How to Develop Rugged Flexibility
Episode Stats
Summary
Brad Stolberg is the author of Master of Change, How to Excel When Everything Is Changing, Including You. In this episode, Brad discusses why Allostasis is a better model for dealing with disruption than homeostasis, and how healthy change moves in a cycle of order, disorder, and reorder.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Change is a constant. Changes big and small are always happening in our lives,
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while the world also changes around us. We can either resist these changes as unmooring
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threats to our sense of self or embrace them as chances to get better and stronger.
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The key to taking that second approach, my guest says, is developing rugged flexibility.
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His name is Brad Stolberg, and he's the author of Master of Change,
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How to Excel When Everything is Changing, Including You. Today on the show, Brad impacts why
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allostasis is a better model for dealing with disruption than homeostasis and how healthy
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change moves in a cycle of order, disorder, and reorder. We then discuss ways to move through
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the cycle with rugged flexibility, an approach to life that keeps something solid and stable
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while letting others change and flow. We talk about the importance of adopting a being versus
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having orientation, managing your expectations, diversifying your identity, and more. After
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the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash ruggedflexibility.
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All right. Brad Stolberg, welcome back to the show.
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So you got a new book out called Master of Change, How to Excel When Everything is Changing,
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Including You. And you take readers through research-backed practices and ideas to help
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them better navigate change and disruption in their lives. And this change could be small
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change or it could be big change. Divorce, you lose a job, sickness, lots of things. What led you
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down that research path to write this book? A mix of the personal and the global is the short answer.
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The longer answer is in the last five years in my personal life, prior to writing this book,
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I had undergone all sorts of change, both good and bad, in what felt like a really compressed period
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of time. So I moved across the country. I left my job with the corporate world. I became a dad for
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the first time. I became a dad again for the second time. Got a big old German Shepherd.
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Sustained an injury, or I guess more accurately put, a longstanding condition tipped over the
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boiling point that took me out of running, which had been an enormous part of my identity for the
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past decade plus. Became painfully estranged from family members. It's a long story. We don't need to
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get into it, but really just all sorts of changes on every level of my personal life. So that was going on.
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And then I distinctly remember being in our kitchen here in Asheville, North Carolina,
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early on in the pandemic and reading articles that all shared the headline,
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when are we going to get back to normal? And there was just something about how that was worded that
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rubbed me the wrong way. I remember thinking like, this is so dumb. We're never going to get back to
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normal. It's absurd to think that we're going to get back to normal. And I was realizing that in my
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own life, though, in many of these areas, like I was still kind of holding on to getting back to
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normal, whatever that meant. And that dissonance that occurred in that moment really led me to
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this intellectual journey of trying to understand how we relate to change and why we relate to change
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in the ways that we do. Well, so yeah, you talk about one of our initial responses to change,
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whatever that is, is we want to get back to normal, right? We want to get back to what you call
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homeostasis. Besides that response, what's another typical response that we have to change?
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I think we tend to deny it altogether or pretend it's not happening, engage in some version of
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magical thinking. We often just rotely resist change. And I say rotely because sometimes we
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ought to resist change, but I'm talking about going on autopilot. So just an instant reaction
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of resisting change. And then finally, very much related to trying to get back to the way things
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were, is we just don't update our expectations for the new reality. So it's like we're living in
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an imaginary old world when what's happening around us is very new.
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And so yeah, you talk about instead of thinking about homeostasis, I think that's how we typically
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approach our life. We want everything to be balanced. And that's, you often see in the blog
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post or podcast or self-improvement books out there, you got to find balance. It's all about
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finding balance, work-life balance, balance with personal interest, family interest. But you say,
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instead of thinking about homeostasis, balance, you think we need to focus on what you call
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what's called allostasis. So what is allostasis?
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This is such a hinge point in the book, one of a few. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time
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here because I think it's nuanced and really important. Homeostasis, many people have heard
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of it. It's over 150 years old. It was the first science around change. But I say science with quotes
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around it because this happened in the early 1800s when things were very different than they are
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today. And homeostasis has stuck around. And it describes any healthy living system is craving
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stability and always resisting change and or when experiencing change, trying to get back to
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stability as fast as possible. So homeostasis describes a cycle of order, disorder, back to
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order, or X to Y, back to X. And as I said, this has been the prevailing way that folks have thought
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about change for well over a century. Only more recently has the scientific community said,
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actually, when you look at systems that really thrive, they don't show a homeostatic response
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to change. What they do is something that is similar but different. So yes, it's true that good,
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thriving systems crave stability, but that stability, they achieve it by changing. So instead of a cycle
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of order, disorder, order, healthy systems engage in constant cycles of order, disorder, reorder.
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So they get that stability, but that stability is somewhere new. And Peter Sterling, who is a
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professor at University of Pennsylvania and his late colleague Joseph Ayer, they coined this
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allostasis. And for the nerds out there, if you look at the etymology of these words, it tells the whole
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story. So homo means same, and stasis means standing. So it says, being stable by being the
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same. Allo means variable. And it says, being stable by changing. So allostasis describes stability
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through change. And that has a double meaning, right? The way to be stable through change is by
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changing, by getting to a reorder, by not trying to go back to the old order.
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No, I love that. And that when I read about that order, disorder, reorder paradigm, instead of order,
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disorder, order again, it reminded me, we've had Richard Rohr on the podcast before. And he talks
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about this idea that you have to, you construct, maybe deconstruct, but then you have to reconstruct
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something new. That's right. And I tip my hat to Richard Rohr in the book, because in a more
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spiritual or just personal growth setting, Richard Rohr writes eloquently about this in his book,
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The Wisdom Pattern. However, what's really interesting is you see this in so many different
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domains. And right, my whole jam is like trying to find patterns across disciplines, because then I
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think there's a chance it's true with a capital T. So Richard Rohr is writing about this in spiritual
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wisdom work. But then you look at management science, and they describe organizational growth
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as a cycle of freezing, unfreezing, and refreezing. And then you look at Buddhism, Richard Rohr,
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are historically more of a Christian lens. And Buddhism talks about going to pieces without
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falling apart, or integration, unintegration, reintegration. Then you look back at the first
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book I wrote with Steve, Magnus, peak performance, stress, rest, growth. So you start to see this
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pattern really everywhere. However, so many people, when it comes to change, are still stuck in this
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model of homeostasis. I can't tell you how many blog posts when I, you know, was first researching
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this book, and I put in keywords homeostasis, are all written in the spirit of behavior change is so
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hard because of homeostasis. Or if you want to lose weight, or you want to quit smoking, or you
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want to change your behavior, you have to fight against homeostasis, when in fact, it's really just
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not an accurate model to think about change. Yeah, talking about allostasis, when we have a change,
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even when things get back to normal, quote unquote, they've changed. So let's take the pandemic,
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for example, I was thinking as you're talking about. We had this pandemic, and people were
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thinking, well, when can things get back to normal? And you're saying, well, things will never get back
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to normal. Things are going to change because of this. Even when we drop lockdowns, or masks,
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or whatever. Examples that I've seen in my own life, the way we do work has changed permanently,
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probably. It's a hybrid model. We're doing Zoom more often. We're doing a lot of work online. My kids,
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their school life has changed. Like, there's no more snow days, basically, because now they have
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remote learning. And so, you know, when it snows a lot, or we get an ice storm here, the teachers
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can send a remote learning assignment to our kids. That didn't happen before the pandemic. So even
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though things are kind of back to normal, things have changed. That's right. And I think the change
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is still occurring. Major downstream effects that, you know, perhaps we haven't really even seen the
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full result of, but just geographical change. How many people moved out of big cities? And what does
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that mean for these smaller second tier, third tier places? Geopolitical change, the pandemic
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completely changed our politics, trust in public institutions. Are public institutions ever going
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to earn back that trust? I mean, there's so much that is still in maybe a disorder phase. And there's
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never going to be what it was before. There will only be reorder. And our work as individuals, as
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community members, as members of society is to try, whenever there's a change, to get us to a
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favorable reorder, to engage with things, to not just rotely resist it on the one hand, but on the
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other hand, also not to throw up our hands and say, hey, there's nothing I can do, but to really
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try to skillfully engage with the disorder to help create that reorder in a good place.
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And your solution, your idea to this, to be able to manage that disorder so we can reorder to something
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good and positive is rugged flexibility. So what is rugged flexibility and how does it help people
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develop that allostasis mindset? Rugged flexibility is, it's a gritty endurance
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and an anti-fragility that not only withstands change, but can thrive in its midst. And I love
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this term because it comes out of what most people, at least people in Western society, would think of
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as complete opposites, right? So to be rugged is to be strong, to be robust, maybe even a little bit
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rigid. And to be flexible, of course, is to bend without breaking, to be smooth, to go with the
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flow. And we tend to think either or. So when change happens, we're either going to be really
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rugged and buckle down, or we're going to be really zen and flexible. And in the research that I did for
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this book and seeing really across the board, all the way from evolution and how species thrive over
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time, to the individual level, and looking at really successful people who have undergone big
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changes and how they thrive over time, what you realize is that they don't go to either end of
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that polar extreme. Like they're not just rugged, they're not just flexible, they're both rugged and
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flexible. They have rugged flexibility. So they're rugged on their core values, on these things that
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really matter to them, their central features, what make them who they are, the hills that are truly
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worth dying on. But then they're flexible on how they apply those and everything else.
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And the key to navigating the cycles of allostasis that we talked about is just that. It's knowing
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your defining principles, your essence, what makes you who you are, that you're not going to
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bend that much on, but then bending on everything else. So it's this term that comes out of non-dual
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thinking, right? Not this or that, not rugged or flexible, which is how we so often think.
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But hey, if I want to be gritty, if I want to thrive during change, I need to be rugged and
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flexible. And so what you've done in this book is you divide it up into three parts.
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On how to develop a rugged and flexible mindset, a rugged and flexible identity,
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and how to take rugged and flexible actions. So in the rugged and flexible mindset section,
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you talk about being open to the flow of life. And one thing that really stood out to me in this
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section was this idea of developing a being over having orientation. So what's the difference between
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In 1976, I got to give credit where credit is due. One of my intellectual mentors, no longer with us,
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Eric Fromm, coins this dichotomy between having and being. And Fromm says that a having orientation
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is when you relate to things in more of an I, its way, or you own it. So I have a house,
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I have a child, I have a partner, I have a 500 pound deadlift, can be other people, can be things,
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can even be skills. And Fromm argued, and rightfully so, I think that a having mindset inherently makes
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you really fragile. Because anything that you have will inevitably change. So I have a kid, well,
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what happens when your kid moves out of the house? I have a 500 pound deadlift, what happens when you
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become injured, or the aging process gets to a point where performance starts to deteriorate?
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I have a wife, well, that's not a great way to be in relationship with someone. And Fromm argued that
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rather than this having orientation, we'd benefit from adopting a being orientation, which is less
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about owning something and possessing it, and more about being in relationship with it. So you can be
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in relationship with training, you can be in relationship with another person, and you can even,
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to some extent, be in relationship with the things that you own, or at the very least,
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not identify with having them, but identifying with what they can do for you. And that's inherently
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less fragile. Because that relationship is going to evolve and change over time. And if you expect
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that's the case, that's great. Whereas if you get so clingy to have something, then the minute that
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things change, you start to become really fragile and discombobulated. I think you see this in two
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really big ways frequently, which is parents when their kids leave the house, and people who really
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identify with their work when it's time to retire. And it can really be a shock to the system if you
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thought that you own that thing, and now it's no longer yours.
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So with the parent example, what would a more being approach to parenting look like when your kid moves
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I think it would just be realizing from the outset that your goal is not to control your kid.
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Your goal is not to, as much as it takes a wise, wise thought to do this, but your goal is not to
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set your kid on any given path. Your goal is to love your kid and to be in a relationship with them,
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knowing that that's going to change. And that's going to look like so many different things at so
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many different points in time. And as a parent, you do want to just hold your kid. And sometimes you
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want to freeze time. And I think wanting to freeze time while it's valid, and it gets to me, I'm sure
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you've had moments like this. It's kind of like a having orientation, right? Like you want to cling
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to this thing that's going to change. So the more that we can realize it changes in love, in the case
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of parenting, deeply, not in spite of that, but because of that, the better off we'll be.
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We've had some guests on the podcast talking about one of the challenges for former elite
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athletes is that moment when they have to stop their sport for whatever reason. They just got
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old, injury or whatever. And it seems like the ones that succeed are the ones who have,
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who develop that being approach. They realize I can't have the joy of being an elite swimmer anymore,
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but I can still relate to swimming, for example, in another way I can coach, I can mentor younger
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athletes coming up. Yep. You hit the nail on the head. That's the second example I was going to use.
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And now I don't need to, cause you're spot on. Well, you had that example from your own life.
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It seemed like running was a have orientation for you. Then you had to develop a being orientation.
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What, what did that look like for you? Yeah, that's right. So it was really hard. Um,
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at first I remember like just walking or even driving and runners and like seeing them and feeling a
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little anxiety, like, Oh, if I'm not this, then like, I don't have this anymore than what am I?
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But ultimately what I realized is that, you know, there was nothing special about my running
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performance. Not like I was a pro nowhere close to it. What I really valued was the mastery of
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craft, the being in community, the really objective quantifiable progress and the physicality of it.
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And I could be an athlete without having to run. And that's ultimately the shift that I made. I
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went back to my own strength training performance roots. I grew up playing power sports. Like so many
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got into endurance sports in my early twenties and pursued that for years and years, but realized
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that there's so many different ways to be an athlete and to still be a part of the running community.
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Even though I myself am no longer running, I still go on so many running podcasts. I still follow the
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sport. I still mentor younger runners. And that made the off ramp much easier than if I would have,
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you know, continue to cling on to needing to run in order to be a runner, let alone an athlete.
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Okay. So this being approach allows you to be rugged because there's something about you
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that you value that's there. It's going to be all the time, right? You're an athlete,
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you're a parent, but allows you to change how that looks as things change or even as,
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As you change, bingo. Another way to look at it is like, what's the core value
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underneath the thing that you're currently doing. And that core value, that's really rugged.
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Generally, you don't have to sacrifice core values, but how you apply that core value over
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time, if you want to change gracefully and with grit, then you have to be really flexible.
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So the value of athleticism or community or physicality or challenge or love that you hold
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onto, that's really tight and rugged, but then the application of it is very flexible over time.
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And you can apply this to your career as well, right? I think some people get hung up in the
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have mentality about their job. Well, I am an executive. I have this position. Well,
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you got to find out what's the underlying thing about the work you do that really brings you
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fulfillment and satisfaction and focus on that and then figure out ways it can change over time
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That's right. Someone that did this really masterfully who I profile in the book is the
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tennis player, Roger Federer, one of, if not the greatest tennis players of all time had a very
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incredibly long career. And what a lot of people that are casual fans of the sport overlook is that
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around age 32, 33, Federer fell off a cliff for three years between 33 and 36. He was dropping out
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of tournaments that he once would have won in his sleep. He was injured all the time. He was not
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ranked highly. I mean, he just was performing like a below average tennis player. You know,
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this is like Michael Jordan having a three-year period of just kind of being average. And Federer
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realized that he couldn't get back to the old. Like there was no homeostasis. Aging had caught up
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with him. And all the things that he thought he had, he had to shift. He didn't have them anymore.
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He didn't have the speed and the reaction time and the power that were once there. But he still had
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this fierce love of the game and of competition and of excellence. So he held on to those things,
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but he completely adapted. So he learned a brand new one-handed backhand to take speed off the ball
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so that he could slow down his opponents getting to the ball. He learned to play at the net more so
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he wouldn't have to run back and forth on the baseline. He even got rid of the racket that got
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him to be the best tennis player of all time in favor of a new technology that all the younger players
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were using. He changed how he trained so that he recovered more. Three-year period, performance falls
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off at age 36 and 37. Federer has some of the best seasons of his life, wins two major tournaments,
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is ranked number two in the world. Again, at age 37, this is like a dinosaur in tennis.
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But it's because he let go of all these things that he quote unquote had and recreated his game.
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And to me, it's like such a beautiful, nicely contained example of rugged flexibility. He's rugged
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because he loves competition and excellence. Those are his values. But he had to be really
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flexible when the change of agent came for him. One of my favorite chapters on developing a rugged
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flexibility mindset is the chapter on expectations. How do our expectations get in the way of us
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navigating change in life? It's one of my favorite chapters too. So what we think that we experience
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is consciousness. So our thoughts and our feelings and our experience of them at any given moment
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is almost never objective reality. It is objective reality filtered by our expectations.
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So one way to think of this is the brain is like a prediction machine. It's constantly trying to
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predict what's going to happen next. And this is for good reason, right? Imagine if every moment
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was just unbiased white space. You would never get anything done. There'd be so much stimulus. You
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would be in a completely like chaotic rut. So it's good that the brain is a prediction machine.
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However, by definition, change is when things don't happen as you predict, as you thought they would,
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as they've been happening. And when our expectations are out of whack or out of alignment with our
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reality, it throws us for a loop, makes us feel really uncomfortable, restless, sometimes even sad and
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despairing. So when things change, the first thing that we have to do to be able to take productive
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action and confront that change is update our expectations. And if we don't update our expectations,
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then we feel a lot of distress and we don't make any progress because we're not working on the
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thing that needs to be worked on. We're working on what we thought would be the situation.
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What are some examples from your own life where your expectations just created more problems for
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yourself? I think a few. I think one is, well, the biggest one is parenting to be totally frank and
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honest. And I think this is something that a lot of men don't always talk about. I know you have on
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this podcast and it's why I love you and your work. But I think a lot of dads just expect that
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like the minute their kid is born, they're going to look into their kid's eyes and the world's going
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to forever change and it's going to be the best moment of their life. And that does happen to some
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people. And for those people, that is so wonderful and beautiful. But for a lot of dads, that bond takes
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longer to grow, particularly in contrast to the woman next to you, the mom who often has a very
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biologically driven immediate connection to the child. And in my case, you know, my first son was
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born and I was looking at my wife and I'm like, I see what you're feeling, but I am not feeling that
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at all. And that was really hard. I felt a lot of shame. I felt a lot of guilt because I had this
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expectation that like he would just be the love of my life from day one. And you know, now at age five
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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
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lot of time. And that was a really hard burden for me to hold. And if I could have had a better
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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.
00:27:37.440
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?
00:30:12.020
Yeah. He adopted a fluid sense of self and it helped him help catapult his career. He walks
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.
00:40:57.420
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
00:41:51.560
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.
00:42:54.400
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
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
00:46:18.780
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,
00:51:55.240
Fantastic. Well, Brad Stahlberg, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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
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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.