The victim mentality is the thief in the night. It’s coming to get you and if you want to be truly successful in what you do, you need to learn how to overcome it. That’s what today’s special guest, Mark England, is going to help us with.

Mark England is a TED X speaker, the co-founder and head coach of Enlifted. He has been researching, presenting, and coaching on the power of words and stories for the past 14 years and will continue for the next 36 years.

Watch this episode to learn more about the power of your language and how you can train yourself to have better internal and external dialogues for a better mindset!

Key Talking Points of the Episode

[00:00] Introduction
[02:16] Sponsor - Lambs
[04:13] Meeting Mark England in Richmond
[04:58] The Resilience Seminar in Richmond
[08:01] Who is Mark England?
[09:03] What is the importance of language in your mindset in life?
[11:35] What are breath words?
[14:15] How did Mark meet his first mentor?
[15:52] The power of telling your story
[17:00] How can one word change the whole story?
[19:10] What was it like when Mark had the victim mentality?
[20:11] Where does our identity come from?
[22:20] What is the victim mentality?
[24:26] How does Mark and his team help people overcome the victim mentality?
[25:51] An exercise to help overcome the victim mentality
[28:04] How important are the words you use to your mindset?
[30:03] What is the promise that Mark makes to people?
[31:53] Who will change your language for you?
[33:25] What is conflict language?
[35:25] What are the three pillars of conflict language?
[36:18] What is soft talk?
[41:05] What are negations?
[48:27] What are projections?
[49:12] What changes will changing your words bring to your life?
[50:10] What is it like to be in an upregulated state?
[55:50] What happens when you put the three pillars of conflict language together?
[56:28] How do you become an effective coach through the right kind of breathing?
[59:55] What is a physiological sigh?
[01:01:56] Why shouldn’t you be speaking from your emotions?
[01:03:06] Is your diagnosis who you are?
[01:04:20] What is 4-stepping a story?
[01:09:23] What questions should you be asking to dig deeper?
[01:11:12] What is the difference between this activity and journaling?
[01:14:00] How can reading your story out loud help you?
[01:15:45] What is the difference between asking questions and giving answers?
[01:17:17] What is the foundation of the 4-stepping method?
[01:21:53] Why is writing your story out important?
[01:23:56] What does it mean to be constantly living in a subjective perception?
[01:26:58] Why is it important to hang out with people who make you feel good?
[01:28:41] What is one actionable thing Mark wants you to do?
[01:30:22] Where can people find out more about Mark?

Quotables

“The level of empathy and kindness in that room was amazing, because we were getting into some vulnerable stories. We were talking about those deep stories that are buried inside, covered with armor, holding up your shield.”

“This last weekend, we let down the shield, took off the armor, we got vulnerable and it was okay because we were in a place with the most caring savages you can possibly meet.”

“I know that language and understanding your internal beliefs and the words that you choose to use is the most profound realization that you can come to.”

“I’ve been doing one thing for that entire 15 years, which is staring at words, helping people with their stories, their identities, and unlocking their breath.”

“When mindset is held in macro conversation, it’s this thing that we know we need to get better at, but how?”

“When we learn about what words to use less of and why, and what words to use more of and why, then mindset gets practical. We can practice thinking, speaking, and writing in better ways.”

“You can listen to these episodes, or any podcast, or read any book all you want, but knowledge is not power. Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes powerful once you implement it in your lifestyle.”

“When people get themselves into an upregulated state, it’s usually through a story. Very rarely do people go run some wind sprints and then walk in the door and get in an argument with their spouse because they’re upregulated and stressed.”

“Good luck changing your clients’ minds if their breath is trapped in their chest.”

“With people’s breath in their chest, their capacity to hear goes down, their capacity to learn goes down, we lose access to our peripheral vision and our creative faculties, so it’s good to know what words to use to help people get their breath back down to their abdomen so they can hear you.”

“I got tired of myself because I didn’t laugh for a year and that’s a very spooky thing to do.”

“I entrenched a victim mentality so deeply in me, it robbed me of my ability to laugh and enjoy myself and connect with people. I was so disconnected and also was just not present because I was caught up in this never-ending story of woe.”

“My identity is not a fact. It’s not the fact of who or what I am, it’s an ongoing, fluid, flexible process and guess what? We participate in that. We did not learn this in school.”

“The victim mentality is an acquired personal trait where a person tends to regard himself or herself as the victim of the negative actions of others, even in the absence of clear evidence. The victim mentality depends on a habitual thought process and attributions.”

“The victim mentality depends, as in it has to have a habitual thought process. Habitual accurately implies duration and addiction.”

“So if the victim mentality, which in my personal and professional opinion, and a lot of people in this game, it’s the thief in the night!”

“This thing is coming for everything. It wants it all. It wants your time, it wants your attention, it wants your relationship, it wants to squat in the entirety of your mental real estate, it wants to rob you of your talent - it’s sneakier than shit.”

“What’s more seductive than our own voice in our own mind? Most people are defenseless to that.”

“There are ways that we can use our words to increase our stress, to trap our breath, to turn things into absolute huge insurmountable problems, there are ways to do that.”

“When I say “how can I ever get over this?” - I’m saying to myself I’m screwed, I can’t get over this, my reticular activating system sees it as this immovable thing, this impossible ordeal.”

“When I take out the word, it’s a presupposition. I pre-suppose that I can’t get over it, so I’m not looking for the way how.”

“I pre-suppose that there are ways to get over this so my reticular activating system, not only does it shrink the thing down in my imagination and turn the volume down on the feels, it starts looking for things that we can take action on.”

“If you make some seemingly minor adjustments in your everyday ordinary language, you're gonna get an immediate return right now, and then there’s gonna be some really cool, down stream, knock-off effects.”

“When I say language, I mean internal dialogue and external dialogue. What we think, what we say, and what we write.”

“If you have a story that’s playing in your head, an interpretation of what you believe your story to be, simply by switching around some words and taking some out, using architecture language, instantly makes it better.”

“It’s your language. Nobody’s gonna change your language for you.”

“There are three pillars of conflict language and these three pillars are responsible for roughly 85% of the ouch, sting, pain, and woe in people’s lives.”

“The three pillars are soft talk, negations, and projections. Soft talk is where the decision and anxiety come from, the anxiety related to indecision. Negations, that’s where the worry and the worst case scenario comes from. Projections, that’s the venom.”

“The soft talk keywords - think, maybe, sort of, kind of, guess, like, almost like, possibly, probably, try, seems, hopefully. Those words, depending on the person, I guarantee that these are in your language. To some degree, they are there and for some of you, they’re a major problem.”

“What they inevitably do in a very sneaky way, it’s death by a thousand cuts, is that they trick you into thinking that you’re an indecisive person.”

“If you want to double your confidence, you can double your confidence in 6 weeks by taking out 50% of your soft talk.”

“The first thing my driving teacher said when I got in the car was “look where you wanna go, because you’re probably gonna go there”.”

“The negation keywords - can’t, won’t, isn’t, hasn’t, haven’t, not, shouldn’t. Those words are gonna force you to stare at the worst case scenario, whether you like it or not.”

“They’re the nuclear codes. Nothing will pucker up somebody’s butthole faster than a good old fashioned projection.”

“When you change your words, you change your stories, and you change your identities. When you change your words, you change what you see, you change how you feel, and if you do it in a conscious way, we go from an upregulated sympathetic nervous system response state to a downregulated parasympathetic nervous system response state.”