“Why Achieving More Won’t Bring You More Love” | (#053) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome back to the Masculine Psychology podcast. I’m David Tian, your host.

For the past two episodes, we’ve been looking at the lie of self-improvement and the tragedy of the achiever that ordering your life around the belief that if you could just become attractive enough or rich enough or high-status enough, or whatever achiever goal enough, then, then you will become happy finally and worthy, and worthy of love and all the good stuff in life, the good life. This is a lie that has been passed down to you by insecure parents or society or teachers that did not feel enough themselves, so they passed down their own limiting beliefs, their own toxic beliefs to their children. [01:05.5]

This is especially the case if you have immigrant parents like I did and my Asian-Canadian and Asian-American friends did, parents who immigrated to a country at a time when there was no internet, when there was no email and didn’t see their families for several years in many cases, and they brought all of their belongings with their kids in tow into a place where that was more technologically advanced, economically advanced, having to learn a whole new language and adapt to a whole new culture, and likely their own visas to stay in that country were pegged to a particular type of job so that they were stuck in that particular profession in order to stay in that country, and it was very little mobility for them. Plus, you add on all of the racism that was even more rampant at the time, so it was just natural that they would want their kids to have the stability that they didn’t have, to have the acceptance of society that they had to fight for. [02:05.2]

All of these limiting beliefs, all of these beliefs that were adaptations to their time and their situation, but now no longer serve you in your context, and, in fact, wasn’t even true for your parents either, but because they were in survival mode, they came up with beliefs that helped them to survive, but were, in fact, false beliefs.

If you believe that being more attractive or being richer or of higher status somehow makes you more worthy of love or connection, then you are believing a lie, a false belief, and one of the greatest tragedies is to spend your whole life working really, really hard, sacrificing so much in order to achieve that elusive feeling of finally being enough through your achievement, and only then discovering that it all is meaningless and empty because it doesn’t bring love or connection or fulfillment, or even happiness or worthiness. [03:06.8]

Even more tragically, for most people, they don’t even achieve those big goals that they think will finally bring them happiness, even though they work so hard for it and sacrifice so much, and they work as hard as they can and then they don’t get there or they burn out and then they beat themselves up for it, so they don’t even get to discover the truth the hard way. They die believing that if they had just worked a little harder, that they would’ve finally been happy that they would’ve finally been good enough, but that because they didn’t work hard enough or they weren’t smart enough or attractive enough, they aren’t enough, that they aren’t worthy just in who they are, of love, of connection. [03:51.2]

Two episodes ago, I went into more detail about why the intermediate goals of making more money or being more attractive, or of getting higher status or whatever the achievement goal is, that that’s just an intermediate goal, that the thing that we’re all really after aren’t those pieces of paper, the money itself, but what we hope that intermediate goal will give us, which is that these feelings, feelings of being enough, of unconditional love, of connection, of being worthy and so on, of happiness.

What this psychology research tells us and what wisdom traditions around the world have been saying for thousands of years is that these feelings that are actually the final goals, the goals behind the intermediate goals, the goals that we’re really hoping will happen as a result of getting whatever the achievement is, the real goals, the actual goals of love, fulfillment, happiness, worthiness, and those feelings, that those are accessible to us directly, that, in fact, if we try to get them through this intermediary of achievement, not only will we burn out and sacrifice a lot and have to work really hard for it, but we still won’t even get it. It will still elude us. [05:11.4]

The happiness will still elude us. Love cannot be earned. These other feelings, the fulfillment and so forth, won’t come through these achievements. If you didn’t have them before the achievements, you’re not going to have them after and, in fact, all of those feelings of love, fulfillment, connection, happiness, worthiness, being enough, being significant, all of those are available to us right now.

Right away, with just a shift in your perspective, you can get them right now, and as a result, you can save yourself the tragedy of sacrificing and working really hard at something, spinning your wheels at something out of the motivation to get these goals that won’t fulfill you, that won’t make you happy.

You can save yourself all of that trouble. You can save yourself all that wasted time and energy and effort, and just learn how to meet your needs yourself for happiness, for fulfillment, for unconditional love, for connection, for worthiness, and a sense of significance. [06:13.7]

You can meet all of those human needs yourself, and if you want any of those emotional goods on a consistent basis as your default state, you’ll have to meet them yourself. You’ll have to meet them in a way that is within your control that you can experience frequently, and that’s actually available to all of us without having to do all of the self-improvement stuff.

Now, I’m signaling out the self-help industry because they’re actually a big contributor to these beliefs and they’re an easy target in that sense, but it’s also just baked into our culture, the achiever cultures, these workaholic cultures, that if you work hard enough, then you’ll make enough money to finally be happy. [06:57.8]

The big lie in self-development for attraction and for attraction, in general, is that if you just improve yourself enough, then you’ll be worthy of women being attracted to you and giving you the sense of significance and unconditional love, but these are all empty promises. These are lies. These are false beliefs. You’re not going to get in any kind of consistent lasting way. The feelings of connection of fulfillment, of happiness, of worthiness, and especially not of unconditional love. You’re not going to get those through achievement or self-improvement.

If what you want to experience, for instance, is love, then just love. These goals, these greater goods, won’t come through these intermediaries, these false intermediaries. That’s the great lie of modern society. It’s not just the lie of self-help, which is a product of modernity. Okay, so if you can get these goals, these greater goods, directly, if what you want is unconditional love, you can just give unconditional love. Just unconditionally love and you’ll experience unconditional love. [08:09.0]

That and many other things were the purpose of diving into the dog story in the last episode, the dog story as a kind of allegory to illustrate these profound but abstract truths and putting them into a relatable story, and those who have years to hear, let them hear, quoting the Bible there.

The dog story illustrates how we turn to our vulnerable selves, our vulnerable parts of us that are holding the greatest need for love, the greatest needs for love, connection, joy, happiness, significance, worthiness, and so on, and how we can, over time as we enter more into or access more of our higher selves, that we can give the parts of ourselves that are most desperate for love, connection, joy, happiness, and worthiness. We can meet those needs directly ourselves through our higher selves, and the dog story is a great way to illustrate it. If you haven’t listened to that episode, once you’re done with this, make sure you go back and listen to the previous episode. [09:14.6]

Okay, in this episode, I’m going to expand on all of these themes and get into three points and the third point is the most important, so I’m going to go through the first two pretty quickly.

The first of these three is the tragedy of the significance-driven achiever and I already began explaining this point, right from minute one of this episode, but just circling back to kind of recap quickly, the tragedy of the significance driven achiever is that they spend so much time and effort in so many years of their lives doing work that they don’t really enjoy, not that much, because they’re actually fighting the fear that if they ever relaxed, they would just be lazy. They would just be lazy bums, resting and not getting anything done. [10:00.2]

If they don’t get anything done, if they don’t succeed, then they’ll become, quote-unquote, “failures”, and being a, quote-unquote, “failure” is as good as dying because being a failure means you’re not worthy of love, and that was a message conveyed to them and they picked up unconsciously, and then, later, unconsciously, often from their insecure parents who also were brainwashed into this belief and passed it down.

It’s a belief that is born out of deep insecurity that they’re not enough for love, but any kind of philosophical exploration of it, just putting out counter examples like my nephew who is autistic, and before we discovered that he was a savant, he was non-verbal and not very high-functioning, and he was a big guy. Now he’s 6’5” and still a teenager, and he was hard to manage in that way when he starts to get very flustered and starts to make those sounds and movements that scare security officers at the airport, for instance, and none of the fact that he later on turned out to be a brilliant savant, none of that changed how we felt about him that he was worthy of love and of connection, and of our presence, our loving presence, right from the moment he was born. [11:18.4]

There are so many easy counterexamples and arguments to push the said achiever into this debating corner where he has to admit and concede that this old worldview that was passed down to him through from his father or mother or whatever greater community in his toxic society is akin to Hitler’s Nazis or the world of Sparta 300 where any child born with some sort of defect gets thrown off a cliff. Not only is that child not worthy of love or connection, it’s not even worthy of life, and that’s the tragic worldview that these significance-driven achievers have imbibed. [11:57.0]

They don’t even stop to ask why they’re working so hard for this achievement, and if they did, they would discover that it’s not just about the paper money or any of that. Those are just ways of getting the thing that they really want, the greater good of love and connection, and of some, in many cases, attention from their parents, the parental figures early on, and they were taught this, brainwashed into this value system, this hierarchy of values, and then adapted through a hierarchy of needs in their minds where they decided early on that the way to love is through significance and the way through to significance is through achievement.

But then it was so hard to achieve at that level that they’ve set for themselves, and they spent all of their time and effort to just focus on that, getting that first thing, achievement, that they forgot that the whole point of that was to get love or connection or the attention of the one that they want love from. They forgot about that and then they worked really, really hard, and sometimes they actually get the goals. They make the millions or the billions, in some cases, and then they wonder, Why do I still feel empty? [13:08.0]

Why did you think you wouldn’t? Because they thought the reason is, because when they were children, they thought, they bought into the lie, the brainwashing that if they did enough achievement, then they would naturally get the fulfillment to the love, the connection that was promised them or that they believed that they learned to believe this is the decision, the interpretation they gave of what happened of the treatment that they got, or the behavior of their parents or their community. Then those are the conclusions they drew that they just forgot the greater good that what they were really aiming for was love, unconditional love. 

I’ll meet these significance-driven achievers in their thirties, forties, sometimes in their sixties, having now spent a great portion of their lives trying to achieve in a kind of haunted way, where they try to convince themselves that they really enjoy the work, and they usually do—they have to have some level of enjoyment to become good at it—but they definitely wouldn’t do that job or whatever they’re spending their career on if they weren’t paid, and almost all of them are burnt out. [14:13.7]

There are parts of themselves that are saying, We don’t have to do this in order to be worthy of love, it just doesn’t make sense, and that’s how they contact me, but then the parts of them that have been dominant for most of their lives have bought into the lie and don’t know any other way. They became that way, achievers, because they thought it was necessary, not because they enjoyed it, and they don’t know any other way to get that love and that connection, and that sense of significance and worthiness other than this kind of driven, haunted, tortured achievement, being like they’re on a treadmill that won’t stop, but that they just need to become stronger so they can just keep up and not rest, because they can’t rest, because if you ever rest, you can be a failure, and being a failure, you might as well kill yourself, and that was the message that they got that has haunted them. As a result, that can sustain you for achievement. [15:09.5]

I mean, if you’re haunted by this thought, this fear that, if you fail, you’re going to die, then, of course, you’re going to work really, really hard to not fail, and that will mean that you’re going to pull off the all-nighters like we did through university and so on to get the A’s and then to get the job that they think will finally be enough.

But then, when they get the job, it’s never enough because they’re at the bottom of the totem pole and now they’re desperate, because they sense that they can’t keep this up because they’re actually exhausted, and all along the way, despite how much they work, despite how much they put into it, despite how much self-improvement work they might have done or might be doing with their two-hour morning routines and so forth that yet love, connection, this feeling of intrinsic worthiness that you being you is enough for love, that all of that still eludes them, no matter how much they run on that treadmill that never stops.

So, what do you do instead, David? [16:06.2]

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Okay, so we’re on Point 2 now and I’m going to go through this real quick because I’ve covered this in other episodes. The thing to do is what I call the therapeutic process and this includes inner-child work, grief work, building relationships with your inner parts and discovering. [17:03.0]

You have to first find them, discover what they are, including your archetypes, and build relationships with them. That means building consistency of visiting with them, of understanding how they see their jobs or roles in your internal system, of their fears, of how they got to be this way, how they came to this job in the first place, and where they happened generally to be located in your body, or in, on or around your body, and checking in with them, building a relationship, not just identifying them one time. That doesn’t actually build a relationship. Building a relationship requires time and contact, so building this relationship with the parts.

Then unburdening the more vulnerable parts that are holding the greatest pain, and then the natural unburdening of the parts that were protecting those vulnerable parts, and then integrating all the parts as they shift through their healing and growth and so forth. [17:57.4]

This is a process. You might call it work. Those are the terms that therapists use. I used to use it. I still might, depending on your view of work, whether you want more work or not, but it’s not like work in the sense of there isn’t a whole checklist of things that you need to do. It’s simply a perspective, a shift of turning inward and it’s like a practice of just being with yourself, and it’s about as much work as breathing.

All of the things that you are doing now is work, the repression, the running on the treadmill to try to achieve, that’s work. All of the stuff that you’re doing to not do the therapeutic process, which is natural—it’s a natural process, once you access these parts—you’re naturally going to want to go to them and build a relationship with them, because that is really enjoyable and it feels really good, and you don’t need to try to do these things. [18:52.1]

You need to try to stop doing the things that you were doing before that kept getting in the way, that process of unlearning the coping mechanisms and strategies that you developed early on, and it wasn’t your fault because it was an adaptation to the conditions back then, and the false belief swirling around that you by osmosis or even maybe consciously adopted through your parents or your community, that it’s a process of letting go of that, because these are obstacles to the enjoyable work of connecting with yourself, and that’s the therapeutic process, the process of connecting with yourself. 

That leads into the third point that I want to make. I’ve talked a lot about the therapeutic process. If you want to learn more, I have many courses that walk you through the therapeutic process. You can get access to all of those courses through the “Platinum Partnership”, which is the all-access pass.

But I want to get to the third point because this is well-addressed, the greatest fear that achievers have about embracing the therapeutic process, which is this fear of laziness, because if they let go of what they know, which is to achieve, the first fear that’ll pop up is “Then I’ll be a lazy bum and then I’ll be a failure, and then I won’t be worthy of anything,” including love, let alone of life even, for some achievers. [20:10.6]

Now I want to describe briefly what work is like when you’re in the therapeutic process, what making a living is like, the things that achievers used to do with the kind of tortured quality and a quality of not being able to rest to this kind of background anxiety, what’s it like to make a living when you are loving your inner child.

I’ve addressed this through quite a few videos and other man-up episodes, podcast episodes, and so forth, but just in case it’s not clear, what you will be free to do is now discover what you are intrinsically motivated to do, and in this day and age, this modern, connected internet world, you can make a living doing almost anything if you’re good at it, and if you really enjoy it, if you love it, you’ll do it a lot because it feels so good to do it, because you enjoy it. You like doing it so much. [21:06.5]

If you do it a lot, you’re going to become good at it, and then you’ll just need some tweaking, like finding a mentor who is five, 10, 20 years ahead of you, or getting into the right community of other people who enjoy doing it and are as good as you and are trying to get better, and so you all, in this community, support and challenge each other.

Let me address that fear directly for the achiever that they will just be lazy and do nothing and, therefore, will make no money, and then be out in the street and be a bum and no one would like them, no one will love them, and so forth, right? They’ll be, quote-unquote, “failures”, and because of that, they will be unworthy of love, so addressing that directly—the reason you are so afraid of being lazy is because you’re burnt out, as a result. What your parts are telling you that are just wanting to rest is that you’re burnt out and you need to rest. [21:57.8]

One important thing that will happen as you connect with yourself, these various parts of you, is you’ll get that message that you’re burnt out and one great thing to do is to consider what you would do for fun, for enjoyment, that you really want to do that isn’t for any achievement. It’s not for business. It’s not for trying to improve yourself or any of that, but just because you are worth it and you like it, and you’ll begin to do these things.

One of those things might be sleep and one of those things might be traveling and not bringing any devices along or whatever, just unplugging and just decompressing, and maybe you’ll just stare into space for a while or just lie on the beach for a while, and that’s because that’s what you need because you are burnt out.

But, after a while, that will get boring, so the big promise to the achievers, and you might have already experienced this as an achiever if you did manage to schedule in some vacation time where you did nothing at all, is that you got pretty bored after a while, and that’s a good thing. That’s normal, because the natural human tendency is to explore. [23:02.5]

You can see that with young children. They don’t want to sleep. They don’t want to rest. Their natural state is to explore. It’s to run around and have fun and to play. That’s the natural state of things and to build things with Legos and so on, right? To build imaginary worlds and so on. It’s natural for us humans to create and explore and be creative, and we might have forgotten that. You might have forgotten that, because as a significance-driven achiever, you forced yourself into one lane or beating yourself up like you’re your own workhorse for too long that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to play in creativity and so forth.

But that’s a natural human tendency. That’s in all of us. That’s natural for humans to have, so don’t worry, because you’re burnt out. Once you decompress enough and that might be a week, it might even be a month—for me, when I discovered this, I decompressed for six months, depending on how you counted it. It was at least six months of pretty much doing nothing except the bare minimum to fulfill my client obligations and I only did things that I wanted to do. I wasn’t going to do them, unless I wanted to do them. [24:10.5]

You could count maybe 18 months, because, increasingly, I said yes to more obligations, but a big part of my life was still just this kind of decompressing. For some people, it could just be a week. It could be months. It could be years. But, at some point, once you have recovered, recovery is super important, and I can use that in a kind of fitness sense. You’ve got to recover and you are overloaded. You have overloaded your system and you’re not growing. In fact, you are in danger of harming yourself. You’re in danger of having a serious injury, psychologically, emotionally, through mental health. Once you can decompress and recover, then you’ll be primed. You’ll naturally look for and naturally move into areas of your life that you enjoy. [24:58.4]

That’s actually how I got into practicing and training and psychotherapy. It was just following my natural inclinations for what I wanted to do, and then I now am spending a lot of my time working with clients in psychotherapy out of fun. It’s actually not a good business model for me and it’s kind of going backwards in terms of my business, but it’s something I really enjoy for the time being.

I’ve now realized that I’ve taken on too many clients for parts of me that would rather do other things and have other priorities, like writing, for instance, so I’ve negotiated with these parts and we’re going to scale back. I mean, I’m going to be scaling back my client practice to about half of the current client load I have now, just as a word of warning for those on waiting lists and so forth. But that comes from a practice of going inside, of attuning to my parts and what their conflicting motivations might be, what some of them want to do and some others want to do other things, and being able to lead them, attend to them, listen to them, and kind of from a place of leadership, negotiate with them to make them all as happy as they can be. [26:09.3]

This is something that happens naturally in resolving inner conflicts and polarizations and so on. It happens naturally when you’ve gone through the therapeutic process so that when you’re in the therapeutic process far enough, you get a handle of this intuitively because you have more and more access to your higher self. 

This includes tuning in what would actually make your heart sing, so to speak, your place of bliss, that thing that the world currently values enough to pay you, that you’re good at, that you enjoy and that you find meaningful beyond just pure pleasure, but that brings you deeper meaning because, in some way, it contributes value to the world or makes the world a better place in some way, in some way that’s meaningful to you. [26:58.0]

When you kind of draw a Venn diagram of those four things, and the thing in the middle, that place in the middle that overlaps these four, that will become clearer and clearer to you the more you go through the therapeutic process. This kind of purpose, so to speak, of your life will become clear and clearer, the more you can tune into yourself instead of beating yourself up in a kind of tortured way where you can’t get off the treadmill, but you feel like you just have to get stronger to run this treadmill longer.

The image I have in my mind is actually from the first scene or the opening or one of the opening scenes of Conan the Barbarian where I remember watching this as a young kid. Arnold Schwarzenegger starts off as a little child. He’s, whatever, 10 years old, pushing this wheel. Yeah, I guess the horde has this big wheel that grinds wheat or something and all of his fellow prisoners or villagers eventually die off, except Arnold now is whatever, 20 years later, I don’t know, whatever years later, is now Arnold Schwarzenegger alone pushing this wheel, and now, although he’s stronger, he’s still a slave. [28:04.0]

I think that’s this sort of fantasy ideal, in the back of their minds, that achievers have that it’s not about making their lives better, but it’s about them becoming stronger so that they can be better slaves to run the treadmill. They’re like lab rats, hoping that they could just become stronger because these freaking scientists keep making them run this goddamn treadmill, instead of looking at the bigger conditions of their lives and how they can break out of those. They don’t have to run on a freaking treadmill anymore, but they can spend their time doing something that they’d love to do, even if they weren’t paid because they’d love to do it.

But they won’t discover that until you go through this period of shift, of transformation, of letting go of the slave trade that you’ve accepted as a result of these limiting beliefs and these lies from self-improvement, and these lies from your upbringing and your community or whatnot, these toxic lies about how you have to be an achiever in order to earn significance, which is required to earn love, but you’ve forgotten that what you’re really after is being enough for love. Then you lose yourself in the pursuit of the paper money or something, thinking or believing the lie that that will actually make you happy, and, obviously, it won’t. [29:12.5]

But many people won’t even discover that. They will die in the pursuit of it, die on the treadmill, not actually having won the game of money, and only then getting the pleasure or the benefit of discovering that it doesn’t satisfy in any meaningful sense. I mean, it certainly doesn’t bring you unconditional love.

To recap the three points in this episode, I went over the tragedy of the significance-driven achiever and that what he’s really after is love, being enough for love, but he’s forgotten that. Then I went over the therapeutic process and that’s the way to actually go and experience all of these greater goods directly, including unconditional love. If you want unconditional love, just love unconditionally, and I know many people can’t do that because of their fears. They can’t even give themselves unconditional love, not in any real sense, because of their own fear that if they do, they’ll be lazy. [30:06.5]

That goes into the third point that, when you discover the thing you can enter into flow in consistently, that you’ll automatically have or you’ll discover the thing that you already have intrinsic motivation to do that you do, even if you weren’t paid, and it just takes some tweaking to discover a way to become really good at that so you can get paid, where you can monetize it in some way, and in this modern world, we’re blessed with the internet and all of the newfangled ways of making money. Complete confidence that you’ll be able to monetize it.

Those are the three points. Now, that third point, just as I was saying, that it does require creativity. That creativity gets blocked in people who have been achievers for a long time. Believe it or not, being an achiever often means you’re plugging away by dint of hard work and effort, and hard work and effort often forces out creativity. Creativity happens when you are in a relaxed state and that creativity is available to you when you go through the therapeutic process, but it’s often elusive before you do that because creativity thrives in a state of play. But, for achievers, work doesn’t feel like play. [31:14.2]

Okay, just as a story to illustrate, one of my clients, Jason, originally started with me through in-person coaching for getting dating results and this was the time when I was transitioning through teaching life coaching into psychotherapy. What Jason really wanted to do was not what he was actually doing. He was working in a tech field, but his passion was a completely other thing and it was in the culinary world, and he didn’t have any support around exploring his passions in the culinary world and, instead, kept going at this tech thing until the tech thing fell apart and he was forced to either apply for a job somewhere else. [31:56.8]

During this time he was able to give it a try and he was old enough that he had enough separation from his parents and their expectations and all that, so he gave it a try, and it turns out, his culinary skills were incredible and his career just took off and he’s done amazingly well just following his passion.

As a result of following his passion of spending his time doing something that he loved, that he would do for very little money just because he loved it and the pay was the activity itself and the kind of creativity that it afforded him that he was so happy in that environment and doing what he was doing, and he believed that he was also meaningful, that when he was meeting women, it was a lot easier because he was coming from a place of “I’m already happy and fulfilled in my own life. I don’t need.” He’s not coming from a place of neediness, whereas before, even though he was making a lot of money in the tech world, he wasn’t actually happy and he was looking for a woman to bring the passion into his life, to bring the color into his life, because he wasn’t happy himself with his life, and as a result, he was actually really needy. [33:06.5]

But now that he had discovered intrinsic enjoyment from the things he does on a day-to-day basis and getting paid for it, he was so much more fulfilled and happy with his life that he was a lot more naturally attractive, therefore, because he wasn’t needy. That was available to Jason because he went through where he got off the treadmill of the significance-driven achiever, the slave treadmill, the lab-rat treadmill, and, instead, made room for the therapeutic process, and as a result, was able to tap into that, that space of creativity and wonder, and discovering what he is intrinsically motivated to do and how he could tweak it to also become wildly successful. [33:50.0]

In case you think, “I can’t do this therapeutic process. I can’t accept myself. I have to keep beating myself up. I have to keep torturing myself to keep running this treadmill of significance and achievement. Otherwise, I will be a failure,” if that’s you, if you’re worried about being lazy, if you ever stop this haunted existence of the achiever, if that’s you, then I highly recommend you begin the therapeutic process, because if you just dive into it, as you go through it, it will start to help you let go of the armor of the achiever, the achiever’s armor, the armor of the intellect, of the excuses, of the fears, of the insecurities.

You can begin the therapeutic process with a good therapist. Just a note that, I would say, more than half of the therapists that are working or advertising out there aren’t good that I would recommend, so a word of warning there. Not all therapists are the same. You can’t just interchange therapists. Make sure, if you’re going to find a therapist, to take your time to find a good one. Then, since you’re only doing probably an hour a week, expect that it will take a long time because you’ve got to commit to the long haul for that type of process. A good therapist can really accelerate that, but just in terms of an hour a week, you’re still looking at a long-term months-long, years-long process for the average person. [35:12.0]

Now, depending on where you’re starting out from, it could take several years of kind of weekly therapy. I recommend, if you’re going that route, that you look up a good therapist in the IFS Therapy Directory. You can also do the therapeutic process through my recorded courses and that’s the reason I made them and I cover all these different facets. They’re not limited to just IFS therapy, of course. In fact, most of the modalities in the recorded courses are drawing from plenty of other and different, varied approaches that I have found to work well and you get exposure to all of them. The best way to get access to all of them is the “Platinum Partnership”. If that’s something that interests you, check out the link in the description of this podcast. [36:00.0]

Okay, thank you so much for listening. If you like this, hit like on wherever you’re watching or listening to this and leave a comment. I’d love to get your feedback. Also, if this helped you in any way, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it as well, and thank you so much for listening and following. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out.

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