The Art of Manliness - How to Develop Rugged Flexibility

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.600 Change is a constant. Changes big and small are always happening in our lives,

00:00:15.900 while the world also changes around us. We can either resist these changes as unmooring

00:00:20.320 threats to our sense of self or embrace them as chances to get better and stronger.

00:00:24.720 The key to taking that second approach, my guest says, is developing rugged flexibility.

00:00:30.000 His name is Brad Stolberg, and he's the author of Master of Change,

00:00:33.680 How to Excel When Everything is Changing, Including You. Today on the show, Brad impacts why

00:00:38.780 allostasis is a better model for dealing with disruption than homeostasis and how healthy

00:00:43.460 change moves in a cycle of order, disorder, and reorder. We then discuss ways to move through

00:00:48.620 the cycle with rugged flexibility, an approach to life that keeps something solid and stable

00:00:53.040 while letting others change and flow. We talk about the importance of adopting a being versus 0.88

00:00:57.700 having orientation, managing your expectations, diversifying your identity, and more. After

00:01:03.520 the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash ruggedflexibility.

00:01:14.480 All right. Brad Stolberg, welcome back to the show.

00:01:22.800 Hey, hey, Brad. It's great to be here.

00:01:23.860 So you got a new book out called Master of Change, How to Excel When Everything is Changing,

00:01:28.860 Including You. And you take readers through research-backed practices and ideas to help

00:01:34.700 them better navigate change and disruption in their lives. And this change could be small

00:01:39.920 change or it could be big change. Divorce, you lose a job, sickness, lots of things. What led you

00:01:47.080 down that research path to write this book? A mix of the personal and the global is the short answer.

00:01:54.820 The longer answer is in the last five years in my personal life, prior to writing this book,

00:02:00.400 I had undergone all sorts of change, both good and bad, in what felt like a really compressed period

00:02:05.900 of time. So I moved across the country. I left my job with the corporate world. I became a dad for

00:02:13.000 the first time. I became a dad again for the second time. Got a big old German Shepherd. 0.91

00:02:18.120 Sustained an injury, or I guess more accurately put, a longstanding condition tipped over the

00:02:24.140 boiling point that took me out of running, which had been an enormous part of my identity for the

00:02:28.820 past decade plus. Became painfully estranged from family members. It's a long story. We don't need to

00:02:34.800 get into it, but really just all sorts of changes on every level of my personal life. So that was going on.

00:02:40.220 And then I distinctly remember being in our kitchen here in Asheville, North Carolina,

00:02:45.140 early on in the pandemic and reading articles that all shared the headline,

00:02:49.680 when are we going to get back to normal? And there was just something about how that was worded that

00:02:54.220 rubbed me the wrong way. I remember thinking like, this is so dumb. We're never going to get back to

00:02:57.900 normal. It's absurd to think that we're going to get back to normal. And I was realizing that in my

00:03:03.040 own life, though, in many of these areas, like I was still kind of holding on to getting back to

00:03:07.740 normal, whatever that meant. And that dissonance that occurred in that moment really led me to

00:03:12.540 this intellectual journey of trying to understand how we relate to change and why we relate to change

00:03:17.280 in the ways that we do. Well, so yeah, you talk about one of our initial responses to change,

00:03:21.820 whatever that is, is we want to get back to normal, right? We want to get back to what you call

00:03:26.440 homeostasis. Besides that response, what's another typical response that we have to change?

00:03:31.580 I think we tend to deny it altogether or pretend it's not happening, engage in some version of

00:03:36.900 magical thinking. We often just rotely resist change. And I say rotely because sometimes we

00:03:42.520 ought to resist change, but I'm talking about going on autopilot. So just an instant reaction

00:03:46.640 of resisting change. And then finally, very much related to trying to get back to the way things

00:03:52.200 were, is we just don't update our expectations for the new reality. So it's like we're living in

00:03:57.660 an imaginary old world when what's happening around us is very new.

00:04:02.600 And so yeah, you talk about instead of thinking about homeostasis, I think that's how we typically

00:04:06.980 approach our life. We want everything to be balanced. And that's, you often see in the blog

00:04:12.440 post or podcast or self-improvement books out there, you got to find balance. It's all about

00:04:17.380 finding balance, work-life balance, balance with personal interest, family interest. But you say,

00:04:23.220 instead of thinking about homeostasis, balance, you think we need to focus on what you call

00:04:27.560 what's called allostasis. So what is allostasis?

00:04:32.020 This is such a hinge point in the book, one of a few. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time

00:04:36.140 here because I think it's nuanced and really important. Homeostasis, many people have heard

00:04:40.960 of it. It's over 150 years old. It was the first science around change. But I say science with quotes

00:04:48.720 around it because this happened in the early 1800s when things were very different than they are

00:04:52.880 today. And homeostasis has stuck around. And it describes any healthy living system is craving

00:04:59.620 stability and always resisting change and or when experiencing change, trying to get back to

00:05:05.940 stability as fast as possible. So homeostasis describes a cycle of order, disorder, back to

00:05:12.620 order, or X to Y, back to X. And as I said, this has been the prevailing way that folks have thought

00:05:19.880 about change for well over a century. Only more recently has the scientific community said,

00:05:25.120 actually, when you look at systems that really thrive, they don't show a homeostatic response

00:05:30.900 to change. What they do is something that is similar but different. So yes, it's true that good,

00:05:37.280 thriving systems crave stability, but that stability, they achieve it by changing. So instead of a cycle

00:05:44.140 of order, disorder, order, healthy systems engage in constant cycles of order, disorder, reorder.

00:05:51.140 So they get that stability, but that stability is somewhere new. And Peter Sterling, who is a

00:05:58.320 professor at University of Pennsylvania and his late colleague Joseph Ayer, they coined this

00:06:02.260 allostasis. And for the nerds out there, if you look at the etymology of these words, it tells the whole

00:06:08.140 story. So homo means same, and stasis means standing. So it says, being stable by being the

00:06:14.960 same. Allo means variable. And it says, being stable by changing. So allostasis describes stability

00:06:22.020 through change. And that has a double meaning, right? The way to be stable through change is by

00:06:27.300 changing, by getting to a reorder, by not trying to go back to the old order.

00:06:31.340 No, I love that. And that when I read about that order, disorder, reorder paradigm, instead of order,

00:06:37.140 disorder, order again, it reminded me, we've had Richard Rohr on the podcast before. And he talks

00:06:43.040 about this idea that you have to, you construct, maybe deconstruct, but then you have to reconstruct

00:06:48.680 something new. That's right. And I tip my hat to Richard Rohr in the book, because in a more

00:06:54.540 spiritual or just personal growth setting, Richard Rohr writes eloquently about this in his book,

00:06:59.240 The Wisdom Pattern. However, what's really interesting is you see this in so many different

00:07:04.280 domains. And right, my whole jam is like trying to find patterns across disciplines, because then I

00:07:08.540 think there's a chance it's true with a capital T. So Richard Rohr is writing about this in spiritual

00:07:13.340 wisdom work. But then you look at management science, and they describe organizational growth

00:07:18.220 as a cycle of freezing, unfreezing, and refreezing. And then you look at Buddhism, Richard Rohr,

00:07:25.860 are historically more of a Christian lens. And Buddhism talks about going to pieces without

00:07:29.800 falling apart, or integration, unintegration, reintegration. Then you look back at the first

00:07:35.340 book I wrote with Steve, Magnus, peak performance, stress, rest, growth. So you start to see this

00:07:40.500 pattern really everywhere. However, so many people, when it comes to change, are still stuck in this

00:07:46.560 model of homeostasis. I can't tell you how many blog posts when I, you know, was first researching

00:07:51.640 this book, and I put in keywords homeostasis, are all written in the spirit of behavior change is so

00:07:57.020 hard because of homeostasis. Or if you want to lose weight, or you want to quit smoking, or you

00:08:01.040 want to change your behavior, you have to fight against homeostasis, when in fact, it's really just

00:08:05.540 not an accurate model to think about change. Yeah, talking about allostasis, when we have a change,

00:08:12.860 even when things get back to normal, quote unquote, they've changed. So let's take the pandemic,

00:08:19.360 for example, I was thinking as you're talking about. We had this pandemic, and people were

00:08:22.900 thinking, well, when can things get back to normal? And you're saying, well, things will never get back

00:08:25.800 to normal. Things are going to change because of this. Even when we drop lockdowns, or masks,

00:08:30.920 or whatever. Examples that I've seen in my own life, the way we do work has changed permanently,

00:08:35.880 probably. It's a hybrid model. We're doing Zoom more often. We're doing a lot of work online. My kids,

00:08:42.060 their school life has changed. Like, there's no more snow days, basically, because now they have

00:08:46.660 remote learning. And so, you know, when it snows a lot, or we get an ice storm here, the teachers

00:08:51.440 can send a remote learning assignment to our kids. That didn't happen before the pandemic. So even

00:08:57.660 though things are kind of back to normal, things have changed. That's right. And I think the change

00:09:01.720 is still occurring. Major downstream effects that, you know, perhaps we haven't really even seen the

00:09:07.880 full result of, but just geographical change. How many people moved out of big cities? And what does

00:09:13.800 that mean for these smaller second tier, third tier places? Geopolitical change, the pandemic

00:09:19.620 completely changed our politics, trust in public institutions. Are public institutions ever going

00:09:23.900 to earn back that trust? I mean, there's so much that is still in maybe a disorder phase. And there's

00:09:29.760 never going to be what it was before. There will only be reorder. And our work as individuals, as

00:09:34.840 community members, as members of society is to try, whenever there's a change, to get us to a

00:09:40.760 favorable reorder, to engage with things, to not just rotely resist it on the one hand, but on the

00:09:46.480 other hand, also not to throw up our hands and say, hey, there's nothing I can do, but to really

00:09:50.340 try to skillfully engage with the disorder to help create that reorder in a good place.

00:09:56.720 And your solution, your idea to this, to be able to manage that disorder so we can reorder to something

00:10:02.240 good and positive is rugged flexibility. So what is rugged flexibility and how does it help people

00:10:08.140 develop that allostasis mindset? Rugged flexibility is, it's a gritty endurance

00:10:14.460 and an anti-fragility that not only withstands change, but can thrive in its midst. And I love

00:10:21.140 this term because it comes out of what most people, at least people in Western society, would think of

00:10:27.420 as complete opposites, right? So to be rugged is to be strong, to be robust, maybe even a little bit

00:10:33.880 rigid. And to be flexible, of course, is to bend without breaking, to be smooth, to go with the

00:10:38.700 flow. And we tend to think either or. So when change happens, we're either going to be really

00:10:44.120 rugged and buckle down, or we're going to be really zen and flexible. And in the research that I did for

00:10:50.360 this book and seeing really across the board, all the way from evolution and how species thrive over

00:10:58.580 time, to the individual level, and looking at really successful people who have undergone big

00:11:03.180 changes and how they thrive over time, what you realize is that they don't go to either end of

00:11:08.580 that polar extreme. Like they're not just rugged, they're not just flexible, they're both rugged and

00:11:12.900 flexible. They have rugged flexibility. So they're rugged on their core values, on these things that

00:11:17.960 really matter to them, their central features, what make them who they are, the hills that are truly

00:11:22.500 worth dying on. But then they're flexible on how they apply those and everything else.

00:11:26.900 And the key to navigating the cycles of allostasis that we talked about is just that. It's knowing

00:11:32.900 your defining principles, your essence, what makes you who you are, that you're not going to

00:11:39.020 bend that much on, but then bending on everything else. So it's this term that comes out of non-dual

00:11:44.880 thinking, right? Not this or that, not rugged or flexible, which is how we so often think.

00:11:49.080 But hey, if I want to be gritty, if I want to thrive during change, I need to be rugged and

00:11:52.840 flexible. And so what you've done in this book is you divide it up into three parts.

00:11:56.900 On how to develop a rugged and flexible mindset, a rugged and flexible identity,

00:12:01.240 and how to take rugged and flexible actions. So in the rugged and flexible mindset section,

00:12:06.220 you talk about being open to the flow of life. And one thing that really stood out to me in this

00:12:10.680 section was this idea of developing a being over having orientation. So what's the difference between

00:12:18.500 the two?

00:12:20.560 In 1976, I got to give credit where credit is due. One of my intellectual mentors, no longer with us,

00:12:26.500 Eric Fromm, coins this dichotomy between having and being. And Fromm says that a having orientation

00:12:34.160 is when you relate to things in more of an I, its way, or you own it. So I have a house,

00:12:42.280 I have a child, I have a partner, I have a 500 pound deadlift, can be other people, can be things,

00:12:50.660 can even be skills. And Fromm argued, and rightfully so, I think that a having mindset inherently makes

00:12:57.520 you really fragile. Because anything that you have will inevitably change. So I have a kid, well,

00:13:03.580 what happens when your kid moves out of the house? I have a 500 pound deadlift, what happens when you

00:13:08.520 become injured, or the aging process gets to a point where performance starts to deteriorate?

00:13:13.820 I have a wife, well, that's not a great way to be in relationship with someone. And Fromm argued that

00:13:18.900 rather than this having orientation, we'd benefit from adopting a being orientation, which is less

00:13:25.860 about owning something and possessing it, and more about being in relationship with it. So you can be

00:13:31.480 in relationship with training, you can be in relationship with another person, and you can even,

00:13:37.740 to some extent, be in relationship with the things that you own, or at the very least,

00:13:41.240 not identify with having them, but identifying with what they can do for you. And that's inherently

00:13:46.820 less fragile. Because that relationship is going to evolve and change over time. And if you expect

00:13:52.000 that's the case, that's great. Whereas if you get so clingy to have something, then the minute that

00:13:57.440 things change, you start to become really fragile and discombobulated. I think you see this in two

00:14:03.040 really big ways frequently, which is parents when their kids leave the house, and people who really

00:14:09.160 identify with their work when it's time to retire. And it can really be a shock to the system if you

00:14:15.220 thought that you own that thing, and now it's no longer yours.

00:14:18.640 So with the parent example, what would a more being approach to parenting look like when your kid moves

00:14:25.380 out of the house?

00:14:26.000 I think it would just be realizing from the outset that your goal is not to control your kid.

00:14:31.460 Your goal is not to, as much as it takes a wise, wise thought to do this, but your goal is not to

00:14:38.240 set your kid on any given path. Your goal is to love your kid and to be in a relationship with them,

00:14:43.160 knowing that that's going to change. And that's going to look like so many different things at so

00:14:47.000 many different points in time. And as a parent, you do want to just hold your kid. And sometimes you

00:14:51.960 want to freeze time. And I think wanting to freeze time while it's valid, and it gets to me, I'm sure

00:14:56.660 you've had moments like this. It's kind of like a having orientation, right? Like you want to cling

00:15:00.580 to this thing that's going to change. So the more that we can realize it changes in love, in the case

00:15:06.420 of parenting, deeply, not in spite of that, but because of that, the better off we'll be.

00:15:11.380 We've had some guests on the podcast talking about one of the challenges for former elite

00:15:16.740 athletes is that moment when they have to stop their sport for whatever reason. They just got

00:15:22.220 old, injury or whatever. And it seems like the ones that succeed are the ones who have,

00:15:27.640 who develop that being approach. They realize I can't have the joy of being an elite swimmer anymore,

00:15:33.960 but I can still relate to swimming, for example, in another way I can coach, I can mentor younger

00:15:39.320 athletes coming up. Yep. You hit the nail on the head. That's the second example I was going to use.

00:15:43.980 And now I don't need to, cause you're spot on. Well, you had that example from your own life.

00:15:48.220 It seemed like running was a have orientation for you. Then you had to develop a being orientation.

00:15:53.700 What, what did that look like for you? Yeah, that's right. So it was really hard. Um,

00:15:58.460 at first I remember like just walking or even driving and runners and like seeing them and feeling a

00:16:05.520 little anxiety, like, Oh, if I'm not this, then like, I don't have this anymore than what am I?

00:16:09.460 But ultimately what I realized is that, you know, there was nothing special about my running

00:16:14.160 performance. Not like I was a pro nowhere close to it. What I really valued was the mastery of

00:16:20.620 craft, the being in community, the really objective quantifiable progress and the physicality of it.

00:16:28.420 And I could be an athlete without having to run. And that's ultimately the shift that I made. I

00:16:35.360 went back to my own strength training performance roots. I grew up playing power sports. Like so many

00:16:40.680 got into endurance sports in my early twenties and pursued that for years and years, but realized

00:16:45.720 that there's so many different ways to be an athlete and to still be a part of the running community.

00:16:50.700 Even though I myself am no longer running, I still go on so many running podcasts. I still follow the

00:16:56.140 sport. I still mentor younger runners. And that made the off ramp much easier than if I would have,

00:17:02.520 you know, continue to cling on to needing to run in order to be a runner, let alone an athlete.

00:17:08.740 Okay. So this being approach allows you to be rugged because there's something about you

00:17:12.500 that you value that's there. It's going to be all the time, right? You're an athlete,

00:17:16.580 you're a parent, but allows you to change how that looks as things change or even as,

00:17:22.380 or even as you change.

00:17:23.520 As you change, bingo. Another way to look at it is like, what's the core value

00:17:26.980 underneath the thing that you're currently doing. And that core value, that's really rugged.

00:17:33.800 Generally, you don't have to sacrifice core values, but how you apply that core value over

00:17:38.060 time, if you want to change gracefully and with grit, then you have to be really flexible.

00:17:42.820 So the value of athleticism or community or physicality or challenge or love that you hold

00:17:49.880 onto, that's really tight and rugged, but then the application of it is very flexible over time.

00:17:54.540 And you can apply this to your career as well, right? I think some people get hung up in the

00:17:59.200 have mentality about their job. Well, I am an executive. I have this position. Well,

00:18:03.700 you got to find out what's the underlying thing about the work you do that really brings you

00:18:08.140 fulfillment and satisfaction and focus on that and then figure out ways it can change over time

00:18:14.980 to get more of that.

00:18:17.760 That's right. Someone that did this really masterfully who I profile in the book is the

00:18:22.100 tennis player, Roger Federer, one of, if not the greatest tennis players of all time had a very

00:18:27.620 incredibly long career. And what a lot of people that are casual fans of the sport overlook is that

00:18:32.940 around age 32, 33, Federer fell off a cliff for three years between 33 and 36. He was dropping out

00:18:40.640 of tournaments that he once would have won in his sleep. He was injured all the time. He was not

00:18:45.640 ranked highly. I mean, he just was performing like a below average tennis player. You know,

00:18:50.020 this is like Michael Jordan having a three-year period of just kind of being average. And Federer

00:18:55.480 realized that he couldn't get back to the old. Like there was no homeostasis. Aging had caught up

00:19:01.520 with him. And all the things that he thought he had, he had to shift. He didn't have them anymore.

00:19:06.420 He didn't have the speed and the reaction time and the power that were once there. But he still had

00:19:12.100 this fierce love of the game and of competition and of excellence. So he held on to those things,

00:19:17.280 but he completely adapted. So he learned a brand new one-handed backhand to take speed off the ball

00:19:23.280 so that he could slow down his opponents getting to the ball. He learned to play at the net more so

00:19:28.760 he wouldn't have to run back and forth on the baseline. He even got rid of the racket that got

00:19:33.780 him to be the best tennis player of all time in favor of a new technology that all the younger players

00:19:38.660 were using. He changed how he trained so that he recovered more. Three-year period, performance falls

00:19:44.700 off at age 36 and 37. Federer has some of the best seasons of his life, wins two major tournaments,

00:19:50.760 is ranked number two in the world. Again, at age 37, this is like a dinosaur in tennis.

00:19:55.760 But it's because he let go of all these things that he quote unquote had and recreated his game.

00:20:02.000 And to me, it's like such a beautiful, nicely contained example of rugged flexibility. He's rugged

00:20:06.980 because he loves competition and excellence. Those are his values. But he had to be really

00:20:11.080 flexible when the change of agent came for him. One of my favorite chapters on developing a rugged

00:20:15.880 flexibility mindset is the chapter on expectations. How do our expectations get in the way of us

00:20:22.940 navigating change in life? It's one of my favorite chapters too. So what we think that we experience

00:20:29.600 is consciousness. So our thoughts and our feelings and our experience of them at any given moment

00:20:34.580 is almost never objective reality. It is objective reality filtered by our expectations.

00:20:41.720 So one way to think of this is the brain is like a prediction machine. It's constantly trying to

00:20:46.460 predict what's going to happen next. And this is for good reason, right? Imagine if every moment

00:20:51.980 was just unbiased white space. You would never get anything done. There'd be so much stimulus. You

00:20:57.020 would be in a completely like chaotic rut. So it's good that the brain is a prediction machine.

00:21:01.580 However, by definition, change is when things don't happen as you predict, as you thought they would,

00:21:08.340 as they've been happening. And when our expectations are out of whack or out of alignment with our

00:21:13.760 reality, it throws us for a loop, makes us feel really uncomfortable, restless, sometimes even sad and

00:21:19.480 despairing. So when things change, the first thing that we have to do to be able to take productive

00:21:24.620 action and confront that change is update our expectations. And if we don't update our expectations,

00:21:30.320 then we feel a lot of distress and we don't make any progress because we're not working on the

00:21:35.120 thing that needs to be worked on. We're working on what we thought would be the situation.

00:21:39.480 What are some examples from your own life where your expectations just created more problems for

00:21:44.580 yourself? I think a few. I think one is, well, the biggest one is parenting to be totally frank and

00:21:51.840 honest. And I think this is something that a lot of men don't always talk about. I know you have on

00:21:56.140 this podcast and it's why I love you and your work. But I think a lot of dads just expect that

00:22:02.760 like the minute their kid is born, they're going to look into their kid's eyes and the world's going

00:22:06.360 to forever change and it's going to be the best moment of their life. And that does happen to some

00:22:11.060 people. And for those people, that is so wonderful and beautiful. But for a lot of dads, that bond takes

00:22:17.120 longer to grow, particularly in contrast to the woman next to you, the mom who often has a very

00:22:23.460 biologically driven immediate connection to the child. And in my case, you know, my first son was

00:22:29.700 born and I was looking at my wife and I'm like, I see what you're feeling, but I am not feeling that

00:22:35.220 at all. And that was really hard. I felt a lot of shame. I felt a lot of guilt because I had this

00:22:40.880 expectation that like he would just be the love of my life from day one. And you know, now at age five

00:22:46.240 and a half, I jump in front of a million bullets for the kid and he is the love of my life, but it took a

00:22:50.120 lot of time. And that was a really hard burden for me to hold. And if I could have had a better

00:22:57.460 expectation that, you know, it might take some time to develop that kind of bond with my son,

00:23:01.740 I think I would have navigated the first two years of that life. Well, not of that life, of his life.

00:23:06.660 And more importantly, of how I navigated it myself much better. And now it's, of course, the first piece

00:23:11.300 of advice I give to impending fathers, which is, you know, try not to have any expectation.

00:23:16.640 Don't think, you know, that you're going to immediately have your life changed for the

00:23:21.480 better, but also don't think that you're not just try not to have an expectation. So that's one

00:23:26.020 example. And then I think of course, another example is just in sport. You know, I know that you train

00:23:31.460 and there's a time in your training cycle where you're making a lot of progress, right? And like

00:23:37.400 every week kind of go up five pounds or whatever it is. And you start to expect that progress and then

00:23:42.880 you get good enough where suddenly the progress is a lot slower. And, you know, you add a hundred

00:23:48.620 pounds on your deadlift in a year, the next year you had 50, the next year you had 20, and now you're

00:23:52.260 fighting for every kilogram, every 2.2 pounds. And if you don't expect that, I think you can get really

00:23:58.760 frustrated with yourself and your training and potentially even quit.

00:24:02.040 No, I experienced that when I was training seriously. Same thing happened to me. Deadlift would go up

00:24:07.980 a hundred, 150 pounds in a year. And then by the end of, I was, I was getting like five pounds took

00:24:14.080 me a train a year and I'd get five pounds and it'd get really frustrating, but I just had to update my

00:24:18.320 expectations. So instead of having high expectations, so at the same time, like you hear things, you hear

00:24:24.620 these research about having optimism. That's positive. It's something good in our life. So should you just

00:24:29.200 expect the worst? Like how do you, what's a rugged flexibility approach to expectations? Do you need to

00:24:35.920 become an Eeyore so you're never disappointed? No, I don't think so. I think it's twofold. I think

00:24:40.480 the first is to just know that your mood at any given standpoint is a function of your reality and

00:24:47.720 your expectations. So before you go trying to shift your reality or shift your mood, you have to ask

00:24:52.920 yourself like, Hey, do I need to update my expectations for what's happening? Have my expectations

00:24:57.620 not panned out? And is the problem simply that I'm refusing to see reality for what it is. And the

00:25:04.140 second is this beautiful concept originally coined by Viktor Frankl of Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust

00:25:11.300 Survivors, Psychoanalysts, sold gazillions of books. But following that book, Man's Search for

00:25:17.340 Meaning, he wrote this essay called The Case for Tragic Optimism that's not nearly as widely known. And I

00:25:22.040 hope to popularize this essay more with this book because Frankl talks about tragic optimism as

00:25:28.020 inevitability and expectation that there will be suffering and tragedy in life. Obviously,

00:25:34.100 he underwent the most unimaginable tragedies. But Frankl was really clear. He doesn't sugarcoat it.

00:25:40.080 He says, everyone, even the best life undergoes tragedy because we're made of flesh and bone and

00:25:46.140 aging happens and aging often hurts. Physically, it often hurts because we have a prefrontal cortex that

00:25:51.620 allows us to make plans. And anytime we make enough plans, eventually we're frustrated because

00:25:56.220 things don't work out how we wish they would. And of course, because everything that we love

00:26:00.100 changes and eventually dies. And that is just the human condition. And we should expect to face that

00:26:06.600 tragedy. And it's tragic optimism because we can maintain a hopeful attitude nonetheless. So again,

00:26:15.080 it's this non-dual way of thinking, not tragedy or optimism, but tragic optimism. Expect tragedy,

00:26:21.240 expect suffering, expect hardship, and be optimistic nonetheless. And I actually think that this is such an

00:26:28.560 important point. Because today what happens, particularly on the internet and in pop culture, is you get

00:26:33.600 these two extremes. You get people that are just toxic positivity, Pollyanna, I'm going to bury my head in the

00:26:40.160 sand. Everything is great with my life. So why care about anything? And then you get this other extreme, which is

00:26:45.580 despair and nihilism. Everything is so broken. Why try to fix it? Everything is structurally messed up.

00:26:51.680 There's no point of doing anything. And even though these seem to be polar opposites, I think what they

00:26:56.580 have in common is they absolve the person that adopts either of those mindsets of doing anything.

00:27:01.800 It's a cop-out. It's lazy. Because if you bury your head in the sand, well, then there's nothing to fix.

00:27:05.900 There's nothing to improve. But if you adopt this despairing attitude, well, then there's also nothing to do.

00:27:11.060 Because you have to have some hope to take action. And what Frankel's tragic optimism does is it

00:27:16.280 situates us smack in the middle of those two extremes. And it says, yeah, life is hard. There

00:27:21.800 is a lot that's broken about just an average individual life. And there's certainly a lot

00:27:25.880 that's broken about the world. But in order to improve, we can't become broken people, right?

00:27:31.780 Like to fix a broken world or to improve a broken situation, we can't be broken people.

00:27:35.780 So we can be tragically optimistic.

00:27:37.440 Yeah. Those extreme mindsets that people take, either the nihilism or the overly Pollyanna,

00:27:42.980 like what they do is it reduces your agency or your sense of self-efficacy. It's like, well,

00:27:47.300 what I do doesn't really matter. So I just won't do anything. But I think this tragic optimism,

00:27:52.960 this middle non-dual way, it actually increases your sense of agency.

00:27:57.600 Yeah. And it's not lazy. And you're right. I think like your take is much more generous,

00:28:01.700 which is it decreases one sense of agency, which is true. But I also think it's kind of lazy,

00:28:05.780 right? Because once you adapt one of those two extremes, like there's literally no point of

00:28:09.780 doing anything. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:28:17.180 And now back to the show. So, okay. So manage your expectations, expect things will be hard,

00:28:23.140 but still have the optimism. You call it, you know, wise hope and taking wise action that

00:28:28.100 you can have effect change once you accept what reality is. Another thing you talk about in

00:28:33.980 developing this rugged flexibility in your life is developing a fluid sense of self. So what does

00:28:41.280 that look like? And how does it make us more stable and rugged, but flexible?

00:28:46.040 Yeah, this was my favorite chapter in the book. So I hope we can spend a little bit of time here.

00:28:49.320 A fluid sense of self is, you know, Bruce Lee. I know that you have, I believe it's his daughter,

00:28:54.440 right? They wrote that beautiful book. You had her on. I love that episode, Be Like Water.

00:28:57.860 So a fluid sense of self is like water. It can evolve over time. It can work around obstacles.

00:29:05.200 It can go through and over things that get in its way. And that is so important, right? Because

00:29:12.080 talk about being versus having. Like a fluid sense of self is very being-esque. It recognizes that you

00:29:17.780 yourself are going to change over time. Now, what people often discount is that water with no bank or

00:29:26.940 no direction is just a random puddle. Part of what makes a river run and have progress is that it has

00:29:33.620 a bank, right? It has a boundary. Without a boundary, a river is just chaotic water. In the boundary,

00:29:39.720 I think for us as individuals, those are our core values. That's our sense of ruggedness.

00:29:44.620 So we have to have some core values to guide our path, but we also want to be really fluid

00:29:49.960 as we go so we can be flexible, so we can change, so we can evolve. So ultimately,

00:29:55.280 that's what I mean by a fluid sense of self. So it's not just water. It's like be like water,

00:30:00.040 but also have these guiding principles to guide the flow over time.

00:30:04.780 And you use a great example of this speed skater, Niels Van Der Poel. Is that how you say his name?

00:30:10.580 Yeah, Niels Van Der Poel. You got that right.

00:30:12.020 Yeah. He adopted a fluid sense of self and it helped him help catapult his career. He walks

00:30:17.340 through him. I thought I love that example.

00:30:18.880 Me too. So Niels Van Der Poel won the gold medal in the 10K and the 5K at the 2022 games. He also

00:30:27.700 set a world record. So he is the best distance speed skater to ever step foot on this planet.

00:30:34.160 And prior to his phenomenal performance at the 2022 games, Van Der Poel was struggling. He wasn't

00:30:40.320 performing at what he thought was his best. And he's a really mature, thoughtful, reflective guy.

00:30:46.340 And he stepped back and he said, what's going on here? And he identified that he felt fear

00:30:51.340 every time he stepped into the oval to compete. And he asked himself, why do I have this fear?

00:30:58.400 And the answer was his entire sense of self, his entire identity was derived from speed skating.

00:31:06.700 Niels Van Der Poel was synonymous with his result as a speed skater and with the sport of speed skating

00:31:12.240 itself. And that's a lot of pressure to carry. And Van Der Poel did this thing that is so remarkable

00:31:18.960 for an Olympian to do, which is deprioritize to some extent his sport. And in the lead up to the

00:31:25.460 2022 games, Van Der Poel said, I am going to take a normal weekend. During the week, I'm going to train

00:31:32.420 like crazy. I am a world-class athlete, but on the weekend, I'm going to have a weekend that's more

00:31:36.460 like my friends who are accountants. So he started to go out for beers and pizza. He went bowling.

00:31:41.760 He went on hikes. He didn't just sit around training all day and then doing specific recovery.

00:31:47.740 And the reason he did this had less to do with his body and more to do with his mind.

00:31:51.880 Van Der Poel wanted to do what I've come to call diversifying his sense of identity.

00:31:56.820 He wanted to create other sources of identity and meaning in his life beyond just speed skating.

00:32:01.860 So old Van Der Poel was just Van Der Poel the speed skater, but new Van Der Poel was Van Der Poel

00:32:07.120 the friend, Van Der Poel the beer snob, Van Der Poel the community member, Van Der Poel who loved hiking

00:32:13.220 in the mountains. And what this allowed him to do is when he went to compete, his entire identity

00:32:20.000 wasn't on the line. It released so much pressure. And as a result, he skated without fear. And these

00:32:26.540 aren't my words. These are his words. So Van Der Poel has written elegantly about what this

00:32:31.500 diversification of his identity allowed him to do was to shed the fear that he used to carry with

00:32:37.100 speed skating because he knew that eventually he'd get injured or eventually aging would deteriorate

00:32:43.400 his performance or he might fall in a race or he can't control what the other competitors are doing.

00:32:48.760 He can't control if other countries doping agencies don't catch cheaters. So if his entire identity was

00:32:54.440 tied up in the sport that was inevitably going to change, his identity was fragile. So Van Der Poel

00:33:00.240 essentially said, I need other sources of meaning. And the metaphor that I like to use for this is a

00:33:05.200 house. Identity is like a house. And if you just have a one bedroom house and the equivalent of an

00:33:12.020 earthquake blows up that one room, it blows all of you up. You are completely discombobulated.

00:33:17.820 But if you have other rooms in your house, then when there's chaos and change in that one room,

00:33:22.740 you can seek refuge and meaning in those other rooms. While that other room that has the chaos

00:33:28.900 gets back to a semblance of reorder. And I think this is so important, whether you call it self

00:33:35.360 complexity, which is the scientific term, diversifying your sense of self, which is what

00:33:38.860 I call it in the book, or just the Niels Van Der Poel approach to excellence, which says you have

00:33:43.280 to care deeply about your main thing to be great, but it cannot be the only part of your identity

00:33:48.160 because that inherently makes you fragile to change.

00:33:51.100 Yeah. The analogy that I thought of when you were describing diversifying your identity was

00:33:55.180 diversifying your investment portfolio, right? Like one of the common things you got to have,

00:33:59.180 you got to diversify, have mix of stocks, bonds, international companies, domestic companies,

00:34:04.100 so that when one goes down, the other one might be going up or staying stable. You're going to be

00:34:08.760 fine. You can do the same thing with your sense of self.

00:34:12.740 Yeah, exactly. It just makes you so much more rugged and flexible, right? So much more robust.

00:34:17.220 Yeah. We're often sold the opposite, which is like, you have to be obsessed and you have to go all in

00:34:21.520 and you have to put all your eggs in one basket. And I think one, that's not true. And two, even if

00:34:28.760 you are obsessed with one thing and you do want to put all your eggs in one basket, that's okay.

00:34:34.020 So long as you make sure that you have other baskets available or to go back to my preferred

00:34:38.180 metaphor, you can spend a whole lot of time in one room, but you never want to completely close the

00:34:44.100 doors to the others because you never know when you're going to need to seek refuge in those other

00:34:48.300 rooms when things change in your main one. Okay. So this could look like, don't just focus on your

00:34:52.920 job. Make sure you spend time on your family life, hobbies, maybe a social group, friends,

00:34:59.720 church group, whatever. You got to do it all so that when one of those areas is going off kilter

00:35:04.860 or changes, you're not going to be left in a lurch. That's right. And I'll use myself to make this

00:35:11.180 really pragmatic because as a result of reading and researching for this book, I've really tried to

00:35:16.860 adopt this. You know, I'm trying to be a world-class writer. I want to be a New York

00:35:20.660 Times bestseller with this book. I treat my work like a craftsperson. And it's very easy to think

00:35:26.440 that I should just prioritize writing, right? And do less of everything else so I can be a world-class

00:35:31.600 writer. But what I've realized is that when I try to do that, I carry a lot of fear and angst

00:35:37.600 because it's so much of my identity is on the line on this one thing. So it's so much better for me

00:35:44.340 instead of spending that marginal extra hour or two writing. This is separate from family. I'm

00:35:49.320 never going to leave my family behind. But to go to the gym and to have an identity as an athlete

00:35:53.600 and to garden, to plant freaking flowers and watch them grow because if my book flops, I can still go

00:36:00.260 out in the garden and have a lot of fun there. And then, like I said, for me, my own values,

00:36:04.380 family is just central. So I think I am a better writer, not in spite of the fact that I have this

00:36:11.920 family life, that I garden, that I'm an athlete, that I also have this community life, but because

00:36:16.080 of it. Because it just makes me so much less scared to fail in writing. And the same is true for the

00:36:20.940 other things. When it hits the fan in the gym, I can lean into my other pursuits. So it's really,

00:36:26.560 really, really valuable. Well, I imagine it's also making you a better writer because by doing those

00:36:30.600 things, it's making you like a more interesting person. Like you're not just holed up in your office,

00:36:36.820 you know, looking at books and just writing. You're out there experiencing life. So it'll give

00:36:41.120 you more to, you know, more to call to when you are writing. Yeah, I think that's it. And I think,

00:36:46.400 you know, I'm using a very specific example. Not that many people make a living writing,

00:36:49.880 but this is so applicable to whatever you do. It's like, what are the rooms that you want in your

00:36:54.020 house? And then how are you allocating your time and energy across those rooms? And I'm not arguing

00:36:59.740 for quote unquote balance and spending equal amount of time in each room. I'm simply arguing that you

00:37:05.020 have a few rooms and that you never shut the doors to any of them. And if you're going to be spending

00:37:09.420 a lot of time in one room, make sure that you don't leave the others completely behind because

00:37:13.560 you never know when things are going to change. So shifting into practices, you talk about developing

00:37:19.480 a practice of being more responsive instead of reactive. How do you develop this bias towards

00:37:26.120 responding as opposed to reacting? There's two things. The first is what is more of an internal or

00:37:33.400 inside game. And then the second is external. So the inside game, let's start there. Stimulus

00:37:38.580 in response, right? We want to create space. I'm not the person that created that. It's actually

00:37:43.220 been attributed to Viktor Frankl. Some believe that falsely there was a psychologist that talked

00:37:47.960 about before. But anyways, you want space between stimulus and response because then you can respond,

00:37:51.940 not react. What I came up with in the book was this heuristic. Reacting tends to follow a path of

00:37:57.700 two Ps. You panic and then you pummel ahead. Responding tends to follow a path of four Ps.

00:38:04.960 You pause and gather yourself. You process what's happening. You make a plan and only then do you

00:38:11.400 proceed. So it is about slowing down when an unexpected change happens so that you can get

00:38:17.980 into that more thoughtful, deliberate, wise, effortful responding mode instead of just rashly

00:38:24.660 reacting. Because nine times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100 in the modern world,

00:38:31.040 things tend to work out better when we can respond instead of react. So listeners might be saying,

00:38:35.980 well, intellectually, that sounds great. And everyone loves a framework, four Ps. But when the

00:38:39.700 rubber meets the road, how do I actually do it? And here, some cutting edge psychology research can help.

00:38:46.040 The number one way to pause and process the first two steps, simply take a few deep breaths

00:38:53.000 and name what you are feeling. Name panic or overwhelm or surprise or excitement or fear,

00:39:01.080 distress, restlessness, whatever it is. Name your emotions. Because by naming your emotions,

00:39:05.580 researchers call this affect labeling, you create space between yourself and your emotions.

00:39:10.760 So instead of getting swept up in the storm, you're at least watching the storm.

00:39:15.620 And that simple pause, deep breath, and naming, you're already on a path to responding,

00:39:20.960 right? Because you're not immediately reacting. And then the plan part, this is about what are your

00:39:26.280 core values, right? What is going to guide my next steps? If your core values are health, authenticity,

00:39:33.040 family, let's say, well, what would it look like to prioritize those? What would a healthy person do

00:39:37.800 in response to this? What would someone who values family do in response to this? What would the

00:39:41.980 authentic response be? And only them proceed. And depending on the size of the change,

00:39:48.060 this whole process can happen in 30 seconds. You're stuck in unexpected traffic or your dog

00:39:53.420 vomits. It's going to make you late for a meeting. Or this can play out over a year. You get laid off

00:39:58.180 from a job. You have a divorce. You have a falling out with the best friend. So this can be really

00:40:03.400 condensed for more trivial changes, or it can be opened up and slowed down for bigger changes.

00:40:07.940 So that's the inside game. Really trying to adopt this four Ps to pause, process, plan, and then

00:40:14.840 proceed. And then the external game, and this often gets discounted, and I wish it wouldn't because I

00:40:20.800 think it's probably equally as important, is to put yourself in responsive context. If you're someone

00:40:27.800 that spends all day on political Twitter and watching cable news, you're going to be a reactionary

00:40:34.480 person. Like you can't swim in reactionary waters. And then when unexpected change happens in your

00:40:40.140 own life, expect that you're suddenly going to be really wise and thoughtful. So if you want to be

00:40:44.460 a responsive person, you want to try to put yourself in responsive environments.

00:40:49.620 I love that. So get off of Twitter all the time.

00:40:52.660 Essentially. I think it's X now.

00:40:54.260 Oh, X. Yeah. X.com.

00:40:55.620 How it makes me feel is like X.

00:40:57.420 Yeah. And I love the, yeah. So I think there's a lot of good things there. I love the

00:41:02.260 Paws and Labeling Your Emotions. We've written about that before on how that can really defuse

00:41:08.880 a situation when you're feeling really amped up, stressed out. When you're in that situation,

00:41:13.700 when you're feeling those emotions, like you said, our initial thing is we want to do something now

00:41:17.700 because we want to make this emotion go away. But just simply labeling the emotion, it can just

00:41:24.120 completely deflate it and it puts you in a better mindset. And I think one of the things that

00:41:28.560 requires labeling your emotions is becoming more emotionally literate, like developing more words

00:41:35.000 to describe your emotions. Sometimes we might think we're angry, but it might be like we're

00:41:41.180 actually feeling envy or resentment. That's different. And whether you're feeling resentful

00:41:46.000 or envious, it might change what you do. So I think becoming more emotionally literate is also

00:41:50.160 important.

00:41:51.560 Yeah. You know what's fascinating about that, Brad? So you look way back to folklore and ancient

00:41:58.000 wisdom. And there's this rule called the law of names. And it appears throughout all kinds

00:42:06.100 of folklore, East and West. And the law of name says that once you name something, it loses

00:42:12.020 its power over you. So this is the premise of the story Rumpelstiltskin, right? Like the

00:42:17.740 only way to get the protagonist's child back from the evil villain is to name, to know its name.

00:42:25.980 And spoiler alert, for those that don't know, it's Rumpelstiltskin. But in all of these folkloric

00:42:31.260 myths, you have to have the exact name. And the characters often guess and just miss and

00:42:38.080 nothing changes. It's only when you get the exact name right that the evil force loses its power over

00:42:44.800 you. And isn't that just amazing how much that mimics modern psychology, which basically says the

00:42:49.700 more accurate your naming of the forces, the more it loses its power over you.

00:42:53.480 Yeah, it's really cool.

00:42:54.400 Yeah. When I was researching the book, I just found that like one of these fascinating

00:42:57.180 moments when ancient wisdom and modern science completely align.

00:43:01.760 Something you talk about in the book is that whenever we face a setback or difficulty,

00:43:06.260 oftentimes our immediate response is to find meaning or a silver lining. And you argue that

00:43:11.880 sometimes forcing meaning on just a crappy situation isn't helpful. Why is that?

00:43:16.640 I think the answer is in the question, forcing meaning. So it is true that for most challenges

00:43:23.700 in our lives, even the really, really hard ones, we tend to grow from those, especially if we have

00:43:29.220 a good toolkit for change. However, that growth and meaning, it has to happen on its own time.

00:43:35.280 So you cannot force growth and meaning or gratitude for that matter. You have to have them come on their

00:43:42.640 own time. So a change happens and you want to have a growth mindset. You want to respond,

00:43:47.700 not react. You want to be rugged and flexible. You want to do all these things. 98% of the time,

00:43:52.520 you'll probably be able to, and you'll work through the cycle of allostasis of order, disorder,

00:43:57.600 reorder really well. And you'll get to a desired reorder and you'll have grown. And that is what

00:44:01.400 personal evolution is all about. However, let's just say it's one to 2% of the time in your life.

00:44:07.280 It just doesn't work. Cancer diagnosis, loss of a loved one, spouse cheats on you and leads to a

00:44:15.840 messy divorce, right? The stuff where whatever tools you have, they just don't meet the immediate 0.55

00:44:22.120 challenge. And here, the best thing that you can do is to release from any need for optimism, for

00:44:30.120 growth, for anything at all, other than just showing up and getting through, just surviving day in

00:44:35.360 and day out. And then when you get to the other side and you don't get to determine when that is,

00:44:41.720 meaning and growth tend to be there for you. The scientist Dan Gilbert coined this term a

00:44:46.380 psychological immune system. And I just love it because he says that much like we have a biological

00:44:51.880 immune system, we have psychological immune systems. And much like our biological immune system

00:44:57.480 heals really fast from small injuries or from things it's faced before, right? That's the definition

00:45:04.440 of immunity. When there's a novel virus or when you undergo a major physical trauma,

00:45:09.460 you don't expect to just immediately be better the next day. It takes time. Sometimes it takes

00:45:14.400 months. Sometimes it takes years. Yet, when we undergo psychological changes or emotional,

00:45:19.860 spiritual changes, we often expect that we're just going to grow from it immediately.

00:45:24.820 And I think this is a huge trap in the self-help world is that all these books on growth and

00:45:28.760 meaning and positivity, they're all true and they're all well-informed. But the worst thing to tell a

00:45:33.620 depressed person is to come up with three things that you're grateful for. Once that depressed

00:45:37.800 person gets to the other side of their depression, odds are they'll look back on it and they'll be

00:45:42.020 so grateful for certain things. And they'll have so much compassion and wisdom that are freaking hard

00:45:47.540 won through surviving depression. But when you're in the thick of depression, all that matters is doing

00:45:52.260 whatever it takes to get through. So I think it's really important. It's basically like all the tools

00:45:57.000 work for 98% of the changes. But when she really hits the fan, huge, negative, unexpected changes,

00:46:04.820 sometimes the most important thing we can do is just release from any need for anything other than

00:46:09.960 survival, knowing that if we can just get to the other side, the meaning and the growth tends to come

00:46:16.260 on its own time and take care of itself.

00:46:18.780 And you offer ideas on what you can do to, instead of forcing meaning, usher it in. Open up the possibility

00:46:24.160 for meaning to happen in even that really hard time. And I guess it's things like staying connected

00:46:29.380 to a community, focusing on relationships. I love you talk about developing rituals and routines for

00:46:34.840 your life. So even when you don't feel like you don't have the motivation to do things, you have

00:46:39.600 that ritual you can fall back on so you can get through that really hard time.

00:46:43.120 That's right. Ritual, routine, social support, this notion of surrender. So getting out of problem

00:46:49.320 solving mode and saying, I just need help. And then voluntary simplicity, which basically says

00:46:54.500 that when your life just feels completely like it is spiraling out of control, do everything you can

00:47:00.640 to simplify what you can control. Because that just gives you more energy and more resources to meet

00:47:05.700 the parts of your life that you can't control. And the research here is really interesting,

00:47:09.540 Brett. What it shows is that when individuals undergo capital T trauma, so that 2% of change that is

00:47:17.560 really negative. Researchers look at the pathways of those who go on to experience post-traumatic

00:47:24.000 stress disorder versus those that go on to experience post-traumatic growth. And what they find is that

00:47:29.980 the first three months are identical. Everyone looks like they're headed towards PTSD. Depression rates

00:47:37.080 are high, anxiety rates are high, despair rates are high. But then at the three-month mark, the people

00:47:42.860 that are going to experience post-traumatic growth, that's when they start ticking up.

00:47:47.520 Now, the question that many people have is, well, what separates the two? And researchers don't know.

00:47:52.280 A lot of this probably just comes down to our inherited neurochemistry. But what's fascinating

00:47:57.640 about this to me is that it goes to show that we cannot force meaning in positive attributes on

00:48:04.140 negative things. It has to come on its own time, and it never happens overnight.

00:48:08.520 One of the things you talk about in the book that really stuck out to me was this idea,

00:48:11.120 when you're going through a hard time, of separating the difference between fake fatigue and real

00:48:15.580 fatigue. What's the difference, and why is that important to know the difference?

00:48:20.280 These are my terms, and they're the most accurate I could come up with. But if listeners have a

00:48:24.240 better way to think about this, I'm all ears because, you know, fake fatigue doesn't really serve it well

00:48:30.020 because it's real fatigue, but it's fake. So I'm going to get into what I mean by this. So real fatigue

00:48:34.920 is when you feel really tired and down and out because you are physiologically tired. What you

00:48:41.240 need to do is rest. There's no way around it. What I call fake fatigue feels exactly like real fatigue.

00:48:47.100 You're exhausted. You're apathetic. You're in a rut. But there's no underlying biological reason for

00:48:52.160 it. You have no reason to feel that tired. And they require two very different responses.

00:48:58.100 So real fatigue, what you need to do is rest. Shut things down. Spend the day on the couch. Read a

00:49:03.960 book. Focus on sleeping. Let your mind-body system recover and rest. Fake fatigue, however,

00:49:10.440 benefits from the exact opposite, which is forcing your body into action. The podcast host Rich Roll

00:49:16.520 eloquently says mood follows action. The scientific term is behavioral activation. And it basically says

00:49:21.760 that for what I call fake fatigue, you don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to

00:49:27.380 give yourself a chance at feeling good. So fake fatigue is like an inertia. And the only way out

00:49:32.760 is to forcefully break the inertia, to force yourself to get going. Whereas real fatigue requires that you

00:49:39.000 shut things down. And what complicates this even more is often what starts out as real fatigue

00:49:44.400 becomes fake fatigue. So here's the example, right? You're super burnt out. It's been a tumultuous time

00:49:49.800 in your professional life, your personal life, maybe both. You got real fatigue. You need to shut

00:49:53.900 things down. You need to do a staycation, take a week off, sleep in, be completely unproductive,

00:49:59.460 just let your mind-body system recover. But then after that seven-day, 10-day, two-week period,

00:50:05.120 whatever it is, you're probably as rested as you're going to be, but you still feel really apathetic.

00:50:11.340 And at that point, what you need to do is you need to jolt your system out of it. You need to just go do

00:50:16.280 the workout or just start the next project, even if you don't want to. And I'm really confident in

00:50:23.180 this framework because you see it practiced by elite athletes all the time. So before big events,

00:50:28.500 elite athletes almost always go through what's called a taper, which is basically they really

00:50:32.980 dramatically decrease their training. So they've been training hard for months, in some cases years,

00:50:37.760 a four-year cycle going into the Olympics. And then for between two weeks and four weeks before

00:50:43.040 the big event, they pull way back. Why? Because they've accumulated all this real fatigue. They

00:50:48.220 need to rest. But in the last couple of days before the big event, elite athletes almost always

00:50:54.020 sprinkle in these very short but highly intense efforts. And the reason for that is to wake their

00:51:00.880 body up, to basically snap the inertia of rest because they're as rested as they're going to be.

00:51:06.480 And now what they need to do is they need to nudge themselves back into momentum and action.

00:51:10.680 No, I like that a lot. I've seen that in my own lives as well.

00:51:13.800 Well, Brad, this has been a great conversation. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that

00:51:17.120 you're really passionate about? You want to make sure people understand about this idea of rugged

00:51:20.520 flexibility? I think that we covered all the things that I would have hoped to cover today.

00:51:25.100 You're such a wonderful shepherd of these conversations. So I feel great about it. Thank

00:51:28.520 you. Well, Brad, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:51:31.820 Best place to learn more about the book is really anywhere you get books, you know, Amazon,

00:51:35.620 Barnes and Noble, your independent bookstore, Audible, it's available in all formats. And then to learn

00:51:40.540 more about my work, my website is just my name, www.bradstahlberg.com. And the social media

00:51:48.700 platform that I tend to be more active on is Instagram, where I'm also at Brad Stahlberg,

00:51:54.540 just like my name.

00:51:55.240 Fantastic. Well, Brad Stahlberg, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:51:58.160 Thank you, Brett McKay. Appreciate it.

00:52:00.140 My guest today was Brad Stahlberg. He's the author of the book, Master of Change. It's

00:52:03.540 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at

00:52:07.040 his website, bradstahlberg.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash rugged flexibility,

00:52:12.940 where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:52:15.320 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

00:52:27.020 artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles

00:52:30.620 that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't

00:52:33.980 done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or

00:52:37.360 Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the

00:52:41.560 show with a friend or family member who you think we get something out of it. As always,

00:52:45.060 thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to listen to

00:52:49.080 AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - September 06, 2023

How to Develop Rugged Flexibility

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