Focused - 239: How to Focus Like a Roman Emperor, with Donald J. Robertson

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Hey gang, Mike here. Wanted to apologize in advance for the quality of the guest audio in this episode. It's a little bit rough. But the conversation is great and there's a lot to be learned from this episode. Donald does a great job of explaining the ties between stoic philosophy and cognitive behavioral therapy and the impact that it has on our ability to focus. So again, we apologize for the audio quality, but we hope that you really enjoy this conversation. Welcome to Focus to Productivity Podcast, but more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Smith. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike, how are you? Doing great. How about yourself? I, uh, had a, had a fun weekend, trying to get focused, read some new

books from a great guy and we got them on the show this week. Welcome to show, Donald J. Robertson. Oh, thanks. I'm really looking forward to, I'm quite excited to talk about being focused and how it relates to ancient philosophy. Yeah. Well, you are, uh, buddy, you are, your books are right up my alley. So I, I, I, I want to get into that. But before we do, it is September, which is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and let's make sure we can raise some money for St. Jude, as we all know, Stephen Hackett, one of the founders of the Relay Network, his son had cancer, and St. Jude was right there for them. Over the years we've been doing this, we have now raised over $4 million for St. Jude. We want to get that number up even more. Just a few things to understand. In the last year, St. Jude reported the first

in utero treatment of spinal muscular atrophy. SMA is a rare neurodegenerative disorder set in motion before birth. It occurs around one in every 11,000 births in the United States, left and treated the most uncommon form of SMA results in progressive muscle weakness that leads to death. In February 2025, St. Jude's scientists reported they had used an orally administered drug to treat SMA in utero. More than two years after the child was born, no identical features of SMA have been observed. This work was led by Dr. Richard Finkel, who has recently named Time Magazine's Time 100 Health List of People positively influencing global health in 2025. St. Jude Gang is not just treating kids with cancer. It's treating kids in utero with cancer.

Every dollar you give to them goes to help a family out. If a family has cancer with one of their children, St. Jude not only treats the children for free, they pay for you to go there, they pay for the family to stay there. It's just they take care of you. And it's just such a great cause. We like to do it every year. Like I said, we've got over $4 million raised now since we started doing this. Daisy and I just made a big contribution.

And because she works for Disney, we got that doubled. The mouse paid for double our contribution. That's awesome. So take a look. Let us know. The focused audience is one of the biggest contributors. We love that. you can learn more, go to St.Jude.org slash relay to learn more. Thanks again. September's

not over, gang. Let's add to that number. Let's give a lot of money to St. Jude this year. 100%. One of my favorite things that we do. And whether you've got a lot of money that you can donate or just a couple of dollars, it all makes a difference. So let's come together. We're inviting the relay community to continue the incredible generosity they've shown over the last seven years. Once again, make a donation to support the life-saving mission to St. Jude. Donors making an individual gift to $60 or more will be eligible to redeem a digital bundle of a campaign-themed wallpapers and a screensaver. And if you donate $100 or more, you can get the 2025 sticker pack featuring six all-new host stickers.

You can donate today by going to st.jude.org slash relay. And just join us in helping give these kids more tomorrow. So, it's st.jude.org slash relay to donate or start your own fundraiser today. if everybody listening to the show gave up Starbucks one day this week and just sent that $5 to St. Jude, is that what a Starbucks cost these days? Is that $5? I don't know. I don't buy Starbucks.

Well, either way, I bet it would be a lot of money. So go do it, gang. Donald, thank you so much for coming on this show. I have to tell you. I heard about you when you released your book, How to Think Like Socrates. And somehow it came up on my list. I'm like, oh, these guys, you know, that all. like make these productivity self-help books about, you know, Socrates and, you know, Marcus Aurelius.

I'm like, oh, I just like to read the source material. I'm such a snob. You know, I grew up, I studied political philosophy in college. I had a very smart professor, a very kind man who got me into ancient philosophy back in the 80s. And so I've always been a source material guy. But then I got your book anyway, and I was just so delighted by it. It's such a great book. And I discovered you, you've got a podcast, and we're going to put a link to that. And just to, you know, tell the audience. So let me see if I get this right. You studied philosophy as an undergrad, but you're currently a therapist, correct? Yeah. There's a reason for that. Okay.

I couldn't find anyone to supervise my PhD thesis when I was a young guy. I wanted to do my PhD in philosophy, but looking at the relationship between stoicism and CBT. And so I pursued a clinical career instead of an academic one. So it was a setback at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I think there's probably some kind of lesson there in terms of stoicism as well. We shouldn't be too hasty to rush to judgment about what seems like a setback. and might actually work out for the best in the long run. Yeah, and so for

folks in the audience who aren't aware, CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is kind of like the medical science putting its modern blessing on stoicism in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. I was very inspired when I first started to look at

cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, they kept quoting the stoic philosopher called Epicetus, who said, it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. And that kind of became a cliche that I saw in every book that I picked up. And I thought, wow, these cognitive behavioral therapists must be really into ancient philosophy. I can't wait to read more about that. And then I was crushingly disappointed because I found

that was the only quote from the Stoics that they ever mentioned. So I became interested in looking for the kind of deeper connections. And the first book I ever wrote was actually trying to survey all of the overlaps, all of the links and connections between ancient philosophy and modern evidence-based approaches to psychotherapy. And so you've brought those two worlds together in a lot of ways, and then you've also written some books for the public that I think are very useful. I just mentioned how to think like Socrates's book, but you also wrote before that a book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And again, it was transformative for me because my old professor who got me into the Greeks did a did a number on me with respect

to Marcus Aurelius. And so this book about how to think like Roman emperors is taking portions of Marcus Aurelius's life. And then you apply that to modern, in some ways modern therapeutic techniques in ways to help, you know, help make yourself better and deal with different areas of your life. And it's just a really good book. But what it also did is gave me a lot more insight as to the life of Marcus Aurelius. And I realized that, because the thing I had always been told is, hey, he didn't invent anything new with philosophy. He was just a guy who quoted everybody.

But the thing that came out of your book for me, which is why I would recommend anybody interesting to read this book, is this guy was the most powerful human on the planet. He could have done anything he wanted. He could have had anything he wanted. And yet he stuck with a philosophical regime that was virtue-based. And I think a lot of people,

I don't think any of us listening could ever have his kind of power to know if we would have the, you know, the strength to have a virtue-based system when you can literally have anything you want. And I got a lot more respect for him reading that book and his struggles and just kind of change my outlook on it. And that's when I start reaching out to you,

bugging you back coming on the show. yeah he was a big deal back in the day as I like to say we say power corrupts yeah but that's why people find it difficult to wrap their head around Marcus Aurelius because he seems absolutely committed and not only that and the book that we have from him the meditations which has become a self-help classic in its own right even those ancient philosophical text was never intended for publication yeah I think that gives it this kind of hallmark of authenticity like we can pretty much tell that these are his private notes.

They don't look like they're intended for anyone else to read. So at night, you know, in his bedroom, you know, he's sitting there going over how he can be a better human being, how he can remain committed to his fundamental goal

of achieving wisdom and virtue. He seems completely sincere in it. You know, no one in the ancient, well, really doubted that he was sincere in that regard either. I think that's one of the reasons people find him today quite an inspiring figure yeah like i said with the kind of resources and power he had he didn't have to take that route and uh and he did and so many did not you know and that's that makes him special but um we wanted to talk to you today about the relationship of some of these ideas

in relation to focus just a couple notes coming out of the books uh one of the uh the themes that comes out of all of your books, and frankly, my knowledge of this stuff is the old-time philosophers, you know, the old Greeks, their idea of philosophy was very different than modern. Like, the way I always say it is, I don't care if I live in a simulation, but I do want to know what the good life is. And I feel like, talk a little bit about how philosophy was different back in the old days. Well, philosophy was a way of life. I mean, we think of philosophers today spend a lot of time in libraries.

They spend a lot of time delivering lectures, but in the ancient world, philosophy was seen very much as a way of life, almost like a religion. Ancient philosophers in some ways would be comparable to wise men from India, from the east. You know, like it's a less on yoga in some regard. And I think the best example of that is the least academic of all philosophers, Diogenes the cynic, who sneered. at academia, had no interest really in logic or metaphysics or anything like that. And Diorgeny's made a virtue out of the fact that he was completely focused on developing his own strength of character and virtue rather than putting on a display of academic learning. Actually, in the ancient world Plato, from whom we get the word academic, he founded the first

ever institution of higher learning called the Academy after the place where it was located. The ancients saw this kind of contrast between these two opposing views of philosophy, one represented by the Academy of Plato and the other represented by Diorginis and the cynics. And the Stoics were kind of somewhere in between. Diorginis used to laugh at Plato reputedly and mock him for being overly scholarly and overly intellectual in his pursuit of very. much too. Just to go down a little rabbit hole on the idea of virtue, the idea of a virtue-based life is something that I think is not talked about as much anymore, but it feels to me like it was a fundamental part of the culture and the ideas for a long time after the Greeks. I mean, another thing I read as a political philosophy major, I spent a lot of time reading the founders

of the United States, and those guys were heavily influenced by virtue-based lifestyle. And what happened with that? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, there's always been, I mean, clearly, even in the ancient world, there are people who aren't following a virtue-based lifestyle, but something is different because almost all, virtually all, ancient Greek philosophers actually agree that virtue is the highest good, and their thinking almost universally revolves around this perspective that today we call virtue ethics.

And today it's an unusual, it's a more unusual perspective. So it is like our culture has changed and moved progressively further away from this whole orientation, this whole way of thinking, which emphasizes our character. For the Stoic's wisdom is the highest virtue and the highest good. and the other virtues are seen as connected to or forms of wisdom. So the difference is, you know, in the ancient world, they might say many people value honor, reputation, first and foremost, status, or they value wealth and property.

And so this is something different that says it's not status or property, that's what life is all about. It's more about your own character, your own wisdom, your own moral integrity, your own self-discipline and courage, these character traits that exist within us rather than outside of us. Yeah, I mean, just my own experience with that is I got exposed to it very young in college. And then I started my career. I was a lawyer for 30 years and kind of lost my way.

I just got involved with being a trial lawyer and raising my kids and all that. And about my early 40s, I felt like something was missing and kind of rediscovered, I went back and read the books and kind of rediscovered this idea of virtue-based life. And I have kind of a version of it I live by. And now when I look at myself in my late 50s, I'm happy. It's like this virtue-based life system has been transformative for me. And that's one of the reasons why I'm sad to see it's so far out of contemporary culture. Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what the cultural historical reasons are for that,

but I'm going to hazard a guess anyway that it's got something to do with the industrial revolution because that's the easy thing to bring most things like that on. So it may be that this huge change that came with industrialisation led us to become a more materialistic and outward-looking society to forget about some of this ancient perspective that was so common, almost universal in the ancient world. But it's something that I'd add about this, you know, from the interdisciplinary perspective, comparing ancient thought to modern psychology.

So this is the core of almost all ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, not just stoicism. Yeah. But in modern psychology, over the past 20 or 30 years, it's gone through a kind of renaissance as well. In the positive psychology movement, there's a lot of interest in research on virtues and character strengths, which is very closely aligned to this whole idea of virtue ethics. the ancient world, but also one of the leading evidence-based treatments for clinical depression, it's a thing called behavioural activation, it's a form of behaviour therapy actually, is almost entirely revolves around a very similar concept. And it's based around this idea

that you can either make the most important thing in your life the achievement of external outcomes, which are usually situated in the future. So, like, one day I'd like to write a bestselling book or one day I'd like to become a millionaire, something that you're working towards that you may or may not achieve. And usually there's an element of luck or some external factors that might intervene there. Or you can make the most important thing, your own character. So, you know, it might be that you say, whether or not my book is a bestseller, I want to write with integrity and creativity and courage, you know, and do my best to live in accord

with those values every day. Now, that's something that you could do immediately, as soon as you make the commitment to do it. And so modern psychology has discovered that people who suffer from clinical depression tend to put a disproportionate amount of focus on external goals, future outcomes. So if I say, hey, one day I'm going to be happy if I write a bestseller, apart from the fact that that's not entirely under my control, it kind of sends a message to my brain that says that means that between now and then, I'm not happy because there's something fundamentally missing from my life.

Whereas if I say, hey, I want my life to be a bit creativity, that's something that can happen right now in the here and now from moment to moment every day of my life so I can have a sense of fulfillment, as if I'm doing something important, as if I'm doing something valuable, potentially every day of my life. that's transformative

in terms of our quality of life and maybe one of the secrets to helping to treat clinical depression effort, not results yeah, yeah exactly you know, it's about the type of person that you want to be, what you want your life

to stand for. Imagine you said listen, the most important thing in life to me is to make a million bucks or write a bestseller and you're working on that, making a lot of progress but the day before you achieve your goal you get hit by a bus and you're looking down from the afterlife would you think that by definition your entire life was worthless because you never actually achieved the outcome that was all important to you whereas if you say no what's important to me

is to have compassion and integrity self-discipline and creativity and i achieve that at least to some extent every day even if i'm working towards some external goal or outcome say you get hit by a bus before you write your bestseller or make your first million or something like that. You might look back on your life then and think, well, every single day of my life was worthwhile because the most important thing to me was the process rather than the outcome, the way that I went about doing things, the type of person that I was. And I instantiated that, I exemplified that, embodied that every day, or at least many of the days along the way.

Those are two completely different perspectives and the value that we assigned to our life. and one of them is clearly problematic. There's no coincidence that it crops up a lot, not only in clinical depression, but also in certain types of anxiety disorders. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Incogni. As you know, data brokers can collect, aggregate, and sell personal information, including names, social security numbers, logging credentials, and more,

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Donald, you're talking a little bit about the stoic virtues, the societal virtues, and I'm kind of curious for someone like myself who doesn't have quite the depth of the background that David does, somewhat new to the idea of stoicism, but someone who is very intrigued in the definition of living the successful life that you described in the last section. What is the relationship there between the societal virtues and the individual values? How do those connect or how are they different in your opinion? The Stoics believed in a particular set of virtues that were their fundamental values, as did many ancient Greek philosophers. They're inspired to a large extent by the earlier thought of Socrates. So the

Stoics believe that wisdom is the most important thing of all. There's a reason for that. They think that in order to assign value to anything else in life, we have to use reason. So we figure out whether something's helpful or useful or not or whether we should place value on it. If our reason is corrupted and we're thinking irrationally, we're going to assign value to everything in life incorrectly. So they compare this to the value that a king has who assign status to all the different members of his court. Not only is the king the most important, but he has a unique kind of value because the status of everyone else in court depends upon him. So they see reason is like the king in this analogy. And if we exercise reason consistently and to the best of our ability,

we would exemplify the virtue that's called wisdom. We would become wise. And so the Stoics think we need to place fundamental importance on wisdom because their ability to discern other values depends on that, basically. And the Stoics believe that we compete, they believe, to put it very simply, they will sometimes say that wars are fought over status and property.

But if we value wisdom, it's not a zero-sum game. We don't deplete our wisdom by sharing it with other people. we actually increase it by doing that. And they believed that if we improved our wisdom and our strength of character, we would

be more likely to live in harmony with other people. So placing supreme value on wisdom, they thought actually leads to greater harmony in society and benefits everybody. So it combines self-interest and social interest.

The most valuable thing for me is to become enlightened and improve my strength of character. But in the process of doing, that. I benefit everybody else around me. I went down a rabbit hole last year on this about this concept of amathia. I don't know if I'm going to get this right or not tell me. But one of the things that I feel like we suffer from right now is that we look at people in the world and we think maybe they aren't, they don't understand things, they're not as smart as they can be, and we revile them. Whereas this concept of amathia, it was a, it was a type of, um,

ignorance that we don't even have a word for in modern English, but it was, it wasn't that you weren't capable of understanding. It was just that you, you, um, you were so caught up in your passions or caught up by something else that you just ignored it. And yeah, right now we, we, we look at other people and we judge them on that, but the, the Greek approach to it was to feel sympathy. And it's almost like, well, they have this thing. I want to help them. It's, you don't despise them, you actually are sympathetic towards them. Am I getting that right? Yeah, absolutely. It's very closely linked to my current area of interest, which is at a moment I'm working on a book about anger and stoic philosophy. So it's very closely connected.

When we get angry with people, something weird happens. Like when we typically in anger towards other people, we tend to objectify people that we're angry with. And we tend to engage in something psychologists call hostile attribution bias. So usually when we're really angry with people, we think that they're acting out of malice or badness. And often we're wrong about that. We often jumping to conclusions about it in many cases because it's a pronounced cognitive bias that anger imposes on us. And the Stoics, following Socrates, very much influenced by him in this regard, said that no man does evil knowingly, and therefore no man does evil willingly. Now that sounds like a highly controversial thing to say. But I think it becomes less controversial if we

frame it from a contrasting perspective, a different perspective. When I'm angry with somebody, if I ask my clients who are dealing with anger issues, when they're angry with someone else, did you believe that this other person was perfectly wise? Well, they'll always say, no, of course. I didn't believe that they're perfectly wise. That would be ridiculous. This guy's like an idiot, he's a jerk. I don't think he's wise. So in that sense, it means that you already realize that the other person is getting something wrong. They're making some kind of error of judgment, a moral judgment that they're getting wrong. Socrates would say that when we think somebody is behaving unethically, it suggests that they don't truly grasp what they

should be doing. They don't truly grasp the nature of the good in ancient philosophical life. language. They don't truly grasp that wisdom and virtue are the goal of life. And so they're kind of misguided and they're making an error in that regard. And because they're acting out of ignorance, they're not completely responsible for what they're doing. They're acting against their own best interests and their own underlying values. They're making a mistake. Epic Titus, the famous Stoic philosopher, compares this to a disability. He says we should view people who act unethically or unjustly, as if they're blind or deaf, but actually suffering from a much more debilitating disability

that affects the very core of their being, their capacity to discern moral judgments. I found that discovery very helpful for me, where I approach people with compassion where I used to not. I don't know. I found that helpful. Although we actually brought you on to talk about focus But, you know, I've got you here on the mic so I can't help myself. Let's focus.

One of the things that I do think a lot of people struggle with, especially today with so many distractions, is how do you focus on what's important? How do you get your attention on what's important? And I think the starting point of that is to figure out what's important. How does this stuff help somebody figure that out? Well, first of all, they should go to Greece. because everywhere you go in Greece you'll see signs that say

Prosoki on the underground that says that you should beware of the gap or mind the gap you see outside people's houses signs that say prosoki skillos

which means beware of the dog now this is a word that still exists in modern Greek but it was a technical concept in ancient stoic philosophy mind the gap beware of the dog be cautious

They're on warning signs. But the word prosochi means pay attention, literally. Focus. And in ancient Stoicism, it referred to a psychological discipline, a form of stoic mindfulness, if you like, that consists in making a conscious effort to continually pay attention to the most important thing in the universe, in this sense.

You know, the Stoics are very fundamental in their thinking. They say we should be continually paying attention to the crucial thing in life, the most important thing in life. And that's not wealth or status, but rather it's the use that we make of external things. The Stoics define it as the use that we make of our impressions, the use that we make of our experiences. We either use those experiences foolishly or we use them wisely. We use them badly. or we use them well, and therefore it's virtue and wisdom and our capacity for it that we're paying attention to. Or to put it, I guess, in more modern terms, it's a form of mindfulness

that the Stoics think we should practice that places supreme value on being aware of how our thoughts, actions and feelings interact with one another. This is very similar to what we do in cognitive therapy, realizing that it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them, and paying close attention to that, because we realize that it's the crucial factor determining our quality of life. I would love somebody, maybe it's been done, to do a study of all the ancient cultures that develop some sort of mindfulness practice. It's just kind of surprising how all these independent cultures grew to realize how important

that was. But how did we ever get to the point where we forgot that? I mean, again, it comes back to what you were saying earlier, right? We're the world ones, right? The Western, educated, industrialized societies, were they outliers, right? How come we're the only ones that don't think mindfulness is important? It has to be re-imported from Buddhism or other, you know, from stoicism, other traditions. there's something, again, maybe, let's blame out for the sake of argument on the Industrial Revolution, right?

Something happened around that time that made us forget that, geez, if you want to do any type of self-improvement, you've got to keep your eye on things, right? I would say, I'll stress this, because I want to kind of sometimes just say things that I think are, I would say to my clients in CBT-based coaching that I do or in psychotherapy in the past. you know, I see many clients that we, today people drink from a fire hose of self-improvement bump online. We're bigger consumers of self-help content than ever before. When I was a young, self-help has always existed as a genre, but when I was a young guy, I had to scrape around to find one or two interesting books on it. Now people go on the internet and they're consuming videos and podcasts and reading self-improvement stuff all day long every day if they want to. And yet as a society, are we improving or have we been helped by this tsunami of self-help? Something's not working out here, right?

And I think there are a number of things wrong with more than self-help culture that explain why it hasn't helped people more. They're often very obvious to psychotherapists because psychotherapists, every client they see is usually a self-help junkie and has a big library of self-help books. but they still wind up in psychotherapy and that there are things that usually stand out, multiple things. But one of them is this weird tendency that people have, despite the prevalence of mindfulness

as a form of self-improvement today, still almost every client I see will do something I can only describe as compartmentalizing their self-improvement. So they'll sit in journal for a bit in the morning and then they'll kind of forget about that and revert back to thinking a load of crazy irrational BS, right, as Albert Ellis used to call it, the original founder

of cognitive therapy. And it's of limited benefit to do a lot about meditation or a little about journaling or something like that. If you're then going to spend the rest of your day just re-inductrinating yourself into unhealthy irrational thoughts because you've taken your eye off the ball. Epictetus is emphatic about that to his students. He says, there's no two ways about it, you're going to have to engage in some sort of continual mindfulness practice or prosoqui, otherwise you're going to do a little bit of self-improvement and then you're just going to revert back to doing unhealthy stuff. It's going to be one step forward and two steps back. There's not an alternative to that. There'll be some generalisation

from the work that you do in the morning. There'll be some knock-on effect from it, right? But it's not sufficient to just go to therapy or coaching. for an hour every week, and then outside of those sessions, just revert back to thinking in a very negative, irrational, catastrophic way about your life that would be absurd. It would be like eating healthy, you know, for an hour a week, and then the rest of the week just eating junk food. So I don't know how we ended up at that point. It's something to do with the commoditization of self-help, perhaps, but this way of

viewing it is completely different. In the ancient world, self-improvement had to be part. of a larger philosophy of life. Otherwise, it was tokenism, in a sense. Yeah, I can tell you from my personal experience that I told you my story, like when I'm going through my 30s, I'm looking for ways to make things easier

and I'm consuming life hacks, you know, little things to make it better. I know in the back of my head because I had virtue system training in college. I understood what these guys were talking about, but the idea of approaching it was too much friction to me. I just, how do I figure out what that means?

I'll tell you, my hang up was Aritae, because Arate was a very attractive term to me, but I'm like, how do I apply that to myself? Because I thought of a holistic. It wasn't until I started breaking it up to parts of my life that it made sense, but for like 10 years,

I wasn't doing that because it was too much work, and I was just afraid of it. And so I feel like for a lot of people, it's like drinking salt water, you know, get the easy stuff and you make you feel like you're making an improvement. But until you really get to the foundation, you're really not making any progress. I think it's often the case. And so usually in therapy, we see clients almost addicted to self-help strategies. But in many cases, they actually take the form of what therapists will call safety seeking strategies. They're basically, or experiential avoidance, right?

you can turn almost any self-help technique into a maladaptive or an unhealthy strategy. And one of the most sneaky ways that that happens is that people will concentrate on doing self-improvement in the wrong area. It would be like, you know, you're throwing buckets of water in your burning shed. And I come along and I say, well, buddy, buddy, you're doing this all wrong. And you say, are you crazy? My shed's on fire. I need to put this out.

and I was to say, but turn around and look behind you, your house is on fire, right? You should be putting that out, right? But you're convinced that you're doing something that's urgent and it's helping you. It's maybe diverting all your attention from where the real problem is, right? I'll give you what I think is an obvious example of this, and it might be a tad controversial, but, you know, let's go there. So a lot of the people that I talk to who are interested in self-help get their advice from influencers in what's colloquially known as the manosphere, right? And it struck me a long time ago

that they place a lot of emphasis on self-discipline in the manosphere and another virtues in many cases. But a lot of the young guys that I came across who were following those influencers and doing that stuff seemed to me to have a more obvious problem. In many cases, they were struggling to form, lasting, fulfilling relationships with other people. Sometimes they were struggling to get on with people at work.

And often it seemed obvious to me that that was because they were really angry and kind of consumed by anger. And they spend a lot of time arguing with people on the internet and get really angry about stuff. So it seemed to me in many cases, to put it very simply, they were putting a lot of effort into improving their self-discipline, so they're tidying their room and making their bed and following all that kind of advice. But they were doing nada, nothing, to deal with what seemed to me as an observer to be their real problem, which was their lack of social skills and the sense of entitlement and the anger that was polluting their relationships.

So one of the problems of the self-help, there are multiple problems as I mentioned earlier, but one is, I guess you could see this is a problem of focus, being distracted and from where the real core problem lies. This episode of The Focus Podcast is brought to you by Zoc Doc. Go to Zocdoc.com slash focus to find the right doctor right now. You can sign up for free. As you get older, you may find yourself thinking, I should go to the doctor more. You know for things like sleep trouble, back pain, or maybe work stress, but it can be tough to get to the doctor. We all want to stay healthy, but it can be hard to find the right doc for your needs.

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Zock-D-C-D-com slash focused. And our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of the Focus Podcast and Olive Relay. One of the concepts that comes out is premeditatio Malorum. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly. But it's just the idea of rehearsal. And I think,

if somebody's trying to get focused, trying to find a way to get their attention on what's important, talk about how that ancient concept could help you today. Well, it's another, I'll back up a bit and just say something because I think it might shock a lot of your listeners. Many people believe that psychotherapy originated with Sigmund Freud, and that's completely wrong. Freud himself trained as a psychotherapist. Actually, modern psychotherapy was around for at least half a century before Freud. But psychotherapy existed in the ancient world. Not in some kind of

lucy-gissy kind of vague way. They literally had books on psychotherapy and models of psychotherapy, psychopathology as well. The Stoics had some very influential books and most of them are lost, but one of them, Seneca's On Anger actually,

still survives today. And one of the central techniques of ancient psychotherapy is premeditative malorum that you mentioned a moment ago. Philosophers of many different traditions it seems, again, fundamental, common sense to them, that if you want to prepare yourself to become more resilient, you're going to have to face your fears. And initially, you're probably going to have to do that psychologically. You're going to have to do it in your imagination. And then subsequently, you're going to have to face your fears in reality in order to master them and overcome them.

And this idea is so obvious in a way, it's so fundamental that it's also central to most modern ever. evidence-based psychotherapy. The most robust technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research is what we call exposure therapy. We know that when you get people to consistently face their fears, something happens that we call emotional habituation. So anxiety will normally abate naturally through repeated, prolonged exposure to the things that trigger it.

And that's something that's established beyond a shadow of doubt in modern psychological research. But the ancient philosophers, all different schools, realized that. And they realized that by facing affairs in imagination, we have, first of all, a lot more flexibility. We can allow ourselves to confront things that we don't have any immediate experience of, but that might happen to us at some point in the future. So one way of developing a greater sense of emotional resilience would be to practice a variety of different setbacks that we could potentially encounter in life. They ancient philosophers in their world talk about facing things like illness, death, poverty, exile

and so on. And imagining those things as if they're happening right now in order to prepare yourself to cope with them, but also to get used to them. So the novelty, the shock of them wears off and you start to desensitize to it. them. Not become numb, but become more familiar with them. So they seem less overwhelming. Don't take us by surprise as much. But also so that you have an opportunity to get in the habit of exercising a more self-consciously philosophical attitude towards all of life's misfortunes. I really like this idea. I grew up with my dad, started a software company and made a lot of

assessment skill-building products in the area of emotional intelligence. And so the idea of mental rehearsal. I've heard from a like performance-based perspective, you know, the story of Michael Phelps and his teacher, you know, put in the videotape and he sees himself winning the Beijing Olympics, you know, and they ask him afterwards. You couldn't, you were swimming blind. How did it feel? Is exactly how I thought it would because he played it over in his head so many times. But I had never really thought about applying that to thinking about the worst case scenarios so that you could be prepared for what they actually happen. I like that approach. The stories think, how could we be resilient if we're caught off guard by setbacks?

We're not prepared for them. And again, we see this all the time. Now, there's an interesting issue here that might be worth touching on, which is a lot people would say, well, isn't that what worrying is for? When we worry about what if this happens, what if that happens, aren't we kind of preparing ourselves? And I think, again, I mentioned earlier, almost any self-help strategy, can. become distorted into a maladaptive coping technique.

So there's good and bad forms of worrying, for want of a better word, or focusing on problems in the future. And so you'll often see people who are dwelling on possible misfortune. What if I go bankrupt? What if I get ill? You know, what if my business doesn't work out? What if I fail this exam? But they're doing it in a...

a dysfunctional way, in a way that just maintains their anxiety in the long term. There's a qualitative difference between what they're doing, unhealthy worrying, and what we call imaginal exposure, basically, or a healthy mental rehearsal in modern therapy and what the Stoics were recommending. There are actually a number of differences, so I won't go through all of them, but when people worry about stuff, it tends to be more verbal and abstract, and they tend to circle around by asking themselves, questions. What if this happens? What if that happens? How will I cope? Whereas imaginal

exposure is usually more visual and it's slower and more static and more concrete. So that tends to be healthier and leads us to overcome our anxiety, whereas asking lots of abstract questions often just maintains our anxiety. It's like worry, it's like a loop you get stuck in. Yeah, exactly. What are some ways, though, if you find yourself stuck in a worry loop, that you can turn that into something positive. How do you get out of the loop? Well, this is like, I mean, this is a real deep dive into kind of modern psychotherapy, but the first thing to realize, the biggest revelations are often just pointing out things that are kind of a mystery in broad daylight, but nevertheless might confuse people at first

or shock them. The biggest revelations often seem too simple to be true, right? So with worry, the key thing is there are two different types of thinking. There are automatic thoughts and voluntary thoughts. Worrying is usually, initiated by an automatic thought. So I see or hear or read something that triggers an alarming thought or it just randomly pops into my mind and then it starts a kind of chain reaction where I have a conversation that might go on for many hours. Maybe I'm lying in bed at night and I can't sleep because I start worrying. Now the key thing is usually we know that people that worry pathologically tend to believe that they're worrying is uncontrollable. In some cases they

believe that it is controllable, but they think it's helpful, and that might be a reason why they continue doing it. What they usually don't understand is that the initial or automatic thought, they can't unthink. It's something that's already imposed on them. It's an intrusive thought. But actually, worrying the thought process that follows is largely voluntary. The clue is that It consists of a chain of connected thoughts that happen over a course of minutes or hours. But because of that very fact, you could interrupt it. So the first crucial thing is just getting people to realize the automatic thoughts might be involuntary, but how you then respond to it, the time that you spend thinking about it is largely actually under voluntary control.

You could choose, I mean, for example, if your doorbell rang, you'd probably get up and answer the door and stop worrying, and focus on something else. Now, people usually need a little bit of help to regain voluntary control over those thought processes. The Stoics actually have a really good analogy for this. It's like somebody's running so fast that if something goes out in front of them,

it's hard to change direction or hard for them to suddenly stop. So when we're worrying, what we're doing is, ultimately it's voluntary thinking, but we can get so engrossed in it. It's like we temporarily, rarely feel as if we've lost control. It's spiraled out of control. But in principle, it's something we can regain control over relatively easily. The main things are that we have to

realize that we're doing it. So learning to spot early warning signs of worry is crucial. It might be, for example, something as simple as noticing that you're frowning, noticing that your heart is beating a little bit faster, notice that you're catastrophizing things, for example, noticing that your thoughts are becoming more rapid and sounding more anxious. Those are all red flags that might tell you, I'm not problem solving. I'm freaking myself out right now and worrying about things. I think of worrying as a kind of negative self-hypnosis. It's like we're hypnotizing ourselves, getting lost in a trance.

One of the other characteristic features of it is that just as in self-hypnosis, one of the main research findings about hypnosis is that people typically underestimate the passage of time. When people worry, they also tend to underestimate how time is passing. They get lost in thought. So one way of snapping out of it is to ground your attention more in the present moment. It's difficult to do mindful worrying or grounded worrying, you know, because usually you get completely lost in a hypothetical conversation about what if this happens in the future. As long as you can ground at least some of your attention in reality, in the present moment,

that tends to prevent you from getting completely lost and worry. So that could just be noticing your breathing while you continue to think about the problem, noticing your facial expression while you continue to think about the problem. That could be enough to anchor your attention and stop you from getting too lost or too hypnotized by this horror story that you're telling yourself about how things might go catastrophically wrong. A horror story about the worst-case scenario is a one way of describing worry. but I still feel this imagining difficulties ahead kind of idea is very useful and like I can tell

you personally like I told you I was a lawyer but I'm no longer a lawyer at one point I decided this thing I'm doing is Max Barky is something I'd like to focus on and I started considering like what would it mean to give up you know 70% of my income to do this you know and like and I went through and imagine the worst case scenario. What if I did it? And I gave my clients away and the max sparky thing went flat or stopped. How would I respond to that? And it like, it gave me data points when I made the decision that made it very easy, even though I knew there's costs and a potential downside. But then I just kept asking myself, well, what if, what if that happens? Well, then what would I do? And you know what? I'd figure it out. You know,

Maybe I'd go dig ditches or something, but I would find a way. And that practice actually made the decision, I think, not even easier, but also more intelligent. So you're describing something that I would call decadastrophizing, right? And I'm going to put words in your mouth now. You're doing what psychologists sometimes describe as going from what if thinking to so what if thinking. Because your emphasis is on your coping ability, right? So you're saying to yourself, well, so what if the worst did happen? It wouldn't be the end of the world.

And there are ways that I could potentially cope with it. That's the opposite of worrying. When people worry, they usually feel as if there's no way that they could cope. They have a sense of helplessness and a poor appraisal of their coping. They're not really figuring out. They usually tend to circle around the bad incident chronologically and not to move beyond it to think, for example, about what would you do the next day and then the day after that in order to recover from a setback

or to cope with it. So you're describing decontastrophizing, developing a coping strategy, and rational problem solving, basically. When people worry their thinking is biased by anxiety, so they tend to exaggerate threats, they exaggerate the probability and the severity, and they'll typically underestimate their coping ability.

So that's why it tends to be unhelpful. And they'll do that for hours. So those cognitive biases are what keep them stuck in the loop. It would be better. One of the most effective strategies are a number of things you can do to cope with worrying. One of the simplest and most effective strategies was developed in the 1980s. And it's usually called worry postponement. So say you have an alarming thought.

pops into your mind, you go, my God, what if this happens? Now, you're probably already anxious, which means that your brain is probably already overestimating the severity and probability of threat and underestimating your coping ability. You might look on that as almost analogous to being drunk, like you just drank a bottle of whiskey. You might say to yourself, I'm not thinking straight right now, because I'm anxious. So if I spend hours thinking about this, I'm just going to be passing this in a loop through

a filter that's distorting things. Right? And the more I do that, the more distorted it's going to become. That's not helpful. What I should do is wait until I've calmed down and I'm feeling more relaxed. I can give it my full attention. And then I could think it through more rationally and calmly and patiently and actually problem solve it rather than catastrophizing it. So taking control of when and where you think about problems is known to be one of the most effective techniques for countering worry. I'm going to hold on to that one for the next. time when those loops shows up for me, for sure. Yeah, we call it worry time.

You say, I'll come back and I'll think about this when I'm less anxious. Yeah. And I can, and therefore I'll be able to think about it more rationally and objectively. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. If you're looking to expand your team this year, join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. So stop struggling to get your job posts seen in an

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I-N-D-E-D dot com slash focus. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Our thanks to Indeed for the support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. Donald, another commonality I read in your books and of my understanding of some of these old gents is that a journaling practice was important. And you see that in the Stoic tradition, but I think you see it, I think, across a lot of the Greek traditions. And one of the things that's interesting to me, because we've been talking about a virtue-based life. And then on this show, we talk about focus. But I think that you get the same purpose served by a reflective practice, that you get to get in touch with what is your virtues, get in

touch with what's important to you. And the people, in my experience, that have the most success on both of those endeavors are the people who have some sort of reflective practice. Well, I'm going to say something controversial about that. Okay. that might shock you at first, but I'll qualify it carefully. Sure. Most of the clients that I see in coaching, and most the clients that most psychotherapist see, have been exposed to a lot of self-improvement stuff, and a lot of them already do journaling. And in many cases, mainly if you're dealing with somebody who has a diagnosable mental health problem,

often journaling appears to be counterproductive, right? now one of the problems with journaling is it's a very broad term and one of the issues with self-help strategies in general is that people might be doing they might be good and bad versions there might be really good versions they probably are undoubtedly really good really helpful healthy versions of journaling and then there's versions of journaling that are probably a bad idea for some people and then there's ones that are kind of in the middle that are a little bit hit and miss because it can mean different things to different people so there's some evidence to show for instance that people who suffer from clinical depression may not benefit that much from journaling where they're trying to express their feelings on paper and in some cases it might actually just be a form of rumination on paper which would be symptomatic rather than therapeutic it's an extension of the unhealthy thinking that they're already engaged in just extending the loop into paper just turning out of paper

you see that a lot in therapy so your clients will have some clients will have piles of notes that they bring into their coach

or therapist and you know like never mind the quality fuel the width sort of thing you've got there's pages

and pages of this stuff that's usually a red flag that tells you the client is overthinking right

and they're doing all this writing you know but they're in a look they're kind of going round in circles

engaged in what we call ruminative thinking or worrying is a kind of similar

thing generalised anxiety disorder, which is basically pathological worrying, also tend to write down copious notes in many cases. And it doesn't look like it's, they often believe it's helping them. But from an observer looking at them, it seems obvious that they're just worrying on paper, basically. So just expressing your thoughts or sometimes kind of over-analizing things or over-thinking things on paper can be maybe an unhealthy or an unhelpful form of journaling.

But actually, journaling is writing. stuff down. There are 101 different ways of doing that. There's good, I'll give you a positive. There's some evidence to show Igor Grossman, who has a lab where he does research on wisdom, found that asking people to use a technique that's sometimes called eliasm, where people talk or write in the third person, that he had a control group who wrote about their relationship problems in a journal, and then he had an experimental group where they did the same thing but rather than saying

I forgot to buy my wife a birthday present and now she's mad at me I don't know what to do they would say Donald forgot to buy his wife a birthday present now she's angry with him and he doesn't know what to do so they'd write using he and him

and the individual's name about themselves in the third person which seems a little bit odd at first but there's evidence from a number of studies to show that that improves problem-solving ability. People are more objective about evaluating the problems and coming up with solutions. It also seems to reduce anxiety

and other forms of emotional distress sometimes when people journal in the third person. So that may be something that people want to play around with. We also, in therapy, we sometimes get people to do lots of different written exercises, but they're usually quite structured. One would be, we talked about worrying earlier, there's a technique, there's a form of decadastrophising

where someone might write about the worst case scenario but they deliberately avoid using any value judgments or emotive language so they just stick to the facts and describe the worst case scenario but is objectively and factually in a matter-of-fact way basically so bringing it right back down to earth

and not talking about how awful or catastrophic it would be but just spelling out the bare facts of what would actually happen and then also writing about how they could potentially cope with it, how they could potentially problem-solve. So forcing yourself to be more matter-of-fact and solution-focused in your writing can sometimes be helpful. But that's the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many other ways of journaling

that could potentially be therapeutic. But the problem is, you know, like anything else in life, often I find when people talking about journaling, what they're doing is maybe a bit more, confused than that and in some cases it may be that they're simply overthinking things are ruminating on paper what about the idea of taking your your defined virtue pursuit i like to call it arate and then yeah going through and looking at it how am i doing where could i improve where have i you know done poorly i think that's a great idea seneca used to do that there's a

this is a this is a maybe an interesting bit of trivia there's a theme poem called the Golden Verses of Pythagoras. I saw it once on a restaurant wall, even. It's a short poem, but it's usually influential in the ancient world. And the Stoics, although it comes from a different school of philosophy, the Pythagorean's, the Stoics refer to it and were very influenced by it. And the golden verses of Pythagoras says that every night, before you go to, it gives very specific advice.

it says some quite mystical things some quite cryptic things but then it gives us really specific bit of advice it says every night before you go before you close your eyes you should thrice

review the events of the day and then ask yourself three questions what did I do badly what did I do well and what did I omit to do and that's actually a really good self-improvement framework

particularly if you're working on your values because you might say listen where I think there's room improvement in my life is I'd like to be a more compassionate person. If I was being a more compassionate human being, I think I'd be able to look myself in the mirror with more of a sense of satisfaction. I could go to my grave happy if I felt that I'd consistently exhibited more compassion or creativity or creativity or whatever's most important to you as a character trait or a value. And you know, you might very simply, there's a great deal that I could say about

this type of work. But I tend to find a lot of my clients who are in management say they've done values work but there's a huge gap. Like usually they're not actually changing their behavior to live more consistently in accord with their values, which is where all the benefit comes from. So

at the end of the day you might say to yourself what would I give myself marks out of 10 for compassion today or being a good father or being a good colleague or exhibiting leadership. Or you might say also how many did I spend today exercising creativity, right?

When my clients come into therapy, even the ones that say, I've done lots of stuff on my values and my journaling and so on, I'll say, okay, cool. So what do you think is your most important value? Which is the one where there's most room for improvement? Let's say they say self-discipline. And I say, okay, over the past week, like how many minutes or hours did you spend actually exercising self-discipline or doing things to cultivate it?

And you know the most common answer to that question? is zero, right? Which is shocking. You know, it's a very simple line of questioning, but if you say to people, what is the most important thing to you in life? The thing that would most fundamentally contribute to living a fulfilling life,

how many minutes have you spent doing it? And the answer is nothing, zero. There's something clearly wrong, if that's the situation that a person finds themselves in. But that's incredibly common. So then at the end of the day, they could also ask themselves, what did I do today that was in accord with the value I place on creativity? What did I do that exemplified creativity?

And then you should praise yourself and reinforce yourself for that and encourage yourself to do more of it in the future. What did I do that might have been contrary to that? Did I do anything that was lazy or ran against that value? And also, is there anything that I could do differently in the future? Are there any additional tasks that I could take on tomorrow that might give me more opportunity to exercise creativity or compassion or wisdom or whatever your core values happen to be? And again, that's kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of values work, but I think it's

a crucial first step for many people. I love the whole concept of the values work and the three questions that you mentioned, what did you do badly, what did you do well, what could you do differently? Those are the things that stood out to me when I read through your book on how to think like a Roman Emperor. You also had in that same chapter on contemplating the sage, at the very end, this idea of making two lists about what do you desire and then what qualities do you find most admirable. And I thought it was interesting that those tend to be very different types of lists. That happens a lot. So people are often very, one of the things, when you are doing

values work, I mean, there's two parts to it. One is clarifying your values. And then the other is changing your daily routine, changing your behavior so that you live more and are quarreled with them. Most of the people that I see believe that they've already clarified their values, but they haven't really changed their daily routine that much to align more consistently with it. Although in reality, I would say, again, controversially, you're kidding yourself if you think you've clarified your values and haven't actually tried to change your behavior. Because it's only by changing your behavior, usually, that you'll really figure out what your values truly are.

It's one thing to say that you value wisdom or compassion, but what does that really mean in practice? What does it look like when you're talking to your wife or kids or whatever? You're only going to really flesh it out and understand what it actually means by attempting to apply it in practice. So I call this the problem of pen and paper work. People say, I've spent ages working my values,

but it's in an abstract way. And it hasn't, you know, it's only through trial. error and carrying out behavioral experiments that we can really, I think, understand our values properly. So how do we reconcile then the aspirational values that we want to be important? You know, we may say reasoning really is the value that should be at the top of the list through which all the other values are filtered. But if our actions don't align with that, we have to be real with ourselves. Maybe we don't value that as much. How do we reconcile that? I think the challenge is that often our behaviour is driven by avoidance.

So the Stoics said, we should probably just mention briefly the Cardinal Virtues of Stoicism, which kind of relate to this question. So you might say, well, when you do values clarification work, people come up with lots of different values, right? So usually we do it in what's called a student-centred or a client-centred where you say, hey, what are your values, buddy? Have you thought about them? Let's jot down a list. what are the things that you want your life to stand for?

More indirectly, you might say, well, what do you admire in other people, as you were alluding to? And then what would happen if you behaved a bit more like the people that you really admire? Maybe then you'd admire yourself. And that might be the key to a certain type of fulfillment in life. So it can be, there's a number of different ways that this can benefit. people, one is, I think, realizing that they'll often discover that when people really clarify their values, there are common factors that we all share across cultures. So research on values, the big shocker, is that they're not as diverse as we might assume.

Most people throughout history have thought that courage was a good thing, you know, justice is good. Some people disagree with that. But the vast majority of people tend to arrive at relatively similar conclusions in the abstract. So we might all agree that justice or fairness is a good thing, but we might disagree about what it looks like in practice, right? The Stoic values are wisdom, justice, by the way, which includes for Stoic's kindness. So it's kindness and fairness. But then the other two values are temperance and courage. Now, the Stoics would say that wisdom is the core value.

Fairness and kindness are what wisdom looks like when we exercise it in relation to other people, individually and collectively. But there's a problem. Fear and desire get in the way of

living consistently in accord with wisdom and justice. So in order to actually embrace those values fully and consistently we're going to have to develop what I call the virtues of self-mastery. We're going to

need temperance to deal with our desires in moderation. We're going to need courage or endurance or resilience to deal with our fears. So the problem in many cases is that people don't live in accord

with their core values because either because they're living in accord with other people's values and following rules that they've internalized for other people or because they're scared, right? Or because they're addicted to or craving certain things. In many cases in therapy, it's what we call experiential avoidance that gets in the way of living in accord with your values. So basically, you know, we're doing stuff because we don't want to feel anxious.

And people with depression tend to engage in a lot of activity to avoid feelings of anxiety or sadness or other uncomfortable, unpleasant feelings. So what they might do all day in very extreme cases is someone might withdraw from contact with other people. They might lie in bed all day. They might smoke weed all day. They might play computer games all day. they might use porn compulsively so they're not doing these things

because they're in accord with their core values necessarily because that's what they want to be written on their tombstone they don't want that to be what their life is all about it's not something that they admire in other people so they're not really getting a sense of fulfillment from these activities

so why are they doing them they're doing them because they're distraction techniques that allow them to avoid confronting unpleasant thoughts and feelings right and so very simply when we're treating depression in particular it's about stopping

allowing avoidance to run your life stop running away from unpleasant thoughts and feelings and running into the arms of all these distraction techniques do you want your entire life just to be about all the multiple ways that you learn to distract yourself

from pain that you're experiencing, you know? You have to face the discomfort and pain. You have to face your sadness. You have to face your anxiety in order to make room for actually doing stuff that you find fulfilling in life. And honestly, that is the ultimate life hack, right? I mean, once you figure out what's important, focus becomes easy.

And, you know, everything gets easy. I am. My own personal experience with the years I was in the world, wilderness versus getting back on figuring out what's important to me. It's, it's transformative. And I, uh, I just want people to think about that. It's so important. Well, you know, one of the things that helps people achieve that realization, the other big theme in stoicism is death. Yeah. Right. So in many cases, it's almost as if we assume the prevailing values of our society. So we're born. We pop out into the world and we think, look around us and think, what's important?

And we think, oh, people seem really concerned with status and property. I guess that must be what life is all about. So we grow up. Before we get a chance to really reflect on things deeply, we're already caught up in the prevailing values of our society. And what we see around us is consumerism, celebrity culture, egotism, hedonism, materialism, like, that seems to be what we see on the outside. Maybe even if it's not what's actually going on in the inside,

It looks like life is a rat race, and it's all about making as much money as possible and maybe getting as many followers in social media as you possibly can. It's no surprise that throughout the ages, generation after generation, people have fallen into that trap and grown up feeling that that's what life is all about.

So how does anybody ever snap out of this trance? I think if it's not philosophy, for many people, it's a brush with death. And it might be their own death, if they find themselves in a dangerous situation or if they have a health scare or for younger people more often maybe their first brush with death is bereavement.

You know, it's maybe having a relative that dies. As time goes on, we see more people dying around us. And that might make us think, as it has throughout the ages, what's the point of all of this? What does it all mean? You know, do I want my life to just be about having earned as much money as possible? Do I want it my tombstone to say

I had a million followers in social media or $10 million in my bank account or something like that? Do those values seem absurd when I view them from the perspective of mortality? And so a brush with death is often, in reality, is often the thing that gives people a shake, a joke.

It snaps them out of this kind of complacency and makes them question their values at a deeper level. It makes them ask, what do I want my life to really stand for? Yeah, a few years ago, I had a very interesting experience. I had two friends get terminal cancer, and I shepherded both of them through to the extent you do as a friend. And one of them lived without knowing a virtue-based life. I mean, he was just a very solid man who pursued what he thought was important his whole life. And the other one was a lawyer friend who always had the best car and the best suits

and otherwise a vapid life, you know, multiple spouses and, you know, just lots of, lots of, lots of baggage. And it was so interesting because he was so miserable his through this last year and just so desperate to deny what he was going through. He never even acknowledged the experience he was going through to, you know, to experience that, you know. The mindfulness was gone to the very end. And the other guy, we would talk about books and life experiences. And it was almost, I don't want to say it was a pleasurable experience, but it was, it was an ending that I would like to emulate.

It was just so interesting to me. Neither one of them had any background about the things we're talking about today. but one lived a virtue-based life, one did not. And the way death came for them was completely different. I think the Stoics, for example, didn't believe that they were making up an original philosophy. In some ways, maybe there were technical things that they said. But they believed that they were describing some sort of common perennial wisdom that people throughout the ages and in different cultures potentially figure out for themselves.

like the Stoics saw traces of similar ideas in other cultures, other philosophies and poetry and tragedies they thought they were just bringing together ideas that are potentially accessible to everybody and so they, you know, for example, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, it would be no surprise to them you know, to look at people who had never heard of Stoicism

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and Oliver Relay. I wanted to mention a couple of other things briefly because I'd like to try and kind of do a little bit of a deeper dive into the values work because I think it's probably important that some of your listeners

but also be kind of concise and punchy about it. Two things I want to mention are it's possible for someone to be living in accord with their values or their virtues, but not benefit from it psychologically. So some people are, they're maybe doing things that are, they maybe have a job that they've chosen to do in order to benefit society, but they've kind of lost sight of the reason why they're doing it. That's not unusual. So sometimes you look at someone from the

outside and think, well, this guy's a doctor, right? Or it could be like a therapist. or somebody who runs a non-profit. And so it seems like it should be really fulfilling and philanthropic. But if we're not careful, we lose sight of how our behavior, our daily routine, our career actually connects with our core values. That's an odd thing, and it's not spoken about much, but it's pretty common. So we have to sometimes make a psychological effort to reconnect our core values with the activities that we're engaged in.

Otherwise, what we're doing might be good for society, but we're not really getting as much psychological benefit from it or as much fulfillment from it as we could. That's one issue that I wanted to mention. And the other one I want to mention, because again, I think it's kind of a problem with self-improvement literature. I find a lot.

I'm not sure exactly why this happens. But most of the clients that I see compartmentalize their self-improvement. I kind of alluded to that earlier in terms of things like journal. and meditation techniques and so on, as opposed to continual mindfulness. But with the values, almost every client initially

will tend to think in terms of their values relating to specific tasks. So they'll say, hey, I want to be creative or I want to be self-disciplined. So being creative looks like writing a book and being self-disciplined looks like going to the gym or something like that. So they start off thinking,

I need to introduce more of these tasks. and then I can tick that box and I can feel that I'm connecting with my core values. But in my experience, people who go deeper into this work arrive at a more paradoxical conclusion, which is that maybe their core values overlap with each other more than they originally realized. Maybe, for example, creativity requires self-discipline.

Maybe self-discipline actually requires creativity to some extent. You know, and the same for most of the other virtues. Socrates said all the virtues are one. We usually think of them as separate, but they're more intersecting than I think most people initially realize. But also the tasks, as people progress in living more consistently in accord with their values, in my experience, what usually happens is they see them as more pervasive. So I might have a client who says, man, I really want to do creative stuff, But we've just had a baby and changing the nappies or taking the baby to the doctor or cleaning the kitchen, you know, doing my taxi, all these kind of the like chores that I have to do every day get in the way of living in accord with my values.

But over time, they tend to see it differently and view their values as potentially being something like an attitude that they can bring to any situation. They can be stuck in a traffic jam, but connect with the value of creativity, even if it's just by taking time to reflect on what it means to them, or reminisce about times in the past when they exercised creativity. They start to think creativity or compassion or friendship, any of these virtues. It's not just something that's linked to specific tasks, but it's more of an attitude that I can bring to any task. And when they achieve that, I think that's a watershed moment for many.

people. They stop seeing certain tasks as being obstacles to their goal in life. And I guess the obstacle becomes the way in a sense. Everything becomes fuel to living in accord with the most important thing in life. Their fundamental goal of their core values. There's a beautiful passage in Tickna Hahn's book called The Miracle of Mindfulness. I don't know if you've ever read it or not. But he's a meditator and a Buddhist monk and a friend of his has children. And at the beginning of the book, he explains how he says to his friend, how are you doing with your meditation practice now that you have this child? And his friend says, well, it's the best thing that's ever happened. Now I have to learn how to be mindful as I change a diaper and as I feed the child. And then suddenly that

inflection point where you go from this is a specific practice to this is a lifestyle. And I think that really is kind of beautiful. You're not doing it right. If you're journaling and your kid comes in and says, can I play and you say, not now, daddy's journaling. You're not getting it, you know? And it links to what I said earlier

about this idea that people would just go and do some self-improvement journaling or meditation, and then they kind of forget about that for the rest of the day. So as opposed to the Stoics thought, we should be continually self-improving all day long every day in a sense. You know, to do that, we have to be observing ourselves.

Mindfulness isn't like a technique. It's a change in our being. It's a change in our identity in the way that we experience ourselves. It's pervasive, you know. And aligning our life with our core values is the same. It's something, you know, it's not something that we do here and there. It's a shift in our whole way of being

that it's pervasive throughout life. and therein lies the road to focus, I would argue. That's maybe what focus is about. If you read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, you know, one other things, he keeps coming back time and time and time again throughout that book to this idea of bringing his attention back to his fundamental goal in life, the thing that he's on reflection identified as being the most important thing in life,

which I guess is the cultivation of wisdom and d'arate. like he sees life is constantly trying to drag him away to do life is all a bit distraction right if you like it's a kind of constant struggle against things trying to lead us away and distract our attention from what we're here to do like from what matters the most to us from what actually gives us a sense of fulfillment you know to go back to the beginning that's what i love about that book so much he's the leader of the most powerful empire on the planet and he views his goal in life is to become to the best version of himself. Yeah, he commanded about 140,000 troops on the Danube frontier. You would never guess that from reading the meditations. He talks

in it about quite mundane things, you know? There are many old things about that book. There are specific details in it, but also he often writes in a kind of artfully vague way. So the most famous passage in the book is

Meditations 2.1, near the beginning, start of the second chapter. And then he says every morning when you wake up, tell yourself that you're going to meet petty and treacherous and deceitful people. And then he goes on to talk about how he's going to deal with that. But he doesn't say, tell us every morning when you wake up, you're going to meet those annoying German envoys or like those obsequious senators that really drive you crazy.

But he's not that specific about it. And so because of that, we can read it. and people will love that book because he's vague enough that we naturally project ourselves into his position so we think, yeah, you know, that annoying guy is the dude

that works at the desk across from me or, you know, like he's talking about my mother-in-law, you know, or one of my other relatives or something like that. Like, so because he's written it in a slightly odd, kind of vague way at times,

it allows us to apply it, instinctively, Without even thinking about it, we project ourselves into the book and imagine how it would apply to our own lives. Well, you really help me unlock it with your book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And I would also recommend folks pick up how to think like Socrates. That's your most recent book. Donald, tell us a little bit about your podcast. My podcast is pretty intermittent. I just find that I stumbled into doing it a little bit.

But I know so many authors and academics through the work that I do. I run a lot of conferences and run an organisation a non-profit called the Plato's Academy Centre. So there were just too many opportunities to say no to for me to interview people that I was interested in what I'm hoping to do in the future

because I'm working in anger. I think it would be a cool idea to have maybe a series of six episodes or 12 episodes where I interview different psychologists and philosophers who are experts on anger and maybe have like a series where we do a real deep dive

into that from a number of different perspectives. But yeah, that's, it's relatively informal. Sometimes I interview people. Sometimes I have them on for more of a back and forth where we're kind of sharing ideas. But it was quite a spontaneous thing, and it seems to have taken off. Like, it became reasonably successful, unintentionally. Well, I find it very insightful. We're going to link it in the show notes.

And I do, I'm interested as you pursue the topic of anger. I feel like that you've got a lot to say on it. Sounds like you might have a book in the works on that as well. Yeah, I'm working on a book about anger. I've been working on it for a couple of years, but it will still be some time in the work. I think the Stoics have a lot to say about it. It's one of those areas where there's actually a lot of psychological research

and a lot of philosophical literature about anger, that people aren't told about it they don't have access to that information so often there are things that psychologists would take for granted about anger that might

come as a revelation to people the information isn't really reaching the general public and you know we can say a great deal about the implications of changing our attitude towards anger for our whole way of life.

And the social implications as well, I mean, I think it should be stating the obvious wars are fought because of anger. People are murdered because of anger. The internet is rife with angry people arguing and trolling online. If we learned how to deal with anger in a more rational and philosophical way, our society would be quite different.

Well, gang, we are the Focus Podcast. you can find us at relayed out of them slash focus if you'd like to join as a member of deep focus supporter you can do that at relayed outfm slash focus we're going to be talking to donald today about how he finds focus in his life um also thank you to our sponsors today one password zoc doc incognin indeed and we'll see you next time