Simple Stoic Thinking Modernized

How are you? Well, happy, happy, happy Monday. Come on in here. Good to have you here today. It is Memorial Day here in the United States of America, a holiday weekend, the unofficial start of summer.

But at the end of the day, wow, it is so much more. It is the Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com. Memorial Day is often understood as something it's not. It just happens, and that's okay.

But the reason we do it is we honor the folks who have served in our military, our armed forces here in the United States of America, and they have died.

They didn't retire. They didn't get hurt. They're not on active duty. They died. They paid the ultimate price. That's what today's for. So keep that in mind as you roll through your day today.

Put a thought that way. And thank you for the service. So today, a little bit different show as we go into this. Sometimes when I get into summer, I kind of get contemplative.

And that's where I am right now. I don't get like, oh, well, let's goof off all summer. I actually kind of get in a more contemplative mode. So today, a very different show, a show that I don't know that I've ever done with this style before.

Although the last five shows, I can probably say the same thing about. I'm just kind of doing what I do in coaching, bring it to you on a podcast, not thinking too much about it. Just these are my thoughts. This is what I learned.

This is where I learned it from. This is what will help. And we're doing that. So a lot of times you'll hear me talk about three areas that I work on.

And you might think it's, hey, it's this big marketing thing. I guess it is. Everything in life is marketing. We got to tell you what we do so you understand the process.

But I've done this so long now, tens of thousands of coaching hours. I have simply figured out that there is just a process. And usually it's by throwing away tons of other things.

That's kind of it. It gets down to the basics. And the more I got down to it without even knowing this, the more I realized, well, I'm not the first one to figure this out.

It's actually going on for a very long time. A lot of it is stoic-based. Now, I'm not the most stoic guy on the planet. I certainly have roots in stoicism.

I'm sorry. I get beat up every time I say that word. So today, I want to take you down a road of the three areas that I work on all the time, awareness, peaceful base, and goal-setting anticipation engine. Those three areas are going to tie them together and show you how they work, and you're going to have a very different feel today.

Now, the other day, I was talking to a client who told me, he said, Scott, why don't you charge more? And I said, because I like you. You should charge more. I said, don't really need to.

And the reason is because my method of working with people and what I'll teach you today allows me to have retention. At this point, my longest client is nine years. I think I average about six years for personal clients, which is why I don't have too many openings. And we spend a lot of time in group coaching because that's where I have the openings.

That's where I can kind of multiply what I do. But the reason is because what I'm going to teach you today allows me to maintain a level of retention that is amazing. And the reason is because we're always dialed into what's going on. It never gets old.

We're always trying to figure it out. There's always something new and we're always reaching for a balance. So that's why I set this up for you so you understand where I'm heading here.

So let me repeat these three things, and I am going to be working off some notes here because this is way too much for me to get it right and remember it. So I'm going to read some notes and ad lib in between and also going to say some Greek words that I can't say very well.

And we'll start with prosike, continuous education, watching your own mind. That would be what the Stoics might call awareness. It's the gap between what happens and how you react.

that's where you actually live between what happens and how you react. You've heard that before. Don't respond, react, right? Take a pause, think, whatever.

It's a gap you live in. Now, a lot of us talk about that gap. A lot of people talk about the gap between in your alignment of how you think and how you live. I'm actually saying between this quick thought and where your action is, it's actually much closer to how you're living every single day.

The event, whatever's going on in your world is neutral. It doesn't matter. The story that you tell yourself is That matters. Or does it? Hmm. See, most of the wrecks that you think are going to happen in your life, they're just running suffering on your brain because they're not even real yet.

I actually put a date down on the calendar when I have to worry about something. Have you started doing that yet? I do. Something comes up in my world and it's like, well, uh-oh, going to have to worry about that.

I said, why? It's six weeks away. Can't do anything for six weeks. Well, some people lose sleep for six weeks. I don't know. I put it on the calendar.

I said, this is the day I start on that. I worry that day. I don't wait. I just take it out of my mind. So Epictetus, disturbed not by things, but by our opinions of them.

Marcus said, the discipline of assent. Pause before you sign off on the impression. Seneca said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Let's wrap this up, okay?

By the way, these are not the exact words. These are not the exact quotes. We don't even know that because it was such a long time ago, but it's pretty close to what we know from the written word, okay?

Translation is, awareness isn't the destination. It's what shows you the line. Once you see clearly, you notice what's actually yours and what was never yours.

And that line is where peace comes from. So when I teach about awareness, people say, well, what do you mean awareness? I mean freaking minute awareness. Every single thing that's going on and processing that.

And when we take that and we move it into a peaceful base, people say to me, well, peaceful base, come on, man. What do you mean peaceful base? I'm going to explain that here in a second and why it's so important, why it's built in to humans. And it, in fact, has been taught for tens of thousands of years and nobody teaches it anymore.

It hasn't been called a peaceful base. That's mine. I gave it a name. I guess that's my contribution to mankind, right? I gave it a name. Let's talk about that for a second.

Atakrasia, freedom from disturbance. And the line under it, as they say, some things are up to us, some aren't. Now, a little sidebar here. If you are a religious person, I'm a Christian.

I have my thoughts. I'm not going to go there today. I never go there. But if you are, you'll see there's an undertone here about how you should be thinking and where your power comes from.

If you're catching it, you know what I'm talking about. If not, you'll learn. You'll pick it up later. But there is an undertone of what I'm talking about here that plays in every part of life, whether you believe in God or not.

Right now we're talking stoicism. The freedom from disturbance. Some things are up to us. Some aren't. I would go a step further and say, I don't think anything's up to us.

Peace isn't something you generate. It's what's left when you stop fighting for what was never in your hands. Your judgments, your effort, your choice, they're not yours.

Outcomes, other people, the past, the weather, it's not yours. The base isn't a place. It's something you carry along the way. So a lot of people get confused when I teach a peaceful base.

They say, well, things should be static, peaceful. In other words, I've got it peaceful. It's going to stay that way. It's not. Because if you optimize for something that you want to be doing, but it's not big enough, your capability hasn't been optimized big enough, as we talked about last week, if you don't control the empty space in your life, your peaceful base will get blown up the very minute something else happens.

The economy of control, the tranquility of the mind, The Inn of Citadel. You can treat yourself or retreat into yourself at any moment. Nowhere is more peaceful than your own soul.

People chasing beach cabins is what they call amateur hour. This is why the base comes in before goals. If you set goals from grasping, every single goal becomes a threat to you. If you stand on solid ground first, you can aim at something without your peace riding on it, whether you hit it or not.

So this is really backwards for what I do. I am very different from people in my world. I don't care. I can make a ton more money if I lied to you and said, let's set a big goal.

Let's go for it. You can do anything you want. Let's give it three days and we'll be there. No. I understand something. If I can't get you 100% completely aware of as much as I possibly can in your life, 100%, if I can't establish a peaceful base that has some malleability to it and get you to the place where you understand that no matter what peaceful base you set up, you're still not ultimately responsible for what happens and get you to relax into that world, you're not going to get the goal you want.

You don't have the foundation for it. So we work on that level. Are some of you going to see the correlation here I just talked about a few minutes ago?

So we talk about awareness, right? And being aware of everything. And then we talked about the peaceful base and being able to set yourself up so you have that solid foundation of which you can do with just about anything.

And then we have goal setting or what I like to call my anticipation engine. And they are the same and they're very different. We can split these into two different kinds of anticipation.

Anticipation is one of those things that is incredibly powerful. If you choose to look at the negative way, you can anticipate something in a negative way and it will literally be a relief when you just get it done. That happens. But the more powerful side of anticipation, the bigger dopamine hit is when it's positive.

And that's why we use it. Science has absolutely proven that if I can take the... obsessive and the harmonious passions that we all live within and add anticipation to that and do a little exploring the possibilities on top of that, we have a really fun life. When we take all that and we say, yes, we're going for it.

We're having some fun. We're exploring. We're anticipating. Everything is great. I get out of bed ready to go. And then we establish a peaceful base on top of it.

Man, it's like being retired without working your whole entire life and fully funded forever. That's the peaceful that it is. It's really cool. So think of it this way.

The archer controls a stance. The aim, the draw, the release. Picture that in your mind. Once the arrow is gone, the hit isn't his, is it? His goal isn't to hit the target.

His goal is to shoot well. There's a reserve clause here. Hovig's hair assists. That's terribly bad. It's so bad, I shouldn't have even tried to say it, but I did.

I'm like, I'm not going backwards. I'm not. I'm glad I phonetically spelled it. I'll make the call. Launch the thing. Have the conversation. Fate permitting.

All in, open-handed. Some people don't get that. All in, we'll see what happens. Some people say, I'm all in, it's going to work, I'm going to force it, I'm going to push it.

Have fun with that. Now, we can have a discussion for hours and hours and hours about the ability to kind of give it up and just go with the flow and you don't have any control over the final outcome. And yet, because you have free will in your life, you do have some control. You create your own path.

We can have a long discussion. And I spend many, many hours every single week on that discussion. But the two go hand in hand. All in. And we'll see what happens.

I talked about two types of anticipation. Bad anticipation. Living in the future that hasn't arrived. That's bad anticipation. You're paying the tax on a loss you haven't had yet.

That's worry. You don't need to do that. When I talk about a pre-planned response, one of the things I'm doing in a pre-planned response is I'm getting ahead of the bad anticipation.

Good anticipation. No, I'm going to stop right there. There's another word. I'm not going to say it again. Free meditation malorium, I think that's what it is.

Rehearse what could go wrong ahead of time. The blow you see coming lands soft. Pre-pay the worst case, and then you'll go on unafraid. That is my pre-planned response.

If you haven't ever studied the pre-planned response with me, I don't talk about it often, but it's literally me saying, okay, what could happen today, good, bad, and different, and saying let's take every single scenario that you might be worried about, and let's work it from every possible angle, the good, the bad, everything in between, and let's kind of work through it. Because the mind is set, if you understand how the mind works, that once you kind of work through the scenario and you just imagine everything that could possibly go good or bad with it, Your mind's like, good, let's go get it done.

If you hold that inside of you and just show up and deal with it, you're going to be stressed. So we want to kind of prepay the worst case of what we're doing here.

So the archer has the stoic view is what they're doing. We get tortured by what we fear in that premeditation of adversity is what I think you may be able to call it. Now, what's really cool about this whole thing, and I know I've mispronounced the words like crazy.

Strangely, in all the speaking I've done in my life, I've never had any ability to pronounce words. Stuff like that. I'm not good at languages. I have no idea why.

I guess I could be. No, I'm sure I could be. I could be trained to do it. But it's just something I've never really cared too much about. And it doesn't bite me too much.

And that's why I don't do a lot of shows like this. But anyway, I gave it to you. I'll give you stuff in between. Let me tie it all together for you, okay?

So I've said over the years, stand up, take a step, repeat. That's what this is. It's kind of got Roman accents on it, I guess. Awareness gets you oriented.

And I will tell you, when I started on awareness about two and a half years ago, and people sometimes just like, blah, blah, blah. I'm aware enough, Scott. No, you're not.

No, you're not. I deal with 30, 40 people a week all the time. And I will tell you, you're not even close to being aware. Most people aren't. But once we get you there, you get addicted to it.

So you have your awareness. And then you kind of roll through to your peaceful base and then you roll through your goal setting. And what's really interesting is when you get goals here, it drops you right back into awareness. And this is why I work with clients and stick with them for years and years and years.

I understand something. I understand that if we get that base built and we get these goals set and you go after them based on your awareness at the time, the very minute you go after a goal, your awareness levels are going to change.

And we have to come back around and be aware of what's happening and alter that peaceful base so we can keep working toward that goal and more beyond that. It's a circle, a loop in life that we have to do. And it happens. It could happen 20 times a day.

It could happen once a year, depending on what you're working on. I have little by little over my time, my career, have just kind of come more and more back to this. It is not sexy. It's not the law of attraction.

It's not, you know, just imagine it. It'll show up. It's not unicorn or rainbows. And by the way, what is the manifestation stuff I'm seeing pop up now?

Are you guys starting to fall for that again? My feed is filled with all these manifestation people. Dream it. You can have it. Have we not been down that road before?

Ah, wait a second. The truth is you can have it if you can dream it. In fact, that's kind of where it all starts. You may be there right now. But you tried everything.

You can't get it to work. You just haven't become uberly aware of what's really going on in your life. You don't have a base that will support your dreams. And maybe you haven't dialed in the exact dream in a way that you anticipate the massive success and you're more worried about what's going to happen if you try to do it.

We don't want to do that. We want to move away from that toward what you want and then lock it right back into awareness so we can continue to get the result you want.

I'll leave you at that today. That's a lot for a holiday, isn't it?