The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 542: Brad Stulberg - How To Excel When Everything Is Changing (Including You)

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 How to respond instead of react… The 4 P's: Pause Process Plan Proceed — Using the 4 Ps will increase your chances of responding better than reacting quickly Non-Dual thinking. It's not this OR that. It's this AND that. It's not self-discipline or self-compassion. It can be both. As we learn more, we become more reasonable. The world is not black and white. We can live in the gray and embrace it. Brad's core values: Life is the doing of his life (activities, health, workouts, showing up) Love is the being of his life (family, being there for the most important people) A new model for navigating change and disorder – A neuroscientist and a biologist coined the phrase allostasis. Allostasis comes from the Greek allo, which means "variable," and stasis, which means "standing." Allostasis is defined as "Stability through change." When Brad went to the University of Michigan, he couldn't go to football games. "It felt pointless to be in the stands instead of on the field, too close to something the loss of which I was still grieving." Science shows that when you fight change, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol. Hard Times are always hard – But with practice, they get easier… In a multi-year study of more than 2,000 adults aged 18 to 101 published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, University of Buffalo psychologist, Mark Seery and colleagues found that people who had experienced medium levels of adversity were both higher-functioning and more satisfied with their lives than those who had experienced extremely high levels of adversity as well as those who had experienced hardly any adversity at all… Five Questions for Embracing Change: Where in your life are you pursuing fixity where it might be beneficial to open yourself to the possibility, or in some cases, the inevitability of change? In what parts of your life are you holding on to unrealistic expectations? Are there elements of your identity to which you cling too tightly? How might you use your core values– the rugged and flexible boundaries of your identity– to help you navigate the challenges of your life? In what circumstances do you tend to react when you would benefit from responding, and what conditions predispose you to that? 10 Tools for Developing Rugged Flexibility: Embrace non-dual thinking Adopt a being orientation Frequently update your expectations to match reality Practice tragic optimism, commit to wise hop, and take wise action Actively differentiate and integrate your sense of self View the world with independent and interdependent lenses Respond to change with the 4 Ps Lean on routines (and rituals) to provide stabiliy during periods of disorder Use behavioral activation Don't force meaning and growth; let them come on their own time True confidence comes from evidence, and it allows you to OWN YOUR SEAT. Owning your seat does not mean certainty, nor does it mean a complete lack of doubts. It means taking your doubts with you and stepping into the arena no less—because you've done the work. Easy: showing up when you are at your best and everything is clicking. Hard: showing up when you are in a hole and the current is going against you. Most everyone can do the former. But it's the latter that has a huge impact on lasting progress, fulfillment, and success. Progress is nonlinear. Keep pounding the stone. Some days nothing happens. Some days it cracks a little bit more. Occasionally, it splits wide open. The implication of this truth is both simple and significant: If you're addicted to visible progress, then sooner or later, you'll burn out of whatever you're pursuing. This is a big reason so many people quit after the honeymoon phase of trying something new. Brad's 3 non-negotiable daily practices for physical and mental well-being: 1. Forty-five to ninety minutes of physical activity. 2. At least one deep-focus block of sixty to ninety minutes on good, meaningful work. 3. Do not fight evening sleepiness, which usually means bed by 10PM. Don't define yourself by what you have. Define yourself by who you are. On developing a BEING over HAVING orientation, and the strength and freedom that comes with it.

Change is not something that happens to you, changes something that you're in conversation with. When you catch yourself denying it, resisting it, pretending it's not happening, trying to get back to where you were, just be aware of that and say, hey, that's not the correct way to think about change. This isn't something that's just shaping me. This is something that I can shape to. So I can't over-control it and I can't fix everything, but I generally have some agency regardless of what's happening. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Text, Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The pursuit of excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 666866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. A great one.

Brad Stolberg, researches, rights, and coaches on mental health, well-being, and sustainable excellence. I like that. He is the best-selling author of The Practice of Groundedness and, most recently, Master of Change. He regularly contributes to the New York Times and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic, among others. He is on the faculty at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His past books include peak performance and the passion paradox. During this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss what it means to have a flexible and

rugged mindset and why it will benefit you. And then how to create and live out your core values, how to best manage the big changes in your life, and we even. talked about the cold plunge debate. This one was so much fun. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy Brad Stolberg. Brad, it is great to have you back on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Hey, thanks so much, Ryan. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. Let's start with what is a rugged and flexible mindset? So rugged and flexible. We tend to think of these terms as somewhat diametrically opposed.

Most people hear the word rugged and they think of durable and strong and perhaps even some sort of rigidity. And people hear flexible and they think bending easily without breaking, soft, fluid. And I think that in order to navigate periods of change and flux and the inevitable chaos that comes for all of us in life, we actually need to marry these terms and we need to put them together and be rugged and flexible. So to be rugged is to be strong, to be tough, to be durable. to be flexible is to bend easily without breaking and to have parts of us that are really rugged, our core qualities that are going to endure the hills that we're going to die on, but then to be very adaptable on everything else. The rugged element, I feel like our core values are rugged, right?

They are firm. They're there. We may evolve. Maybe they're tweaked from time to time, but they're kind of part of our character. What has been your process to develop your own core values to be rugged and lasting and dependable? Yeah, that's right. So the way that I like to think about this is in evolutionary terms. So you think of a species that has been able to endure and persist over a long period of time. And they have these two components. One is essential qualities that never change or that if they're going to change, as you mentioned, they just kind of tweak. Because if these things change, they would no longer be the same species. They'd be unrecognizable. But then they're super flexible and adaptable on everything else. including how they apply these qualities. So for us as individuals looking to thrive throughout the course of our own evolution of our own lives, you're right. Our core values are these essential

qualities that are the hills that we're going to die on. So that's all prelude. To answer your question, about once or twice a year, I like to sit down. I've got a list of a hundred sample core values. It's certainly not exhaustive, but it's great for a start of brainstorming. And I just go through and I say, hey, these are the core values that are important to me. And I just generally end up with between 12 and 15. And then the hard work is narrowing them down to three to five. And I think it's a really important part of the process because if you want to be great at everything, you're not great in anything. And then for each of those, defining them in super concrete terms and then coming up with daily practices that you can show up and act on those values. So they

can't just be like a motivational poster on a wall. They have to be very actionable. And I've been doing this exercise now for the last five years. So now they don't really change very much. It's more an inventory of, hey, am I actually living up to how I want to apply these? The words followed by the critical behaviors to match the words. I think that makes them real. What are yours and what are some of the behaviors that match the values? Yeah. So I've actually narrowed mine down to just two, which is life and love. And life for me is the doing part of me, the activity. So I guess under life, you could put things like my creative work and my physical pursuits. I think health is a big part of being able to do what I want to do.

And then under love is the more being part of me. So that's where things like my family relationships and my presence falls. And then for the core qualities, right? So life is about showing up for things, even if I have fears that are important to me and realizing that I can take those fears with me and I can still do the thing because I never want to diminish my life because of fear. And then life is also about the way that I eat, the way that I take care of my body, because I want to be here a long time at a high quality. So this goes all the way down to five days of at least 60 minutes of movement, right? Like that level of granularity.

And then love is around making sure that I'm there for the people that are most important to me. So you go from love to something in my case as seemingly, I don't use the word trivial, but down in the weeds to turn my phone off every night during dinner and I put it in another room because that's a time I want to be fully present with my family. I take a digital Sabbath where I'm offline for 24 hours every Saturday because that is how I exude love because I really define love is like full presence for the things that you care most about. Wow. In your book and I flipped first, your most recent book called Master of Change, How to Excel when everything is changing, including you. Love the title and the contents are even better. But I noticed

I flip to the very back. I look in the acknowledgments. And the first person that you mentioned is Caitlin. And you said she's the best partner for me. And the book wouldn't happen without her. And while we're on the topic of love and life and your values, can you describe the importance of having a partner like you have and how important that is for you to do the great work that you're able to do, which helps now millions of people? Yeah. It's the most important thing. I don't even know where to start. Back to rugged flexibility, for me, that partnership is a huge sense of what makes me rugged. Things can be crazy in life, but I know that I have that partnership with my wife

that is going to be strong and stable. And even as we both change, change together, change in different ways, that bond, it's like the rudder, the foundation, kind of the ground that I stand on. And I think that I'm just so fortunate to have that partnership. And also to be really clear of it, it wasn't like that overnight. We've been married for almost 10 years. We dated for six years before that. So it's been a long time. And I think there's a common trap where people want that, like after a month or two.

And that foundation is something that you never stop building. Like talk about a practice. You have to keep building it. Otherwise, it can become more shaky. What are some intentional things you do to make sure that keeps growing? that relationship? Yeah, I think the first, and this is going to sound, I don't want to use the word, I don't know how it's going to sound, but something that's really important for me in how I

approach relationships. And what I was going to say is it's going to sound like settling. And I don't feel like I settled at all. I feel like I have the best partner in the world. But the goal for my relationship is that it's good enough over and over and over again. And if it's just good enough over and over and over again, after 10 years, after 20 years, after 30, hopefully we're both alive after 40 years, it will be perfect. It will be great. But to have an expectation that any day is going to be great or any day is going to be perfect

or Caitlin's going to show up exactly as I hope she does just sets you up for disappointment because that's not how humans work. That's not how relationships work. So I think this first is the mindset that we both just need to be good enough for each other. And if we can be good enough for each other but to do that every damn day, then the outcome will be great. And then in terms of the practices, this digital Sabbath is something that's relatively new. And I built that into my life because I do want to be really present. And it's easy to say that you're going to be present. But when you're in our industry where we're basically like competing in an attention economy and Saturdays a day when people aren't at work, including my wife, but everyone's online.

Like that can be a very busy day for a creative. And it was a deliberate choice that said, but what I have isn't enough now. It's never going to be enough in terms of following and ability to reach people. So like I need to put my foot in the ground and make sure this is a day that's purely to be present for the family. And then I think the last thing is just to be really comfortable with someone's imperfections and to just accept those fully as a part of what you love about them. And that's kind of cliche advice, but it's cliche for a reason. But really, the biggest thing is the good enough. And that's how I parent too. And this traces itself back. I feel like we might have spoken about this last time on the podcast to the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott,

who had this whole theory of good enough parenting where like the perfect parent is like a helicopter parent and tries to do everything right for their kids. And then the negligent parent or the checked out parent, they just like kind of ignore their kid. And the good enough parent sits squarely in the middle and has the best outcomes. And as someone that was raised as to be a perfectionist by, you know, well-intentioned boomer parents that like really wanted me to be great at everything. this notion of like not needing everything to be great always has been so freeing for me. You write about expectations in your new book.

And I'm curious. And this is something I've battled with as a husband, as a dad, as working with others. I think I have pretty high expectations for myself. And sometimes the people closest to me feel the brunt or I guess I could say even the pain of that because it just, it goes on to others who are. closest to you. And that can be a problem. What's this dichotomy between expectations you have for yourself versus the expectations you have for other people, the people you love, the people you work with? This is something I personally, I think, need help with and struggle with. Yeah, I think that those are two separate things, what you're getting at. So the first,

and I struggle with this too, I think every driven person that cares about excellence and mastery struggles with this to some extent, which is when you set really high expectations for yourself, it can create a pressure cooker environment in your own mind at times, or at the very least, like a feeling of being. And that can boil over, and then you can have a short temper or be frustrated or not be as present or little things bother you. Or worse yet, you have a day for whatever reason you didn't get what you wanted to done at the quality you wanted to.

And then you come home and you're just like, you can't really be there for your kids because you're upset about what happened at work, but it's not like you're working on it, and you're just kind of a mess. And I think when that happens, I'm just like try to be really aware of it that's happening, and I'll just name it to Caitlin, and I'll say, Caitlin, like,

I'm feeling down about myself right now because I didn't meet my own expectation. And that's why I'm in this bit of a funk. So I don't want you to think it's you or anything else. And if this funk gets in the way of like what we need to do, I need you to tell me that, and I'm going to listen to you. And I've gotten pretty good at recognizing that,

like when that happens. And then how do you relate to others that perhaps don't have the same expectations as you do? I think that they're just different expectations. So like someone's expectations might not be the same for quality in their work, but they might actually be higher for like joy in their life. I don't think that it's like, oh, this person has a lower bar. And some people just do have low bars. And these tend to be people that like I don't find much in common with.

I don't find people with low bars very interesting. but there's a million different ways to have a high bar. And I think it's about realizing that their high bar might just be pointed in a different direction than my high bar. It's funny, man. I see friends of mine who they have a high bar, I believe, for joy and for getting to the Friday happy hour and then living it up and having like a great time. And I see them and talk to them and they seem so happy and so ready for the fun,

their job is not really their life. It's just what they do to make money in order to then pay for their life. And that's kind of the opposite of how I live. And so it's weird, but in a way, I probably should be better at appreciating our differences that we just approach it, not necessarily the same way. And no one's right or no one's wrong. It's just, we're just different. Yeah. And I think that the minute that you start to judge or resent them, that probably says more about your week than theirs. And you're, like, frustrated that you feel trapped in, you know, a dungeon of your making, if they're good people, right? But there's also something to say about people have different temperaments. And I think that's a reason that people grow apart. You know,

you've got some high school friends that are happy to just live for the weekend and work to pay the bills and get to happy hour and watch sports all day. And I think it's easy for people like us to judge that. But if they're good people and they have integrity and they're honest and they show up for the people in their lives, then who's to say that they don't have it figured out? Because we're all going to die. And as much as you and I want to reach people, like we're probably not going to be remembered like the Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed. It's just values neutral.

It's just different. However, I think it's a lot easier to relate to other pushers when you're a pusher. Because sometimes these friends and these other people will look at you like you're anti-fun. And it's not that you're anti-fun or crazy. It's more that like your sense of fun is from, meaning or the pursuit of excellence, whereas their sense of fun might be from joy. And it's completely values neutral. And I think people that sustain excellence for the longest time,

and I know that you've spent more time than anyone thinking about this topic, they tend to be able to like marry those two things and to find enough joy in the process to keep going. The reward for great work is more work as how I view it. Like I get to keep doing this thing. And I think I feel like we're very aligned there. I want to talk more about change because this is the big focus area of what you've been studying and researching and certainly writing about in Masters of Change. The average adult faces 36 major life disruptions. This stat, I mean, wow, really. So can you walk through to find a life disruption? And I did not realize it was that many and how we can be better suited to handle these life disruptions. So this research comes from Bruce Filer.

team and they went out and they talked to hundreds of adults and they asked them to walk through their life paths and these tended to be older adults. And yeah, they found that the average number was 36 major life disruptions. As I start naming them to you, I think it's not going to seem so crazy. So examples of what qualifies for a major life disruption could be going to college, graduating from college, starting a job, transitioning jobs, getting fired from a job, retiring, getting a huge promotion at a job, getting a big demotion at a job, starting to date someone seriously, moving in with that person, getting engaged, getting married, getting divorced,

having kids, your kids move out of the house, having some sort of injury that takes you out of a passion that you love or a pursuit that you love, getting sick with depression or anxiety, recovering from depression or anxiety, distancing from a best friend, meeting a new best friend, losing someone that you loved. These things also can happen multiple times throughout our lives. throughout our lives. So you quickly have a menu of about 20 common disruptions. Sometimes we face

all 20 of those. Sometimes we only face 10 of those, but we face each three times. And it very quickly adds up to 30 plus major life changes. What are some of the ways we can, let's get started here, can best handle these life disruptions, the big changes that happen for us, both the good ones and the bad ones, or the negative ones, I guess I should say. Well, I think the first is this mindset shift from change being something that happens to you to change being something that you are in conversation with. So there's an old model of change, homeostasis, been around for 150 years. I'm sure everyone listening has heard of it.

And it conceptualizes change is a pattern of order, disorder, order. It says that living systems dislike change. They like stability. And when change happens, they want to get back to where they were. This has been the prevailing model of change, as I said, for over 100 years, well over 100 years. More recently, scientists have said, actually, that's not a very accurate fit model for how living systems thrive. Yes, systems crave stability. The homeostasis folks got that right, but that stability is constantly variating in somewhere new.

So if homeostasis is a pattern of order, disorder, order, what researchers call allostasis is a pattern of, order, disorder, reorder. So yes, is living systems we crave stability, but that stability is always somewhere new. We're constantly somewhere in this cycle of order, disorder, reorder. And when you have this switch, you stop thinking about change as this thing, this event that happens to you. And you start thinking about it is the nature of life. So Alastase, as you write about is defined as stability through change, right? So that we have some sort of skill. that we've developed to be stable through whatever life throws at us. How do we develop this muscle, this skill? How do we get better at allostasis? How do we get better at being stable through change?

So now we're getting into the core of the book. So it's back to where we open, right? This term rugged flexibility. And I think that there's a mindset approach. There's an identity approach. And then there are specific actions. And they're all really important. So let's work them in sequential order. So the mindset. I'm going to be explicit. I'm going to say it again. The first shift, this change is not something that happens to you, changes something that you're in conversation with. The second big shift is around accepting change when it happens. When you catch yourself denying it, resisting it, pretending it's not happening, trying to get back to where you were, just be aware of that and say, hey, like, that's homeostatic thinking. And that's born out of a culture that oriented

around homeostasis, but that's not the correct way to think about change. This is, isn't something that's just shaping me, this is something that I can shape to. So I can't over control it, and I can't fix everything, but I generally have some agency, regardless of what's happening. Another key component is around realizing when our expectations for what is going to happen

is different from reality. Our brains are prediction machines. Our brains are constantly predicting what they think is going to happen. We get really good at it. And by nature, when things change, those predictions are off. The more swiftly we can update those predictions,

we can update our expectations to match reality, the better fit we are to handle reality. So those are the big mindset shifts. Now, the part of the book that I found most interesting to research and think about and personally applicable is the part around identity. And the metaphor that I'd like to use, so the question is, how do you have a strong and stable

sense of self when everything is always changing, including you? Like, you're changing, you're aging, you're becoming a parent, You're getting married. You're getting divorced. There's all these changes to identity. So how do we think of ourselves as strong and stable in the midst of all this chaos, this flux?

And the metaphor I like to use is thinking of identity like a house. And you want to have a house with multiple rooms. In one room might be the podcaster, the athlete, the parent, the partner, the community member, the friend, the gardening offici. And where people run into a trap is when they start to live in a small one-bedroom studio, when the only room in their identity is parent, because then the kids leave. And then, who am I, if not a parent in this way? Or athlete. And then you get injured.

Who am I if I can't participate in my sport? Or a podcaster or book writer and your podcast flops. Or your book doesn't do well and you can't solve the next one. Who am I, if not this? So paradoxically, the way that we get a really strong sense of self is by diversifying our sense of self. And it's okay to spend a lot of time in one room. As you know as well as anyone, a part of excellence and mastery is giving yourself permission

to go all in on something, but you've got to make sure that you don't let the other rooms go to complete disarray. Like you want to keep those doors available. Because then what happens is even in less extreme circumstances when something isn't going well in one key area of your life or when something's changed. changing a lot in one key area of your life, you can lean into those other areas to gain a sense of stability. I'm excited to get to the action part too, but this is so true, especially with athletes. I vividly remember the end of my time when you're, partially it's an age thing too,

because I was younger and more immature, not very wise, not that well read and put everything into this like I'm a quarterback I'm a football player and then they tell you you're not good enough to keep playing anymore right because the only place to play is professionally and if you're not good enough they retire you and all of a sudden your sole identity is gone gone and I think that's why so many of those guys when did that happen to you so it ended at the end of my college career the funny thing is I ended up playing a few years professionally in the arena football league so like I got another taste of it. But I vividly remember, Brad, my last game of my senior season at Ohio University,

both of my parents come to the game, which was rare because my parents, my brother was playing at the same time at a different school. So they always had to, one would go to his game, one would come to mind. So they both hurt my game. That was like emotional because one was skipping his game. And they're on the field at senior day. And I started crying. And I couldn't stop.

Couldn't stop because this is it. And even as the game started, I'm starting the game as a team. team's quarterback still struggling because I was thinking about this is the end. This is like a whole giant piece of me is gone. And I struggle that in whole night and then for a while afterwards too because I thought I don't know what else I am if not this because I've been doing it since I was in first grade. And now here I am, whatever, 23 years old and and it's gone. It was, yeah, man, I still can very vividly remember those moments because of how hard it was. Yeah, Athletes tend to have the harshest transitions for a couple of reasons.

One is, as you mentioned, generally to get to a level where the sport does become primary to your identity, you have to start very young. So it really is formative to how you think about yourself and who you are. A second big trap that athletes suffer from, or not even suffer from, that is just inherent to being an athlete, is your career ends when all of your peers careers are taking off. So like somewhere between 22 and 40. And then the third trap is to excel as an athlete, you do have to have a single-minded focus in many ways. However, what I would counsel young athletes now is you can have that single-minded focus,

but you've got to just keep those other rooms available. So you don't have to spend equal time three hours in each of your five rooms every day. You can spend all your hours in the athlete room, but just go visit those other rooms and just lean into them enough so that they're there to keep you stable. And you see this more and more with elite athletes that are kind of diversifying their sense of self. It's like a diversified investment portfolio. It makes you more robust. Yeah. I read you struggled with this too.

When you went to the University of Michigan, so you played high school football, I believe you're all part of some of the greatest teams in your school's history, 17 and 3 over the past two years, did really well. Weren't quite good enough to play at Michigan, but could have played at other schools when you really wanted to go to Michigan. And you wrote that you couldn't go to football games because it was too hard. So how did you manage this as a young kid? I mean, I guess a man, but I still view myself as a kid. I was a kid. Yeah.

How did you manage it when you went to college and we're no longer a football player, but at this place with a rich tradition of football? So it's really interesting. I'm glad we get to nerd out on this a bit. The context, I played tight end and slot receiver and a little bit of outside linebacker. I was squarely good enough to play at schools like Amherst, Washu in St. Louis, Lbian, smaller D1, D2, Big D3 schools. Visited a lot of these schools and really just made a tough decision, which was,

I was wise enough to know that, hey, if I'm not getting recruited to a big D1 school, I'm probably not going to be a professional football player. So it's going to end at some point, and it might as well end now, because I want to have a big school experience. So went to Michigan, and as you mentioned, just completely incapable of going to Michigan games. Why? Because every once in a while, one of the athletes on the Michigan team would miss a play that I could have made. So like they'd miss a block and I'd think, I could have made that block or a ball would go through the slot receiver's hands. And I could have made that catch.

And I just like the idea of tailgating and getting pissed drunk and having a good time at a football game was so foreign to what a football game had meant for me. So I tried to go to the first two games and I just wasn't happy and I just stopped going to football games. And what's fascinating, is while all of my friends were getting drunk off their ass going to football games, I would sit in my dorm room as a freshman and read philosophy. Wow. And here I am now writing with a lot of philosophy influencing my work. So I didn't know it at the time at all, but I was like undergoing this transformative shift in identity. In hindsight, and I was not aware that I was doing this, I wish I was wise enough to say I was where I was very fortunate. I just fell into it. Even in high

school is the captain of the best team in my school's history. I also was a part of the school newspaper. So, like, I did kind of have these two vocational hats, even at that young age of, like, writer, reader, thinker, and football player. And I shifted in college very squarely into the other one. But I also, like, I couldn't be in the wait room. So I got really into endurance sports. I had to do a complete disconnect from football. And only now is like a grown-ass man with kids. can I watch a Michigan game and have fun watching it? Can I say one more interesting thing for the football folks that are listening? I never had this problem, though, with NFL football

because those guys were at such a different level from me that it was like watching superhumans. So they would never miss a play that I could have made. That was so much fun. But the Michigan guys that were like 20% better than me, enough where I could have never made that team, but one out of every five plays, perhaps I could have pulled off the play.

Yeah, it's a great point. It's a great point about the pros. I took us off on a little tangent. We talked about mindset. We talked about identity. And then the third part was actions, which we didn't fully get to when it comes to rugged flexibility. Can you share? And that's how you also organize the book of the actions part of it. This is something that I know many of your guests have talked about before, but I'm going to talk about it again because it's so freaking important is the space between stimulus and response. So a change happens. Our expectations are wrong. It's very easy. for the brain body, the nervous system, whatever you want to call it, to kind of have a freak out moment. And we can either react, which tends to be hot, immediate, and rash, or we can respond, which tends to be deliberate and thoughtful. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we want to be responding, right? We want to have some agency. We don't just want our mind-body system to go on autopilot. If we're getting attacked by a snake or something, yeah, we want to react. But for most of the first-world problems that we face, we want to be able to respond. So then the question is, well,

how do we set ourselves up to respond? And I developed this heuristic, two Ps versus four Ps. So two Ps is we panic and we pummel ahead. It's not what we want to do. Four peas is we pause, we process what's happening, we make a plan, and then we proceed. So key to pausing is naming the emotions that you're experiencing. So all sorts of research shows that once you name something, you create space between yourself in it, and then in that space, you get the freedom to take a deliberate, thoughtful

action. So you can name overwhelm, panic, angst, despair, sadness, tightness, excitement, joy. But just when we have these super hot emotions that result from a change, just naming them. And this can be big change such as I just tore my ACL, but this can also be like, I'm in a rush to be on time for a meeting, but my dog just had diarrhea. So it's like, you know, overwhelm in that moment. Just name it because then suddenly you buy yourself some space. Then you process what's happening in that space and you say, all right, like I was supposed

to be at this meeting, now there's diarrhea all over the floor, I've got a sick dog, like what can I do? What are the right steps forward? And I don't have the answer. It's going to depend on the situation, but just asking the question gets you into this responsive, thoughtful mode of being. Then all sorts of research shows that when we're in the act of making a plan for what we're going to do, even if we don't have very much control, just the act of making a plan gives

us a sense of agency. And it takes our brain out of what neuroscientists call a rage pathway and into what they call a seeking pathway. And a seeking pathway is challenge focused, goal focused. A rage pathway is just what it sounds like. It is angry. It is raging. And it's a zero-sum game.

Like you cannot have your rage pathway lit up in the brain. at the same time as your seeking pathway. And anyone that's lived a human life knows this because it's very hard to be pissed off about something and constructively working on it at the same time. Like you get to be one or the other. So when we start planning for how we're going to respond to a situation, it takes us into the seeking pathway into constructive action.

And then finally we proceed. And I want to spend another minute here because this is an interesting paradox. The nice part about reacting is we just go. When we go through a thoughtful process, sometimes we get analysis paralysis because we get to proceed and the path forward isn't clear. So what should we do? Should I do X or should I do Y?

I don't know. And here the key thing is to treat whatever you do like an experiment. It's not be all end all. Given that you went through the process, there is no quote-unquote answer. There's only a right process. If you've paused, if you've processed, if you've processed what's happened, if you've made plan, then you just have to take a leap of faith and force yourself to proceed, knowing that you can adapt and adjust. And regardless if the change is as small as your dog having diarrhea in between

meetings, or as big is a serious illness, the more that we can flex this muscle of going through this thoughtful process, the better off that we tend to be. So let's make it real for a second. Can you maybe share a real example from your life when you've had to implement the four P's and it helped you make a better decision or to create a bigger buffer between the stimulus and your response instead of reacting? So a couple of years ago, my family moved across the country. And it was a move that we were excited about, but at the same time, you know, had a whole bunch of fears. Like we left behind community, health care, family, like all these things that gave us a big sense of stability. And I distinctly remember that shortly after we got to where we live now, I started feeling

like fairly down, just kind of like in a rut. And this was long before I wrote this book. And I realized that I was comparing my new life with my old and trying to recreate what I had in Oakland, California, in Asheville, North Carolina, even though Oakland, the Bay Area is very different than Western North Carolina. And I think that that was like the pause, was just having that moment of insight. Like, this is not working. Naming what was going on, too, like becoming very aware.

Like, I was looking to meet the same kind of good friends that I had there. I was looking to find the same kind of coffee shop that I had there. And it was just out of like pure reaction mode. Like, oh, this is new. My body doesn't like this disability. So like, let's get back to where I was, even if it's in a completely different place. Processing that, realizing that that's what. was going on and then accepting it, updating my expectations for what this was going to be,

and starting to make a plan for like a new routine and what a new set of friends are going to look like. And really like getting into the weeds, like how much time do I want to invest, staying in touch with people across the country at the cost of meeting people here? And like, again, there's no right or wrong answer, but just starting to become aware of these tradeoffs and making a plan for how I want to try to groove into a new life here. And then finally just jumping in and proceeding and in going with it. Now, this is obviously not something that took place over a minute or a day.

This was probably like a two-month process of like really being in the pause process plan proceed. But I think that it got me out of this rut of trying to recreate what I had in Oakland in Asheville. Well, how is it now? I love it. Yeah. I mean, I would, I'm, it just as squarely feels like home. So what made you, but it's been a long time.

What made you make the move? A whole bunch of. things. My wife's family is all on the East Coast, and it's a time zone and a six-hour flight, whereas now we're a one-hour flight and same time zone or even like an eight-hour drive from D.C. where most of her family is. Cost of living, as you know, is quite expensive in the Bay Area. And in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, it's a lot cheaper, especially when you have kids and you want to ideally send them to a public school if possible. It's almost impossible in the Bay Area right now. And then also some just models of other people that do similar work to us that left urban areas

and kind of like took a hit to their short-term intellectual candy in circles. But in the long run, really were able to develop like the peace and quiet to do good work, but also maintain their health and family life. And those three things. But if I'm being really honest, like even that is somewhat retrospective thinking or like delusional optimism. The real reason that we moved is because my wife wanted to be closer to her family. Sure, sure. But then, like, I embraced it and I tried to take as much optimism as possible.

And now I'm realizing that those other things are actually true. Another big change that people go through. And some are thinking about this right now. Should I leave my job? Should I go to another company? They make these pros and cons list and they're still not sure even after filling out the full list. What kind of frameworks have you created? I'm sure clients of yours have you've gone through this with them.

When someone is thinking about making a change, particularly with their career, either they're going to change what they do or they're going to change companies. There's an opportunity out there. They might want to go do it. What are some ways you help people make that big career decision when it comes to leaving a job for another one? Oh, this is such a rich topic. So I'm glad that you brought it up. I very rarely can give someone like do this or do that.

advice. That just feels like a narcissistic approach as a coach because I don't know what's best for them, only they know. So my job is to help them come up with their own answer. So a couple of tools can help with this. One is to have them come up with like a kill plan, which basically says that what needs to change six months from now or what needs to change a year from now in order for you to want to keep doing this thing. And we write it down in great detail. And then six months or a year later, those things either have changed or they haven't. And if they haven't, again, I can't tell them what to do. All I can say is we came up with these kill criteria. We were really specific. They haven't changed. What do you want to do? Another thing that can be really

helpful is self-distancing, which is taking yourself out of the situation and pretending that a close friend was in it and then giving advice to that friend. It just helps us get a couple more degrees removal to see a situation really objectively and use our wisest part of ourselves to to move forward. And then finally, and I think this is often the most powerful, is to ask someone, and most people know this in your gut, do you feel like there's a genuine chance that this is going to change, or are you just prolonging the inevitable? And if the answer is just prolonging the inevitable, unless there's really good reason, which sometimes there is, such as, hey, I'm three months pregnant and my current job has like a great maternity leave and I don't want to be

unemployed, great. But unless there's a really good reason, generally if you're prolonging the inevitable, it's time just to call it right there because life is too short to prolong the inevitable in such a big part of our lives is work. The researcher Dan Gilbert from Harvard, behavioral scientist coined this term the inescapability trigger. And it basically says that once you decide that you're prolonging the inevitable, that it is inevitable that this is not. not the right job for me. This is not the right company for me. It's a terrifying thing to recognize, but once we do, we move towards something better a lot faster because we give up on trying to fix the old and we can devote all of our energy into imagining the new.

Super useful. Thank you. Very practical, too. A phrase that I love that I read in A Master of Change is non-dual thinking, meaning it's not this or that. it's this and that is how I took it. Can you describe non-dual thinking and why it's useful to implement this into all of our games every day? So people that grew up in the West are trained in linear thinking, which is this or that. And there is a lot that is great about linear thinking. It underlies the entire scientific method, right? Like the scientific method is trying to disprove hypotheses. So it's going to be this way or that way and we're going to find out. And it is the engine of science is this or that judgmental, binary, linear thinking. So it is a good thing in many

circumstances. But in certain circumstances where there's a lot of ambiguity or where the answer is often it depends, which is almost always when we're navigating change, this or that thinking starts to get in our way. And far more constructive is this and that thinking, which as you said, is called non-dual thinking. And what it allows us to do is it allows us to shift between various lenses of how we approach a situation. And instead of just having a hammer or just having a Phillips head screwdriver, we get a hammer and a wrench. So we can carry both these tools around. So we can carry this or that tool around when it's useful, but sometimes the answer is this or that. Sometimes the answer is this and that. And it just gives us so much more freedom.

So like a couple of examples. One that I love is this notion of self-discipline or self-compassion. So should I be Jocko or Gagins? Or should I be like Tara Bro. and Sharon Salzberg and sing kumbaya. And so often when undergoing changes, the answer is both. Like, you should be Jocko and Gagins. And in order to show up and do those hard things, you better learn how to love yourself and be kind to yourself to. So this is an area where people are diametrically opposed,

but the answer is both. It really is the core of rugged flexibility. Should I be rugged or flexible? Well, the answer is yes, you ought to be both. And so often, when we approach change, we face this. Another really profound example of non-dual thinking is this term tragic optimism that was coined by Victor Frankel. And Frankl says that life is full of tragedy. Like it is inescapable that you as a human are going to suffer.

And we can accept that and we can be optimistic and trudge forward nonetheless. Literally, the title of his book is Yes to Life. We can say yes to life even though we know that they're suffering, which is so different than the bullshit on the internet where people are either, like toxic positivity, polyana, I go to get my organic food and I pretend that nothing is wrong in the world. Or the opposite, which is everything's terrible, the system's broken, despair porn. And both of those are copouts because they absolve you of the need to do anything. Like if everything's great, why fix it? If everything's doomed, why fix it? But there's a huge gap in the middle, which is like things are broken and a lot is wrong about the world that we inhabit. And there's a lot

that's beautiful about life. And while we might not be able to completely fix everything, we generally have some agency. It reminds me of a conversation with Paulina Pompilano, an amazing writer. And she talked about the fact that the more, she's done a ton of interviews. I've done a ton of interviews, obviously you have as well. And the fact that the more and more you do, the more people you meet, the more conversations you have, you become more reasonable. You become less this or that. You become more of a non-dual thinker because it's just the world becomes more gray and not so black and white. And I feel like that's a good thing. I think from a leadership perspective, it's usually a good thing to become more reasonable and open-minded,

less judgmental, more live in the gray, less live in the black and white. That's right. The way that I've come to think about it and I talk about it with my clients, I write about this in the book a little bit, is I think that all of these skills and tools that people in our orbit, it work with. Growth mindset, gratitude, tragic optimism, grit, fit, range, you name them. They are all great tools and you want to have a really big toolkit, but you also need to discern when to apply what tools and in what situations. And I think being a mature adult is having a big toolkit, but having the discernment to use them wisely. Because we're what often happens with this or that thinking is we just take a hammer. It's just grit.

Or hey, I read Annie Duke's book. It's just quit. We should quit everything. It's trendy, quiet quitting. All the elites are talking about quitting. Or Goggin says we should just grid it out. So just grit. When in fact, they're both really important tools to have because there's a time to quit and there's a time to grit. And I think that like that to me is being reasonable, is not seeing these things as yes or no, but as tools. And this is true scientifically too. There's a big, replication crisis in management research, psychology research. It's also in hard science, so really across the board. And it's tempting to say to hell with it. But I actually think what the real answer is, is these are complex nuanced things. And it's very hard to get to capital

T-true. But we can get to lowercase T-true, which is like, yeah, this is probably true in this situation. But it might not be true in that situation. So we can use it as a tool instead of a blunt force instrument. How do we get better at discerning which tool to use and when? Reading a lot of books, talking to a lot of people and living life. I mean, there's no shortcut, right? Like, I think it's practice. But I think just having language for these things, like realizing, I mean, one of my favorite examples is grit or quit or like rugged or flexible. Just having someone tell you that actually it's okay to hold on to both of those things at the same time.

Like that in itself to me is the most important intervention because then when you go into a situation, like your mind is big enough to see these two possibilities and to realize that neither is right or wrong. It depends. So then you can work with it. Whereas if you read Carol Dweck's growth mindset and everything for you is growth mindset, well, what happens when you like come across true tragedy in your life? Then you're like, well, I need to grow from this.

Maybe you don't. Maybe it just sucks. So being able to set down these tools at appropriate times. I don't know why it made me think of this. but I love seeing you get into some Twitter fights from time to time. I hate doing that, man. So one of my favorites is about, this has nothing to do with anything, but I just think it's funny and it's worth maybe bringing up cold plunge.

I'm already laughing at Huberman or Sahil, Sawhill Bloom, who's been on the show, and you guys talking about cold plunge and science and whatever. Can you just bring that Twitter fight to life or whatever Twitter's called now to life when it comes to cold plunging? and all those kind of hacks or biohacky type things. I've become a lot softer on those things. I used to say bullshit.

Yeah. And now I think bullshit. But I say if it works for you, then do it. But please don't moralize it. I don't need to see a hype speech from your bathtub. I mean, if we can just pause for a minute, and this might piss some people off, but the absurdity that there is a genre on the internet

of people that wake up at first, five in the morning, get butt-ass naked, flex their abs as hard as they can, and give hype speeches from cold bathtubs, when you step back and realize what that is, I mean, it's absurd, like to me. But if it works from you, and if you watch those hype speeches and you get value in them, and clearly a lot of people do, and that motivates you, and it tells you that you can do hard things, that's great. Now, Cold Plunge in particular, I think the research on Cold Plunge, and like my formal training is in public health, right? I'm on faculty at a big school of public health. So I know a thing or two about scientific methods. I can own my seat here. The study

that everyone cites had a sample size of 15 people. The sample side had the control group from the experimental group, excuse me, had a 50% differential in body fatness. And the effect of that study was something like an additional 36 calories burned over 24 hours. We are talking two Doritos in a sample size of 15 people that were unmatched. And this is the study that, Everyone cites. And if you watch the cold punch debate, the goalposts constantly shift. So at first it was like shivering. Then it was brown fat activation.

Then it was it increases your metabolism. And at the end of the day, the only reason, and it can be a good one for people. So this is where it becomes softer. The only reason to do a coal plunge is if you find that there aren't enough hard things in your life, there aren't enough real things in your life. And a cold plunge is something that you like. and it helps you do hard things and realize that you can endure discomfort.

If that's why you're doing a coal plunge and you get value out of it, great. However, you can deadlift, you can run up a hill, you could get two young kids out the door to preschool. There are many hard things to do, and what I don't like is just layering on hard things for like bullshit virtue signaling.

I think that's just a waste of time. So I don't know, where do you stand on this? You asked me for my opinion. I gave it to you. I hope I don't get canceled. I've watched the videos from time and time. I've now since have to kind of mute all of them. I can't do it anymore, man.

I just can't watch the autumn. It's like the phone automatically turns on if you get a cold plunge. So I have to kind of mute those ones. I'm glad that I'm not alone. One thing I love, for example, I don't know if you've, maybe we've talked about this for it. I recently took a vacation to South Lake Tahoe. And I don't know if there's a better way to wake up than swimming in that cold water

with my brother. out there just kind of getting after it. Time out. Time out. Okay. This is the point. That is incredible. That's how this whole thing started.

It started in Nordic countries with people in community going at sunrise and doing something ridiculous. I endorse that one million percent. Right. How it ended $8,000 bathubs and people waking up their wives at four in the morning to post to social media is very different than doing something extreme in a community. community. Yeah. Well, the thing that's great, and we can't do it every day. We don't live there. We go there once a year. But you swim, you get kind of cold together, right? You do something hard with somebody you love. And then what do we do afterwards? We go sit in the hot tub. Good contrast. We sit there. Great kind of life conversation. An amazing way to start the day. Then you go do whatever we're going to do for the day. So that's the extent of that stuff. For me, yeah, I like to do hard things in a wait room. I like to do hard things by like a weird thing like from Michael Easter, which I know, you know, it's where. I love my glacier.

Choose the stairs instead of the escalator, like be a 2% or all that type of stuff. So we're, I mean, it's not surprised. We're on the very same page, I think, about this. And I think that also, like, life is hard enough often. And, again, I can't help but put my science hat on. The reason why I personally choose to do hard things in the weight room or to go on a ruck is because, one, my time is limited. And two, like, my capacity for, like, voluntarily suffering is limited.

And we know that there is. so much more health and longevity benefit to training hard than to going in cold water. So why not do the hard thing that also has the health and longevity benefit? Well, speaking of that, you mentioned earlier in our conversation, and we're aligned completely when it comes to I got one body. I don't control everything, but I want to try my best to keep this body healthy. I'm a workout every day. I love it.

It's more mental than physical, but it's both. I know. What are some other ways that you think are good? for just an average person to say, do these things or this like range of things in order to keep your body in mind in a good spot so that you can keep growing as we all age? Yeah, I think the most important things is, and again, I'm putting on my public health hat here, regular physical activity, and you want it to be challenging. And for some people, that means a brisk walk.

For other people, that means training for a marathon. and most people that train for marathons start with brisk walks. But daily physical activity, 30 to 45 minutes in a minimum per day. More is almost always better. Something that Michael Easter, who's a friend of mine popularized, and you mentioned his book, His Stuff's Great, is this idea of rucking, which is if you don't want to run because you don't like it, or it's hard on your knees, or it's like just too hot and miserable to run,

you can put on a backpack and you can put some weights in it or soup cans or books and a great way to progressively challenge yourself while walking is to carry progressively more weight. This is what our species kind of evolved to do is go on long walks carrying things. So I'm a huge fan of rucking around nutrition. For me, I try to keep it really simple, which is just avoid highly processed foods. And I think if you do that and you have a movement practice, the result tends to be pretty good. The research is very clear that tobacco products are one of the number one, if not the number one kind of artificial shortener of quality of life and longevity. So if you use tobacco

products, I highly recommend that you get help quitting. Do you smoke a cigar once or twice a year? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about consistent smoking, vaping, so on and so forth. The research on alcohol shows pretty clearly that under five drinks, alcohol is probably net neutral, not five drinks at once, five drinks over the course of a week. Those should be at separate times. Although there's more, there's like a debate going on right now. Now, in epidemiology, whether that number is actually three drinks or five drinks, but it's not a lot. And I want to caveat this, because if you are someone listener out there where drinking is somewhat problematic or you go to a brewery and one becomes two and then two becomes three, that's probably

something to pay attention to. That's not healthy. And then community is super important. So just building community, having a sense of belonging. And those are the big five that we talk about in public health all the time. So it's movement, nutrition, no tobacco, minimize alcohol, if not abstain, and then build relationships and community. Back to change.

This makes sense, but it was just good to read it. Science shows that when you fight change, your body actually releases the stress hormone cortisol, and that's when cortisol is released, it usually is not a good thing. Can you go deeper on that, this whole mindset of working with it or being alongside it as opposed to fighting it because scientifically it actually releases a hormone that's not going to help you. That's right. So this is a key equation, I think, in the book, which is this notion that suffering equals pain times resistance. So when we have change, there's generally some sort of pain.

Even if it's a good change, I'm talking like biological pain. Like there is a change to our baseline to our stability. when we resist that, we multiply the level of instability that we feel and we suffer more. So the research grounding in this comes out of pain science. And where cutting-edge pain sciences right now is for individuals that suffer from really bad chronic pain, the work, and it is so hard, is getting people to accept that pain and not resist it while still working to make it better. So talk about non-dual thinking. Not say, I'm going to be in pain forever, I'm doomed to despair. That's terrible. But also not say, I need to get rid of this.

I need to fix this. This is ruining my life. But to say, this pain is here. I don't like it, but it's here and I accept it. And even though I accept it, I can work on it and I can try to tweak some things to minimize it. Because the more that we practice wrote resistance, again, suffering is pain times resistance, the more it multiplies our pain. So a huge part of cutting edge pain science and pain rehabilitation programs is actually teaching people to accept their pain while at the same time wanting to make it go away. And that is like talk about again, like all truth is paradox, non-dual thinking. I think that's a really profound example. In the book, I talk about the Mayo Clinic Pain and Rehabilitation Center. It's really on the cutting edge of this.

and they have some fascinating approaches that have helped people in chronic pain. One more question, Brad, before we take off, your meeting with somebody who's earlier in their career. Maybe they just were a recent college grad and they want to do good, but they're not exactly sure where they want to go. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to that person? I think the most important is to try to follow your interests and do that within reason.

So if you're interested in basketball, but you didn't make the high school team, you're probably not going to be a pro basketball player. But within reason to follow your interest, don't try to find your passion. Don't try to find the perfect job. Lower the bar to I'm curious about this, and this is interesting.

Prioritize working with good people. And then especially when you're young, you can do a lot of job crafting. So like follow your interest sounds great and romantic, but you also need to make a paycheck and get health insurance at some point. But you can take a job that is X and very quickly and make that job Y. And I think that people underestimate the amount of freedom, especially in knowledge work that you have to shape a job in certain ways to your skills. And then be really open-minded about the long-term path. Out of school, I was working for McKinsey and company.

I got rejected. Not only did I get rejected from playing D1 football, I got rejected. from journalism school. So these two things in high school, right? Writer and football player, I did neither in college. And now I'm a professional writer. And I'm finally able to watch a college football game. And I'm not even that old, right? I'm not 40 yet. But at the time, it felt like, all right, I guess I'm never going to be a writer. But in my early jobs, I did a lot of job crafting where I was doing a lot of storytelling and writing. Like even at McKinsey, which was my first job, looking back on it, I avoided the financial model like it was the plague. Very quickly became

known, Brad is never going to do a model, but it's worth having him on the team because he's so good at crafting the PowerPoint deck in the story. And now I make stories for a living. So I think like job craft and follow your interests. Well, it's another great piece. You found something that you were curious and interested in. It became great at it. So great that others said, we got to have them on the team. Even if you didn't have all of the skills, you were good at something that was super valuable and we're known for something, and I think that goes a long way. The book is called Master of Change, How to Excel when everything is changing, including you. Love the cover, man. I think this thing looks really good. Congrats on getting this thing done. Like everything you

write. I read the growth equation, and I love the practice of groundliness, which we talked about before. But I'm just so appreciative of you, man. I'd love as we have to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Yeah, thanks for all that you do for the community of people interested in excellence and mastery. There's a lot of noise out there, a lot of bros from their hot tubs, so it's always good to find other signals. Cold tub, cold tub, cold tub. I love it, man. That's true. Actually, bros from their hot tubs would be much better. I'm with you. All right, man, thanks so much. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you

from this great conversation with Brad Stolberg, a few takeaways from my notes. How to respond instead of react. The four P's, pause, process, plan, proceed. And using the four P's will increase our chances of responding better as opposed to reacting quickly. And then non-dual thinking. It's not this or that. It's this and that.

It's not self-discipline or self-compassion. It's both. And as we learn more, I've noticed, and doing hundreds and hundreds of these episodes and having these conversations, I find we become more reasonable. We realize the world is not black and white. We can live in the gray and embrace it.

This is non-dual thinking. It's not this or that. It's this and that. And then I enjoyed learning about his core values and how he's narrowed them down to just two. Life and love. And life is the doing of his life, activities, health workouts, showing up. And love is the being of his life. That's family and being there for the most important people.

I think getting clear on our values and how we show up in the world. And in accordance to those values is a really important thing for all of us to do as leaders. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the word and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Brad Stolberg. I think it will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to go to Ryanhawk.net, which will launch you into Apple Podcast. And once you're there, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show hopefully five stars. And by doing that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon, can't wait.