Discover the surprising truth about self-sabotage and hitting your upper limit. Join Andrew and Cat as they unravel the unexpected reasons behind why we sabotage our own success.

Brace yourself for a mind-blowing revelation about how we subconsciously limit our happiness and financial success. Get ready to uncover the hidden barriers holding you back from embracing positive changes in life. Are you prepared to be shocked by the real reasons behind self-sabotage? Stay tuned to unravel the unexpected truth and break free from your upper limits.

In this episode, you will be able to:

  • Unlock your potential by overcoming upper limit problems.
  • Discover how to stop self-sabotage and achieve success.
  • Learn effective techniques to adjust your financial thermostat.
  • Embrace positive changes and transform your life for the better.
  • Overcome personal growth challenges and thrive in life.

The key moments in this episode are:

00:00:00 – Understanding Upper Limits

00:03:00 – Embracing Success

00:08:55 – Financial Thermostat

00:09:38 – Practicing Acceptance

00:12:56 – Uncomfortable Acceptance

00:13:43 – Embracing Control and Illusion

00:14:26 – Being Careful What You Wish For

00:15:10 – Self-Sabotage and Upper Limits

00:16:26 – Living with Change

00:18:45 – Action Steps and Identity Shift

00:26:05 – Excitement for the future

00:26:13 – Farewell message

00:26:24 – Reminder for professional help

00:26:38 – Final message

Transcript
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Have you hit your upper limit and don't know what to do? It may not be what you think. Welcome to the five year you podcast, a show dedicated to helping you become the best version of yourself one day at a time. I'm Andrew.

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And I'm Cat, and we promise to keep it raw, real, and relatable.

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Are you ready to grow? Today's episode is called hitting your upper limit, and it's our intention for this episode. You discover what your upper limit is, why you may have it in place, and what you can do to get around it. How are you doing, Cat?

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Doing great. How are you?

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I'm good. This episode is going to hit home, I think, a little bit hard for me, and I'm a little nervous. As I record, I'm like, oh, you're not going to hold this together very well, but that's just me having an upper limit. So do you want to kind of explain what you view this as?

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Right. All of us have probably heard the term, like, hitting your limit, right? And when I hear that phrase, I think about me with my kids or something, you know, like, I think about me saying, like, I'm hitting my limit or like, I'm hitting my threshold. And I am very, very, very sound and noise sensitive, like sensory sensitive. And so I know what I'm hitting my, like, limit with that. And so we always think of it as, like, this kind of negative thing. Like you're about to just go. You're about to just explode or like, you can't take it anymore. But. And you brought this to me. You recently read a book, who's it by?

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Gay Hendricks. It's the big leap.

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Yeah. And he describes that you can actually hit your limit with the good things, too.

::ctually got that book back in:::

Give my kids the number, right? I'm like, mom, is that a ten? And you do not want me to go above that.

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Okay, so just so the upper limit issue is, uh. It's a little bit different than that. I think we all get when we're just exhausted or the kids are pushing our buttons or the boss is doing this or life has just kind of pushed us. That's easy to understand. And the coping mechanisms for that are, you know, taking time out, doing some deep breathing, meditating, yoga, stretching, earplugs, you know, going for a drive, like kind of giving yourself a reset point is kind of the idea of that when you are hitting your upper success limit, that's a lot different for me. I am very much go, go type of person. I've come to the realization that being happy isn't something I'm going to get by. Go, go, go. It's something that I just have to embody. And embodying it, I can do that, I can live it. And when I'm trying my best to just be calm and live in my happiness, live in my joy, I have a really hard time with that. I am so used to because of my life being frantic, living in a bit of trauma or it's not so much what I live in now, but it's friction, I think is maybe the right word for it, that when I don't have it, I struggle. And you had a great thing, though. I want you. I hopefully you're willing to share with everyone. It's being able to live with this new level of. I'm going to call it success because I really do view that it's like it's an internal level of achievement, but then feeling worthy enough to live and to feel that you're safe enough to live in it, in my case, and this upper limit, this kind of ceiling that you hit where you're like, it's literally feels like you want to get there, but you have to allow yourself to push through. So I think you had a really good insight today about upper limits and everything. If you're open to sharing it.

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I think that one thing we don't talk about enough, and I wish I had realized this sooner, and I have done this so many times in many different areas of my life, is that when things get good, I tend to self sabotage without realizing it. You know, it is a subconscious thing. It's not like I'm trying to mess things up. But to give an example from work, let's say the majority of my work, you know, we have all of our projects and all of our entrepreneurial pursuits. But my base income comes from being a financial writer. So maybe I'll get, like, a great new client, or someone will offer to pay me, like, a ton more than I expected. And maybe subconsciously I will self sabotage. I will procrastinate, or I will, you know, turn something in in the morning or be late. And it's because it is so uncomfortable for me that someone thought I was worthy of this price. Or that my writing was good enough to get into this publication. I have to really watch it. I didn't figure it out on my own. It's pointed out to me by a therapist. And it's hard. It's hard to realize that I do that to myself. A big thing that I'm trying to do now is learn how to be okay with good things happening to me. I think when you go through hard things, everyone listening to this has had some type of trauma or difficult thing, hard relationship or challenging childhood moments. Things that impact us and affect how we view ourselves. So when we're having these good things, you're dating someone new. You've gone, like, all week without yelling at your kids. It's like you're so used to, like, the chaos or the stress or the drama of it all, that somehow you do something without realizing it to make sure you go back to that equilibrium instead of embracing the good that you're in.

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Yeah, I can relate to that. The imagery that came to mind when you were saying that it's kind of like you're on a rough lake, and you've got to keep paddling, to kind of keep the boat balanced and going in the direction you want. And suddenly, when the winds change and the lake calms, you don't have to do that anymore. But you've gotten so used to trying to steady the boat that you really don't know how to settle into that new feeling. It's a very odd thing. And a lot of people are listening to this, and they're going to be going, okay, I get that. And other people are going to go, I have no clue what you mean. I want to meet you because you sound wonderful, Ben. But it's kind of like when you have a go go lifestyle, and then suddenly you get, like, an hour to yourself, and you're like, you could just sit on the couch, but you can't physically allow yourself to sit down because you've gotten so used to going, going, going, going. That the idea of quiet time in the middle of the day is unfathomable. And it feels more uncomfortable than the stress you have from go, go, go all the time. It's kind of like you almost have this. I don't want to call it faulty wiring, but you have this pathway in your brain that needs to be redirected to a different outcome. And to know that it's okay to do that, it's okay to get the big clients. It's okay to sit quietly when, like, you keep saying, all I want is calm. And you get it, and you're like, oh, my God, calm is, like, terrifying.

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Why is it quiet?

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Yeah. So then you go, you know, you turn the tv on loud, and you start making a meal that, you know, you don't know how to cook because you, your pots and pans are still in the box.

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You just want to insert the stress into your life because that's your default. And this is a very high level of self awareness that is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people because it requires you to look at yourself and to admit to yourself somehow, unconsciously, I'm messing up stuff for myself. And then you have to look at it objectively because, right, we're not supposed to have self loathing. We're supposed to, like, love our inner child. And you have to look at yourself and say, it's okay, you're not doing it on purpose, but you have to stop if you want to get to where you want to be. People do this a lot with money, too, you'll notice. Like, people get, maybe they want to earn more. They want to get out of debt, let's say. And they, like, pay it off. Or they get, like, a big check in their account, and they're so used to living paycheck to paycheck that they will self sabotage. They'll go and buy something bigger. They'll do something just to get back again subconsciously, because you're used to being in money stress. You're used to paycheck to paycheck. You cannot sit with the feeling of having ten grand in your account because that feels so foreign to you. So a lot of it is just like practicing sitting with the things, the quiet, the money, the calm.

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And this sounds so even when I'm listening to it, I agree with you wholeheartedly, and it's way harder. But I know people are listening to it and going, well, it must be nice to sit with $10,000 in your bank account or sit with the calm, you poor thing, you. But maybe that's part of your block, too, with regards to money. T. Harvaker, in his book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. This is the first time I'm actually citing something perfectly, by the way, and might be the last. So he talks about the financial thermostat and what it basically is, is that a thermostat, when you have it set to 72 or 22 for us Canadians, and you open up the window and it drops from 72 down to 62, you're going to have the heat click on and it's going to raise you up to 72. So in that case, your money drops. You're going to find ways to make money. That's an easy one. Harder one is when your financial thermostat is set to 72 and it goes all the way up to 80, which is the ten grand in your account in this case, and you don't feel comfortable with it, and the air conditioning clicks on and it lowers your money back down to that area that you feel safe in. So that's kind of what the upper limit is. It's just knowing that, like, first of all, bringing awareness to it is the first thing always. You know, the other part is, and Cat and I have played this game of, like, trying to gently bring it up to the other person when they're hitting the upper limit, we can both safely say it doesn't always go super well.

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Andrew's definitely, like, better at accepting, like, oh, maybe you're right. And I'm just like, no, I'm not. It's hard when you're, like, faced with the reality and like, and then later on I usually come back and I'm like, yeah, you were right. You were right. I was hitting an upper limit. It's challenging, you know, it's like all of us, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, it's because you like personal growth. You want to be become your best self. You know, our whole podcast is designed to help you become your best self in five years. And it's so easy for us to talk about, like, how to get happier. And if you're depressed, here's what to do. And if you're in debt, here's what to do. But so few people talk about how hard it is to accept when things are going well, when business is going well, you have to train yourself to accept that you're worth all of the things that are coming your way. I think another thing we do is, like, we're afraid of it leaving because we're like, oh, this can't last. If you had a chaotic childhood. And, you know, we're always attracted to what's familiar, whether it's good for us. Or not. Let's say you have, like, a chaotic childhood and you had lots of chaotic relationships and you meet someone really, really nice. You're like, oh, this can't be true. Like, the other shoes gonna drop? Or they probably, like, have a secret weird collection of, like, taxidermy frogs or something. You know? It's like, something's gotta be.

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I've told you that's a normal thing in Canada, but you're just never gonna believe me. Just kidding.

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But we can't accept when something's good. Yay. I don't even know where that came from, but I'm glad I got a snorkel.

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I'm just like, you just said that you had a frog collection. Well, folks, we all have our moments.

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And we all have our hobbies.

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Yeah, I do not. Just for the record.

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No, no, I did not get that real life example from Andrew at all.

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That's a real life example for you. That's scary. Anyway, go on.

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No, but it's so hard for us to accept when things are good and calm and especially if you've had a chaotic beginning or, like you said, some type of trauma or something like that, when things are going good, it makes us incredibly uncomfortable. And for me, what I've learned is, like, the self sabotage, the unintentional self sabotage is a coping mechanism. And it's because I'm trying to control the outcome. If I bring the drama, if I bring the stress, then I'm the one creating it. So I'm in control of what's happening as opposed to sitting and waiting anxiously for the other shoe to drop. I might as well, like, count myself out. That way I'm in charge of the outcome and, of course, control and an illusion. None of us are in control, but we're not talking about things that we're consciously doing. We're talking about unconsciously doing.

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No, and that's young Catherine coming in, going like, I need to make sure that I'm not triggered or hurt or whatever. So I'm going to go do this thing because I need to. A good example of this is just be careful what you wish for. You just might get it. People will hear that and go like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, well, if you get what you wish for, then you have to learn how to live with it. So it's multi dynamical. That's my new word, multi dynamical. Yeah, it's. It's that kind of day. I'll give you an example for myself. So last week I went to for Reiki. I harbored most of my tension in my shoulder to my neck on the one side, and I know it's there. I left and it was gone. And I was walking around and I think I even texted you saying, like, I think I feel good right now. Is this how people feel like when their body is not completely tense? Yeah, but I could feel like I've become really self aware of my, of my body. God, that sounds weird. I always could feel my brain wanting to, like, tense up and part of it going like, no, we're gonna keep calm. We're gonna keep calm. Within 2 hours, I had self sabotaged. I picked a fight that I didn't need to pick. A canadian fight is you just don't say sorry as often, but unless you're in hockey, then it's a complete, then it's a full up fight. But I just had this weird sensation of, like, this doesn't feel right, and I felt so uncomfortable. Like, literally, physically, I felt uncomfortable, and I was struggling to get back to it. Now I know what it feels like. I'm trying to get back to that non stress point, but your thermostat kicked.

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On and you went back to the feeling that you were familiar with, which was having stress and pressure in your shoulder and neck.

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Yeah, because I've lived with it for so many years, and letting it go is not as simple as it may sound, because I think a lot of us are just like, you know, calm down. Yeah. Because that, that always works.

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That's helpful to say to someone.

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It's never worked in the history of time. It's the worst thing you can ever say to somebody. So when you have those moments, just bring that awareness to yourself. Go like, okay, I feel uncomfortable in this thing that I say I wanted. I have two choices. I can go back to how it was. I can stress myself out. I can cause chaos, panic, overspend, whatever it is, or. And this is the harder one. I can try to live with it and just get a taste of that feeling. You don't have to be perfect with it. You're not going to be perfect with it. So there you are. You're off the hook. But try to just experience that money in your account. Try to experience the calm, try to experience the peace, the love, whatever it is that you've said you've wanted and you've gotten the taste for. So that way you're able to give yourself that feeling and you can go back to it. At that point, we're feeling people. So when you get a new emotion, a new physical sensation, and you like it, you can figure out a way to get back to it. Sometimes we're just shown these things in the beginning to go, look, you can live without the shoulder pain. Look, you can live with calm, and then you wreck it because, you know, you hit the upper limit, but then you get to go back and go, okay, I really did prefer that. Now I have the contrast, which we've talked about in previous episodes, of being able to go, okay, I have the contrast of what I'm doing right now. I want to feel that more. This is how I got to it last time. Maybe I can get to it a different way. Maybe I can kind of ease into it. Maybe I just give myself permission to fail a little bit while I try to figure out this new feeling, this new financial state, this new calm. And when you give yourself permission to do it, you're going to grow into it easier than not bringing the awareness to it, just hitting your upper limit and going back to how you've always been, because you're listening to the show, because you do not want to be the way you've always been. You are looking to become the best version of yourself in five years. And we are here to help you. And we're telling you this upper limit is going to happen to you. And if you know that it's there, you can adjust around it. If you don't know that it's there, you are going to go build the business or have the relationship or whatever. And when you get it to exactly how you want to, you're going to get either bored, you're going to self sabotage, you're going to do something because you haven't done the inside work, you haven't figured it out. And that is what we want to avoid before you get there. So learning how to live with that is a big part of it.

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I would offer some action steps to the people listening. You know, how do you take this information? Now we've built awareness. What would be a good next step? I'll give you a few examples. Let's say from a money example, let's say you get tax refund, right? Or a Christmas bonus, or sometimes, depending on how you get your paycheck, sometimes maybe two or three months out of the year, it's a three paycheck month instead of a two paycheck month. And so many of us are already, like, calculating before it comes, if we know these things are happening, like what we're going to do with the money. Instead, try and let it sit in your account and try to become someone that is used to the feeling of having a little bit more money in your account and just sit with it. And if that made your chest tight or a little uncomfortable, it's a good sign you're hitting that upper limit, you know, before making the thermostat kick on and trying to think of ways to spend it and all this stuff, just sit with it. If you are in a relationship, you're married, and, like, you guys haven't nitpicked at each other in a while, you haven't argued. You're thinking to yourself, oh, my God, we've been getting along, like, really well. Do yourself a favor and don't say.

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That out loud and don't say, calm down.

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But, like, try to acknowledge, like, yeah, things are going really well. And before you kick the thermostat on and, like, pick a fight about the toilet seat up or something, think to yourself, like, this feels really good. This can continue. There's nothing wrong. It's okay for me to be safe. It makes sense that I'm getting along with my partner. We love each other, right? Or whatever it is you have to say.

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That was the goal.

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Try not to create a situation in which you kick on an equilibrium. You kind of fall back to old habits. Same thing with your work, your workouts. You're on a really good run with your workouts, right? You've been, oh, my gosh. This is the longest I've seen stuck to my workout routine. This is the long. This is the most days in a row I've gotten up to go run. Do yourself a favor. Don't let the thermostat kick on. Keep going with it. Make that your new normal, your new temperature.

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I think the weight one's one that I was just thinking about, too. Uh, with working out and stuff, I know for myself, you get to like that kind of. And I'll use air quotes here for goal weight. And then you're like, well, now what? And it's like, oh, I may as well go eat the bad foods for me and get back to, you know, so I can do something so I.

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Can lose it again.

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And I can lose it again.

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Exactly. Because what am I if I'm not worried about getting to my goal weight, what am I going to do to occupy my thoughts? I need to do something to mess it up so that I can get back on this hairy journey to lose the last ten pounds or whatever it is we do.

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Exactly. And I think that's one that people can probably. We can all maybe identify with a little bit is like, you get to that point, you're like, okay, well, now what? It's like, well, now you need to shift your identity from somebody who is wanting to achieve their ideal weight to that lives with their ideal weight. Your identity changes in that moment, and so you have the awareness. You have the awareness that things are going well or that you're at your ideal weight or whatever. You're aware that you might be hitting an upper limit and that it feels uncomfortable, and then you start to shift your identity around it. And that doesn't happen overnight. It can, but it's. It's rare, I find. So you want to be able to just go, okay, I'm a person that, you know, lives at their perfect weight. What does this person look like? I get to discover what calm Andrew looks like, what healthy Andrew looks like, what multi billionaire Andrew looks like. I'm going to put that out there. I mean, I may as well, right?

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Might as well.

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Might as well. So while we're doing this, it's like, now I'm gonna just see. Yeah, you know what calm me is, okay? To just read a book or to just sit quietly with my thoughts and not pick a fight, to feel the calm in my body and allow that calm to just be there. It's a lot easier when you are able to kind of give yourself that new identity to live with once you get it. So now you're not. You're not that person who goes paycheck to paycheck. You're that person that has a couple extra dollars in the bank account, whatever that amount is. You embrace that, and then you grow. Maybe you, you know, do it again. Yeah, you just. Again and again and again. And you're always changing, but that's. Again, part of the challenge is to understand that when you hit your limit, your ego might be going like, oh, we are not changing. This is so what I'm used to. And whether it's better for you or not, your ego doesn't care. It just wants to keep you the same. So I think that's a really good place to kind of switch over to our glimmers now.

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I think so, too.

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For you listening. If this is your first episode, at the end of every episode, we like to share a glimmer, and a glimmer is just that thing that makes us smile and happy and brings delight to our world. So, Cat, what's your glimmer this week?

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You know what I did that I don't normally do is I actually took my kids to a movie recently. Maybe like once or twice a year I'll actually go to the movie theater because very endorsy and opposed to, you know, loud things and crowds and such. But yeah, and you know what? They were so grateful and I think it's because we don't go all the time, so that when we go, I actually will buy the popcorn and the ices and stuff for them. And so like it's a treat for sure. And those two kids said thank you so many times for that. I was like almost taken aback. Like, they knew it was kind of a special thing. They know mom doesn't normally like the loud movie and all this stuff. And so they were really feeling. It made me feel so good. We saw if the imaginary friend movie. Yeah, it was cute. I mean, it was definitely like for them, you know, but my ten year old son doesn't want to see rom coms, strangely. So, you know, we saw the kid one, but no, it was good. It was a good outing and it was definitely like a good glimmer. Something different to do, for sure. How about you?

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I went to if on my own and I being told now that it was for kids. I'm just kidding. I didn't. I'm really grateful for the summer that's coming up. I feel like last summer was a little bit chaotic. And I feel this summer, I just feel like through the podcast and the things we're talking about, especially today's episode, that I'm just ready to embrace a new version of me. And I'm really excited for that version to come out because I feel that the tools that I've been gathering and everything, I'm just really excited for, uh, the rest of this year. Uh, and I know it's kind of not so much a glimmer, but I think sometimes to look to the future when you haven't in the past and felt excited maybe in the ways that a lot of other people do, when you're kind of like, I don't know what it's going to be like and everything. I think I've really come to embrace uncertainty, uh, a lot more than I ever used to. And I'm really grateful for it because I'm. I'm kind of like, what's the summer gonna bring? And I'm just kind of shrugging and going. I really don't know, but I can't wait to find out. Excited for the future right now, it's, it's pretty awesome.

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That's really great. I love that. I feel like that's such a good note to end on, too. It's happy.

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Thank you. Yeah, it's kind of the point, but, yeah, that's what we did. All right, everyone, you guys have a great week, and we'll see you next time.

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See you next time. Bye.

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Hey, one last thing. Don't forget to go to fiveyearyou.com future to start getting those emails from your future self. It will change your life.

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Hey, guys, quick disclaimer. We're podcasters on the Internet. If you need to seek professional help, please go see your healthcare professional.