Good Life Project - Steve Magness | The Truth About Toughness (a better way to do hard things)

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Adults do this thing — and maybe you've already done it yourself since you've grown up — where they go out of their way to remind children that life will come with its difficult moments, so we should revel in the good, easy times while they last. Ease, we learn, is the state we should most aspire to.But, what about those hard things, moments, and experiences? Isn’t there value in them, even if they’re not fun in the moment? Aren’t they important in not only making us who are, in fostering confidence, competence, and resilience? In making life truly good, and equipping us with the resilience to get through the times when it’s not? And, what about that age-old notion of toughness? What’s really going on there? Can we be tough, but also gentle, vulnerable, open? Today's guest, Steve Magness, a world-renowned expert on performance, well-being, and sustainable success, joins me to dive deeper into these questions and explore the fascinating intersections of success, toughness, doing hard things, and science. Steve is co-author of the best-selling book Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox. His most recent work is Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. In his coaching practice, Steve works with executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes on their performance and mental skills. He's worked with Olympians and professional athletes across the NBA and MLB, and his writing has appeared in various notable outlets such as Forbes, Sports Illustrated, and Men's Health. Toughness is a word that comes with certain unfortunate, heavily machismo-fueled perceptions that might not be accurate or even helpful to us as we strive for success or try to work our way through hard things. In this conversation, you'll hear us dissect the words "grit" and "toughness" as Steve offers his take on the matter, defining grit as the ability to create space for navigating your doubts, insecurities, and feelings that can get in the way of the desired outcome. And in the end, we explore the importance of training our brains to escape the shock of difficulties and forge on until the end — even with the complicated feelings and all. You can find Steve at: Website | The Growth Equation podcast | On Coaching podcastIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Angela Duckworth about grit, resilience, and adaptability.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes.Ka'Chava: 10% OFFFinancial Feminist Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's just something about pushing our comfort zone, doing difficult things, doing things that make us feel alive, that just for whatever reason, just the quirk of human biology, just contributes something that is almost like needed and that cultivates and pushes us forward. And honestly, like that's kind of what it's all about. So adults do this thing, and maybe you've already done it yourself since, well, you're probably grown up. I'm working on that myself, where we go out of our way to kind of remind kids or quote, younger folks in our life, that life will come with its difficult moments. So we should just revel in the good and the easy times while they last. Ease, having no resistance, no struggle,

nothing hard. We learn, well, that's the state that we should most aspire to. That's when things are good. And as you're a kid, that's when it comes most naturally. So just enjoy it and try and avoid anything that challenges you. But what about those hard things and moments and experiences? Well, isn't there value in them, even if they're not fun in the moment? Aren't they important in not only making us who we are, but in fostering confidence and competence and resilience and making life truly good and equipping us with what we need to get through the times when it's not so easy or good? And what about that age-old notion of toughness? What's really going on there? Can we be tough, but also gentle or vulnerable or open?

Maybe all the above. Well, today's guest, Steve Magnus, a world-renowned expert on performance, wellbeing, and sustainable success. He joins me to dive deeper into these questions and explore the fascinating intersections of success, toughness, doing hard things, and science. So Steve is the co-author of the best-selling book, P-Performance and the Passion Paradox. His most recent work is Do Hard Things, Why We Get Resilience Wrong, and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness. In his coaching practice, Steve works with executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes on their performance and mental skills. He's worked with Olympians and professional athletes across

the NBA, Major League Baseball, and his writing has appeared in various notable outlets like Forbes, Sports Illustrated, and Men's Health. And toughness is this word that comes with certain unfortunate, heavily sort of machismo-fueled perceptions that aren't really accurate or helpful as we strive for success in parts of our life or try to work through hard things. In this conversation, you'll hear us dissect words like grit and toughness as Steve offers a different take on the matter, defining grit as the ability to create space for navigating your doubts and insecurities and feelings that can get in the way of the desired outcome

and really re-imagining toughness as something that's more expansive. And in the end, we explore the importance of training our brains to escape the shock of difficulties and forge on until the end, even when the complicated feelings hit and try and derail us. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the

thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. The notion of doing hard things, I think, is something that so many people are grappling with these days. And you've devoted so much of your energy to helping people sort of like at the elite levels of athletics, entertainment, entrepreneurship, business perform at these extraordinary levels. And you yourself, of course, have your own background as an elite level performer that you draw from. I have this sort of meta level fascination before you even get into the notion of doing hard things and what makes it easier and harder and some of the fallacies that we've been building around, my bigger curiosity is this. Why does it even matter?

I mean, in the context of living a good life, that we say yes to hard things, what does it give to our lives? What does it add to our experience of being human to say yes on a persistent basis to genuinely hard things? Yeah, that's a really good question. So for this, I'm going to turn to help from philosopher Joseph Campbell, who is famous for, of course, his work in The Hero's Journey. I remember his conversations with Bill Moyers and reading the book afterwards. And he has this wonderful section where he talks about peak experiences, where he's just talking about things that make us feel alive, right? And here's this eminent, again, well-respected

academic philosopher and this great, exquisite person. And I'm like, what is he going to talk about? Like, what's his experience? And Bill Moyers asked, like, well, what are your most salient, like peak experiences? And he talks about a track meet at Penn Relays he ran in college. How many years in his past at that point? Right. At this point, it's gosh, I don't know, like 50, 60 years ago, you know, it's, it's way back. And I just love that because it kind of gets that at this answer to this question, which is, there's just something about pushing our comfort zone, like doing difficult things, doing things that make us feel alive, that just for whatever reason, just the quirk of human biology,

that just contributes something that is almost like needed and that cultivates and pushes us forward and like makes us feel alive. And I think, honestly, like that's kind of what it's all about. Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned, he references this thing so far back in the past. You know, I often think, you know think part of the reason that we're here, each individual probably has their own quote, unique reason for being, but I think a more universal thing that most of us experience is there's some sort of intrinsic drive for growth that exists in all of us. Rather than stasis, it's sort of like if you ask the average person, it feels like they haven't grown in any meaningful way for a substantial amount of time, how they're doing, my sense is they're going to respond in

some way, not positive. But if you ask a typical person who's actually really experienced some sort of major growth, even if it was brutally hard, how they're doing, they're probably going to respond in a much more positive way. Is that your sense also? I think you're spot on. That need for growth and progress is at the heart of so many of the different psychological theories on well-being. You look at self-determination theory, which is on motivation and such, is that competency, which is progress and growth, is a central component of that. In fact, I was looking at research just the other day that showed that when you take people who are not satisfied with life and unhappy and put them through essentially a course that says, stretch yourself, do some sort

of activity for the next two weeks that is just a little bit beyond your comfort zone and you track the results of that, their life satisfaction goes up. And it goes up even more if that activity that stretched themselves was something that was beyond themselves, meaning it helped other people or helped society. So I think you're spot on. There's just something about progress and growth that is central to human nature. Yeah. I mean, I think it's fascinating because on the one hand, I feel we all are wired that way in some level. But on the other hand, if you look at, I have no statistic, I have no actual data on this, but my sense is, and I'm curious whether you have data on this,

that if you look at sort of like the percentage of the prevalence of people in the general population who regularly say yes to pushing themselves in a fairly meaningful way on the level where they feel uncomfortable, they're stepping into a space of uncertainty where the stakes are pretty high, that most of us run from that. It's sort of like this much smaller number of people who persistently say yes to that. But most of us, there's something about that experience that we're wired to not want it, even though the net effect of moving through it

and succeeding through it is profoundly positive. I think a lot of it is because our brain is almost like overprotective. Often we think about this in the physical sense. We think like, oh, of course our brain would protect us from a lion outside or whatever have you. Like, of course it freaks out if it hears a rustle in the bush and like that could be a snake or what have you. But the same thing occurs with, I think, our psychology is that a threat is a threat. So often these like difficult, uncomfortable things like they're threats to our ego, our sense of self, our status, go the easy path to shy away. That's where our brain is pushing us because our brain's job is safety and security. So of course we go that way. But I think what we've experienced is and what we know is that oftentimes the other path, the hard path

is where growth and development comes. So it's really you're sitting at this like nuanced, difficult problem where it's like, oh, my inclination is to always, you know, choose the easy path. But man, there's some good stuff over here, even though it's going to be really challenging. And I think even in situations where we don't get to choose, the research bears this out, that often going through life's most difficult or harrowing situations or losing a loved one, like, yes, those experiences are hard, but often we can come out of those experience with growth that is positive. And I think there's something lovely about that message that during our most difficult times, like there's still something good that can come out of it. I wonder if it's important to make a distinction between things that are going to drop into all

of our lives organically, whether we want them or not, whether we sought them out, like the loss of somebody or, you know, a brutal financial circumstance or like, or illness or whatever it may be and how we feel if we're able to move through that and grow through it rather than be destroyed by it. And the distinction between that and the nature of an experience that's really hard, that has the opportunity for growth, that would not organically necessarily have to be something that would fall into our path that we actually actively seek out and say, oh, I'm going to go do that. Because I feel like we're all going to fall at some point, we're all going to have to deal with that former. But it's a different thing to

say yes to that second scenario. Yes, I would agree. And there's science and psychology behind this is when we have to make the choice, it's almost like we open up our mind to be trained. So if I'm actively choosing this, then it's almost like I'm inviting myself to say, okay, this is opportunity for growth or development. This is opportunity to change your perspective, where if it just happens to us, it's kind of we go down a different path, right? We're just like, we have no choice. We're just like, we have no choice. We're just like, we're going to get through this one way or the other. But if we actively choose, and again, there's research especially centered around this idea

of control, which is if you're making the choice, you have some sense of control. Often when something just happens to us, like we don't have really control. We just have to get through it and when we have control a couple of good things happen a we're able to persist longer and difficult things if we feel like we have a choice in it right it's why micromanaging in the office is often so bad because it takes away our control. But the second thing is it opens us up to finding meaning and finding purpose in the thing itself. And often when it's just thrown upon us, yes, we can find meaning and purpose. But when we have that choice, it's almost like an extra kick, an extra power in there. The brain almost opens up and says, okay, we can train hopefulness

instead of helplessness. Let's get on board. Yeah. Do you feel like control is a bit of a double-edged sword? So on the one hand, we have enough control where we have enough agency that we can be intentional and say yes to this thing that we think might bring scary stuff, but also opportunity for growth and amazingness and connection and all these things. But at the same time, if we are so controlled by the need for control, we're never going to say yes to something where we don't perceive a risk of failure. And by only saying yes to things where we feel like we have 100% control over every part of it, over the means, over the outcome, we're saying yes to the things that are almost effectively least likely to make any difference to us. Yeah, so what you're getting at here is the nuance of all of this. And this is what I really wrestled in in the book is that we so often want the simple explanations. We want it to be like left or right, A or B,

and not either, or not both and. And the problem is most things are both and. So with control, absolutely. The way I like to explain this is using the athletic example. If you look at athletes who have like rituals, for example, like a baseball player who walks up to the batting box and does the same thing every time, puts on the glove the same way, like swings the

bat the same way before he's ready. The reason they do that is for control, is it gives them a little control over a situation that is like kind of out of their hands to the degree. So it wrestles back. It says, oh, if I do all these things, then I feel in control of my body and what I can do. Well, that can be good, but it can also be bad because rituals can backfire

because they become this thing where, oh, I have to do this. And if I don't do this, I'm automatically gonna fail. And I think that is that central part of that control issue, which you're getting at, is that it can be great, but it can also lead to almost like this area in the space where you are no longer in charge, but the thing is. And while you're thinking like, oh, I have control of all this thing, really, you're just subservient to like, oh, I need to do this thing instead of like, I want to do this thing. And once we switch to like need to too much, we kind of find ourselves in a bad spot. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like most of the magic happens when you have enough control to say yes to the first step in when the stakes matter to you. And I feel like most of the magic happens when you have enough control to say yes to the

first step in, when the stakes matter to you. And then there's enough that's out of your control after that, that there's the opportunity for surprise. An author myself, I remember writing a book a decade ago now, over a decade ago, about uncertainty and how we manage uncertainty. And I realized that I had approached the book by writing a detailed outline. Like I had mapped out every single idea, every single topic, the structure of the book, everything. And then I figured I'll just proceed to largely fill in the outline, right? I'm writing a book about uncertainty, living with uncertainty and taking action in the face of uncertainty. And everything I'm doing is designed

to eliminate uncertainty from the process. And I'm feeling okay, but then I'm talking to all of them. I'm introducing all these people to perform at the highest levels in all these different domains. And to the one, they're telling me, you can do something good

by sort of like really controlling things. He's like, but then to the one, they would all, I would talk to somebody and they'd be like, but the exceptional, the exceptional experiences in life, the exceptional, the world-class things, the things that, that have the opportunity to change you as a human being, they only happen when you let go of that. It's the great irony in the world, right? In that, again, you see this all the time in sport. Is it often to get through that, that barrier, that breakthrough, you have to let

go and you just have to trust. Or you have to relax and let go at the time when you think you're supposed to put forth the most effort, the most control. And I love sprinting as the example here, because if you watch Usain Bolt run, you know, when he was at his peak, 100 meter world record holder, like he was so relaxed doing it compared to everybody else. And you're like, you're running, I don't know, 27 miles per hour as a human, exerting so much of the world outside of sport, we think like, oh, the way forward is, you know, control everything, outline everything, put forth all this effort, like try really hard. And yes, that can work. But at certain stages, like you just have to trust and let go and relax into the into the difficult moments and not exert effort and control.

And that, as you said, is often where the kind of magic happens, but it's a really difficult space to get into. Yeah, no, completely. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. I want to pull us out a little bit and talk about talking about the ideas of doing hard

things and why it can be important for us to do it, how it can make us feel and the notion of control. Notion of control is sort of like a subset of a bigger topic that you've been focusing on a lot. And this is the idea of toughness. Some people may have heard the phrase mental toughness or called it that before. We look at this thing as, well, it's central in our ability to go out there in the world and do hard things, right? But your lens is yes and. The way that we have thought about the notion of toughness, it's just really completely broken for a long time. Tell me more about how and why. Sure. So a lot of our view of toughness,

and I did this, I went out and surveyed over a hundred, you know, people from all walks of life said, Hey, what, you know, tell me what your image of toughness is, of someone who's tough. And almost inevitably, the same answers come back. They're like, oh, someone who's got a lot of strength and power and control and just kind of grits their teeth through whatever challenge and doesn't show any signs of weakness and all of these things. And I think that's our traditional conceptualization of toughness. And if you trace it all the way back, or at least from what I could tell, it comes from twofold. It comes from like our conception, our popular conception of the military, largely coming out of the World Wars and other stuff. And then how that translated into sport. And I think both of those conceptualizations, you know, they're false. They're almost like the wrong history. Because if you look at what the military actually does, it's not what our perception of it is. It's not, oh, we're going

to just throw these people in the deep end and see what works. That's at least not the modern conception of it. Maybe back in the day it was. But that's kind of our conception of toughness is let's throw people into the deep end, see if they can do this really difficult thing. And if they can, they're tough. If they don't, you know, you're weak or soft. So what? We can't do anything about it. My view of toughness is and which aligns with our kind of modern conceptualization, ironically, in the military of what they do is that's not reality. Reality is that working your way through hard things is a skill that everyone can develop. And that skill is dependent not on gritting your teeth, not on pushing through, but creating the space so that you can navigate the doubts, the insecurities, the feelings, the emotions that inevitably pop up because we're human beings. We all experience them. So it's having that space so that you can almost work with your body and biology instead of just saying, hey, we're going to ignore all this and just try and bulldoze through whatever is in front of us. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that from your lens,

our notion of what makes a human being tough comes from sort of generations old ideas that are sort of a misimpression of the military and how they would train. I think like so many of us have heard stories about, you know, like SEALs training camp and stuff like this and think that it's all about training toughness. But in fact, we're cherry picking this one thing and telling the story of this is what it's about. But we're actually missing probably 95% of the rest of what's actually happening and being taught and being trained, right? And then just saying, well, it's this one thing that we hear about when it's that final

challenge and to see if you can survive rather than, I guess the phrase that you use is stress inoculation. Right, exactly. And what happens is we kind of pick up on almost the movie version of it, which is like, oh, yes, they go through this very challenging task, you know, in the Navy Seals, it's hell week, and they see if they survive. And we say, oh, that's how we create toughness. But we don't realize that's not how the Navy SEALs or any of the military creates or develops this ability. That's just one selection thing to see like, oh, where are you at? So we can see if like you're at the lead of the elite so that we can then develop you as a soldier or special forces or what have you. If you look at the research and then talk to those who have been through various branches of the military, the US military is the nation's largest employer of sports psychologists. And I think that's such a fascinating stat because what is sports psychology except,

hey, how do we handle difficult moments, anxiety, all of that stuff? And if you look at, and again, talk to people who've been through it, there's courses, there's stress inoculation, which is essentially, hey, we're going to train you how to cope with different things. Here are all these various skills. Once you have the skills or we've taught them, then we're going to put you in difficult moments so that you can learn how to use them. And then afterwards, we're going to review what happened so that we can like fix, learn and grow. And it's it's teaching. the rest of the world is like, we've taken that whole process of like, hey, here's all the tools, let's teach you how to use them to like, oh, let's go put you through this incredibly challenging

thing and see if you survive without giving you any tools whatsoever to manage or navigate this challenge. And without afterwards reviewing or learning from it at all. And when you do that, you don't get growth. You don't get toughness at all. You just kind of get discouragement from like being thrown in the deep end. Yeah. I mean, I feel like what you're describing, it's based on an underlying assumption that maybe it's an unspoken assumption, which is toughness is something you either have or you don't, is that it's not actually a trainable thing. So our job is to just put you in an extreme environment, see who survives. Those are the tough people. And then we're going to take them and we're going to groom them and make

them even tougher and give them more trials. And those who don't have it kind of don't have it. It's not starting from a place saying, this is actually a skill set. And maybe some people arrive with their brains wired in a way where they're just able to tolerate certain things differently. But there's also a lot of it that's literally trainable. And if you just sort of like you're trying to create a weed out test to see who's got it or not, you're eliminating so many people who would be phenomenal contributors to whatever it is that you're doing together. If you also assume that they were great human beings, he'd want to be on a team or, you

know, like in a family or whatever you're doing and that we can all learn these skills. Exactly. A hundred percent. And I think for whatever reason, this idea that toughness is something that you have or you don't is kind of ingrained in our society when, again, all the research and experience tells us that that's not true. You might be a little bit better naturally at different components of resilience or toughness, but the reality is all of it can be trained. I myself have years of data on this. So as kind of just a science nerd in my own work, helping endurance athletes and world class endurance athletes, I'd give them every validated like toughness questionnaire imaginable at various points in their career. I'd put them through the tests that researchers kind of use to develop or understand like pain tolerance and different things like that. And what I saw is, again, that sometimes the fastest of the fastest people coming in, like scored very low on those

components. And you'd be like, but you're one of the best in the world. Like, you're supposed to be tough. And I'd be like, you know, this is how it is. Okay, I don't know. But then over time, like working on things like you'd see that ability improve. And I think that's where we've made a mistake by saying either have it or you don't. And that just doesn't reflect reality. And like you said, whenever we go down that you have it or you don't mode, you lose out on talented people who are capable of amazing things. Here, I think one of the most surprising things in my book that I found in researching is there's this famous story of Paul Bear Bryant when he was at Texas A&M and he held this now famous camp called the Junction Boys. And it was just like whoever survived was on the team. And the popular story goes like, oh, it created this tough team that's great. Well, that team won like one game that year. So it didn't work that year. The flip side of this, if you look at all the players who quit during this weed out and you're like, oh, those people are weak. Some went on to be

professional players in NFL. Some went on to play like high level baseball. One went on to literally become like a war hero. So you're sitting there and be like, did you really weed out the weak athletes? Or did they just say, hey, this is crazy and this sucks. I'm going to go find something better to do to apply my talent to. And you just miss these highly talented, highly motivated players who maybe could have been great for your team. As you're sharing this, part of my mind is wondering how much of our understanding of this sort of like the old narrative of toughness is really about who has been in control of that narrative for generations. What you're describing is a very masculine, machismo, ego-driven description of what it

means to be, quote, capital T tough. But at the same time, I'm thinking about like this single parent with three kids who's working two jobs just to get by. That is a hard, hard thing. Like you can think of all these day-to-day things, but at the same time, you're like, how do you get through that? That person is probably as, if not tougher than so many of like these elite performers in different domains. And there are probably so many more of those folks like all over the world who are just getting through every day in really, really hard ways. And the lens that they're bringing to getting through those days is not what you're describing. It's a whole different paradigm. And I guess

that's sort of like where you go with this. It's like, okay, so let's do a little bit of myth busting around sort of like this old school paradigm of toughness. But then what is it really? Like if it's not that, if it's not this sort of like repress and ignore and suppress and fear and dominance and bravado based thing, then the question becomes, what is it? And you talk about this notion of sort of like a new model built based on these four different pillars. Yeah, definitely. I think you're spot on. I think that, again, I think so much of this comes from who dominates society and society in different areas. So that's why we have to hold on to those ideas. But if you look at, okay, so it's not this thing that we thought, what is it? Well, I kind of break it down into four pillars,

as you said. And I think the first one is something we briefly talked about, which is ditch the facade, embrace reality, which essentially means the old model said, you have no weakness. You just fake it till you make it. You just show confidence. Don't pay attention to doubts. My model, the new model says, accept what you're capable of. Life is going to be tough. Like when you get through difficult moments, you're gonna have all sorts of doubts and insecurities. That's normal. You don't need the bravado. You need just this kind of quiet inner strength instead of focusing on the external, the outer strength. The second pillar I use is listen to your body, which is, again, old model says like, don't listen to your feelings,

no crying in baseball, man up, all those things that we all know. The science and psychology tells us the opposite, which is like really tough and resilient people are literally experts at listening to their body. They have this phenomenal ability to understand what their feelings and emotions and their inner voice are kind of telling them and to understand, hey, is this something I should listen to or is this something that I should pass on by? And then the third pillar is I call it respond instead of react, which is, again, so much of toughness traditionally is just like react, like in that moment, just go, go, go. And what I try to do is say, hey, we make our best decisions when our mind is steady. So when you're a soldier out on the battlefield, you don't want your head on a swivel all over the place. You want to keep your head on straight so that you can pay attention to the things that are important. The same goes for the rest of us, which I call that responding discomfort, which is essentially the environment around us creates or allows us to do really difficult things.

Often we think of toughness as like this individual component of I've got it or I don't. Right. But the reality is our environment supports and allows us to take on challenges. So if we have the environment and support around us that says, hey, you can take risks, you can fail, you can mess up, and that's okay. It's not the end of the world. We're more likely to take on difficult things and to persist because we're essentially in this mode where we're playing to win instead of playing out of this fear of failure and playing not to lose.

And for 99% of us, we perform better when we're playing to win and not out of this fear of failure state. So those are the brief summary of how I redefine the new model. Yeah. So let's dive into each one of those four because I'm curious. There are things So let's dive into each one of those four, because I'm curious, there are things that really pop out about each one of those four different elements. Like, so pillar one, you described ditch the facade, embrace reality. So this is about not being delusional, you know, and which is interesting to me because I think in

the game of toughness and trying to perform at your top levels, there is some guidance that says anything that is negative, completely eliminate from your mind. Focus entirely on you being 100% successful, you obliterating any obstacles. In fact, any obstacles don't exist. You are above them. You're beyond them. And rather than saying, let's be absolutely completely realistic about the scenario and about the challenge and about you, like your own personal capabilities, it's saying the traditional

model says, let's be as delusional as because we're going to, quote, need that to get through something so hard. And you're saying the science is actually like the exact opposite. Yeah, it is. It's delusion works on very easy things that you're already capable of doing. Delusion typically fails whenever you come up to that like really challenging moment and your brain realizes is like, hey, this was supposed to be easy. This was supposed to I was supposed to get this. I was supposed to have this. Your brain says, this isn't reality.

So I'm just going to sound the alarm and your alarm goes off like tenfold. Again, a friend who's in the military put it like this. He said, a little bit of doubt keeps me sharp. If I don't have that doubt, it's almost like I give myself permission to like, oh, just check out for a little bit. And during life's most difficult moments, like we want to be focused and checked in.

So I took that concept and I said, okay, great, this applies. And the research validates that concept, which shows that essentially we need a high degree of overlap between our perception of the difficulty of the demand we're facing and the reality of that demand we're facing. Now, we might be able to get away with like a tiny bit, a little bit like, oh, we have a little bit more confidence that we can do this than we're really capable of. That's not a problem. But when there's not enough overlap, when there's it's too far askew,

things go wrong. Our brain is primed for freaking out, seeing whatever we're doing as a threat instead of a challenge. So the best thing we can do is, as I said, like embrace reality and see the reality of whatever it is we're facing. Yeah. It's interesting that the notion of being realistic, like real accurate appraisal and the context of toughness is fascinating to me. I remember years ago seeing research in the domain of entrepreneurship and startups. Researcher basically sat down with a whole bunch of people who had started companies, founded companies, and it was a chunk of years down the road. And they were successful. They had sort of gotten through the trough of sorrow and they were in a good place. And they asked them some version of, had you known how hard this was going to be before

you started? Would you have said yes to it? And many of them said no, that it was so much more brutal than they had ever imagined that had they known going into it, they wouldn't have actually ever done it. On the one hand, it's like, you're probably a lot less likely to succeed if you're not good at this, like, you know, the craft or the skill of accurate appraisal in the beginning. So you can really respond to the hard things when they happen. At the same time, like, then you take studies like that and you say a lot of

the things that exist that are extraordinary in the world of business or things that help us or companies might not actually exist if people made their decisions entirely on accurate appraisals of how easy or hard this particular thing is going to be. So here's where we get back to that nuance. And for this answer, I like to use the example of the man who led the US, the country, through its most difficult period, Abraham Lincoln. And if you study Lincoln or read the scholars who do, they'll essentially tell you he had a lot of hope for the future, right? Where he's like, we can do this.

We can unite the country. We can, you know, at some point in slavery, maybe not today, but at some point we'll end this. But in the here and now, he was almost like tragic. It was just like so realistic in the Civil War and being like, this is really difficult, like almost melancholy or depressed through much of the war, unfortunately. And I remember one of his biographers put it as he was a tragic optimist. at what you're talking about is if you're going into entrepreneur, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you need some sort of at least a decent amount of optimism to say, hey, this thing is really going to be difficult, but I'm going to figure my way out. So it's almost like the link and the hope for the future. But as you're going through those challenges, you have to be realistic

on, okay, how can I handle this? Am I going to get through this next phase? Do I need to pivot, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that kind of balance is maybe kind of getting at is accurate appraisal is maybe it's like hope over the long term, but like in the moment of like, hey, what's the next challenge and how do I get through this? Yeah. It's like on a day-to-day basis, absolute clarity, absolute reality. I get that. One of the things you talk about under this pillar also is this idea of knowing it's basically knowing when to hold the knowing when to fold, right? Like when do you throw in the cards? Like when is it just hard, but still possible? Or when is it like when you kind of done, you bring up this, the concept of learned helplessness, which is this notion that we all

start out from a place of hopefulness and possibility, but through conditioning, you know, like many of us learn that in fact, like we don't have enough control over the circumstance, no matter what we do, we're not going to be able to actually get what we want. So we just kind of give up. I've gone deep into this topic because I was fascinated by it. You know, this was based out of original research, I think was in the late became much more focused on neurology and sort of like neuroscience and neuropsychology and re-examined it from a neurological perspective, this concept of learned helplessness and kind of turned the original research on his head. And what he said was when you actually look at what's happening in the brain, and I'm so curious on what your take is on this, he said, we assumed that we all start from a place of optimism and possibility and through experiences that essentially train us

that nothing we do is gonna matter. We learn helplessness. He said, it's actually the exact opposite when you look at what's happening in people's brains is that the brain assumes helplessness when exposed to adverse conditions or challenges. It's that the power and the agency side that we actually have to learn, which is kind of disheartening, you know, to think that like,

is our actually innate state one of helplessness? And it's only through experience that we learn a state of possibility and power and agency and hopefulness. Yes, I love that story because it, again, it almost brings it full circle. And my take is, I think it was Mayer who said, essentially, like, we have to train, you know, part of the brain to essentially send the message that, like, hey, we have the situation under control. We can do something about it. And I think, you know, while some of that is disheartening, I think it, you know, in my view is why this book is called Do Hard Things is it's not only about the toughness.

It's about, holy crap, we have to train our brain to come online and like say hey we've got this we're under control so to me it comes back again to that nuance of how do we train that hopeful muscle how do we develop that in their original research the dog jumps over the little barrier so that it escapes the shock. Like we have to be able to train ourselves to escape that shock. And I think that's where, again, this nuance and contrast comes is in one hand, I'm saying almost like toughness, like we need to encapsulate some of these maybe Eastern views and like create space and bring down some of this masculinity. But at the other hand, I'm saying, hey, wait a minute, like it's not like, you know, just create space and don't do anything about it. We actually

have to train this muscle. So it's important that we embrace discomfort and take on challenges. And as I said, often like train this sense of control so that, feel like we can do something about these difficult moments. Yeah. And what a powerful notion. If we start from the assumption that the baseline state for many people is a sense of powerlessness functionally, that doesn't have to be the way that we live, that that's actually reversible, you know, that we can train ourselves into a place of believing that we have control, the ability to affect an outcome by our own effort and thoughts and actions. Then what does that tell us also about what's the role as we step into sort of like grownup life? If we're a leader, what is the role? If we're a parent, it's part of our job actually to sort of like start from this baseline assumption and say, okay, part of what I really want to do is create experiences that will train this sense of agency and power because I'm going to start from the assumption that it's not necessarily innately there in people. So let's actually create what we need to help sort of install this in the individuals that we really want to see

thrive and succeed. Exactly. And going back to a point we made earlier, this is again, another example of this ability is a trained ability. It's a skill you can learn and develop. And maybe that we all have to learn and develop. And I love your take on, well, what's our responsibility in parenting? Because my wife is a elementary school teacher with has covered kindergarten and first grade. And so I learned a lot about this from her, which she essentially has told me is like, you've got to give these kids like the space to learn and grow and like, take on things that they might not be able to. In fact, I'll give you the behind the scenes on book writing here is the title of this book went through so many iterations and I was struggling with it.

My editor was struggling with it. And it wasn't until I talked to my wife while she was teaching during the pandemic. She was teaching from home when they were virtual. And I'm like overhearing or talking to her students. And you know, one kid's complaining about something and she's like, you know, little Jimmy, like, remember, you can do hard things. And I was like, that's it. That's what we're trying to do. So I do think we have this wonderful responsibility, which is not just so much of the world is like, oh, how do we protect our children? How do we protect our

grownups, everybody? It's how do we put people in the place where they can stretch outside of their comfort zone and kind of figure things out? And I think it's not only kids. I think it's also adults. Because if you look at in the modern workplace, often what we do is we, again, micromanage and take away choice from people and say, hey, just do these tasks and get them done and don't give them any room to move outside of that. And I think, again, what does that do? It doesn't train that hopeful muscle that we need to. We've got to give people within some parameters the freedom and space to explore. Yeah, which is one of the reasons I really dislike this popular categorization that's happened in organizations and business over the last, I want to say a couple of decades, which is like, you know, they're trying to sort of like rapidly identify the quote, high potential people in the organization so they can give them all of their energy and promote them up higher. And I'm like, that is so absurd to me. It's sort of like what you're saying is we want to take the people who are sort of like easily training themselves to do this thing, assuming that it's innate and just promote them along rather than saying the universe of humanity

is high potential. The failure isn't theirs if they're not performing at the level. The failure is ours because we haven't actually figured out how to train the skills and the practices and the lenses that would let everyone perform at that level of potential. It's this pet peeve in organizations that I have because it really creates this false categorization that I think just, A, it's wrong, but it also, like you're labeling a large percentage of humanity as being less than when in fact they're not less than at all. For some reason, they're either disengaged or don't have the skills or some blend of a whole bunch of different things. But I look at that categorization that happens literally on a daily basis in thousands of organizations,

and it drives me a little bonkers. I'm right there with you. I think often what they do is they essentially train apathy in a lot of people. And then they blame those people for like, oh, you're not motivated. You're not working hard. It's like, well, you created this environment where you labeled me as someone who had no future, who can't make progress, who can't rise up, who doesn't have the talent. So if I'm receiving those messages every day, all day, what do you think is going to happen to people? And I think that's where it's, again, it's, you're spot on is, how do we create the environments that allow people to grow and fulfill their potential and give them the skills to do so, versus taking the what I call the cheap

and easy route, which is, oh, I'm just going to like identify a couple people, select them and then forget about everybody else. And that just does, you know, it does everybody a disservice. And again, I'll go back to my wife is elementary school teacher. Like they are ingrained. Don't label kids. Give them all a chance and meet them where they're at and give them like try all your tools set to be able to teach them to read or write or learn how to do math or whatever have you. Because we all develop at

different rates, and we all have different skill sets that develop in different situations. And the only way we find out, like, where our possibilities are, we cultivate those people and give them the skill and the environment to do so. Yet so often we just cut people off and cut people down. And it's just very disheartening. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of

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you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk i want to dive into some of these other pillars too. The second pillar is all about really tuning into your body. And I'm a huge believer in this. I feel like so many of us have become largely disembodied. Like we're walking around living from the neck up. You know, it's all cognition and no feeling, no sensation. And we discount everything that our body is telling us as valid information, valid intel to make decisions that would allow us to do big things. And this for you, it seems like pillar number two is like, let's reintegrate here. Exactly.

I mean, that's what it is. And we do live kind of in a modern society that is like cuts everything off. It's almost like distract everything, don't learn these skills. So that's where it is. But again, if you look at, I'll go back to the research, it shows from athletes to teachers to one of my favorite series of studies

was on stockbrokers that found that those who had a greater interoceptive ability, which is essentially to read the signals and listen to the signals that your body is sending, they perform better in their job in investing. When you see stuff like that, you're like, oh, of course, listening to our body is a skill that we all need to develop. But again, I think the modern world kind of just pulls us away from that. And it doesn't, it's not like the most difficult thing in the world to do or it doesn't take rocket science.

It is literally just spending time alone in your head, noticing things and like experience things. One of the first things I do with anybody I work with is I ask them, like, are you taking walks without your phone or without podcasts? Sorry about that. But without other things, not, you know, sometimes you can listen to a podcast, but at least every once in a while, are you just existing in the world instead of reaching for something to distract you. And that is one of the best abilities to kind of re-engage and be like, oh, I've got all these sensations, emotions, feelings that flood my senses. Maybe if I figured out how to speak their language, I'd be in a better world. But for most of us, it's a foreign language that we just tune out. Yeah, no, I so agree with that. We're talking to be fortunate to be situated in Boulder, Colorado for now after my entire life being in New York City. And so I'm hiking in the front range of the Rocky Mountains, you know, like four days

a week. And sometimes I confess to having like an earbud in listening to podcasts at double speed to sort of like get background and prepare for things. But I try and really make the majority of that time with nothing in my ears, with nothing on my body, just being fully present and seeing how I feel and observing nature and smelling. And it's transformative. It really makes a difference. And I think that also really weaves seamlessly into the third pillar, which is this idea of responding and not reacting. Because part of what allows you, I feel like, to be present in the sensations and the intel, the intuitive, the subtle signals your body is sending you is the ability to be aware, like self-aware, not just of your external environment, but also of your internal

environment, which is also fundamental in your ability to embrace this third pillar and be less of a reactive person and actually be more of a responsive individual. And you're saying the science also shows that that switch is really critical in being able to step into hard things and sustain and do them at a high level. Exactly. And I think, again, you're spot on in that ability to listen to your body and sit with it is critical. And one of my favorite experiments that showed this is they took a bunch of expert meditators

and monks and then your average Joes, and they stuck them in an fMRI machine to look at their brain. And they took a scalding hot probe and put it right on their wrists, below the wrist, the sensitive area of the skin, and saw what happened. And both groups rated the intensity of the pain about the same, but they experienced the pain incredibly different. The expert meditators, they described it as like this dull kind of experience that they were separate from. The average Joe's experienced it as like this integral, this like, oh my gosh, I'm going

to freak out. This hurt a lot. They couldn't separate or create space. And then the brain scans gave away the rest, which is the meditators, their amygdala, threat sensing area of the brain was very quiet. Their prefrontal cortex was online essentially saying, oh, yeah, we see this pain. It was flip-flopped for the average Joes. They were freaking out. Their brain was just like panic mode. And I think that is what we're getting at when we say respond instead of react. And I think it's so fascinating that meditators show this ability because if you look at,

again, elite athletes and elite endurance athletes who might not meditate, but they spend a lot of time, listen to their body, separate out the different signals, the different ideas of pain or discomfort. It's in a lot of ways, the same sort of skill that is developed and their brains look not exactly, but remarkably similar when they're put through some intense pain or intense discomfort. So I think, again, it all integrates, but it's all about this ability to just create that space instead of just going react, react, react. I love that study.

I thought it was fascinating. In my notes, I jotted it down as monks versus mortals. The way that you also, you teased out a really interesting nuance, I thought, and the difference between the two, which is that the sort of the average person, they were focused not just on the moment of the pain but once they knew what it was it was just a whole bunch of additional energy was devoted to anticipating and then lingering on it after so it's sort of like they're zapped out of just being present to what the experience is not devoting a ton of mental like cognitive and

emotional energy to like what if it to like, what if it's happening again? What if it's happening again? And then as soon as it's done, you're like reflecting, reflecting, like the average person is spending a huge amount of time reliving the trauma to a certain extent in the past and in the future. In addition to in the present moment, whereas the trained meditators, the monks were just like, they were fine.

And then when it happened, yes, it's uncomfortable that they could almost dissociate. And then once the stimulus was gone, they were kind of like back to baseline. So they had so much more bandwidth to just devote to like everything else that was going on. So to me, it was fascinating because it also spoke to the availability of cognitive and emotional bandwidth to go and actually allocate it to doing the hard thing rather than being distracted from what it would actually take to accomplish this thing. Yeah. And I love that research because it essentially said that like the mortals, as you put it, got three times the dose. And of course, if you get three times the dose, the anticipation, the during and the after, of course, you're going to succumb to it and like think this is the worst thing. But that's what it kind of gets gets added is responding as what are you doing? You're tackling the problem at hand, which is during the moment that it feels difficult or you feel that pain, navigate it. But once it's gone, you don't need to linger on it. You don't need to like ruminate on it.

And so much of it is ruminating. And that carries on to not just physical discomfort, but think about other things where maybe someone said, you know, critiqued you during a presentation or critiqued one of your papers or writing or what have you. How often do we then play it over and over in our head and it almost like grows in strength? Well, that's that lingering effect. You know, we're carrying this thing that might have been a minor stress that we could have definitely handled. And instead, we're letting it grow and grow and snowball out of control so that now this minor thing has become this thing

where our mental space is so occupied by it that it's almost become this existential threat that we can no longer handle. Yeah, it's so interesting the way our brains work. It really kind of does weave us organically into that fourth pillar of yours, like the notion of transcending discomfort, you know, like we, because we're talking about discomfort here to a certain extent. And it's, you know, and I guess the underlying assumption there is that anything worth doing, anything where the stakes are high, anything genuinely hard is going to include some level of discomfort, whether it's emotional, whether it's cognitive, whether it's physical, whether it's all three, right? If you're an athlete, it's a physical discomfort, mental discomfort. If you're a parent, if you're a caregiver, if you're a physician or a surgeon working in 15 hour surgeries, anything but worth doing where the stakes are actually, they matter to you, it's going to involve discomfort. I thought

it was fascinating that you used the word transcend discomfort. I'm curious whether you consider different words there because that has a particular sort of like connotation to me. I did. So on all these titles of chapters of sections, I went through dozens upon dozens of them. So I ended up with transcend, which is, I'm not sure what the connotation is for you that you think of it, but I was a little like, well, this kind of implies almost a little of woo-woo, like we're going beyond this. Much of the book, well, there is that in that, and there's philosophy and all sorts of stuff. There's a lot of research and science back to it because I'm at heart a science nerd. But I settled on transcend because I think

we have, again, this fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to take on difficult things. And to me, it was about not only how do we create the environment to be able to handle difficult things, but also that almost anything that's going to cause us to grow or adapt is going to come with some discomfort. So there's this level of accepting it and finding almost a little bit of meaning in it so that you can move on and move past it and just kind of say like, this is what it is and this is what it takes and I'm going to embrace it. Yeah. And I mean, you brought up that M word there, meaning. And that's what I thought was fascinating.

This is not about like find ways to eliminate the discomfort. It's you're basically you're saying it is going to be there. It almost is necessary. It's almost a mandatory part of something on the level that will really be meaningful that it's there. But to find meaning in the sensation of discomfort and the experience of discomfort, the way that that landed with me is it qualitatively changes the way that you experience discomfort if you can assign meaning to it while you're going through it. It doesn't mean it's

more comfortable, but you experience it just like psychologically differently. Exactly. And a lot of it to me is we have these life stories and these life narratives that we almost carry around. And I think these stories like shape the lens that we see the world through and shape how we experience it. And to me, finding meaning in discomfort is almost like changing that life story.

So you're integrating that experience into your greater life kind of narrative. And you can make meaning out of the struggle or even out of the suffering. And in some interesting way, it almost like that meaning acts almost like this glue that holds us together and says like, yes, this is really difficult. Yes, you might be going through a harrow, again, as you kind of said, is just kind of you, it just changes the way you experience. You kind of bring it home by zooming the lens out, you know, it's sort of like, okay, so if we have this new model of how to do hard things, these four pillars to focus on,

so it's less about bravado and dominance and masculinity, it's more about presence and meaningfulness and transcending discomfort and body integration and all of these things, right? And then we see there's science around this, that there is sort of a new way to step into hard things that is much more likely to yield really extraordinary outcomes.

And then you also zoom the ones out and you see how we conceptualize toughness as a society, that we fall in for the appearance without the substance. So now you're sort of like taking it away from the individual and saying, let's talk about this on a society level. And there's something weird happening. Absolutely. And I felt this was important to include because if you look societally,

not to get into it too much, but like we have people in power, people are leaders, people are politicians who have this appearance of like, oh, this is strength, this is tough, et cetera. But then there's no underlying substance behind it. And I think zooming out from that is if you look at, again, society and not to hate on it all because I use it, but social media and Instagram and what have you is we're really good at creating the appearance of values and strength and toughness and resilience. But it's kind of fake because, again, as we outlined here, toughness is dealing with the

thing. So if I never show you the hard parts or the struggles, if I don't show you that that exists, then it's kind of living in this stage distorted fantasy instead of embracing reality. It's just, I think, something societally that we need to wrestle with and get back to, hey, let's stop propping up these ideas that are important. Another example, maybe to drive this home, is I'd watch advertisements of companies that support valuable things like maybe diversity or inclusion or whatever have you are women's rights or whatever right but then you look underlying and the company is like littered with abuses in that area and again that kind of gets back to like oh we've captured this

appearance but we're not doing the actual hard thing, which is the work to handle or change society or build the world that we actually want to live in. We're just creating the facade. something disparaging, but almost like this call to action of like, let's start doing more real things in the real world that reflect how our world actually works and how we want it to be. And stop worrying about creating the Instagram filtered version of the world or Instagram filtered version of toughness, which isn't real. Yeah. And acknowledge that it was really hard. It didn't come easy. I think we like to think that if we put the shiny happy, I did this really big, hard thing and it wasn't that hard for me. I just knocked it out of the park that that's the aspiration. But in fact, that disconnects society from each other because our lived true experiences, we don't connect with that

because it's not true. It's not real. Whereas if we all sat there and said, there's a lot of hard stuff going on here and I'm working towards it and maybe I get to knock a thing off here or there. And man, I stumbled like crazy. And this was brutal at moments. And I thought about giving up a million times, but a lot of help and whatever, like I figured this thing out, at least this time, who knows about that to me, like we're in a moment where we need to relate to each other in a way that connects us rather than dissociates us. I agree with you. I think sharing the fact that like things can be really hard and they don't come easy and we stumble a lot, you know, it's not going to make us look bad. It's actually going to reconnect us with the people around us. And we need that more

than ever right now, which is a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting here in this container, a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh man, to live a good life, I'll life, it comes back to fulfilling those basic psychological needs, to connect with people, to find community, to have some room for growth and progress, to have some autonomy in your life, to have something that makes you feel alive and gives you a purpose that is greater than some external thing. I think if you can work and strive towards those things, and we might not accomplish all of them, but if you're continuously working towards them, I think that to me is a good life. Thank you. You'll find a link to Angela's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.

And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller

now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Results will vary.