In all relationships and generally in life, it’s considered good manners to “know what you want.” But what if you don’t? Worse, what if you actually do have preferences, but you’re too afraid to speak them aloud? In this solo episode of How to Be an Adult, Luke Chao explores these questions and tries to arrive at some principles for how to be more decisive:

• Not knowing what you want isn’t always a problem. Sometimes you’re genuinely indifferent between several good options. Other times, you simply haven’t accumulated enough knowledge or experience to develop a preference. Neither situation needs to be pathologized.
• You discover your preferences through experience. You can’t necessarily know what career, relationship, or lifestyle suits you until you’ve explored different possibilities. Sometimes the solution to uncertainty is to gain experience rather than engage in more introspection.
• Sometimes “I don’t know what I want” is a lie we tell ourselves and others. You might know exactly what you want but feel uncomfortable admitting it because your preferences conflict with other people’s expectations.
• People-pleasing can disguise your true desires. Fear of disappointing parents, disagreeing with friends, or violating cultural expectations can make it easier to claim uncertainty than to express a genuine preference.
• Short-term and long-term desires can conflict. Something that feels good today might undermine your future ambitions. Make decisions with the understanding that there will be a tomorrow, and that your future self deserves consideration.
• Beware of believing the grass is always greener elsewhere. When you compare your current circumstances with imagined alternatives, remember that your existing choices were probably made for good reasons. Don’t dismiss the judgment of your younger self or overlook the benefits of what you’ve already built.
• Indecision is itself a decision—and often the worst one. Refusing to choose doesn’t preserve every opportunity indefinitely. Opportunities can disappear, relationships can move on, and progress can stall. Making a decision allows your life to move forward.
• Making a decision necessarily means eliminating alternatives. The word “decision” implies cutting off possibilities. Rather than fearing the options you lose, recognize that committing to one direction is what makes meaningful progress possible.
• Stop searching for the perfect choice. No career, relationship, home, or life path will be flawless. There are many options that are good enough to produce happiness, prosperity, and fulfillment. Perfectionism can prevent you from appreciating perfectly acceptable opportunities.
• Most decisions aren’t permanent. You can change careers, move cities, end relationships, or pursue different interests as your circumstances evolve. Making a decision today doesn’t mean surrendering your ability to make different decisions tomorrow.
• However, there is enormous value in commitment. Staying with a career, relationship, or pursuit allows benefits to accumulate over time. Experience, expertise, trust, and meaningful achievements often emerge only after years of sustained effort. The freedom to change course also includes the freedom to stay.
• There isn’t one correct path to a fulfilling life. Many different careers, partners, homes, and circumstances can lead to happiness. Your job isn’t to discover the one predetermined route to success but to choose a worthwhile direction and continue developing it.

Table of Contents

0:00 – Introduction
3:38 – What If You Lack Knowledge or Experience?
5:41 – People Take “What You Want” Seriously
9:51 – When “What You Want” Conflcits with “What You’re Capable of”
12:04 – “What You Want” in the Short- and Long-Term
15:52 – The Grass Isn’t Greener On The Other Side
17:40 – Any Decision Is Better Than Indecision
19:30 – There’s No Perfect Decision
20:28 – Few Decisions Are Forever
23:58 – The Merits Of Commitment
26:11 – No Single True Path
33:58 – Outro

Listen above, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or watch the full video on YouTube. Remember to like, subscribe and share!

The post How to Know What You Want (Ep. 40) appeared first on The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis.

Because this podcast is called How to Be an Adult, and we take our promises seriously, you will never see us release an episode titled “How to Never Disappoint Others” or “How to Avoid Criticism.” In this episode, Luke Chao talks about how to disappoint others in a principled manner:

• Disappointment results from an internal mental mismatch between a person’s expectations and reality; it does not exist in the external world.
• Living an authentic life and pursuing creative or entrepreneurial goals inevitably leads to disappointing some people due to the diversity of opinions and values.
• It is impossible to be universally liked, and trying to avoid disappointing others often results in personal resentment, bitterness, or the betrayal of one’s own principles.
• Individuals should be the primary authority over their own lives, as they are best positioned to know their own constraints, needs, and capabilities.
• Saying ‘no’ to others does not require extensive justification or a watertight argument; a simple, direct refusal is sufficient to maintain personal boundaries.
• When facing disappointment, criticism or even anger from others, you should consider whether you have failed a moral principle; if you are acting in alignment with your personal values, it is not an error.
• The only person you truly cannot afford to disappoint is yourself, since you are the only individual you are guaranteed to live with for your entire life.

Table of Contents

0:00 – Introduction
4:27 – Adulthood Requires Disappointing Others Sometimes
13:06 – No Is a Complete Answer
21:03 – Stay True to Yourself
23:38 – Disappointment Does Not Harm Others
29:33 – Outro

Listen above, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or watch the full video on YouTube. Remember to like, subscribe and share!

The post How to Disappoint Others (Ep. 39) appeared first on The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis.

“Just be yourself!” We’ve all heard this platitude, but without specific instruction in what it means, the advice is rather useless. In this solo episode, Luke breaks down how to be yourself, and six enemies of your authentic self:

• Being authentic as an adult means embracing your individuality rather than compromising your values, thoughts, or feelings to meet external standards or please others.
• Individuals like Rosa Parks, Einstein, and Gandhi are viewed as iconic because they trusted their own moral compass and inner judgment rather than conforming to the expectations of their time.
• The primary enemies of an authentic self include toxic shame, performative niceness (people-pleasing), fear of rejection, the pressure to conform, and getting caught in competitive status games.
• We consider people-pleasing to be passive-aggressive because it involves suppressing one’s true thoughts and feelings, which eventually erupts negatively.
• Status games are zero-sum competitions that fosters misery through constant social comparison; in contrast, living authentically is a positive-sum game where each person can thrive on their own unique path.
• Adults are encouraged to use their own intelligence to solve life problems by asking themselves well-formed, substantive questions instead of speculating on what others might think.
• Self-actualization, according to Abraham Maslow, is a lifelong journey that becomes possible once basic needs are met and one chooses to act with integrity and self-esteem.
• You are not an inferior version of anyone else, including parents or peers, nor their illusions fio you, and you are inherently lovable just as you are.

Table of Contents:

0:00 – Intro
1:18 – Parable of the tiger who was raised by wolves
2:38 – You are incomparable with other individuals
6:30 – Trust your own adult judgement
9:13 – Prompt engineer your brain
11:56 – Questions to ask yourself
13:51 – Enemies of your authentic self: Introduction
14:04 – Enemy #1: Toxic shame
17:59 – Enemy #2: Performative niceness
22:47 – Enemy #3: Fear of rejection or criticism
25:15 – Enemy #4: Conformity
26:06 – Enemy #5: Neediness
28:28 – Enemy #6: Taking the status game too seriously
33:11 – Abraham Maslow and self-actualization
42:55 – Outro

Listen above, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or watch the full video on YouTube. Remember to like, subscribe and share!

The post How to “Be Yourself” (Ep. 38) appeared first on The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis.