start?

And so if you're suffering right now and you are hurting, and you're like, “Man, I just hate myself. I don't feel good. Nothing goes in my direction,” we have to look at this and understand not only the path to how you got here, but more importantly, how we get you out of this place.

And so I'll tell you my story because I think it matters and it's important in the context. And I'll tell you exactly what I did, and hopefully it will help you because I'm gonna guess you probably searched something along the lines of, “I don't have self-esteem. How do you build confidence? How do you love yourself?” I don't know what, but something brought you to this video. And my mission with this is always to make sure that you can walk away from watching these feeling like you have a friend who's here with you.

And I have built a massive coaching business. I've helped a lot of people, but the thing that I want to do here is I want to connect with you as much as we can in this capacity as friends, because life's hard and I get it.

So when I was a little boy, we were incredibly poor. I don't know how to really describe how poor we are without telling you this story.

When I was in first grade, or it might have been second grade, I went to school and I grew up in Indianapolis. It was a freezing cold Indianapolis winter day and the jacket that I had at that time was full of holes and ripped. You know the old stuffing that used to be in jackets? Well, it was coming out every time I would put it on.

So I'm in school and I go to the office, and there's a lost and found. In the lost and found there's a Tommy Hilfiger jacket. I'll never forget this till the day I die. I take this Tommy Hilfiger jacket because it's in lost and found, and I assume at this point anyone can have it. The teacher thought nothing of it, by the way.

I wore that jacket. At the end of class, this kid comes up to me. He's like, "That's my jacket." I was like, "No, it's not." And he's like, "That is my jacket. I want it back." And I ended up having to give the kid his coat back, which is reasonable, by the way. Then I went back home in my jacket that was full of holes, tattered, and torn. Back to a home with no heat, no electricity. My parents were drug addicts and alcoholics. They didn't know how to manage their money. They certainly did not know how to take care of children.

I never met my father, and my stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. Taking all of these things into this home on a daily basis started to shape the way I thought about myself. In my home, it was very abusive. Things that people say to kids that should never be said. And so I would always feel like I don't matter. I'm not important. I'm not worth anything because of what I would hear them say to me.

And then I would hear that in school. And then I would see that on the report cards because I had D's and F's due to a learning disability.

As I got older, I realized I didn’t fit in with most kids, especially in high school. Turning 18 in 1999 and 2000, those years were really interesting because we were starting to have the internet at our fingertips more. You had things like Total Request Live. You had kids showing up to school massively influenced by social culture.

And for a kid like me who was literally poor and who didn’t have a lot of money, I would steal things. I mean this literally—I would steal clothes and backpacks and whatever the look was to try to fit in. But kids would still call me fake. They’d be like, "That's not who you are. You're pretending."

The truth was I was a massive chameleon. I was such a big chameleon because I had learned how to stop being me to feel safe. Most of us who are in traumatic backgrounds as children—or really anyone these days because of the world we live in—we cater to the group to feel safe.

The problem with that is when you lose your identity, you don’t know who you are anymore. And when you don’t know who you are anymore, people sense that in you.

And so here we are. I'm 18 now. It's 2004. I'm trying to figure out who I am, what I want, and where my life is going, and it's a complete disaster.

I mean, I'm getting high every day. I am breaking the houses, stealing cars. At this time, I'd lived with my grandmother who got put into hospital. She had a co. And it was basically me and my little brother trying to survive as a 17 year, 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, and it was crazy town. Fast forward a few years, I got to say I got lucky.

Might be an understatement. There was a lot of hard work that that was required to get to the spot of lucky, but a couple of things happened that really transformed my life. One. I actually became a general manager of a fast food restaurant when I was only 19. Well, I was general manager in training when I was only 19 that created so much for me because I learned about leadership. I learned about what it means to run business. I learned a lot of things that served me really well in my life. Couple years later, I landed a job with a Fortune 10 company where I'm making like multiple six figures a year. But here's the truth.
That experience that I had when I was younger about being a chameleon, about feeling invisible, about doing whatever it took to get people to like me. Was still a part of who I was, and so I leaned into all of the things that I thought make us human and I thought made us communal and I thought would bring friends into your life.

And those things were not good things. Those things were drugs and alcohol and partying. Those things were spending money on stuff that I didn't really want to impress. People that I didn't really like. They were things like cheating on my girlfriend who loved me tremendously because I had so much fear of not being the cool guy who could get all the girls.

And then I just started spiraling further and further and further until I was at 26 and I literally had a rock bottom moment. You can call it a midlife crisis at 26, but that's what it was. I just found my, myself at this place where it's like, what is happening? With my life, and this became the turning point.

So this became the moment for me where I really had to look at and explore who I was, because what was so abundantly clear to me is that I had no self-esteem and I had no self-confidence, and I had no self-belief because I didn't know who I was and worse. I didn't allow myself to be the person that I wanted to be like deeply inside of you, there is a person that you know that you want to be.
And in order to be that said person, you have to allow that person to exist. And what's so difficult about that is that when you want to allow that person to exist, now you're in this conflict. You are in the conflict of the past, the person that you were meeting, the person that you are being in conflict with, the person that you want to become.

And what happens is you have to make a decision. And in making that decision, a few things are going to happen. One, it's going to be incredibly unsettling. And the reason that it's going to be so unsettling is because. If you have an experience like me, what happened is I had to take a look at my life and I realized I was not ever honest.

I never told the truth. I was never someone that could be counted on if you wanted drugs, alcohol, girls, clothes, cars to party, to to have fun, to do anything of substance that would get you intoxicated or make you forget your life. I'm your guy. You need help. You need connection. You need a brother. You need a faithful partner.

You need a good man. That wasn't me at all, and it wasn't me because I didn't know how to do that. You know, you see so many of these experiences in childhood that kind of frame what it means to be who you become, and it's not until you sit and you look at them and you assess them and ask yourself, is this who I actually want to be?

Does it change? And so the first thing that happened is I just start taking a really deep inventory of where I was. And then from there, one of the things that happened that I didn't anticipate, that I hope doesn't have to happen for you in the way that it happened for me, is that I started to always tell the truth about everything all the time.

And in the beginning, I had to pay my taxes. What do I mean by that? I had to right a lot of wrongs. I had to talk to a lot of people about some things that, to tell you the truth, are pretty upsetting. I had to have conversations with people that I had hurt and who had hurt me and I had to tell the truth.

And that was so difficult because it was unknown. Because if you're a chameleon and you don't know how to be yourself, you don't know how to tell the truth 'cause you haven't done it. And then the third thing that happened is that slowly, and this took years, I wish I could give you a quick fix, and today you'll believe in yourself and have massive self-esteem.

It took years to pull and grow myself into the man that I am to today and that I will continue to become because it was constantly like rewriting data. I was taking all of the environment, everything that was happening, I was assessing it. And effectively what was happening is I was rewriting my understanding of myself.

And so if you are in this third part where you are exploring truth every single day, where you're being who you are, without question every single day, now it's just a timeline before belief starts to exist. Then there's a couple ways that you can speed this up. One, the first thing that you do is you start doing exactly what you say you're going to do.

Self-confidence is actually only built through you doing what you said you were going to do. If you don't do that, you won't ever start to climb the stairs of confidence because you will always continue to let yourself down, and the least confident people in the world are the people who don't follow through.
Wow. Now again, this starts with maybe baby steps. You don't wanna go climb Mount Everest if you don't even know how to walk up the stairs. Beyond that, the thing that you have to start doing is putting attention only on things that either A, you enjoy, or B, that make your life better. A lot of suffering that we have as individuals is because we continue to do things that take from us. How do I know? Because when I was in the best relationship of my life and with the woman I arguably should have married many, many years ago, I cheated because I thought that was a thing that made me a man, right? Again, pulling in that old data that frames our experience now, it's something that today, like there's 0% chance that would ever happen because of the work that I've done and recognizing that the choices that we make.

Are the very things that define who we are. And so we have to constantly make choices about the person that we are choosing to be and the person that we'd want to become. And that's hard because you don't have a roadmap. So one of the things that you can do is just take a pen and a piece of paper and write down some concepts of the idea of the person that you want to be.

Because when you do that, now you have a marker. You have something to look at. But here's what happens. So many people write down things that actually do not make their life better. Cars, clothes, money. Sexual partners, you name it. All of the arbitrary things in life that were lied to, let me tell you, lied to about, I should say.

Let me tell you this. I had this very vivid imagining of what my life would be like when I made a hundred thousand dollars a year. So at 18 years old, I got fired from a warehouse job where I was putting microchips and motherboards like a monkey on an assembly line. 12 hours a day, five days a week. It was a brutal, and I got fired and I'm sitting in my car.

This is the same time I had just got kicked outta summer school. You see, I had to go to summer school because I failed my business class. And one of the best things that ever happened is my teacher did not pass me. So I had to go to summer school. End up in summer school, I get kicked outta summer school.
So now I've been fired and kicked outta summer school, easily the biggest loser in my entire family. My entire neighborhood and what felt like to me, the entire world. And so here I am, I'm looking at my life. I'm like, well, what are you going to do about this? Because it was of an intensive battle. Like have you ever had one of those moments where you're at war with yourself?

Because if you have, then you understand that this next part is what really shifted for me. Now, I had the wrong idea. At 18 years old, I thought to myself. Okay. If I can make a hundred grand a year by the time that I'm 21, this will solve all my problems. Well, by the time that I turned 21, I had done that, and yet my life wasn't different.

Nothing had changed. In fact, most things got worse. And so then I was looking at my life again here at 26 on the backside of rock bottom, on the backside of just being in the worst place that I'd ever been. And I made another assessment, okay, if I go down this path and I try to attain these goals, will my life be different?

And 26 to 30 was kind of the beginning of that journey. So I'm exploring these ideas and notions of self and life started to get very different and it was amazing. It was very, very difficult. Mind you, but it was amazing. And at 30 I moved across the country to go work and do deep, deep work, uh, with one of the best psychologists, arguably in the world.

So anyway, I go West Coast and there I'm doing the work. People are asking me to help them. This is almost a decade ago, and they're like, Hey, can you help me with childhood trauma and healing and overcoming and self-confidence and all these things? And initially I said no, and then I said yes. And a couple things happened with the yes that were really, unimaginable.

A couple of those things. I became a bestselling author. I ended up writing three books. I've been on billboards in Times Square multiple times. I've spoken on some of the biggest stages literally in the world, in front of 10,000 people at times. I've traveled the whole world and back again. I've made a lot of money and helped a lot of people, and yet a few years ago, found myself brutally miserable to the point of a burnout, to looking at my life and having had built this amazing thing that was helping so many people.

I mean, at one point in our podcast, you know, we were doing millions of downloads. We were doing episodes multiple times a week. We had hundreds of people coming to online events, and I was selling a ton of books, and I'm getting paid to speak on stages, and I was miserable because I had. Removed the very thing at the core of my joy, which was helping people. And I replaced it with, how big can I make this thing? And I think that's a trap that a lot of people fall into, to tell you the truth, I, I just, I just do. I think that a lot of people who aim to help and go to serve, they fall into this trap.

And so it went from initially I'm going to help people and that fills me up to I gotta fly private and buy Louis Vuitton shoes. This is all true, by the way. And so I'm looking at my life and let me tell you this, to fly private and wear Louis Vuitton shoes and spend the night in a thousand dollar a night hotel rooms and fly first class and have people cater you like that stuff is really, really amazing.

I'm not gonna lie to you from a, from a kid who was homeless to a, to build a business that helped people and made money, felt amazing. But guess what? Complete burnout, complete rock bottom. Lost it all. Lost it all. Not, not in its entirety. What I mean by lost it all. I mean, I had to walk away. It wasn't lost.

It was a decision I had to sit and look at my life and say, I can't do this lifestyle anymore. I can't do the traveling constantly and speaking on the stages and trying to help do all this stuff when I'm not fulfilled and my cup isn't full. And I didn't understand that. And you hear about this idea that people should go and do the thing that makes them happy.

Well, what happens when the thing that makes you happy makes you miserable? And so I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this. Well, how do you get to this place where it's not what we think it is that brings us fulfillment? And where I've landed, and this may change, but today where I've landed, it's like, how do I help more people?

But more importantly, how do I only do what fulfills me? How do I say no? So Two things have happened over the course of the last couple of years. One, I started saying no to pretty much everything. If, if I did not feel like it was something that was deeply entrenched in the core of my being that would bring me fulfillment and happiness, I wouldn't do it.

I mean, I turned down stages five figure speaking events. I turned down podcasts with huge names that you've heard. I turned down writing a fourth and fifth book. I every, I just was like, I don't wanna do any of this. I just wanna serve people. And then the other thing was I had to take a look at where I was in alignment or disalignment, or misalignment I should say.

And so I'm thinking about this concept and idea of alignment. What does alignment mean? Alignment is based in creating this frame on a series of your values and understanding whether or not the thing that you want to do or the thing that you're doing is true to who you are. And I realize like I don't really care about most of the stuff that all of my peers and I have been indoctrinated to believe matter. And it's weird because when you come from nothing and then suddenly you have a lot, and then suddenly you have access to everything. It's such a crazy mind game. And the reason that I'm telling you all of this is because I want to tell you and close the loop about where this started is.

There is no amount of money that is going to make you happy, and we hear people say this all the time, but it never feels true. It didn't feel true to me until I had it and lost it multiple times. By the way, you are never going to be happy with the idea notion of fame. Let me tell you this. Standing in a back room, signing autographs in books that I wrote, shaking hands, taking pictures.

Great. I love, I'm so happy I got to do that, but it never made me feel full. Walking down the street or being at a basketball game or being in an airport and somebody stopping me. Like, those are great moments. But they were never moments that made me feel like, man, I really am true to myself. They're a byproduct of the experiences of business and learning social media, but they weren't about to me, none of those moments, even though I value them, and let me be clear.

None of those moments brought me an immense sense of joy. They were just like, well, I guess this is part and parcel for the experience. And so we have all these ideas and notions where it's like money and fame, money and fame, money and fame. If you get those, you will be happy. I just don't think it's true, and I look at the sacrifices that we make.

We sacrifice relationship. We sacrifice friendships. We sacrifice family, we sacrifice events. We sacrifice the opportunity to connect. I can't remember his name and I don't know his title, so I'm sorry because I don't remember. But this idea just came into my mind. There was a guy, I want to say that he was a speaker at the House of Representatives, but I don't remember, but there's this very, very famous clip.
Where this guy is getting on stage and he says, I'm sorry I'm late. My wife just died and he does his job. And that's a real moment that a real human experience. And whenever I think about that clip and that real experience that this man had, I just can't help to feel a tremendous sense of suffering and pain and sadness for him.

Because we've been led to believe that it's the career that's going to make us happy. It's the money, it's the clothes, it's the smoking hot partner. And it's not that those things aren't great again because Sure. But the question is like, what is the price you're paying to get them? Because we, we've been lied to.
We've been told it's that, but it's not. And I've experienced it and it's like if you want to have. Confidence and self-belief and self-love, and to be able to live a life that's fruitful. I think that it truly starts with you taking a deep inventory of what actually matters to you. Social media is a lie, all of it.

And I've been a part of that lie, by the way, because I, I can tell you right now, there's been moments that I posted stuff where I'm on stage and there's a thousand people in the audience giving me a standing ovation, and then the moment I get off, I'm dealing with real life struggle problems, loss.

Hopelessness, all of the things that we feel, and I don't know that there's a one size fits all solution to anything that I'm talking about today. I'm just kind of sharing openly some thoughts that I have about the entire journey, and as I sit and I think about what's in front of me, the one thing I can tell you is having a deep sense of alignment is truly the only thing that is going to make me feel.

Happy, sustained, confident. We have to stop lying to ourselves and we have to stop letting the media lie to us also. I mean, you know, the reality is like what makes you happy? If you can answer that question and you can follow that, I think you'll win the game. Many, many years ago I met Gary Vaynerchuk.
I've met him a few times actually. He's an amazing man, but he always used to say this and I never understood it. And as I'm heading towards towards 40, I understand it. And if you understand what he said faster than me, I hope faster than me. Um, I think that it'll help you a lot. He said so many people work in jobs that they hate to buy, things that they want to impress, people that they don't like.
Anyway. When the reality is that they'd be much more happy making $45,000 a year doing the thing that they love the most, like scooping ice cream. And I didn't get that. I didn't get that idea of like, go be happy. And it's not that you're going to be happy every day. I'm certainly not happy every day and I.
I don't trust people who are happy all the time. There's something off about that. But if you can have more happy moments than miserable moments, I think you're winning. And so it's really about if you want to feel the most confident, what is the thing that you do in your life that brings you the most joy and the most fulfillment?

'cause if you can answer that question, that's where everything will change for you. And so I hope, and I encourage you. To walk that path. I'm walking that path deeper myself in this moment with you. And the reason why is because I, I looked at so much of the impact that I've had on the world, and I just realized I'd gotten so far away from the thing that I love the most.

And that's not just creating content and videos and having conversations like this. But it's about being home and having a home and having a place and falling in love and enjoying my friendships and eating food and not picking up my phone every five minutes because I'm so stressed out about the next thing in business.

Now, of course, that's a part of it. All of the things are, but it's really about coming closer to home and where I'm at. For me, that experience in this moment is hopefully serving you at a higher level as a friend. And as somebody who wants to see you successful, because I mean, if I can make it like really, like if I can figure this out, so can you.

I mean, I have the world against me. I've struggled in every way possible from learning disabilities to addictions, to everything in between. It's been a hard life. I'll never sit here and pretend that it hasn't. It's been brutal. Like there's days where I realize like I can't pick up the phone and call mom and dad 'cause they're dead.

Well, my mom's dead 'cause she died of an overdose and I've never met my father. I'm certainly not calling my stepfather, my grandmother's dead. And I'm so thankful. I have amazing friends who can step into those places, but it doesn't mean that doesn't hurt. The experiences of childhood where I felt deep loss and that parts of me were stolen from adults who were meant to love, like I don't know that that ever goes away.

But I do know that every single day that we choose to continue to show up, to live, to push through, to give it our best effort, regardless of all the suffering, like that's an amazing gift that we can take advantage of because the truth is, it's going to get harder again. The next thing will come. I'm on, and in fact I'm on the backside of a next thing.

I went through a vicious breakup at the beginning of the year, not, not in the way that like it was verbally or physically abusive, nothing like that, but in a way where it was like, you know how people talk about irreconcilable differences? Yeah. I had that experience where we did everything in our power to make it work and it didn't, and it was earth shattering and luckily I have again, amazing people that I could lean on in that time.

But again, that hard thing came a shift in the business came a shift in location, came a shift in health came all of the things that happened that offset the experiences of all of the good happened, and I think that they will happen again. And I can't help but think about this very simple line that has served me quite fondly quite well, especially this year, is that this too shall pass.

We go through suffering, we go through hurt, we go through identity crisis. We lose ourselves. We try to find ourselves, and we do it over and over and over again. And I think that's a part of the human experience, and I think it's okay. If your life isn't where you want it to be right now, I think that's okay.
Your life can shift in a moment, both good and bad. But generally it's, it's net. Generally it's net neutral. Like if you really look at your life, generally it's net neutral. It it often offsets. But if you're unhappy and you're miserable and you don't have confidence or self-belief, the thing that I would push you to today is that I'd really have you check yourself.

Where are you not living as the person that you're meant to be? Because if you answer that question, everything will become different for you. I said, I just wanna say thank you for being here again. My, my hope is just to simply serve you as a friend. There's a free community that you can come and join. The link is down in the description.

If you're suffering, you're looking for hope. You're not sure where to begin. There's other videos that I've created here on the channel that I encourage you to watch. Also, if maybe there's someone in your life that could use this kind of conversation and friendship, send them this, hit the share button and send it to them.

And if there's any value that I've created for you, hit subscribe. That's up to you. Either way, I appreciate you. Take care of yourself, take care of each other.

And Until Next Time, My Friend.

Be Unbroken. I'll See Ya.