The 5 MindKillers: How You're Sabotaging Your Mental Fitness (& the Countermeasures to Stop) | Chasing Excellence

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Okay, let's get into today's show.

Hello and welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for being here.

This is, as you may have already noticed, going to be the longest episode of Chasing Excellence in the history of Chasing Excellence.

And I'm really excited about it.

Over the last year or so, maybe.

No, it's about the last year we've had our friend Chris Irwin on the show.

We've had him on four times.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Chris, for those folks, maybe if you haven't dived into those episodes yet, you're in for a treat.

Chris is a retired Navy SEAL and the creator of something called Rare Sense, which you can find at raresensecom.

He's built a framework for training your mind just like we train our bodies.

In these conversations, across all four of them, we cover five mind killers and what he calls their countermeasures, which are the tools you can actually use to get mentally fit.

One quick note before we dive into the first one.

This entire episode you're going to hear in parts of those conversations where I ask Chris to explain what the mind killers are.

So we do that a few times.

Again, he was on four times the beginning of each one of those episodes.

I basically said, Hey, can you catch us up?

Remind us what we're talking about.

I'm gonna keep those in this here episode, and I'm doing that on purpose.

First, because repetition and reinforcement is how these ideas actually stick.

So perhaps the first time you heard them, was in those original episodes.

Now this will be the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth time you hear these ideas and that's how hopefully, they're gonna stick in your mind.

So that's the first reason.

Second reason and this is really cool is that Chris has been working on a book.

All about this framework, all throughout these conversations that we've had with him.

He's still working on the book.

I'm not entirely sure when it's going to come out.

I promise he's going to be back on the show and we're going to talk about it a bunch when it does.

But the cool thing and another reason why I'm keeping them in this here episode even if they do feel a little bit like haven't we already gotten this is because you can actually hear Chris refining and clarifying these concepts as we go.

His explanations get sharper.

He gets more organized, even clearer.

I think he even went, when we started these conversations, there were seven mind killers.

By the end of it, he had refined it down to five.

So even that in and of itself shows you how he's working with these ideas, how he's working through these ideas, so that he can ultimately deliver something in a book form that is really tight, really concise, really focused, really organized.

And so it's a really cool masterclass on how good thinking evolves.

All right.

So without any further ado, again, this is a very long episode.

I'm really excited to put all of these into one session for you.

One long session to mentally, maybe hopefully you've got a long road trip coming up soon.

Cause this is going to be perfect for it.

So.

First conversation.

We're going to lay the foundation of what the mind killers are, and we're going to talk about the first of them, which is oblivion.

So let's dive in.

So Chris, what we want to talk to you about is specifically RareSense and the work you're doing there at RareSense.

So I'd love to get a high level sense of where it came from.

And then I want to get into a big part, if not maybe the majority, of what RareSense really works on is this idea that you've got called the seven mind killers.

So I want to start there.

I want to start our conversation there.

And then we're going to get into some of the more specifics around those mind killers.

But can you just give us a sense of what rare sense is?

Give us a sense of rare sense.

And then move us into the seven mind killers.

Joke number one.

Right.

A rare sense of what rare sense is.

So it is the uncommon pursuit of mind fitness is kind of the tagline of Rare Sense.

But the overarching idea is that we can train our mental health the way we can train our physical health.

And so most people certainly you guys and people that I would think would be listening to this are very familiar with the idea of the ownership you have around your physical health and moving that towards fitness in the sense that it's on a spectrum, it's not a binary thing, and you have power, for the most part, over just about every input that creates your fitness or lack thereof primarily your diet, and meaning your overall diet right.

Not going on a diet, exercise and sleep.

And there's some other things that we could add in there, certainly.

But that's kind of the biggies, right?

If we're just kind of going broad brush here.

But conversely, for the most part people think of mental health as a binary thing, where you either have problems of some sort or you're fine.

And you're sort of almost like walking around, like well, I hope I don't get any of these problems somehow, right.

And the issue with that is that it puts the whole mental health construct paradigm into a.

It's a pathology.

So it's an illness thing.

It's basically like the way you can get ill physically, gets sick is like all of mental health right.

It's like if you're not okay, you're just sick and because of that we treat it that way.

So we give people drugs and we send them to therapy and it's just this complete dichotomy of, On the one hand, you've got physical health, which is very much a training paradigm.

It's up to you for the most part.

It's not to say you can't get sick or anything like that, but there's so many things you can do that impact your physical health and drive it towards fitness, as you guys are well aware of.

Where on the other side, mentally, it's a treating paradigm for the most part.

We're just telling people it's not within your control.

You just have to hope you don't get one of these brain diseases or whatever.

Rare sense is taking the tact of, no, that's not true at all.

That's not... the way it is for almost everybody out there.

It's not to say there's no mental illness, but what we're dealing with for the most part is people that are mentally out of shape.

And so therefore we need a training modality to teach them how to get in shape mentally.

We need to view it exactly the same way.

It's not binary.

It's on a spectrum.

And that's kind of the that that concept was the genesis of Rare Sense.

Super interesting.

OK, so I mentioned the seven mind killers.

I'm going to give the seven real quick just to tee us up here.

Oblivion, storytelling, suppression, fear, stagnation, injury, and isolation.

And each one of those mind killers has something you call the countermeasure, which I love.

Mm-hmm.

We're going to get into today, oblivion and its countermeasure.

But I'd love to ask you first where did the idea of the, where did the conception of the seven mind killers come from?

What kind of work was done on your part to begin to form that?

Oh, these are the these are the ones that we're going to talk about.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's based on personal experience, essentially.

So I'm somebody who, like you said, I spent a long time in the military and getting out of the military I had a lot of mental health problems, right?

As we would sort of historically call it or traditionally call it.

I had a lot of survivor's guilt.

I started looking inward at various things that were going on in my body and thinking that they were the signs of some kind of terminal illness and spiraling down mentally and, as a result, developed a lot of physical things as well that went along with that sort of chronic illness type symptoms.

Based on what I knew at the time, I was...

I think, like a lot of people that come from professions like that, I didn't want to share any of that.

I felt very ashamed of it.

Didn't know what to do about it exactly.

So I kept bottled it up, tried to suck it up, suffer in silence.

That tends to be the modality that guys go with a lot of guys, because that's what we know in terms of a tool.

And that didn't work.

And I went down the treatment kind of paradigm as well.

I went to tons of doctors.

I tried all sorts of supplements, sort of traditional medicine was like well, we don't know what's wrong with you.

And there's a lot more to this too.

I've kind of fell off a cliff at one point too, about five years after I'd left active duty.

And I went the alternative route.

Like I said, I did all sorts of holistic stuff, took a gazillion supplements and none of it really did much.

I mean, some of it helped a little bit, But by and large, it just didn't work.

So I got to this point where I was essentially suicidal thinking.

You know, I just don't know the way out of this.

And instead I took a different tact of well, maybe this all sort of traces back to what's going on with me mentally.

Like maybe I've just sabotaged my own mental health so badly that that's really what's going on here.

Like our mind and our minds and bodies are not separate distinct entities.

They are They're intertwined, right?

They're sort of inextricably linked.

And so even the physical stuff that I was experiencing was like maybe this is really like a mental thing.

So I just changed my approach to, all right, I think I got to do a lot of training here.

But I have to figure out like what I'm doing wrong to start.

So that's where the mind killer concept came from.

It was like OK, as I tried various things, figured out what worked, figured out what needed a lot of work.

How can I bucket this stuff into something that people would understand?

Again, the same way that if you're training physically, it's like okay, not necessarily.

I mean, CrossFit does, combines a lot of this stuff, which is great.

But you can say i'm working on strength today, i'm working on endurance today, that kind of idea of what are the big buckets of things that you have to work on.

So the mind killer idea was sort of what is, what are these big buckets that we sabotage our own mental health with?

When you started down the journey of Rare Sense and you said about five years ago, things maybe got as bad as it got, were you kind of a blank canvas in terms of what the heck am I going to do here?

Or did you have some history of looking at mental health, mental fitness?

Certainly, you spent a lot of time training over the course of your career.

I'm just curious, did you have a head start on a lot of these ideas?

Or did you find yourself sort of at rock bottom, saying I don't know what step one is, but let me figure out what that looks like.

I was pretty much rock bottom.

I had very little.

I mean it's kind of funny to think of it now, because some of it Ben and I were talking about this.

Some of it seems so obvious now when I talk about it.

I go, that's obvious, isn't it?

And you find out, no, it's not.

And it wasn't for me either.

I mean.

The reality is I had never done any meditation, any breath, none of this stuff until I was in my mid-40s.

And no one had ever said, hey, you might want to try some of this.

Like, it might help you, you know?

I mean, the only things I had done, honestly, was I'd gone to therapy a little bit.

Not too much.

I had had a therapist try to prescribe me meds for like mental health meds and I didn't take them.

I kind of didn't believe in that, quite frankly.

So yeah, it was pretty much blank slate.

Super interesting.

Okay, let's jump into.

Well, first thing first actually, and this, I think, maybe leads us into the single mind killer that I want to talk to you about today, which is oblivion.

And you write this on raresense.com.

Most people don't know anything about themselves.

Facing the mind killers is an opportunity to change that for the better.

So, with that in mind, with everything you just kind of talked about in mind, what do you mean by oblivion?

What is that?

And does it matter that it's mind killer number one on our list of seven mind killers?

Is there something special about oblivion that we need to sort of tackle first in order to get through the other?

Mind killers?

Yes.

So I think the answer is yes to all of those questions.

You do need to tackle it first.

By and large, they go in order in terms of the best way to approach them.

It's not to say.

As you get more familiar with this stuff, you might place emphasis in different places.

And as they get towards the end, you could probably mix them up a little bit, I would say.

But regardless...

Oblivion is step one.

And I would say that's true whether they use that term or not.

That is true for any kind of mental health mindfulness practice out there.

So before we even get to that, just sort of framing up a little bit of how I view mental health and mind fitness.

There's a couple of fundamental things to understand.

The first one is, and this is part of oblivion too, is not understanding these things, right?

Oblivion is a lack of awareness.

It is like if you have no idea what's going on, that's oblivion.

That's being oblivious, right?

But when we think about thoughts, which is really what we're talking about here, we use that term in a couple different ways.

We use it to describe actively thinking about something, focusing on something, right?

I'm thinking, I'm having thoughts about this thing.

I'm thinking I'm working through a problem, I'm working on something which is conscious thinking.

But the other way we use it is sort of this chatter that's going on in our head at any given moment, which is subconscious.

And that's really where the problem lies.

It's unfortunate that we use that term thoughts to describe both those things.

I really feel like they should have different terms.

What people don't understand about the chatter is that you don't generate it.

It just shows up in your head.

And most people... never make that leap.

They never come to that realization is that most of the quote, unquote thoughts you have, you didn't really author, they just show up.

And the sequence that I take people through is going from most people say, I am my thoughts.

They are an identifier of their thoughts, meaning anything that percolates to the surface, the chatter they go.

Or sorry, they don't even do that.

That's me.

I am that.

And therefore, I have to own it.

I have to take it seriously.

Anything, right?

And it can be a good thought.

It can be a bad thought, a helpful one, unhelpful one.

It doesn't matter.

It's like, that's me.

Some people get one step better, I suppose, into, I'm the thinker of my thoughts.

So it's, I'm thinking that stuff.

And I always tell the story of a friend of mine who was I was talking through some of the stuff.

He was going through some difficult times, a divorce.

And he had seen this meme on Instagram from a yoga instructor that said, I'm not my thoughts.

I'm the thinker of my thoughts.

And he said, that's great.

That's kind of what you're talking about, right?

And I said, no, not really.

Like, that's part of the way there.

But where you want to get to is I'm the observer of my thoughts.

And he said, well, that makes me feel like I'm not in control of my thoughts.

And I was like, exactly.

That's the point.

That's what you have to get to.

You're not in control of them.

And again, different from actively, consciously thinking about something, working through a problem.

That I get.

Yes.

We were sort of, that's when you're trying to take ownership of that stuff and do something with it.

Right.

But the, again, the chatter is, Yeah, not in control of that whatsoever.

And so the point is what we're trying to do is disassociate from that, disidentify from that.

And this is the fundamental thing that anyone has to do from a mind fitness perspective is have the ability to objectively observe that stuff.

And the analogy I use is it's an information stream.

So, the same way that you can, you have your phone and you have a social media.

Multiple social media feeds on that that you don't take ownership of.

It's just like, oh, that's interesting.

And I'm scrolling through that.

Or you're listening to a podcast like this, or you're listening to music, or you're watching something on YouTube or whatever.

All of that is just information streams.

But you never feel like, well, that's you.

You can take it as seriously as you want.

The chatter is another information stream, just like those things.

And it really is just like them.

I mean, people sort of have trouble getting there of like, yeah, but like, no, it is the same thing.

It feels different because it's like in your head.

But it really isn't.

It is just an information stream.

And during the course Ben and I were talking about.

This is what I love is, from a terminology perspective, is we understand those things?

We call it programming, right?

We call it television programming, computer programming.

And the thoughts in your head, if you let them, if you don't realize that they're programming you too, right?

That's what they're doing over time.

And so that is why that is step one.

It has to be.

Do you find that?

So there's something really interesting in there that I'm curious your thoughts on, which is this idea of conscious and subconscious thoughts, or thoughts and chatter?

Do you find that when you talk to people about these things, when you work with them on it, that...

They haven't even identified that the chatter exists, let alone begin the process of disengaging from it.

Like do you first have to introduce just the concept of it to them, so that they can maybe begin to plug themselves into it?

Yeah, I mean for the most part.

That's why you have to make that distinction between thoughts versus thoughts, right?

Like this is one type of thought.

This is another type of thought.

Because a lot of people have never... clued in on that at all.

I don't think it's a big leap.

I think most people sort of get that.

They'll go, oh, okay.

Again though, I think what a lot of people do is they still sort of go, yeah, but...

It's like, okay, I can see that, but it's not really the same thing.

It's like they'll get sort of halfway there and it's getting them all the way there to where it's like any of that stuff that's showing up in your head all day long, right.

All day long is stuff that you can just disidentify from.

So, and by the way, Ben, I was going to say, Ben, throw in some comments here.

Well, I was going to say it seems like there's a varying level of oblivion or a varying level of lack of awareness.

One could be that there isn't this distinction between these two types of thoughts, right?

Another could be a lack of awareness that you don't control the subconscious chatter, that it is just there for your observation.

And I think another one might be that maybe some people are aware that there might be that chatter but they're not necessarily aware of the magnitude of it or that it's there all the time.

Chris, you gave the.

When we were chatting about this, you were saying how it took a long time for you to realize the negative chatter that you had in your head while you were training.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And it's like you've been training your whole life in a very, very meaningful way.

You've accomplished incredible physical tasks and you're still a really fit dude.

But to have gone through decades and decades of training and essentially be oblivious.

Yes.

A really smart guy being oblivious to that experience, negative thought pattern, that thought programming that was kind of permeating unconsciously.

So there's that kind of spectrum of unawareness that maybe you had in other areas but Not in the one where I think it's the easiest to recognize it, just because I'm a coach and does this for a living.

So to me, that's where it screams at you.

Yeah.

That is, I mean, nobody is perfect at this either.

Like as we get into sort of countering this.

You still fall prey to it, right?

Everybody does.

The trick and the challenge is to have the ability to pull yourself out of it, hopefully at any given moment.

And that type of thing where you're talking about Ben, where I started to get into this and it was like I spend an hour in the gym every day or whatever.

And one day it finally occurred to me like maybe I should become aware of what I'm thinking while I'm working out.

It was like, this is...

There's some negative stuff going on here that I was never aware of, right?

Yeah.

So maybe for a little, Chris and I presented on this this past weekend.

So one of the participants came up to me today.

We're now 48 hours removed from this.

And we were chatting about it and she kind of had that same realization in terms of how powerful just the awareness part of that is and how it is omnipresence.

It is always there.

And I...

I was kind of doubling down on that.

Like, this is the deal.

Like, there's a reason that this is mind killer number one.

Yes.

Is because it all starts with awareness.

And the example she was giving was.

After my class today, I read a passage from a book to my 9.30 class.

And she came up to me because we've already had like three conversations about this.

And she goes.

She's like, this is exactly the type of book that my stepmom would read.

But the thing that her mom is like, there's nothing for me to work on.

She has no awareness at all of where she is, in terms of even forget about the voice, in terms of like mental health.

She is incredibly mentally – I don't want to say mentally ill because that gives a stigma to it.

But she is – I like your term, Chris.

She is 200 pounds mentally overweight.

Yeah, right.

I really like that perspective instead of mentally.

Well mentally, because it's either binary right.

You're either mentally well or you're mentally sick, mental illness.

Yep.

And she is very mentally out of shape.

Yet she has no concept.

That is something that she actually needs to work on, because she is living a very, very challenging life because of it.

It permeates everything, including, as you said, her physical health is a mess because of it.

So you mentioned awareness, which is the countermeasure.

Oh, sorry.

No, no, no.

It's fine.

I think that's where we're going anyway.

Natural segue.

So just to clarify that term.

The countermeasure is sort of the overarching strategy that we're trying to employ against the mind killer.

The same way we would be like, if we're working in strength, it's like okay, we're in the strength kind of channel, so to speak.

And then we have a lot of exercises that we can stack up in order to gain strength, build strength.

Same idea.

So it's Awareness is sort of like the strength term, so to speak.

And then I break it down by exercises that help you build that countermeasure, right?

The thing we did this past weekend, Ben.

I mean we start off with kind of various meditation practices, which is really the root of that.

Most awareness building is essentially some form of meditation.

To kind of dovetail on your point about people that don't even realize how unaware they are when we do those small, like beginner meditation type things.

The people who are like that are the people who, when you ask so what did you?

You know, were you able to focus on the thing?

And they're like, yeah, no problem.

Like the whole time.

And you're like, no, I guarantee that that didn't happen.

Right.

You've got seven tactics and we can maybe spend as much time on any of them that you think is the most value, but I'm going to list them real quick.

So these are the seven tactics of awareness, which again is the countermeasure to oblivion.

Tactic one is meditation, which you just teased a little bit.

Tactic two is mind priming.

Tactic three is mind assessment.

Four is a mental mantra.

Five is thought voicing and six is to stop multitasking.

So if there's anything you feel like is worth mentioning more about meditation, cool.

If not, I'm happy to jump in.

That's from an article I wrote about this.

It's not an exhaustive list necessarily, whether you call them tactics or exercises or whatever, the whole idea.

I mean, I tend to refer to them actually more as exercises these days.

Because again keeping it in the context of the analogy to physical fitness is Makes a lot of sense.

But by and large, they are some form of meditation.

And so like, what we did with the folks at this seminar was walked them through four very basic meditative practices that build on one another.

And so the first thing we tend to do with people is just nothing, which I love, starting off with where we did it for five minutes, where it was like okay everybody, we're sitting in a circle, close your eyes, and I just want you to do nothing for five minutes.

And see what that feels like.

See what you notice.

And it's a chance to be as opposed to do, which I think is so valuable these days, especially because we do all the time.

And we're constantly get a drumbeat of do more, get up earlier, right?

Like it's just do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

And we have lost the ability to be bored, basically.

Being bored is an extremely valuable mental health tool.

And I tell people next time you're in a truck or car or whatever and you've got a 30-minute drive, Just don't listen to anything and see what that does for you and see if you can notice where your mind's going during that right.

So it's a really valuable tool because people are uncomfortable doing it.

It's like five minutes seems like it's 20 minutes.

And coming out of that the sort of cue is how'd that feel and what did you notice?

And you know people say they notice something physically, they notice the way they feel.

Some people might notice their thoughts.

They tend to not do that.

It tends to be sort of physical or you know something like that.

So we'll kind of walk them along that progression.

Then we'll do a notice shifting focus exercise where you sort of dive into what it feels like to focus on different things.

And we use the darkness behind your eyes or what you're hearing.

Again, these are kind of precursors to meditation.

A lot of times I feel like meditative practices are almost.

It sounds really basic, like it's simple, but it's not easy right.

And they almost launch, they get too advanced too quickly.

So we'll sort of feel what it's like to focus.

Because again, like what's conscious energy feel like?

We sort of talk about it, but what's it actually feel like?

And the sort of the upshot of those two things is to get those two terms in people's heads focusing, like what it's like to focus and then what it's like to notice, right.

In contrast to that, because that then builds on the meditative practice which, in very simple terms, is just those two things.

People think it's calming your mind.

It's none of that.

It has nothing to do with that.

It is picking a focal point for your conscious energy and then noticing when you get distracted from it, which for most people happens in about three seconds, if not faster, but they don't notice it.

And that's the challenge.

That's the skill to build.

Again, they'll be like.

You'll be like hey.

Put very simply, it's like we're going to focus on what we hear for the next five minutes.

Close your eyes.

Okay, just focus on 100% of your attention on what you hear.

And some people, again, you'll be like, how'd you do?

Great.

Yeah.

It was focused the whole time.

You were not guaranteed.

You were not.

There were all sorts of, there was all sorts of chatter happening that you just were not, you were oblivious to.

If, if somebody was to, if you're working with somebody, and that was the case and they go great like yeah, nailed it.

Really?

I just focused on what I was listening to the whole time.

And I don't think another thought came in.

Like, where do you go with them with that response?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's eating a little bit of kind of giving a little slice of humble pie there of again, like no, you didn't.

Let's try it again.

So you can shift the focus.

So you can try other focal points.

You could try, again, darkness behind your eyes.

You can try your breathing, which I don't like to start with because it's something you can control your breathing.

And that makes it a little bit more challenging, because people tend to then try to control it instead of just noticing it.

Or you can do the mind priming thing, which sort of like a mini meditation where you're literally just checking in on your thoughts.

So sometimes that's a better approach for people, where We're making the focal point the thoughts themselves.

And so that can have sort of a little bit of a breakthrough effect where it's like okay, I want you to just pay attention to your thinking for a little bit here.

And try to notice, again, the chatter.

Don't try to think about something.

Try to just focus on your thinking.

The quote-unquote thinking, right?

Because once they sort of can do that, that can help break it out where...

Now they go, oh, okay, I see what's going on there.

Now, if I'm trying to pay attention to something else now, hopefully they can notice when the thoughts interrupt that.

A couple things.

We started this with talking about oblivion, and one of the things we want to get folks to, we want to get ourselves to, is this recognition that we are the observer of our thoughts.

And one of the things that and this happens, I think, anytime somebody tries to meditate certainly anytime.

I've tried, but it was brought home over the weekend as you were doing these exercises then you'd talk with the group about what they experienced, what they felt, etc.

And almost to a t, when somebody had something to say, basically what they were saying was i spent the whole time judging myself for feeling like i did the thing wrong, yeah and so.

So that's really interesting to me, this idea that we want to be the observer of our thoughts, but we can't be the observer if we are actively judging ourselves for the thoughts, because if we're actively judging ourselves for the thoughts, in your metaphor, we're judging the radio station for playing the next song and the next song after that.

That's right.

We can't possibly separate ourselves if we are also at the same time taking ownership of it.

And so how hard is it for folks?

How hard is it for you as a coach or somebody working with this to get people to move from that?

Just OK, cool.

I observe it.

I notice the thoughts.

But man, I got my hands around that thing.

And if that thought wasn't exactly what I hope it was going to be, I'm somehow failing or I'm somehow a bad person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think, to start, it's a great.

You're right.

We had a number of people who were like oh, I kept thinking like, am I doing this right?

Am I failing at this?

And it was getting them to the realization of like, you see how much judgment there is there?

Like how much the chatter is laced with judgment, right?

So it's a great start.

That's a great step.

The fact that they even realize that's what's going on is a really good thing.

Then it is because they would even say, I noticed that or so I was thinking this.

And so it's it's then trying to reframe even that to this. no, you weren't thinking that.

You were noticing that that thought was showing up.

And the verbiage there is important.

The terms we use are important.

Because that's then helping you disidentify it.

So it was like they're still, And again, this is like people have never done this before.

So so it's like totally to be expected right, it'd be like.

It'd be like you've never worked out before and you're like how come I can't deadlift 400 pounds?

I mean, I thought, you know, well, yeah, you've never done this before.

So you shouldn't be surprised at that.

It's making them realize again that that awareness is great.

But then taking it one step further and just being like, If someone came out of that and they said I noticed that this thought showed up with sort of a judgment aura to it, that would be sort of like the perfect response, right.

Because that's a complete observation and they had no ownership of it.

Generally, people don't do that, though.

Again, they're like, oh, I noticed I was judging this and I was thinking this, right?

It's such a good step on the journey, though, right?

Totally.

Absolutely.

Yes, we all want to be the detached observer.

But as you said, that's the deadlifting 400 pounds.

To me, if they're aware, and I was like, I had this experience.

I was aware that I was judging myself in the middle of it.

You know, that's...

That's a, you are not in oblivion.

Is it basically what it is?

You have progressed past the oblivious state because you have so much awareness.

We are not where we want to be.

We are not the detached observer, right?

Okay.

We also most of our people can't do 40 pull-ups and run five minute miles and have 8 body fat, but you are now in the mental gym and you are doing the work.

What we don't want them to do is not enter the gym.

Right, that is the case where, like nope, I got it.

I was good.

Like, yep.

Okay, what's the next thing?

Right.

Okay, Chris, what's step two?

Because I got this one.

I nailed it.

Yep.

So that's like I think that the, that detached program I really like what you said is, i know like oh, that's a, that's a good one.

Like i didn't man, i was really thinking about how dot dot dot, like i no, i noticed that my thoughts did this is really cool and maybe even that, You know, I think it's just like as the constant nudging them of like retweaking that's the thought experiment to retweak the narrative that they're telling themselves along the way.

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but that's a really cool understanding.

Because maybe just go back full circle again or not full circle, but back to the beginning.

It's if we don't have this level of awareness, if we continue to live in the state of oblivion, that chatter will end up programing you.

Yes.

And that's what we don't want.

We don't want to live as unconscious beings programmed by our genetics, our surroundings, our environments, our experiences.

We want to take some level of control over this and there is a.

That's what basically, we want to.

We want to train it and um, that's a dangerous place to be is in the default.

Yeah.

Especially when you take into consideration that a lot of that programming is negative, right?

So if you consider, some percentage of that chatter is judgment back towards ourselves.

If we let that, if the bulk of that is negative and we let that program us like, just imagine where you end up after 2030 4050 years of that.

Yeah, right.

And not only judgment, but like, you know, as you said, human beings have a negativity bias, right?

It's like for survival.

It paid off big to remember which berries killed you rather than.

Is a blueberry taste better than a strawberry?

You know?

So that negativity bias is going to let the defaults pop up.

There's a lot of things that are going to keep us from kind of reaching our peak.

One thing on that too, just on sort of labeling thoughts as well.

There's a lot of people talk about negative and positive thoughts.

I tend to prefer helpful and unhelpful, or useful and useless, because you can think of something like I'm so out of shape, which is a negative thought, as being helpful if that motivates you to get in the gym and change your diet and all of this kind of stuff.

So it's more, Is this thought serving me in the moment?

Is this helping me or not helping me?

I think it's the best way to look at it.

And you can look at that as a judgment.

But again it's sort of an objective judgment of like is this?

You know, if you can achieve that level, that's like really where we want to be.

I will say too, that what's really important is, Ben.

You know, you did it when we were in that circle.

You're like, I noticed this and I was having this and I'm same way.

Right.

It's like you're not.

No one's like get a guru or like getting to this.

I'm on this higher plane of existence than all of you guys.

Right.

I was I was like, here's what I noticed.

I noticed that I was because I'm doing this course.

Thoughts were coming up about, OK, what's the next lesson I got to teach?

Like, am I doing this like same types of things?

Right.

The important component was the awareness of it.

Not that, again, not in control, right?

Like that's the whole thing.

It's like, that's fine that that's coming to whatever it is.

The point is to be able to be aware of it.

If I didn't say this, I'll say it now, which is that this is gonna be the first of a series of conversations that we're gonna have with you, Chris.

That I'm really excited about.

We're gonna go through all the seven mind killers.

I wanna end this conversation.

I think it's related or it might just be my excuse to bring up something that I was able to witness, that I enjoyed as a witness and not a participant, which is the workout at the end of the seminar.

Ben, could you give us a sense of what was going on?

Just give us a high level sense of what you as the coach were trying to accomplish.

And then please tell us about stealing Chris's bike seat.

My seat is missing.

Yes.

And then Chris, I'd love to talk to you about the experience of that, but within the context of this idea of oblivion and awareness.

But Ben, I'd love for you to set the scene for us.

So throughout the day, as Chris said, we essentially progressed this meditation practice from just be to let's focus darkness behind the eyes ears, to let's pay attention to the thoughts.

And we basically, let's do now with some actual stimulus with music.

And we progressed up to doing it in a a dynamic environment where you're going to be challenged and the negative voice is going to pop up.

Like nobody gets to go through that workout without the negative voice becoming loud.

And probably dominance.

And we just kind of structure the workout to make it very accessible.

Everybody can do it, and purposely so, so that everyone kind of gets to judge themselves not only against the feeling that they have.

But you create a little bit of race.

So now there's like, not only that, there's social comparison.

And you know there's a lot of different dynamics that people have to deal with in everyday situations.

You know the comparison thing and for people that are really fit, that are going to win, they might not have that as forward-facing as some of the people that are new to physical training.

So i you know, like chris is one of those people and chris kudos to him.

I did chris's meditation practice.

Chris did my workout portion, So during that portion I added an additional challenge for Chris and a bunch of the other people that were kind of excelling at that thing.

So I'll let Chris kind of say what the...

Yeah, we should probably.

The workout involved burpee box jumps and biking where it was.

You had a set number every two minutes of burpee box jumps to do and then you were trying to accumulate X amount of calories and do that as quickly as possible.

So I'm good. going back to my bike and around whatever.

And Ben had taken the seat, the bike seat out.

Now, it was- So this was a Concept2 bike for folks who are like- Yeah, Concept2 bike, sorry.

It slides out, basically.

Yes, it slides out.

It's relatively easy to slide out.

I will say I don't use Concept2, but we don't have them in my gym, so I barely ever have used these things.

And so Ben was putting it in as a trigger, like how are you going to respond to this kind of thing?

I actually legitimately thought I had like accidentally pulled the seat out somehow, because even when I was setting the seat it was like wow, this is really sensitive.

Like it's really easy to pull up.

And I thought oh, I got off and I pulled like I grabbed it.

You know, I'm like gasping for air, I'm like I pulled this thing out.

So I'm like, Ben, the seat's gone, right?

And he's like, what seat?

And then at that point, I'm like, am I hallucinating?

Like, am I that out of breath at this point?

Am I actually sitting on a seat?

I don't know.

Yeah, literally.

And then I finally clued in like, oh, okay, I understand what he's doing here.

Got it, no problem.

We'll get after it, right?

But yeah, I mean, even that though...

I thought about it.

I was like yeah, I mean I probably should have figured that out like in the, in the moment, whatever.

Um, But it is interesting because I did think once it was clear like okay, Ben did that on purpose, right?

That this was kind of a trigger test.

I did spend some time then thinking, cluing in on like okay now, what am I thinking?

Right, like we're past that, so good is any of that?

Is any of that thought like oh, that was, here's some examples, right?

Oh, that was stupid.

Like you should have figured that out right away.

That that was what was going on, is it?

Oh, this is, this is harder now, And all of that stuff kind of came up.

And so it was, despite me sort of not understanding what was going on, it still served a positive, like it was a training opportunity, right?

Because regardless, even if this is great like, even if it doesn't turn out exactly the way you want, Even from a triggering standpoint, there's a follow-on thing that's going to happen there where you can take note of what you're thinking right.

What the chatter is.

And that was basically the exercise behind the exercise, right?

Was let's force people into a triggered environment.

Whether it's something that they Triggers, come in through the five sentence.

In that workout, in generally, it's what people feel, right?

It's they get into round seven and now they're completely anaerobic.

Their heart's trying to rip through their rib cage and they got battery acid in their veins and they're feeling this thing and they're being triggered.

Well, there's other things that trigger people.

And then the mind will if you don't take control of it, which is what we'll get to in these subsequent conversations.

But the first thing is you have to be aware of it.

You have to be aware of, oh, there goes my thoughts doing that thing.

Programming.

The programming just kind of changed.

You went from watching a rom-com to a horror movie.

It's like you don't have control over it.

It just sort of happened.

And if you go, okay, I don't need to give this more meaning.

What Chris could have done is gone like, this is so unfair.

Why did he do this?

Like, oh my God, am I not going to finish now?

I was in first.

Now am I not going to finish first?

And like just layer on and people that don't have Chris's – wherewithal, Chris's practice, Chris's understanding of this.

This is where they go.

I've done this with my games athletes and they've stopped.

Really?

Yep.

Wow.

Yep.

So it's like one of those things that like you know in this small little circle who we've talked about this a lot and we've worked through this a lot.

We don't recognize how much.

Something that triggers you.

If you don't have that level of awareness or when this goes down, people go, really?

What do you mean they would stop?

That's the same thing as an athlete arguing with a ref during a game.

Yeah, right.

And this is why we do it.

This is something that's outside of your control.

You don't have control that the seat is no longer on the bike.

How are you going to respond?

Yeah, that's it.

The ref called a bad call on you.

It's done.

It's gone.

How are you going to respond to that?

Maybe you're just like.

You don't visibly respond, but inside it's eating you up to the point where it's deterring your performance.

Well, that's something we got to work on.

And this is why I believe that this aspect of training to become an elite performer is as important as what's your Fran time?

What's your mile time?

How many pull-ups can you do and all the rest?

Because that's your potential.

But very few people have the ability to actually perform at, or even close to their potential when things don't line up with their expectations.

If it's lining up with their expectations sunshine rainbows, 70 degrees, winning by 30 points in the fourth quarter.

I know what it's going to look like.

We know what it's going to look like.

What happens when, you know, example is in the 2015 CrossFit Games when you got to get on a plane.

And the plane is delayed on the way back.

And you get back at 2 a.m.

You have to be on in the Pacific Ocean at 7 a.m. next morning.

And this is where the athletes were talking about boycotting.

Literally, they're like, we're going to boycott the games.

That's insane.

That that's where their thought process went to as opposed to.

I'm going to do what I can with what I got for where I am.

I'm going to control all the rest.

So there's a few things out of that.

One is what was so interesting about it to me too, was it highlighted?

It's not always what you're thinking during the workout, but after it as well.

Because I tend to be the type of person where I'll go oh, I'll beat myself up of oh, I should have realized that that's what Ben was doing right away.

You're smarter than that.

You should have realized.

And again, that's chatter that goes.

And so that was a really good...

I mean, it helps to be in this environment where we're really into this stuff too at least for me, and hopefully other people as well because I was really noticing oh, I'm going there right now.

Like, we don't need to do that, right?

No one's judging you.

I love that so much.

I just want to pause on that.

I'm going there right now.

I don't need to do that.

Yep.

That is so, if you have that level of awareness of where your voice, because it's going to do that.

Yes, it will.

Yeah.

Right.

It's going to do that.

But if you don't go with it.

Yep, yep.

That's the magic.

It is, it is.

And then the other piece is like I don't train games, athletes or anything but the example I use with like kids.

I coach kids soccer.

And I'll do this with especially some of the as the kids get older, is like hey guys, we're going to get some calls that don't go our way in this game.

If the referee calls a foul on us and it wasn't a foul, like he calls a trip and it wasn't a trip, why was it a trip?

Why is it a foul?

And they'll go, you know, they'll kind of dance around it.

And the thing you're trying to get them to is because the referee said so.

That's all that matters at that point.

Arguing about it doesn't change that.

The only reason it's a foul, ultimately, is because the referee said so.

And so by extension, no point in arguing about it.

No point in worrying about it, dwelling on it, screaming at the referee.

None of that stuff is worthwhile, right?

You just have to realize like, it's because the guy said so, or girl said so.

And that's the same thing like you're talking about with getting a no rep or something like that.

It's a no rep because the guy said so.

And the extension of that is, okay, who cares about training games athletes?

And Chris, when it was a 20-year Navy SEAL, that's probably not that relevant for most of us.

But what is, is when your wife or husband says something that triggers you.

Yes, sure.

Yeah.

And when your mind starts to go there and you go, there it goes, I'm not going there with you.

I'm just going to sit back and watch the movie happen.

And you can have that detached observer of the change of the programming.

That's where this becomes powerful in your everyday life.

All right, so that was the foundation.

Awareness.

You can't do anything about your mental fitness until you can actually observe your thoughts without getting swept away by them.

Now, once you have that awareness, you start to notice something.

A lot of the thoughts running through your head are stories stories about your past, about who you are, about what things mean.

And a lot of those stories are hurting you.

After the break, we're going to get into mind killers number two and three, storytelling and suppression.

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We're just going to roll right back into a conversation about the mind killers and specifically about the next two mind killers storytelling and suppression.

Before we do, Chris, I have a one sentence descriptor of what mind killers are.

I want you to tell me if this is right.

And then give me a little bit of context for folks if they haven't, or if they just want a reminder as to like what these mind killers are.

What are we actually talking about?

And so here's my one sentence descriptor, which is mind killers are obstacles or patterns of thinking that sabotage our mental fitness.

Close?

Good?

Yeah, definitely sabotage our mental fitness or sabotage our mind fitness.

It's not necessarily patterns of thinking, because some of this stuff actually has to do with feeling and some of it has to do with even sort of cognitive development, so to speak.

And so it is.

I would probably summarize it better as kind of mental behaviors or mental patterns that we have, so to speak.

And conscious and unconscious or subconscious, right?

Yeah, both.

Yep, for sure.

And, as we've talked about, a lot of this hinges on unconscious thinking and how we respond to that right.

Mm-hmm.

And the first mind killer that we talked about last time around was oblivion.

The countermeasure to that being awareness.

So part of that is bringing things from the subconscious or the unconscious into the conscious so that we can In your words, we can actually train it like we do our physical fitness.

Yeah.

I mean, quick recap on that, right?

I mean, like you said, people can go back and listen to this.

That component is so foundational because the ability to objectively observe things, especially unconscious thought chatter as Ben and I would refer to it, is the first thing you absolutely must do.

You can't do anything else until you can have that ability to do that.

Okay, so let's jump right into storytelling.

I just want to read a little bit from one of your articles on Rare Sense and we'll link to everything in the show notes in the listener guide.

But he wrote this, which I thought was great.

You are the author and the audience.

And he wrote elsewhere.

When I was in the thick of my negative storytelling, I thought everyone judged me the same way I did.

But that wasn't true.

They weren't even telling a story about me.

They didn't care.

They were too busy narrating their own stories.

In all cases, there was only one main character and one person in the audience.

It's the same person, oneself.

I just thought that was such a powerful thought or idea, or even metaphor, that you are both the author and the audience.

So let's walk into this conversation about storytelling, maybe with that as our start.

Yeah.

Well, let's be clear.

When it comes to mental behavior, the stuff that does not become audible in any way, shape or form.

That's true with all of it.

Like there's one author and there's one audience and that's true for everybody.

That's a really important thing to just kind of hang on for a second, because so much of suffering is self-generated and literally has nothing to do with anybody else other than ourselves.

And look, I had to have this conversation just to pause real quick on this.

I had this conversation with my oldest son.

He's 17 and he's a figure skater, competitive figure skater.

Anyone who's heard me on podcasts, I'm always talking about my figure skating kids.

And he's also a very talented musician and is very serious about music and band.

And he was doing this combo thing for the Winter Wonderland on ice, like the Christmas ice show figure skating thing where they were doing a routine.

And then at the end of it he went backstage, got his saxophone and then came out on the ice and does a sax solo on ice on his skates.

No, he's not doing anything technical while he's doing that, but still pretty cool, right?

He's done all this cool figure skating.

He's out of breath too, and he's trying to blow into the saxophone and create music training for this.

Rehearsing for it, he did something that pretty much every figure skater has done at some point, which is he left his guards on his figure skates, which are the things that protect the ice skates, right.

So when you walk indoors, you're not dulling your blades.

If you step on the ice with those things on, you, like, immediately eat shit, basically.

Like, it's just... It's slip and slide.

Every skater, I think, has done that at some point.

But he did it with the saxophone, where he's holding the saxophone.

The coach was like, get out here.

And he... ate it and he like falls over he's trying to guard the sax but it dented the bit like bent the bell of it and and got a dent and it's a school instrument it was a brand new barry saxophone i don't know what these things cost like six seven thousand bucks and he's all upset about it as he would be right Not really embarrassed, but just like, oh my God, this is a new instrument and what's my band director gonna think?

And he still had work he had to do that day in terms of rehearsing for the show.

I had to sit him down for a second because no one else was mad at him and i was like dude, right now, the only person that is beating you up is you.

You're the only person doing it, so you gotta get past this.

Right now, like i get it, you're upset, but like you, right now, there's nobody else judging you about for this other than yourself, and the point is you can take that into.

This is what people do all the time with themselves.

So getting into storytelling a little bit, the whole point of oblivion awareness is again sort of getting this third party perspective of thought as a starting point, of just treating it as any other stream of information.

And that's good.

We need to have that separation.

But even when we do that, we get the separation, but then we're not doing anything with the thoughts, so to speak.

We're not treating them a different way other than the separation.

It's just that distinction.

But then there are certain types of thoughts that can be problematic.

So even if we elicit that response or if we sort of bring about that separation, there's still kind of things that we then have to change the way we operate with them, where it's not enough just to say okay, I'm separated.

I'm objectively looking at this.

It's like, yeah, but this is kind of problematic for me.

The other thing about thoughts is they take us, generally speaking, in one of two directions into the past or into the future.

They rip us from the present moment, by and large.

Usually, unless we're focused, conscious attention, which is on the moment, usually Everything else is like yanking us one way or the other.

We're like worrying about something that's going to happen or we're dwelling on something that did happen.

And so where storytelling comes into play is the past stuff.

And where this starts is, there's kind of like a little bit of a buildup to this, but...

When people think of past thoughts, the word that comes to mind is memories, right?

When we think of stuff from the past, it's a memory.

And we need memories.

Every day when we wake up.

If we had no memory of who we were, we'd have a tough time navigating the world.

So it gives us sort of continuity of our psychological experience.

It helps us learn, right?

There's all these reasons why we need to have memories.

And people think that memory is the problem when it comes to sort of like dwelling on things in the past.

It's not the memories that are the issue.

It's generally speaking, it's the stories we tell about the memory.

And the example I always use is I had sort of this incident when I was on active duty, where I don't get into the details too much, but I had basically like an operational kind of let down where a situation where I didn't feel like I measured up to the level that I should have professionally.

From that day forward, for about 12 years, I replayed this story of like you're a failure and you fucked up and guys don't like you as a result.

Like, you're a loser.

And this was like a constant talk track in my head, like every day, until I sort of realized one day why do I keep telling this story about this thing.

And it had nothing to do with the facts of the situation.

It had everything to do with the interpretation of those facts.

And so the broader example I use with a lot of people, especially in the Boston area, is Bill Buckner in the 1980 World Series.

And for anyone who's not familiar, Bill Buckner was the first baseman for the Red Sox in the World Series.

And it was game six of the World Series.

They're playing the Mets.

It's like the 10th inning or something.

I'm going to get even some of these details wrong.

I think it was the 10th inning.

It was extra innings.

And Mookie Wilson's up to bat and he hits this routine grounder down the first baseline and it's right at Bill Buckner.

All he has to do is the most routine, scoop it up, step on first base.

Now they wouldn't have won the game.

And this goes into a whole other thing about memory of like.

I remembered this wrong, which tells us a lot about most of your memories aren't even right.

They're not even accurate.

But that would have ended the inning.

The Red Sox would have been back up to bat.

If they had won this game, they would have won the World Series.

Well, instead, the ball goes through Bill Buckner's legs and goes into right field.

Ray Knight, who's on second base, scores.

And they win the game.

And then the Mets won games seven as well, Red Sox lose, and this is curse of the Bambino, this is like oh, it's destiny.

And everybody, like in Boston, heaped all of the blame on Bill Buckner, as if he lost the World Series for them meanwhile like, Bob Stanley had thrown a wild pitch, and there's all sorts of other things that go into play here right, and The thing that happened is that the ball went through Bill Buckner's legs.

All that other shit is a story around that.

And there's a whole group of people who are rooting for the Mets, who told a completely different story about it.

That was all about victory and their destiny right.

So the whole point of that is like the interpretation of these events, where we sort of base our identity when it's stuff that happens to us is all a choice.

It's all a matter of like, what story do we want to tell about these things?

And that's a very natural human characteristic there because we love stories.

This is kind of how we help come up with morals and lessons and teachings and everything, right?

Storytelling is part of our culture but when we turn it on ourselves And we take some memory that doesn't intrinsically have any sort of negative or positive anything truly like the worst thing that can happen to you intrinsically is not inherently like positive or negative.

We spin it.

That's the problem, right?

And so what we have to learn how to do is recognize that and realize that we can tell a completely different story of this, what we call reframing.

A couple things just to go back.

First, I think that The fact that your son wasn't embarrassed when he fell on the ice.

Yeah.

It speaks so much volumes to the environment that he's been raising.

I think that would be the natural default for a lot of people.

And that's so far already like. up the mental, emotional ladder, fitness spectrum.

I think that's really, really cool.

You know, the other, when you were talking about the Billy Bean, I'm sorry, the Billy Buckner.

In Boston what you were saying.

I don't think people outside of Boston recognize how deeply entrenched this storytelling was in terms of the Red Sox can't win.

We are cursed.

There's graffiti all over Boston before 2001 about like –

Reverse the curse.

It was a part of the narrative if you grew up in Boston, that because the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth the Bambino to the Yankees, that we're cursed.

And they look for all these things from...

Aaron Boone to Billy Buckner to the 76.

It was just like – and you're looking for these things to confirm your storytelling.

What was really interesting is that I don't think even people from Boston recognize –

Billy Bean is hired by new ownership.

He's the GM of the Athletics, the Oakland A's, to run the company.

He accepts the offer.

Three days later, he's like, I can't do this.

I can't move to Boston.

I'm going to stay in California.

And...

The owner of the socks is like all right, well then, if you're not going to do this, who do you think could do this?

And he's – I just blanked on the name of it.

The young kid.

Dang. the young GM that came in and ran.

I don't know his name.

I could help you out.

It'll come to me.

Anyway, they're like, you need to get this, the kid.

He's going to be the youngest.

He's like 28 years old.

He's never done four.

He grew up just like minutes away from Fenway.

Yet he didn't have the same story that we all told ourselves as Bostonians.

He told himself – the story he said was –

They never put together a true championship caliber team.

They never had a true number two.

We had Roger Clemens.

We had nobody else's number two.

So they had Pedro.

They're bringing Curt Schilling.

They had no like real meat of the order.

They built up this and they built a real clubhouse and a real contender, because he looked at reality, facts instead of interpretation.

He looked at the actual facts and the actual numbers.

And because he didn't fall into that false narrative, he was able to do things that no one had done for a hundred years.

It's just really powerful.

Like whether you accept these memories, these stories as reality, or you go wait a minute, take a step back and kind of operate with them a little bit differently yeah, and notice like sort of cultural society theo epstein, by the way, theo epstein, oh yes, i just looked it up, good job.

You know, those sort of cultural societal whatever, those types of things, that's kind of a thing in and of itself.

The point is that the thing with Billy Buckner that's like the whole town and there's all sorts of other stuff layered on that.

But the point is like with people that are not famous, that aren't doing things on world stages and everything, we still fall into this trap, but it's all internally based.

It's all this just like you make up this bullshit about yourself.

And the other thing is we think that it is on sort of a world stage because we're the center of our own show.

We are the actor.

We're the lead, right?

And we're the audience.

And so we think we're the most important thing.

And we think when something especially sort of bad happens or traumatic...

Everybody else is thinking about this too.

And they're not, right?

Like my son's thing five minutes after it happened.

Nobody else was thinking about it at that point because it didn't happen to us.

And if someone asked us about it, we would remember it.

But we weren't dwelling on it.

And that's the difference there is these loops that we get.

This is referred to sometimes as rumination.

The rumination is this sort of like loop that I can't get out of seemingly, but you can.

I give this example of... sitting next to a Vietnam veteran at a dinner.

And he's one of these guys who tragically was, like he just wore PTSD on his sleeve.

He had like the service dog and he was sort of like jittery and he right off the bat was talking about his experience and just saying you know that stuff just never goes away.

And I was like well, it's not that you're going to forget what happened but like, this story you're telling yourself can definitely go away if you want it to.

This stuff never goes away is a story as well about like you were just reinforcing this pattern that you're in right.

This negative spiral, so to speak.

I really like that addition that we are the author, the actor and the audience all at the same time.

That's really an interesting way to think about how we tell stories in our own lives.

I want to move a little bit into the countermeasure for storytelling.

So again, as a reminder, countermeasures are sort of the thing we can put in place to begin to fight back against whether it's oblivion, whether it's storytelling.

And the countermeasure to storytelling in your perspective, Chris, is gratitude.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I mean, so I would say that we sort of altered this a little.

Like everything you guys, Ben, you've ever done, I've always respected this about you, is sort of you evolve it as it goes.

You go, well, you know, we're going to change that a little bit.

So even in working with Ben, I've sort of adapted the actual countermeasure to reframing.

Like the whole idea is reframe the stuff.

Now, I will say trying to reframe stuff from the perspective of gratitude is ideal.

So if you can get there, that's great.

But it's not to say that we have to be thankful for absolutely everything that's ever happened to us.

So let's use like trauma as an example.

Like people talk about trauma, right going through trauma, and that's usually the thing that people have a tough time getting out of when it comes to some kind of past experience.

Trauma's a little interesting because you can use that word In myriad ways you can.

You can use it as, like the, the thing that happened can be the trauma.

Right.

It can be sort of like the lasting effects of that, like physically.

But then it can be this sort of lasting emotional trauma. effects of that too right they sort of like the the mind stuff that that carries on and we sort of use that interchangeably but that's the problem tends to be that piece of it right physical like if we're in a car accident and the physical trauma like that stuff will heal assuming right like you're going to heal your body will heal but The part that people have trouble with is kind of the intellectual, which is the storytelling aspect, and the emotional part of it, which is suppression, which is what we'll get to.

And trauma is also something that, like it can be something that happened to you directly.

It can be something you witness, like you're on ground zero when the planes hit the tower on 9-11.

Or it can be something like in my case, where it's like you did something that you're embarrassed by or feel guilty about, or something like that right.

It can be any one of those things.

But so getting back to this kind of like reframing was, I did some treatment called EMDR which sort of opened my eyes to this, where they kind of if people aren't familiar with EMDR, you can kind of look it up.

But you kind of do some stuff with these like paddles that make tones and whatever.

But a therapist kind of leads you through this like well, what would you want to tell yourself about this situation?

And you go through this process and like you come out of it and for whatever reason, It just kind of makes you realize I don't need to tell that story.

I can tell a different story about this.

Why am I telling this?

And so for me it was an eye-opening experience, but it also made me realize well, I don't need to do EMDR to do this with anything else that I'm telling a story about.

I can just do that on my own.

I'm perfectly capable of that.

And it goes back to the, when people say, well, you know, I'll always tell that story.

Like, that's a story too.

Like, you know, you just kind of keep, but the whole point is like, reframe it somehow.

So let's envision like the most traumatic like someone gets assaulted is like physically assaulted terrible, horrific stuff, right?

You can tell a story of victimhood on that for the rest of your life.

And this is an incident, by the way.

All these things that we're talking about are things that do not exist anymore, whatever they are.

9-11 doesn't exist anymore.

Being assaulted by someone doesn't exist anymore.

Ball going through Bill Buckner's legs does not.

The thing is gone.

So the only place that it exists, that it manifests is in here, internally to somebody, right?

You could change that story to.

I went through this terrible thing and look how strong I am as a result.

You can tell that story.

It doesn't make the thing not terrible or whatever, but it's like I'm stronger because of that and I can actually go tell other people how strong they can be after something like that.

That's a completely acceptable story to tell.

And that's just a reframing of the incident.

That's all it is.

And to take it one step further, like you were saying, you can say you know what I'm actually thankful that happened because it gave me an ability to talk to other victims out there in a way that I couldn't before and that kind of thing, right.

Like I went through horrible chronic illness and I could be like, oh, so fucking terrible.

And you know for a decade of, but instead it's like no.

That gave me such compassion for people that are in that same boat and taught me so much about how you can overcome this kind of thing on your own.

And there you go, right?

And that's literally just making a choice about the way you're gonna frame the memories.

I really like the choice aspect of that.

There is a difference between being a victim and a victim mindset.

Totally.

There's somebody came across Elizabeth Smart and people might remember that name kidnapping victim.

The story she told herself after the event was, I'm ruined forever.

At 14 years old, she's kidnapped from her bedroom in Utah by a religious fanatic, held captive for nine months, repeatedly assaulted, brainwashed.

And then after being rescued, she struggled with shame and guilt.

Society labels sexual assault victims as damaged, and she feared that her future was gone, like completely destroyed.

Her mother, a powerful woman, told her something else.

She said you know, what this man did to you is terrible, and there aren't words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is, but the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy.

Yeah, The story she told herself after that was I am not ruined.

I am strong.

And she went on to become an advocate, leading national campaigns.

Written books started foundations.

She refused to let her past, the thing that happened to her, define her.

There's a choice.

There's completely a choice.

Yeah.

And there's people that will even hear that and they'll say yeah, but yeah, but my circumstance blah blah blah, whatever.

And the thing that you have to this gets back to recognition of thoughts is like that's a story too.

You know, you're just compounding the problem.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And sometimes it doesn't go as far as, you know, trauma.

Like this shows up in like the small little time.

Extreme examples are easier to exemplify because they're so extreme.

But as a coach of regular everyday people watching them work out, I see this manifest all the time.

You can see it in their body language.

You can see that as they're training, they're telling them the story of like –

I'm just not the type of person that can push through hard things.

I'm just not that disciplined.

You talk about doing something like the whole 30 and they're like I could never make it 30 days doing that.

And they're just self-sabotaging before they even put a foot through the door.

It's this shows up in the smallest little ways of doing a workout next to somebody.

And just immediately they go, well, I'm not as fit as her.

So I'm like, give themselves an out right away because it's protective.

It is that storytelling mechanism is protected.

We look research for meaning and meaning come in very, very different ways.

Like the way we usually talk about meaning is in terms of impact and growth, but meaning is other stuff is like, you know, when you elizabeth, smart telling yourself that she's ruined, as that's giving meaning to the the, the acts that, the horrific acts that happened in a negative way but still a lot of meaning does.

Yeah, it's not a productive one.

Yeah well that, and this is why the reason we generate stories in the first place is generally because trying to find meaning in things.

Right, we're really not good at operating with sort of purposelessness and just like nothing means anything.

So like meaning really helps us define ourselves.

And so we look for meaning.

But then when there's like this whoop, this thing that sort of throws everything out of whack, It's like well, how do I?

That doesn't work with the narrative anymore.

So how do I?

And that's when it sort of will alter into like well, I guess now I'm a loser, because that's the right.

I have to derive meaning from this.

And so it's well, I was destined for this and blah, blah, blah and whatever.

Right.

Because we're such storytelling machines, we look for confirmation everywhere.

So we say like, I just could never do the whole 30.

You don't start the whole 30.

You go, see, I can't do that.

Or you start like, I don't have the discipline to make it through that.

You sign up for the first day, you fail the first day, you go, see, like, I just don't have that.

And we just want to like.

So we have such a confirmation bias that we'll look for ways to reinforce our story.

If that is the case, because we're kind of stacking the deck against people and reframing is the countermeasure.

What are the steps?

What are the tools?

When people recognize this, if they have step one, if they have the awareness they're not in oblivion, they can hear themselves telling a story.

How do we start to reframe this thing?

Yeah.

So in terms of actionable stuff, right?

And we always try and make this actionable.

It's like theory is great, but like, how do we do, what do we do about this?

So, when it comes to oblivion awareness, we talked a lot about basic sort of meditation practices, like just getting in touch with, like noticing what's going on with the thought process, spending some time doing nothing to just like feel what that's like and just get familiar with the way thoughts can rip you away from whatever it is you're doing, right.

Now it's a question of like zeroing in a little bit on what's that saying a lot of the time, right?

When it comes to like, so it's usually a storytelling thing is like, it's a repetitive pattern.

So a lot of times chatter is just sort of bullshit and it's stuff that has to do with what I did yesterday.

But typically we're talking about chatter that is repetitive.

It's patternistic.

So the way to sort of start analyzing this is if we're doing some kind of meditative practice.

It's like now we're going to start to write some stuff down afterwards.

We're going to commit to some kind of journaling practice.

If we're talking about stories, let's do some journaling, right?

We're going to turn it into an actual story.

So it's okay, for a week I'm going to do 10 minutes meditation in the morning and then I'm just going to write down.

I don't have to write down every single thing that cropped up, but it's like where did my thoughts go for those 10 minutes and be very objective about it, just like here's where it went, like I'm not trying to force anything, no judgment.

This is really important too.

It's just like a stenographer in a courtroom.

Just literally write down what's being said.

Reviewing that and going, okay, is the same thing cropping up a whole bunch here?

Do I see the same kind of story, or even like the same kind of attitude coming up over and over again, because that's when you can zero in on like wow, i say this to myself a lot.

And then the question is is that a?

Is that a good use of right?

Is that a?

I don't like positive and negative.

A lot of people say that positive versus negative thoughts like.

I don't like it, because negative thoughts can be motivating right.

A negative thought that says I'm out of shape can get you in the gym and make you healthier.

So it's more, is this serving me?

Is this useful?

Is it ineffective?

Is it destructive in some way?

And so if we can identify that, then it's like, okay, now how do we counteract out of that?

And so you may have to like what I've had to do is I had this sort of tendency to a repetitive thought, of sort of catastrophizing thing.

This kind of gets into fear and things like that.

But coming up with a mantra that overwrote that, like reprogrammed that, you know?

But it could start as simple as just like, hey, I keep telling this story.

Let me write out, literally write out a better story to start telling myself.

And then place that somewhere where you see like, if you're really prone to this, write out your story in a very simple terms, like on a sticky note, and put that somewhere where you see it all day long, where you can go okay, every time that again.

Getting back to the noticing thing, every time that story crops up, I'm gonna start telling myself that story.

Even saying it out loud can be helpful.

And then the other sort of like it's associated to that.

But getting into sort of the gratitude thing, right.

Like we really do want to get.

There's almost a capability you can develop if you just start thinking in grateful terms.

Some of this stuff will dissolve a little bit on its own.

So like I was talking to a friend of mine, I turned him on to the five-minute journal.

Do you guys know the five-minute journal?

Yeah.

Really simple practice, right?

It's like one page a day where you just sort of set an attention.

You say things you're grateful for.

And it's basically sort of a gratitude practice.

And he's had some trauma in his past and stuff that he's dealt with.

And he's like, man, I've been doing that now for like a year.

And it's so helpful for me.

Like it's completely changed the way I think about things.

Because you just build this pattern of... thinking about things in a thankful manner.

And it can be hard for people to start.

Look, I've had times where I'm sitting there trying to think of one thing to be grateful for and I'm like struggling.

The reality is you have thousands of things you could be thankful for in any given day, right?

So I like that as like a morning thing, like a statement of gratitude on a yellow sticky.

The same thing, you just stick it somewhere, you see it all day.

And then an evening reflection too of like highlights of the day.

Just three things that like, you're grateful for for the day right, like even if it was a quote-unquote bad day, which again is bullshit too like that's just the story you made up, like there's no such thing as a bad day, that's um.

So those things can be really helpful.

And there's all sorts of other journaling practices too and things like that.

Let's transition into our next mind killer, suppression.

You write this while storytelling deals with what we think about certain past occurrences.

Suppression concerns how we feel about it.

More specifically, it's about how we respond to how we feel.

Can you talk a little bit about what suppression is or what you mean when you say suppression?

Yeah, typically when we're talking about past thoughts, the way we interpret memories, You have those two issues right.

So we talked about a traumatic experience where there's a physical thing that might have to heal, maybe not.

But then usually there's an intellectual component which is a storytelling piece, how we're thinking about this.

And then there's an emotional piece to it, which is how we feel about it.

And the issue for a lot of people is that we don't process emotions very, very well.

We just don't do it in a healthy manner when it comes to some of this stuff.

So if we have some kind of thing from our past where it bothers us, for some reason our tendency is to hold that in and this can get kind of woo with sort of energy, stored energy and stuff.

But this is absolutely real.

And if you don't read a book like The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, like it'll convince you like this notion of like storing energy, sort of destructive energy, in various parts of yourself is absolutely true.

And the thing that i sort of highlight for people is, like you know, we think about memories themselves.

Right, what is a memory?

A memory is it's an experience that we have and somehow we store that information, the data, in our cells, right?

And like, we sort of take that for granted.

Like, yeah, but that's weird if you think about it.

Like the fact that I can imprint, like I have an experience and somehow that information is imprinted in me that I can then recall, And there's a whole thing about how that works.

And it's not how people think.

It's not like a foul cabinet where you just go like, oh, here's the memory.

Here's exactly how it happened.

That's not what happens at all.

But the fact that we can do that, Who's to say that the only place that information gets stored is just in our brains and just that it's information.

That it doesn't have energy associated with it, positive or negative, however you want to classify that.

The reality is it can.

It can get stored in different ways.

And this can be really, really, really unhealthy for people.

Men especially...

And I don't want to get too broad brush on like the genders and what we're prone to the way to act.

You just suppress it.

You're just like, well, I'm not going to deal with that right now.

This is a perfect time where naturally I should be bawling my eyes out and I'm just going to stuff it all down and we treat emotions as if they're not required.

And this is probably my one beef with like stoicism, because stoicism can kind of go this route of like It's not to say don't deal with your emotions, but just think rationally about them and they'll all be fine and everything.

No, we have emotions for a reason.

They are the way that we energetically process our experiences.

So when something makes us laugh...

Like the laughing is like an energetic processing of that experience.

And when something is sad, is sorrowful, crying is like an expression of that.

It allows us to process that experience.

But when we don't allow ourselves to do that, it's not like it vanishes, right?

This is like, you know, air pollution.

It's like all the stuff coming out of people's tailpipes doesn't just disappear, right?

It goes somewhere and it's toxic.

Right.

So the crude example I always use is like it's like holding in a fart for people.

It's like, you know, can you do that for a little bit of time?

Yeah.

But like if you did that, if you kept doing that for 20 years, like how horrible.

Would you feel like how toxic is that?

And it is the same thing.

Now, conversely with a lot of like, there's other people and this sort of, I think, leans more towards women, where it's an anger problem, where they don't exactly know how to express anger correctly.

And I think my interpretation is, those things can a lot of times get sort of intertwined with one another because they're sort of the most volatile of our emotions.

So men, not comfortable with crying, but we're okay with the anger piece.

So we compensate for a lack of being able to cry by getting angry all the time.

And you see this with guys, right?

Like he's fucking angry all the time and he's probably never hasn't cried in like 20 years or vice versa, right.

Like I'm always like, oh, it's okay.

Everything's fine.

And I'm going to go cry by myself in my room, right?

You have to figure out ways to not only do this healthily in real time, but the other challenge is figuring out how to sort of process repressed stuff.

Look, I got kind of set on the path of this, kick-started a little bit with some substances outside of the country, that where i was like crying for four hours, like screaming crying, But it opened a doorway for me which allowed me to then figure out where I could do this in the future.

And the story that I tell is I went to see Top Gun Maverick. which great movie.

Like I loved it.

And I have like, I got into the Navy because of the original Top Gun.

Like I went and saw that movie.

I was like, this is amazing.

You can do this as a job.

You can be a fighter pilot.

And I went to the second movie, the sequel, 30, whatever it is, 35 years later, 40 years later.

And I'm like, oh, this will be fun.

This will be great.

And man, I was so emotional from the jump on that movie.

Like just, it was like that feeling you get, right?

Of like, I want to...

And I'm sitting here going, I don't know why I feel this way.

I don't know if this is because it's pulling something from the past out of me.

But the difference was, instead of just holding it down, which I kind of had to do in the theater because I know myself, it's like loud, it's like screaming at the ground, right.

When the movie was over, we were there as a family, but we had two cars.

They told my wife and kids, like, you guys are going together.

I'm going in my truck.

And I just got in my truck.

I didn't even drive out of the parking lot.

And I just, like, bawled my eyes out for, like, 15 minutes.

But it's like a weight comes off of you.

You're just like...

And the thing was, I didn't have to psychoanalyze it.

I didn't have to be like, I wonder what that was all about.

It was purely the movement of it that was important, you know.

And the last thing I'll say on this just like where I started to really notice this for myself was like a few years ago, when it was like I was watching some banal podcast animated movie with my kids and there's some touching scene and I'm like getting all you know sitting on the couch, like getting all choked up on this thing, just thinking what, why is this doing this to me?

Right, and the reality is my body was trying to figure out a way to get some of this stuff out of me because it was so harmful and destructive.

And it just was looking for any window.

It was like, okay, here's something, let's try this, you know?

And at the time I was like, I don't know, just same response, like just stuff it all down.

Chris, where, I mean, you've clearly thought about this a lot.

You've done a lot of reading on it.

Do you ever?

I mean, is it so simple to say like well, boys are taught not to cry and girls are taught not to get angry?

And like that's the source of all this suppression, or is it?

I imagine it is, but is it much deeper?

Is there reason for all this suppression beyond, just like, the sort of cultural story we tell ourselves?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, I don't know.

And again, I don't want to paint a broad brush.

Everybody's unique and different, right?

Just my experience has been, especially around sort of like alpha types.

We tend to fall into that bucket.

I think some of it is cultural.

I think we're just, as Americans even, we're sort of like not wired to do that correctly.

It's just kind of not in our.

I mean, you go go over to like europe and like italy or something like.

Lots of emotion right, maybe too much, i don't know, but culturally they're very wired to be extremely emotional like they get.

They get in fights with not fistfights, but like they get in arguments with each other and then and but everyone's friends and it's like it's part of the thing, like it's that's part of it we are.

We fall way too much into sort of and look, I'm a huge fan of this too, and this is part of the reason why it was a problem for me.

I'm very sort of empirical and disciplined and think about things and analyze things and not feel as much stuff, And so I had to shift that a little bit like tap into like well, how do I feel about this situation?

Things even like intuition.

It's not to say our intuition's always right, but like not always analyzing the situation from a thinking mentality, but from a feeling mentality too.

And you can go too far that way too, where it's like, I don't even pay attention to the data.

It's just, you know, but there's a balance there that I think is really critical.

What is the countermeasure then to suppression?

How do we start to feel our feelings in an appropriate degree?

You don't hold in your farts.

He already said that.

You read Walter the Farting Dog.

You learn the lesson.

I'd like to say that my boys don't have any problems with that.

So if you'd like to learn, come on over.

I mean certainly there's things where it's just, it's just as simple as, like you, starting to recognize some of the stuff when it crops up and figuring out a way, especially if you've done it for a long time.

It's like you.

So less crude example.

It's like keeping the cap on a soda bottle, shaking it up.

And then at some point, if you unscrew the cap, it's gonna explode, right?

So the better solution is how do I figure out how to slowly unscrew the cap a little bit?

It's tapping into that.

Certainly it's figuring out ways if you've got some sorrow suppressed.

How do you process that on your own terms?

People aren't comfortable crying in front of other people, but if you're uncomfortable, doing it by yourself, And I was there.

I know there's a lot of people there.

It's literally by themselves.

They're not comfortable doing that, right?

So there's a little bit of that.

But then it's working with your mind-body connection to get it better at energetic processing in general.

So there's like breath work that can support that.

There's things like qigong, which I think can be really effective in this.

I mean, exercise just in its own is part of this too, right?

That can be really effective.

But it's sort of thinking of yourself as not just a material being, but an energetic being.

And how do I move energy more effectively through myself?

So it's sort of a combo of those things.

Brene Brown talks about this, which is people feel something and they have a hard time, as you said, like feeling it, letting it out, because they have a hard time actually labeling it and they might mislabel it.

Right.

So there's research that shows that when people are asked, they can really only identify like three, three emotions.

It's like happy, sad or angry.

Yeah.

Well, you might be really frustrated with your kids.

But if you can't label it as frustration, it comes out as anger, right?

And I think there's a level of – I remember reading this somewhere about kind of a more evolved emotional intelligence is when you have the right emotion, the right amounts at the right time.

And that's a big – if you do that, then it really does get processed.

But if you feel – sad and it comes and it but um it actually you think it's guilt then it's that's a wrong emotion it's like or you have As you said, you feel something, you don't let it out enough.

You suppress it.

You don't feel it the right amount or you're angry for your dad for being abusive when you were younger.

But you still hold on to that today when he hasn't been abusive to you or your family in 25 years.

You're like. right emotion, right time, right.

Yeah.

There's something like that in this.

The challenge there, the problem I think I have with that.

That's not wrong, but it turns into psychoanalysis a little bit, where again we're getting too much into the thinking component, again where it's like well, let's get the right label on this and everything.

I'm more worried about the pure visceral movement of energy.

Like I said, I've done some psychedelic stuff.

I think those therapies can be helpful.

None of the stuff I talk about is like go do these things at all.

In the very small amounts that I've done some of these treatments, they helped sort of open my eyes to some things that I then realized like I could do these also in other ways right.

So it's not like you have to do any of that stuff to get there.

But one of those was a couple of guided ketamine things with a therapist, right?

Like legally in the United States, like you take, technically it's a disassociative.

I don't know.

That's not just a distinction without a difference.

But the end of one of these things, sort of apropos of nothing, no real proximate thought, that would make sense.

I had this sort of emotional release and it was crying, but I was laughing at the same time.

Like Joker-esque type response here.

Literally like Joaquin Phoenix, kind of like crying and laughing sort of uncontrollably at the same time.

So if I were at that moment to go, what is this?

Let me label it.

Like, is this happiness?

Is this sadness? not the right question to ask.

The question there, I think, is like, or the response I should say, is do I again resist this or do I just lean in and let it happen?

And then not really worry much about it after that, right?

Like the therapy there, it's a visceral thing.

And I think that that's the important piece of it, in my estimation anyway.

As a wrap-up question Chris, we did a at chasingexcellenceemail.

We put together a recommendation roundup recently and you were kind enough to give us a recommendation.

And what you recommended was perfect breathing, which I know is something you talk about in the article about the countermeasure to suppression.

So, just as a way to get out of this episode, could you talk to us a little bit about what perfect breathing is?

Maybe give us some homework to do, as it sort of relates to, you know, working through this particular mind killer.

Yep.

Yeah, so perfect.

Breathing comes from James Nestor's book Breath, which is a great book if you haven't read it.

Easy read, very well written, just about kind of like the importance of healthy breathing.

And he talks about the perfect breath, which is...

It's five and a half seconds inhale, five and a half seconds exhale, which translates to five and a half total breaths per minute.

And it's theoretically five and a half liters of air.

So there's like sort of this perfect sort of five and a half balance across the whole thing.

But the idea is like it's the, it's sort of the perfect physiological way to breathe, like through your nose.

Five and a Forcing.

This isn't Wim Hof, none of that.

We're sort of like getting in this very calm, energetic state, right?

And so yeah, I did a track on this, with a sort of guided music track on YouTube that allows people to, Like you can do breathing where you're counting and stuff like that.

I really like it where you don't have to think about it at all.

Like let's get to the feeling aspect of this.

So the whole idea is like this is there's like a sort of a thumping and just a tone that goes back two tones.

So you don't have to count at all.

It's just breathe in.

When you hear the one tone, breathe out when you hear the other one and you'll kind of hear the beat going through it.

And to date, it's by far my most popular video on YouTube.

People just find it very effective.

I think there's something to it again of just kind of helping you get in an energetic state that allows you to move these things.

And look, this is stuff that I think five, 10 years ago.

If you'd talked to me about these kinds of things, I would be like fuck off.

Like, that's stupid.

So I get it if people's response is that, but I can tell you through vast amounts of experience that This stuff is absolutely true and it is critical.

You're an energetic being.

Your mind is an energy.

It is not a thing.

The energy of that you have to take care of and your emotional health is an enormous part of that.

Okay, so we've talked about how we tell ourselves harmful stories about the past and how we suppress emotions instead of processing them.

Those are backward-looking problems, as Chris would say, dealing with what's already happened.

But fear, fear is forward-facing.

It's all about the future.

And for a lot of us it's the mind killer that shows up physically, whether in panic attacks, chronic stress, that constant sense of threat, even when there's no real danger.

After the break, Chris is going to break down fear and introduce one of the most counterintuitive countermeasures.

Say that three times fast.

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I'm excited to get into this.

This is a big one.

I would love Chris, if we could start with a reminder as to what the mind killers are, if you can give us the Cliff Notes version of what it is.

And then we'll get into this conversation about about fear.

So first, just a reminder, what are mind killers?

Why?

Why are they worth focusing on?

So mind killers are essentially the ways that we as individuals self-sabotage our mental health.

And all of my content is based on the premise that mental health is a training modality.

It is something that you can train towards fitness.

It is not a treatment thing.

It's not something that like, you're helpless against at all.

It's Um.

So, just like you guys do everything around how you can train physical fitness right.

Like you can improve your physical health through training and what you eat and sleep and diet all of that.

You can do the same thing with your mental health.

And unfortunately, most people are sort of resigned to this idea that they are. powerless against it you end up with some condition like anxiety i can you know either and say i have anxiety i have depression like it's some disease that you caught or something and it's just not true these are patterns of behavior that we develop over time and they can be undeveloped and counteracted but Most people don't know how to do that.

They don't even really know what they're doing wrong.

And there's no sort of training modality against it.

So all of my content is designed around, built around, how do we do that?

How do we assess our own level of mental fitness?

The way you can assess your physical fitness through biomarkers and through strength tests.

How much can you lift?

How fast can you run a mile?

How do we assess it?

And then how do we improve it?

And can we bucket those things on some levels so that we've got like the same way, You've got strength and endurance and flexibility and agility and whatever else.

There's 10 of them, right?

Like in the CrossFit model, there was 10 of them.

I don't remember all of them.

But that same idea, like do we have kind of channels that we can – we can improve.

And so the mind killers is identifying those, the destructive channels.

And then the countermeasures are how you then counteract them through various exercises.

And so the ones we've already talked about and this this is like your guys' content, like Ben's content, constantly evolving for me.

And I think getting more concise and succinct and better.

I will say at this point, it's getting to the point where it's pretty, pretty well codified, but it started off actually seven mind killers.

I've further reduced it to five.

So I think, if you need to go back to that first podcast episode, we did.

I think we're talking about seven.

There's other ancillary things that play into it, but they really play into the interplay of the mind killers into the physical side of things and how that works together.

And so I kind of removed those and said yeah, this is the way that this becomes a mind body construct.

Not a separate, but the five are really all about the mind, like what we do as individuals.

So the ones we talked about so far were oblivion, which is this inability to have the proper relationship with the chatter, with the sort of bullshit that's always kind of going on in your head, just not recognizing it, not having an appropriate relationship with it.

We then move to storytelling, which has to do with how we treat essentially the narratives we build around memories.

One of the things that Oblivion does is that it pulls you out of the present moment, by and large.

That means that you're either going forwards or backwards in time.

That can be okay.

It's not necessarily bad.

But when you're going backwards, typically where it's destructive is, we build these narratives around our memories that are unhelpful and unnecessary too.

And then we talked about suppression, which sort of brings the emotional component into that.

So there's sort of an intellectual piece of that, which is the narrative itself.

Like that's just sort of like, what am I telling myself around this?

And we talked about the countermeasure to that, which is reframing.

But then there's this emotional piece of it too, where we store this sort of the energy, the energetic aspect of that as well.

And when we're talking about real traumatic stuff from our past, you have to address both of those things.

You have to examine the narrative that you've built around that and figure out a more constructive way to say that.

But then you have to deal with the energetic, the emotional component of as well.

That's kind of where we've gotten to now.

And then the last two, fear and stagnation.

Fear then goes the other way, which is forward-facing thoughts, right?

Like what we think about the future, basically.

And it has that emotional component tied into it.

And then stagnation has to do with basically our intellectual development.

The first four are sort of Things that are, I think, almost in the traditional treatment realm of mental health.

But a lot of stuff stops there.

Meditation is great, but it doesn't really expound on your mental abilities.

And that's really what stagnation is all about.

The other thing is they all, they do sort of build on one another, right?

So, like the awareness piece, which is the countermeasure to oblivion, of like how you become, create a third party environment.

Relationship with your thoughts is kind of the foundation of it, and then that sort of takes you into storytelling and then and then you sort of wrap into sort of the emotional component and then fear is sort of both a story and an emotion.

One thing and I love that you teed it up, and we definitely talked about a little bit in previous episodes this idea of a training protocol, for lack of a better way to put it.

As we're listening and as we're thinking through each one of these mind killers.

Is it the right way to think about it being?

Each one of us has a weakness in each one of these mind killers.

And it's not about identifying.

Oh, you know what?

Oblivion is really my issue, or fear is really, and everything else is okay.

But just like in the gym where it's like I'm a really strong athlete or I'm a really well conditioned athlete.

Is it that we want to identify our strengths and weaknesses across these mind killers and say I'm going to pay more attention to those weaknesses or I'm going to pay more attention to the ones that I'm strongest at?

Like how do we begin to create a program, quote unquote, such that we can begin to tackle these mind killers as effectively as we can?

Yeah.

So, so once you can kind of understand all of it conceptually, right.

You go through all of that content of each mind killer, each kind of basic countermeasure.

I start people off with some very basic 10 minute routines that they can do at different times of the day that address everything together in concert.

Like not all in one go, but it's like, here's a 10 minute routine that does some of this stuff.

Here's a 10 minute routine that does kind of this stuff.

Because the idea is you want to... you're training for life here, right?

This isn't like, there's no competition, right?

I mean, this is one place where it is a little bit different from physical fitness, in that you're not entering some meditation contest or something like that right, you're literally just training for life.

So it's like you're trying to do these things so that you develop better patterns of behavior, so you are fit the rest of the time right.

And look, that's the way it is for physical fitness for a lot of people too, right?

You go to the gym one hour a day or whatever it is, so that you look good naked and you feel better the rest of the time, and all of that, and you can play with your kids until you're older or play with your grandkids.

So there's kind of things that I think it's good to get the basics under your belt.

And then I do think that the awareness piece is something that everybody needs, that you should always go back to.

It's just, it is the foundational piece of it.

And so it's.

It's something that it's sort of like any sport, like you can never.

This is virtuosity, right.

Like you can never get too good at the basics right, and I coach soccer with my middle son and I'm always saying brilliant on the basics guys, like all the step over fancy shit's great.

But like you can never pass a ball perfectly.

You can never trap a ball perfectly, right?

Like you can just, same thing with, air squats and that stuff, right?

Virtuosity, building on the basics.

So it's kind of the same thing there.

So I think it's a good idea for people to get some reps under their belt with all of the things and then always go back to that.

But then yes, at some point it becomes a bespoke approach where you, through that journey, figure out you know what I need the most work on fear.

I need the most work on suppression.

And that is part of what you should be doing.

Fear is my biggest mind killer.

I know that.

It still is.

And so that's where I need the most work.

And so that's where I've got to pay the most attention, right?

And with the exercises too.

What just like anything you'll figure out is I like some of these more than others, but they're not necessarily the ones I need the most either.

So and you've got to play that balance between those things.

Like sometimes it's good to just do the things you want because it's you're getting something done.

But other times you've got to be honest with yourself and say, OK, this is what I need the most.

I'm sure we're going to get into the actual fear one, but how did you know that fear is your biggest?

Because it's sort of what started this all for me.

Part of it was storytelling as well.

But just as I've gone along, the hardest physical side effects that I've had from this are in the fear modality because of the way it manifests itself physically through emotion. sort of cognitive decline or cognitive dysfunction, panic attacks, things like that.

Once you start knowing your mind, once you start paying attention to the chatter, you see what it's saying, right?

And like you can bucket it and go.

I remember doing an exercise where it was like writing down things that I was resistant to doing and then putting the why next to it.

Like it was.

I can't remember where I got this, but it was like these various columns of like this thing, these thoughts that I was having.

And then, and it was just the same shit.

It was just all anxiety, all fear, all were, you know what I mean?

And so.

That's just knowing yourself over time.

For me just very clear that that's the issue or the primary thing.

That's the thing I have to work the hardest against.

Yeah.

How did you know?

Cause you just said it was also a little bit storytelling.

How did you how were you able to figure out that?

Oh, it's fear.

That's the first domino.

And maybe everything else falls after that.

But it's really the fear thing that I have to pay the most attention to.

Is it again?

Is it to your point?

Like you've just got to do the reps and eventually, after doing enough reps, you'll just keep circling back to oh, it's this thing.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, for me it was like when I started kind of going down this destructive path, I didn't know anything I was doing.

Like I knew I was fucked up, but I didn't know what I was doing wrong.

I didn't know why.

So it's taken me over 14, 15 years to really figure all of that out.

So when I can wind the clock back, I can pull the thread and kind of see how that all snowballed on itself.

But at the time, I didn't know any of that.

Mm-hmm.

But they're all, I mean, like, it's not a, these aren't clear lines in the sand.

This is the whole thing, right?

Like it all kind of you know, like all the mind killers and the countermeasures to them.

Yes, they are specific to those, but they work together too.

There's overlap here.

Like we'll talk about fear and openness, but that kind of leads into curiosity and stagnation, right.

And the same way that suppression and the emotional aspect of that that molds and kind of like, morphs into fear.

Because fear is also an emotion right, it's just a different emotion and we treat it completely different than those other two and that's why it needs a different but.

But it's not, but they're, they're also.

There's an energy associated with all of those things, right.

And so even some of the exercises where we're talking like breathing exercises, it's like they.

You know they're in this lane but they kind of overlap a little bit.

You know it's not cut and dry stuff.

It's sort of, you know, I always go back to training.

It's fucking training.

As you're saying, I'm like, it's the same exact thing.

It's the same thing.

It's like, are you working on cardio or strength today?

It's like, I don't know.

I'm working out.

It's the, hey, what do you do to work out?

I lift weights.

What do you do for cardio?

I lift weights faster.

Like, I mean, you know.

Yeah, or even like real specifically, right?

If you're training, if you want to improve your VO2 max, you don't need to just do VO2 max training right.

Right.

Lactic threshold training improves your VO2 max training.

Yes.

Like aerobic endurance will improve your there's blend.

There's there's carry over to so many other things.

Yes.

So, Chris, I think we should get let's take the dive.

Let's go right.

You kind of teed it up really well.

Yeah, it's after suppression.

This is where the emotions come in.

It's where suppression has to do more with past.

Fear has more to do with the future.

Fear has a lot to do with the emotional side of it.

And you kind of tease that openness is the countermeasure to it.

You want to take us through the masterclass of fear?

Yeah.

And the reason why those are together is because they're sort of two sides of the same coin.

We tend to fault to one or the other to make up for the other one.

And our response is that we push it down.

We don't allow ourselves to properly process those emotions.

And that's the real problem.

Fear, on the other hand, That's not the issue.

It's not that we don't allow ourselves to process it.

It's that we sort of succumb to it and it runs away with itself.

And the reason why it's an issue is...

Fear is a most primal emotion, right?

And so when we talk about emotions being the way that we energetically process our experiences, and that's what it is, and they're totally natural.

It's a reaction.

It's something you feel.

And you don't think about, right?

Whether that's something that makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you angry, or makes you afraid.

That reaction, not in your control.

Someone jumps out and scares you.

Boo!

That feeling we get that...

Not in control of that, right?

That is the emotional reaction.

That physiological mechanism for a specific reason.

Fear is a survival mechanism.

It exists evolutionarily to keep us alive.

And it's sort of like again, this is for the old, this is like lizard brain shit.

The oldest emotion we have.

And it. served a purpose by sending blood to our muscles and like narrowing our field of vision and doing these things to keep us alive literally physically right so it's like the proverbial sort of getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger whether that actually ever happened or not i'm not sure but some kind of threat to our survival We got to run away.

We got to clean up.

I had to inform Heather yesterday that Sabertooth Tigers don't exist anymore.

She really, she really felt they existed still.

You'll get caught up on Heather stuff, but yeah.

Okay.

Yes.

Yeah.

They're gone.

They were dying for a long time.

They were like a long, long, long time.

Wooly mammoths.

Yeah.

But we feel all those physiological effects, right?

And that's a healthy expression of that.

And that is your sort of classic fight, flight, or freeze.

So it's helping you either fight the threat, run away from the threat Or, in some cases, actually play dead, which is another way to kind of.

But the whole point is like keep you alive, right.

And then once the threat passes, you return to baseline.

And this is a, it's a yin and yang of your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.

Sympathetic is that arousal. component of it.

Parasympathetic is the rest and digest, slow down like a parachute.

That's how I always think about it.

And that's fine.

And sometimes we still need that.

Like if we're about to have a head-on collision, you know driving down the road or something, and you get that thing like you need that.

It's like heightened senses, boom.

But in our modern day and age we really aren't in much physical danger most of the times, but we we trigger that system all And, by the way, this is called your limbic system in your brain.

And there's contention whether it's really a system or not, whatever.

It doesn't really matter.

Like people go to way down the rabbit hole of like your hippocampus and your, I don't give a fuck.

I can't feel my amygdala.

You know what I mean?

Like I can't go.

Oh, let me work.

You know what I mean?

Like let me flex my amygdala or something.

The point is, there's a part of your brain that triggers this right um, But we just don't have those physical threats.

But we do this to ourselves all the time.

And we do it by getting nervous, worrying about things, catastrophizing.

And the problem with that is...

When you do that consistently and habitually, you raise your sort of threat threshold, so to speak, and you're now on this constant level of essentially fear.

This is chronic fear.

It's no difference.

We can call it anxiety.

We can call it catastrophizing.

We can call it hypervigilance.

All pieces of the same exact thing.

It is fear.

And because of that, you literally will feel the physiological effects of that.

This is why people get brain fog or they have chronic fatigue or they have digestive issues, right?

Like your body stops digesting when you're in that state.

Not very well anyway, but we don't recognize it.

And this is the thing, like I first kind of really thought about this from a veteran's perspective.

Like veterans, you would never say, if you said, do you realize you're afraid all the time?

They'd be like, no, I'm not.

I'm not.

And it's like, well, yeah, you sort of are.

You're on this heightened state.

You go into restaurants with a with like your sidearm and you put your back to the wall so that you can assess the threats that might come about.

Like living in that environment i'm constantly in danger thing is super destructive to your body and that the real issue with it is if, if you snowball it, it can really screw you up like i'm talking, incapacitate you like bedridden, can't get out of bed Because your body literally shuts down.

And this is such a huge component of all these mystery chronic illnesses out there that people don't realize.

But even if you're not that bad off, you're not bedridden where you're chronic fatigue syndrome and you can't focus.

And I've been there on that you can still be in this sort of heightened state and not realizing what it's doing to you physiologically.

And it's also got all these other downstream effects about the way you interact with people and the way you interact with the world.

To me, it's so insidious and so destructive And that's why I think it's its own mind killer.

It has to be because the way you treat it is completely different too.

It's not the way you deal with sorrow and anger at all.

Yeah, I think of all of them, this might have the most, and probably because it's the most tightly tied to emotional, which has means that it's going to affect your body.

Yes.

I think you're spot on calling out the fact that this high level of chronic anxiety stress whatever you want to has real, real downstream biological effects.

Yes, it really does.

I want to highlight really because you said it, but the undiagnosed piece of this is massive.

You highlighted that when your body is in a chronic state of stress or acute stress, it down regulates your digestion.

It also down regulates your immune system.

And if your immune system is downregulated and you're exposed to a certain pathogen toxin or you have cancers in your body at all times?

If this is the default state, you don't have the ability to fight those things off the way you would if you were managing this in a more productive, healthy way.

So you hear these stories of, yeah, but she was so healthy.

She ate so well.

She went to the gym all the time.

She was such a high achiever.

Like she had it all.

Like she just like was go, go, go all the time.

And then you go like, yeah.

Tell me about her stress levels.

And this is where our reactive medical state hasn't kind of quite caught up to this aspect of how meaningful this is on it.

Yes, it can make you bedridden, as you said, from this fear of like I don't want to leave the bed.

It could be this fear type thing of a veteran walking into a public place and back to the wall and searching for an attack.

But I

I just want to, because I think the importance of what you said cannot be understated.

And I think it'll be part of the more mainstream conversation in five to 10 years.

But for right now, I want people to just kind of like understand how real this is.

Every cell on your body is trying to figure out if it should be acting in one of two ways.

Should it be on high alert?

If you're in a chronic overstressed state, it's high alert or should i be in repair mode?

Should i be building the systems?

And those are binary.

It's a light switch.

One is, As you said, car's going to cut you off and you feel that shock that like that's awesome.

That's so amazing.

You become a superhero for a blink.

But if we're in that all the time, man, it's so, so dang destructive.

Yeah.

And there's a couple of things you said there that I want to kind of dovetail on.

One is stress is the same thing, right?

It's another way to say that.

And right.

So you can say stress, you can say hypervigilance, you can say anxiety.

I just I like to wind it all the way back to fear because that is like a very, very core.

That's what it is right and those the other things are just like offshoots of this, like very very, very core thing that every animal on the planet yeah, feels right, not just us.

The other thing is the difference between acute and chronic.

Acute stress, great.

That's a workout.

A workout is acute stress.

Awesome.

Really good for us.

It is the chronic piece of this where you're just never down from that.

The other thing I want to clarify too is The bedridden stuff.

It's not like, I'm afraid.

I don't want to get out of bed like a agoraphobic kind of person.

It is literally you cannot...

I mean, you're so debilitated.

And I'm like this is one thing where people who have never been in these circles, these chronic illness circles, or have never gone through this themselves, it's hard to believe.

But I'm telling you, you can wind this system up so badly.

That you just can't function.

Physically cannot function.

Like you're so tired.

The room spins around you at 100% of the time.

And I've experienced all of this personally, you know, and it's such a highlighting moment.

It highlights to me in such a strong way the interplay between mind and body.

Like.

Nowhere else is it clearer that this is a holistic thing we're talking about, not one or the other.

I remember hearing Tony Robbins once say that stress is the achiever's word for fear.

I bring that up because it strikes me that everything that you just said Chris, whether it's anxiety, whether it's stress, We don't ever want to use the word fear, even if to your point, when you really get down to it, that's the right emotion.

That's the right word to describe the reaction that you're having, that we're having, that we have when it does afflict us.

Why do you think we are so hesitant?

You mentioned it before, the soldiers you've worked with pointing out like you're in a fear state.

Mm-hmm.

Why don't we ever like it?

That's actually very helpful to me.

Listening to you talk, being able to identify it in my own head, in my own experience, saying oh, I used to think that might have been depression.

I used to think that that might have just been me being an anxious person.

But really, it was fear.

And that's actually really clarifying.

So why is it so hard for us to be able to label the thing as what it is?

Because of stigma around these words, right?

Fear is a weakness.

That's how we typically think of it.

The same way we think of like crying as a weakness.

It's like it makes us uncomfortable because of the stigma around it.

So if you tell someone you're afraid, it's like you're a pussy or something like that.

Right.

That's how especially bravado, macho, alpha type. dudes and women as well, I suppose.

Like it just it's like, no, fuck that.

I'm not afraid.

Right.

And I think it really just boils down to that.

But that's why I think it's so important to talk about it's a biological thing.

It's biological.

And here's the thing as we get in, let's kind of go into the countermeasure piece of this, because it speaks to this point, which is, I think, most people.

Figuring this out for me, this countermeasure to this specifically, took a long time.

Because, like I said, this was the hardest one for me.

And still is.

Again, you never win this game.

You get better.

But I have to go back to these tools.

And it happened to me this morning actually, where I had a little thing going on with me that was like making me dizzy.

And like I could just feel the whatever triggered it.

Who knows where I had to go back to some tools.

I did some visualization.

I did some calming stuff to like kind of get in like I'm fine right now.

You know, but I had to spend a lot of time with it because we come from these circles where we think of the counter to fear as like bravery, like courage.

Right.

When you think of like, well, toughness, being courageous, that's.

No.

And the reason that that's not right is because you have to be afraid to be courageous.

It's not the opposite.

It's something you do in spite of being afraid.

If you're not afraid, then you're just psychotic.

Like if you're running into gunfire and you're not afraid, you're a psycho.

You're not, you know what I mean?

You're not brave.

Like you're just a psychopath.

So that's not it and that's why i think people, a lot of people from these lines of work struggle with it.

So much is because they're used to that.

They're used, they're brave cops are brave, firefighters brave, absolutely right but they're hyper vigilant.

They're living in this chronic fear state because they don't have an actual counter to this.

And so I was kind of going down the road of this and I learned this through these various like neural retraining things, where you sort of unwind, you have to like reprogram your subconscious, because this becomes, it becomes subconscious.

That's the thing, right?

It's like your body just goes, OK, cool.

This is what we're doing all the time, right?

This is where we live now.

And so you have to consciously overwrite that with things.

And all of those programs basically are about calming your limbic system down, visualizing like a place where you're like you're very relaxed and parasympathetic, and just doing it over and over again to kind of reset this baseline.

So I started off with this kind of mindset of like curiosity.

Curiosity like that's the kind of counter is like, because certainly becoming interested in your thoughts and everything is part of it.

But there's sort of like a, there's an underlying like modality to even that.

And curiosity kind of goes into that stagnation piece.

And it's this openness.

I had a guy who I was working with, with some detox stuff.

And he's a very intuitive guy.

And he would say to me, Dude, you need to be more vulnerable.

You have this shell around you all the time.

And I totally didn't know what he meant for the longest time.

I was like, what do you mean I'm vulnerable?

I cry on Instagram and stuff like that.

Not what he was saying.

It's this willingness to be like harmed almost.

It's this like you have to feel safe.

And the way you feel safe is by being open. it's it's hard it's it's very hard to describe in a way but if you think about like like a turtle is protects itself like put by it's got a big shell and it protects itself by hiding in the shell right and that's what you're like when you're in that state like you're you're Subconscious is shelled.

It's armored and that's what so many people are now.

It's just I've got armor on at all times to protect myself.

From what other people say, from what might happen, from the news from people that talk bad about me on Instagram.

And you have to like D.R.

It's like just like take the armor off.

Right.

And like I like that analogy because it really works with. people that are in those like military, special operations, firefighters, you have a uniform that you literally put on to go into battle.

We put on body armor, we put on helmets, firefight protective equipment, all this shit.

But when you're done and you get back to the base or whatever, like the fire station, you take all that shit off.

But we don't take the emotional part of that off.

We then still live in it and we go back to like doom, scrolling on social media and watching news that just makes us like, oh my God, I should be worried about that.

You have to do the same thing.

And so.

Yeah, you have to open that up.

And there's ways to do that physiologically.

And there's ways to do it sort of intellectually and emotionally too.

What are those?

What is the difference between the, what is some example of physical?

So physical would be certain breathing techniques.

So there's things like box breathing, which is like a People generally know about there's resonance breathing, which can actually increase your HRV.

It's Lea Lagos's method.

It's a four second inhale, six second exhale.

But those things actually make you more physiologically resilient to something that's upcoming.

Right.

So that's just a way to sort of.

Make it so your nervous system reacts better in that moment.

So those are like physiological breathing exercises, right?

Then outside of that, there's sort of intellectual things you can do.

So one is, I talked about the statement of gratitude last time with sort of storytelling.

Statement of intent is the other side of that, which is like I intend to approach the day with this kind of attitude.

Statement of gratitude is kind of a way to reframe the past and any bullshit.

You might be thinking about something that happened to you in the past.

Statement of 10 is a way to reframe the kind of future and always think about it in sort of like this open mentality.

There's things like Tim Ferriss has got this thing called fear setting, which I sort of glammed onto a little bit and sort of expanded.

But the idea is really writing down things where you think this way, things you worry about, things you catastrophize, like getting very detailed about that, the thoughts that take you down this road.

He's got a thing where it's sort of like, okay, what are the measures I could do to mitigate that?

And some other things.

What I think is really important is writing down those things.

Okay, if this happened, I would react in this way.

But tracking what actually happens, I think, is so important because 99 of the things we think are going to go sideways do not.

And the more you track that, the more you sort of go.

None of this shit that I worry about ever happens.

Like, so why am I worrying about this crap?

And then there's kind of visualization techniques you can do.

And Ben, I know you do this with athletes where it's not only visualizing something in sort of a positive light, but then visualizing it like hey, it doesn't go exactly the way I wanted, but how am I going to react in that scenario, right?

Because the reaction, again, is what's so important here.

It's just like the other emotions going the other way.

It's like feeling sad, feeling angry, not a problem.

How we respond to that reaction is what's important here.

The response to that fear is so important.

And that's the snowball piece of this is so critical too.

Because what happens with people like me is your brain actually will view the things you're feeling physically as additional threats.

So once you start getting like panic attacks, right?

Or dizziness or whatever, your limbic system now goes, that's a threat.

Like we need to be worried about that.

So what does that do?

That just reinforces this loop and you get in this loop that just gets worse and worse and worse.

And so you have to like train yourself to react in a different way.

I gave a talk a couple of years ago and afterwards there was a woman who we were like at a friend's house and we're having dinner.

And she said, she was talking about panic attacks.

She's like, I get panic attacks and I just, my husband just has to hold me and do it.

And I said, I just took a yellow sticky and I wrote, so what on it?

And I gave it to her and I'm like next time you get a panic attack, Look at that and take that attitude.

Like, so what, right?

Because what you're doing right now is you're reinforced.

You are making this panic attack.

Just come back at some point in the future because you're afraid of it.

Like you're resisting against it.

And I haven't brought up that word yet, but the resistance is the issue in most of these cases.

Because again, that's that like shell thing.

It's like I'm pushing against it instead of just kind of letting it be.

And it's a really hard thing to do for most people.

It's still hard for me sometimes.

But if you can just be like, okay, so panic attack.

Okay.

So what doesn't the panic attack is not going to kill me.

No one has ever died from a panic attack.

As far as I know, someone can, if someone, if someone out there is like, yes, they have.

Okay.

But like. it's just not going to do anything to you really.

It's just the way you feel.

And anyway, she got back to me.

She was just like, this is like life, life altering, like this attitude.

And I've had that.

It happened to me.

I was sitting in a terminal, an airport and anyone who's never had a panic attack.

It's not like, because again, you've reprogrammed your brain, so to speak, to do this.

There doesn't have to be some proximate cause.

It's not like you have to have a thought that's like, I'm worried about something.

It'll just hit you for seemingly no reason.

And this happened to me.

I was about to get on an airplane and it was just like the what it feels like to get a panic attack.

It's just like all of a sudden.

And I just sat there and closed my eyes and was like, okay. whatever, like do your worst, you know?

And it's sort of like a bully, like bullies like it.

When you fight back, you know that's what gets them off.

It's like, I'm beating you up.

And the more you scream and wail, like, that's what I like.

But if you just go, whatever, like do whatever you want, like the bully gets bored.

It's not fun anymore.

And it's sort of the same thing here.

And that's that openness.

When you were in that you know when you're in the airport or if somebody's out there, they feel a panic attack coming on, or whatever it might be the physical manifestation of it.

Is it?

How do you start to move?

So how do you like, what's the first thing we should do in that scenario?

When we could try to resist against it, and to your point, that just makes it worse.

Yeah.

Is it like the shoulder shrug?

Like, is that literally the first thing we should do?

Like, oh, okay.

I guess we're going through that now.

Is that literally the first reaction we should have once we have the awareness of oh, it's happening.

Yep.

Yes, it is.

You have to, you have to. cut the circuit, so to speak, you have to like change the loop.

And if you just go into the same pattern, you're literally, you're just, you're just folding it back on itself.

So the second you go, okay, cool.

No problem.

I can feel this.

Again, it's this openness.

It's like, I'm okay with this.

I can feel this right now.

And I'm not going to be bothered by it.

Now, here's the thing.

For most people, it's not going to solve the problem immediately.

Your panic attack might just go on.

It probably will.

Exactly the way it's always done before.

But the more you do that, eventually it won't happen to you anymore.

Or if it does, it's infrequent and you just go back to the same thing.

So this is kind of what happened to me this morning.

It was like I had this little I don't know why, like sometimes I still get these sort of panic.

It's hard to describe.

It's like a panic stab kind of thing, because I haven't completely trained my way out of this.

But what I did was I did a little neural retraining thing where I get up and I talk out loud too.

And this gets into the kind of like for people that are really in a bad way here these neural retraining systems.

Annie Hopper's got one.

Ashok Gupta's got one.

Ben Ahrens has one.

Ben's is my favorite, Reorigin.

They have full-on programs to retrain your brain where you spend three, six months kind of doing this every single day to eventually kind of like get yourself so you don't feel this way anymore.

I just went back to that practice where I'm talking out loud.

I'm sort of saying to myself, like, this is nothing to worry about limbic system.

Thanks a lot.

Appreciate the warning here, but there's nothing, there's no danger.

And it's weird, right?

Like it sounds weird. but it works.

And now it'll work almost not instantaneously for me, but like it'll, it happens a lot faster and things happen less frequently, which is again just like physical training, right.

It's the same kind of thing.

Like eventually it's like, okay, I feel much better all the time.

I don't feel awesome every single day.

I'm going to have the best workout, but it's a lot more frequent.

So Yeah, that is it.

You just have to show up and do it again the next time and do it again the next time.

And eventually it will dissipate.

Like I can't remember last time I had a full blown panic attack.

Doesn't happen anymore.

Is that the same – is that a similar workflow exercise for kind of like these downstream effects?

That's like a massive fear.

That's a panic attack.

But people that have – we're talking about earlier, like low levels of anxiety.

They're stressed out at work, right?

Like there's just too much going on.

I feel like they're never getting caught up and they just always have this chronic level of stress or anxiety that can't kind of get worked through.

I understand that the level of openness to like I'm going to.

When this happens, I'm not going to be the turtle that goes back into the shell.

I'm going to go out there and experience the storm.

I'm going to let this pass all the way through me.

For people that are, and maybe it's because it's harder to point at it because it's such a lower level, right.

Like I just got a lot going on.

Like I got a real lot going on and I can't.

So my countermeasure is Scotch and Netflix at the end of the night, right?

Like that's the thing that...

What is the openness of that?

And I don't.

Yeah.

You know, you know, that Scotch and Netflix.

It's like, yeah.

What what is the the wafer, the the the open version of the lower level?

I would say on that, because you're right, there's plenty of people where they're not physically.

Now I will say they probably are a little bit.

They don't feel it to that degree, but it's like...

I'm just tired.

I get tired a lot.

And, you know, I just don't feel like 100 percent.

Right.

Like they do live in sort of a little bit of a low grade, like a low grade fever kind of version of this.

But it's like the sort of realization of what's triggering all that.

So it goes back to sort of What are you thinking?

This goes back to just kind of like knowing your mind.

What are you thinking that makes you do that all the time?

Like you're stressed out about what?

Like what's the chatter saying that's making you all stressed out?

Like...

I think it's a common thing for mine.

So what if the answer was, I just got so much going on.

I feel like I'm so behind at work.

I don't know how I'm going to get caught up.

I have the kids.

I have to make dinner.

I have the carpool.

I have these six loads of laundry.

I'm not going to get caught up.

I don't know when this ends.

I don't feel like this is going to end anytime soon.

This is my life.

I don't like it.

Yep.

So in those circumstances, and by the way, I think most people have some level of that too.

Most of it is self-imposed.

Most of it is not exactly true.

And this is something I had to kind of come to grips with too is like, I've got all this stuff.

Like I'm forcing the speed and forcing the sort of urgency of a lot of this shit.

Most of this stuff that you think is like super urgent is not.

So this is sort of like a consequence tracker.

Again, going back to like, okay, something that you want to do.

If I don't actually do that today, what's the actual consequence?

Right.

Like, what is it?

Is it that big of a deal?

Not usually.

This is something that I've tried to kind of incorporate in my own life, too.

I don't have to. create stress where it doesn't actually exist.

Like I get it.

We have responsibilities and all that kind of stuff, but you can slow that shit down too, right?

What if somebody says, no, Chris, I can't.

I do have to pick up these three kids.

I do have a dog that needs to go to the vet.

I do have this project that's due at work tomorrow.

My coworker dropped the ball because they were sick for the last 10 days.

These are urgent, real things that do need to get done tomorrow.

Otherwise, my kid has to spend the night in the park because he didn't get picked up from soccer.

I think to me, some of that is just a story.

Yeah.

Again, do I have responsibilities?

Yeah.

But the way I act about them is not required.

I don't have to stress about that.

I can just be like, okay, I got this thing to do.

Now I got this thing to do.

Now the oh my God, the world's going to fucking end if I don't you know.

That component of it is just a story.

It really is.

Like all three of us are busy people, guaranteed.

Got a lot going on every day.

But I can tell you.

My stress level, so to speak of where it used to be versus now is completely different.

It has nothing to do with what I'm doing.

It has everything to do with my attitude towards doing those things and just being like okay, here's the thing I got to do right now.

I'm going to single task it.

I'm not going to get distracted by other things and I'm going to do it deliberately too.

Like the speed component I think is a lot of times just fabricated.

It really is, you know?

And look, it's not a perfect thing either.

People do have busy lives, but the attitude you take towards that is completely within your control.

It just is, you know?

It's not that... You say this too, Ben.

It's... doesn't mean everything's sunshine and rainbows all the time, right?

Like being a realist is important, right?

It's not that it's not like oh, everything's amazing and everything's always wonderful, and it's sunshine and rainbows.

But it's just like accepting the reality of like, okay, I got this stuff to do today, yep.

Okay, well, maybe just write out real quick, like, okay, what is the actual consequence of that?

Is that a real consequence we need to stress about?

Probably not.

It's almost like the consequence and then the result of that – so like okay, if I don't get this project done, what's the consequence of that?

I get fired.

Like okay, then what happens if I – it's almost like what's the next – because that would be like I get fired.

Oh, this is –

See, Chris, this is real.

This is a big deal.

This is something I stress about.

It's like okay, if you get fired, what is the And I think that that's the big thing that we do is?

You know we're, so try to your earlier point.

We we put all of these things on.

Fear is built into us from an evolutionary survival standpoint.

It's a mechanism to keep us alive.

Yeah.

And we'll do is we'll take these things and.

You get fired.

Okay, you get fired.

You still live in suburbia with your SUV and it's not life or death.

It's that, okay, if you get fired, you're going to be unemployed for a little bit.

Well, are we have a severance package?

OK, so you have a severance package and then you search for another job.

And during that time, like it's actually you you're not going to struggle to put food on the table.

This is like some people.

Right.

I guess other people.

Right.

If they get fired, it is a much more dire situation.

But this is to your point, is it's?

We tend to catastrophize, we tend to okay most likely if you don't finish the project, most likely you're not going to get fired.

Most likely it is that you're going to have to ask for an extension.

You're going to have to do something else.

And we don't need to go down this doom loop.

And that's what kind of snowballs on top of each other as well.

It's like stuff's gonna happen or it's not right.

And like you're being afraid of it, worried it doesn't change those things.

That's the big kind of realization, right?

So the point is like, with that sort of shell versus, you can either go through life Where things happen and you're like Doing it that way.

Or the exact same shit can happen.

And you can be like...

Hey man, okay, we'll deal with it.

If something actually bad happens, if one of these catastrophes actually happens okay, we'll deal with it.

And like I may even write out some, you know, think about some mitigation measures, but those scenarios of people like are you?

Most of these things, I'm going to get fired.

No, you're not.

Most of the times when people think that, it's not going to happen.

I like the turtle analogy, right?

It's like, which way do you just want to experience life?

Do you want to experience life in the shell, not experiencing life?

And when you're in the shell, by the way, all these terrible feelings have nowhere to go.

Or do you want to get out there and see the thing, experience the thing, walk through the thing and probably be able to bring a better version of yourself through the thing?

And the things are going to happen either way.

And I love the turtle analogy too, because there's the tortoise and the hare story as well.

So, and the moral of that story is like slow and steady wins the race, right?

And so it's like you can either be one of two things.

You can either be the turtle that never starts.

It's just like, I'm afraid to go.

I'm in this shell.

Or you can be the turtle that like chill like Milo goes along and eventually wins the race, right?

So which one do you want to be?

And that's a choice.

Like all of those things, everything on the news, all that bullshit, that stuff's going to happen, no matter what.

So...

What's the attitude you want to take towards it?

How much you want to pull that into you internally and have it affect you, right?

It's just not helpful.

Yeah, and i think my big takeaway from this conversation is that our default response to whatever it is the news, the late project, is to try to resist against feeling the feeling that it is eliciting.

Right, the point isn't to not feel the fear, It's actually the opposite in some way.

It's actually to just let it in, recognize it for what it is, let it wash over you in the way that a wave washes over all of us, and then get to the other side of it and say okay, the thing that that little voice in my head said might happen didn't happen, or it did happen and it's not that big a deal.

But we can't get to that point if we're spending all of our energy Trying to keep the feeling of fear.

And again, that word can be stress or anxiety or worry or whatever it might be.

But trying to keep that fear at arm's length, which is, in fact, the problem.

Yeah, yeah.

And I love the word resistance.

I use that word all the time.

It is like, it's the resistance that is the problem, right?

Because using the physical thing again, like resistance, is really good resistance training right.

Like the resistance, like pulling against weights.

That's great in acute circumstances, but it's terrible. long term.

And it's the same thing here.

It's like that resistance is that improper response, right?

It's the resistance to just life in general around you.

It's the resistance to the way you feel internally as a result of it.

And like you have to just let go of that resistance and you can't do that if you're, if you're closed off.

Cause it's, they're synonymous, right?

Like resistance is being closed off to the, to all this it's armored up.

Yeah.

All right, so far we've covered oblivion, storytelling, suppression, and fear.

Four mind killers that keep us stuck, anxious, and mentally out of shape.

But there's one more, and this one's different.

It's not about being trapped by the past or paralyzed by the future.

It's about standing.

Still, it's about not growing at all.

After the break we'll be talking about stagnation and why curiosity and wonder might be the most important countermeasures of all.

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Could you remind us what mind killers are?

Yep, for sure.

So mind killers are essentially the way that we self-sabotage our own mental health and prevent ourselves from being mentally fit.

Most of the time these days, people think of mental health as a pathology, right?

It's something to treat.

And if there's something wrong, you have a problem of some sort.

You go to a therapist or you get pharmaceuticals or both, some variant of that.

And the whole concept of mental fitness is that.

No, this is a discipline that gets better and fitter through training, exactly like physical health does.

But in order to be able to do that, you need to know what you're doing wrong.

So in terms of the ways that you're not mentally fit, What are those things?

What are the tendencies that we have to drag down our own mental health?

And so that's what the mind killers are.

And I've stated this before, but it's born out of the...

Fear is the mind killer, which comes from the movie Dune.

That's where I kind of, I sort of stole that term from that movie.

There's this whole thing called the litany against fear, which the whole idea is that fear will kill your mind in a dire circumstance where you can't think rationally.

I just kind of like broaden that idea to these other things.

And so you mentioned, we've gone over oblivion storytelling, suppression and fear and their countermeasures.

And now the fifth one.

And I should say too, there's a framework here that I haven't talked about yet in terms of the way that you can kind of like graphically think of these things that I think is real important to kind of quickly go over.

So if you think of a two by two matrix, right?

You have like four boxes that are arranged in a square where your X axis, so to speak, is time basically.

So past and future, right?

So the two boxes that are stacked on the left represent the past.

The two on the right represent the future.

And then your Y axis is essentially your energetic, your mind, basically the energy of your mind.

So the top two boxes is thinking and the bottom two is feeling, right?

So you've got kind of like thinking and emotions like that.

So then each one of those boxes, you've got that matrix there, right?

So right in the center of that is oblivion.

That is just complete lack of awareness of what's going on in the present.

It really kind of overlays the whole thing, right?

If you just have no awareness of your past thoughts, your future thoughts, your emotions nothing, you can't do anything here.

So that sort of sits in the center.

And then if you start at the top left box, that's storytelling.

That's your thinking about the past.

That's the stories we tell.

That's how we think about the past.

Suppression is a feeling about the past problem.

So you go down, right?

That's your right, your feeling past.

And then you go over to fear, which is your think or sorry, excuse me, your feeling future.

And now we have one box left, which is the thinking future, which is where stagnation comes into play.

Brilliant.

I love that visual.

Yeah.

What, if anything, do we need to know or understand about just the idea of stagnation as a concept to get into this conversation about why it is that fifth mind killer?

What do you mean by stagnation?

I think what you need to kind of realize is, so if you think about that framework where you have those four boxes with oblivion kind of overlaying the whole thing, it's like, okay, what would that mean?

What is your thinking future mean?

Exactly because a lot of people, i think, would would say it's fear.

People think fearful things like that would be the biggest problem when it comes to thinking about your future.

But We've already talked about this.

Fear is an emotion.

It's a feeling problem, right?

It may be born of a thought sometimes, but the real problem is the emotion itself.

It's the energy that goes along with that and what you do with that.

So it really is this idea of like, you just don't grow, you don't develop.

You wake up today and you're exactly the same as you were yesterday in terms of your mental development, not just what you know, but what you're able to do.

We go back to this idea of fitness, as I define it in either the mental or physical realm, is your capacity to act.

That is the simplest way I can think of defining it.

And so if you're going to have more capacity to act, you have to get smarter.

You have to be able to do more.

You have to build skills.

You have to do all those things.

And unfortunately so many people hit this stagnation point where they just plateau off and they're not learning anything or developing any skills.

They're basically just like getting distracted with social media and watching TV and that kind of thing.

And to me, it's the place where a lot of typical kind of mindfulness practices will fall short.

There's a lot of talk that mindfulness, great meditation, breath work journaling, all that stuff, all this like internal analysis stuff, which is what we've talked about so far.

Becoming much more aware of your thought processes, dealing with suppressed emotions, reframing your stories, becoming more open so you're not like pushing back on things and becoming resistant.

But then that's still just.

It's all like internally, like a lens is internal and you're not like becoming more worldly right.

And I think that's a big chunk that's missing from those things.

We almost put it in this like academic realm where it's not part of that.

And to me, that is the final thing.

It's like, okay, if you get this Ferrari of an engine of your mind really tuned up, well, now what can you do with it?

Like where can you make this thing go?

And that piece is equally important, as important.

All right.

So I think that the obvious where I go is Ferrari of a mind.

Love it.

Stagnation.

Bad build skills.

Good capacity to act.

Love it.

Act like a Ferrari.

Even better.

Yep.

Where do we start?

Yeah.

And actually, let me frame up a little bit more of of why I think we suffer from this a little bit.

Part of it is just societal.

I think we still live in this model where we sort of have like an education phase of life and then we have a work phase of life, and then we have a play golf until you die phase of life.

Right.

Basically, it's like 20-ish years, maybe a little more, where we learn stuff.

You go to school and your job, so to speak, the expectation is that you're learning things.

Skills too, like you're playing sports or whatever it may be, or you're playing a musical instrument or something like that.

But that's all in preparation for like this work phase of life that you go into next.

And that's going to be 50, 60 plus years, whatever that may be.

Of course, it used to be a lot of like we're in that like this one career, or a few careers for your whole life.

And that's completely changed.

But people kind of shift into like the skills and stuff.

The stuff they learn is about work at that point.

Right.

It's about, like make getting better at my job, or it's like I may have to take some training, or something like that.

But the kind of like learning for learning's sake completely falls off the map for a lot of people.

And a lot of stuff is considered childish too.

It's like, well, we don't like do skills, even a sport or a hobby or something like that, tinkering with stuff.

And then again, and then it's like well, and then you finally retire, and then you just kind of like frump on the couch and play golf and get tan like Ben until you die right.

Like that's kind of the thing.

And nowadays- I'm tan, the next step is death.

Yeah, the next step is death.

Damn.

But-

Nowadays, too, I'd feel like we're almost at a race to the bottom intellectually in a lot of ways.

Social media and media just keeps making things dumber for people.

You even hear this if you're writing a book, as I am, where it's like you got to make that people read at a sixth grade level.

You got to make that, you got to dumb it down.

You got to dumb it down, make it more easy to follow.

Like people can't understand that.

And that's I mean, I get that.

I get the accessibility behind that.

But that's a terrible statement about humanity in general, because to me you just then have to be getting it lower and lower and lower.

Like eventually you're just communicating grunts and emojis and you know we're back to like cave people or something like that.

So I think we just have to take it upon ourselves to break out of that trend and really think on a day-to-day basis.

What have I done to actually increase the capacity of my mind today?

What have I done to expand it?

Did I learn anything new?

Really learn anything, right?

Not just like watch some bullshit YouTube video or whatever, but...

Did I learn something today?

Am I building my, and I can get into the different ways I break this out, but that's basically the idea.

Is there a, A difference between the brain and the mind in this sense.

So there's a lot of coming out right now in terms of the neuroplasticity of the brain.

And as you challenge it whether it's through Rubik's Cube or reading a challenging novel that's, your brain will essentially rewire and grow and evolve and the cognitive decline gets pushed back.

Is there something different that... Is that what we're talking about?

Or is there something different on top of that that... says, yes, all good.

But in terms of this stagnation, what we were trying to do is work on walking into the mental dojo and training the mind like stop the stagnation, actually take steps forward.

And in order to do that, it's not just read Shakespeare.

It's not just do more Sudoku.

It is – or that new game that's like really – everyone's playing now.

It's from Crazy Rich Asians.

Have you seen – it's kind of like – Have you seen that?

No.

Uh-uh.

And that's what like all these soccer moms are playing this now because you ask them about it.

It's sort of like gin rummy where you like rummy cube, where you're like trying to do math to make combinations and stuff.

And they're like, it's good for the mind.

Okay.

I get that that's good for... Is it like Mahjong?

Is it like Mahjong?

I think that's it.

That's exactly it.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So is that... I get that's good for the mind.

But when I hear that, I hear good for the brain.

Is it also good for the mind, in terms of the way you're saying it, in terms of mental fitness, having the capacity to act, in terms of not just cognitive ability, but also this sort of centeredness, the resilience, this emotional maturity, this ability to, if you get knocked off center, to self-soothe and get yourself back on the right track?

Yeah.

So let me go out at that a couple of different directions.

So brain to me is an organ in your body.

That's all it really is, right?

It's no different in that regard than your heart or your lungs or anything like that.

And the health of your brain is important for sure.

It impacts your mind, but your mind is the energy.

It is the experience.

It is you.

It is that sort of ephemeral thing that we can't put a point to or really put our finger on, or anything like that.

And that's a really important distinction.

Obviously, our mind is somehow, we don't even exactly know.

It's somehow connected with our brain, but that's not the only piece of it.

And a lot of circles.

Nowadays we get really wrapped around brain health, which again is important, but I'm really talking about mind health, mind balance.

Mental fitness, right?

So the things you're talking about yes, there is for sure science out there that talks about how learning, doing that kind of things.

There's neuroplasticity behind that that stays off neurodegeneration and conditions like that that there's a definite benefit biologically.

But in terms of the improved experience, Yeah, absolutely.

Like that, that piece, because to me that capacity act isn't just resilience or like not being able to write yourself.

It's not just that.

Again, it's like I'm in a situation where I have to.

Problem solve my way out of it.

Have I done enough work ahead of time, where I've got more tools in my toolbox to solve my way out of this situation, right?

Can I come up with a novel solution to something?

That is part of mental fitness.

That is part of a fit mind as far as I'm concerned.

I'm getting a conversation with somebody and they're so outside of my wheelhouse that I can't even communicate effectively with them.

Can I improve that?

Yeah, I can.

And that to me is part of a fit mind.

It also just like, even just in terms of having more knowledge, that you can then turn in on yourself obviously, right.

The more you know, the more able you are to look at those things objectively and understand what's going on.

So to me, it's a huge piece of it that's critical to have.

The other thing I want to say real quick that I didn't kind of touch on is Where you see this a lot.

This kind of being stuck, being stagnant, is where people spend a long time in a career and then they have to do something else.

Like you see it in veterans a lot.

And that's why it kind of came to light for me.

It's like you spend 20 years in the military and all of a sudden you're out of that.

People feel like well, that's it for me.

That's the best thing I'll ever have done.

Their identity is so tied to something like that that they can't break out of that and think no, I can do something completely different.

And Patrick.

I know I provided kind of a rough draft of the chapter in the book on this, but I talk about Bob Ross in there, who we all know.

Most people hopefully will still know him.

Well, at some point that's going to age out, but...

He's like this, you know, guy with the poofy hair and beard that painted happy little trees on TV.

And he's had this really like super mellow, he's like a human quaalude, just like super mellow, soft spoken.

Hey man, it's all happy trees and everything.

And we all know that persona.

So it's like so strong, right?

Like you could have a little caricature of him.

People would know exactly what that is.

But Bob Ross spent 20 years in the Air Force and at least part of that time as a drill instructor.

Like full metal jacket style screaming at people.

And you would never know it seeing what he became.

And when I found out about that, it was like, he was, I think he was stationed in Alaska.

He like did some painting class or something, fell in love with painting.

It was like, when I'm done with this military stuff, I'm doing that.

And I'm never screaming at people.

And he had the courage to completely shift and do something.

He learned a completely new skill and changed the way he was.

Now it's not to say you have to go through such a dramatic transformation, but that thought of of I am that thinking again of this like it's future storytelling in a lot of ways right.

Like when you look at this sort of where it falls in that matrix.

It's butted up against fear and storytelling.

And that's because those, it's kind of born from that.

Like it bleeds over from those things, right?

Like fear about what could happen in the future bleeds into that.

And this storytelling of like narrative from the past and that the identity, and I'm the type of person who that then leads to like, well you know yeah, I was that for 20 years and it's best I'll ever do.

And, you know, I might as well just like go out to pasture at this point.

I like that.

The two stories, two of the stories you've told us in the last few episodes Bob Ross and Bill Buckner.

I think everybody understands.

Yeah.

These stories from the 80s.

I'm curious.

Is a synonym for stagnation.

That's probably not a synonym, but is what we're talking about with stagnation?

Could we also use the word lazy?

And how do those two things interplay with each other in your mind?

That's a good question.

I've never really thought of it in terms of laziness, but I guess you could sort of think of it that way.

That being said, I think there's people who are not lazy who are stuck.

Right.

Like you can think of people that are very busy, very successful, go to work every day, work hard, go to the gym, do all of that.

But they're still stuck.

Ten years from now, they're going to be the exact same as they are now.

They literally may not have learned anything outside of job requirements.

They spend any of that time that they could just sort of digesting media and whatever.

They can't do anything new with their bodies.

And I believe a big part of this is skill development, whether that is...

You know an instrument like me, or woodworking, or juggling, or magic or archery or whatever you know like that or sport.

Even a new sport can be something like that, too.

It's just a way where you're expanding your abilities.

That capacity just becomes bigger and broader.

I want to go back a little bit to what you talked about a few minutes ago, this sort of three stages that we all kind of get shoved towards, which is, you know, education or schooling, and then work, and then.

Ben gets a tan and dies.

Those are the, that's what I got.

He's done.

Can we go back to that education piece?

And I wonder is the way we are educated and obviously the way we educate the generations behind us.

Is how we think about education feeding into what ultimately becomes what sounds like a midlife crisis of stagnation.

Is there something about how we're taught to learn that creates the stagnation?

I'm trying to think of the way to kind of frame that a little bit like the way we're taught to learn.

I think it is somewhat just a societal construct again of like you do this for a certain period of time, then you do this for a certain period.

Now i think that this is probably potentially changing a little bit, but certainly for me growing up that was the paradigm, that is how we sort of thought of life And I I benefited from having a father who He would always say to me I never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

And I honestly never really knew what he was doing for a job either.

He did a lot of different things over the course of his life.

But he just had that attitude.

And he was always reading a book.

And he was always curious about things.

He was always asking people questions.

Always.

Just, Even though he's super intelligent, he kind of He never.

Whoever he was talking to, he made them feel like they were the most important thing in the room and was just like so wanted to understand more about them.

And I just... I really...

Thought that that attitude was so critical now, whether that's something that he was just inherently had or whatever, I don't know.

I don't know maybe, maybe that's the case, but it was a good model to learn from.

So yeah, I mean, I don't know man, like I think some of it is is again societal and we're sort of taught that way.

And then and then but.

Really what we should be doing with people, right, is teaching them how to learn.

That idea of just like perpetual learning, I think is so, so critical.

I think you guys subscribe to that, ascribe to it, but it's something that you, I think you have to consciously pay attention to on a day-to-day basis.

Can we maybe move into, I think you used the phrase, the cycle of wonder.

Am I getting that right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So it's basically a way to break this down into, as you know, everything I do.

I try to make it non just theoretical but actionable.

Like, what is this?

What does this actually look like, in terms of a workout, so to speak, right?

Like work, workout or Physiology is great, but what am I doing on a day-to-day basis to make this happen?

So I look at it as you've got two phases, so to speak, of breaking out of this.

And the countermeasure to this is wonderful. this idea of just like curiosity, right?

Like just childlike curiosity about things.

And so if we're going to break out of this, there's kind of two pieces to it.

There is the learning piece, like how do we bring on the information?

And then there's the application of those things.

Right, so we want it's like we want to acquire the new abilities, whatever those look like, and then we want to be able to apply them.

And so the learning piece, the acquiring piece, is two things.

It's knowledge, straight up, knowledge like stuff that I understand, that I didn't understand yesterday, and skills, which is your body being able to do something.

And there is a distinction there.

I think of something like, like a martial art, right?

You can read books on how to do martial arts and really understand how martial arts works and not be able to do it.

Right.

Reading all the books in the world about jujitsu is not going to make you better at jujitsu.

You may understand it.

You may be able to watch it and like, see what moves are happening and the history of it, and all of that does not make you good at that at all.

You then need to go learn how to do it with your body right.

You have to practice it.

And the same is true with any other discipline, same as with music.

You can learn all about music theory and not be able to play a single musical instrument.

So you have to be doing both those things.

Now they don't have to be necessarily in the same discipline, but the idea of I'm doing things where I'm just basically reading right, like understanding stuff, that way, but then taking on some kind of skill that I practice right on a day-to-day basis.

For me, that typically is musical instruments.

I've got guitars and pianos that I'm, I'll piano, digital piano that I'm kind of tinkering around.

But I also like, I go, I still play soccer.

And I like to think that that is, there's all sorts of benefits to that, like community.

And you can name a whole bunch.

You know obviously, the physical fitness aspect, but there's a skill base to it too, right?

Like I'm out there, I'm trying to like still get better at that skill.

And then there's the application of those things.

So when you have that capacity then, or as it's getting better, okay, now what do you do with it?

You can do three things.

You can play like literally free play, like just go around, plunk around on this thing, whatever it may be.

Again, that could be a sport where you just like you having fun with it same thing with an instrument.

Like I'm just playing around with it.

You can solve, like problem solve.

So, and that's certainly like, think of something like chess, right?

Like if you learn how to play chess and play chess a lot, it's a problem solving thing.

Like I, all of a sudden I can see solutions that i couldn't see before, and that's a whole fascinating thing in and of itself, which i wish i knew the neuroscience behind at some point.

I need to get into that.

But just, you guys have all had that moment where it's like you're looking at something, and you're looking at something, and you're looking at something, and all of a sudden, like the solution comes to you.

How that happens, I don't know.

But I do know the more of a foundation you have around, whatever that is, the more likely that is to happen.

And there's a cross-disciplinary thing about it too, right?

So, like you, then start The more knowledge you have, that's broader in skills, you can bring those into things.

It's like if you were...

If you're an athlete, you can then bring some of those skills and knowledge you learned as a competitive athlete into business right.

There's applications across things.

So...

So we've got kind of free play, problem solving, and then creation, like the art of these things.

Once I know how to play a guitar, I can create a new piece of music.

If I learn how to paint, like Bob Ross, I can create something.

And I think that to me, as we talk about mental fitness and humanity, that ability like there's no better pardon the word but personification of kind of human, the human mind, than artistic expression.

It's just it's the one place that i think we actually can improve on nature like, like there is there some beautiful kind of music in nature, like bird song and waves crashing stuff sure, but You compare that to you know Mozart.

It's just not even close.

Like that's something you're able to bring something new into the world that didn't exist.

It's like beautiful.

And that's that's an incredible thing to be able to do.

But again, it's built on the capacity you've. you know, fostered over time.

I thought you were going to say Bon Jovi.

I like Bon Jovi too, man.

It's good too.

My son is in a band and he only refuses to play songs by two bands, and it's Bon Jovi and Guns N' Roses.

He refuses to play those two bands?

Yep.

Guns N' Roses?

I'm just like, you're wrong.

So you're wrong.

Sorry.

Those are bangers.

You play those, people are going to lose their minds.

Yeah, you go rip out the solo to Sweet Child of Mine and you watch people lose their minds.

Game over.

And then go talk about Bill Buckner and...

And then go talk about Bill Buckner and Bob Ross.

What's interesting Chris, is what I'm thinking about, this idea of stagnation and creation, which I think you could, in a certain context you can sort of juxtapose the consumption versus creation.

And we live in a very consumptive culture.

And in many ways, we're pushed towards consumption as sort of the American dream.

And what's interesting to me, the dots that I'm connecting is everything's pushing us towards consumption.

And overconsumption tends to crowd out creation.

And that in and of itself creates this stagnation.

And so you've got all these people who, through varying means and methods, are being pushed somewhat consciously, towards stagnation.

So it's almost like oh, of course, there are so many people who feel stuck or feel unsatisfied, or unfulfilled.

It's because their entire life leading up to that moment where they realize it has been here, consume more.

Consume more stuff and let that crowd out any moment you might have for creativity and creation.

100%.

Yeah.

I mean, that is the model these days, right?

It's just like consume, consume, consume.

We're just going to push content at you at all times that you are very passive.

And it's not to say that you can't consume content that's interesting or might teach you something.

You for sure can.

But the majority of it is just kind of vapid nothingness, right?

It's just sort of like vacuous nothingness, nothing that that doesn't.

Again you get to the end of the day and you're like, what did?

How did that really make me better?

And and it's not to say, also like we need time for just recreation and we need time to unwind and we need time to just entertain and all that.

We need that.

But Part of the problem with that constant barrage of noise and information and everything it's just like the ability to kind of separate and do nothing is people don't think as much anymore either.

Like, just think.

Sit there and think for a little bit.

I mean, and that goes back to sort of like the awareness of your own mind, but you just people look for distraction and it's almost like.

Here's another thing too.

The advent of AI, I think, is making this worse.

Because you just have a robot now that does your work for you.

And it's great.

Don't get me wrong.

I love ChatGPT.

It's a hugely valuable tool.

But when you're forced to actually think for yourself, it's almost uncomfortable these days.

I'll give you a prime example of this that just happened to me.

I'm working on this book and I use an AI tool to help me basically edit it.

And it's called Lex.

Lex.page, really useful writing AI thing, just different than ChatGPT.

It's more designed for authors.

And so as I'm writing, it's like I chat with it and it helps me kind of restructure things.

And I'm like, I don't like the way that sounds.

Can you give me...

And I was coming back from a trip on a flight and I had two flights with a layover and neither flight had wifi on them, which is really rare these days to literally, so it was like seven hours or something.

And I'd gotten through all the podcasts I had downloaded.

I'd read the entire book I had.

I had nothing left.

And there was no screen either.

There was no like videos to watch or anything.

It was like old school, like playing with nothing to do.

And I've got my laptop.

They call that raw dogging.

Yeah, raw dogging.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, I've seen that.

No screen.

You just stare at the seat.

No headphones, no nothing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Raw dogging.

Yeah, raw dogging.

So I sat there for a few minutes at the beginning of this flight that was going to be on for like three hours.

And I thought, all right, what can I do here?

I can't.

I'm like I guess I could take the manuscript that's in Lex and I could just put it in a Word document and just work on it myself, like without AI.

Yeah.

And it was daunting.

I was like, shit, I'm going to have to just work on this myself.

Just think.

And it was a little bit of a... checking myself aha moment of, wow, okay.

That's something to be aware of, right?

Like your reliance on this thing, this artificial stupidity.

It's the, you know it segues so where it parallels so nicely, because you've reframed this up as mental fitness.

Yep.

Right.

Which is this thing that is trainable.

And if you work at it, it improves.

It's not something you need to necessarily.

It can help, but a pharmaceutical or therapist, but no, you can go to the mental gym and do work.

You have to work at this thing.

You can think of the evolution of our species, right?

Before the advent of the agricultural revolution, We were hunter-gatherers and our physiques were – we didn't outsource our physicality to a horse with a plow.

We didn't outsource it to a farm where we raised the – we had to go get it.

We had to go hunt it.

We had to go gather it.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution.

What we used to have to do to walk and transport on our backs.

Now we have cars and planes and trains, and things move faster than a horse, and we no longer could.

We can now outsource more of our physicality with this AI.

To your point, we are now outsourcing our cognition.

We are outsourcing our brains.

And if we're not careful about that to your point, We're going to fall farther into stagnation, because it's the environment.

We have to fight against this as well.

Yes, we have to fight against the ultra processed food that has consumed our environments.

It's now when you get an oil change.

You also have to say no to the Twizzlers when you go.

You know when you go.

When you go to buy printer ink from Staples, you have to say no to Sour Patch Kids.

It's everywhere.

And you have to be so crazy intentional with this development of our physicality.

Otherwise, if you let the environment take over, you're gonna be up against it.

It's the same thing with where we are at the very, very beginning stages of this, this cognitive play as well.

Yeah yeah, i always envision, i think of that movie idiocracy, mike judge, where it's just people get dumber and dumber and dumber and dumber where it's or like wally right, that movie yeah, wally's the one that i think about a lot as well.

You know, what also is interesting is you and Patrick both framed this up really nicely in terms of what we're in front of now is a lot more distraction.

Yeah.

We talked about this framework and Patrick, maybe you can help me remember who actually presented this.

But there's this really cool Chris thing that we came across, which is, you know 50, 100 years ago, there was art.

And art enhanced your well-being.

Art made you better.

When you watched a, a ballet, when you read Shakespeare, when you saw even like some really incredible movies from the past that were arts.

Then somewhere along the lines, art turned into entertainment.

And it wasn't necessarily about who can make the most beautiful thing.

It's who can make the most entertaining thing.

That then turned into...

Maybe I'm missing one here, Patrick.

You can help me out.

Distraction, as you said.

And then distraction, how it's now led into... The game is not the distraction play.

Like, no, no, no.

Pay attention over here.

Don't worry about that.

Pay attention over here.

It's here.

It's in the phone.

It's now turned into addiction.

How do you get them to actually not stop scrolling, like it's literally that's the game it's been monetized to who can keep eyeballs glued the most that you know is scary.

Maybe I'm doing a little of my own storytelling and finding that emotional thing about the future.

But it is one of those things that we have to again be cautious of, because the game now is not We think.

We think it's art or we think it's entertainment.

This is so cool.

But when you get to the end, as you said, you get to the end of the day, you're like, what the hell?

What did I do?

All I watched was like seven second reels of nothing.

Because you were distracted and addicted.

And it's funny the more I think about it, the more I feel like this mind killer specifically, is going to become more and more and more relevant.

Right.

Like, you know, again, it's all relevant and all that work needs to be done.

But this is going to become more and more a part of people's.

It's going to become more pervasive in society where people have to resist this urge.

You talk about like the music industry now.

I watched a video.

There's a guy, Rick Beato, who does a, he has a YouTube channel, which I really like.

I don't know if you guys have ever seen seen his stuff, but you know, whatever it is millions of subscribers but does a lot of breakdown music, just like really knows music theory, how to play instruments and just dives into like what makes songs really good.

And.

And he's talking about AI music now where you can, and he does this in basically real time.

It takes him like a couple of minutes where.

He goes into whatever I don't know if it's Claude or ChatGPT and just basically creates a fake artist.

Says hey, I need an indie kind of artist.

Guy creates a photo looks like a real photo of this person, not a real person.

Fake name little bio.

And then it's like okay, I want lyrics about this circumstance was like driving through the desert or something.

Here you go, lyrics, right?

Instantaneous.

And then throws it into an AI music engine, use these lyrics, make a song in this style, boom.

And it sounds just like I mean, like it's getting to the point.

There was a little one that started with the AI music.

You could kind of hear, but it was like a guy strumming a guitar singing where I was like if I heard that on the radio I would have no idea.

And no one had to learn an instrument to do that.

No one had to learn how to write lyrics, no one had to do any introspection, nothing, zero.

And that's fine from a consumer perspective of like, oh, this is a nice song.

But from a people that are going to generate the content from again, a personal growth perspective.

That's terrifying.

Terrifying of where we could get to, of nobody able to do anything anymore other than feed prompts into computers.

You know, I did a video the other day on social media where I was just showing people how to just figured out a guitar solo by ear.

Because you know again, even that's a shortcut, like in a skill.

And I'm not saying I don't do it.

Of course I do.

Like I'll look on videos on how to if I want to learn a song, how to play it.

But the skill of I'm just going to listen to this and figure it out note by note is again like something I have to force myself to do.

But there's a huge benefit to it.

It makes me a better musician.

I hear things now that I didn't hear before.

I'm like, oh, I know what he's doing there.

You know, that kind of thing.

So yeah, it's going to become extremely relevant, more and more relevant.

I think there's another interesting parallel.

There's lots of interesting parallels between the mental fitness and the physical fitness.

And I think one of them is and I think we've seen the physical end of it for the last whatever 20, 30 years which is that to get fit, to get fitter, is very uncomfortable.

And you have to accept that discomfort, day after day after day, in order to move closer to that fitness.

And I think that what we're talking about today, especially what we're just talking about, is to fight against stagnation, to create and not consume.

To think when it's easy not to think is.

We are now entering into a period where it's going to be just as easy to be physically unfit as it is to be mentally unfit, because it's so easy to whatever it is.

Use AI to consume, to jump on your phone, to do whatever.

And now, more and more and more, we're faced with the discomfort of starting to build the mental fitness, because the world is conspiring to make it really, really easy to just take the easy road.

One more time and one more time.

And the other thing that we didn't even talk about yet is it's more and more just telling you what you already want to hear.

Right.

It's not exposing you to new ideas.

It's like, oh, you like this.

I'm going to feed you more of that.

You like this is what you believe.

I'm going to feed you more of that.

Right.

So, like we have to do extra work, now to your point, be uncomfortable and think about and entertain ideas that don't coincide with what we already believe or what we already think we know.

And that takes extra work now in a way that it didn't before, because you just get everyone's in their own echo chamber.

Right.

You're in this knowledge bubble, belief bubble of information.

That's just like I'm in my I'm safe.

Right.

I'm in this echo chamber and I'm good and I don't have to listen to anything I don't like.

And yeah, it takes more work these days, but you have to do that.

It doesn't mean you have to look, you can still, but entertaining those ideas is really important.

Debating people is important.

Having an argument like a civil argument that exposes you to something like oh, I didn't think of it that way, maybe.

And being open to those suggestions.

Again, that's a curiosity.

Like, am I really interested in what this person has to say?

Am I really interested in their point of view?

That's wonder.

That's a sense of awe, right?

I like what you said.

I think it's a really good clarifier.

When you say the word debate, I think most people go, I'm going to try to win.

I'm going to try to get my point across.

And you just said it like, what can I learn from this person?

Yeah, right.

That I think is such a valuable character traits to go into every situation, every interaction, asking yourself what can I learn from this?

Yes.

And it's super valuable.

And as you tie all that back together, right.

So if you think of that like the final kind of countermeasure and circling it back on itself, and this is called the countermeasures is the arrow.

It's the mental fitness arrow.

So if you take the first letter of each one of those awareness reframing regulation openness wonder, it spells arrow.

And the whole idea is like, this is the direction we want to go.

And it's also kind of a weapon.

I mean, I come from the military.

We love acronyms too.

So it's like, you know, this is a weapon to fight the mind.

You're in a safe place.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's a weapon to fight, to battle the mind killers too.

But as that kind of loop closes on itself, that curiosity and the observation from the beginning, that is like, if you're to encapsulate the whole idea, it's curious observation internally and externally.

That is like the embodiment of mental fitness is curious observer.

There's something interesting in this conversation that I think I'm trying to connect the dots on, which is you know and what I'm thinking about is.

You know, Ben?

You just mentioned most people.

When they go into a debate, they want to win.

And there's one or two other moments in this conversation that I started thinking about like oh okay, so one of the things that we're trapped by is our obsession with outcomes.

And I think I thought about it again with like in 10 minutes you can create a fake artist with AI and you've created music.

But Chris, what you're saying is like, it's actually process that we need.

We're obsessed with outcome.

And what we're giving up with that obsession, is an appreciation for the process that builds towards the outcome.

Yeah.

I mean, this is you guys know this, right?

Like that is I mean, that's the whole point of all this stuff is there is no winning.

There is no end game.

There's no finish line.

It's just a day after day after day pursuit.

It's a it is a process.

And to that end, you have to figure out a way to be in love with the process.

You have to be interested in the process.

Certainly true with physical fitness.

And I mean that's part of the reason why like what you guys do is because it's a way to make it engaging for people.

It's a way to make the process fun.

Like they're not all competing.

I mean, for the longest time, working out wasn't about competition at all.

It was just about, I want to look good and feel good and live longer and that kind of thing.

And that ability to be engaged in the process is so important.

I always think of Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, and in that book He talks about guys like Eddie Van Halen, who it's hyperbole obviously, but actually he talks about, I think, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I may have been injected the Eddie Van Halen, but the point is like.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he was the last person on earth, would wake up and go to the gym.

Like he loved bodybuilding, right?

And he loved the competition aspect too.

But on some level, that didn't matter.

And Eddie Van Halen.

When the lights went out and the show was over, he like still went backstage and just played the guitar, because he loved playing guitar, right.

It didn't.

That part was great all the accolades and the fanfare and everything.

But he loved playing guitar.

And so with these things, with the skills, with all of it, That's this magic is you got to, you got to love the thing, the process, right.

Like that's where you got to.

That's the curiosity aspect of it, but that's where you got to find it too.

And some, and it can take some work too.

You know, I'm big on, you got to have a hobby.

You got to have something, get a skill, right? you may not have had a hobby in a really long time.

So it might take you some work, but there's a lot of hobbies out there.

And I know tons of guys that have later in life.

I mean, I know a bunch of dudes that after the military became like metal workers or woodworkers, guys that make furniture and like Awesome.

Or archery is a big one.

Guys become hunters and that's a skill.

I'm taking my first archery lesson in two hours.

Nice.

Try not to kill yourself.

Arrow goes this way, Ben.

That might be a good segue, because the last thing I wanted to chat with you about Chris, is actually a bit from the chapter, a couple of chapters that you sent us to just to read and chapters of the books.

You're working on a book about all these mind killers, which I'm really excited about.

So I want to talk about personal mission statements.

I'm going to read a little bit from that chapter.

And I'm interested because Ben and I just had we just did an episode on building your vision and your anti-vision.

So, in other words, like where are you trying to get to and what are you trying to stay away from or get away from?

And part of that conversation or part of that process is to have a sense of mission, of purpose, of what you're trying to do here or why you're here.

So you write this.

But by battling stagnation through the cycle of wonder, you don't just create things, you forge your future self.

Dedication to these practices can take you beyond personal improvement and show you who you can become.

However, it helps to have a North Star on this journey to give you direction and meaning.

So I'd love to just like give us some thoughts on the role of a personal mission statement, perhaps how you came to that And then how that does fit into this puzzle piece of stagnation.

Yeah.

And by the way, I'd love to hear about anti-vision or whatever the term was you use.

That's really cool.

I really want to hear what that is.

So see, there's the curiosity piece.

I'm curious about what you guys are doing.

Yeah, I think.

Coming from the military, the idea of a mission is really obvious, right?

Like we have mission statements for commands, for organizations, for teams.

And then we have missions that you do, like in the military.

And it's really clear, like this is the objective.

This is what we're going to go do, what we're trying to do.

And that's translated into business too where, like organizations now much more so than I think in the past have a mission statement.

It's like, here's what we're all about.

And Simon Sinek obviously made this like part of the whole zeitgeist and like kind of transformed things in a way, with the whole start with why thing.

And he's now adopted this personally as well, personal misstatement.

But I will say it's something that I had never done.

And I'd been exposed to that material.

And then I heard Evan Hafer on.

Joe Rogan, probably, and Evan Hayford, sorry, the CEO, founder of Black Rifle Coffee.

I heard him years ago.

And he was talking about how he was kind of like in this place, like get out of the military, sort of lost directionless, rudderless and just decided to write a simple mission statement.

It was really...

I mean almost like, like childlike, in its simplicity of just to transition out of the military and lead a happy and fulfilling life.

But it was just something to be like.

Am I every day when I wake up, what I'm putting in on the day?

Is it getting me towards this goal?

Right.

A North Star goal.

And hearing that, I was like, yeah, I need to do that.

I think I've never actually sort of reified that.

I've never made it concrete.

And it actually turned out to be harder than I thought.

Now I actually did it.

I was working on this before, before like even reading Simon Sinek stuff or anything like that.

He has a very specific way to do that.

He's also very like, so it's almost like formulaic.

He's also of the mindset of like, that's your why forever.

Like it never changes.

I'm not sure I ascribe to that.

I think, and I think we can get too into the weeds on it too.

It can be like, oh, yeah.

I think whatever feels good for you is great.

I think it's gotta be simple.

You should be able to like remember it.

And I think it should be tied back to your values.

So I always liked the drill of just like, start with what matters to you.

Where do your values lie?

Because the reality is for a lot of military people like me, where we feel like the military gave us purpose.

And when we get out, we no longer have a purpose.

It's not accurate.

What really happened was the military's values aligned with our own.

And that's why we were drawn to it.

But that idea of purpose is not something you like.

Go find like it's under a rock or something like that.

It's something you create.

And I think that's the people feel like it's passive.

It's like, I'm just going to wait for my purpose to land in my lap someday or my mission statement.

So look, I just, I nubbed this down to the idea of a mission statement.

And I like that because I think it can be fleeting if it needs to be.

It doesn't have to be, this is your mission statement for the rest of your life.

But it's whatever it is.

It's simple short, tied to your values and gives you a direction that you're trying to get to every day.

So if somebody was out there like okay, I want to write this mission statement, and we've talked about a number of things today, but one of those being creativity, or create something.

Is it is it like, OK, I'm going to go, you know, you just mentioned hobbies.

Right.

So let's just use that as the example.

I want a hobby.

I want to connect that to my personal mission statement or those kind of different enterprises in some way.

I think they're slightly different.

They're connected, but I don't think it's exactly the same thing.

I think it is your mission statement is kind of the bedrock of the direction you're going, right?

And then everything should...

Wrap up to that somehow.

Like if you put, if you wrote that down and pasted it somewhere where you can see it.

It's like, what am I doing right now?

Is it, I mean, obviously we all have cheat days, right?

Like with food or whatever.

So it's, I think you can have mental cheat days too.

I think that that's okay.

It's an 80, 20 thing.

It's not, we shouldn't be striving for perfection.

You're never going to get there anyway.

But it's like, okay, is 80% of the stuff I'm doing heading that way, right?

And I think that's a good metric to have.

Yep.

I like that.

I also really like it can sound like it's not going to have as much meaning or be a little more ambiguous, or not as directive if you do it as – I'm going to use the word loosely, as you just described it, which is just what feels good.

If it changes, it changes.

And if it's –

And you're kind of like well, okay then, where's the –?

How is that going to be a true North Star, if that's a sense?

I just want to point to some research that we've come across before, which is –

They compared and contrasted companies that changed their mission statement versus ones that never changed their mission statement.

And the ones that changed it were significantly more successful I forget what the terms are that they use to describe successful than the other ones.

And at first glance you kind of go like that seems very counter intuitive, and when you unpack and roll it back a little bit it actually makes tons of sense.

The ones that are changing their mission statement are talking about their mission statement.

It must matter to them if they say hey guys, we actually think it's more in this direction now.

Hey guys, maybe this word wasn't right.

We think that this should be there instead.

Hey guys, yeah, the last 10 years we were doing that.

We've shifted, we've grown, we've evolved.

The markets have changed.

We're actually doing this now.

Like leniency.

Grace.

Yeah.

Yeah, of grace in terms of like, you don't need to nail this thing.

It doesn't need to be perfect.

As you said, it's directional.

And if you're going in the right direction, 80 of the time you're going to end up pretty damn close to that North Star.

We never hit the North Star anyway.

The North Star is a moving horizon.

So we just want to keep on moving in that right direction.

And that helps us get there.

And Ben, everything you just talked about, like the organization doing that.

What's all that born from?

That all to me is gets back to wonder.

That's all curiosity.

It's all internal like hmm, you know what?

Actually, we probably should do this a little bit better.

I mean like we I've done that all the time at the foundation where I work like we changed our mission statement a little bit.

And we've changed our pillars and everything, because we're constantly going back and going and look, this is something I've really respected about you.

I remember taking, I think, your Philly donor course and then I took it again, or there was some point where I'd seen it twice.

And the next time I did it with you, you were like, yeah, we did this for a little while.

We realized that like I mean, how many times have you gone back and analyzed your own methodology and like, revamped things right?

Numerous times, I think, right?

It's been through a number of iterations.

Yeah.

And that's all that, that, again, that is that curiosity mentality, right?

It doesn't mean you were wrong.

It doesn't mean that you're not like exacting about the things.

It just means that you constantly have that attitude of Hmm, is that right?

Does that still feel good?

Am I still on that path?

Is it still what I care about, right?

And that's all curiosity.

All right, two great big thank yous, actually, I should say.

First, to you, if you've made it this far, I am so wildly impressed by you.

Two to Chris for all of his work, all of his thinking, for the time he took to break each one of these mind killers down for us.

I'm really excited to continue the conversation with Chris.

Again, he's working on a book.

Go check out raresense.com.

He will definitely update us all there first.

But when the book is coming out, or maybe even before that, quite frankly, we're definitely going to have Chris on.

Again, we're going to continue this conversation.

So thank you to him.

Thank you to you.

And we will see you next week, for i promise a shorter episode.

Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.

Two quick things before we go.

The first if you want even more from this episode, i do recommend you check out the full listener guide, where we break down all the big ideas.

We ask reflection questions.

We give you steps to put these ideas into action.

The link is in the show notes.

And the second thing while you're there, check out the chase club.

It's our premium membership, where we include bonus content, ad free episodes and the brand new chase tracker app.

Check it all out at chasing excellence dot email.

[Mastering Mental Fitness: Breaking the Five Mind Killers]-[The 5 MindKillers: How You're Sabotaging Your Mental Fitness (& the Countermeasures to Stop)]

📋 Summary

Mastering Mental Fitness: The Rare Sense Framework

The Foundation: Oblivion and Awareness

Navigating the Past: Storytelling and Suppression

Navigating the Future: Fear and Stagnation

The Path Forward: The ARROW Framework

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Mastering Mental Fitness: Breaking the Five Mind Killers]-[The 5 MindKillers: How You're Sabotaging Your Mental Fitness (& the Countermeasures to Stop)]

📋 Summary

Mastering Mental Fitness: The Rare Sense Framework

The Foundation: Oblivion and Awareness

Navigating the Past: Storytelling and Suppression

Navigating the Future: Fear and Stagnation

The Path Forward: The ARROW Framework

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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