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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Welcome back to the One Day at a Time podcast. Host, Scott Fleer from Wales. I apologize, any Americans listening, accent might be tough. I try and slow down on purpose, but I naturally speak way quicker than this, just so you know. Today's podcast, I was going through my notes.
Speaker 1:I use this tool called Roam Research, and it allows it's basically your second brain, graphic, graph based knowledge. So all the book notes I've had that I've highlighted that I use on the Kindle or added on manually, my work things, my ideas, some Q and A's I've done, everything I've put into that. And I've now gone back through to try and see, instead of reading new stuff, reading new books all the time, like, what connections can I make from all of this amazing content I've read from all these experts and all of the insight I've had? Let me put it together and see what we can link up. So basically, that's what this podcast is going to be about.
Speaker 1:And it's going to be less about the theories and stuff, more about the practicality of stuff. Right? So, there was a book by Austin Kleon that I loved, and he says in the book, to quote him, Your personal decisions should be made not by asking, 'Will this make me happy?' but will this choice enlarge me or diminish me? So, it going to make you grow as a person or is it going to make you shrink? Are doing it out of fear?
Speaker 1:Are you doing it out of like a growth mindset? And how do we build a mindset that enlarges us, that makes us want to shine and that makes other people want to shine too? From that quote, thought, let's have a look. Let's have a what the stoics say about this type of mindset. Let's have a look what modern psychologists say about this, and even a Welsh political giant here in Bairvan.
Speaker 1:So, let's get into it. So, point number one is to stop lying to yourself about the past. Right? We love to tell ourselves stories about the past. I'm anxious because of my parents.
Speaker 1:I can't start that business because I was traumatized by a failure ten years ago. So we have all of these stories we tell ourselves and really they're not true, they're lies. And this is what cognitive behavioral therapy essentially tries to help out with. It's like, what you're saying isn't actually a fact, so let's look at it again. Let's let's look at it.
Speaker 1:What would your friends say about this? What would you say about this again? What would you say about that after? Is that a fact or is that fiction? And then when I was looking through looking at other notes relating to this, so there was a book I really enjoyed reading.
Speaker 1:It was called The Courage to be Disliked. And this is kind of like a fierce rejection of this thinking that I did this today because of something happened in the past. Now, is a view. Some people, have to acknowledge that there's horrific things happened in the past, and it does have this like a big power over some people for sure. But when it comes to like day to day decisions, should I go for that job or should I start that thing?
Speaker 1:Should I start this hobby? Maybe we think middle in ground, we tell ourselves stories. I can't start that hobby. Like, I ain't got time. I don't feel like I want to do it.
Speaker 1:Like, it's not right for me. It's bit too far away and stuff. But, know, we know the truth. Like, if we really want to do something, we typically do do it. If we really want to sit on a couch and eat some Cheerios watching films, we will do that.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you, if we want to do nothing all weekend, we will do that, you know. If we want to sit in and have a, you know, if we want to go for a cup of coffee with our friend, we're going to go there, we're to do it, we're going to make it happen even if it's raining outside. So yeah, some things are more difficult to do, but really deep down, if we want to do something, we do it. And he talks in the book about the difference between the study of causes and the study of purpose. So this is a big thing with this psychologist Adler.
Speaker 1:And he argues that we focus only on past causes, we end up with something called determinism. So, really, do we have any free will at all? This is a big question that Robert Sapolsky, one of the stress experts and neuroscientists from Stanford, was trying to answer in his book and he kind of claims we don't really have much free will at all. Like our biology, our past, everything, we are determined to do a next set of behaviors based on that. So, do we have free will is the question.
Speaker 1:And the question really is up to us to decide. If we don't have it, then yes, we will always be a product of our automatic thinking. And if we do feel like we have some of it, at least we can be aware of the limitations that we do have. That's important. But then being aware of the limitations, does that free us from the limitations?
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? If I'm aware, I am anxious to do a, I don't know, a dance class because I've got no rhythm, and I'm completely aware of this fact, and I could be completely aware it goes back to maybe one night out I had a dance and someone said, You dance, you suck, and then you get embarrassed. I don't know. Whatever it is. Is being aware of it without judging yourself is at the start of being able to take action in the future that's different from me.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? And in the book, right, this is what Adler says, No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, the so called trauma, but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. Quite a big change in what today we think, right? It goes on to say as well, your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose for yourself.
Speaker 1:So whether you agree with him or not, there is a truth to that. You know, we've all been given different decks of cards, different hands, as we say, in this life, for sure. Some of us have started off with two parents happily married and well for each other, earning good money, love each other, household is full of love, household shows respect, household makes sure that the kids are going to the sports classes, to the piano lessons, everything, right? You can have the most amazing stuff. Some people grow up with a single parent household.
Speaker 1:Some people like my friend Mike, one of the most amazing people I know, foster kid all his life, passed around different families. I'm not sure more about it, but I'm sure maybe one day I'll get him on to speak about his story. He's just amazing. He's able to make something from his life when he had such a messy upbringing with limited opportunities, feeling rejected, obviously, of course, and then being able to say, you know what? It doesn't have to define me.
Speaker 1:And I'm not to say this is hard to say that everyone can do this because it does depend. There's someone in your life you might meet, a friend, a family member, we need help on our journey for sure. We need help. We need guidance. We need light.
Speaker 1:We need someone to sometimes point us in the right direction. So, if you do feel that you're stuck and stuff, asking for help is one of the quickest ways to get out of a rut. And some people are so good at helping you and they want see you succeed. They'll just point you in the right direction and it can change everything for you. There was a guy I met, Barry Randall.
Speaker 1:Amazing story. He's now a very successful businessman making multiple millions. And when he was a landscaper, he used to go into rich people's gardens, you know, and turn their back garden into a dream. He used to do that and he used to work himself to the bone and couldn't find a way of kind of making more money. And one rich guy he used to go and do this for said to him, Listen, read this book, it's going to change everything for you.
Speaker 1:And every time Barry would go back to do the job at this garden, the guy would ask him, Have you read the book yet? And Barry would say, Oh, yeah, a few pages. And the guy knew he hadn't read a single page because once he would have started to read this book, it would have changed his life. And what happened is Barry did eventually read the book. They called it E Myth, and it is a brilliant book for any business owner that wants to read it.
Speaker 1:And it completely transformed his mindset. He no longer saw himself as a landscaper. And I was not saying that's a bad thing, he thought more hours in, I'll have to get more money. He started thinking of himself bigger. He started thinking, what if I help other landscapers?
Speaker 1:What if I coach other landscapers with what I know? What if I build a community of landscapers across the country where we can consolidate the leads that people want? Like, it's all bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it became, you know, it became so big that he was able to pay off a mortgage and a huge debt he had. All because this one guy, you think about it, this one guy gave him a book that he knew would change his mindset and persisted on him reading it and following up.
Speaker 1:And then he did. So, you know, those opportunities are out there for all of us to seek, I think. We just got to put ourselves out there a bit more. And you might find these moments in your life like a game, it's like an unlock. And once you unlock it, a whole new dimension opens.
Speaker 1:So I thought that was interesting. So the next thing from my notes is I want to mention is that Adler's saying there that this is not your so called trauma, so that's not going to be something that sits well with today, know, with more awareness of it. But on the flip side, the trauma isn't real, the trauma isn't real comment. On my notes on The Body Keeps a Score, which is about trauma, one of the top books about trauma, He makes it clear that trauma affects the entire human organism, the body, the mind and the brain. But he also quotes his teacher, Elvin Sembrandt, who said something profound.
Speaker 1:He said, The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. So perhaps we can merge both of those. We can say trauma is not just like psychological, it's in the body, people, you know, we know this, the reaction to things that happen, of course. And on the other side, a lot of our suffering is from our own way we speak to ourselves and like how do we balance both? We're suffering with trauma, and then we can get through that with EMDR therapy with all our stuff, is there a future where we can also think that maybe we are suffering more than we need to because of our imagination?
Speaker 1:And this is a quote by Seneca, a stoic philosopher two thousand years ago. We often suffer more in imagination than reality. He said this. And Montaigne, a famous French philosopher, from 1500ish, he said that, I've suffered loads of things that haven't actually happened. So in a sense, 85 to 90%, he says, of his inner sufferings are about things that actually didn't happen, you know, and the mind is powerful.
Speaker 1:If we do feel like it's real in the mind, it becomes an actual reaction in the body. So we've to be careful about that stuff. So we need to balance both of those, you know. So to move on now to other quotes and things from the book, just so I can look at my notes now. So the next link I was finding because this tool is amazing, by way.
Speaker 1:It links all your thoughts together and you can kind of analyze them. And I'm gonna do more of this because I think it's fascinating. And I'm going back through my notes and I really love how much how many notes I do take. But in the world of high anxiety, we can call it today, and in Donald Robertson's book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, he clarifies a huge misconception. He writes that people confuse stoicism, capital S, the philosophy, with lowercase stoicism, which is more having a stiff upper lip.
Speaker 1:But stoicism isn't about suppressing emotions. The true philosophical way of living of stoicism with a capital S is not about suppressing emotion. Donald goes on to say, Stoic philosophy teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent. They're neither good or bad. What matters is, in other words, isn't what we feel, but how we respond to those feelings.
Speaker 1:The Stoics would call it proto impressions, kind of proto reactions, like reactions that happen to us in a flash because they bypass our thinking in a sense, and they're more like straightaway to the limbic, you know? And that can be anxiety, feeling a bit of fear, walking on stage, whatever it is, there's a lot of these things that happen. We can't actually control all of those things. If we try and control those things, we fight them. And because they do happen, we fight them and we judge them and it makes it worse.
Speaker 1:So, we're always in this inner conflict in the mind. The stoics would be like, Those things are going to happen. What really is the option to do is my response to those things. And then my response can be, well, they happen and like, I can't stop them. So my dealing is in the second stage of them.
Speaker 1:You know, the second stage of them is what is important. Okay, to move on now, how do we actually change behavior? This is one topic I've been fascinated about. So the answer is in the book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. He completely dismantles the go big or go home myth, and he writes this.
Speaker 1:I found that the only consistent sustainable way to grow big is to start small. Another philosopher called Judi Krishnamurti, one of my favorites, says, To go very far, you must start very near. And starting very near means starting at who you are. Now, don't create this illusionary perfect self of your thinking in the future and work your way backwards from there because you're working your way back from an imaginary place. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:Where you can move forward is if you can put your left foot forward on a piece of solid ground, you've moved. Does that make sense? You can start very near by doing a little step. And this is a very important personal philosophy to have. This is why in the app it's all about like, okay, just try and hit your calories today.
Speaker 1:Try and get more protein in today, 10 grams. Try and get 500 steps more today. That's what changes your life. I did 15,000 steps today and I had 150 grams of protein because I went into the shop and I got five protein shakes, and then my calorie intake 1,300 because I've fight through, I'm like, okay, great. That's your day one done, but that's not sustainable for you.
Speaker 1:You've just done the same mistake as always, thinking you have to completely overload your life in one day. You feel good for that day, then after two days, you can't keep it up, and then you think you're a failure, and then you stop. You know, that's really the danger. So, he calls motivation a party animal friend, be your fog. Great for a night out, but not reliable to pick you up from the airport.
Speaker 1:Instead of relying on willpower, he says, he suggested we change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. So the mindset shift here, you stop trying to brute force your life with shame. It doesn't work. Start small, celebrate the tiny wins, 500 more steps today, 10 grams of more protein. This creates momentum.
Speaker 1:And the final point, right, is to rise with your people, not out of them. So we often think of mindset as a selfish pursuit. My success, my wealth, my abs, but the strongest mindset in my database here are deeply communal, or the strongest minds are deeply communal, community driven people. So I was looking at quotes by Aneir Mairvan, the founder of the NHS, a Welshman from the coal mines, the architect. They give him an impossible job, but there's a beautiful section about ambition he talks about.
Speaker 1:And ambition is something that can be very destructive, but also something that we can use, you know, as something to be used in the right ways because too much ambition is dangerous. He says this, Deep in his heart and not as a political pose, his ambitions were communal and collectivist. He wanted to rise with the class, not out of it. So, this mirrors the sentiment in The Courage to be Disliked, which states flatly, In a word, happiness is the feeling of contribution. And if you want to lead, whether it's your family or company, you have to embody this.
Speaker 1:There's another book, another note. I'm hitting you with so many book notes right now. It's an amazing book. It's called A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman. And he argues that leadership isn't about technique or data, it's about presence.
Speaker 1:He warns against the quick fix mentality and herding, urging leaders to have stamina to define themselves. He also says the capacity to separate oneself from surrounding emotional processes whilst remaining connected. You have to be the non anxious person in the room. And he talks about this in the book because he talks about in a family unit, if you all become as emotional and reactive as the worst person in the group, then there is no structure and it becomes very destructive. Like he explains it like a cancer cell out of control, you need some kind of presence there, a leader to be able to have structure, otherwise it all gets out of control.
Speaker 1:And sometimes the leader is seen as someone disliked. Why is he doing this? Why is he doing that? But you need this kind of authority and you need to be able to define yourself. Otherwise, everyone gets destroyed.
Speaker 1:And he talks to the person in a family sense, a work sense. And it's quite a fascinating look at. As Anaydin Bevan wanted to rise with others and not rise out of the working class by his own and be a London boy, he wanted to bring everyone up with him. I want to leave you with one final thought by Anaydin Bevan, and he called advice from his parents, and here's the advice he got. My Methodist parents used to say, have the courage, my son, to say no.
Speaker 1:Well, it takes a good deal of courage because only by saying no more and more to many things can you say yes to the most valuable things. So go out there, say no to the noise and say yes to what enlarges you. And I'm going to leave you with that. And if you like this type of podcast where I go through book notes and stuff, and it's not always 100% related to weight management and all that, let me know. And I can, do more connections and any other themes.
Speaker 1:But, I've enjoyed going back through the notes and I think they're really, really important for the mindset. But guys, have a good day, one day at a time. You can get through any hardship between now and bedtime. If you know you just got to get to bedtime, you can push through the mental energy you get from knowing just until it goes dark, you know, at 5PM now. Get things done before it gets dark because once it gets dark, things change.
Speaker 1:So say by 5PM, I want to have done X, Y, Z. And if you're working, fine. Try and get your workouts in the morning if you're going do them. It's my highest success rate. And if you can't, do them in the week.
Speaker 1:Just do them on the weekend. You don't have to work out in the weekday. You can just do a Saturday morning, a Sunday morning workouts, lower body, upper body, done. And then in the week, you can just get your steps in. You don't have to follow by, I gotta work out Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Speaker 1:No. We we we don't have to follow by these rules. Right? So have a good day. See you soon.