How to Build Resilience with Steve Magness

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What the research shows is that separating out what we
feel is important to getting to that next step of
doing something about it and taking action. Welcome to the
one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the

(00:23):
importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
garbage out, or you are what you think ring true,
and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back

(00:44):
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

(01:16):
Our guest on this episode is Steve Magnus, a world
renowned expert on performance, well being and sustainable success. He's
the co author of the best selling Peak Performance and
The Passion Paradox, and Steve coaches executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes
on their performance and mental skills. He also serves as
a consultant on mental skills development for professional teams, including

(01:37):
many of the top teams in professional sports. His most
recent book is Do Hard Things, Why We Get Resilience
Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness. Hi Steve,
Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks so much for
having me. I am really excited to have you on.
I appeared on your podcast in the past and I
just really felt a real connection. We had such a

(01:59):
good conversation. And you have a new book called Do
Hard Things, Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising
Science of Real Toughness, which is such a wonderful book,
and I can't wait to get into it. But let's
start like we always do, with the parable. There's a
grandparent who's talking with their grandchild who said, in life,
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things

(02:21):
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents greed and hatred and fear.
And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second,
looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins,
and the grandparents says, the one you feed, So I'd
like to start off by asking you what that parable
means to you in your life and in the work
that you do. So, as you probably know, Eric, I

(02:44):
love this parable and when I heard it from you,
it was like a light bulb went off. My background
is in running and athletics, but for the longest time
I conceptualized that battle as this angel versus devil on
my show Older and in sport or running it saying
you know, one voice saying, come on, you can do it,

(03:06):
like accomplish your goal, and then another voice saying, slow down,
You're not good enough. You know, find a hole to
step in. Just quit. What's the point? And I tho
fake injury, the fake injury? And I promise you those
are the thoughts that went through my head. And when
you get them in private, like even the best of

(03:27):
the best, you know, marathons in the in the world
will tell you the same thing. It's a concept that
is familiar with me, and I always thought of, well,
how do you navigate this? And in many ways that's
the genesis of this book. Do Hard Things is like
that parable of how do you navigate this? And I
think outside of the athletic context, where that parable really

(03:50):
comes in is well, what happens is we often spend
most of our time beating that negative voice or sometimes
unintentionally the ing it by resisting it and actively trying
to avoid it, which often makes it come back like
ten times louder, ten times stronger. So that parable what
does it means to me? It's central to how I

(04:13):
think about not only my athletic pursuits, but also my
pursuits in life. Is what am I feeding and am
I continuing to do hopefully good work that feeds that,
you know, good voice or angel on my shoulder, or
you know, whatever analogy you want to use. Yeah, there's

(04:33):
so many good things you said in there, and I
want to start at the beginning of the book, which
will do in a second, but I'm going to jump
ahead for a second because you just mentioned a little
bit about sort of these two voices, and there's a
point in the book where you're discussing sort of the
positive or negative voice, and you say that it's easy
to come up with hard and fast rules on what
we should or shouldn't say to ourselves. But just like

(04:55):
with emotions, there aren't good or bad inner voices, just
the ones we need or don't need to hear at
the moment. It's up to us determine which voice we
need and when. And then the other sentence right near
there was it's not whether our inner voice is an
optimist or a pessimist. It's whether it's fair say more
about that. Yeah, so I think so often we think
of again, even with those parables, even with this angel

(05:18):
verst Devil, we think of it as good and bad,
and I tend to as well. But sometimes the good
voice actually can be harsh. And in researching and writing
this book, a couple of things, well, one the research
was kind of nebulous on well, should you have positive
self talk or negative self talk? And it essentially said,
you need the self talk that works in the moment,

(05:40):
and sometimes that's going to be good. Sometimes that's going
to be quote unquote negative. And the reason they think
that is it's because sometimes you just find yourself, maybe
to use the running example, slowing down or like saying
I can't do it, and the thing that dislodges you
from that moment is maybe that negative voice that says,

(06:02):
hey man, what are you doing? You're better than this? Right,
or in another context, sometimes as a coach. I've had
athletes asked me to essentially, Hey, I don't want you
to do this often, but every once in a while,
if it looks like I'm kind of like giving in
to that fatigue and not handling it, well, it's okay
to you know, maybe even cuss me out briefly, because

(06:24):
that almost snaps us out and says, oh, I'm too
narrow and stuck in this spiral. And sometimes that negative
voice or realistic voice can kind of dislodge us and
take us out of that moment. Yeah, there's so much
these days about self compassion, about sort of being on
our own side. As another phrase that I love, and

(06:46):
I think there's a ton of wisdom in it. It's
it's something I teach in my Spiritual Habits program. I
think it's really important, and I think, like anything, if
you go way too far in one extreme and you
only have it, you know. But I think that for me,
it's not that self compassion is about letting ourselves off
the hook or not talking to ourselves sternly. A lot

(07:07):
of it, I think has to do with how we
do it. And you make this point a lot because
when we think of toughness, we think of Bobby Knight,
we think of drill sergeants we see in marines, you know,
screaming in their faces. We've got this model of toughness
that says that's how you become tough, and your entire
book is really an attempt to upend that whole idea.

(07:29):
It really is. And I think what we see is
we're stuck in kind of the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties
version of toughness, which is kind of a rudimentary version
that said, hey, whenever you face challenging obstacles in your life,
grit your teeth, put your head down, try and ignore
or avoid, you know, any emotion or negative thing that

(07:51):
comes about, and just bulldoze through whatever it is. It's
the as you said, Bobby Knight, the drill sergeant's method.
And what happens, or what we see is that is
essentially like giving me a hammer and saying, any problem
you face, like, just use this hammer and you're going
to figure it out. Right, Well, the hammer will work

(08:12):
for when a nail is there, but unfortunately for life, like,
we're faced with a myriad of different, you know, difficult
things we have to encounter in real toughness to me
is about developing this diverse array of tools so that
we can match the tool with the problem instead of saying, hey,

(08:32):
bulldoz through everything. And I think the other part of
this that is really important is that the old model
often overemphasizes this kind of disciplinary and demanding no and
under emphasizes the part that like really matters, which is
people tend to handle difficult things when they feel secure

(08:54):
and supported so that they can then you know, utilize
the tools they have to overcome that challenge. Yeah, when
you think about that old model, the answer that a
lot of people would say if they were to combat
your argument as well, but it works for some people,
you know, But I actually wouldn't say that. They would say,
but it works. You know. It's the same thing when
I'm sure you have clients like this, I do too,

(09:15):
who say, like, but but this being a real asshole
to myself has worked up till now. I'm like, well,
it may have, but you make a point and I
love it, which says that, you know, this would be
akin to declaring the best way to teach swimming is
to throw every kid into the deep end of the pool. Sure,
for some it would work, but for many it would
prove disastrous. You know. I think that's the point here,

(09:36):
is that that model of toughness, Yeah, it does work
for some, but it certainly doesn't work for everybody. There's
also fascinating research you on earth about how that style,
that command and control style, or that authoritative style actually
makes people more fragile and more brittle. It absolutely does,
and there's some fascinating work, as you said, especially in

(09:57):
the coaching but more so in the parenting world, that
shows that, you know, we tend to adopt that authoritarian,
disciplinarian style because we think, well, it makes people more resilient,
it makes our kids more disciplined. But if you look
at the research, it actually backfires. Kids who are raised
with highly authoritarian parents actually have more behavior problems, They

(10:20):
have worse emotional control, and even in one fascinating study
that looked at children who were parented in that way
and then went into the military, they do worse since
surviving in the military. The one place where you think, oh,
the style will resonate. The reason for that is pretty simple.
When we are parented or coached or lead in that manner,

(10:41):
it doesn't teach us the skills of the motivation to
be able to handle difficult things. So, for example, why
do kids misbehave more because they aren't taught the skills
how to maybe cope with the emotions they experience, to
deal with success and more so failure and a way
because they're essentially only coping style is said, Oh, I

(11:05):
need to behave this way and forget everything else because
if I don't, I'm gonna be yelled at or screened at,
or punished by mom or dad or coach or whoever.
And the other thing that does is it shifts our
motivation style from intrinsic to extrinsic. So we're motivated to
maybe be disciplined in that moment because we're afraid of

(11:28):
our parent or a coach punishing us. And decades of
research shows that that extrinsic motivation might work when we
have someone screaming over the top of us, but when
we don't, which is most of life, it fades away
and you need that strong intrinsic motivation, which is often
developed through support care and in the parenting research was

(11:50):
called responsiveness. That's what leads you to develop and have
that flourishing internal motivation wonderful. Yeah, as you were saying that,
it made me think about a specif of an incident
in seventh grade where my grades fell off a cliff
and I spent all my time trying to figure out
how to doctor my report card. I didn't spend any
time trying to get better grades. I didn't contemplate why

(12:10):
I might want better grades. I didn't count none of that.
My energy went into trying to doctor the report card
so my mom and dad wouldn't punish me. And so
that's like the classic example of how for me, authoritative
always has driven me to just be like, Okay, how
do I get around that? Not how do I get
better at this thing? Not how do I behave? How

(12:30):
do I not get caught right? Which is my sort
of rebellious style, but it makes that point of it
drove me away from any sort of intrinsic motivation for
why I might want to do well. You know, I
love that example because I think we can all resonate
with that, because we all had moments of that where
it's like the extreme control often backfires because all it

(12:52):
does is push us to figure out not the right solution,
which is like how do I improve my grades, but
the easy, quickest, you know, coping mechanism. And you see
the same thing often with actually there's some research on this,
but you see the same thing often when you see
like overly controlling parents or coaches who said all these

(13:13):
crazy rules. Well, what it does is it makes the
kids or the athletes really smart and ingenious at getting
around the rules, right. They figure out how to get
out of the room or avoid the curfew instead of
like the lesson, which is like we have to prioritize
stuff and be safe and secure and all that good stuff.
So I will give everybody out there, if you're a

(13:36):
seventh grader report cards are probably digital these days, that
you have to be a hacker now, so never mind,
this advice won't help. Let me just tell you that
your parents will not buy two quarters in a row.
That you dropped your report card in a puddle and
that's why it looks so scuffed up once, sure, benefit
of the doubt. Twice. Nope. There was another bit of
research around this that I found absolutely fascinating also, and

(13:57):
it was looking at NBA athletes and whether they had
been coached by an authoritative style coach. And the research
was if you've been coached by an authoritative style coach,
you didn't perform as well, So okay, but it went
further than that, tell me about like kind of what
was there really, at least for me, the jaw dropping
part of that. So this is one of my favorite

(14:17):
pieces of research that I came across for this book.
As you said, these researchers, psychologists, you know, studied coaches
and then NBA across numerous seasons, right, And what happened
is they found, just as you said, the coaches with
kind of this authoritarian abuse of kind of coaching style
what they called it, their players performed worse. And then

(14:40):
also they showed or those players had higher levels of
aggressive fouls like technical fouls in the NBA. So the
kind of you know, abuse of authoritarian style rubbed off
on them. But what was fascinating is it didn't just
apply when that coach was coaching the as players. It

(15:01):
applied for the rest of those players career. So even
after they went to another team and left that coach
behind for years, their performance decline, you know, was down
a tick, and their number of technical fouls or aggressive
fouls went up. So to me, I saw this both
as a coach, you know, as a parent, as leader,

(15:22):
I'm like, oh my gosh, this is kind of profound
because the impact that we have can shift someone's trajectory
for the long term. And this is among the best,
you know, athletes on the planet. These are adults, right,
so if it can happen with them, it obviously can
happen with the rest of us. So we've sort of

(15:43):
spent a few minutes here defining what toughness is. Not
let's talk about what toughness is. How would you define
real toughness? Yeah, So to me, I kind of frame
it in a decision making concept, which is essentially, any
time we experienced discomfort, which could be stress, anxiety, fatigue,

(16:04):
whatever you want to call it, what often happens is
we get pushed towards that kind of reactive, quick decision.
Toughness to me is experiencing that discomfort, then creating the
space to navigate that experience so that you can come
out and make a wiser, thoughtful action instead of choosing

(16:26):
the kind of quick hit, the easy path, the path
that doesn't lead towards growth. And it really is in
creating that space so that you can navigate and use
the tool that matches with that situation. Yeah, your definition
of toughness is similar to what I refer to as
emotional regulation. But I know I'm using emotional regulation in

(16:47):
not the way that it's often used. But I often
just define emotional regulation is working with our thoughts and
emotions skillfully enough that we can act according to our values.
And you're saying something very similar when you're saying that
toughness is navigated and discomfort to make the best decision
you can. And I love that idea of being able
to stay in there with really feeling whatever we're feeling,

(17:09):
and then say, okay, but still, what do I want
to do here? Taking all the factors into control exactly.
I love your definition of emotional regulation because that's what
it really is, because if if you think about it,
when we're ever we're in a difficult situation, what often
happens is we feel that discomfort and then we get

(17:29):
this barrage of emotion thoughts in this swirl, and often
when we aren't able to kind of navigate that, what
happens is we just go, oh my gosh, this is overwhelming,
you know, my mind kind of spirals and we just
kind of our brain goes into kind of protect and
survive mode, and we just hit the eject button, which

(17:50):
is what's the easiest way to get out of this situation,
which is often you know, avoidance, like you know, escaping,
not dealing with the problem where the thing And I
think we're often told and taught that both in sport
and life, and instead what I'm trying to do is
just like you're trying to do, and your mission is like, okay,

(18:12):
doesn't it make more sense to kind of sit with
that experience and figure out, Okay, how do I turn
this alarm down to an appropriate level? How do I
show my brain that not every moment is life or death,
but that I can figure out how to navigate and
handle some of this emotional swirl and these thoughts that

(18:33):
are spiraling and kind of work my way through it
to get to something that thoughtful action or something that
reflects what I truly value and what is really important
to me exactly. You say that negative thoughts of quitting
are normal. They don't mean you're weak. They represent your
mind trying to protect you. And I think that's another
really important piece because we have this sense of tough

(18:55):
people don't struggle with this stuff, right if you're a
marathon or you're just fur than I am, because you
must not want to give up at mile thirteen like
I do, you know, So I think this normalization of like,
of course we have these thoughts of wanting to quit.
It's our mind trying to protect us. When we get
signals of discomfort and pain. Those are signals and our

(19:17):
brain is going to interpret them in a particular way.
But that doesn't mean we're not tough exactly. And I
think this is one of the most important concepts because
let's think of it like this. If you think, oh,
you know, having these thoughts of quitting or doubts or
insecurities are like getting to mile thirteen and being like,
you know, I don't know if I can make it.

(19:38):
If you think that the best of the best don't
have those, then that automatically makes you think, oh, I'm
not good enough, like I'm going through this thing that
you know, tough people don't. The reality is opposite. And
I can tell you because in writing this book, I
interviewed dozens of dozens of world class and durance athletes,

(20:00):
particularly because that's my background. I talked to some of
the world's best marathons, and I'd ask every single one
of them, I'd say, does you know the thought of
quitting ever come into your mind? And every one of
them it was like they light up and then they
tell a story, often in like this crazy you know,
difficult or this this important race, like some said, oh yeah,

(20:23):
in the middle of the Olympic Marathon. You know, at
mile fourteen, I was looking over at the aid station
or the porter potty and saying, oh, if I duck
in there, like maybe I don't have to finish this thing.
You runners have got all kinds of creative stepping a hole,
duck into the porter potty. You guys have really worked
this out exactly if your mind. But that's kind of

(20:46):
the thing, is your mind goes, your mind goes to
these crazy spots, you know, and instead of thinking like,
oh I just had that thought that means like I'm
weak and I'm not tough enough. Well, if you think that,
that's gonna just cause you to spiral, and even more
so if you understand that, you know what, this is
just part of the process. Because I'm doing something, whether

(21:07):
that's running a marathon or giving a big presentation or
just doing something that is outside of my comfort zone.
What happens is those thoughts are normal. It's just your
kind of brand saying, you know what, this isn't normal.
Normally you're sitting at a desk working and this is
a little different. So we're gonna let you know that,
like this is a little uncomfortable and that's okay. Yeah.

(21:30):
I've coached a number of people on creative pursuits, on writing,
on entrepreneurship, and this is a lesson we have to
definitely cover because to your point, everybody goes through it.
I've not had a guest on this show, and I've
had some you know, fairly high profile people that haven't
felt that exact thing, that haven't said, like, I know,

(21:51):
I wrote three bestsellers, but when I was working on
the fourth, I was certain I couldn't do it right,
Like all my magic is gone. I can't do it.
And so we all face that, And to your point,
if we don't think that's normal, then we think we're
not good enough. And then what happens is that erodes
our confidence. And you talk about how important confidence is,

(22:12):
So maybe that would be the place we could move to,
is kind of talk about the role of confidence in toughness. Yeah, absolutely,
so confidence essentially it kind of sets the table for
how close to our maximum abilities are we going to
be able to get right. It sets that line, and
I think we're again maybe starting with where we often

(22:35):
get confidence wrong is we focus on the external. So
we think that we need to act confident. We think
that we need to walk around with this bravado and
you know, give us this vibe that everything's in control,
that we're able to do everything, that it's no problem. Well,
the reality is the research with top performers across fields

(22:57):
paints a different picture, which is essentially we need this
kind of internal quiet confidence, and that quiet confidence often
comes from a being realistic with maybe a dose of like, yes,
you need to be optimistic that you can handle the thing.
But the way I kind of look at it is
we need a realistic appraisal of both our abilities, what

(23:19):
we're capable of, and the difficulty of the task at hand.
So again I'm gonna use way too many running examples,
but it's if I'm going to sign up for a marathon,
then I need to know that the marathon is going
to be incredibly difficult. But at the same time, I
have done enough training where I can get through it,

(23:40):
and maybe it's just beyond my reaches, but that's okay.
I can figure that out. What I don't want to
do is sign up for the marathon and then be like,
oh man, I got this, no problem, Like this is
a piece of cake, because what happens is when I
get to that difficult moment, reality is going to smack
me in the face and be like you prepared us
and told us that this was going to be a

(24:01):
piece of cake, that you got it. Like now you're struggling,
like what's the deal, and you're gonna feel that ten
times or ten x. And what really cemented this for
me is I was talking to some military operators who
are in this special forces and one said to me,
essentially said, often people think it's the people who come
in and you know, have this extreme confidence, who are

(24:25):
the ones who make it through special Forces and all that,
And he said, the reality is you have to have
a little bit of doubt, because if you don't have
a little bit of doubt, then you're not gonna stay sharp.
So it really is that kind of Goldilocks zone of
confidence where it's kind of realistically optimistic where it's like

(24:49):
I can handle the thing. It might push me, but
I've done the work and have the evidence that I
can do the task. You were talking about having that

(25:37):
right balance between realistic appraisal and yet some optimism, and
it made me think about being in the software startup world.
I was in software startup companies for the first i
don't know twenty years of my career, and in a
software startup company, you are faking it till you make it.
To some degree. You're always out selling stuff that you
don't have yet, you're just outdoing it. What I learned

(26:00):
after about the first one, or into the second one,
was if the gap between what you say you have
and what you actually have is too big, you're doomed
because you will convince someone to take a chance on
you and then you won't be able to jump that gap.
You'll crash. So, yes, you have to be faking it
till you make it. You have to be out ahead

(26:22):
a little bit of what your actual capabilities are. But
if you get too far out that is just as bad.
So that was kind of what was coming to my
mind as you were sharing that. That's a great example,
and again all youth athletic example is if I'm fit
and going into a marathon race. If you know previously
I ran I don't know to thirty five for the

(26:43):
marathon this time. If I say I'm gonna go run
to fifteen, that's too big of a gap. Yeah, I'm
gonna fail. If I say I'm gonna try and run
two thirty, well, I've never done that before, so I
don't know if I can, right, But the gap is
small enough where it's like, you know what, if I
train hard enough, if everything goes well, this is possible.

(27:05):
We're projecting into the future, just like that software example,
where it's like if the gap is difficult but manageable,
then we're more likely to have confidence and succeed. And
the other thing that I think really kind of drives
this in is that one of the central components of
having intrinsic motivation is seeing progress in what you're doing

(27:30):
and seeing that there is a path forward. And this
is where I think that it kind of aligns with confidence,
where if that gap is too large at some point,
we're gonna stop seeing progress for a long time, and
that's going to hurt our motivation. We're gonna start thinking
that there's no path forward, there's no way I can
meet my promises, and that just kills the internal drive

(27:54):
of everyone. So even setting that kind of gap initially
where it's something that's hard but manage well, can help
us keep that internal motivation because it helps us see
even if the progress is minimal, that hey, I'm still
inching forward. Hey it's still possible to hit this goal.
And I think that's vital in central. Yeah. The other

(28:14):
thing I was thinking about is we're having this conversation
and thinking about when you talk about confidence being something
that comes from the inside that we can't fake. I'm
curious how you might think about someone who is starting
out with something like I have a goal to be
a great novelist, but I've never written a line in

(28:35):
my life. You know, I've gotta have enough confidence. I've
got to have enough belief in myself to start and
stay with it, right, But I can't just suddenly be like, well,
I am a great novelist, you know, move over J D.
Salinger here, I am right. That doesn't work either. So
how do you think about sort of getting from that
very beginning place where you don't have a lot of
internal ability to this point to call on or draw upon. Yeah,

(28:59):
so a lot of times what happens is we think
that building confidence takes doing amazing things, but the reality
consistency matters more than kind of the intensity or you know,
volume of the amazing things that we do. So instead
I like to think of it as how do you
build that kind of confidence muscle? Is consistent small challenges

(29:20):
or consistent small doses of things that, yeah, maybe push
you a little bit out of your comfort zone. And
that writing example, going from hey, I've never written anything
to I'm gonna start a newsletter or back in you know,
my day, like start a blog or what have you,
where it's like get into the writing world and then

(29:41):
start trying to write for other people, and you're really
kind of building that muscle so that you can prepare
and meet your goals over the long haul. The other
thing that really comes to mind here is, although this
got cut from the book, I love the research I
did on us, which is on President Abraham Lincoln. Obviously

(30:03):
heroic guy, but if you looked at his kind of approach,
he had this unbelievable hope for the future and his
writing where he said we're gonna win the Civil war.
We're gonna, you know, cure the country of this ill
of slavery. But in the here and now, in those moments,
he was incredibly kind of almost a little bit pessimistic,

(30:25):
but I'd call it realistic in the moments, right, he'd
be like, this is what we need to do on
this step, like for this battle, for this strategy, what
have you? This is it. I'm not gonna look, you know,
two years down the line, five years down the line,
fifteen years down the line. And I love that kind
of model for you know, building confidence as well. In

(30:46):
the moment, be focused on the small step, but keep
a little bit of that idea or that hope in
the future that kind of can kind of fuel you
through those small steps where it's like, you know, I
believe I can be this novel list or that I
can accomplish this goal, and the way that I do
that is focus on nailing the small steps of the

(31:06):
process to get there. Yeah, that whole section on confidence
made me think a lot about something called the Stockdale paradox.
Are familiar with that, Yeah, I'll share it real quick
for listeners because it's very similar to what you just
said about Abraham Lincoln and it's you know, there was
Admiral James Stockdale, the highest ranking prisoner of war in Vietnam,
and someone was asking him later like who made it

(31:27):
through these really brutal, terrible circumstances? And you know, is
that the optimists? He'd say, no, the optimists, they died
of a broken heart. They thought we'd be out by Halloween,
by Thanksgiving, by Christmas, and they died of a broken heart. Pessimists, Now,
pessimists really didn't didn't fare too well either, So okay,
who did? And he said the thing was you had
to accept the absolute brutal reality of your circumstances, but

(31:51):
never lose faith in your ability to ultimately overcome them.
And ever since I read that, I have loved it,
and it has been so fundamental to the way I
look at optimism and pessimism is to really say, like,
neither is the tool for the job all the time.
It's really accuracy. And the reason the Stockdale paradox kept
coming to my mind in your book is that's another

(32:13):
of the key themes of this book over and over
and over again, which is accurate appraisal of what's really
happening and It shows up in a lot of different
ways in the book, but that is a key piece
that you talk about. I love that you brought that up.
I never actually thought, even though I know what it is,
I never thought of connecting the Stockdale paradox to it.

(32:33):
But it's so important, and as kind of my outloaded before,
is what we get is that accurate appraisal sets the stage.
So it's almost like the way I think about it is,
how are we preparing our brain for what's to come?
And we can either prime it by preparing it for
what we're going to face, or we can prime it

(32:54):
maybe optimistically or pessimistically. And research again keeps telling us
that when our brain gets surprised, you know, going either
way on the extremes, what happens is we default towards protection,
or we default towards freaking out, or we default towards survival.

(33:15):
So to me, that's where that kind of middle ground
is really important. Is if we can have the accurate appraisal,
then we're better prepared for the challenge. And actually there's
some fascinating research that shows that it impacts our biology too,
So going into any sort of you know, difficult moment,
whether that's a game, you're playing, a race, you're running,

(33:36):
a speech, you're giving. If we appraise something as a challenge,
we tend to have what's called a more positive stress response,
which is adrenaline and testosterone that makes us feel yeah,
maybe a little bit nervous, but also excited, like we're
going to take on the challenge. If we go in
with that survival or protective mode, we are appraising it

(33:57):
as a threat, which is often a companied by more cortisol,
which makes us ruminate and catastrophizes and all that good stuff. Well,
if you look at well, what's one of the central
determinants for whether we see things as a challenge or threat,
it's that accurate appraisal, that appraisal between what's the task
at hand, what are my capabilities? If there's at least

(34:19):
a decent amount of overlap, we're more likely to have
that challenge response. Let's pivot a little bit because there's
another area of accurate appraisal that is also right in
the heart of this book, and it's the accurate appraisal
of our internal states. We've been talking about accurate appraisal
of the challenges we're going to face, but you talk

(34:41):
very much about accurate appraisal of what's going on inside
of us, because it is our emotions or feelings, and
we can talk about the difference between those perhaps, but
that's the sort of thing. It's the internal cacophony that
you describe that is often pushing us towards giving up
or a way from our goals. So talk about the

(35:02):
importance of accurate internal appraisal to get this across for
the listeners. I love to tell the story that came
from my wife actually, who is a elementary school teacher
and for years she taught kindergarten in first grade. One day,
while I was writing them the book, actually, she she
asked me, is like, do you know how or why
kids throw tantrums when they, you know, come into kindergarten

(35:25):
or whatever have you. I said no, like what's the deal?
And she said, well, what happens is they experience something
that causes this cacophony of emotions, right, and they don't
know how to deal with them, and they don't know
how to sort through them. So their responses a tantrum.

(35:47):
And if I, as a teacher go over and say, hey,
what's wrong, Jimmy or Susie. They say, oh, I'm sad.
And what you learn over time is that most kids
kind of say I'm sad, and it applies to everything.
It applies if you know, they didn't get selected at kickball,
if someone stole their pencil, or if someone tried to

(36:09):
you know, cheat on a test, whatever had them that
that caused them this disarray. They all call it sadness.
And the reason it is because their kids they haven't
developed the ability to sort out the nuance that maybe
us as adults, we'd split apart sadness and say, well,
maybe that is loneliness or maybe frustration or jealousy or

(36:33):
whatever have you to describe that emotion or feeling. And
what the research shows is that separating out what we
feel is important to getting to that next step of
doing something about it and taking action. If we can
slice into dice apart that nuance, it aids our ability

(36:54):
to navigate the thing. So it kind of comes back
to again, this accurate receie of in this case, reading
our body signals allows us to deal with you know,
uncomfortable or difficult things a lot more. And there's all
sorts of research that shows that in athletes athletes who

(37:15):
have what they call better ter reception, which is essentially
reading your body signals, they're able to perform better and
make it through the difficult moments in their races or competitions.
Even surprisingly, in investment makers and stockbrokers, the ones who
have higher levels of inter reception actually do better when

(37:37):
the stock market is kind of going crazy and everyone
feels stressed, because they can separate out what's the stress
that I'm feeling, maybe because of the stock market versus
maybe this is just the climate where everyone's kind of
freaking out and I'm feeling anxious and uncertain and kind
of slice and dice apart that so they can get
to the best action. Yeah, the section in the book

(37:59):
where you talk about inter reception is fascinating. It's something
I've long been interested in. And you have some studies
that are really interesting, and one of them is that
people who self harm had what you call greater inter
receptive ambivalence and lower inter receptive appreciation. Say a little

(38:20):
bit more about what that means. So this was fascinating
work and what it showed is it essentially people self
harm partly because they're getting all this emotional response or
this emotion. Something triggers them to feel all this emotion
and they can't separate it out, meaning they don't have

(38:41):
that kind of terro receptive like awareness to slice and
dice apart as we said. So what happens is they
end up self harming as a way to essentially cope
with that. Because they create a sensation where they know
where it's coming from. That kind of overwhelms the rest

(39:02):
of the stuff that they're feeling, which turns down that
ambiguous feeling and turns up something where they know where
that sensation and feeling is coming from. If you talk
to therapist or psychologists, one of the keys to often
dealing with people or helping people who have self harm
is essentially creating emotional vocabulary and an awareness around different

(39:27):
feelings and sensations so that they can kind of navigate
it instead of going from, oh, I feel this emotional overload,
so I need to fix it by you know, cutting
or harming myself. You talk about how poor and ter

(40:10):
receptive awareness is linked to addiction, eating disorders, kind of
all across the board, and what I think is fascinating
about it. I don't remember the exact line, but the
essence of it was, and maybe it was with the
self harm people was they felt more, but they had
way less ability to understand it. That's fascinating. It's a
stronger emotion that they don't really understand. So maybe let's

(40:32):
for a second break apart the definition that you use
as far as toughness between feelings and emotions, because this
is kind of important as we move from terroception to
understanding our emotional life exactly. So feelings, to me the
way I kind of understand, and we could spend hours
kind of dissecting it, but the way I like to
look at it is feelings are the nudge. So they're

(40:56):
your body's basic communication system that says, hey, something is
going on internally that I want you to be aware of.
Right in, emotions are they're kind of more complex cousin
that move from often from nudge to shove. And the
reason I say emotions are more complex is because they're

(41:18):
partly dependent on context that we attribute and assigned to them. Yes,
there's some wonderful research, most of it done by Lisa
Feldman Barrett, that shows essentially depending on the context that
we add on or elaborate on it, that will change

(41:38):
our kind of biological and you know, behavioral response to things.
So the way I like to kind of explain this,
or one of the ways is if you look at
the word love, for example, in America or if you
come from the culture in the US, it has a
particular meaning, right. We often attribute it to like love

(41:59):
of bous or some sort of romantic love. If we
look at different cultures, for instance, ancient Greece, instead of
one love that covers everything from romantic to you know,
friendship or what have you, they have separate words about
I think it's five or six different definitions of a
type of love, which allows them to have more nuance

(42:21):
around the concept and more specificity. So they interpret and
often experience or they would interpret and often experience love
in a different way. And we know this from studying
you know, different cultures around the world, whether that's you know,
tribal cultures, modern tigrable cultures in the words they use

(42:42):
versus you know, maybe Western cultures like ourselves. Is that
we don't all have the same kind of context that
goes with every emotional experience, and that changes how people
interpret and deal with and experience it. Yeah, this is
such a fascinating area and interesting personal exist ample for
me is that I've been learning to try and work

(43:03):
with sensations that come up of I mean, the best
description I have of them as tired, but if I'm
not careful, I will describe them as depressed. Right, They're
very similar, but the difference between those two contextualizations is
actually pretty important. Tired, I can just go well all
right time, you know, like take a rest. Depressed is

(43:27):
a bigger problem. Depressed ties to a long history. So
sort of learning to take those inter receptive signals, the
feelings that are coming from my body, but then giving
a little bit more thought to that. And you actually
say this very well, you said discern nuance involves two components,
awareness of the feelings and sensations and then interpretation and

(43:48):
contextualization of them, which I think really speaks to this.
So I've got to sort of get better at noticing
what signals my body is sending becoming more aware of them,
which is a very much a mindfulness thing, right in
some ways is bear attention, right, which they talk about
in mindfulness, like what's actually here? Can I get clearer
on what it is? And then there's that next step,

(44:09):
which is all right now, how do I contextualize this?
I love that word that you use for that, because
I think it really no pun intended, puts it in
context for what we're actually doing. There's a wonderful tool
that I discovered that therapists use to get at that
second one, because I think that first one of awareness
is we're starting to get an increase of that through
mindfulness and meditation, and that movement has kind of taken

(44:32):
us to awareness, but often we haven't moved to that
second level or second layer, which is that context. And
there's a tool called the emotional Wheel, and you can
google it and look it up, but essentially what it
does is it starts at you know, the very basic
maybe the word tired, as you said, and then from
there it gives you different descriptors that get a little

(44:56):
bit more nuanced and complex. Right, we go for um
tired to whatever sleepy or fatigued or whatever vocabulary you want.
You can keep going down multiple levels. And I love
this and therapists often use it for this exact skill
because similar to earlier where I said the kindergarteners say

(45:19):
I'm sad for everything we like to think as adults, Well,
I've learned how to you know the complexity behind it,
but often we don't. And often it's because we're told,
you know, to kind of keep that inner world quiet
and not to explore it or to avoid these sensations
that they're negative when the reality is investigating them and

(45:41):
you know what, safe space allows us to add context.
And the other example that I give in the book,
but that really, you know, not surprisingly resonates with me
as an athlete, that all athletes have to face is
think about it. When you first got started and you
go out the door and you start running, you start

(46:01):
lifting weights, that first sensation of pain. Often you interpreted
it as like, oh, what's wrong? Like am I gonna
get injured? Like I should stop? This hurts a lot.
In fact, I was on a podcast not too long
ago where someone told me the story of a friends
children who was walking up a hill for the first

(46:23):
time and he was like, Dad, my legs feel like
they're gonna fall off. And the dad's like what, He's like, Oh,
you've never experienced the fatigue of walking up a very
steep mountain. It's like, no, your legs aren't gonna fill
off fall off. But what happens there is often if
we haven't ever experienced it and sit with that, we

(46:44):
don't know the difference between pain that might mean injury,
or pain that might mean I'm a little fatigued, or
pain that might signal maybe I'm running a little on
fuel and I need to grab a banana, or I'm
a little dehydrated and I need to drink a water
or drink some water and all of those. You know,

(47:05):
different nuances send us down a different path and send
us down to different signal. But if we don't kind
of sit with them and experience them, then it all
kind of gets jumbled together. And that's why I think,
you know, that second part is really important. Is you know,
whether we're talking about physical, psychological, or whatever have you,
discomfort is being intentional and adding context and nuance to

(47:28):
things is a vital component we often miss. Yeah, Early
in my recovery from heroin and alcoholism, I was taught
this acronym halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. And the reason
we're taught that is because I've had no ability to
interpret anything except I want to drink. That was my
entire response to nearly anything. So just having that checklist, oh,

(47:52):
is it hunger, actually, oh it is? Oh? Am I angry? Oh? Okay,
well I can do something different. Am I lonely? Am
I tired? Just be able to go? Is it? Any
of those common things allowed me to interpret it in
a more granular way than just needing to drink? You know,
I love that acronym because it's spot on, because what
often happens is we associate behaviors with the wrong kind

(48:17):
of signal. In the book, I tell another story where
they call it misattribution of arousal. In the book, I
tell this wonderful story where they put people on a
very high, scary bridge and people, you know, had physiological arousal. Right,
they were a little scared, what have you. Well, when
they were on the bridge alone, they interpreted as scared.

(48:38):
These were all males. If they put an attractive female
next to them on the bridge, they interpreted as, I'm
physiologically aroused because I'm attracted to this other person, so
they would be more likely to, you know, ask this
person out. When they did the same experiment on a
bridge that was like five ft off the ground, they

(48:59):
didn't make that mistake. So I think, you know, in
that same way. You know, although that's a fun story.
Often that happens in the negative, you know side where
we start, you know, misattributing any sort of feeling or
discomfort as oh, the way that I deal with and
cope with this thing is to drink or do drugs

(49:24):
or self soothe in some other manner. And just having
something that kind of allows us to step back and
see that kind of nuance and be like, no, where
is this actually coming from? Is incredibly helpful. Let's talk
about inner dialogue for a minute. You say that researchers
define two main types of inner dialogue, integrated and confrontational.

(49:47):
And the reason I want to pivot there is that,
assuming that we have gotten a little bit better at
recognizing the signals inside, we've gotten a little bit better
at some degree of emotional granularity. Now we still have
the thoughts swirling and getting to decision and doing all that.
So let's move now to kind of inner dialogue. What
we often have is that integrated dialogue, which is more

(50:11):
what I would call that kind of productive dialogue that
is telling you or thinking about things or tasks that
you might need to do or things that you might
need to remember. It's very straightforward. The confrontational dialogue is
often where we have going back to the very beginning
of this conversation is like that angel versus devil on

(50:31):
your shoulder, where you have a decision that you need
to make or you're getting pulled in one of two directions.
The latest psychological theories almost show it as if it
is two different self competing. So you have the self
that wants to eat candy for dinner what have you,

(50:55):
versus the self that knows that they should, you know,
order the salad, and we have this bad attle between
these selves where it's that inner dialogue that is confrontational.
So you know, people hear that and they say, okay,
so I'm essentially have two roles in myself battling it out.
How do I deal with that? Well, often what it
is is there's several different tricks of the trade that

(51:18):
can help us kind of get the positive or the
path that we want to go down. And most of
the time it is to dislodge, as we talked about
the beginning, dislodge that kind of negative spiral so that
you don't get caught in this kind of ruminating, catastrophizing
battle that often occurs. And we can do that in
a number of different ways. So for example, there's some

(51:40):
wonderful research that shows that just changing how you talk
to yourself, moving from first person to second or third person,
so from I to you were Steve and Eric, that
creates what we call psychological distance, where your brain starts
interpreted in a different way. And the way I like
to think about this is your brain is used to

(52:03):
hearing you know, well I should do this or no,
I should do that, all the time, so it gets
comfortable with that. But if it here's like you've got
to do this, Steve or come on, Eric, in its head,
it's almost like it steps back and says, hey, wait
a minute, who's this voice? Like who's this person talking?

(52:23):
And what happens is that creates a little bit of
that space which we know and research shows brings down
that kind of like emotional level as well, so that
we can deal with it. The other tactic that I
love here is it actually taking that voice from inside
to an outer voice or outside. And this sounds a
little strange, but again I'll give a sport example is

(52:47):
if you watch professional tennis players before difficult shot, often
you can see them mumbling to themselves. Now why would
they do this, Because when we move from that inside
voice of that outside voice, it creates again that psychological distance.
It dislodges your brain and it says, wait a minute,

(53:07):
I'm now hearing this voice, you know, through my ears
as well. Maybe I should pay attention to it. And
because you've created that space, you can actually use that
self talk to again focus yourself on things that are
maybe important, like in the tennis example, where you're going
to hit that shot versus the negative kind of inner

(53:31):
battle that often occurs, which is telling you, you know,
to focus on why you can't hit that shot, or
why you're being overcome with stress and can't deal with
the thing that you're doing. So a lot of it is,
you know, shifting and changing that inner voice. It allows us,
it gives us the power to handle the difficult moments. Yeah,
I've said this on the show a number of times

(53:53):
recently that I just have really been rediscovering the power
of sing to myself similar to like you're saying either
Eric or you can do this. Eric, you can do this,
and then reminding myself of plenty of times I have
done it. It doesn't work every time, but that very
simple like when I find myself stirring to be like,

(54:15):
you know, I'll just be like, hey, relax, like you've
done this a thousand times, you know. I'll start getting
stressed about getting ready to go on a trip, as
the example I often use, and my brain will start
to be like, well, I got too much to do,
and I'm just like, you've done this a thousand times.
Have you ever not gone away because you didn't? Like
it always works out? And just that. I think it's

(54:35):
a combination of reminding myself of capability to handle it,
but also the distancing voice part of it. I think
it's it's both those things that make that helpful thing
for me. I love that example because what you've done
there is you've created some distance, and then you've also
backed that up with evidence and perspective. Right, let's step

(54:56):
back and be like Eric, you've gone through these trips
hundreds of times, like zoom out, like understand, this isn't
as big of a deal as you think, which stress
often causes us too narrow. So you know, this is
what it is is combining these tools because what happened
there is often that psychological distance of changing the verbiage

(55:19):
created that space where you could have that conversation. We're
often maybe we're in that spiral. We can't insert that
conversation because our brain is so locked in on that
negative or catastrophizing. It's almost like we can't get a
wise word in because it's like we're going down the
rabbit hole and it's it's too late. So we need

(55:40):
to like be able to or break ourselves out of it.
So let's talk very practically here for a second. Maybe
you could help walk us through like a common example
and how we might approach it in a tougher manner.
So let's just use something as simple as exercise. I
think is always a good one because it's relatively easy

(56:01):
to understand. And I'm on my peloton bike back there,
and I'm in the middle of a say, a four
minute interval, and a minute too I start going, oh, boy,
like whatever it is, I don't quite know where it's
coming from, but my brain just starts saying sort of
like you, like, I can't finish this, this is awful,
I hate this, whatever the nonsense is. I just suddenly

(56:23):
noticed like I don't like it and I want to quit. Right,
how do we work with that? I'm not asking you
to sum up your entire book in two sentences, although
I kind of am, but but just you know, like,
what are some practical takeaways people could use who find
themselves in this situation or they get home from work
and they're really tired and they're like, I really should
go clean the kitchen, but god, I'm really so tired. Sure,

(56:46):
that's that's no problem. So I'll give some strategies that
I think really works. So one is we just talked
about is shift how you're talking to yourself in those moments. Right.
The other thing I think with that self talk is
it's really important. Is what I would say is try
and have what i'd call a calm conversation versus this catastrophizing.
Try and literally slow that inner voice, that dialogue down,

(57:10):
because if we can slow it down and act like
you're talking to maybe a friend or a child, then
what that does is that sends the signal that hey,
I don't need to be panicked, I don't need to
freak out. Because when we kind of spiral often like that,
our voice gets really quick, we're jumping around all the time.

(57:31):
That catastrophizing goes, and your brain kind of interprets that
is like, oh, we're moving really quick. This must be
a catastrophe like sound alarm. The other thing that I
think is really important in those moments is that stress
narrows us. So whether it's you're writing the peloton or
you're coming home and you're so tired, stress tends to

(57:54):
focus us on the thing that is causing the stress.
So all we can see ahead of us is I'm
so tired, which amplifies the feeling of fatigue, which starts
giving us evidence of like, oh, of course I'm fatigued.
I just got home from a you know, a nine
hour work day or what have you, and I didn't

(58:14):
get much sleep, and it focuses on those things. Well,
one of the best things that you can do is
to shift your attention. So if you find yourself going narrow,
shift it to very broad. So instead of focusing on
let's say you're riding your exercise bike and you're like,
my legs hurt a lot, Like I can't deal with this, Well,

(58:37):
you've got to shift your focus of attention somewhere far
away from your legs. Right. Maybe you're thinking about what
you'll do once you get done with this, or maybe
you're thinking about the reason that you chose to get
on the peloton or enter this race in the first place. Right,
you're taking your attention and shifting it. And this works

(58:59):
in a number of different ways. So this can be
literally your attention. So if you're doing something difficult, again,
our attention tends to narrow because we're in the stress
or visual field tends to narrow because fight or flight
narrows our focus. So literally adopting a broader perspective, so
like softening our gaze or trying to pay attention to

(59:22):
our periphery or in my case as a glasses where
taking my glasses off so I can't see any details.
There's actual research that shows that that will turn down
our stress response just a little bit in that moment,
because again it signals to the brain, oh, we're zooming out.
This stressful thing must not be quite as a big

(59:43):
of a deal. And the last piece of advice i'd
give that is another tool you can use, as we
talked about at the beginning, where progress is really important
to motivation. When we're in the thick of that challenge
or stressful event, often what happens is we see the
big deal and it its impossible. So we get home
and we think I can't clean the kitchen. That means

(01:00:06):
I have to sweep the floors and like the counters
and clean the oven and you know, wash all the dishes,
and it just you're You're sitting there like this will
take hours and I don't have the time or energy.
You break it down. Instead of going the big thing,
you say, you know what, what's the first step, and
we'll just get to this point. I Am just going

(01:00:27):
to unload the dishwasher or you know, sweep the floor
and start there. It's no different than in the middle
of you know, that four minute interval. You don't think, oh,
I've got you know, two more minutes left. You say,
you know what, Eric, just make it to the next
thirty seconds and then we'll see what happens. And what
happens is you just kind of break it down, break

(01:00:48):
it down, break it down. And this is honestly one
of my biggest tactics for surviving a marathon. For example,
is if I thought about, you know, the twenty six
point two miles or even a half mare it on
the third teen miles, I drive myself mad. So in
those difficult moments, what do you do. You say, you
know what, I get it. You're hurting. Just make it
to the next mile marker or the next turn. Then

(01:01:11):
we can have this conversation again. And what inevitably happens
is you start to see yourself making progress, You get
a little closer to that finish line, You see that
you can make it, and that internal motivation comes back
online and says, you know what, I understand. You're hurting
a lot. You don't want to do this, but we're
really close that finish line, the completion of this task.

(01:01:33):
It's manageable, so we might as well keep going. I
love that. Well, Steve. We are at the end of
our time. You and I are going to continue talking
in the post show conversation because I have a ton
more notes for us. One of the things I want
to explore a little bit is the idea that experts
really sort of tune into bodily sensations, like a professional
runners going to tune into those body sensations, where someone

(01:01:57):
who's non professional like me might be trying to distract
from them. I want to explore that a little bit more.
I also want to look at the connection between the
amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and how important that is
in emotional regulation. Listeners. If you'd like to get access
to the post show conversation as well as ad free
episodes and the joy of supporting something you care about,

(01:02:17):
go to one you Feed dot net slash join Steve.
Thank you so much. I loved your book. I think
it's such an important conversation because I think toughness is
really important, but it's branded badly and a lot of
people who could benefit from it don't want to get
near it, and a lot of people who are trying
to employ it are going about it wrong. So I
think it's really important work. So thank you, Thanks so much, Eric,

(01:02:39):
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Episode Transcript

Host

Eric Zimmer

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