Transcriber: Graziele Cavalcante
Reviewer: Mujtaba bakhet The answer is yes. I did
play basketball. Yeah. I remember the exact day and place
my entire life changed and I didn't even know it. It's April 26th
and I'm 18 years old. I'm in the gym. I'm listening to a podcast, as
I usually do when I work out. And I heard the podcast guest
in my ear say something. I'd heard so many of these 30 to 60
something psychologists, activists, authors and business leaders
say many times before. If I had the same mindset now that I did
in my teens or 20s, I’d be miserable. I was such an idiot.
I remember every time I heard those statements expressed with
a laugh, it made me feel sad. I was entering college. I didn't
want to be miserable, and then I felt actually pretty irritated.
I refused to be miserable. Much of this refusal of misery
had to do with that. Just five months earlier, I had
sat hand in hand with my dad as he passed away after a six year battle
with the terminal disease, ALS. Following that experience, I promised myself I would not spend
a moment of my life hating it. As I learned that time is never promised. My irritation intensified
as I reflected on the fact that these personal development
leaders are rarely talking to young people specifically. This didn't make
any sense to me because I thought, Aren't we the ones that need to
know this stuff about growth, mindfulness and emotions the most? Over the next decade, I was supposed to
determine a field of study or career, potentially find a life partner,
decide where to live, handle personal finances and retirement, maybe even start a family and many other
decisions that had life long impacts. But here I was with thousands of other
high school seniors receiving the same piece of advice for most of the
adults in our lives. You've got time. You'll figure it out. I just don't
think you need to worry about it. And although this advice is slightly
anxiety reducing in the moment, we are rarely if ever, given practical,
emotional and decision making, training, making the anxiety, reducing moments
extremely short and fleeting. Because we didn't know how to navigate
these decisions we had to make. And so with that moment in the gym, I found my mission to change the
rhetoric of what your teens and 20s could and should be.
Which brings me to today. And after a bit more study, it turns out
teenage Libby had some very valid points, two points in specific down
to a neurological level. How we train our brains now in our 20s
truly matters when it comes to setting ourselves up for a less stressful
and more fulfilling life. Your brain is a complex system
of neurological pathways. You can think of it like a
complex system of roads. The more you drive specific routes, the more ingrained those habits and
behavioral patterns become. And that is why it's so important we start
specifically choosing which routes we continue to drive down now because
it will be much more painful and difficult to rewire your mind 30 years
from now when your mental software has become hardware. And point number two. Teenage love was also on to the fact that the decisions we make in
our 20s do matter. But that is why we need proper emotional and mental skills to help guide
us in those decisions. Meg J. PhD clinical psychologist, notes
in her newly revised book, The Defining Decade These statistics that
might shake up any young adult a bit, 85% of life's most defining moments
happen before age 35. Not the most important, not the
best moments, but life. Definers are often happening
before your mid-thirties. Your 20s coincide with your
peak childbearing years. More than 50% of us will be living with, dating or married to our
life partner by age 30. Your earning power is generally decided
in your first ten years of work, and as you probably know
in your childhood, that's where you will have
peak brain development. But your personality and your brain
changes more in your 20s than any time before or after. These statistics
show us that the decisions you make in your
20s do in fact matter. But to any young adult listening, I do
want to note these are statistics. Correlation does not always
mean causation, but still, whether we like it or not, we do have some big decisions to
make over the next decade. Let’s dig even deeper. We’re humans not statistics as I mentioned so instead of going to Google,
I went to humans to create my own type of study
on the matter I've spent my career thus far
talking to today's teens and 20 somethings about what they actually
need to feel more prepared for their life. I wrote a book
answering their questions. I started a podcast educating them on
the topics that their parents or the education system generally
weren't teaching them. I created an online platform reaching
millions of them worldwide, and now I stand here today being a physical representation of what is
often represented as a statistic. Where are our teens in 20 somethings
struggling most? The common thread did not have to do with
being addicted to their phones. It didn't have to do with being
bullied by their peers or being overly stressed
about school or work. The common thread was much
more conclusive, a feeling of being constantly
at war with their minds. But it's not the 21st century that is the
culprit of this mental mass distress. It's that historically we
have rarely, if ever, put any true emphasis on the development
of emotional and decision making skills. We need change. Our young adults,
our children, our parents, Raising our children and young
adults need better mental and emotional skills to better create a
future for themselves, their families, their communities and society at large. What is going on inside
of each of us creates the reality of what is happening
outside of each of us. These emotional skills, these are
not what we call soft skills. These are life changing, life saving,
society altering skills. So how do we make this change? Well, it turns out changing the way
society functions on a mass scale is a little bit difficult, which, you know,
is probably not very shocking. But still, with my work with young
people over the years, I have found three core pillars of
information that can help young people have a simple foundation of better
emotional intelligence, better decision making skills and
empathetic self guided growth. Which brings us to pillar
number one. Unlearning. There are many unhelpful social constructs
that weigh down today's youth. Being the grade on your paper determines
your intelligence. Or you're supposed to be nothing
but young and dumb right now. Or my personal favorite. This needs to be
the best time of your life. So annoying. But the most harmful of all is the way many of us are socially
conditioned to determine what a happy and successful life looks like and
how to actually achieve it. My dad was a very money driven man,
caring but very money driven. And as his daughter, I inherited a
lot of that money driven energy. The idea that if I just made enough money,
that's where I would find peace. But for years I watched that same
mindset tear him apart. Absolutely destroying his ability to
have peace. And I didn't want that. So I asked myself, okay,
if I can't determine the success of my life based off of
money or status power net worth. How do I determine that I'm living a
successful life? How do I gauge it? And I contemplated that question for
a really long time until I found an answer. Living in alignment. Living in alignment is aligning your
core priorities, your actions, and your thoughts with your
deepest core values. So when your head hits the pillow at
night and you can ask yourself, Am I living as aligned as
I can in this moment? And you can truthfully answer
that question with Yes, that is what peace feels like. Because there's nothing more to
long for with that mindset, the only person that is in charge
of your success is you. And that's a very blissful, fulfilling
and freeing feeling. I urge you to take audit of
what social conditionings and mindsets you have inherited. Question why you think, believe, act
or speak in the way that you do. And from there you can reconstruct your
views to be more aligned with you and the future that you want
to have for yourself. As we unlearn social conditionings, we free up space to then create
an authentic way of being. Which brings us to pillar number
two being. How do we design? An authentic way of being for ourselves.
What does that mean? In order to align our way of being, we must become healthier and more self
aware individuals. So how do we do this? Most of you, I would imagine, know the
common answers to this question. Therapy, journaling, meditation,
breathwork, reading, and other growth methods. But what I want to talk to you about is why we do
these things. Why put forth the effort? Because if you've gone through any sort of
intentional growth process, you know, it's pretty gruesome and it's pretty hard.
So why do we do this? I want you to think of it like this. For analogy sake, let's say your
life goal is to build a house, but you've never built a house before. So the only way that you can do this
is by building your house in the way everyone around you teaches
you to build a house. And after 20 years of living in
this house that you built, you come to realize that maybe some of the practices people taught you about
building a house probably weren't the best. And you know this because there's areas of your house that
are starting to warp or crumble or malfunction. We use these
growth methods to gain the tools that no one ever taught us. We can then use those tools to
rebuild so we can live in a house that doesn't feel like it's
consistently falling apart as we learn how to reconstruct our views
in a way that is more aligned for each of us, our foundation
becomes sturdier as our communication skills improve
the leaking in our bathroom stops. As we learn to trust people again, our AC kicks back on as we learn how
to better emotionally regulate. And pillar number three is doing. Some years ago, I had convinced
my mom to jump out of a plane with me in New Zealand. And she had asked me if I had
checked the safety record for this company that we were jumping with
, and I told her I had. I didn't. And so as we were sitting
in the parking lot, I started looking up reviews and articles, and it turns out a plane of theirs
had crashed just a month earlier, but no one died. So I figured
that we'd probably be fine. So, like the wonderful daughter I am, I told my mom it was perfectly
safe and we went inside. And considering that I'm here today and
she's in the audience, we did live. So that's that's good. But the interesting thing about skydiving
is that it doesn't at all feel how you expect. The world always made
it seem so scary and chaotic, but it's not that scary and
it's not very chaotic. You're falling too fast for your brain
to even recognize what's happening, and before you know it, you're just slowly
floating and you're enjoying the view. Skydiving is more
serene than anything else. And I've come to realize that making bold
changes in our life is very much similar to skydiving. The people in our
life that have never jumped, have never actually gone skydiving are
generally the ones that are giving it the reputation of it being
so scary and chaotic. The same goes for making bold changes. The people that have never actually done
it or understand that they even can. Are usually the people that are making us
or contributing to us feeling afraid. Quitting a job you hate or coming
out to your parents. Ending the relationship that you know
is not serving you is scary. It is very scary. But if it does feel
right and there's a way to make it work, it will bring you more peace than chaos.
It will bring you more peace than chaos. It will allow you to live more aligned. And that is why it will bring you this
underlying essence of peace. The courage to jump when you know your
being self is urging you to do so. That is the art of pillar number three
doing. Unlearning being and doing. The concepts that I teach
are not wildly unique, and yet when I share them
with young people, they harvest life changing results. When I share these simple mental and
emotional skills, I get feedback, DMS and messages like this. I'm 18 years old and I'm raising me and
my little sister in a small apartment. And your videos have helped with
so much of the stress. I read your book and I don't
feel so afraid anymore. Or I consider making another
suicide attempt last night. And your videos saved my life. We must stop this generational cycle
of underdeveloped mental and emotional skills as it is one of the
deepest roots of societal suffering. To any young person listening. Our 20s don't need to be so confusing
and they don't need to be miserable. Start being intuitive and intentional
as soon as possible. No waiting for a traumatic event or the stereotypical midlife crisis
to change and to grow. Take radical responsibility as soon
as possible as this is where joy and fulfillment are born. An idea we're
spreading to every teen and 20 something. The sooner you grow, the better.
Thank you.