To Change the Way You Live, Change the Way You Think
The following is adapted from Self-Assurance by Jeremy Amyotte.
All I ever wanted was not to struggle. But struggling seemed to be in my DNA, as if it was my predetermined destiny. I thought little of myself as a young boy, and it only got worse as I grew older. Whether I was learning something new, interacting with people, or just generally trying to get through life, nothing came easy to me. I felt alone because everyone around me appeared to have what it took to accomplish what they wanted, while I was stuck wondering why I wasn’t better, why life wasn’t better. Struggle was all I knew, and I hadn’t the slightest clue how to break through it.
I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, as the youngest of three siblings, whom I’m close to. My parents started their family at the ripe young age of nineteen. Though they were young, they were loving and respectful, and neither ever said or did anything to intentionally hurt us. My mom was a wonderful homemaker, and she made all three of us her main priority. She did her best to keep us active and socialized, and she encouraged us to follow our passions. Dad was the good-looking guy who could pick up any sport and play like a pro. He was also a great salesperson, filled with charisma and talent. I adored being in his company and felt like the luckiest kid in the world when our family was together.
For the first decade of my life, we lived like any other middle-class family. We enjoyed ski trips to the mountains, camping trips, family dinners, Friday movie nights, and all the other awesome stuff that makes up great childhood memories. But, as I would later find out, Dad had a secret. He struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine.
He managed to hide it well over the first few years. He functioned well enough to maintain his day-to-day responsibilities and reserved his habits for the more social hours of the night, thus hardly disrupting his work and escaping the attention of his family. But over the years, he distanced himself from the house, and the family time that we all cherished so much began to fade. When he was home, he wasn’t the same person I’d remembered. He was filled with anger, frustration, and intense stress. The happiness and laughter I recalled filling our home in the years past were replaced with distress and shouting — mostly from Dad toward Mom as he paced aimlessly through the hallways, lamenting about everything that was going wrong. I listened to all of it, and I felt his pain, as I could often hear subtle whimpers of grief cracking through the armor of his angry dialogue. The drug had taken over his life, and consequently, it took over ours too.
When I was thirteen, Dad was forced to move out. Mom was left to take care of us alone, and although she was doing her best, her authoritative “because I said so” parenting style didn’t mesh well with my rebellious nature. Within a year, I moved out too.
I first moved in with my dad, as he had a condo on the other side of the city. The fridge and pantry were completely empty, and the furniture was minimal. He just had a bed and nightstand in his room, then an old, lumpy couch, a coffee table, and an old television in the living room — the kind that was shaped like a box, with bunny ears that you had to adjust in order to keep the picture from scrambling. None of that mattered much, as Dad forgot to set up an account for electricity, and we eventually lost power. It was as if he had started moving in, but then quit halfway and abandoned the place. Hanging out in a dark, half-empty condo with nothing around me got old fast.
Cell phones weren’t a thing yet, and we didn’t have a landline, so it left me quite isolated. I also didn’t have any money, and neither did Dad. Besides, I had only seen him once in the time I had stayed there, so even if he could manage to spare a few dollars from his habits, I wouldn’t have had the chance to ask him for it. Somehow, I found ways to scrape enough money for a bus pass and to keep the kitchen stocked with bread, peanut butter, and jam, which provided me with my daily three meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I ran out of those food items, I took an earlier bus to school. I would stop at my mom’s house on the way to sneak some food from her pantry while she was at work. I didn’t think she would mind. Even though I wasn’t living with her, I was sure she would still want me to eat.
I could handle the isolation and the lack of resources, as I thought it was a fair trade for my freedom. Every evening, I would walk across the street to the pay phone inside a mall to call my friends and girlfriend. That was until a kid got shot in the mall. That mall always felt like an unsafe spot where I shouldn’t hang out. It had a grocery store and a few dingy retail shops. Otherwise, it was just a spot in a bad part of town for all the bad kids to hang out at after school. I didn’t feel quite as comfortable there after the shooting, but I didn’t want to spend more time than I had to at the condo. Instead, I started hanging around with friends, inviting myself to their parents’ homes, and loitering until they’d ask me to leave.
My dad eventually told me that I had to move back in with Mom, as he knew his condo wasn’t a good place for me to live. I obliged and moved back home. But that lasted only a few weeks, as I just couldn’t get along with my mother. So I packed my schoolbag full of clothes and moved again. I stayed with friends in their parents’ homes until I was no longer welcome. Then I would move to another friend’s house until their parents asked me to leave too. If I had nowhere to go, I would move back in with my mother, but it never lasted long, as I would quickly be reminded that we just couldn’t live together.
Over the years, I continued to struggle. I barely finished high school and went straight to working jobs I wasn’t good at with people I didn’t get along with. I started a business that never made money but left me with six figures of unsecured debt before I turned twenty-one. I had nothing to show for it and no income to pay it back. I was ashamed of my body. I wasn’t good with girls. I had a short fuse and dealt with anger and frustration on a daily basis. I wasn’t articulate, and I cowered if any attention was on me. For as much as I wanted to be seen for who I dreamed I could be, I didn’t want to be seen for who I really was.
I constantly changed everything in my world while still trying to figure things out. I moved to at least thirty homes in a ten-year span, putting my footprint on every area of the city. I changed jobs, found new friends, and experimented with new substances, but the struggle always followed me. I couldn’t fucking get away from it, though I sure kept trying. Eventually, I stumbled upon some advice that set me on a different path. My outside world didn’t change that instant, but my thinking did. Then, little by little, life started to improve until, eventually, I was living in a completely different world and I’d become a completely different person. I became quite literally addicted to my own psychology — to how my thinking affects my life. I never ignored what I thought and felt, but I learned to turn negative emotions into positive and productive outcomes. The advice I heard came from a CD recorded by my business coach, Richard Robbins. This introduction to a new way to look at life was the seed of a truth I couldn’t ignore. I listened to it over and over until it registered so deeply that it rooted itself as my default way of thinking, pushing out the old ways — the ones that contributed to the struggles and pains I was trying to get away from.
A Common Experience
It turns out that my insecurities are common. Many people have been through much more, and many have been through less. Each one of us is on our own inimitable journey, and despite that, it took me a long time to realize that the inner challenges I faced weren’t exclusive to me. Nobody’s are. Our experiences in life aren’t all the same. We each experience our life challenges at different intensities for different reasons, but every emotion and thought that you and I have felt has also been felt by another. This is what connects us as humans. The trial we face is to find ways to work through our thoughts so we can turn our struggles into genuine successes. Our ability to do so is really the only thing that separates us, and the good news is that everyone is capable of it if they allow themselves to trust the process.
I’m not an expert in the field of self-assurance. I don’t study it for a living, and I have no official credentials that qualify me to speak about it. In fact, I have no formal degree in anything. I was barely seventeen the last time I stepped foot in a school classroom. But I am an active student, learning as I move through life, studying others, and reflecting often. In doing this, I eventually found a way to become someone that my younger self would never have imagined possible. I found a way to escape the mediocre life I thought I was doomed to live. The road wasn’t paved with sunshine and roses, but I learned to turn my deepest fears and insecurities into the very sources of my success. It’s not what I have that I’m particularly proud of, but who I’ve become, the people I’ve attracted into my life, how I feel, and how I learned to deal with the way I feel. I have come to realize that I’m capable of achieving anything I truly want, and it’s a stark contrast to the person I used to be and the life I used to live.
To learn more about how you can take control of your own life, Self-Assurance is available on Amazon.
Jeremy Amyotte is an author, an entrepreneur, an investor, and the leader of one of the highest-producing real estate sales teams in his territory. More importantly, he is a father, a husband, a friend, and a mentor. He is also an amateur musician, an athlete, an animal lover, and a passionate student of life and human psychology.
