Brad Stulberg, expert in personal development, talks about responding vs reacting to change, developing core values, and navigating major life disruptions. He introduces the concept of allostasis - stability through change. The importance of pausing, processing, making a plan, and proceeding is emphasized. The negative effects of resisting change, as well as career advice and personal experiences, are also discussed.
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Quick takeaways
Embrace change by updating expectations and recognizing your agency in shaping it.
Develop a rugged and flexible mindset by marrying strength and adaptability and prioritizing core values.
Shift your perspective on change as an inconvenience to an opportunity for growth and adaptation.
Deep dives
Change is a Conversation
The podcast episode emphasizes that change is not something that happens to you, but rather something that you're in conversation with. It encourages listeners to shift their mindset and recognize that they have agency in shaping change. By accepting change, updating their expectations, and realizing that change is a natural part of life, individuals can navigate periods of change and chaos more effectively.
Building a Rugged and Flexible Mindset
The episode explores the concept of having a rugged and flexible mindset. It highlights the importance of marrying strength and durability with adaptability and resilience. By identifying core values as rugged elements that endure, individuals can be more flexible in other areas of life. The episode also emphasizes the significance of defining core values, creating actionable practices, and prioritizing both self-discipline and self-compassion.
Navigating Life Disruptions and Making Career Changes
The podcast delves into the challenges posed by major life disruptions and provides insights on effective approaches to handle them. It encourages listeners to shift their perspective from perceiving change as an inconvenience to recognizing it as an opportunity for growth and adaptation. Additionally, the episode explores the process of making career changes, highlighting the importance of developing a discerning mindset, understanding personal criteria for change, self-distancing, and discerning when to quit or persist.
Managing change as an athlete
As an athlete, it can be challenging to cope with the end of a sports career and watch peers succeed. It's important to maintain a single-minded focus but also keep other areas of life open to maintain stability. Elite athletes are diversifying their interests, treating it like a diversified investment portfolio.
Rugged flexibility in responding to change
When faced with change, it's crucial to practice rugged flexibility. This involves pausing, processing emotions, making a plan, and proceeding. Naming emotions creates space to take deliberate action. By embracing change and responding thoughtfully, we can avoid unnecessary suffering and adapt to new circumstances.
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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.
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