Gary John Bishop - Stop Doing That Sh*t: End Self-Sabotage and Demand Your Life Back

In your day-to-day life you are, for the most part, on autopilot.

S omeone once asked me, Whats at the core of every human being?

Bullshit, I replied.

There were a few nervy moments of shoe-gazing silence followed by a gust of swirly, disjointed questions to cover the unease.

Apparently, they were expecting some new-age, metaphysical answer about untethered spirit or essence of ancient forests or particles of distant stardust sprinkled with fairy juice. But my response was (and is) unequivocal. In my experience of people (yes, Im people too, as are you), if you set aside all of the positivity and hope, there is quite clearly a whole other animal lurking below the surface, a conversational bullshit if you like, something not quite as empowering or comforting as wed all like to believe. Not evil or nefarious but rather something more akin to cynical, constraining, repetitive, and ultimately unfulfilling.

The kind of stuff that undermines a life. Sabotages it, to be precise.

This wee book is my take on finally uncovering and transforming your bullshit. The kind that constantly sabotages your life.

So, if youre tired, overwhelmed, overworked, underloved, stopped, paused, bored, broke, too anxious, too analytical, lacking confidence, uninspired, disconnected, on the wrong path, headed in the wrong direction, bottomed out, mired in the past, worried about the future, disappointed, afraid, untrusting, unforgiving, suspicious, angry, frustrated, or just plain stuck in a cycle, Im your guy and these are your pages.

No, really, theyre yours. Dont just read them, use them.

Lets get to the blackened heart of that bullshit, then root it out.

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In my last book, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life, I wrote about the constant internal chatter that we all deal with. The noise of opinion, judgment, reasons, fears, and excuses that rattle around in our heads every moment of every day. Sometimes its loud, sometimes its quiet, but nonetheless, its always there. Your self-talk is the locker room of your life. Where everything is strategized and worked out. Where your plans for yourself live and die.

Most of these plans never see the light of day. Especially the good stuff, the dreams. You kill them where they rise. In your head.

People are little more than a living conversation, both internal andspoken. A dialogue in a body. A skin-and-bone bag that talks,and it talks about everything, and the limit of that talk is the limit of that life. Period.

In short, you are what you talk about, or rather you are the nature of what you talk about. If, for you, life is too much, it really is too much! The confusion is that you think life is a certain way and you are just reporting on what you are seeing. But thats actually backward. The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly. And youre doing it all the time. Youre never (like never, ever) acting upon life itself. What you are acting on is your opinion of life. Thats why its such a different experience for each of us.

Life just is. What you call it is up to you. Bear in mind youll have to live with your call. And you do.

This isnt something new either.

Philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger explored the importance of language and how it molds our as-lived experience of absolutely everything. Those feelings you have (or lack thereof) are constituted in your language. Your talk is your life, and we see it most glaringly in your regular little sashays into the world of self-sabotage.

This may require a bit of radical thinking on your part, but in a very real sense, your emotions and your conversations are in a constant tango with each other, swaying and swooping through life. As a society we have become increasingly addicted to changing our emotionsto feel happier, more confident, more whateverand all without addressing what is enlivening those states. Its not the sucky life you seemingly have but your dialogue about your life that has you by the throat, and the vast majority of that dialogue is blissfully unnoticed and therefore unexplored by you. Its running in the background.

This book takes the work we started in Unfu*k Yourself to the next level. Were out to finally uncover your personal brand of self-talk and discover why it remains the source of all thats currently shitty in your life. In the day-to-day living of our lives, we mostly just experience the moods and emotions of our internal chatter without doing the work to determine what its really saying. So, if youve ever wanted to know why you talk to yourself in the way you do and, more specifically, what it is that drives that talk... read on.

Before you start to think Im slipping into another positive thoughts clich, lets get something clear. Theres a reason simply changing your self-talk to Im good enough or Im smart enough or I am loved or I can do it to overcome the negative BS doesnt quite work for everyone.

The problem with that approach is that it doesnt address the muck. You just cant be one way to overcome another way that you dont like. You cant short-circuit the process. Its the emotional equivalent of sweeping the dead cockroaches under the rug before your friends arrive. Sure, it all looks good, but in your heart of hearts you know the dead cockroaches are still there. Its like that in our mindswhen we sweep the negative emotion under our mental rug, deep down we still know something else. Something more akin to the truth. Its like lying to yourself but you just dont believe the lie. A con game.

Were using these pages to get under that rug. To reveal those hidden emotional cockroaches and free you up, to let you authentically be rather than pretend to be. You can, of course, shift your emotional state by doing, a process I covered in my first book, but the common denominator in all of this is language.

The way we work is that we can only ever be one way at a time. You cant be angry and loving simultaneously in a single moment. Its one or the other. You cant be forgiving and resentful or indifferent and sad. At any moment in time, youre always being one way and ONLY one way.

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Before we dive in, a few people commented that my last book didnt say much about me, so Im rectifying that right here and now.

Im Scottish. Full-on accent, with a penchant for kilts and crappy weather.

I love empowering people. My lifes work is to give people something that might allow them to change their lives for the better. I dont do that by telling you youre awesome or that one day your ship will come in or that everything happens for a reason or any other kind of modern, new-agey schtick that some people have come to adopt.

I give it to you straight. Right between the eyeballs. You are the problem, and you are the solution!

(As a related aside, someone once told me Im not everyones cup of tea. Tea isnt everyones cup of tea either was my response.)

Im also not arrogant enough to think I could solve a conundrum that has perplexed philosophers, scholars, scientists, and great minds as far back as we (or at least I) can trace. My single intention is to make a difference with one person. You. Thats it. If youre reading this and focusing on how it applies to your spouse, your dad, your boss, your cousin, or your ex, youre completely missing the point.