134： Unfu＊k Yourself ｜ Gary John Bishop
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Summary
In this episode, Ryan interviews Gary John Bishop, author of Unfucking Yourself, about how to redefine yourself by becoming unrealistic, how to uncover the narratives we tell ourselves, and how to get out of your head and into your life.
Transcript
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At times, we tend to get in our own heads and become our own worst enemies.
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We often write off anybody who happens to disagree with us or puts us down in any way,
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and then we often label them as quote-unquote haters. But it's our natural tendency,
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especially as high-achieving men, to be our harshest critics. It's valuable at times,
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and it drives us to do great things. And at other times, it creates unnecessary
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barriers to our success. My guest today, Gary John Bishop, author of Un-F Yourself,
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I'll let you fill in the blank, joins us to talk about how to redefine yourself by becoming
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unrealistic, how to uncover the narratives we tell ourselves, the difference between knowing
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something and being aware of something, and how to get out of your head and into your life.
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You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears, and boldly chart
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your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time. You are not
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easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are.
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This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,
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Men, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Mickler, and I am the host and the founder of
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this podcast, The Order of Man. Guys, this one today, this one's probably one of my top five
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favorite episodes, and I have interviewed some incredible men over the last two years, guys like
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Jocko Willink and Andy Frisella, Tim Kennedy, Ryan Holiday, Grant Cardone, so many amazing men,
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but this one, this one is really good. Before I get into the conversation, though, I do want to get
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into a couple of housekeeping items. First, I want you to subscribe. If you would subscribe wherever
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you listen to your podcast so you never miss either our interview show, like the one you're
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listening to today or our Friday Field Notes, and while you're there, if you would, please make
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sure that you leave us an iTunes rating and review if you haven't done that already. Second,
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other conversations designed to help you become a better man. And third, I want to introduce you to
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slash man. So guys, with those three items today said and done, let me introduce you to our guest.
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His name is Gary John Bishop. He is a personal development expert and the author of Un-F Yourself.
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Again, I'll let you fill in the blank. This is a book I just picked up to read a couple of weeks ago
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and knew immediately that I had to get him on the podcast. In reading his book, I can appreciate
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Gary's no-nonsense approach, which is probably very similar to mine, to human development,
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high-powered mentoring. And again, I knew right away I had to get him on the show. This guy's
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worked with top athletes. He's worked with Fortune 500 executives in his personal development career.
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But I can tell you, this guy is real. You're going to hear that. He's raw. He tells it like it is. He
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pulls no punches, which is exactly what we as men might just need in order to come to some
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realizations about our own lives and how to get out of our own heads and out of our own way.
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And what I enjoyed most about my conversation with Gary is that this is a man who got me thinking.
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Got me thinking a lot about what he had to say during our interview. In fact, he caught me off guard
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a couple of times as I was pondering what exactly he was saying and what exactly it all meant.
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And he gives one of the best and most unique answers to my question,
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what does it mean to be a man that I've ever heard?
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Gary, thank you for joining me today. I appreciate you being on the show, man.
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Yeah. Looking forward to it. I had mentioned to you that I picked up a copy of your new book.
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It was probably a couple of weeks ago. I read through it. I blasted through it in a couple
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of days and knew I had to get you on the show. I worked a couple of my networks and angles and
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here we are just a couple of weeks later having this conversation.
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Yeah. So tell me about the premise of the book. Let's start there and then we'll dive into this
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because I think it's a topic that a lot of guys need to hear, myself included, when we
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Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things that really had the book come together, Ryan. So
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one was what I do is kind of grouped in with a self-help category and I'm not a big fan of
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the whole notion of self-help. I think the whole idea of self-help is that you're in a place where
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you're kind of, you need help. And I just don't think that empowers people. So I'm kind of like
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the anti-self-help, self-help guy. I'm more like the self-growth, self-empowerment, self-development
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kind of guy, self-actionable kind of human being. I looked in this category anyway and quite frankly,
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I just saw a lot of voodoo, a lot of BS, a lot of stuff that's not actually going to make a
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difference to the quality of a human being's life. So I wanted to write something while has a kind of
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wisdom to it and, you know, is grounded in some really fundamental principles, but at the same
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time would compel the reader to stand up and take a different action in the life. And so the angle
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that I took was through your self-talk. So, you know, you and I and everybody listening to this right
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now, you have self-talk. Okay. So some of you just said to yourself, no, I don't. Sure. Right. So
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you're in a constant dialogue with yourself. It's not a monologue. It's a dialogue. It's like to-ing
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and fro-ing between something like you're offering an opinion. There's a narrative at play would be
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another way to say it. And most of your narrative is unseen. So you don't even notice you're doing it
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and you're doing it all the time. Not some of the time, all the time. As I said, some of it,
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you don't even know you're in it. What you might know is, or what you might see is if you look in
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your life, you'll see that you're acting on your own narrative. So you're not, you don't hear it.
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You're too busy acting on it. So the constraints of your life, the barriers that can, and we've all had
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these experiences in life where we're kind of in these repetitive cycles of behavior that we know
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doesn't work for us, or we're doing things in life that we just know we shouldn't be doing it,
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or even looking at things that I know I should be doing, but I'm not doing it.
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Then those are invariably areas where you might uncover some narrative of yours that you hadn't
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thought about. And so the book is about giving people insights into that and starting to see that
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in real terms for yourself, and then giving you the kind of language that empowers you, the kind of
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self-made narrative, if you like. But I need to be clear about it. This isn't personal
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affirmations. It's not neuro-linguistic programming. It really is none of those things. They work to
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whatever degree they work, but it's not what I'm talking about. And, you know, the response to the
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book has been, I mean, really overwhelming, to be honest.
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What would you say is the difference between affirmations and what you term as assertions in
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the book? Yeah. So an affirmation is designed to overcome something that's already there.
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So if I'm saying to myself, a common one is I'm good enough. Okay. Now, why would I say that to
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myself? I'd only say that to myself if at some level I relate to myself, like I'm not good enough,
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which is, by the way, very, very common. Okay. I'm not good enough or I'm not smart enough or very,
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very common. It's very prevalent around very successful people, believe it or not.
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Just as if you're trying to talk yourself out of something you believe to be true about yourself.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I say this to people all the time. You're not stopped by life. You're
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stopped by your opinion of it. So you're not stopped by life. You know, life is just there,
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waiting to be acted upon. So, you know, an affirmation is more like to present something,
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to overcome something else. A personal assertion is very different. A personal assertion is when you
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look at a moment of time, which would be this moment of time, and you assert something,
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you stake a claim for something, you stick your flag in the ground about something,
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you're not concerned with the past. You're not concerned with the future. You're concerned
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with this moment right now. And you are making an assertion by yourself on behalf of yourself.
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And your next action is going to be given by what you've just asserted. So that's what's very
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different and unique about what I'm talking about here.
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Why do we get so concerned with the past and the future? I know I've struggled with this,
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and I'm really curious to your thoughts as to why that is.
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You know, I've done a lot of work in this field for over a decade of, you know, facilitated and led
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transformational programs all over the world. And as human beings, we are fascinated with the past
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in the future. We're actually obsessed by the future. We're in a constant state of trying to
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determine how it's going to go. That's why we have weather channels. And it's everywhere. It's
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what the news is all about. It's all about what's going to happen next. And for human beings, that's
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a very important thing because it's the one thing that sets us apart from just about everything else
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on the face of the planet. You know, monkeys aren't concerned with what's going to happen next.
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Neither are dogs, neither are dolphins or whales or foxes or squirrels. They don't care what's
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going to happen next. They're connected to what's happening right now. However, they have a set of
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tools to help them facilitate and get their way through this life. We are not the strongest. We're
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not the fastest. We're not even well adapted to these conditions, to be honest. So our ability
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to kind of predict what's coming is probably our greatest strength. So we're fascinated by it. And we
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use the past as a measure. So we look to the past to kind of inform us as to what we should do
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next. Now, in some cases, that's a pretty good strategy, right? But that means everything you're
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about to do, you've already done it. So you're already limited by what you've already seen.
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So I'm committed that people give up the idea that the past is a decent guide because it's not,
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it's one of these things like, you know, like for instance, how many times have you met somebody
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and the first time you met them, you're like, I don't like that person. And yet over time you get to
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know them and you're like, you know, I actually do like that person. All the time. Right. Well,
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that first meeting, they triggered something with you about your past. So you weren't really there
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for that person. You were there looking for cues to confirm your initial conclusion. And then it
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didn't confirm it. So you were left with, well, hold on a minute, I need to change my mind now.
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Consider you're doing that everywhere. You're not just doing that with people. You're doing that with
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pants. You're doing that with jobs, careers, businesses, your finances, your body, your home,
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your everything. You're in a constant state of predicting what's about to come. And then when
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you're wrong or rather inaccurate, when you're inaccurate, then you have to get through the
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bullshit of trying to change your mind and see how it fits. So I'm much more interested in this kind
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of as lived experience. And it's a challenge, by the way. I'm not saying, you know, I'm floating
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on air and doing this. Sure. But it's a challenge, a challenge to interact with life as it is rather
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than how it appears to me. You made the distinction between wrong and inaccurate. I'd be really curious
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what the distinction is there. Yeah. It's not even a word I really use that much wrong, especially when
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it comes to people, because if I'm, the minute I use the word wrong, somebody is going to be right.
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It's either going to be me or somebody else. I'm not really interested in that dynamic between people.
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It doesn't work. I mean, I've been married for 20 years. I couldn't tell you the last time I said to
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my wife, you're wrong. It's just a bullshit statement to make. It doesn't do anything.
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In fact, just leaves her there. So I'm more interested in, well, what's going to work and what's
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accurate and what's inaccurate. And let's have a look at that and see that. So I'm more,
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I would say, just in general terms as a human being, I'm way more interested in what works
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than what's right. And I imagine too, that this is a less, for lack of a better term,
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combative statement, especially when you're working with other people like a spouse or an employee or a
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boss or whatever it may be. For sure. I mean, you know, if you haven't guessed yet by my accent,
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I'm originally from Scotland. Combat's not something what we shy away from. You know,
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it's a big, as it really is, like confrontation's a big part of culture in Scotland, very much so.
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But, you know, like it's after, I mean, I'm 50 now. I spent 30 something in my years fighting
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for my life to turn out. And I realized that I didn't have to do that. I actually could just
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take a look at, well, what works, what doesn't work. I should probably cut out what doesn't work.
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And I should give more attention to what works, who's right, who's wrong. At the end of it all,
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no one remembers that BS. People only remember what worked.
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How do you begin to strip away, because this sounds like an ego and a pride conversation now.
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And I know I've dealt with that in the past where I have to be right, but that's my ego speaking.
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Yeah. How do we overcome some of that? Yeah. I think, I mean, I really mean this when I say
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this. This isn't just some bumper sticker that I'm saying here, but you got to start with that
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you're an asshole. And you really got to start there. I'm not kidding. And you got to start
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with that in your life, you are the asshole. And you got to keep starting there. And you got to keep
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getting yourself back there. And you got to keep getting yourself grounded in that idea.
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Yeah. Not for like some, again, some like, I don't know, some adulation or, or like, you know,
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somehow you're, it makes you more attractive because you're humble.
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Absolutely not. You got to start with, well, I'm the asshole in my life. And if I look at my life
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and I look at everything going the way it's going, if I'm the asshole, what do I now need to do?
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So it keeps putting you in the center of your own little universe. It keeps getting you in the
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middle of it as opposed to being a player in it, you know? And I say this to everybody,
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you got to get the, you are the player. And I don't mean player like in the way of, you know,
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dating or on that scene. I mean, just like in the general living of your life, that your life is
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going the way it's going, isn't a coincidence. You're in it. So you would, if you keep seeing
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these kind of, like, you know, if you have no money, you're not on a job you want, you're not
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in a relationship you want, you got to start with you. You can't, or if you're in a relationship
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and there's problems in it, you got to start with you. You can't keep looking over there like,
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oh yeah, because if you didn't do that, I'd be better. Because we both know that's not true.
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You can be a jerk with no one in the house. You don't even need anybody there.
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Right? So you got to keep starting yourself and you got to keep bringing yourself back to yourself.
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You've got to keep grounding yourself in that your life is a product of what you're putting in it.
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And when you keep starting there, then you can start addressing it and start saying, well,
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what's not here that I need to put in it? What do I need to now cut out of my life? What do I need
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to stop? What behaviors, what ways of being, what actions do I need to start cutting out to improve
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the quality of my life, to improve my performance in life and ultimately improve my effectiveness?
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I want to get to that. Before I do, I want to talk about one of the assertions that you make,
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which is I am wired to win. And the most fascinating part of this concept in the book was
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that we are already winning in the view that we have of life. I'm probably butchering that,
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but I think you know what I'm referring to. Can you walk me through that? Because I think this
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ties in nicely to what you just said. Yeah. So, you know, we tend to look at our life in terms
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of successes and failures. And even the successes don't really light us up that much. They light us
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up for a little bit, but not for long. We are very prone to making the extraordinary ordinary.
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So, even the extraordinary things in your life, after a time, you'll just shrug your shoulders
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about it like, you know. Why do we do that? Well, because you're wired to pursue. You keep
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looking to the future as an answer. And that's the same with all human beings. You'll notice like,
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if you went to college and you got your degree, the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction didn't
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last. It disappeared after a little bit. And then you were left with the next thing to do.
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Now, what's at play there? What's at play there is fundamentally at some level,
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you're not only not okay with life, you're not okay with yourself. And in the back of our mind,
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we're driven to some day in the future that when I get there, that day will be when it turns out for
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me, I'll turn out and my life will turn out. So, when I say you're wired to win, what I mean is
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your wiring is very much geared to have a very familiar kind of problem in your life. So, and
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again, for all your listeners, if you look in your life, you'll notice your kinds of problems
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are the same kinds of problems. And I mean, by nature, that they've always been, right? So,
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procrastination, lack of confidence, you know, too forceful, not forceful enough,
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you know, no self, you don't experience yourself as being someone who's disciplined or you don't
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feel as if you're someone who can be vulnerable or it's very familiar kind of you. Now, why is that
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a win? Well, because life continues on its current path and you get to keep living the life you've
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lived and the safety and certainty of knowing how it turns out. Now, even though that might sound like,
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well, holy crud, you know, I mean, but I've, I'm, I'm losing, it seems like I'm losing with my
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finances. If you look really closely and if I'll use finances as an example, because it was something
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for a lot of years of my life, I really struggled with finances. I realized that I was out to prove
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a point in my own life. And the point that I was out to prove is that life is hard. So, whenever I
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got money, I would never, there would be no real intention to keep it. There'd be this massive
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temptation to spend it, to keep getting myself back to, to the bottom again, so that I'd have
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to fight back. Interesting. And my personality is very much geared towards that. It's very much
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geared towards the struggle, which in the last probably half a dozen years of my life has been
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really challenging because there's not a lot of struggle around me. So you make it hard on yourself?
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Well, yeah. I mean, your guys will notice this. There's probably not a person on this call
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hasn't at some point thrown a hand grenade into something that works.
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Why the heck do we do that? Well, we do that because when you do that, it gives your personality
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a chance to grind up against the unworkability. So you get to continually prove the legitimacy
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of your own personality. What I say to my clients, what I say to the people who follow me on Facebook
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or my website or my mailing list, I say, look, you guys, at some point, if you really are someone
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who's after a different kind of success, a different kind of accomplishment, you can't be you because
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you are already at the zenith of you. It requires you to reinvent yourself. And I mean, like your kind
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of habits, actions, ways of being action, automatic responses. Those have got to start moving.
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If you don't start interacting with the world in a different way, you're just going to keep
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repeating the same actions over and over and over, getting the same kind of results while leaving
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yourself in this state of kind of want or disappointment.
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Yeah. I mean, this makes sense. I actually grew up in my life believing and even did for a long time
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after that struggle is somehow noble, that those that struggle are more righteous, even maybe than
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those that don't. And so, like you said, the hand grenade thing was a real thing for me.
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Yeah. And you know, it's funny because I often I'll talk about self-limiting beliefs.
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If you ask somebody their self-limiting beliefs, they'll pause and then they'll come up with some
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bullshit line. No one knows what their self-limiting beliefs are. Why? Because you're living them.
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You're everything you do is governed by them. You don't get, you don't have self-limiting beliefs.
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You are self-limiting beliefs. Everything you do, every thought you have, every action you take
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is governed by an already existing paradigm of reality that you made up.
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So how do you then begin to redefine yourself if it's so difficult in the first place, maybe even
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to define yourself? Yeah. I read this thing a couple of months ago, came out, I think it was
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the University of Vancouver or something, but they looked in your brain through a series of tests and
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a bunch of research. There's no definable place in your brain for you. That is, there's no locus of
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existence in your brain for you. I'm going to say you, I mean the kind of you that you would say you
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are. So the way that we would define ourselves, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
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There's no locus in your brain for that. There's no way like, oh, well, there's Ryan. Right. That's,
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there's no place where that exists, which is kind of weird. It's like, well, hold on a minute. I mean,
00:22:11.600
what do you mean I don't exist? You know, cause most people talk about that. If you ask somebody
00:22:15.440
like, you know, where do you exist? They'll look at their legs or something or like, well, in my head.
00:22:20.780
Right. Or they'll define themselves by their job or their occupation or hobbies or whatever it may be.
00:22:26.140
Or the sizes or thighs. Right. Right. But anyway, but what I say to people is, no, you exist and the
00:22:34.720
actions and the conversations of your life and you, you perpetuate yourself in those. So if you're not
00:22:41.320
changing those up, if you're not shifting what you do, if you're not shifting what you talk about,
00:22:45.920
then who you've been at this point persists and it persists every day. So for all intents and
00:22:52.660
purposes, the you that you know yourself as persists by virtue of what you say and what you do.
00:22:59.500
And if you want to change yourself, you need to start changing what you're talking about and what
00:23:03.820
you're doing about it. And it's not like one of the things, you know, like just, I don't know,
00:23:08.780
just annoys the shit out of me is when I hear this stuff about believe in yourself,
00:23:14.400
you don't need to believe in yourself. You know, some of the greatest things you did in your life is
00:23:20.220
when you completely lacked belief in yourself. Like you had no confidence in your ability to do
00:23:25.340
it, but yet you did it, you know? And, and I say, actually, when you at least believe in yourself
00:23:29.940
and when you at least have the confidence, well, I would say those would be the kind of places in
00:23:34.580
life where you're in the midst of something uncertain. That is something that you can't
00:23:39.240
predict. That is something that's not from your past. And that this is an opportunity for you to step
00:23:45.040
What is the factor that would drive a man to proceed with something that he's not confident
00:23:51.160
So I actually had this episode in my life a couple of years ago. You know, I've, I've got a personal
00:23:57.340
one-on-one coaching business, a very small number of clients. It's been that way for a number of years
00:24:02.740
now. And I remember sitting in front of my laptop and I was strategizing my year, my, the four quarters
00:24:09.120
of the year. And, um, I had this Excel spreadsheet open and I'm like, I'm going to do this and
00:24:14.820
then I'll do that. And then I'll do this and then I'll do that. And then I caught myself
00:24:18.880
and I thought, what am I, what am I doing? So I, I added up all the numbers and I saw
00:24:24.960
that my year, I had already determined how much, what's the maximum amount of money I could
00:24:30.360
make. And I had, I had no like conscious memory of setting that number up. And I started
00:24:37.700
to realize that that number was just there for me. It was like accumulated over a period
00:24:43.800
of time that that would be a reasonable amount of money for me to make doing what I do. So
00:24:49.300
I challenged myself. So why don't I just double it? So first of all, I doubled the number.
00:24:55.440
Then I went back to the spreadsheet and realized that all my plans were just nowhere near that
00:25:00.200
and I needed to rebuild. It was in that process that I started to engage with, particularly my
00:25:07.320
career, my finances in terms of what I think I couldn't do. And I'm way more interested in what
00:25:12.900
I think I couldn't do than what I think I can do. Because what I think I can do is based in what
00:25:18.160
I've already done. And I'm really not interested in that life. I'm not interested in like perpetuating
00:25:24.440
the myth of my past. I'd rather strike a blow for some unforeseen result. And I'm willing to fail.
00:25:32.000
I'm not like, you know, so what? I failed. I don't care. All right, let me do something else.
00:25:35.840
I don't think I can do. Right. I'd rather die that way. I'd rather die having lived that life
00:25:41.840
than, well, at least it was certain. And this is one of the assertions as well,
00:25:47.420
which is that I embrace uncertainty and just recognizing that you never know what's going
00:25:52.480
to happen and being okay with it. Right? Right. I think you got to look to your track record
00:25:57.680
and when in the face of uncertainty. So if you look in your life, you'll see that even when it sucked,
00:26:04.060
you pulled it out. Like you did it. You, you managed to turn it around. And if you keep looking
00:26:10.140
there, that'll give you a little bit more, you'll be a little bit more settled with what you're about
00:26:15.260
to do. But uncertainty isn't just some nebulous thing. In the face of uncertainty, you're having
00:26:22.120
physiological responses. You know, you might not be sleeping well. Your thoughts might be racing.
00:26:27.920
Your heart beats faster. The pit of your stomach sunk. You feel like you want to puke.
00:26:31.540
You're shaking. You're nervous. You're, you know, in a panic. In the face of real uncertainty in life,
00:26:39.160
like, you know, I'm going to quit my job at the end of the month and go start a business.
00:26:43.420
And I don't know where I'm going to get the money from. And I've got enough to support myself for
00:26:47.480
six weeks. And I don't know. And I'm not saying people should jump in and do that kind of stuff.
00:26:51.620
You know, you got to strategize properly on one hand. But at the same time, there will come a point
00:26:56.940
when you need to jump into the uncertainty. You can't make it all certain. You can't because
00:27:01.700
what will invariably happen is your plan will get screwed with. And you'll be so addicted to your
00:27:08.220
plan that you'll want your circumstances to line up with your plan. And those are the moments when
00:27:13.280
you need to dance with the uncertainty. You need to jump in there and wrestle with what life's
00:27:17.680
presenting you with rather than wrestling with it in terms of how you think you should be.
00:27:24.920
Gentlemen, just a quick break to tell you about our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council.
00:27:29.920
This is a really important time of year inside of the Iron Council. Of course, the men who are part
00:27:35.140
of our brotherhood as we are just launching our new battle plans for Q4. We as brothers are not
00:27:42.440
concerned in the group with New Year's resolutions. We are concerned with ending this year right now,
00:27:47.680
on a high note. And that is exactly why and what the battle plan is going to help you with.
00:27:53.160
We've got systems for identifying your top priorities in each of four quadrants, developing
00:28:00.200
tactics or steps that you can take each and every day that you do not miss and the tools for tracking
00:28:05.680
your progress towards those objectives. And then of course, you're going to have the accountability.
00:28:10.040
And that's been a huge, huge point of value for a lot of the men inside of the Iron Council.
00:28:15.100
You're going to work with 300 other men. And then specifically, you're going to work with 15 men
00:28:19.980
in your battle team and get to know them on a more intimate basis. These guys are going to help you
00:28:24.300
succeed and give you the tools and the guidance and the accountability. So if you're interested,
00:28:27.920
I invite you and I encourage you and maybe even challenge you to a bit to join us inside of
00:28:32.820
the Iron Council. You can do that at orderofman.com slash Iron Council. Again, that's orderofman.com
00:28:39.140
slash Iron Council. Now let's finish up this conversation with Gary.
00:28:44.240
I know this has been true for me. There's been times in my life, most of my life, in fact,
00:28:49.000
where I have been very strategic, trying to make everything perfect. And what I've realized is that
00:28:55.100
I actually am more stressed trying to make things perfect than I am just going with the flow and
00:29:00.520
allowing things to work out to some degree that the way they're going to work out and being okay with
00:29:04.660
that. Yeah. You know, I spend a lot of time in social media. There's a lot of things on social
00:29:09.360
media that are actually valuable, but there's a lot more to them than you think. But I mean,
00:29:14.600
I do them myself. I put a lot of memes out there. I put a lot of statements out there for people
00:29:18.400
they ponder. But I want them to know there's like the weight of the universe behind what I'm saying
00:29:23.480
here. It's not a bumper sticker. Sure. And if you think about it and you let yourself be with it,
00:29:27.820
it'll present you with ideas. But strategies are great. Strategies are awesome. But you can't allow
00:29:34.400
yourself to dwell on them because they're there. They become like a sidebar from the reality of
00:29:40.080
the thing itself. So it sounds to me like you're a character trait that you would have is called
00:29:45.680
being analytical. And you'll that's kind of like an answer you have to life. Right. So when presented
00:29:51.220
with a problem, you're going to analyze it, which, again, has value on that on one hand. But on the
00:29:57.040
other hand, analytical is very as a very internal state. So you go in like question yourself,
00:30:02.160
question what you're doing. It's very internal. So you got to be able to find the balance like,
00:30:07.620
OK, I got enough and the rest I'm going to have to work out as I'm doing it because your life only
00:30:15.080
changes in the doing. It doesn't change in the thinking. It doesn't. Your life does not change in
00:30:21.600
an Excel spreadsheet. Your life will not change in the planning and strategy. Your life will only
00:30:28.520
ever, 100 percent of the time, every single time change when you act.
00:30:35.840
Yeah, it makes total. So basically, if I'm understanding you correctly, the way that we
00:30:40.900
begin to redefine ourselves is to be a little unrealistic and essentially do the opposite of
00:30:47.480
what our normal track record would suggest. You know, I there's a couple of philosophers that I read
00:30:52.440
one's a kind of he's not kind of controversial guys, a totally controversial guy. Martin Heidegger
00:30:58.140
is a German philosopher. He was what made him controversial is he was a Nazi for, you know,
00:31:04.120
six or seven years or something. But Martin Heidegger was a really he's a really intelligent
00:31:07.700
man. He's a really smart guy. And he was extremely complex. The works that he wrote, his opus was
00:31:13.260
called a being and time. And what he was out to uncover was what is it to be a human being?
00:31:19.280
Now, it's a very complex work. And I'm not a philosopher. I, you know, I dabble, but I
00:31:23.900
I'm not and I'm not a philosophy major. There's people out there, especially Heideggerian philosophers
00:31:29.480
who love that stuff. And I love it, but it's not I don't have that kind of depth of knowledge
00:31:34.480
about it. However, Heidegger talked about this thing called Entworth. And what he was talking
00:31:40.160
about was it later became what he called freedom. Freedom for a human being can be found in the
00:31:48.800
act that you take in a concrete situation when compelled to act by default. And that's there's
00:31:58.220
nothing else. Freedom isn't a feeling. Is this discipline? Would you define this as discipline?
00:32:02.620
Discipline is this kind of nebulous word as well. He's here's what Heidegger's saying. Heidegger's
00:32:06.960
saying. And this is definitely where I come from. I want people to understand themselves. I want people
00:32:12.220
to really uncover their own wiring, not because that's fascinating, because it's not. It's kind
00:32:19.600
of boring and simplistic. And it sounds complex, but you're not a complex being. You're a very simple
00:32:24.920
being, complicated by circumstances. So you're a very simple being, like I am, like everybody is.
00:32:33.080
What Heidegger's saying is the more you uncover yourself, the more you see your own default thoughts,
00:32:40.360
feelings, your own default actions. When you uncover it, when you finally see it, when you
00:32:46.720
finally become aware of it, not knowing it, right? So like there's a difference. If I know something,
00:32:52.500
it doesn't necessarily change anything about me. When I'm aware of something of myself, it changes
00:32:58.140
everything. How do you define it? What's the distinction there? Yeah. So like I might know
00:33:03.780
how to lose weight, right? I might. I mean, there's nobody listening right now who's like,
00:33:08.480
oh, he's going to tell us how to lose weight. This should be good. There's no secret there.
00:33:12.240
Right. It's not like, oh my gosh, hold it. Everybody be quiet. Right. Silence, please.
00:33:20.120
He's going to tell us. Everybody knows, right? Move around and stop eating pies. You know,
00:33:25.440
it's kind of like stick to that and you'll be pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. That makes no difference,
00:33:30.260
right? I mean, that doesn't make a difference, like knowing how to lose weight. But if I was
00:33:35.280
fully aware of it, if I actually saw what this was doing to my body, if I actually could see it and
00:33:40.780
witness it, if I could actually see the impact that it has on not only me, but the people around me,
00:33:46.040
if I could start to see my own bullshit and how I buy into it, if I could see what I was doing with
00:33:50.900
my life and be like emotionally connected to it, like unveiling the full impact of every time I ate
00:33:58.640
a bag of fries rather than just, well, just this one time and write it off. So it's about starting
00:34:04.860
to kind of connect to your impact as a human being on you and others. Those are like the doorways to
00:34:14.020
awareness. When you're aware of something, there's no going back. You can't, you can't. It's like,
00:34:21.260
for instance, using a word or a phrase or saying something in public that you think means nothing
00:34:26.860
and then you see somebody crying and you'd be like, well, what? Hold on. What did I say? I don't,
00:34:31.800
did I, is that me? I don't, is that, do you know if that's seeing how it impacts other people?
00:34:37.540
Right. And then you're like, well, hold on a minute. The next time that word's about to come out
00:34:41.160
your mouth, you're thinking. Sure. You're now at a crossroads. Well, that's the same with you as a
00:34:45.940
human being. The more you get aware of yourself and you can only do that through working on yourself
00:34:51.180
through. And to me, that's a never ending process. If you're a, if one of your listeners is listening
00:34:56.500
right now and saying, yeah, well, sometimes I work on myself. Dude, you should be working on yourself
00:35:01.560
all the time. It should be a relentless study. Not like you're fascinating because every time you
00:35:08.400
discover something about yourself opens up new paradigms of success, your success will not be
00:35:14.820
found in things. Your success will be found in how you see those things. And if you look at your life
00:35:23.240
right now, you're only pursuing the kinds of things that, again, I talked about this earlier,
00:35:28.180
that you think you can do. That's, again, based in some constraint. You got to break all that up.
00:35:34.700
You got to start getting aware of your own constraints. You got to start getting aware of
00:35:38.140
the impact on you. And to tie it all back to the Heidegger thing, the more you're aware,
00:35:42.600
the more you have something called freedom to choose. And when you're unaware, you have no freedom
00:35:49.900
to choose. I hear people using this word awareness all the time and talking about self-awareness and
00:35:54.360
they have no idea what it means. Like they have no word. Definitely. No idea. Same in this stuff about
00:35:59.520
mindset. They don't know what it means. They just use it. They haven't thought about it. And I don't
00:36:05.140
mean thought. I mean like think. I mean like sit in a chair and think and get present to yourself and
00:36:10.700
see yourself and experience yourself and start to notice the draw to be this way as opposed to that
00:36:17.160
way. Notice the compulsion to act on this and not act on that and start to see yourself in terms of
00:36:24.180
constraints. And the more you'll see your constraints, the more you'll start to see there's
00:36:28.740
a life beyond them. There's other ways you could act. There's other ways you can interact. What that
00:36:35.100
does is open up a whole other domain of potential for you. You have the potential to not only be an
00:36:43.340
expanded kind of human being, but to act in those ways and produce those kind of results and ultimately
00:36:49.960
go beyond the kind of default life that you would have anyway. Is this the study of ontology? Which
00:36:56.980
admittedly is a word I had to look up, but I wasn't familiar with it until I started studying you and
00:37:02.120
researching what you were doing. How does this tie into it? Yeah. So you are a, Heidegger said,
00:37:07.980
each man is born many men and dies as one. What does he mean by that? Yeah. I'm trying to think
00:37:14.480
about that. So enlighten you, please. Yeah. So if you've got any little ones in your family or if you
00:37:21.820
can remember your own childhood and go back to like when you were three and younger, and if you
00:37:27.280
think of kids at that age, three and younger, you'll see their, their level of self-expression.
00:37:33.520
It's just phenomenal. Like they have this, they have this capacity for being like it's, and now you just
00:37:40.500
exercise the whole spectrum. You're talking about my daughter right now. She's three and you're
00:37:45.560
talking exactly about her. I cannot get her to stop talking and she's, which I don't want to,
00:37:50.040
but it's just amazing to see all the thoughts that go on in her mind. Right. And she, and she will go
00:37:54.580
from like crazy upset to joy in like six seconds. Yes. Right. And you're like, how the hell did you
00:38:02.060
take that? So true. That was insane. How did you come out of that funk so quickly? I mean,
00:38:07.560
you know, you get a two or a three year old, if they're upset and you tickle their stomach,
00:38:11.960
they'll turn it around in a heartbeat. Yeah. Try doing that with your mother. Won't go well. Yeah.
00:38:18.620
Go very badly. Why is that? Because your daughter has this real capacity for
00:38:24.100
switching ways of being. She's, she's unconstrained. She's free to be.
00:38:30.420
Is it free from the judgment of others or freedom from something else?
00:38:33.340
Well, we'll get into that, but, but it's, it's, she experiences this whole freedom to be,
00:38:38.240
there's no constraint. She doesn't feel like she has to be this way or that way or that way or this
00:38:42.720
way. In fact, your daughter is way more present to the miracle of her life than you are because
00:38:48.660
she's connected to what's happening right now. I mean, that's why if you put, you know, a cardboard
00:38:54.260
box in front of your daughter, she's fascinated. Right. You put a cardboard box in front of you,
00:38:59.120
you're just trying to think how you can get out of the recycling. That's exactly. I think about
00:39:03.020
more trash I have to throw away. Right. Right. But she's, she's like fascinated by, you know,
00:39:09.380
I mean, she'll play with something for two hours and you're like, man, I was bored by it before you
00:39:14.300
even took it out of the box. And that is part of being a human being. We become jaded and we become
00:39:21.600
uninspired by life. And that's because as, as we age, as we get a little bit older, and it's particularly in
00:39:27.840
the first quarter of a life, first 20, 25 years of a life, the ways of being that we demonstrate
00:39:33.440
become more constrained and more constrained and more constrained until you had about 25.
00:39:39.800
And that's kind of like when your personality is rounded out, when you're kind of like the you
00:39:44.380
that you're going to be. It's not like you can't make changes and you can, but you're still pretty
00:39:49.400
much grounded in the same you that you were when you were 25. You're looking your life,
00:39:54.080
you're doing some different things, but for the most part, your approach, your view,
00:39:59.260
your experience of being you is the same. That's why often, by the way, when people look back at
00:40:04.500
things they wrote when they were 10, they're like, oh my God, what was I? Because you were less you
00:40:10.200
then there was more available to you then in terms of like the ways that you could be. But again,
00:40:15.660
as you aged and you'll see this with your daughter, by the way, she'll start becoming more defined.
00:40:20.960
There'll be less expression, less width to those ways of being.
00:40:27.680
I mean, I can even see that in my nine. I've got a nine-year-old as well. I've got four kids,
00:40:30.920
but I can even begin to see that in my nine and six-year-old as well.
00:40:34.360
Absolutely. You'll see your nine-year-old. You'll definitely see in the next three years
00:40:37.120
between nine and 12, you'll be shocked. You'll be like, oh my gosh, like you're becoming a person.
00:40:42.840
Right. I say that you're like a little human. That's what I say all the time. Yeah.
00:40:45.860
Right. But your three-year-old is, I mean, if you put a bunch of three-year-olds together,
00:40:50.080
it's all pretty much of a muchness, right? If you put a bunch of 50-year-olds together,
00:40:55.520
you'll see a bunch of personas. So you become this kind of more defined view as you go along.
00:41:01.740
I encourage my clients to get back in touch with that range of being that's available to you. You
00:41:08.060
have this amazing capacity for shifting yourself, to shift your emotional states, to shift your
00:41:15.060
outlook. And you can do it in a heartbeat. And that's, again, it's not like sitting telling
00:41:20.340
yourself, you know, you're crying, you're saying, I am happy. No, I don't mean that. I mean,
00:41:25.700
you do have the capacity though, to interrupt the drift of your own persona. And it started play and
00:41:33.000
experiment with your life and started take on your life more like an experiment, more like an
00:41:36.960
opportunity to express something rather than to get something done. And I'm fascinated by a human
00:41:44.100
being's ability to do that. And, you know, again, I'm kind of like you, I've got a three-year-old son,
00:41:48.100
I've got a five-year-old son, I've got a 12-year-old son. And, you know, they're all in these different
00:41:53.500
stages of development, but at the same time, like the little one's ability to just be is the most
00:42:00.660
fascinating thing to me. And I see he's in a much better place to love and enjoy life than I am.
00:42:09.560
Because my experience of being alive includes 50 years of bullshit that he doesn't have. And that
00:42:18.380
I see it as part of my development to keep setting that aside, to keep taking all of that,
00:42:23.900
putting it to one side and exposing myself to life as it is.
00:42:27.720
This is interesting because there's a thing that I've heard, and I don't know a lot of guys have
00:42:32.240
heard, is that we need to become innocent like children. And this actually brings on a whole
00:42:37.220
new meaning of that for me. Really fascinating stuff. Gary, we're bumping up against time. I took
00:42:42.660
a bunch of notes here in preparation for our conversation. And quite honestly, I don't think
00:42:46.680
we got through a quarter of what I planned on talking about. I'm sure that we could do this all day
00:42:50.560
long. But for the sake of time, I want to ask you a couple of questions as we wind down. And then I'm
00:42:54.880
going to give you the opportunity for guys to connect with you. That first question is,
00:42:58.800
and you had talked about this, what does it mean to be a human? But I want to ask,
00:43:04.480
If you'd asked me that question 20 years ago, I think I'd have said something like a challenge.
00:43:11.020
And I just so don't see it that way anymore. You know, I'm, I guess, fundamentally, I'm a bit
00:43:15.540
of a Jean-Paul Sartre existentialist. And I'm saying, what is it to be a man? It doesn't mean
00:43:21.780
anything. And every day of your life, you have the opportunity to reinvent what it is to be you
00:43:27.200
and to be a man. And you're not stuck. You're not boxed in. You, even though it might feel that
00:43:34.080
way in life, what it is to be a man is to grasp the opportunity of being alive and shake it for
00:43:40.700
everything it's got. I love that answer. And so unique and completely different than anything I've
00:43:46.080
ever heard in 200 plus episodes. That's definitely going to give me something to think about.
00:43:49.980
Gary, how do we connect with you? Somebody's listening to this. They want to know more about
00:43:53.180
what you're doing. I know you've got a creative live course that just came out. You've got the
00:43:56.540
book, obviously, but how do we learn more about you? Yeah, you can go to my website,
00:44:00.840
garyjohnbishop.com. You can join up to my mailing list there. You'll find me on Instagram.
00:44:06.760
You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on Twitter, all at garyjohnbishop. And I interact with
00:44:13.100
people. So as you'll have seen, you know, I don't just, um, you know, I'm not passive on social
00:44:18.180
media. I talk to my followers. I talk to the people who like what I do and, and people share
00:44:23.420
and send me, you know, emails and links of results they're producing in the lives with, with, uh, with
00:44:29.100
some of my stuff. Um, and you know, I love it and I welcome your people to come check me out and,
00:44:34.700
you know, see if there's anything there they can use to further what they're up to in their lives.
00:44:39.960
And I can attest that that's true because I reached out. I think I had posted a picture of
00:44:44.140
the book on Twitter. You had commented and I said, Hey, I'd love to get you on the show.
00:44:48.300
You told me to reach out to your team. Your team reached out to me so I can attest to the fact
00:44:51.440
that you are active there. And that's something I appreciate for sure. Awesome. Thanks for doing
00:44:55.200
that by the way. Well, Gary, I appreciate you. I appreciate how you show up. This book is amazing.
00:44:59.340
Uh, it's a quick read. It's a powerful read and, uh, certainly appreciate all the thought and,
00:45:03.940
and you redefining who you are because I can see how this is going to help me redefine myself
00:45:08.620
and the guys who are listening to redefine themselves. So thanks for taking some time to come on the show
00:45:11.980
today. Thank you for having me. There it is. Gentlemen, an extremely, extremely fascinating
00:45:18.020
interview. I'm sure you felt the same way with an extremely fascinating man, Mr. Gary, John Bishop,
00:45:23.260
everything that we talked about his book, his website, his social media course, his creative
00:45:27.740
live course, all of it is available at order of man.com slash one three four. So make sure you check
00:45:35.280
that out. And after you pick up a copy of his book, which I highly recommend that you do, I have read
00:45:39.300
this book. It's an amazing book and an amazing message. If you would shoot Gary a message on
00:45:43.520
Facebook or Twitter, wherever you spend your social media time, let him know where you heard
00:45:47.960
about him and what you thought about the book. Now, Gary did mention if you listen to the interview
00:45:52.860
that if you want to redefine yourself, you're going to have to challenge yourself to do something
00:45:57.200
different. And that's exactly why I'm going to suggest and recommend that you join the iron
00:46:03.040
council. Just one more time today. I hear from a lot of guys who say they're planning on joining
00:46:07.240
next week or next month or next year, but I would challenge you to get off the sidelines
00:46:11.780
and give something new a try. The worst case scenario is that you try it for a month.
00:46:16.040
You learn a few new things, you get some new resources, you make some new contacts and you
00:46:21.220
leave. But the best case scenario is that you enjoy it. It challenges you and it revolutionizes
00:46:27.360
the way that you view your life and how you interact in your life. So if you're interested in that,
00:46:32.320
you can head to order of man.com slash iron council. Again, order of man.com slash iron
00:46:37.840
council. I will look forward to talking with you on Friday for our Friday field notes, but until then
00:46:42.700
take action and become the man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of man
00:46:48.540
podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be.
00:46:53.300
We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.