Today, I’m going to be sharing a few steps that you can take to improve what I call reboot confidence. Oftentimes, when we try to end our behavior with pornography and masturbation, or other out of control sexual behaviors, we lose confidence. 

We lose confidence because of slips and relapses. We lose confidence because we lose motivation all the time. We’re doing really well but then we stop doing the things that we know are working and then we slip. 

We lose confidence because we always seem to have something come up in our life that causes us to slip. We feel as if we can never catch a break. Why does something so stressful always have to come up when we are trying to deal with our behavior?

I’m going to share a few simple steps to help you in this area.

1. Ask yourself, “Is this something that’s going to help or hurt my reboot?”

It is as simple as something like deciding whether that third drink is going to help or hurt your reboot. Many men don’t think about that. They just have the third drink and assume, “Hey, you know what? I’ll be able to control myself.”

Now you’ve got to ask yourself an honest question. It’s just like when you’re trying to stay on a diet to lose weight or body fat. Every time you eat, you’re going to ask yourself, well, is this going to get me closer towards my goal? 

The same applies to your reboot. This goes from the things you do to places you go to. It’s choosing to stay up for one more hour to watch a show, choosing to go out late at night, choosing to binge eat certain types of food. Maybe it’s the decision to watch YouTube videos for three hours in a row, choosing to sink into negativity for hours.

Ask yourself, “Is this choice going to help or hurt my reboot?”

2. Learn how to make decisions based on goals

When it comes to dating, when it comes to your environment and boundaries, learn to make your decisions based on goals. Don’t make them based on emotions. A lot of times guys will just make certain emotional decisions, right? Think about some of the emotional decisions you’ve made.

“I’m going to text this person because I feel this emotion.” 

“I’m going to skip this class or skip this session because this is how I feel.”

How you feel really is not relevant to what you have to do at that moment. I’ve mentioned this before: your emotions have nothing to do with what task is at hand. At that moment, you’ve got to learn to step past it and still complete the task and make that a habit. 

At the same time, that task needs to be based on a goal. So what is your reboot goal? And this decision you’re making, is it emotional or is it based on that goal? You will always find that you come back to a rational, logical place, which may not be as fun a place as your emotion was going to take you. 

3. Visualize the results of your decisions and follow through on them

Once you make a decision, especially with regards to your reboot, you need to follow through on it. You’ve decided that you’re going to get off social media for the next week. You’re going to delete all the apps from your phone. You’ll put a porn blocker on your device. You plan to go to bed at 9:30 PM every night. 

You need to first visualize the results of your decisions before you even start to act on them. See yourself as you start preparing for bed. Decide ahead of time that you’ll stop bringing your phone to bed. You’re going to stop using your computer with all the doors and blinds closed. You decide that keeping things open keeps you accountable.

Visualize how everything will look, smell, sound, feel, and taste. Have a vision of what that completed goal looks like for you. See yourself leaving your phone in your living room, going to bed at 9:30 PM, and then waking up refreshed and happy the next morning. Visualization also increases your confidence.

Then follow through on your decisions.

4. Don’t run away from your challenges

One of the things that I’ve learned in my years of coaching is that the men who are most successful at rebooting were the ones who didn’t crumble in the face of challenges. Challenges will always be an opportunity for them to grow because they understand that confidence comes from challenges.

It doesn’t matter what it was. I’ve had men who were doing so well in their reboots and suddenly their wife who was supportive for months or years, one day she just snaps and says, “I’ve had enough of this shit. Like I’m, I’m done with this.” And at the same time, their career got T-boned by something else that was happening. 

So now they have this career issue that requires almost all their energy and at home, this person that they love very much is drifting away. This person they care for, this person who is important to them might disappear.

Those are challenges and we often get overwhelmed. The best thing to do, though, is face it and embrace it. It can be as simple as sitting down and going, “I embrace this challenge.” You have to do what you have to do anyway. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be less painful, but it will probably become less overwhelming and it will definitely build your confidence. 

5. Consistency

There is no way that you are going to reboot and end your out of control behavior if you don’t build up some form of consistency. You do not have to be perfect every day but you have to be consistent. You want to reach a point where you feel off when you miss something in your routine.

For example, if I miss my workout, I know something is off. You could knock me out for four days and I would still wake up and go, “Yeah, I have missed many workouts. I don’t know how many, but I know I missed some, and I do not feel great.” 

That level of consistency is critical to ending this behavior. You were consistently jerking off viewing pornography and putting yourself in that situation. You’ve got to recondition your brain to do it. You’ve got to keep doing it till the entire reboot process becomes simple. Simple, but not easy. 

That means that just as you would come back and you would routinely masturbate to pornography, you’ve got to get to that same level with your reboots. You’ve got to wake up in the morning and do your recovery time. You’ve got to read the right books. You’ve got to visualize. You’ve got to do the exercises from the program. You’ve got to be consistent with it. 

The beautiful thing is that it takes a shorter time to step out of this behavior than it did for you to build it when you use our system.

6. Compete with yourself

You have to compete with yourself. This kind of relates to consistency, too, because you want to be better. When I talk about it taking a year and a half to two years to rewire your brain, it doesn’t happen passively. 

That happens when you take action. In 90 days we’ll get you to a point where many of these things are habitual. At the same time, as human beings, we always tend towards homeostasis. We will always get to a point where our brain and our body doesn’t want to change. It’s what’s comfortable.

But you must understand that the process of ending your out of control behavior involves a transformation. It involves your brain rewiring itself. So you cannot afford to have that process stall. One of the best ways to break out of this is to build a habit of competing with yourself.

Consider the areas you want to get better. Maybe you want to practice your meditation. Perhaps you want to get better at committing to a great sleeping schedule. You want to feel more alert and focused today than you were yesterday. I want to be more aware of my triggers today than I was last week.

Competing means that sometimes you might fail but that’s okay. You’re a competitor, right? So come out and keep doing it and you’ll get better and better and better. At this point, you’re rewiring your brain to move forward the better you get. As you continue, you’re building up all these wonderful skills that improve your reboot confidence.

7. Stop complaining to yourself and stop complaining to others

Oftentimes, we don’t verbalize how challenging something is, but we have a lot of negative self-talk. We complain to ourselves about waking up early. We complain to ourselves and say, 

“God, why do I have to have these filters?” 

“Why can’t I just be like a regular guy?”

“Why do I have to be in a group?”

“Look, there are all these guys out there who watch porn and enjoy it and have done so for years, why did I have to have porn-induced erectile dysfunction?” 

“Why did I have to be the guy who’s addicted to shemale porn?”

“Why is my marriage falling apart?” 

“Why can’t my wife be cool with me watching pornography?”

Basically, you’re bitching to yourself. Sometimes you’re bitching to others, but you’re mostly complaining to yourself. It’s important to change that negative self-talk. We have several modules on this in the Porn Reboot system but this is something you can quite honestly learn on your own, too.

8. Stop trying to please the partner(s) you are intimate with

Some men are so averse to conflict that they will do anything that their partner says to please her. They even do this at the expense of their reboot. For example, you know you should be going to bed early because you have this great schedule. When your schedule is off, you’re more likely to slip during your reboot.

Your partner might want to stay up late but you’re such a partner pleaser that you don’t tell her. You tell her, “We can’t do that today because I’ve got to go to bed.” Then she’ll say, ”Oh, you’re no fun. You always have to do something with your reboot. You always do this.” And you say, “Okay, okay, just this one time.” 

But then you end up relapsing, and she gets pissed at you and upset that you can’t say to your reboot. It’s still your fault; though, because you were so busy trying to please her. Stop trying to be a pushover to please your partner, especially at the expense of your reboot.