"Just go talk to her, it's not that hard!" I told myself this as I prepared myself to talk to the girl I was interested in. It's through this kind of experience I got my first taste of this important lesson: You cannot rise above your self-image.

For many people, not just men, the things they do is a by-product of how they see themselves. They see themselves a certain way, so they expect a certain type of treatment.

Because they expect a certain type of treatment, they act in accordance with it. Then they get the predicted result, leading them into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

But what if this wasn't exactly the case? What if the formula for what happens isn't so set in stone?

Today, I'll be going over why you cannot rise above your self-image and how to rise above it.

The War Within everybody

Within everybody is a "civil war". A war between expectations and desires. A war to decide what you do and how close you get to your desires. This war is the heart of your struggles.

There's a saying from Blaise Pascal that goes, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." If you are unable to sit quietly in a room alone, then you have no hope in a room around others.

This is exactly what happened to me every time I got rejected by a girl I was interested in back in high school. Once I'd say what I wanted to say, I would so desperately want her to say yes to me, to give me what I want.

Thoughts like, "I hope she likes me" would race through my mind until she gave me her answer.

It wasn't until later that I learned women can detect this desperation like a shark smells blood. I was dead in the water before I even tried.

For many people, this war within is the reason why they struggle with so many things. Your inability to calmly let things play out and see what happens is why they always go so wrong.

You cannot rise above the noise with more noise

By now, you've probably got some experience trying to strong-arm things into working the way you want them to. Just as this doesn't work on others, nor will it work on you. In order to end the war within, you must learn to silence the noise.

But how does one silence this noise? Surely it's a grand struggle that takes decades to see come to fruition, right?

Well, no.

The noise comes about as a result of being too attached to an outcome. Being too attached to an outcome results in you identifying with that outcome and acting desperately towards achieving it, whether you are conscious of it or not.

You identify with that outcome because you believe it will happen, even though you don't want it to.

Going back to the example of girls, I used to believe that girls would reject me. I wanted to be accepted by a girl but believed that they would always find something about me to reject.

This led to me not only being rejected by the girls I wanted but completely passing up the girls who showed interest in me. To make it even worse, I didn't realize that this was the reason I rejected the girls who were interested in me.

To stop this cycle of self-sabotage, I had to learn how to make the unconscious conscious.

Improve your mental landscape

The war within is waged upon your subconscious mind. The sides at war with each other are fighting for the same resource: your mental energy. As you are the arbiter of your mental landscape, it's up to you to improve the abundance of your mental resources.

When it comes to stopping your self-sabotage, there are two key parts to it.

First, you need to improve your mental health.

I will keep preaching this until I'm beyond a broken record because it's that important. Your mental health is step zero. If your mental health is shit, you can expect everything important in your life to go to shit.

Meditate, exercise, journal, go for a walk, play with your dog, whatever it takes do something to improve your mental health.

Improving your mental health is like causing more resources to appear out of nowhere in your mental landscape. If resources are abundant, then there's the war within is redundant and will die down.

The second key part, once you've improved your mental health you need to insert new beliefs into your subconscious.

Once resources are abundant, the warring factions in your mind will need new rules to follow. As the arbiter of your mental world, you get to decide those rules.

These "rules" are your beliefs. Inserting new beliefs are as simple as selecting them, thinking about them, and then behaving in accordance with them, especially behaving them.

Once you improve your mental health, what your mind needs more than anything to keep your results going is hard evidence that what you're doing actually works. There is no better evidence than seeing the results you want to see.

Your new, prosperous mind

Once you've improved your mental health, you simply keep repeating what got you to that improved state. Keep meditating, journaling, exercising, whatever you did to improve your mental health, then keep maintaining your beliefs.

It is a bit of a journey to get to this state, but once you get here you will love yourself for it. The grass is greener on this other side, and you have the power to cultivate it within yourself.

- Karl