ArchiveFM

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

542: Brad Stulberg - How To Excel When Everything Is Changing (Including You)

Duration
1h 1m
Broadcast on
27 Aug 2023
Audio Format
other

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. Change is 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 66866 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 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Great one. Brad Stolberg, researchers, 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 to paint. 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 in 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 in 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 blasting 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 in 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 100 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."

Transcription truncated.