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In this episode of "A Changed Mind," David Bayer dives deep into the true purpose behind life’s challenges and childhood traumas. Challenging the belief that early wounds hold us back, David introduces a five-part framework, suggesting our souls intentionally choose difficult beginnings as resistance training for personal growth.

David explores the ideas of soul contracts, misunderstood expectations of unconditional love, the pattern of outsourcing self-worth, and ultimately, the path to discovering divine love and restoring wholeness.

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Available on Amazon: A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness, Rewire Your Brain & Reengineer Your Reality

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What We Explored This Episode

00:01 Reading Your Life & Childhood as Curriculum

06:08 The Five-Part Soul Contract Framework

12:44 Conditional vs Unconditional Love & Outsourcing Self-Worth

18:13 Discovery of Divine Love & Restoration of the Self

Memorable Quotes

"You were born into an environment that was designed to give you the exact opposite of what you actually came here to become."

"Transforming that trauma is how you become who you came here to be."

"As traumatic as they might seem, the things that happened to you happened for you; when you scrutinize what actually happened and look at who you've become today, you could never become the person you are without those things happening."

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Most people feel lost in their life. They look at the bad things that happened growing up, their early childhood traumas, the wounds from their parents, and they assume those things are holding them back from being successful and figuring out what they're meant to do in life. A decade ago, I thought that too. I was a drug addict with two homes in foreclosure and a bunch of baggage from my childhood. But fast forward to today, and I built a $50 million business, a podcast with over 3 million listeners a month, helping people just like you. Here's what I've learned along the way. You and I, we've been getting it backwards. You weren't born into the wrong family. In fact, your soul chose this setup. And the setup is this. You were born into an environment that was designed to give you the exact opposite of what you actually came here to become. If you came here to be wealthy, you were born into a family where there was barely enough. If you came here to be confident, then someone had to steal your confidence. You, when you were a kid, if you came here to live in unshakable faith, then life brought you lots of reasons to doubt yourself. That trauma your parents or someone else in your family handed you, that was an agreement signed before you even came. Because transforming that trauma is how you become who you came here to be. So this episode isn't really about purpose. It's about learning to read your own life. Because once you learn how life actually works, the path to fulfilling on your full potential becomes obvious. This is your life finally explained.

Welcome to a Changed Mind. A journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth, and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture, and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools, and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity, and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a Changed Mind.

All right, guys, what we're going to be talking about today is how to read your own life correctly. Because the wounds, the parents, the early traumas, those things are not the reason reason that you're stuck. They're actually the curriculum. That's the resistance Training that life set you up for in order to achieve your full potential and become who you came here to be. And so when you understand the structure of how your soul incarnated, what you came here to do stops being a mystery. And a lot of people feel like they're not good enough or we find ourselves people pleasing, or we compare ourselves to other people. Can you relate to this? Am I the only one? So in this episode I'm going to break down all of that so you understand why you do what you do, which we are all doing, and how this bad behavior or these behaviors that were formed during your childhood are actually part of the process of you becoming more powerful than you could ever imagine. So when I'm working with my high performing clients and entrepreneurs at some point in time, we realize that almost all of us have some form of resentment towards our parents. Even if you grew up in a great environment as a kid, you weren't physically abused, you weren't sexually abused. Almost everybody has resentments towards their parents. And the reason for this is because our parents were the ones who installed most of the early age programs. You know, most of your limiting beliefs, your quote unquote childhood traumas, they happen before the age of seven, as your nervous system is still really beginning to evolve. The brain is going through this massive developmental phase. And so you are assuming these programs. A program might be like money is hard to make. A program might be I can't trust people. A program might be I'm not worthy or I don't matter. And we receive these programs from our parents. And then as you start getting into personal growth in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you find that some of the limiting beliefs that you have are easy to transform, and some of them are harder to transform. One of the things that we've discovered after 10,000 coaching conversations is some of the more deep rooted limiting beliefs, or as you start calling them things like traumas, they're bound by resentment. So just think about it for a minute. Most of your beliefs were formed in relationship with someone else. And so if you're trying to get rid of a limiting belief, but you're still holding on to the person who gave you that limiting belief through this mechanism called resentment, you can't get rid of the limiting belief. It's like a cord that connects the two of you. Until you let go of the person, you can't get rid of the limiting belief. And so a lot of people hit a ceiling in their life. It could be a ceiling in their income, a ceiling in their business, they run into a health challenge, repeating relationship challenges. And you start to realize, wow, everywhere I go, there I am. And I've got this limiting belief that just won't seem to go. More often than not, it's tied to a resentment. And most of our beliefs were formed with our parents. So we've got a lot of cleanup work to do with mom or dad or the absence of mom or dad. And so as you start to get into looking at resentments, I'll use myself as an example. You know, I really. I struggled with, and still am challenged by worry, feeling like I don't know how to do things right, feeling like I'm going to do something wrong. And as I've done the work, I can see exactly where I got that. Like, my mom was told by her mom that she was worthless. So my mom never felt good enough. So I learned that behavior from my mom. My mom and my dad were a perfect match. My dad was extremely academic, intellectual, but not particularly emotionally intelligent. And so a lot of times he'd point out things my mom was doing wrong. So, again, a perfect mat. My mom felt not good enough. My dad was critical. And so I also received that sort of critical judgment from my dad, which was, again, perfect for feeding into what I learned from my mom, which was that I wasn't good enough and I didn't know how to do things right. So as those programs, as I felt like they were holding me back, especially in my early 40s, like after I got through my drug, my alcohol, my sex addiction recovery, and I really started getting into personal growth. I'm like, shit, man. I'm having these repeating patterns in my life, and it's because of this core belief that there's something wrong with me and that I'm not good enough. And I tried to transform those beliefs, and I had a really hard time. It was much easier for me to actually transform my beliefs about time or about money or about trusting other people, because those weren't deeply rooted in my relationship with my parents. But I wasn't able to transform what I would call my core program until I started getting into forgiveness work, until I really started looking at the judgment I had over my parents and the anger that I had for not only what I experienced as a child, but also for feeling like they gave me this shit and I had to carry it around for the rest of my life, and it was holding me back. And so through the forgiveness work that I did, I came to understand that actually this was all set up, and I Want to share this setup with you because it's going to make so much sense for your life. I don't care who you are, I don't care where you're at right now. But it's important to understand. I've got a five part framework that I'm going to share with you that's going to give you so much context. I want to start with number one. Number one is the Soul Contract. So what is the Soul Contract? I know this might sound a little woo woo, but just stick with me here because the whole framework is going to just clarify so much for you. The soul contract is this. You came here to become something. It was very intentional. What I believe is that you've lived many lives. So you've come into the body and you left the body, come into the body, left the body, incarnated and left. And in each life you have certain experiences, you learn some things, you become something greater as a soul. But through the process of an individual life, you decide based on that previous life what you want to learn and become in the next one. So let's say, for example, in a previous life, there was a lot of mistrust that you experienced. So in the next life, you'll choose to come in to learn trust. But as you come into the next life, meaning as you came into this life, if you came here to learn trust, you'll be born into a family where that trust was violated. If you came here to be confident, you'll be born into a family where your confidence will be taken from you. If you came here to be abundant and prosperous, you'll be born into a family where there was never enough. That's the Soul Contract. And mom and dad are going to be for you what they need to be for you in order for you to have the possibility of becoming what you chose to become in this life. And you can think of it as resistance training. So the way that you actually become stronger in your character, in your quality, in your soul, in what you want to become, is by actually working through the opposite of it. And that just sort of makes sense. You know, there was a movie called Evan Almighty where Steve Carell is told by God, who played by Morgan Freeman of course, that he needs to build the ark. And so Steve Carell starts building the ark and it starts building an incredible relationship with his sons because they're building the ark together. Well, his wife at the beginning of the movie had just wished that he would have a more a better relationship with their children because he was a very Busy politician. And so she actually got what she asked for. And she's sitting at a diner, and Morgan Freeman shows up, and she's all distraught because all over the news is this crazy man who's building the ark for the flood, which is her husband. And Morgan Freeman says, hey, how you doing, sweetie? And she says, well, I'm having a rough day. And she said, why? And she said, well, because that's my crazy husband there. All I really wanted was for my family to be closer together. And Morgan Freeman has this great line. He's like, sweetheart, how do you think you get what you want from God? You know, if you want to be courageous, do you think God gives you courage or he gives you opportunities to have courage? And so it's such a great line, because what that implies is the resistance training opportunities to be courageous activate the courage within you. And so whatever you came here to learn, the absence of it in your childhood was the opportunity for you to actually grow through that. It was the seed for your greatness. It's important to understand this because a lot of times we blame our parents for what happened. I can blame my parents for making me feel like I'm not good enough or that I don't know how to do things right, but really, that was something we agreed to before I even came. Now, you could say, but, Dave, I didn't agree to the alcoholism I experienced with my dad or my mom. I didn't agree to the physical abuse or the sexual abuse. But I'm not saying we condone this activity in the soul contract. What I'm saying is I would invite you to look at your life and to see who you've become as a byproduct of your childhood traumas. Because what you'll see is that that which you love the most about yourself was actually a reaction to what you experienced in your childhood. It was a compensation. You became stronger as a result of what occurred in your childhood. So there was a soul contract. And what's also helpful in understanding this, when I look at my mom and, like, what she gave me or what she did to me, in order for her to actually give me such a strong feeling of me not being worthy, she had to actually receive so much of that from her mom. You know, I heard the story of my mom's mom. My mom's mom told my mom she wishes she was never born. She was this angry woman who escaped Nazi Germany. She lived in. Well, she lived in Latvian. So she escaped during the German invasion throughout Europe. And so she was this Angry, embittered woman. That's who my grandmother was. She was always very sweet to me. I mean, I only knew her till four years of age. She ended up, you know, dying of cancer, probably because of the unmetabolized anger inside of her. She passed that on to my mom. So you think about my mom's agreement was, I'll go in and I'll be born to this angry woman. I will carry this trauma of not being good enough my whole life, and I'll never transform it because my mom's not going to transform it at this point. My mom's 78 years old. I will do that to give it to my son, knowing that he's going to be the torchbearer for our family and for this trauma. He'll transform it, and then he'll be able to help millions of people through the work that he's gonna do in the world. So these are the soul contracts. They're hard to understand. But the first step to understand, if you wanna make sense of your life, is that the things that happened to you weren't actually happening to you. They happened for you. As traumatic as they might seem, they happened for you. When you scrutinize and you interrogate what actually happened and you look at who you've become today, you could never become the person that you became today without those things happening. And the person that you're becoming today is the person you wanted to become in this life. Now, if you're earlier on in the journey and you're still not yet processing or transforming this sort of trauma seed, you may not have that perspective yet. Dave, you don't understand. I don't like anything about who I am today. Like, I'm constantly anxious and I'm struggling with financial insecurity. I understand we're all in different chapters of the journey. That's how I felt 10 years ago as well, too. But I can tell you, looking backwards, I can see that this was by intelligent design. So, number one, the soul contract. Number two, what ends up happening as children is that we have the misunderstood expectation. Number two is the misunderstood expectation. The expectation is that our parents should love us unconditionally. You know, and I. I understand this. I have a three and a half year old now, right? He's a toddler and we're able to communicate. We have such a good time. He expects unconditional love from me. And you can just put yourself in the place of a child or even remember maybe what it might have been to a child. Of course you expect unconditional love from your parents, but this is the misunderstood expectation. Again, it's part of the setup. This is how life works. Our parents could not give us unconditional love. No parent could give their child unconditional love. Because your parents are conditional. Our parents are conditional. They have the conditions of time, the conditions of money, the conditions of their relationships, the conditions of being a single mom or a single dad, the conditions of work and having to, you know, provide for the family, the conditions of unprocessed trauma. Right? Our parents had their own traumas. So our parents were very conditional. They could only love us according to their condition, and they loved us exactly according to their condition, which is why many of us received, by anyone's account, an inadequate level of love or quality of love from our parents because it was based on their condition. And so, as a byproduct of not receiving unconditional love from our parents, the conclusion we came to was, there's something wrong with us. My mom or my dad would have loved me unconditionally if I had been better, if I had been good enough. And so this is actually where the seed of not enough is born. Almost every single person I know, unless they've done a tremendous amount of work experiences, not being enough. Now you might look at some people and go, you know that super rich person over there who's super successful and drives all the sports cars and is a celebrity in their own right. They don't seem like they feel not enough. And it's like actually all their success is just a compensation for this unhealed not enoughedness. It's part of the structure of how life works. So every single one of us experienced a conditional love from our parents, while we expected an unconditional love from our parents. And the conclusion that every single one of us came to was that there must be something deficient in us. So this is the establishment of not enoughedness. And so, as a byproduct of that of believing we were not enough, due to the misunderstood expectation, we move to part three, which is the outsourcing of self worth. So humanity today, one of its most active activities is the outsourcing of self worth. You think about how nations export products. We are exporting our self worth and our self love on a daily basis. We get into relationships with other people that are not actually authentic relationships. They're relationships of exchange, what you could call horse trading. And so our relationships are, I will do certain things for you so that you'll approve of me, so that I can then approve of myself. This is how we are exchanging for self worth and self love. And you will be a certain way for me, and that way I will approve of you. And so I will give you permission to love yourself. This is where so much of the relationship dysfunction in the world occurs. Today, I'll share a brief story highlighting this for you. And I still find myself leaning back into this, although I'm much better. But three and a half years ago, four years ago, when Carol was pregnant with our son, she had asked me early in the morning, she said, hey, we have the OB GYN appointment. I just want to make sure you're on time for it. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'll be on time. And as is usually the case, I was not on time. I started getting in my head, I was thinking about something, I'm piddling around the house, next thing I know it's time to leave. I'm not ready to leave. I need an extra 10 minutes. Carol gets very upset and the meaning she gives that experience is you don't care about me or the baby. That's what she told me. Well, this was very upsetting to me because I absolutely do care about my wife and my unborn child and. But rather than just know that within myself because I have self love and self worth installed inside of me, I needed her to apologize. I either needed her to apologize or I needed to convince her she was wrong. Just notice if you engage in this type of behavior because I don't think I'm the only one here. Right. If you're following on YouTube, you can give me a comment if you relate to this or not. But I needed either her to apologize so that I could feel good about myself, or I needed to empirically prove that she was wrong. I needed to make the case in the court of David and Carol so that I could justify feeling good about myself again. We were walking around the mall later in the afternoon. We still weren't talking. We were with Carol's family and she had like a 15 year old niece. I mean, her niece was 15 at the time. Gabby and I'm. Gabby and I are having a sidebar conversation and she's like, are you okay today? I said, no, I'm upset. We had this argument this morning and you know, Carol's wrong and all this stuff and I'm, you know, making the case to Gabby that Carol should apologize or that Carol's wrong because I still don't feel good about myself because I don't have sovereign self love. I'M in the business of trading my self worth like we all are. And she was so cute. She's 15 years old and she looked at me after I told the whole story and she goes, who gives a shit what Carol thinks? You love you. I was like, man, there's so much wisdom in this 15 year old. But if you look at what happens in this third piece, we're outsourcing our self worth. We're in this horse trading, relational exchange so that we can feel good about ourselves because so many of us feel like we're not enough. Well, part four is the discovery of divine love. Because the fourth part of this process is that eventually that becomes exhausting. Eventually we're brought to our knees because we cannot manage the reality around us and get everybody to agree with us so that we can feel good about ourselves. And so oftentimes it's through depression or anxiety or broken relationship after broken relationship or drug use or alcohol use to try to soothe yourself because we're not able to fill this gap of, of feeling like we're not enough. Something brings you into a relationship with a higher power. For me, it was my drug, alcohol and sex addiction recovery. In recovery, I found my relationship with God. And it's a personal relationship. So it's a personal relationship that you start establishing with a higher power of your own understanding. Because it is. That's actually the only relationship that can offer you unconditional love. Because the God of your own understanding is the only unconditional love that exists. God is not conditional. God can't not love you enough because God's got to go to work. God can't not love you enough because God's got His own trauma. God can't not love you enough because God's having a conflict with Mrs. God, right? So, so there is an unconditional love available to us here. So we were right as children. We were wrong, though it was not our parents. It's a higher power of our own understanding. It's being in a personal relationship with the divine. And so again, all of this is by design. We can see that. Wow, God actually calls us back to him or to her through this dysfunctional system or structure that's actually set up to allow us and to encourage us to become who we came here to be and to develop our character, develop our quality and develop our soul and to also re establish our love with the God of our own understanding. So this is the discovery and the establishment of divine love. And then part five is the completion of this structure, this hero's journey or soul journey, which is the restoration of the self. Because now that you realize, wow, I don't need to get love from other people, I can get it from my higher power. What you also start to realize is you can get it from yourself, right? As you stop seeking for self approval externally, you begin to approve of yourself in this structure of a relationship with my God and the values I live by, and a relationship with my myself. So now I'm actually, I'm good with me, I'm good with me and I'm good with God. And this is how you actually become complete. This is what a whole human being is. And so we begin as fractured because that fracturedness allows us to develop some skills and qualities and compensations that help us to become uniquely who we are. But it also calls us into an environment that is not sustainable so that we seek out a more sustainable relationship with reality. And in that process we heal ourselves, we get the love that we always deserved and we're solid within ourselves. So, so this is the structure, this is how life works in about 20 minutes that I wish I had learned when I was in school. So, you know, before we close out, I hope you enjoy me sharing this with you as much as I enjoyed sharing it. Because as I've understood, like nothing ever really went wrong. As egregious as some of the things that happened to me may have been when I was a child and when I realized that those things that happened to me are not holding me back, they're actually the resistance training that has allowed me to become who I am today. And as I stopped outsourcing my self esteem to others and started rebuilding my relationship with my higher power and then reclaiming my own sovereignty like love for myself. The byproduct of that is I've become clear on my passion, on my mission and purpose in life. I've started to make more money, I've started to heal myself physically, I've started to have better relationships. I've started to most importantly, enjoy my life more because I'm no longer caught up in this false reality that my parents did anything wrong and that I can possibly get self esteem and self love from other people and this disconnection between myself and all of reality or the divine. And so this has helped me to actually level set who I am and what I'm doing in the world and how to navigate on a daily basis through life. So if you love this episode and you found it was helpful for you, I'd love it if you paid it forward and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. If you're following along on YouTube and you haven't yet, absolutely subscribe. Come out with a different framework twice a week on all things related to life. And if you want to go deeper, absolutely check out the resources in the show notes of this episode. Lots of free tools, trainings, videos. You can jump on over to davidbear.com, subscribe to our newsletter, become a part of our community because this is not a Do it Yourself project. This is a Do it all together. So I love you so much. Thank you for allowing me to be here with you today and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David.

One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.David DavidBear.com you can find the link in the show Notes and subscribe to our newsletter A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released, along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind.

Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.