Most of us spend our life assuming that whatever is happening in our mind is not something we can control. We seem to live as though the thoughts in our minds are objective reality itself. The truth is that while we cannot control outside events we can control how we think about what is happening. We can slowly learn to choose our thoughts. In this episode we are going to discuss the insights of the great Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius and how he can help us to control our thinking.
Transcript
Hi guys, Jonathan Doyle with you again, welcome back to the daily message.
Speaker:Hope you had a chance to listen to yesterday.
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Speaker:We're going to do a quote today from the incredible markets are really as
Speaker:one of the giants in the stoic universe, the universe of stoic philosophy.
Speaker:He was also a Roman emperor mentioned that that's quite an impressive CV.
Speaker:Let's do it.
Speaker:You have power over your mind.
Speaker:Not outside events realize this, and you will find strange.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:If you are not familiar with stoic philosophy, let me
Speaker:give you 32nd introduction.
Speaker:I guess the Stoics with the first to kind of say, look, life is pretty difficult.
Speaker:You know, their time in history, life expectancy was probably
Speaker:35, maybe disease, death, infant mortality was off the charts.
Speaker:Life was.
Speaker:Food.
Speaker:So, you know, it was food scarcity was a thing.
Speaker:Your chance of getting overrun by some other nation tribe
Speaker:or empire was pretty likely.
Speaker:So the Stoics took a position of wow.
Speaker:Life is kind of nice, like there's flowers and there's nice
Speaker:things and there's friendship and there's pleasures that we have.
Speaker:But there's also this great deal of suffering.
Speaker:It happened.
Speaker:So they were trying to deal with the question of what do
Speaker:we, how do we deal with that?
Speaker:You know, if you look at that, I guess I'm no expert on Buddhism,
Speaker:but the Buddhist philosophy is the transcendence of suffering.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So that you, you extinguish desire.
Speaker:You don't want any.
Speaker:You learn to get rid of all desire and then you don't suffer
Speaker:and then you enter Nirvana.
Speaker:You have transcendence from my Buddhist friends out there.
Speaker:I probably just had a hatchet job on one of the great world religions.
Speaker:So please forgive me.
Speaker:But I don't, I do know that what the original, uh, you know, what Buddha was
Speaker:trying to do is address the question of.
Speaker:So the Stoics doing it to the Stoics, took a different approach was how do you
Speaker:accept it instead of extinguishing desire?
Speaker:How do you accept the reality of suffering and how should you act in the face of it?
Speaker:How did you conduct yourself in life is difficult.
Speaker:Isn't that a great question for us?
Speaker:How should we conduct ourselves in the face of difficulty
Speaker:suffering loss and adversity?
Speaker:It is okay to jump up and down, have a meltdown, but then what would we do?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I remember there was a point early in, uh COVID when, you know,
Speaker:all my U S speaking had stopped.
Speaker:And I was just so frustrated.
Speaker:I was really frustrated at the way that they, that the
Speaker:governments were dealing with it.
Speaker:And I blew up.
Speaker:I was remember I was downstairs in my house talking to Karen and
Speaker:I just, I had a tantrum friends.
Speaker:I had a tantrum.
Speaker:And so it's okay.
Speaker:When life is difficult, we can get upset.
Speaker:But then what do we do?
Speaker:How do we.
Speaker:So what Marcus early is telling us today is let's begin with the first point.
Speaker:We don't have control over much of outside events.
Speaker:You don't get to control earthquakes.
Speaker:You don't get to control tornadoes.
Speaker:You don't get to control an unexpected, tragic cancer diagnosis,
Speaker:or the L you know, the loss of a friend or family member tragically.
Speaker:We don't, we we're not God.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like we, we don't, there's so much of reality.
Speaker:But we don't get to control.
Speaker:And one of the illusions of modern cultures, I said a few days ago is
Speaker:this veneer of pleasure and comfort and safety, you know, it's great, right?
Speaker:Like compared to our ancestors, we have flushing toilets.
Speaker:We have a whole bunch of really good stuff, but we have this veneer of safety.
Speaker:And I think part of the problems with the overreactions of COVID
Speaker:was this idea, this safety.
Speaker:This idea that we can somehow mandate or create this, this insulated bubble
Speaker:of protection, which isn't true.
Speaker:We can't like, I mean, the reality is that we born, we live, we die.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:We can manage a lot of the risks, but eventually we have to
Speaker:accept that we are not in control of a great number of things.
Speaker:So what do you do with that?
Speaker:So throughout history, people have been finding different ways to
Speaker:deal with that uncomfortable truth.
Speaker:You can deny that.
Speaker:You can avoid that truth.
Speaker:You look at say hidden ism, right?
Speaker:Like this idea of just you just pursue rampant pleasure that
Speaker:life's arbitrary, it's unknowable.
Speaker:There's no meaning in the universe.
Speaker:So just go out there and run a market as much pleasure as you can.
Speaker:And that's the point.
Speaker:So can we agree that throughout history people have had all
Speaker:these different philosophies?
Speaker:So what we want is a philosophy that works, that helps us to contribute to
Speaker:others that helps us to grow and develop that helps us to love and to serve.
Speaker:So what it really is, is telling us.
Speaker:We can't control what's happening outside on the big stuff.
Speaker:You know, there's, there's definitely what we, Stephen Covey
Speaker:used to talk about this, right?
Speaker:That the locus of control that the circle of control and the circle of concern,
Speaker:there's, there's great, big global events we can't do much about, but there are
Speaker:smaller things in our own little orbits that we can, so we want to deal with that.
Speaker:We want to control what we can control, but all the other stuff.
Speaker:We have to learn to manage our thought processes around it.
Speaker:This has been one of the greatest revelations of my life, coaching, the team
Speaker:that I coached yesterday, I was trying to help them realize that, you know,
Speaker:you can, you can control your thoughts.
Speaker:They happen so quick.
Speaker:I spent most of my life thinking you can't, but you actually can
Speaker:decide what you think you can do.
Speaker:You really know that if you get anything out of today's message, it's this, that
Speaker:you actually can control your thoughts.
Speaker:You actually can manage the.
Speaker:Of what you allow to go through your.
Speaker:So at the moment as a recording, this, you may be seeing this as it comes out,
Speaker:or you might be seeing it much lighter, you know, inflation is going nuts.
Speaker:And my other hat that I wear is in macro finance and investment.
Speaker:And I, you know, I kind of know the deep roots of this inflationary process.
Speaker:What's actually driving it.
Speaker:It's a story for another day, but it's.
Speaker:So you can jump up and down.
Speaker:You can get stressed, you can get depressed, you can get all political,
Speaker:you can do whatever you want, or you can control your thinking and go, right.
Speaker:This is the reality.
Speaker:What do I need to do?
Speaker:What do I need?
Speaker:You apply this to any issue that you're facing, you got
Speaker:a difficult person at work.
Speaker:Well, that's a reality.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:There's things you can do.
Speaker:You can, there's a whole bunch of strategies that you might use, but
Speaker:the first strategy is that you've got to get control of your thinking.
Speaker:You've got to get control and you just got to say, is it positive?
Speaker:Is it negative?
Speaker:Is it helping me to grow?
Speaker:Am I going to be a better person?
Speaker:Is this, this is hard.
Speaker:Me telling you this, I wrestled with this, I fight with this and related
Speaker:to this is this idea that, um, look, this goes back to a lot of the
Speaker:early personal development thinking.
Speaker:And sadly, I think this idea that I'm about to share got kind of, it lost a
Speaker:lot of credibility with that book, the secret and the movie, you know, this
Speaker:magical idea that you can kind of just, you know, think something into existence.
Speaker:I want a Tesla.
Speaker:Where's my Tesla.
Speaker:But behind it is an idea that, that our thoughts basically have a charge that
Speaker:they have a positive or negative charge.
Speaker:And I guess they do at the level of brain chemistry, right?
Speaker:Because your thoughts really electro chemical impulses in your
Speaker:brain Synetic charges, right?
Speaker:Tiny, tiny minuscule charges of electricity.
Speaker:Moving through Myla NYSED signups is in your brain.
Speaker:So there is a charge component to our thoughts.
Speaker:And some people would argue that the positive or negative charge in our
Speaker:thinking tends to shape a lot of our experience of reality so that if your
Speaker:thoughts are predominantly negative and we've all experienced it, right.
Speaker:There's times when we're just like.
Speaker:And we're just like, what's the point?
Speaker:What's the point?
Speaker:And that negative thinking creates a whole negative feedback loop.
Speaker:Whereas maybe the Thompson your life, when you feel amazing, you just like,
Speaker:you feel a million bucks, you want to run out, you just feel so pumped
Speaker:because a different energy, right?
Speaker:There's a different energy in your thoughts.
Speaker:There's a different energy.
Speaker:The simplest example.
Speaker:Is imagine watching a favorite sporting team.
Speaker:Imagine if you have a team that you've loved since you were young or, you know,
Speaker:just work with me here and you're at a grand final, and there's two seconds to
Speaker:go and your team wins, like how many of you were just like, oh, that's great.
Speaker:I'm glad they won.
Speaker:I guess, you know, what actually happens is the entire crowd just goes crazy.
Speaker:Use your body differently.
Speaker:Your thinking's different.
Speaker:And you get this.
Speaker:So, this is longer than I wanted to go, but you know, Marcus earliest
Speaker:in today's quite as reminding us that maybe we don't get to.
Speaker:A fair bit of what's happening, but there is one part we can control.
Speaker:And that's the thinking that we bring to it.
Speaker:And I just want to encourage you because I spent most of my life
Speaker:thinking that you just couldn't.
Speaker:I spend most of my life thinking that, well, you know, this is just how I
Speaker:think, and this is reality and it's like, nah, you do get to control.
Speaker:Is that good news?
Speaker:I think it's good news.
Speaker:Good news.
Speaker:That you can actually control what you think.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:That's it for me tonight.
Speaker:Please make sure you subscribe.
Speaker:Grab your free access to my book.
Speaker:Bridging the gap in the link below shares with a few friends.
Speaker:My name is Jonathan Doyle, and I'm going to have another message for you tomorrow.
