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The Ways We Sabotage Ourselves with Wassim Dabboussi

Mitch Stephen|By September 24, 2019

Episode 322: The Ways We Sabotage Ourselves with Wassim Dabboussi

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REIS 322 | Self-Sabotage

We sometimes have the tendency to sabotage our own success in life. Our self-doubt creeps up and makes us feel small, keeping us from achieving big goals. Today’s guest, Life Domination Coach, NLP practitioner, and sales professional Wassim Dabboussi inspires us to go after what we want in life and shares how we can combat our self-sabotaging tendencies – pointing to the three vicious traits that have long been impeding many people towards success. Wassim lets us in on the importance of self-improvement and getting what we want out of life even if it can be challenging. At the end of the day, to be fulfilled in all aspects of our existence can only be achieved when we learn how not to sabotage our own growth. Learn more the ways how in this great episode.

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Wassim, how are you doing?

I’m great, Mitch. How are you?

I’m doing good. Give us a little background. How old are you by the way? Do you mind me asking that?

I’m 41 years old.

You’re in Sydney, Australia across the globe. What we’re fixing to talk about spans the world. It’s universal and we’re going to be talking about self-improvement and how to get what you want out of life. Tell us your background? How did you get to be 41 and in this chair talking about this?

I started my journey when I was eighteen. I wanted to become a psychologist. My family stopped me from doing that. I got into personal development on my twenties and it changed my life.

Why did your family stop you from being a psychologist?

My family migrates to Australia and they had a view that if you’re a psychologist treating people who have a mental illness, you’re going to end up with a mental illness.

I see, what you immerse yourself in is what you become.

That’s all my parents believed and they were very afraid of my future. They coached me to get into information technology, IT and I lasted four and a half years at uni and a year and a half in the workforce.

Everyone got to spend their time in the woods. I have a book called My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom. It was put out many years ago and it’s still relevant now. A lot of people call me and say, “Our lives are so parallel.” When I listen to them, they’re not that parallel. I figured out what they’re connecting with. They’re connecting with I’m telling them about my time in the woods and my struggle and how hard it was. Everybody has that time and there are the ones that do well or when they come out on the other side, they’re better for it. Other people are still stuck in it and trying to figure out their way out. This is going to be a relevant conversation. May I ask what culture is that that’s afraid that you’re going to morph?

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I’m from Lebanon. I’m a Lebanese background.

You try some IT, that doesn’t fit. How do you get your way into self-improvement?

At the age of 25, I was a struggling young father who purchased his first house. We had a quite large mortgage. My wife had taken time off from work and we couldn’t afford to live in our house. I had to move in with my parents and rent the house out. During that time, I decided to find a way in which I could make some extra income. I was a teacher by that time. I go into network marketing and through that, I had a great opportunity with a great presentation to get to a big performance event with one of your guys in America, Tony Robbins. I went there and I saw this massive six-foot-something guy told me I’m going to walk on fire. I’m like, “What is he talking about? There’s no way I’m walking on fire.” That night I walked on fire twice and that changed my life.

It’s neat when you can trace it all the way back to a defining moment. He’s quite a speaker, isn’t he?

He’s an awesome speaker. I promised myself at that event that I’ll take my son when he’s fourteen years old to Tony Robbins and I fulfilled that a few years ago. I’ll be taking my second child to the next Tony Robbins event.

You’re inspired to start helping people. When people come to you, what’s the over repeating theme? What are they trying to accomplish? What are the words that they say?

The biggest challenge that my clients face is how can they have a fulfilling life in every part of their life, whether it’s their degree, their success in their career, their health and their relationships? This is where I work with my clients. I get them to hone in and find out what their purpose is in life, find out what motivates them and how can they have an inspiring vision that’s going to drive them towards it, not away from pain.

Half the battle seems to find your purpose, to find where you belong. My personal story too, I was 34. I couldn’t find my ass with both hands. I was a hard worker. I always had a bartending job at night. I had some money, but I always had the entrepreneurial endeavor of the month that I was trying to get off the ground, trying to start a business and I failed at so many. People ask me, “How did you get into real estate?” I like to tell them, “I failed at everything else.” It was the last thing. There was only one thing left. I never sat in class when I was a child going, “I want to flip houses.” It wasn’t even a word back then. It wasn’t even a profession back then. It certainly didn’t have any TV shows all over the globe and it never crossed my mind. It’s something I accidentally did once and it stuck. What’s the biggest problem with people finding out where they belong? It’s a huge issue I would imagine because I see a lot of people still trying to find out. When you see the people that know what they’re supposed to do, life changes for them at that point.

The biggest challenge that I find is most people are living somebody else’s dream or they’re living to somebody else’s expectation. Most of the time, it’s usually their parents’ expectation. If you’re a male, it’s usually your father’s expectation.

I understand that. It takes a lot of courage to go against that. For a while, you can’t go against it because you’re so dependent. When does this normally start to change?

For me, it starts to change when I try so many different things and I was not happy. I tried marketing business and I tried to run a cafe. I owned a gym at the moment, which is something I’m also passionate about. It all came around full circle for me, which is my need, want and desire to help people. I was sick of working with somebody else’s dream. I was like, “Screw this. I want to take my life to the next level.”

Self-Sabotage: Many people these days are living somebody else’s dream or living to somebody else’s expectation.

When you decided that, what was the first thing you did? What are the steps to becoming a person who helps other people in this fashion?

I took quite dramatic steps. I quit my job and got paid out and I just went full in. If you’re going to do something, you’ve got to immerse yourself and get full out. One of the things I learned quite early on is if you want to take the island, you’ve got to burn the boats.

Who said that? Was it the Greeks or the Romans?

I think so, the Romans.

The theory was no one could retreat. They sailed across the country to take some land or to take an island and the captain or the leader burned all the boats, “We win or we die.”

If you take any second option or any plan B, most people fail because they’ve always got a plan B.

That’s interesting because the human body is the most adaptable thing in the world and it will figure everything out. If you put yourself in positions where you can’t retreat, you will stand and fight and move forward. It may not be pretty and they might get ugly. I had a similar experience where I took having a job off the table. I had to figure out something to do. It was no longer a choice. I had to have some great mental discipline because when it got tough, I could have easily gone and taken another job, but I didn’t. I made myself figure it out.

A man once told me that the human body is the most adaptable thing in the world. If you give it enough protein, enough water and if the mind doesn’t go, it will figure everything out. We were on that topic because he was a prisoner of war in Cuba. He got captured in the Bay of Pigs. He was Cuban and he was coming back from the United States to go fight for his country when they got captured. That haunted me for a while. I was single, I didn’t have any kids. I lived in the United States of America. I had a great family. I was never going to starve. I was always going to have clean water and protein. The thought of not having those two things was ridiculous. The problem was, was I mentally strong enough not to go back to a job? I’m not suggesting that everybody do this because it’s not right for everyone. Is it, Wassim?

It definitely isn’t. I’m at the age of 41, I have built myself in the sense that I’ve got investment properties that positively gain. I’ve got another business and my wife has a very successful role. My kids will be older. I’m in a place right now with me not only following my own purpose and my own vision for life, but it’s also showing my children what they can do.

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How important is that? That’s wonderful. It’s no wonder that every generation seems to do a little better until they get lazy.

One of the things that I discovered was for me to be the perfect and the best role model for my kids. I need to show them that no matter what age you are, you can go after what you want. You can go there, you can fight the battles, go through the struggles and see what needs to be done and do whatever needs to be done to survive. That’s the mission I’m on. It’s not just about me. That’s the other thing that sometimes a lot of people say, “I want to become financially successful. I want to do this,” but why? Why do you want to do that? What is the reason behind it? We spoke a little bit before the show about away and towards motivation. The towards motivation is a lot more powerful if you have that as your vision. That can only be where you understand your why and understand your purpose.

You’re away and you’re towards. If you want to get away from your job, it’s more powerful to figure out what you want to go to than to figure out what you want to get away from.

If you want to get away from your job, you’re going to work to get another job, which you’re making a certain amount of money, which is going to be exactly the same as that job and you’re going to be stuck there. If you’ve got a big vision for your life, if you’ve got a massive vision for what you want to do and why you want to do it and how is this going to make the world better. I believe most humans in the world do the best they can with the tools they have. We all want to make the world better in one way or another. If you’ve got this massive vision, which is going to help other people, which is going to make the world better, you’re going to be a lot more driven to do that than getting away from a boss that you don’t like.

There’s a whole bunch of people out there and it seems like there’s a house flipper on every corner. In my industry, it seems like everybody flips a house now. They are house flipper for at least a year and there are a lot of people calling themselves life coaches and personal coaches. It’s overwhelming and daunting. What makes you different? What separates you from the crowd?

I’m not a textbook coach. I haven’t just read a couple of books about personal development. I actually lived through personal development for many years before I started taking on this role. For me, personal development was originally to become the best father, the best provider and the best protector for my family and being the best husband I can be. It wasn’t about doing it as a job. I got to a place about where I saw many men around me who were struggling to have the success that they want because their relationships are falling apart. They didn’t have their whole life together and they started approaching me and my results speak for themselves. They would say, “How did you do this? How did you have the relationship you want? How do we overcome this? How did you get your wife to support you to do this? A lot of them feel that their partners are not supportive. I struggled through that in the beginning when I first started my journey. I had to figure out, “How can I get my wife on board and for her to be my number one fan and my biggest supporter?” Living through that allows me to give others the guidance that they need.

I too had to drag my wife by the back of the hair like a caveman into the cave of entrepreneurialism and self-reliance. She was kicking and screaming the whole way. I don’t want to sound impersonal or uncompassionate, but I was at a point where I’d already been through a relationship that was substantial and this had nothing to do with that relationship. In the downfall of that relationship, in the loneliness and in the time in the woods between that failure of that relationship, which at the time hurt me pretty bad. I decided to reinvent myself. I decided who I was going to be and what I was going to do. I also decided that if people around me didn’t support me that I would excommunicate them.

If they were someone I loved or someone I cared about, then I wouldn’t excommunicate them from my life. I would set them aside and not talk to them about what I’m doing. I would put them over there until I could come back with some success and evidence and shut them up. There was my wife. I didn’t have a college degree and I was getting paid about $15 an hour for working my ass off. I was making people other money and I could see that I was improving their businesses by tens of thousands of dollars and they weren’t giving me any of it. It pissed me off. I had this struggle with my wife who was going to divorce me, but I had made up my mind that I was going to go in this direction. If anyone didn’t want to come with me, then I would have to meet them in the great beyond some time or meet them later. They could catch up with me or I would catch up with them somewhere. I was going this way and I didn’t care who went and who fell off. I did care, but it didn’t matter who it was. I was going in this direction.

I think you’re asking the question, how do I get my wife onboard?

Self-Sabotage: When you’re living life with a passion, you’ll never get bored.

I did it like this is where I’m going. If you don’t want to go, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I don’t know if that’s the best plan. Luckily, she hung around. How do you suggest you work it?

I totally connect with what you’re saying because I had a very similar experience. I remember coming home from the second night of the Unleash Your Power Within. I had walked on fire. It was 1:00 in the morning, 2:00 in the morning after getting home and I looked my wife straight in the eye and I said to her, “Life is never going to be the same again.” She looked at me horrified like, “What are they doing to my husband over there?” She literally thought I was getting brainwashed because I was always negative.

You were getting brainwashed, weren’t you? You were getting good brainwashing.

I came back and I showed her that I was a better person. I showed her that my new journey is going to make her life better. I showed her that I’m doing this for us and our family. By being a better person, it took some time. It took a few months where she started to realize and I’m like, “I used to do this, now I’m doing this and that’s because of the journey that I’m on. This is a positive journey.” I reinforced that all the time until she started coming around. As soon as she took that small bait, I took her to her first personal development event.

How did that go? Did she want to go or did you talk her into it? Was she excited about it?

She was like, “I will give it a go.” It wasn’t very expensive. That’s the other thing, back in 2003, I had no money. I had a single income, about $40,000 a year, a new baby born and $450,000 mortgage. I just paid $1,000 to get to an event for four days. That was about a week and a half wage from me at the time. She already saw me spend $1,000. I have to take her to an event that wasn’t even near as expensive to even talk her into it. She goes, “You’re not spending any more money on me.” After that event, she had some breakthrough. She started having a bigger vision for her life and our life. She’s like, “I can see where this is going.” Now she’s like, “You have to do this. You owed men what you’re doing because of the experiences you’ve had.” She’s now my number one fan.

Are you doing this on a massive scale? Are you helping people on a massive scale? Are you doing it one-on-one or are you doing 20 to 30 people a year? What level do you do this at?

I do group. We do have a group coaching program where there are a lot of online courses and things like that. However, I find that the best success I get at the moment is through one-on-one, those that want to take their life to the next level.

I could see that though because probably a lot of the conversations is very personal.

Many of my clients think they are personal, but I hear the exact same thing over and over again.

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I’m not a mill house either. I probably take between fifteen and twenty people a year on a one-on-one. I have group coaching too. We’re just talking about real estate deals and all the things that can come up and how to overcome them or how to improve. How long are people usually with you when they’re taking self-development help with you?

It starts along for three months but usually, that will last longer than that because as the journey progresses, new things come up. One of the challenges or one of the things with personal development, it’s not really a challenge, I’m sure you’ll agree with me. Every time you take your life to the next level, every time you level up, it doesn’t necessarily get easier. There are new challenges. You’re always creating new problems. You create better problems for your life. It’s the same with personal development. Every time you breakthrough, something you’re doing that’s sabotaging your life, you find somebody else that you’re doing that’s sabotaging the next level. It’s got to be consistent and ongoing.

I saw a poster. It was a lion walking right towards you, staring you in the eyes and it said, “If you’re comfortable, you’ve stopped growing.” At some point you sit down and go, “I’m done.” That’s different times for different people. You can say you’re done for a while. A lot of us sit down for six months or eight months and go, “No, I’m not done. This is boring. I’ve got to get on with it again.” Somebody liked that and calls, “I’ve got to walk on some more fire.”

That’s the thing, when you’re living a life with the passion that you have, when you’re living a life where you’re doing something that you genuinely love and you have that towards motivation because there’s something bigger than you. You’ll never get bored. They will get bored in their jobs because they’re not doing something that they love and it is a dead-end job.

A lot of people out there are like that. Either get a new job, move up or keep doing it and then find something to do after hours that challenges you and try to replace that. What advice do you give investors that are still working too much or too hard?

Get clear on what you want to do. The clearer you are on your vision, the more driven you’re going to be to work towards it. Many times, many of them don’t succeed because the passion and their drive towards it are not big enough. They don’t take massive enough action. You and I know that you’ve got to take massive action and for you to take massive action, you’ve got to want to take massive action because it’s not easy.

There’s a quote in the front of my book. When my wife read this, she looked at me and said, “For the first time, I finally understand this part of you.” I’m going to read it to you. It’s a quote from Michener and it says, “The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.”

There are a lot of things about what you said in that quote. One is to be successful, you have to take massive action. This can take fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day. If you hate what you’re doing or you’re not connected to it, you’ll never make it through the hours. If it seems like work and it’s only been four hours, you’ve got a long way to go in the day. What blessed me was that I found something that I was on fire about and it didn’t matter. You could tell me to go home and I didn’t want to. I want it to go and I’ve started talking about it many years ago and haven’t stopped since. I have a podcast now and we’re still talking about it. I talk about it every day from the time my eyes opened to the time it closes. I don’t know why and I don’t care. I’m just glad I found it. The point is you’ve got to find your passion and get something because the number of hours that you need to put in to be successful is a lot. If it seems like work, you’re not going to make it.

I’ve been out since 7:00 AM and I’m still going and I’ll be up again at 4:00 AM.

Is this work? I would tell my wife, “I’m going to go down a little bar.” She said, “Where had you been?” I said, “I’ve been at the bar.” She said, “You’ve been out just having fun.” I said, “No, I was working.” She said, “You’re not working at a bar.” I said, “I don’t know. I only talked to several millionaires down there and they’re interested in what I’m doing. Maybe they’re going to loan me some money.” Was I working or was I playing? I’m not really sure. What are some of the things that sabotage us along the way?

Self-Sabotage: You’re better off launching something imperfectly and making a difference than waiting for it to be perfect because you will never be perfect.

The biggest things that sabotage people in my opinion from what I have seen over the years and this has been from my own experience, every time I fail, I’ve found that I’ve been displaying three traits. After I got out of the crap that I was in and got out of the woods, I’d look back and I’m like, “That is why I did that.” One is I wasn’t accepting my dominance as a man. I wasn’t accepting who I was as a man and taking ownership of who I am, taking ownership of my situation, taking ownership of how I got myself to where I am and that I am responsible. Nobody else is responsible to get me out. Whenever I was failing, I was playing the blame game. I was looking at who was the one that screwed me over. Who was the one that got me fired? Who was the one that walked out on me? I didn’t look at what I did to get myself in that situation. Every single time, the moment I changed my perspective and looked internally and looked in the mirror, I said, “I did this. I have to fix this.”

Taking responsibility for everything in your life and everything about your life is the number one thing. It’s the first thing I did and I didn’t know that I was doing it, but I remember the conversation and look myself right in the mirror and said, “It all stops right here now.” There’s no blaming anybody else for anything, nothing, not one thing. I should have seen it coming or I’ll know better and I’ll see it coming next time, but it doesn’t matter what it is. What’s the second one? You said three.

The second one is accepting your dark side. A lot of people would think the dark side is a bad part of us, but if you read and look at what great athletes and great leaders in the world have done, they’ve always accepted that dark side, that burning desire to create something different. Every person that’s changed the world never had a realistic view of the world. We are taught in school, at work, in society and on social media to play small and be part of the crowd and not step up and take our life to the next level. To not follow the dream that you have that could be seen as a warped version of reality to the other people. It can be sometimes that dream that you have that is so different than everybody else is going to make the biggest difference in your life and take you to the next level.

I’m doing things and you’re doing things I never dreamed of several years ago.

If someone said to me a few years ago that I’d be on a podcast with someone on the other side of the globe, I’d be like, “No way in the world.” I’m out there selling pharmaceuticals.

I wrote three books. I know somewhere there are four English teachers rolling over in their graves.

That’s the other thing, this is not the third thing, but this is something else that I found that many people do, which is they want to get perfection. They want to get everything to be 100% right before they launch it. You’re better off launching it imperfectly and making a difference than waiting for it to be perfect because you will never be perfect.

I’ve got to tell you this story. I was at this convention and this lady runs up with my book and she’s very upset with me. I finally had to stop while I was talking to someone. I said, “I’m sorry, can I help you?” She said, “I can’t believe that you wrote this book. I found seven typos in your book.” She was so disgusted with me. She goes, “Why do you write a book if you can’t spell?” I said, “You ought to take solace. You too can buy 2,000 houses and not know how to spell.”

I’ve read so many books and I love to listen to audio while I’m reading. I listen to the audiobook while I’m reading it.

If you want to take the island, you've got to burn the boats. Share on X

That’s double saturation. I never thought of that.

I used to be a pharmaceutical rep. I was on the road a lot and I would always have podcasts, audiobooks, etc., playing the whole time. I discovered when I was listening to this particular book and I was like, “I want to learn every single word in this book.” I bought the book and then I sat there one night and I started like, “I want to try this. I want to listen to it and read it.” English is my third language. That’s the other thing. I came out here and I didn’t speak a word in English when I was ten years old. English has never been my strong point. I totally get where you’re coming from. When I started writing, I’m lucky that I’m married to an English teacher.

You better not read along with my book because I don’t read so good. I start to ad-lib as I get to the topics in the book. I started saying it in my own words. You would be reading my book going, “This guy went off the road here.”

That’s exactly the point I was getting into. Many of the books that I read and the author is on the Audible, they’re not the same because the author is talking differently. Because now that many years I’m in Australia and being married to an English teacher, I had to bring up my level of English. Now, I actually can see typos, I can see the mistakes and these are books by multimillionaires. People who have gone out there and have amazing empires. It all right to have some mistakes.

A guy said, “I’ve seen your book. There are a couple of mistakes in the book.” It’s the same thing. There’s not that many and that can be I was taking creative liberty. Some of them were debatable whether they’re misspelled or not. I chose to spell it that way for a reason. I said to the guy, “That’s not very nice to say in front of all these people. I don’t criticize your book in front of people.” He was really fast. He took the bait. He says, “I never wrote a book.” I said, “That’s right. You haven’t written a book, have you?”

That is something that is very important, which drives back to the second point. We live in a society and I don’t know whether you have this in America, but we have a term here in Australia called the tall poppy syndrome. Have you heard of that saying before?

No, I haven’t heard of it.

It’s Australian and I believe it’s a British term. What is the tall poppy syndrome? If a poppy grows above the rest, it gets chopped down. Whenever someone rises above the crowd, whenever someone gets a little bit ahead, they start getting criticized. They start getting hate. They start getting told they’re not good enough. “Who are you to write a book? Who are you to speak about personal development? Who are you to be flipping houses?” Whatever it is that you’re doing, having an online store, having a business online. Who are you to be doing that while the rest of us are out in the brickyard, we’re laboring or we’re in a 9 to 5 job in an office or whatever it is? You start getting criticized for dreaming big. If you don’t have that mental strength, you start doubting yourself. You start getting scared and then you get back to playing small again.

This is when it’s good to have a sounding board and have your mentors and have people like you in the corner saying, “No, this is typical, just stay there.” When I started this podcast, I thought I was going to get an audience like the one I have. They’re such a loyal, friendly and good audience to me. I never did. I decided to try it. The main thing, I was going to be myself and if you liked me, you liked me and if you didn’t, you can move on. I was going to see how many people maybe would like me. It turned out to be way more than I thought. It’s like the president we have right now. He doesn’t care if you like him or not. If you like him, he’ll be president. If you don’t like him, don’t go for him, he won’t be president because he’s got a lot of better things to do.

I’m at a boot camp for an American guy and he pretty much said that he had a vision or he had a theory a year before your conference. He said, “If I can get 50% of America to hate me, I can become president.” A year later, you got in your president.

Self-Sabotage: Affirmation without action is not going to work.

If you can get 50% of the people to hate you, it means the other 50% are in the other bucket. That’s good. Until we’re sixteen or seventeen, we’re around the same people all the time. Most influential people are our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our grandparents and our friends that we’ve been around for a long time. They have us pegged in a certain hole and they won’t let us out. Sometimes, I noticed this trend, a lot of people move towns, got separated from all that. That’s when they started becoming their own person when they didn’t have someone pushing them back into the ditch they were in. When you try to come out, they push you back in. It’s not necessarily the tall poppy syndrome, they weren’t criticized. It’s just they wouldn’t believe you. If I walked into the room on my first, second or third flip and said, “I need to borrow $50,000 to buy a house.” Everyone will say, “Who is going to give you $50,000?” Because they had seen me grow up and all my mistakes and all my bad traits and they knew everything. I wasn’t allowed in their eyes to become someone different. Talk to me about that.

That’s a very interesting point and that’s something I had to overcome when I first went to Tony Robbins event and I wanted to take my life to the next level. I took inventory of who’s in my life and I realized that I am where I am because of one network. One of my mentors says, “Your network is your net worth.” Who you hang around with is going to influence you. This is why it was so important for me to bring my wife onto that journey. I take my kids onto the same journey that I’m on, so they can be in the same environment. I had to change also the people I hang around with and who I’m getting advice from. I had to pay in the beginning and still now for the advice. I had to pay for the access. There’s nothing wrong with that because if you’re paying, you’re going to pay attention. The more you pay, the more attention you pay.

We’ve got a book that we’re going to give away here. It’s Man DeCoded Secrets BlackBook. Tell us a little bit about the book.

It says Man DeCoded Secrets BlackBook, which is the underground playbook that I want you to know about. In this book, I’ve dissected exactly the things I have done and what are the major areas of my life I had to work on to get the success that I want. I dissected down exactly what were the areas that I have discovered that I needed to focus on. By focusing on these areas, I was able to live a lot more life every time. Every time I want to take my life to the next level, I will start with the exact same four things and take each one of those parts of my life to the next level. By doing that, my whole life would go up to the next level.

I want you to go to 1000houses.com/improve and get a free copy of that book by Wassim Dabboussi and learn about those four things. I’ve got to digress. We still have the third trait. We’ve got the first one which accepted full responsibility for your life and everything in it. The second one was to accept your dark side and don’t be afraid to be unrealistic. There are people who want to tell you that that’s too much, too big or not going to happen. Don’t let them sway you. What’s number three?

Number three is deceit and lying. Many people lie to themselves about their reality. They lie to others about what is happening and they don’t accept the truth of who they are. This is a major wall. It’s a major hurdle to growing as a person. We live in a society where we are taught from young children that it’s okay to have a white lie. It’s okay to bend the truth. It’s okay to stretch discretion to the truth, to bend the rules a little bit. What I propose is to be congruent and be truthful to yourself internally and externally so that your values are congruent and therefore you no longer have to hide anything about your life.

One thing I love about being a podcast host is I get to talk to a lot of very interesting people. I start to see common themes. I was talking to a self-improvement person and he said that he had the honor and the pleasure of meeting the maharaja and they became friends. One of the biggest impacts that the maharaja had on him was the maharaja asked what his affirmations were and he said the affirmations. The maharaja said, “That’s great. Are you living them? Are they you?” He had to go back and go through his affirmations and he figured out that he was hiding behind the lie of positive thinking. He was thinking positive but it wasn’t true. He wasn’t living those affirmations. They were not him and he had these affirmations. I think that’s to the point of what you said. You can’t lie to yourself. There’s false enthusiasm and there’s enthusiasm. They can’t have a false enthusiasm like, “I’m going to go climb the mountain. No, not really, but I’m going to keep saying it because I’ve heard that if I keep saying it, it will happen.” We can’t just keep saying it and not take actions. The words alone won’t let you. If you’re not doing something to get there, then either change your aspiration or start applying it to yourself.

The reason why this is so important is because if you’re lying to yourself, you lie to everybody else around you. If you can’t be truthful internally, then how can you be truthful externally? How could you be trusted in the world? You have to keep your promises to yourself.

These are three of the traits where people are sabotaging themselves. They’re not accepting full responsibility. They’re not accepting their dark side, which the dark side is a tricky word. If you’ve got dreams bigger than other people or ambitions bigger than other people and people don’t want to accept it, don’t worry about that. The third one was don’t lie to yourself. Is it really what you want? Is it what you’re doing? Are you taking action?

Affirmations are great. I was 100 kilos overweight and I’m not a very tall guy. I use affirmations, but affirmations on their own without action is not going to work. I was always telling myself that I will lose weight, but I had to go to the gym also to follow it.

I’m in this process in my own life right now where I can stand to lose about 40 pounds. I’m not very tall either. I’m finding it very difficult to change my diet, although I know there are healthy things out there that I like to eat. You have to go get in the habit of providing that stuff and having it ready in your house because I don’t know, sometimes I wait until I’m starving to death before I think about eating and then it’s too late. I don’t have the willpower anymore. Go to 1000houses.com/improve. Get your free copy of Man DeCoded Secrets BlackBook and learn how to improve yourself. If you’ve never been to an improvement class or had an improvement coach, it’s quite an experience. I don’t see how it can hurt you if you’ve got even anyone who’s sincerely interested in helping you. Even a good friend that knows what they’re doing, it can work. It pays to go to professionals sometimes. A lot of times in life, you get what you pay for. You don’t get what you don’t pay for. My life changed dramatically when I started getting coaches and mentors. I hope that yours does too. Anything you want to say to people maybe before we wrap it up?

I totally agree with you in terms of getting coaches and mentors to take your life to the next level. The importance of that is two things for me. One, they have experience in living life. They know what you need to do to get to where you want to get. The other thing also is having a friend to speak to is great, but sometimes there is that emotional bias. A coach and a mentor are going to hold you accountable. He’s going to make you be truthful to yourself and take accountability and go after the dreams that you want. A friend is going to say, “You tried, it didn’t work. The next time we will do something better.” A coach is not going to let you do that. Every elite athlete has a coach and they don’t learn and fail.

I’m thinking about some of my football coaches, “That wasn’t good enough. Get back there and do it again. Now you’re getting better.” Did you play sports?

I played basketball as a child and then at the age of about sixteen, I went to an all-boys high school and there was a girls’ high school next door. I had to make a choice of either hanging out with the girls at lunch or play basketball. Somewhat basketball stopped right then and there.

We’re talking to Wassim Dabboussi. Be sure to check out his book at 1000houses.com/improve and get a free copy.

I’ll offer your clients a free fifteen-minute consultation with me.

This man is very affordable. He’s got a $37 masterclass. Tell us a little bit about the masterclass.

In the masterclass, I dive deeper into these three vicious traits. I go into detail of how they stopped me and other people that are saying exactly what it feels like, to identify when you are displaying these traits. Each and every one of them is what I go into detail of how to identify and how to get out of it. Because sometimes when you’re in the crap or when you’re saying you look out the train and not seeing the forest, sometimes you don’t know how to get out. That’s where I’ve been every single time. I needed to learn and identify how to get out of where I am, get out of my head and be able to stop being my biggest enemy.

You have an online monthly coaching program. It’s only $197 a month. I’m mentioning prices here and I didn’t even ask if I could or should. Let me preface it with this. These are the prices now. This conversation will be archived for I don’t know how many months or years. The man has the right to change his prices or improve his programs. Get a masterclass for $37. Get an online coaching program for $197 a month. It’s a three months commitment, but most people would probably go on past that. It’s a month to month thing. Am I right on this?

Yes, it’s month to month after that.

Try it out. It can’t hurt anything and you may find someone that you’re still talking to two or three years later. That’s what happened to me with some of my coaches I signed on temporarily. When we connected and things helped, I still have relationships with them.

You’ll meet so many people who are on the same level. Going back to that “Your network is your net worth,” once you start connecting with people on the same wavelength, you’re going to start elevating your life.

I’d like to thank you for stopping by to get Wassim Dabboussi and figuring out maybe a path to make some improvements. I also want to thank my sponsors over TaxFreeFuture.com. If you don’t have a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement plan, please go to TaxFreeFuture.com because you will not believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. Have a good a week, Wassim and we’ll be talking to you soon.