147: You Are Not Your Past: Use the Debox Method to Remove Self-Doubt, Anxiety, Shame and More with Mindset Expert Jay Roberts

Robert Plank: Our very special guest today is Jay Roberts. Jay's the founder of this thing called Deboxing. It's a revolutionary self-help method that will free your mind from trauma, anxiety and emotional hangups and stress, leaving you free to live your life, have inner peace and be the real, more confident, happier you. I'm down for all of those things. Those things all sound awesome. How are things today, Jay?

Jay Roberts: They're really good, Robert, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Robert Plank: I'm glad you're here. Could you tell everyone who you are and what makes you different and special?

Jay Roberts: Wow, yes. Us English, normally not very good at sort of tooting our horn so to speak.

Robert Plank: You're all about the self-aggrandizing, right? Self-deprecation.

Jay Roberts: That's kind of our way isn't it, the Brits. We tend to hide behind screens a little more. My name is Jay Roberts. I am 44, currently as we're recording this. I'm married. I've got two children. A son who's nine and a daughter who is seven. I've kind of ended up in this field not by design actually, but I was in the home business field for a long time. The fact that you're kind of talking to home business owners resonates with me because I've done a lot of that stuff. Really, over the years, have ... I always kind of fell short. I was kind of pushing. I had some mini-successes, but kind of always fell short, like invisible shackles holding me back. It was that that lead me to kind of stumble upon this natural ability that we all have that's kind of changed everything for me in a short space of time.

Robert Plank: What natural ability is that?

Jay Roberts: We all have a natural ability to psychologically self-heal. An ability to remove the root cause of our emotional struggle. Let's face it, as home business entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it, the self-doubt, the naysayers, the peer group, the wife or the husband don't quite believe what you believe. There's always those elements of doubt where you just keep on doing yourself, almost like you're proving everybody right.

I think in the end when you're looking to try and to make a go of something, make a success, of course, we talk about mindset. The moment I used to hear mindset, I used to switch off. I don't know how you feel about like the term mindset. What do you feel about the term?

Robert Plank: It was something for where, I don't know, like five or ten years at least I would always hear about this mindset thing. I'd think, "Oh great, that's like Tony Robin stuff or there's going to be some guy shouting at me or telling me to jump up and down." As soon as I started listening to some of it a little bit, I didn't go crazy, I just kind of used it like every couple of weeks. If I felt like I was kind of in a little bit of a slump or could use a boost, it was crazy. I think that what I had to do was get to the point where I could accept all the ... almost like the borderline hokey stuff, the foofy-doofy stuff. Once I was able to kind of take that in, then it's something where I go back to that, not everyday, but every few weeks if I need either a boost or to get back to being a happy person I guess.

Jay Roberts: I think the problem is a lot of it ... like I call it woo-woo fluffy stuff. A lot of in this kind of law of attraction, thoughts become things. This whole genre that's kind of swept the home business, the network marketing or multilevel marketing, whatever you call it, the entire industry has become consumed by a lot of this mindset stuff that really for most people doesn't really make any difference. They end up feeling more frustrated. Of course, positive thinking. Research now proves that it actually does more harm than good for most people.

Robert Plank: Why is that?

Jay Roberts: Because you've got a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. The unconscious is where everything is stored, your past events, all the things that have affected you are stored in the unconscious. If those things are too big, you can't just positively talk over the top of them and expect it to take. It just doesn't work, so people are using affirmations, and then it's not really making them feel any better. There kind of this dialogue with themselves is, "Well, what's wrong with me? Why aren't I feeling any better? Why is this working for other people and it's not working for me?"

The truth of it is that most people are going out with an overly positive persona, and it isn't really working for them. They're just kind of pretending that it is and pushing through. The research now just shows that more people go backwards than they do go forwards when they're using positive affirmations because their unconscious baggage just doesn't believe what you're saying to it.

Robert Plank: It's like they have the anchoring wrong or whatever? They have the affirmations as maybe at first to kind of put a band-aid on the problem.

Jay Roberts: If you take a look at it, what I've learned is that we all experience lots of things. We're all born with a core box. Brené Brown did a fantastic TED Talk on vulnerability and another one on shame. What she did after eight years of research, she discovered everyone feels that same shame, feeling that they're not good enough and not worthy. We're all ordinary people are born with a core box if you will that says, "I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy." You're experiences, events, comments from parents, comments from peer group, losses on the sports fields, all of these things, these events, these negative events that support the core box delusion of not being good enough. Now they embed in your unconscious brain and they stay there. They continue to play you.

Over time, these things mount up and mount up. In the end, your belief in yourself just gets worse and worse. You keep trying to push through it, but you can't because these unconscious baggage boxes, they're going to stay there until you actually find out how you get rid of them. You can't just write over the top of them.

Robert Plank: Could you explain the box concept and how that works?

Jay Roberts: For me, I always found it difficult with a lot of personal development and therapy. I've had hundreds of therapy sessions over the years, couples and individual. Spent thousands of thousands of pounds. The thing that struck me was that nothing really seemed very easy to understand. It was very complicated. Psychologists used a lot of long terms. I found myself getting confused. In the end, you know what? I just wanted it simple.

What I wanted is I feel this way, I want to feel that way. How do I get there quickly and easily? I came up with the term of boxes. I wrote it down two years ago, the summer of two years ago on a single sheet of paper. Just what it felt like when I was letting go because I'd already begun letting go of these boxes. I was writing down what it felt like and how I visualized it. The visual for me was that my brain, my unconscious brain was made up of corridors, cupboards, and in each cupboard were boxes. In the boxes were stored past events that were continuing to affect my life.

You could find it ... Imagine walking down a corridor and you go into a cupboard. There's boxes there associated with insecure about your girlfriend or boyfriend, and then it's a way of actually releasing that emotion in those boxes. You then are free of the reactions that are linked to it. Boxes was just a way to make something more tangible and easier to understand, mainly for myself because I'm quite simple to be fair.

Robert Plank: I like simple. Nothing wrong at all with simple. Would you say that ... You have these boxes, and they're different issues to get rid of. Would you say that having all these things arranged in boxes helps you to have more focus. You could just solve just one of the boxes, solve just one of the problems, as opposed to trying to fix your whole entire self? Is that the advantage to it?

Jay Roberts: Yeah, you just kind of ... Once you kind of get the front end, I can cover that in a second, but your emotional reactions. This was the kicker, the bit that really like I worked really hard to find, the everyday way that we can just identify when we've got a box being triggered. What happened was that from experimenting on myself, and then sharing it with lots of other people is your daily emotional reactions ... A negative emotional reaction is linked to your boxes. Psychologists actually go as far to say that up to 90% or more of your emotional reactions are linked to your past.

I don't have a number. I don't know how they could necessarily quantify up to 90%. I just know that either a large portion or all of my reactions that were negative were linked to the boxes. That was kind of my direct line to get straight into them. You can go in now and literally ... Let's say you have a conversation with a friend on the phone. That friend says something to you. It annoys you. They kind of put you down, and it makes you feel a little bit anxious, a little bit annoyed at what they've said. Most people just kind of brush that off or have an argument or whatever, but what you can do now is just stop and say, "Hang on a minute. There's an emotional reaction. That's a box."

It's like you have this dialogue with yourself, so your consciously saying to your unconscious brain, "Okay, that's a box. Bring it on through." That acknowledgment that it is a box, it's kind of like letting the unconscious area of your brain say, "Okay, could you bring this up for me?" All of a sudden, it starts to come through for you, and then you get an opportunity to create a trigger release, which we can talk about in a second. Actually, then you can let go of the box or boxes that are associated to that reaction. When you've done that, you go back. If that friend does the same thing to you again the following week, you'll find that you won't be affected by it at all. You've removed the root cause of your reaction.

Robert Plank: Interesting, and I like that a lot because we were talking a few minutes ago about the mindset stuff. A lot of it is not very concrete, even like a lot of the law of attraction stuff. It's either not concrete or it's this so ... You've got to figure out all these terms and this whole kind of system. I like that, like you said, this whole box thing, it's simple. It's something where I can actually see like, "Okay, before I made this change, before I fixed this problem, I reacted in X way. After I ran through this process, now I reacted in Y way." That's kind of like I think with all this mindset stuff, there's like the intangible, the nebulous stuff, but then when it actually gets down to, here the couple of tools, now it's couple of tools. That's something that really helps me because now that's something that I could use over and over again, as opposed to just having some kind of vague idea there.

Jay Roberts: Exactly, and I think that's one of the other things is that it just makes something more tangible because you've got a reaction on one day. You've deployed Debox protocol, and follow that process. You create the emotional release, and then your system kind of reboots almost it feels like. You look where have my reaction changed? You suddenly see, "Wow, that actually worked. That actually got rid of that. I'm no longer feeling anxious about that particular thing or that particular even or what that person said to me."

Robert Plank: I like that. It's almost kind of like if you feel a certain way or you do certain things, it's tough to attack that problem because you have nothing to attack. As opposed to like if you said, "Okay, I feel a certain way. Now I'm diagnosed with this," then you say, "Now I know the thing that I have. Now I can attack it." Obviously, it's not the same thing. We're not talking about like a medical diagnosis, but that whole idea of there's actually a name for this thing. There's actually a pattern that I can identify of the way that I'm acting.

I know that I for sure have this. I'll have something random to me happen in a day, and it'll make me think back to like some random time when I was like ten years old, five years old when something happen. I end up kind of like having that resentment or whatever you describe. It's cool that now that I can kind of label it in a box. Now that's a thing that I can kind of attack.

You mention this trigger release thing. I hope it doesn't get too dirty, but what is this trigger release process?

Jay Roberts: The trigger is creating an emotional release. An emotional release for some may be crying. This has been an interesting one because of course for men especially, there's this kind of thing about men crying, but the good thing is that you can do this in a room on your own and no one needs to know. Actually, there's an art to crying. There's a way to do it that can bring about the removal of these emotional baggage boxes from the past. Brené Brown said in her talk, it's leaning into the discomfort instead of managing it and trying to positively override it. That's exactly true.

This is where it was counter intuitive. When I kind of stumbled upon it, it didn't make sense to me because everything I learned from being mentored by a psychotherapist for eight or ten years and all the sessions I had was that you kind of ... you didn't necessarily head into the big storms. By leaning into the discomfort, and then staying with the sobbing feeling, staying with it until it's completely emptied, what you're actually doing is getting rid of old trauma. That's one of the ways that you can create a trigger. Let me just ask you a question. Do you ever watch a movie and it moves you to tears, like you get a lump in your throat and watery eyes?

Robert Plank: Sure. Yes, sometimes, not often, but every now and then.

Jay Roberts: Here's the thing. If you're moved to tears by an event or something happening, this is where people need to lay down an preconceived ideas and just go with it, but tears, you being moved to tears, watery eyes, lump in the throat, that's boxes ready to come out. Movies has been amazing for me because I've been able to trigger so much baggage release by watching a movie that they movie me to tears. For anybody that remembers the '70s film, The Champ with Ricky Schroder and Jon Voight, that was one that just got me, father son stuff. Ended up being a fantastic trigger for me to get rid of quite of a lot of baggage that I was carrying around, feelings of inadequacy around my father when I was younger.

Robert Plank: You mention that, so like there's your father stuff. There's like you watch this sad movie and brings to light a box that you might have not otherwise known that was there. Is this the matter of kind of seeing what comes your way or is there like an inventory taking process where you figure out your boxes? Where do you start with all this?

Jay Roberts: The main thing is never try and figure it out on the front end. I've watched this so many times. The way that I can visualize it is our conscious mind, the thing that we do all our thinking with is like a pea, and the unconscious part of our brain where everything is stored, filed and hidden is like the galaxy. We can't figure out a galaxy issue with a pea brain. It's just not possible. I don't try and figure out what the issue is. To quote Bruce Lee, who's heavily influenced me and my life, it's kind of, "Don't think, feel." You follow the feeling. You don't think about what it could be. You're not trying to figure it out in the front. You just know you've been impacted. You know you've got an emotional reaction. You deploy box protocol. You follow the feeling. You look for the trigger to get the emotional release.

What often happens is as you're kind of having a bit of an emotional release, whether that be by sobbing or a bit of discomfort, it suddenly pops into your head exactly what it was about. Suddenly, it tells you on the way through. That's what that was. I found that when you try and figure it out in the front, you get caught in thinking, and you lose the speed and impact that you can actually get rid of this stuff with.

Robert Plank: When these boxes come in, is this just a matter of there's a box that you discover is there, you go through the process, you do the release. Is the box gone? Do some boxes take a while to go away? Is it end up being like a bunch of boxes? What happens there?

Jay Roberts: It could be one or two. It could be a whole stack of boxes. The main thing is is that when you've been moved into this emotional release, for most people, it does tend to be a little bit of either light crying or people can go into a real proper sob to let go. That's not the only way to release. I can talk about that in a second. The main thing is is that you stay with it. You stay with the feeling.

I think too many people kind of ... They may have a little bit of upset, and then they feel a bit better because they've released a little bit of the top pressure. They leave the cupboard and go on with their day. When actually, you want to stay with the thought. What created the upset? What created the trigger? You just give yourself half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour where you just sit with it and just let it keep coming through.

You'll find that each wave of emotion or each kind of reaction then it comes is kind of like one box. That's how I kind of found a way to count the boxes. If I had a little bit of discomfort and a few tears, then it stopped, that's one little box gone, but stay with the feeling. Stay with what triggered me. Keep thinking it over and over just laying on the bed, running it through my mind, and then I'd feel another one coming. There's a bit more emotion. It was kind of like they stack and rack sometimes. You get one release. It dies down for a few minutes, and then suddenly because you've stayed in the cupboard, up comes the next one. You just got to stay there until you feel it's all gone.

You do feel, suddenly, you kind of ... People talk about you feel like a weight's gone. That's what it feels like when you've got rid of the associated boxes to that particular event. It's like almost a breathe out and ... You feel a bit tired, but it's gone. You know you got it all because you will sleep like a baby that night. That's how you know you got all that cupboard out. If you have an anxious night's sleep, if you have a rough night's sleep, you didn't get it all. You need to revisit it.

Robert Plank: I keep hearing that from you that I guess the thing to keep in mind is to let it all happen. What it reminds me of is just like I think when I first got a cell phone, and I first got a smartphone in particular like an iPhone, I would just always be being interrupted constantly. I'd always be like, "Oh, phone's going off. Got to check a text. Got to send a text." For those few months, I didn't really feel much of anything in the way of emotions because I didn't have time to think. Every time that I started to have a thought about myself, something else would pop up to distract me. I think that what I've heard maybe five or ten times from you now is that you have to like keep going with that and keep letting it happen. Would you say that that's like a common problem that a lot of people they kind of just dip their toe in the water and they get a little bit of a result. They kind of back off and go into this safe, comfortable area?

Jay Roberts: Yeah, I think they do. I think also people like ladies, women more so than men, I think would admit to crying. They'll say they have a good cry and let it all out. They feel better for it. What it is is then they then leave the cupboard and don't stay with the feeling to actually get rid of the root of the issue. You've kind of got rid of the initial pressure, but not stayed with it.

I think it's people starting to get in-tune and understand their emotional reactions, and then starting to use your emotions in order to get rid of the root cause of the negative emotion. You reboot stronger. You're evolving inside. You're internal mechanisms are evolving and you're becoming freer with every cupboard that you remove. There's that popular phrase, "Fuel the fear and do it anyway." This kind of redefines that a little. It's like fuel the fear, use the fear, remove the fear, and then move on with comfort. I can give you a couple of examples of just that actually.

With phobias and things, they're passed on. If we have a fear of spiders or something, it's because we would've seen ... normally we've seen somebody that had a fear of spiders. They did it in front of us when we were younger, and suddenly, we adopted that fear.

Robert Plank: Makes sense.

Jay Roberts: I was in Spain. It would be the summer of 2014. No, 2015, sorry. There was a water slide. It was very high. It was a eight flights of stairs. It must've been a good 50, 60 foot up, big water slide. You come down on this kind of inflatable ring together, and then it kind of ... It's almost like a ... It goes up the other side like one sort of big kind of seesaw type of thing on this water slide. My son who was then seven said, "Should we go on that big slide, daddy?" My wife said to him, "You know Daddy's scared of heights. You'll have to go on your own."

I did. I had a massive fear of heights. I said, "Go on. You're going to go." He looked at me and he said, "No, I'm scared." I'm looking at my seven year old son and I'm right there. I'm like, he's going to take my fear because I've just put that in him. I've just put my box in my son. That would stay with him then. I'm like, "Right. Okay, no. I'm going to go." Natalie's asking, "Are you sure?" My wife said, "Are you sure?" I'm like, "No, no. I'm going to ..." If amplifying the sobbing releases the boxes, I wonder if amplifying my fear and my anxiety gets rid of the phobia.

We went. We got a couple of flights up the stairs. We're only sort of five or six foot off that ground. I'm holding my son's hand. I close my eyes. I imagine myself walking up to the top. I imagine myself leaning over the edge and looking down the 50 feet or whatever it was. I imagine myself hanging off of the end with one hand with just holding the bar. I'm pushing myself to the absolute extreme in my mind, but the anxiety I was feeling inside was exactly the same as it would've been if I was doing it. It's the great thing about visualizing is that it seems so real that the feeling is real.

I stayed with it. I just didn't try and calm myself down. I didn't try and, "I've got to manage." I just stayed with it. I let it just come through me and take me. All of a sudden, it started to die down. I felt a little pop like almost like it went from really amplified to like ... and then it dropped.

By the time I got to the top, bare in mind I've had this phobia since I was a little boy, it was about 50% less than it was at the start. We went down the water slide. We came around again, and I did exactly the same thing again. I felt, came through. I stayed with it, then it passed through, died down. Literally within 10 or 15 minutes and three goes on that water slide with my son, my phobia, by staying with the feeling and allowing it to come through me, I'd got rid of my fear of heights I've had for 37, 38 years. I got rid of it in 15 minutes. From that point on, I'd actually stopped that going into my son.

Robert Plank: It didn't just help you, but it helped your son too.

Jay Roberts: That's our responsibility as well. We're entrepreneurs, and we're trying to make a go of a business, a home business or whatever, but you're passing your stuff on unconsciously to your children. All of your unconscious behaviors, their unconscious is picking up on it, and they're taking it in. None of this, everyone's oblivious to it. It's no one's fault. It just is the way it is. The more you can kind of recognize this and get this connection with your two selves, your little conscious self and your huge unconscious self, and start to remove your emotional baggage boxes, then actually what happens is the great consequence of that is that you're not passing that stuff onto the people you love the most, your own children.

Robert Plank: That's some pretty powerful stuff. Could you tell us about ... I mean, we've been talking this whole time about this method, the Debox way and all of this kind of stuff. Could you tell us about how you've put this all into a book and about all that kind of stuff?

Jay Roberts: Yeah, sure. I mean, the book title, the book is called The Debox Revolution. I've got the book is just about finished. It's going to go for a release on October the 1st. I've got a coaching support form, so I can be there personally to help people get the idea and get them into this new level of emotional awareness, ultimately emotional self-reliance.

What I also wanted to do with the book is I wanted to kind of do good with it as well, and because Bruce Lee was a heavy influence to me, not just in the martial art, but in his philosophies, but his belief was ... He created his own fighting system that you should be able to win a fight really quickly. Be direct, no wasted energy, no fancy moves, just get the job done. Really, from a mindset personal development point of view, that's exactly what Deboxing is. It's that Bruce Lee. It's just win it quickly. Get the job done. Be direct.

I've actually partnered up with the Bruce Lee Foundation for book sales for the USA and the rest of the world. All of the book profits are going to be going to the Bruce Lee Foundation because they are dedicated to helping people become the best they can be and honestly express themselves. That's a perfect fit for me for somewhere to take the book profits.

Robert Plank: Could you tell everyone where to find that book and tell them about ... and if you have any other websites, all that good stuff?

Jay Roberts: You'll find everything now it's kind of come into one website. Literally, I've just finished, and I can take ... We're in beginning of September. I can take pre-orders for the book now. It's debox.co. That's debox like detox, so D-E-B-O-X, dot, C-O. You literally will find everything there. The book is there. I've got an online course with quizzes and everything coming within the next couple of weeks as well. The coaching forum is there. Actually, anybody can find anything out about me from that site.

Robert Plank: Debox.co, so thanks for coming by the show Jay. As we've said, I think we're both kind of on the same page about this. A lot of the mindset stuff like learning it, trying to go about and find out the old way of fixing your inner stuff kind of just for me and everyone else I know, it leads to this whole rabbit hole of confusion, just not really getting to the root of the problem as you say. I think that this Deboxing thing is a really cool life skill that everyone needs. The water slide example especially, that was super crazy. It all makes sense. I think that from what we've been hearing is just everyone is just afraid to let things play out and afraid to embrace the fear, embrace the anxiety, embrace the doubt, all that stuff, so this Deboxing thing, even though at first look it seems really simplistic, the more you get into it, it seems super powerful. Freaking awesome stuff. Debox Revolution, debox.co. Thanks for coming by the show Jay.

Jay Roberts: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.