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In this episode of the Self Relativity Podcast, host Dr. Vaheo Ohanessian discusses the 10 primary obstacles to self-improvement. The enemies identified are self lies and self deception, emotional and placebo thinking, externalization and the influence of others, dependency and reliance on external factors, uncertainty and lack of control, denial and ignorance, faith, hope, and beliefs without evidence, patterns and biases, cognitive dissonance and procrastination, and living in scarcity. Hanessian explains how these factors can hinder personal growth and wellbeing. Future episodes will delve into each of these enemies in more detail to explore their impacts on individual lives.
00:00 Introduction to the Self Relativity Podcast
00:21 Unveiling the First Enemy of Self Improvement: Self Lies and Self Deception
02:33 Exploring the Second Enemy: Emotional and Placebo Thinking
03:09 The Third Enemy: Others and Externalization
03:56 Dependency and Reliance: The Fourth Enemy
04:46 Facing Uncertainty and Lack of Control: The Fifth Enemy
05:22 Denial and Ignorance: The Sixth Enemy
05:59 Faith, Hope, and Beliefs: The Seventh Enemy
06:58 Patterns, Biases, and Purpose: The Eighth Enemy
07:55 Cognitive Dissonance and Procrastination: The Ninth Enemy
08:42 Living in Scarcity: The Tenth and Final Enemy
09:17 Conclusion and Future Episodes
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Dr. Vahé Ohanessian
Welcome back to the Self Relativity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Vahé Ohanessian. At Self Relativity, we believe to feel good, you must think well. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the 10 enemies of self improvement. The first enemy of self improvement is self lies and self deception. The reason it is such an important enemy of self improvement is because as human beings, And as sentient beings, our whole goal is to try to be happy.
If we can't be happy, our goal is to feel good. If we can't feel good, our whole goal is to feel less bad. So at any given moment, we want to feel better than we could. And there are two ways that we can do this. We can either look to see why we are feeling less than the way that we want to feel. But that requires for us to be able to look within ourselves.
And to see what is causing the issue that is making us not feel good and in order to fix that, then we have to not only look at a dislikable reality that could be part of our existence, but we also will have to come up with a way to fix it. Which will require effort and time. So in order for us to improve our feeling, we will have to take a lot of effort and time to fix it.
However, if we can come up with some kind of a thought that we can rationalize and justify why we're feeling bad, then at that time, we can make ourselves feel better, at least temporarily, without resolving the issue. However, the issue will remain and the effects of it will come back at a later time.
This is why, when we try to come up with a thought, or when we create a thought to rationalize and justify the way we want to feel, instead of using our feelings to go and look for the thoughts that are causing our feelings and to fix the causes of those thoughts, that is when we commit to self lies and self deception.
And this is why we're so prone to lies and deceptions, not only from ourselves, but from other people. But as I say in the book, the biggest lies we hear are the lies we tell ourselves. Because the easiest person to fool is ourself. The second enemy of self improvement is emotional thinking and placebo thinking.
I coined the term placebo thinking because placebo thinking is basically thinking the way we want to feel. Placebo thinking is creating thoughts in order to support the way that we want to feel. Our thoughts have to create our feelings. Our feelings shouldn't dictate our thoughts. And placebo thinking and emotional thinking Is one of the ways that we support the number one enemy of self improvement, which is self lies and self deception.
The third enemy of self improvement is others and externalization. Externalization is a term that I coined, which is a very central part of our existence. Externalization means to preoccupy our mind and distract our mind with external things or external people in order to avoid looking within ourselves to see what we need to improve.
This is why others and externalization, which are external factors to our existence, can be a problematic issue when it comes to self improvement. Because when our focus goes externally to others, then we cannot be focusing on ourselves. The fourth enemy of self improvement is dependency and reliance, and this specifically means dependency and reliance externally on others.
And as defined in the book, others means other people and or other things. When we are externally dependent on others, we are not able to rely on ourselves, and we give away our control, and we give away our independence to external factors, considering, for example, other people. When we are reliant and dependent on other people for either tangibly or intangibly, for material things or for emotional reliance, then other people have more control over us and we are not able to make decisions in our life for the best way that it can apply to us.
The fifth enemy of self improvement is uncertainty and lack of control. And uncertainty and lack of control comes into our life when we do not have control over things. That are guiding our existence, these uncertainties and lack of controls could be because of our dependency and reliance on other people where we're not able to have control over our life and make decisions for ourselves, or it could also be because we have on result issues that we're not being able to address and resolve and eliminate from our lives.
The sixth enemy of self improvement is denial and ignorance. What denial and ignorance enables is for us to avoid getting information, data, and facts about certain things that we're dealing with. When we deny the information that's uncomfortable for us, or that we don't want to see, or we ignore the information that we don't want to see, then what we're doing is that we are separating ourselves from how reality is affecting us, and we're trying to put ourselves in a more comfortable position that the denial and ignorance are enabling us.
The seventh enemy of self improvement is faith, hope, and beliefs. This could be controversial to some people who believe in this type of mindset. However, faith means to believing in something without any evidence. Hope means to have a positive wish without really putting any effort, just sitting and waiting for something positive to happen.
And a belief, Which is what we most carry is a state of mind that we are convinced or that we assume that has value, but we haven't confirmed it for it to have value in order for us to confirm beliefs into having value, we must find the support effects to turn it into knowledge. But because beliefs can often be created by our mind as a placebo thought or as other forms of thinking, beliefs can be comforting, but yet beliefs might not be in here.
The eighth enemy of self improvement is patterns, biases, and purpose. As pattern seeking animals, We are programmed to seek for patterns and recognize for patterns for safety and generally these patterns. We associate them with an intentional agent creating those patterns and in the modern times where our safety is not as much danger.
We tend to create patterns. And we tend to recognize patterns with an alternative motive, and we sometimes give it a false agency in order to be able to utilize patterns to deceive ourselves. And these patterns end up creating an external purpose and agency for us that takes our control away from ourselves.
The ninth enemy of self improvement is cognitive dissonance. and procrastination. Cognitive dissonance means holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time. And we do that because one thought is telling us how reality is, and the other thought is a thought that we created in order to avoid accepting our reality.
Procrastination is a method of delaying dealing with something that we don't like. So we can procrastinate often in, in not dealing with a thought that is uncomfortable for us. Cognitive dissonance allows us to avoid discomfort, and procrastination allows us to delay dealing with discomfort. The tenth enemy of self improvement is living in scarcity.
When we live in scarcity, it means that we do not have a lot of choices and options in life. And when we don't have a lot of choices and options in life, then we have to settle for less. When we don't have a lot of choices and options, that is generally a socially related issue. And in order for us to be able to increase our choices and options in life, we have to increase our social value.
In future episodes, we will be unpacking each of these enemies of self improvement in detail, so that we can understand how they affect us in our life.
You've been listening to the Self Relativity Podcast. In the next episode, we will be addressing the 10 commandments for self improvement.