Episode 9: Defeating the Demons Within

Chris Albert 00:00:01 (link to this point)

Good morning. Welcome to the Warrior Soul podcast episode nine. This is Chris Albert. Thank you so much for listening today. I'm gonna start this podcast off by reading from a blog I wrote last week.

The title of the blog is defeating the demon within, battling your own negativity. And it starts, last night, I was stressed beyond all belief. I stared at the ceiling with a heavy feeling in my chest as if the world were taking its hands and pushing them right down on top of me. I tossed and turned and did everything I could do to get the negative thoughts out of my head. You're going to fail.

You have no business running this company. You were a shitty Marine, and now you're an even shittier civilian. Then I tried thinking about all the things I had to be grateful for. The fact that I used to be homeless and now I live in a house. The fact that I have an amazing girlfriend who loves me and has so much faith in me.

But then it started again. You'll be back in the car before you know it. She won't love you when she finds out who you really are. Remember Captain Letendre and Corporal Pierson, how they died while you were working on your shitty college degree? You don't deserve shit.

You better start planning for a long hot summer because your bed is gonna be in the back of that Honda Honda Civic if you're lucky enough to afford the payments. That's the beginning of the blog, And last couple of weeks have been quite difficult for me. I'm not gonna say that they're difficult event wise. There's been nothing really traumatic that happened. I did turn 37 a couple of days ago. But life itself has actually been really good.

And you know business has been going great with Warrior Soul Apparel. We're moving forward into a lot of different things, and I'm really enjoying the work I'm doing here. But what do you do when the circus that's going on in your own head starts to take over. What do you do when the darkness begins to seep into everything? And you begin to feel despite the fact that you have control and management over your life, That you're losing a little bit of control inside of your head.

And that you're no longer the ringmaster. I think about it a lot. And I'm still going through this. So I'm not an expert in healing. I'm not some guru who has some idea of some quest you're supposed to take or some journey you're supposed to take.

I'm not a monk sitting on top of a mountain. I'm a person very much like all of you and with some experiences that are very similar to a lot of those experiences that you have. And I think in a lot of ways when I do think about my life, I have so much to be appreciative for. Know, one, I'm lucky to be alive and breathing. I'm lucky to have two eyes, two ears.

I'm lucky to have all my limbs and fingers. And I'm lucky to have my health. Because in that there's opportunity. There's opportunity for me to grow. There's opportunity for me to learn.

There's opportunity for me to teach all of you and learn through that process. But at the same time, there's doubt. There's fear. There's this thing inside of me that wants to drag me down. And if I wasn't able to sit here and talk to all of you about it, and I wasn't able to openly and honestly admit to it, then I think a lot of the other work that I'm trying to do here would be bullshit It'd be a fake, a fraud. Someone who's just trying to garner attention. Someone who's just trying to give you some false sense of hope and some false identity that you can work off of, that'll put me in a better light. But that's not what I want.

I want you to understand that a lot of the struggles, a lot of the things I talk about, a lot of the things I do to try to make myself better, they're hard for me too. But all of it is based around fear. It's based around insecurity. It's based around the thing that we all fear the most. And that is that voice in our head.

We pay we pay attention to it consciously or unconsciously. And a lot of times, the funny part is is that it masks itself so well that you don't even know it's there. And you don't even know what it's actually telling you. Because you don't know it's there, it becomes a lot harder to reveal it for what it is, which is just a reality that you're creating. It has no basis in reality.

It has no basis in the real world. It's something that you're creating in your head that's keeping you from doing what you really want to do, and it's keeping you from actually being happy. So then the question becomes, how do you fight it? How do you fight something that's a piece of yourself? How do you control something that's almost an impulse and that you think you have no control over.

And again, this is something that I had been struggling with and that I had been battling with for a lot of my life. And it really almost has nothing to do with military service. I mean, that that it's part of it. It's part of my history. Because it's part of my history, is part of it.

But there's a strong part of me that believes that even if I had never served, I'd still be going through this. And there's a strong part of me that believes that even if a lot of you had never served, you'd still be going through a lot of the same things too. We do this because we're veterans and and we're brothers and we help each other out. But beyond that, we also have to realize that we're human. And that none of this makes us crazy.

None of this makes us, abnormal. I deal with humans who had never served before in their lives. And they have a lot of these same fears and same, tendencies. A lot of them do suffer from, survivor's guilt in one way or another, based off of experiences they had in their lives. A lot of them do doubt themselves.

So while all of you who served are my brothers and I love you and that this podcast is mainly made for you, I want you to understand that if you're a human out there who hasn't served, yeah, these these are normal feelings. And and if you're somebody who has served, it's not your service that made you crazy, and you're not crazy. And you don't have a handicap because you served your country. So I want to get that out of the way first and foremost. These are real human problems that we're dealing with.

And there are things that keep almost everybody from actually doing what they wanna do in life. And there are things that keep almost everybody from rising to the next level. The hard part isn't fighting it because a lot of times you don't know where it comes from, and the part of us is almost afraid to admit where it comes from. So what do you do? You can go back to that Sun Tzu quote.

It says, if you know the enemy, but not yourself. For every battle you win, you'll also lose one. If you know yourself or sorry if I murder this. If you know if you don't know the enemy and you don't know yourself, you'll lose every one of a thousand battles. I didn't have my copy of Sun Tzu next to me.

But you have to put some time into knowing yourself because you are both you and you're the enemy at the same time. A lot of people don't understand this. You are your biggest obstacle in the world. Almost all of us get in our own way somehow. We tell ourselves things that keep us from doing things because we have these built up identities in our heads.

One of the ways that I've been really battling it, and some of you might be calling me hippie, some of you might think this is completely woo woo, but or off the wall, but I meditate. I meditate a lot. I try to meditate twice a day for twenty minutes. And again, I'm not some guru or any expert on meditation, but the way I've done it is I put a black mask over my eyes so that I can't see or, have any real understanding of my surroundings that's gonna distract me. Then I put myself in a supported position, and I have a binaural beats app on my phone that I listen to for twenty minutes, all the while just trying to focus on the tone of the binaural beats. And to feel the support of the couch or the floor that I'm laying on. I'm just taking twenty minutes to myself to try to exist with an empty mind. And what that does is it gives me a better sense of where my thoughts are coming from.

Are my thoughts based in reality? Or are they based in some fairy tale I'm telling myself in my own head? And what I found is that most of the time it's the fairy tale. And keep in mind that this meditation has nothing to do with religion. There is no religious basis for my meditation practice.

It's just something I try to do and it's based in something called mindfulness, where we try to have a better understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. And it gives me better focus on my breathing. And again, allows me to try and hash out where a lot of these feelings are coming from. And then after the meditation session, what I'll do is I'll pick up a journal, and I'll just write about what I'm thinking. I'll write about what I'm grateful for in my life.

Because that's the other part of living with the fairy tales in your own head. Sometimes it keeps you from knowing and understanding how good we actually have it. It blinds you to everything in the present. Because if I were to open my eyes last week, I would see that I have an amazing life. I have an awesome business.

I have an awesome girlfriend in my life who loves me so much. But the lies in my head were telling me something different. And the fact of the matter is that I've been here before, you know, for years, when I was going through some really bad stuff. I used to tell myself, I had this fantasy in my head that my life was a punishment because I wasn't with my brothers when they died. My life was a punishment for having an easy deployment.

My life was a punishment for leaving the Marine Corps and going off and pursuing my own education. These are the things that were going on inside of my head. And I know from talking to a lot of vets and a lot of people, a lot of humans that they have similar things going on their heads. They build up reasons why they don't deserve happiness. They build up reasons why they don't deserve success.

And because they build these reasons up to the point where they actually seem like reality, they become self fulfilled prophecies. You know, we make our own reality happen based off of our own negativity. Even when I'm recording this podcast a lot of times, I have the voice sitting behind me and it's saying, your voice probably sounds really stupid right now. You don't really know what you're talking about. You're not gonna help anybody.

What are you doing this for? This is a waste of your time. And I sit here and I erase what I say. Sometimes I erased two hour episodes that I've recorded just to record them again. And again, that's me creating my greatest difficulties.

That's me providing my biggest obstacles. So meditating for me has at base helped me to sort out the facts versus the fantasy. And I want you to think about all the things you're telling yourself in your head right now that are keeping you down. All the negative thoughts about your personality, how you look, about what you should be doing with your life. All the things you didn't do because your mind told you you shouldn't be doing.

All the opportunities you've had to make yourself better. And what you need to do is to sit down and figure out why. But besides meditation and figuring out where the voices come from, what else can you do to really battle this? Because you can't meditate yourself through a tiger attack. Right? There's a gentleman who says this.

His name is Dan Pena, And we've had him on for an interview in one of our blogs. You can search through our blogs and and see see that interview. And he says, yeah, you can't meditate yourself through a tiger attack. So you have to understand that that's a tool. It's a particular tool we use to to really hammer ourselves down.

Right? To pin down where those negative emotions are coming from. And to really put ourselves in a better direction toward doing what it is we really wanna do. But what else? One of the most rewarding things I've ever done is in reading biographies, some of which I've gone over here for you on this podcast.

You know, when I think about the book, The Forgotten Highlander, and I think about everything that that man went through in his imprisonment with the Japanese. I forgot which episode that was, but but that was an episode we did. I mean, this is a man who went through six years of absolute torture. And he came back and he lived a very happy life. A life where he's grateful for everything he's been given and a life where he's dedicated himself to helping others and to making the world a better place.

I think about that because it makes me understand that no matter how bad my life gets or how bad I think my life gets, there's a lot of other people on this planet. And there's a lot of other people on this planet who would give anything to be in my position or your position or anybody who has the ability to listen to this podcast position. You know, that was listening to this thing about Turkmenistan the other day. And in that country, everything, all forms of communication are controlled by the government. Of course, there's other governments on this planet that do that.

But they have to use in a kind of underground app that's really hard to get just to listen to a podcast. There's people who can't afford the devices to listen to podcasts. And yet all of us have this amazing tool that we can listen to podcasts on, that we can look up anything on, that we can reach out and communicate with anybody in the world on. And we think of it as routine. We take it for granted.

What would life be like if we took all the resources we actually had and put them to their greatest use? What would life be like if we saw everything we have as an asset rather than thinking about everything we don't have? What would life be like if we had the confidence to take the chances necessary to make our lives better? And when you read about the world, the real world, not the bubble we live in, when you read about the real world. And for those of us who've actually experienced the real world, we know that we're lucky.

We know that we have opportunities here in this country and in the Western part of the world that many people around the world do not. The question is what are we going to do with it? What are we going to spend our time here on this earth doing? Are we going to sit here and listen to those negative thoughts in our head? Or are we going to actually take some action and put all these resources to good use?

Because there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the world who would do anything to switch with you and be in your position right now. So then the question becomes, what keeps us from using those resources? And as I said, it's it's a voice inside your own head. It's a way of looking at things. It's your perspective that that really limits you.

But what are things that keep us on focusing on that perspective rather than focusing on improving ourselves and changing our perspectives. You know, in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with what we actually spend our time on. How much of our time is spent on things that don't help us or that actively hurt us? You know, how much of our time is spent drinking? How much of our time is spent watching TV shows that aren't teaching us anything?

How much of our time is spent just sitting around and thinking about negative things? Something I have to tell myself over and over again is that time here, and I've said this so much and I hate to beat a dead horse, but time here on this planet is so short. And if it's short, then why do we spend so much of our time doing things that aren't going to help us? You know, focusing on the negativity, focusing on TV, focusing on drinking, doing drugs. And it comes back to that point.

It's because we try to do things to numb ourselves to the present. Because we think that the voices in our head that are holding us down are coming from the present. But they're not. They're coming from some reality that we've made up. They're coming from some story that we built up, some narrative.

You know, the reality for me is that I've gone through a lot and I've created every business I have out of nothing. But the story in my head is that I've spent the last ten years wandering, figuring out what to do because I wasn't strong enough to actually get anything done. And there's a big difference between the reality and the story.

Part of what I've had to do is build up a sense of self confidence to stand up to that narrative. To say, you know what? That idea that you're a bum, that idea that you are worthless. All that is is fantasy. So right now, I've I've gotten to the point where I can start to differentiate things.

That's why I can have thoughts like those and not fall completely off the deep end anymore. Not retreat to the bar and get myself drunk like I used to. Not look for a bottle of pills that can numb me temporarily until I wake up in the morning and have to feel it again. And part of it was that I had to have the courage to stand up against it. Part of it was that I had to allow myself to feel it. Allow myself to feel that pain that I'm inflicting on myself to understand the futility of it all. To understand the fact that it's useless and it's not helping me. And in understanding the fact that it was useless, revealing it for what it really was, which again is nothing but fantasy.

The last thing I think that all of us who go through these things really need to do is to stop thinking that the world somehow is going to have mercy on us and give us a solution for the problem. That's impossible. And it's impossible because the problem doesn't come from the world. The problem comes from us. The problem comes from our perspective, our thoughts, and our lack of action in facing it, feeling it, identifying it, and developing a new perspective.

So, again, our focus needs to be on how we're going to change that perspective. And one of the biggest things I think that's helped me in continuing my desire to defeat those voices and to move forward isn't trying to give some value back to the world. Trying to do something just to help people. Because if I was just somebody who peddled t shirts or just sold stuff, I don't think I would be doing this. I think I'd be I think I would have quit a long time ago.

The biggest way I've fought my demons is in searching for ways to give value back to the world. Whether that was through what I did with the fitness industry, or whether it's what I'm doing now with Warrior Soul Apparel, my biggest thing has always been trying to help people. And yeah, part of that is altruistic, part of that is a desire to sincerely help people, but part of it is also selfish because it makes me feel better. And it allows me to sort out those voices in my head and allows me to see what kind of value I can bring to people, what kind of value I can bring to the world. So if you're at home right now and you're trying to figure out what your purpose is, what your path in life is, you know, the biggest and best thing you can do is to try to figure out how you're going to give back.

What are you going to give to the world? Because when you give to the world, eventually it's going to come back to you. And it's going to come back to you in a positive light. But if all you're giving off is negativity and negative vibes, then you're gonna get negativity back. And nothing's gonna happen for you.

So these are just some of the things, like I said, that I'm going through right now and some of the things that I'm trying to implement in my life and some of the things that I've been implementing in my life. And as you can hear from this, this is still a process. This is still something that I'm working on. And none of this guarantees that you're not gonna have negative thoughts. In fact, the negative thoughts are probably gonna be with you for the rest of your life.

The question is what kind of impact are they gonna have on you as a person? What kind of impact are you going to allow them to have on you? And what kind of impact are you gonna allow them to have on your life? You gonna let them ruin you, or are you gonna use them? Are you gonna face them?

Are you gonna face them down, adapt, and overcome so that you can move on to better things. And rather than thriving off of your own negativity, rather sitting there and dwelling on it, move on to a place where you're actually gonna be able to have an impact on other people. Onto a place where you're gonna be a lot happier and where you are gonna be living the best life that you can. Just to break that down into the three things that I'm doing. The first one was meditation.

And there's a few different apps you can use as far as helping you out. You don't have to get a meditation mask or spend money on anything like that. A lot of times what I've done is just wrap a t shirt around my head so that I couldn't see anything. The the mask itself I use is called the Mindfold. I'm not associated with that company, but you can Google it.

And you can you can get one for yourself if you want. I think they run about $20. But again, if you just wanted to wrap a t shirt around your head or something like that, you could do that. And then the app I use is called the Brainwave app. But there's a lot of different apps that you can use.

You can use the Headspace app. And that's something new that's been put out there that actually has guided meditations on it. That'll help you to do it if you're uncomfortable in doing it for yourself, or if you don't feel like you can get into a meditative state. That app is a really good choice. And again, I'm not associated with that either.

The second thing, of course, is reading. And I've gone over a lot of those books here on this podcast that have had a big impact on my life. I mean, The Forgotten Highlander, huge impact on my life. But also the biography of Chesty Puller, Chesty. And, you know, seeing all the difficulties he had in, becoming a Marine Corps officer in the first place, but then, you know, overcoming a lot of those difficulties to become a legend that had a huge impact on me.

Because a lot of times we think of our heroes and we think of them as kind of on this trajectory, where they rise to greatness. And we forget about a lot of the stuff they go through to get to where they got, so that we know them and love them. And, you know, even with The Old Breed with E. B. Sledge, seeing everything those guys went through in The Pacific in World War two.

I mean, again, huge impact on me and my perspective. But read things that are gonna give you some perspective on life Because there's two ways of learning things. There's there's ways of becoming, you know, wiser through experience. But a lot of times when we experience something, as you just said, as I just told you, it is clouded by those voices in our head. And when we hear them through the voice of another person, where we hear about their own experiences, they give us a different way of seeing things.

And of course, I forgot to mention this during the meditation part, but journaling, writing yourself, writing your own thoughts down. The blog I wrote for this, it was therapeutic in and of itself. And I'll put that in the show notes over at Warrior Soul Fitness on the blog. But the things I tend to journal about are, am I grateful for? What are my biggest challenges?

And I write down different types of solutions I can take to overcoming those challenges. And then at the end of the day, I just write a few words about what how I think the day went and things I could do to make the day better. And then finally, figuring out where you can add value in this world. Figuring out what you can do to help other people. And there's endless ways of doing that.

And it doesn't have to be just opening up a charity or opening up a five zero one c three. You can help people through a business. You can help people through your own deeds on a daily basis. You can do things that are going to make you feel better about yourself and that are going to make other people feel better about you. And finally, before I get off today, you know, I just want to say we're all on this path together.

I get up here and I talk on this podcast, not because I'm better than you, not because I have some secret knowledge or anything like that, but I get up here because I wanna talk to you. It makes me feel better to talk to you. You know, I I record this thing on my own computer, and, I don't have some fancy studio or anything like that. I just do this because it's something that plays into everything else I talked about. And hopefully, it adds some value to your life.

Because in me giving you this, giving you this information, it definitely has a positive impact on my life. And so thank you to everybody who's been giving the positive comments, who's been listening each week, and who's been following what we're doing here at Warrior Soul. And I appreciate you guys so much. And I thank God for you guys every night. So that's about it for the week.

If you wanna see the show notes for this podcast, if you're listening to iTunes right now, you can go to the Warrior Soul Fitness blog. Go to warriorsoulfitness.com. Click on blogs and look for episode nine. I'll put some notes about what I talked about. And whatever you're doing out there, wherever you are, know yourself.

Learn about yourself. Figure out what lies you're telling yourself that are keeping you down. Expose them for what they are, and push yourself to rise above them and to become better. I'll talk to you guys next week. I love you all.

Peace.