All right, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And today I want to talk to you and get your week started out a little bit by talking about breaking through barriers and ways that you can become more, I guess I would say, develop more self-mastery in your life. Mondays, I like to talk a little bit about mindset, and then we'll get into money and body and business and lifestyle. But today, I've really wanted to share an idea with you, something that I spent some time studying and meditating on myself over this weekend. And just to kind of set the stage for a little bit, I know that most of us are trying to accomplish goals in our life. We're trying to accomplish things that we feel are going to take our life to the next level, help us to feel like we're successful in whatever area of your life, whether it's personal, business, finance, relationships. But one of the things that we continue to run up against are barriers, barriers that keep us from this path, this ultimate goal that we're trying to accomplish on this path of success that we have. And over the weekend, I had the opportunity to listen to a TED Talk by Master Shi Heng Yi. And he is a Shaolin master and headmaster of the Shaolin Temple in Europe, in Germany. And he, you know, he combines Eastern philosophies with modern-day mindfulness practices. So he talks about self-awareness and discipline and balance, and ultimately self-mastery. and I was listening to this TED Talk, and he was going through some ideas and examples of things that keep you from achieving your goals in life, and let's just kind of wrap this all around the idea of self-mastery. If you've listened to The Daily Mastermind much at all, you know that my ultimate goal with The Daily Mastermind is to help you to achieve the life that you were meant to live, your best life, and really that involves unleashing your potential and learning self-mastery. Well, Master Yi talks a little bit about there are five hindrances for you to be able to achieve self-mastery. And these five hindrances are things that it might give a little bit of a different angle on areas that you might struggle in your life. But there are five areas that I thought were really worth talking about today to set your week up. So I'm going to go through these five hindrances. These are basically all internal barriers. I know a lot of times we feel like we deal with external barriers, but truly for you to be happy and fulfilled in life, you've got to be able to create self-mastery. So most of the problems you going to go through most of the barriers and things that block you are going to be internal So he talks a little bit about these five hindrances and he really emphasizes that recognizing them is the first step towards overcoming them So I want to go through these five with you this morning. I hope they're ideas that will inspire and motivate you to analyze where you are in your life and what is it that's holding you back, but also more important than holding you back, being able to recognize these five things that are going to keep you from self-mastery and from achieving your goals. Before I get into these five, he talks about the journey up a mountain and how if you want to get to the top of this mountain, you want to get to the peak, these are five things that might keep you from getting to the peak. They might distract you. The first one is sensual desire. Sensual desire is really that craving for pleasure, comfort, and distractions. They're the things that pull us or pull our focus away from growth. And this always becomes things when you chase short-term satisfaction. So for example, when you're checking your phone or you're seeking entertainment or things to relax or things when you're stressed, these ideas of sensual desire or craving things that are comfortable, things that your senses are attracted to, your sight, your smell, your feel, your touch, these are things that are going to pull you away from your focus. So you may be climbing the mountain towards your success, your peak, and you get distracted. You get distracted by sensual desire. So it's important for you to notice these. The second hindrance is ill will. Ill will, he likes to describe as feelings of anger or resentment or frustration or things that create internal resistance or poisoning of your mind and your heart. And this is things like holding grudges or being easily irritated or clouding your judgment, people that distract you and lead you to feel angry or irritated. And ill will is definitely one of those things that's going to distract you from your goal. So when you see things that make you feel angry, resentful, frustrated, remind yourself that these are things that are keeping you from your ultimate objective. The third hindrance along the path to self-mastery is dullness or heaviness. Now dullness or heaviness, this is this idea you might at times feel mental sluggishness or a lack of motivation or fatigue. You know, when you're overloaded and you feel lack of motivation or fatigue, this is going to diminish your clarity. It's going to make you less disciplined. It's going to give you less energy for progress. So what'll happen is you'll procrastinate your most important things because you overwhelmed You feel like you burned out And remember this dullness or heaviness this is a hindrance that going to keep you from achieving your goals The fourth hindrance is restlessness or worry See this involves always being in that state of mind about, you know, stressed over the future, anxious or overthinking the past. So anxiety, overthinking, inability to stay still. Your mind constantly jumps from thought to thought. You just can't get any peace, inner peace. And this is stressing about the future. things that aren't even happening yet, or it's focusing on your past, the things that you feel like define you. They will cause stresslessness and worry. And then the fifth hindrance, and then we'll talk a little bit about what you can do about this. The fifth hindrance on your path to self-mastery is skeptical doubt. Skeptical doubt. This is constantly questioning, or this is kind of maybe indecisiveness, indecisiveness. This is questioning the path you're on or your abilities or your self-worth or your teaching. The idea here is that maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe my confidence isn't there. You question yourself so much that it's hard for you to make commitments and stick to them. And it also leads to paralysis. It's like you want to overanalyze things. You second guess your decisions. And as a result, you don't ever make progress. So there's these five areas that are hindrances to you having self-mastery. Sexual desire, ill will, dullness and heaviness, restlessness and worry, and skepticism or indecision. Now, how do we create solutions? How do we move forward towards self-mastery without constantly getting distracted? Or what do we do about it? And one of the things that he mentions is this RAIN method. And RAIN is an acronym, R-A-I-N is an acronym, for a way for you to remember how to deal with these things in your life. And so I want to talk with you about that, and then we'll kind of wrap things up. RAIN stands for R-A-I-N. The first is recognize. You've got to recognize that this hindrance is actually happening, that you're experiencing one of these five things. and once you recognize them, you can move to the next step, which is acceptance. You have to allow the experience to exist without judging it, without getting frustrated, without wondering why you continue to cycle through these things you might be dealing with. Just recognize them and simply accept them. And then you can move into what I think is more productive, which is investigation. That's the I in RAIN, investigation, where you can explore the cause. You know, why did this start happening? When did you start feeling this way? Was it an event that triggered it? Was it a person or a situation that triggered it? And once you sort of understand the cause it very very important This last step this letter N the very important part is to non In other words, you've got to recognize what it is that's coming up for you and accept it. Maybe even investigate what it is, why it happened. But the most important thing is to remember that you are not the hindrance. It's something that's just coming up in your life. And so when you learn to recognize, accept, investigate, and non-identify with the hindrances, what's going to happen is you'll be able to move through them. They'll pass quicker in your life. You won't get caught up in the feelings, the agitations, the frustrations, the self-doubt. And when you're feeling restless, look, let's take an example here. When you're feeling restless, when you're feeling overwhelmed, when you're feeling burned out, just recognize the tension. accept that it's okay to feel unsettled sometimes. Investigate why do you feel this way? Do you feel failure? Do you feel rejection? Are you worried about what people think? And then just recognize that this is not you, that it doesn't have to be the way you're going to continue to run your day or your week. And just don't identify with that emotion. I believe, and this is one of the reasons this hit me so much, I believe that if you'll learn to recognize these five things in your life, sensual desire, ill will, dullness, restlessness, or indecision, you're going to find that you can deal with them better, that you can move past them quicker, and you're going to find that you're going to move along your path to self-mastery at a greater pace, at a greater rate. And so at the end of the day, with awareness and consistent practices like that RAIN method, you're going to be able to clear the path, get that self-mastery moving. Because remember, I say this a lot, and I hope you really understand that I believe this, and I believe this for you, that it's never too late to start living the life that you were meant to live. It really isn't. It doesn't matter where you are in your life. It doesn't matter how many obstacles you've gone through. It doesn't matter if you're overwhelmed with circumstances right now. You have inside you the ability to create the life that you were meant to live. but it does take awareness and it does take action and it does take some work. So that's my message for today. I hope you'll carry that into the week. I look forward to talking with you more tomorrow, but in the meantime, do me a favor. Would you please share this episode? Just share this episode either on your social media or share it, text it or message it to somebody you know that might benefit. It'll really help us to spread the message, to be able to help others with things that they're struggling with, and it would mean the world to me. So I look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. I hope you have an amazing day. Once again, this has been The Daily Mastermind. Talk with you soon.
