Hello and welcome to today's episode. We're on number 31. And I just want to remind you guys, my name is Andrew, I'm a Life Coach. I don't know if you've listened to other podcast episodes, but if this is your first one, welcome. And this whole podcast is designed to help you understand nicotine addiction.

And I'm just going to start there. Most people won't call it an addiction, but it is an addictive chemical substance. So it's an addiction, right? And I want to tell you this, this podcast isn't designed to like scare you or make you hate vaping or any of that shit that comes along with a lot of the anti vaping, all that kind of garbage.

I'm not even anti vape, to be honest with you guys. The reason I do this work is because I think that if you learn how to quit vaping by using the tools that I teach as a life coach, your life's going to get a whole lot better on a lot of different dimensions. It isn't really just about the vaping. So I just want to start there.

I don't think you're a bad person. If you vape, I don't think there's anything wrong with you for getting into nicotine addiction. And we're going to deal with it with love with ourselves. And we're not going to deal with it at all. If you want to quit with hatred of yourself or shame or using willpower, this is not the right podcast for you.

If you want to learn how to love yourself and then quit because you love yourself, then this is exactly where you're supposed to be. So I do want to say this right before I get into the episode today. I have a quit vaping course. It is 97. It's a one time payment. I've gone all over the world with the pricing on it and all this stuff.

And I've decided, you know what? If this course helps you quit vaping forever, then it's absolutely positively worth 97. And I also want to say this, I really want to make sure this works for everyone. If it doesn't, and you take the course and you're not happy, please reach out to me and I want to make it right.

And by make it right, I want to find out where there's blind spots, where I can do better, where I can help you. And I'm even willing to get on the phone with you and do coaching. If that's what has to be done in order to help you quit. Um, so like, really, I want to do that. That's something I really do want to do.

I don't know how long this, this offer is going to last with me being able to be available time wise to include into that, um, 97. But right now I'm offering it and it's July of 2023. So let's do it. Today's episode is on shame. And this is a really good episode. So as you guys know, or maybe you don't, I have a four year degree in psychology and I've studied a lot of psychology independently of my four year degree.

I love it. It's just so cool to me. And I've studied a lot of life coaching tools and you know, life coaching in general, the tools are pretty much psychology based. There's some, some less scientific methods in life coaching. For instance, like spirituality, law of attraction, that doesn't really have a scientific basis yet, but I do want to offer that a lot of the things in life coaching that people have been teaching for a long time, their science starting to catch up with it.

So like a lot of the law of attraction stuff. You can really start to look at and prove with the, um, the quantum realm, which is pretty cool. And I'm not going to get too into that today, but long story short, one of the, one of the most fundamental things you learn when you start studying psychology is called behaviorism.

And pretty much what behaviorism is you use positive and negative reinforcements, and you can use this with dogs or children. Pretty much. We see this as like a very common example. So with a kid, if you touch a hot stove, it hurts. You won't do it again, right? Negative reinforcement. Don't do that again.

And the negative reinforcement there is pain and with like rewarding, right? So if a kid does something good, you reward them. Here's a piece of candy, nice job, give up the good work. And that reminds them in the future, if I do this again, I get rewarded. And it's a very simple mechanism with dopamine, right?

Whatever thing brings dopamine positive. I want more of that now. This is the way that your brain works. And this is the fundamental things I teach. And when it comes to understanding your behavior and changing it, this is like really all you need to know is like your emotions guide your action. If I have a negative emotion, it's going to deter me from doing things like that.

Again, if I have a positive emotion, it's going to encourage me to do things like that again. Right. And that's. pretty much it. I mean, you really don't have to get more into psychology to change your behavior and understand that. So when it comes to quitting anything or changing any behavior, if you are using negative reinforcement, when I'm, when I'm saying negative reinforcement, I'm saying like, things like shame, guilt.

Um, self loathing, pitying yourself, that's not going to work very well. And pretty much anybody agrees in the psychology world that positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement. And the example that I like to use is like, think of it like a, a nation. Think of yourself being like a country or an organized group of people.

Who is a better leader and who gets more influence, the person who rules by force and like dictator who scares people or the person who leads by influence, who encourages people to believe in them? Well, obviously the person who leads by influence is going to have the longevity to actually be a successful leader and overall they're going to have a lot more influence and power and control than anybody who tries to force people with negative reinforcement into line.

And you can see this, by the way, in any like any government system and any with any powerful leader, the reason that people are powerful when they become leaders isn't because force force doesn't last very long, it just doesn't work. Power rule by power just doesn't work, but rule by equality and by caring and love and like positive emotion and inspiration that works really well.

So, so many people, when they try to quit, they use negative reinforcement themselves. And I've talked to people, a lot of people who are like, they're, you know, I'm. Even people who have taken my course or they're in the middle of it, I'm talking about how it's going and everything. And they said, well, it's just hard to quit.

And they have all these thoughts like, Oh, I'm just guilty about doing it. And I should have never done it. And they're there. What they're doing is beating themselves up into wanting to quit. So I want you to think of it like this. You're shaming yourself. into taking care of yourself. Does that work very well?

Like, have you ever been able to shame someone else into doing what you wanted to? And if they do, do they actually do it, and they do it forever? No, they don't, right? They like, are resentful towards you? Like, think about it like a kid, right? Hey, you have to do your laundry, or you're gonna get punished. So what happens?

They do it, they resentfully do it, they half ass do it, and then they hate you for it. It doesn't work very well. So what's the actual cure? It's like, well, let's find a way to make you want to do the laundry because it's, it's like positive for your life. It's going to have a good outcome. So in effect, what we're doing is not shaming ourself into a new behavior.

That doesn't work. And when you try to do that, what ends up happening is you use willpower, and then any time that you mess up, you use it as evidence against yourself to bring more shame. And the funniest thing is when you feel shame or guilt or self loathing or anger at yourself, what do you do? Well, you numb over those emotions.

Well, how do you numb over your emotions, Andrew? Well, most people who numb over their emotions who are addicted to nicotine, they're probably going to use more nicotine. So that's why shame doesn't work, right? We want to use positive reinforcement because when there's better emotions, we're not tempted to get out of them.

Bye. Vaping or by overeating or by drinking ourself into oblivion or by over porning right or over gambling or over whatever your vices The reason we use vices is to get out of the bad feeling So if we're trying to quit a vice by creating more bad feeling it's kind of counterproductive that makes sense Right like logically, so how do you actually learn how to love it?

And this is what I want to say and I said this so beautifully to a client the other day on a call I said, before you ever quit vaping, I don't want you to quit vaping right now. She got on the call. She thought I was like upset with her for vaping. I'm like, I'm not upset with you guys. I love you guys.

I'm not upset with you for vaping. I vaped for seven years y'all. And before that I smoked cigarettes, like this is not a shame podcast. I don't even know really what's best for your life. So for me to come on here and say, you should quit vaping right now today. And you shouldn't be a vapor. That's none of my business.

I don't know what you should be doing. But I can tell you that if you're beating yourself up into quitting, it's probably not going to work. So I told her before you ever put down your last vape, before you even consider it, I want you to love yourself exactly how you are, a vaper. Find complete unconditional love for yourself.

Every time you want to hit your vape, instead of beating yourself up about it, find a way to love yourself. And you know what's so funny is once you actually do that and you love yourself, Quitting is going to be so appealing to you and that's exactly what happened to me. I've been looking, it's like, why was it so easy for me to put down my last vape?

Obviously the life coaching tools that I teach, right? Feel my emotions, change my thoughts, beliefs, learn how to love myself. But I'm like, why was it so easy? It's like, oh, because before like the two to three months before I ever put down my last vape, I was learning how to love myself. So it made the process of quitting so easy.

I had an urge. I didn't beat myself up. I relapsed a couple of times before and I, I had learned over the last couple of months before I really quit that I don't need to beat myself up for relapsing. I can just be curious instead of angry or shameful. And when you are curious, when you stop judging yourself, you are able to get to the actual issue and you're able to change it.

That's it. But when you judge someone, you immediately make them defensive, yourself included. So it's like, you know, people come to me all the time as a life coach and they say, I want, I have a problem. I need my partner, my spouse, someone else to get coaching or someone else to get help. And it's like, the only problem that I see is that you're judging them for the life that they're living.

When you stop judging them and you meet them with unconditional love for the exact place they're at without any, like trying to change it whatsoever. That's when you can help them. And it's so funny cause it blows people's mind. It's like, well, how can I help someone? Change their behavior. If I'm okay with their behavior, it's like, that's exactly how so it's like you guys be okay.

I'm serious. And you're gonna be like, Andrew, he's a quit vaping guy. Like he's a life coach, tells people to quit vaping, but he told me to keep vaping today. And it's like, I'm going to tell you that because I do not want you to quit vaping until you learn how to love yourself because it's through the process of learning to love yourself that you're going to quit vaping.

I promise you. And, you know what's so fun is that I'm a huge Hannah Montana fan. I saw her Best of Both Worlds tour when I was 13. I brought two motherfrickin 30 t shirts. My brother still owes me 30 and I'm keeping interest on that shit. And I always say like, the work that I do, that I put into the world, it's the best of both worlds experience.

You get to love yourself. And vape. And then because you love yourself, quitting is easy and you do it when you want to. There's no negativity. There's no nastiness. Like when you actually quit, you might be slightly irritable, but I promise you someone who loves himself, who's slightly irritable, handles it so much differently than someone who's shaming themselves with their irritability and being an over being irritability.

It's like, it's okay. Exactly where you're at. It's perfect. I don't know what's best for your life, but I know exactly how to change your behavior if you listen to me and you, and you actually do what I say. So I'm going to be plugging this vape course a lot because I'm really proud of it. And I think that it's an amazing.

way for you to learn how to love yourself and actually apply this material. I teach you something called the self coaching model and it shows you exactly how your thoughts are creating the results in your life. And then I show you how to change those thoughts. And really when it comes to loving yourself, I've done podcasts on this in the past, like learning to love yourself is literally just learning to choose what you want to believe about yourself and then to start believing it.

And that's exactly what this tool will teach. If you take the course again, I really want everyone to have complete success with my work. Um, I don't know what's best for you. I don't know when the best time for you to quit. It is. But I promise you that this work will allow you to do it without any kind of like beating yourself up.

And truly, if you do it the way that I'm saying, learn how to love yourself, feel your emotions, change your beliefs. You will no longer have the desire to vape. Sign up for the course. Reach out to me. I love hearing from you guys. Um, it's just like, yeah, I love this work. It's so cool. So anyways, don't put down your last vape if it's coming from shame, that's the wrong way to quit.

And you might as well keep vaping as you're, if you're going to hate yourself because what happens, it's like, it's so funny. Just think about it. It's my last little point. It's like, think about it logically. How do you treat someone you hate? Well, you're not very nice to them. Do you think that you would like help them eat right and like you help them support him at the gym and like have big goals and you'd be compassionate with him?

No way. So why are you doing with it? Why are you hating on yourself and thinking that's going to help you to build a better life for yourself? It's not. And even if you do quit vaping from hate, you're going to hate yourself even more for it. You won't feel better. And that sucks. So I have a fantastic day.

This is a great podcast episode. Listen to it again. Let me know what you think. If you're listening to this podcast, if you're not gonna buy the course, whatever, do what you want. I want you to buy it. I want people to get into it and actually enjoy it. But, um, you could at very least relate. rate the podcast because this has been just fantastic.

I'm so proud of this damn work. Um, I love it. This is totally what I'm meant to be doing. I'm right aligned. Like, I literally sweat when I make podcast episodes. I've been sitting here for, I don't know, 15 minutes, just sweating, excited about what I'm talking about. So thank you for being here. You are, you was kind, you was smart, you was important.

If you've never seen the help, it's a great movie. Go watch it. Um. There's a shit pie. That's fun. So have a good day, guys. I'll see you next week.