Brian Kight - 14 Hard Truths About Fear, Desire, and Discipline

Brian Kight and I challenge the myth that more information leads to better lives and show how courage, discipline, and clarity turn principles into practice. We map emotions to desires, reframe integrity as wholeness, and break down four identities that define every team’s culture.

• lessons from 2,088 daily posts on what actually lands
• principle collectors vs users and the field of action
• courage and discipline as the action gap closers
• emotion wheel for naming fear and reducing anxiety
• fear paired with desire and shifting aims to control
• why fear of failure is often fear of embarrassment
• integrity as alignment between stated and lived standards
• fun as operating at the edge of your ability
• competitor, player, chaser, socializer identities on teams
• building cultures that reward competitors without losing others

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"Listeners, thank you for tuning in. Tune in next week. Check us out, athleticfortitude.com. Download the pod, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Five stars on the baby. Thank you, BK."

Transcript

Lessons From 2,088 Daily Posts

SPEAKER_01 0:00

After thousands of micro lessons, what have you learned about human behavior that you didn't know before you started your newsletter chain?

SPEAKER_00 0:08

So, you know, the the first thing the first thing is is what I've learned about human behavior is kind of it's a little it's really it's related between me and an audience. Uh and I think anybody who makes anything uh will will say this, or anything at volume at least. Um I I saw somebody saying this on X the other day. Probably the single biggest thing is that I have, I mean, I've written two as of today, I've written 2,088 daily disciplines. Right. And the single biggest lesson of doing that is I still have absolutely no clue which lessons are gonna stick and land and people are gonna be interested in and tackle in which ones they're gonna which ones are gonna be duds. I mean, I will I will write, like you know, the the joke I'll tell people when when they ask sort of about it is I will write what I think will change the world. Like I'll think it's gonna win a Pulitzer Prize, this is gonna be the thing that you know launches into the stratosphere, and it'll be crickets. And some of my best some of my best performing quote unquote or best received content in daily discipline has happened at 10 p.m. You know, after I've had dinner, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh no, I forgot to schedule daily discipline for tomorrow, and I will write something from a note that I have to myself, and I'll write it in 30 minutes and push it out, and I will get 200 replies on, oh my god, this is I cannot believe how much this is speaking to what's going on. Like this is fundamentally changed. So not that I try to do it that way, right? But uh so what I've what I've learned is uh to write for me is I've learned to write truth. Right, write it, write the truth as I see it. Um that's number one. Number two is what I've learned is that a lot of people are what I call principle collectors, not principle users. I like that. They love to collect principles that they know uh and they've rarely actually apply those principles directly. Um the principles are souvenir for them. And and and maybe it's just the era that we're living in, right? With uh podcasts and books and tweets and posts and Instagram and all the different stuff. Um human beings have always um known more than they actually execute. That's just always that's just a nature, that's a human nature thing. But a product of our world, or at least the era in which we are living, is that the volume of content has exploded, but our the the the amount of our application has not changed at all. We are applying kind of at the levels we always have. So I was kind of like, you know, the graph of, you know, pick a topic, right? Like and when I do keynotes, I will, I will a lot of times I'll open with what's happened to the amount of leadership content over the last 26 years, basically the internet era from 2000 forward. What's happened to the amount of leadership content? I mean, it's exponentially exploded. It's a J curve going through the roof. What's happened to the quality of leadership execution over the exact same time period if you were to map that graph?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Probably remained about the same.

unknown 3:50

Yeah.

Principle Collectors vs Principle Users

SPEAKER_00 3:50

And then, you know, you know, some people are doomsday. I'm not, like, oh, it's you know, it's gone off a cliff. No, I don't think it's gone off a cliff. Like, you know, there's areas where it has, you know, not gotten better. Um, there's areas where it has really dropped off, right? Like probably the quality of our the leadership in our education system. It's probably not it's not great right now. Right? It's not great. Uh quality of leadership in our government, not great right now. I don't think that's a political statement. I think I think we can all kind of look and say, like, you know, I don't, I don't think it's amazing, right? I don't think it's awesome. Uh whereas, you know, like in in the in the in in coaching in sports, I think it's gone up. Now, but it just hasn't gone up at the same degree that the content has. So, how do we explain the explosion of knowledge and information and insight and learning that we've had just in the topic of leadership or diet and exercise? Diet and exercise is a great example. Like we know, I mean, the things we've learned over the last 26 years about diet and exercise, unbelievable what we've learned. We could stop right now and and not learn another thing about diet and exercise. And we know just about all the things we would know for people to be as healthy as they could want to be, again, within the realm within the realm of the human body's limitations, right? And people don't do it. Like they just don't do it. So what the reason I say that is like the sort of the learning is is that is that the the next frontier, right? The frontier that I'm betting on is we need to help people apply principles in the field of action where they operate. Right. And and field of action is just a, just that it's just a all field of action is is a term for the reality that you live in, right? That's it. So maybe your field of action is you run a gym, maybe your field of action is you coach, maybe your field of action is, you know, you're a mom raising kids in in a house. You don't have a job out in the world. Your field of action is your home, right? Your marriage, your parenting. Um, maybe your field of action is in a classroom, maybe your field of action is um as a CPA with clients. Maybe your field of action is you're a college student. Uh the principles that you're learning and reading and consuming, like they can't be souvenirs that sit on a shelf or in your Kindle that you downloaded or that you post and say, I read these books this year. Because the field of action, you know, frankly, even you know, creating content or a post you write or whatever, the field of action doesn't care how many views a YouTube video gets. Like the only thing that matters in the field of action is does it work? And that's that's where I've always lived is does it work? And so I get, I get uh uh the reason I started Daily Discipline eight years ago was uh nine years ago now, 2018, was that I got frustrated how many people were hearing things and then just still not doing them. And so that's why the the daily every daily discipline ends with do the work. Like that's that's it. Um and so now I'm in my ninth year of writing daily discipline, 2088 messages in, and I I'm I'm I'm more in belief of that than I was when I even started, that that the big gap is transitioning from it's not information, it's not knowledge. Um, if that was it, it it we would have solved this a long, long time ago. It's transferring from the exposure and the knowledge, and frankly, even the training into the field of action. How do you get it into the field of action where you are operating and actually apply the principle there so that you can generate some evidence, get some feedback and consequences about what's happening, good, bad, or indifferent, and then learn how good am I actually at doing this? And then does this principle actually work in the field of action where I operate? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

So those are like the two big things that that immediately jump to my mind. Um uh uh obviously there's, I mean, I could I could go for a long time, could go for three hours on everything that I see because I get obviously I get a I get a front row seat access to uh a lot of people's experiences uh as they reply to daily discipline and interact in our community and stuff about what they're what they're trying to do. But those are the two that jump out to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

I read earlier this week, it was learning is a smart man's version of procrastination, and that gap between what we learn and what we do for, like you just said, majority of people generalizing here is really far. And any successful person, in depending on your definition of success, is there's a razor-thin gap between thought and action. There's a razor-thin gap between what we learn and what we do. And the closer we can get to that is the closer we can get to having the agency to build the best version of ourselves. What do you think the difference is between the people who are able to create that razor-thin gap between thought and action, as opposed to the people who learn, learn, learn, learn, know all these principles but never change, act in alignment with what they've learned? Courage, two things, courage and discipline.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Um, you know, courage is the willingness to act when you're afraid. And all of the whatever the manifestations are of fear. People don't like to acknowledge or admit that they're afraid, um, but then they say, I have anxiety. Well, that's fear. Uh, I have doubt, that's fear. Um uh, you know, I'm uncertain. That's fear. And we don't like to say it, but we say that's fear. Uh, or we we we don't say that's fear, we say it's something else, but it's really just fear. Um, something interesting if you're if you're interested in that, um, a tool that is awesome. It's called the emotion wheel. Have you ever heard of the emotion wheel?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

I have not.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

So the emotion wheel is cool. Um, it's super simple. You can literally Google it and then go to images, um, and then you can find. I mean, though there's thousands of versions of them, just find one that makes the most sense to you. But human beings experience only a handful of core emotions. Um, and there's a couple different debates in schools of thought on on what they are. Um, but like, you know, the solidified ones are fear, joy, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger. Um, there's debates on love, um, happiness, that's joy, right? But what the these are the core emotions. And what an emotion wheel is, at the center of the wheel, you know, like uh think about like a pie or a pizza, at the center of the wheel are these core. And then as the wheel expands outward and it gets bigger, there are all of the layered examples or manifestations of that emotion, but more nuanced in specific contexts, right? And but what it does is it it ties and it shows visually anxiety is just a manifestation of fear.

unknown 10:46

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:46

That's all it is. And so what it does is it shows you all the specific things that you might feel, or a label we might call it, or a specific application, and just showing you, hey, that that's really just this emotion. It's all it really is. And I found it to be very useful for myself, um, and like having kids and being married and interacting with people, that when I can see maybe something on the outer side of the wheel that's very specific, a term that people use, or what looks like what people are feeling, is for me to be able to go back and remember that's just this emotion. They're just feeling this emotion, like it's just fear. They're just sad, they're just surprised, they're just angry. And I don't mean just to minimize it. I mean to just come back and say, hey, it's not, it's not all this uh confusing, it's just anger. They're angry. Okay, great. Like let's address that. So um, so being able to being able to to identify that and bring it back is is super important, right? So when I when I look at that. Um what was that? Remind what was that? Remind me the question you asked that you would you that that sparked us into this. I was describing the emotional and I was I was I lost track where we're connected to.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

No, the difference between the people who are able to create that razor-thin gap between thought or learning and action in the ones that can't.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Yeah. So it's yeah, so courage being it. And so connecting back to the fear. So the reason people uh the reason why I say courage is at the end of the day, the the things that stop us from action, they're not, they're not complex. It's just a lot of times it's that we we either don't understand them or don't have the tools for navigating them, navigating them. And so what stops somebody from acting when they know they need to is fear.

unknown 12:30

Right?

The Action Gap In Leadership, Health, And Life

SPEAKER_00 12:30

And there's a lot of things we'd be afraid of. Um, but the script in most people's head, whether it's explicit or implicit, is I'll act when the fear goes away. And the thing, Colin, is the fear never goes away. I'll I'll do it when I'm when I'm not so when I'm not full of doubt. I'll oh, once I overcome doubt, then I'll do it. And the thing, Colin, is you don't ever beat doubt. Ever. The second you beat doubt, you per you do something, and then that doubt goes away, but your action then brings you into an environment that introduces you to a new doubt. So every time you you quote unquote overcome doubt, it levels you up and exposes you to something new that reintroduces doubt again. And now you're back into doubt just onto something else. Right? You're like, oh, I doubt whether I could start a business. Well, you start a business uh and you beat that doubt. You're like, man, I did start a business. But then you get introduced on, I doubt I can sustain this. Well, then you do sustain it for a while. You're like, oh, I doubt I can grow it. I doubt I can keep it. I doubt I can sell it, I doubt I can hire people, I doubt I can charge more. You know what I'm saying? Like you never beat it. You just you just keep elevating to a new kind of doubt. Uh so that's the thing, is it's not, I mean, this is age old, and this goes all the way back to, I mean, you can go back to 2500 BC, the Greeks were writing about this. About, you know, they they they there's a there's a there's maxims from ancient Greece saying, once you know, you must do. You must act on what you know. Because what they recognized was in ancient Greece in 2500 BC, when they did not have all the the the knowledge and intelligence that we have today, with whatever they had, they still didn't act on it. And the things that got in the way were fear or simply the discipline to continue doing the action. So courage and discipline, I mean, if you just built two skills, now I have kids, right? If I could give my kids two skills, I'd be hard pressed to find if I just said, hey, you I'm gonna give my kids courage. Again, not because I can gift it to them, but like to build it into them. I mean, I'm gonna build courage into you and I'm gonna build discipline into you. And then other than that, you do whatever you want. But if my kids don't have courage and my kids don't have discipline, they are not gonna build a very good life. Full stop. It doesn't matter how smart they are. A smart person without courage is it ends up failing.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

I think the important part is I'm big on I care less about the emotion and more what we do about it and redefining what our relationship is and without going into like super complex details about what anxiety, stress, these different emotions, feelings are, it's understanding the root of them. Like you said, a lot of anxiety comes from fear. A lot of what we define as anxiety probably really isn't anxiety. And if you can understand what that fear is, you can put together your own process or game plan to attack that fear. And then at a certain point, you realize, and honestly, Brooks Kepka said this in an interview the other day, and I loved it, and I sent it to some of my athletes. They were talking to him about his return to PGA tour, and he was like, I was insanely nervous on that first T. He hit it right down the middle, and then he joked because he didn't play as well off the T the rest of his round. He's like, I guess I should have been more nervous on the other holes. And it's the point that just because you feel nervousness or anxiety or stress or some other type of emotion doesn't mean that you can't operate or perform at a high level. I'm not telling you to ignore your emotions. I'm not telling you to disregard them. But once you understand where they're coming from, you can live and succeed in a really high stress environment, even with a range and herd of emotions on the back end that feel like they're infiltrating you, but really you just have to step in and control and dictate your responses.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

So, two things. I mean, one, one, you're totally right. Um, you're totally right. And so, you know, you you made a point, and and let me underscore it. Most people have most people who feel fear and whatever the manifestation of it is, anxiety, again, I'm gonna I'm gonna call it fear because I'm gonna make sure we're talking about the base emotion and then however it whatever comes out of it. Um, so whatever term you want to call it, and if you're like, I don't like the word fear, or I'm I'm masculine or I'm tough or I'm whatever, and I don't want to acknowledge I don't fear anything, or you're just it makes you feel too vulnerable to use the word fear. I'll meet you where you are, whatever term you want to call it, I'm okay with that. All right. I'm only interested in the reality of what's happening. But two things. Number one is most people have no idea what they're actually afraid of. And because they don't know what they're afraid of, they can't actually address it. I'll give you an example. I don't remember if we talked about this last time, but people say they're people say they're afraid of failure. Uh, and they're not afraid of failure. They're not. Because somebody who's a for somebody who says they're afraid of failure, Colin, what what what what's it, what's what are the typical patterns uh that you see from somebody who is afraid of failure? Like what's what's what's the most common, frequent patterns like you're like, oh man, that person's they're caught in the grip of fear of failure. Well, what do you usually see from somebody who is saying that about themselves?

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Usually you're less afraid of the fear of failure and more fear of the opinions of people who are watching you fail.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

But I'm saying, like, what's the behavior? Like, what's the behavior pattern that that shows up in somebody who says, Oh, I'm afraid of failure? Like, what do you see in this as what are you doing? Why are you doing that? And they say, Oh, it's because I'm afraid of failure.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

What's the behavior that that we're like hesitancy, pacing, like sweating? Here you go. Like your mind wandering, like you know, yeah, you're sitting in this, like uncertain, like you can just see they're kind of like edgy, sketchy.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Yeah, you see, you see inaction, hesitant action, halfway commitment, resistance, avoidance, backing away, right? Okay, well, here's my thing. If you're afraid of failing, and that's the true fear, that's really the fear, failing. I'm so afraid that I will fail. Does not hesitation, avoidance, backing down, halfway committing, does that not accelerate your failure? So you're engaging in a behavior that accelerates the thing you say you're afraid of happening. I always use the example. And again, if we talked about this last time, we just get a little quick little rehit reset. Like, I think we did. What when I was in college and I was I was single, I always I use this example every time because it's the human thing. You can go back to high school with prom or whatever, but like my example is like I played college football, like I'm out with my guys, you know, we'd go around, like I would, you know, my buddy would see a girl, be like, man, look at her, she's cute. Like, I'd be like, go talk to her, and he'd be like, No, no. I'm like, why not? He's like, Well, like, what if she shoots me down? I'd say, then continue not dating her. Who is she? I don't know. How many dates have you been on with her? None. So if you walk over and you talk to her, and then she says, get away from me, what have you lost? You don't even have it right now. So my point is, how can you be afraid of not having something you don't have? Here's what it is. Fear of failure is being afraid of ending up where you are right now. That's crazy. Okay, so if failure is what you're really afraid of, now here's the here's the truth, okay? Cut through the noise. What does somebody who is genuinely, truly afraid of failing and like failing specifically? That is the true fear. What behavior pattern emerges out of somebody who is genuinely terrified of failing? They do everything in their power to win. They exhaust themselves to win. So, as a signal, if somebody, if I look at somebody and they are not doing everything possibly required to win and succeed, I know that person is not afraid of failure. They're afraid of something else. And they don't even know what it is. They're afraid of embarrassment, they're afraid of rejection, they're afraid of isolation, they're afraid of not being good enough. They're afraid of you know doing something, they're they're afraid of losing social standing. They're afraid of discomfort, they're afraid of whatever. It's not failure, they're afraid of. So, right, now let's let's let's play a scenario out, okay? Let's say you and I are at the bar, you and I are out wherever, okay, and we're back in our, we're back in our boys, we're in college, okay? And I walk, you see me, I'm I point at a girl, and I'm like, hey, I walk over there and I'm like, I'm gonna go talk to her, and you see me walk over and talk to her, you see her shoot me down, you see me walk back to you, okay? If we're boys, what are you saying to me? Are you saying, BK, man, I am so proud. I was watching your effort, and you were courageous, you were disciplined about that attempt, and I love the fact that you tried, and it's okay that it didn't work out. There's a lot of fish in the sea, buddy. Is that what you're saying to me if we're if you're boys with me?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Not in college, not in college maybe, yeah, mine am I right? But if we're in college, what are you saying to me? No, I am I'm giving you the hardest time ever. I am making fun of you, telling you you look stupid, things of that nature, being a typical, you know, uh typical college guy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

So what am I really trying to avoid?

SPEAKER_01 21:57

I'm trying to avoid the embarrassment of it.

Field Of Action: Make Ideas Work

SPEAKER_00 21:59

I'm trying to. I'm trying to avoid the rejection of social status from her, and I'm trying to avoid the embarrassment that I would get from you, my friend, because I don't want you to do that to me and I don't want to feel like that. I'm not afraid of not getting the date or meeting the girl or failing in that endeavor. I'm afraid of the things I attach to that. And here's how real that is. Now change the scenario where I'm by myself and I'm in the social setting. Doesn't matter what it is, coffee shop, bar, whatever. I will also be afraid of going out and having that conversation. And by the way, this translates to sales. This translates to starting a business. This translates to putting out content anywhere. Because it's, you know, I'm saying asking on a date because we did this at prom in high school. Like, will we be afraid to ask somebody a prom? Because what? The worst thing in the world was asking somebody a prom and they told you no. Because then everybody would know, you know what I'm saying? Go right back to like those teenage heavy emotions. We remember that. Go back to eighth grade, asking a girl to a dance, right? Kids don't do dances anymore, but back in our day, that's what we did, right? And so, and so we're not afraid of we're not afraid of the result itself, the failure in that sense. We're afraid of what we attach to the failure, which means if you don't have embarrassment or rejection or identity attached to that failure, all of a sudden that fear of failure isn't even real because you realize, oh, I'm not afraid of the failure. Because I could fail privately and be fine. Like I could fail privately and be fine. Also, why would I not be afraid? Why am I not afraid of just not getting a date period? That's failure, isn't it? I want to meet her, I want to know her. Right? I wanna I wanna I wanna get her number. Okay, well so instead I just don't ask. Well, didn't I fail? Why am I not afraid of that? Why am I afraid of not getting it? Because to me that like that's failure. There it was, you wanted it, you didn't get it. Failed. Whether you attempted or didn't attempt is irrelevant to the actual outcome. You didn't get it. But in one scenario where I don't ever go out there and I don't ever ask, what's the one thing I took, what what what did I take out of my experience? What did I not get? The rejection, the embarrassment, the loss of social status, that reveals the true fear. It's like a player, it's like it like in college, like if you, you know, not college, but like, you know, in any kind of athlete, it's like if you if you kind of don't try your hardest in a drill or an exercise, whatever you're doing, if you don't try your hardest, you can be like, yeah, I didn't get that outcome, but it's because I didn't do this, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

And you get to maintain all of me. I was that was exactly me, but from an academic lens. Sure. Yeah. My so my thing was at a very young age, I was propelled in all like advanced learning classes. I was really naturally smart. I picked things up quickly, you know, didn't take me very long. Then I became associated. For me, everything was easy. And then the second I had some challenge academically, I shut down. Right. You know, I began to get that fear of status, right? The fear of embarrassment, the fear of rejection. And so where I defaulted was, well, I'm not even gonna try. I'm not gonna try and look how good I did. You know, I gotta, I gotta be on this paper. My friend got name. It's like, well, you studied for eight hours. I didn't do anything. Imagine if I did try. It becomes a default mechanism, a defense mechanism that you utilize to give yourself an excuse for for failure. And the reality is internally, we sometimes will analyze the situation without even thinking about it and determine that the failure of the outcome without the attempt is a better option than trying and failing because of all the things that we've articulated up to this point that come with that failure. Yes. But what we're not calculating in that, you know, split second decision, or at least consciously we're not calculating, is well, what if I try and it goes right? What if I try and I get everything I wanted? What if I try and I get everything I've ever dreamed of asked for? We have a hard problem looking at that in the attempt. We bring ever all the other nonsense to the forefront of our mind because, you know, we have negativity biases naturally, instead of focusing on what if everything goes exactly how I want? And nothing can go exactly how you want if you're not willing to put yourself in the arena, if you're not willing to put in the work, if you're not willing to attempt. And that is a really hard way to be. It's simple in thought, but it is very hard to execute. But it's always uh kind of look at the world as haves and haves nots. I don't care about your money status. I care about, you know, how you view your own internal success. Most people aren't really internally fulfilled. But the people who are, the haves of the world, are able to analyze that and be like, well, what if everything goes right? And they're able to center their identity around someone who's willing to put themselves in those scenarios to get everything that they've ever wanted. Yep.

Courage And Discipline Beat Hesitation

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Absolutely. And I'm I'm gonna come back to uh you you would you had asked about learnings. And I want to I want to touch on the relationship between, I call it external excellence and internal fulfillment, and we can come back to it. Um and you know, you're you're hitting on a you're hitting on an important piece because which leads into the second thing about these emotions, you know, the first being that people do not know, people usually don't know what they're afraid of. And because they don't know what they're afraid of, they actually they they stay in it forever because they don't they don't ever know which fear they're trying to resolve for. They think, oh, I'm solving for my fear of failure by not exposing myself to it. When the reality is they are actually extending the fear of failure, or not extending the fear, they're extending the failure. By not asking for the date, you continue to not have it. By not launching the business, you continue to not have it. By not getting a raise, you continue to not be there, which means you're still separated from it, which means you're still going to be in that, in that space. So the first piece that you know, actionable, right? Moving into the field of action is the field of action move is you need to diagnose and figure out what you are really afraid of. So the easiest technique to do this, uh, it is so simple, is ask, write down, you can write it. I writing it down is makes the most sense because you you you make it physical and then you and you make it visual and it gets outside of your brain because thoughts stay inside your brain, you can manipulate them however you want, but once it's written on a piece of paper, you've now your your brain connection your brain connects with it differently. So you write down, and whatever the failure is that you're imagining, just picture it, right? So, you know, yeah, let's, you know, you can go with my example, okay? Uh, you know, I'm afraid of uh I'm afraid of getting rejected by a girl because I'm afraid of and then write down why are you afraid of that? I'm afraid of how it would look to people who saw that. Okay, and you go down a line and you say, I'm afraid of how that would look to people who saw that because I'm afraid of and you write down and this is the whole point. If you don't know what that is, this is my point. Why are you afraid of that? And if you can't actually write it out, now you know you have a fear that is controlling and driving your behavior that you're not even conscious of. You're giving you're giving your your command center, right, the the the the sticks to steer you, you don't even know what it is. And so do that like five five levels. And what you're gonna find is you're actually gonna get down to a fear that maybe you haven't consciously thought of, but is real. And here's the here's the thing I would remind people of. And if somebody's like, ah, I don't really know, like I can't think of it. That's okay. But you gotta know that that fear is in there, even if you're not consciously aware of it, and I and I think some people think this starts to get foo-foo. It it's not foofo. I mean, it's just it's it's uh it's basic physics. Uh, if the fear wasn't there, then you wouldn't be feeling it. Like if the fear wasn't there, your behavior would be different. But the fear is quite obviously there, and there, even if you aren't conscious of it, somewhere in your brain, somewhere in your mind, your mind knows that fear and it recognizes it and it reacts to it. Your job is write it down. So write down I'm afraid of blank because I'm afraid of blank. Answer A. And then I'm afraid of answer A because I'm afraid of like underlying fear. So kind of you what you want to do is go like underlying fear, underlying fear, underlying fear, underlying fear, and then really kind of like four levels. And then I'm afraid of usually like two or three underlying fears. And then what you get to is then you get down to I'm afraid of this underlying fear, the third level one, because I'm afraid of this deeper fear. And then I'm afraid of that deeper fear because I'm afraid of the real fear. And the and the real fears are almost always identity driven, almost always. It's not failure. Okay. So I'll give you, so that's that's number one. Number two, does that make sense? Like, I'm afraid of this because I'm afraid of that. It's such a simple thing. Um, and you can see right away, like, if you try to do that in your mind and hold it in your mind, it gets way too messy, way too fast. So, because your mind will go in a thousand ways with a thousand thoughts at a thousand miles an hour. You gotta write it down to like keep yourself structured around this. Um, super helpful. Number two is this, and I've been writing about this on daily discipline this week. So I've been writing about courage, right? About about about acting while you're afraid. And one of the things that I I I've kind of realized is people don't understand the nature of how fear works. And so if you ask yourself, where did this fear come from? What is it that is what is it that is what brought this fear into my presence? Right? Here's a here's a great here's a great uh uh reference point to remember. When you feel fear, you have to remember that's because you're in the presence of desire. Fear is paired to a desire. Fear and desire go together. So what happens is, and this is you know, you can go back. I mean, this is every philosophical and religious text ever written has understood this intuitively and then built these structures around it. Fear is the manifestation of threatening of a desire. So a fear is simply I desire something, and the desire has elevated my fear. So where does fear of losing come from? Fear of losing comes from the desire to win. If somebody doesn't have a desire to win, they do not fear losing. If they fear losing, it's because they have a desire to win. So what happens is by by looking at your desires, you learn about your fears, and by looking at your fears, you learn about your desires. If I'm afraid of being rejected by somebody, whether it's like sales or or in pitching a business or in something, if I'm afraid of rejection, it's because I desire acceptance. That seems pretty important to know.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

I love the conversation about desires. Uh, do you have you read Naval or listened to Naval talk at all?

SPEAKER_00 33:57

I I know of him, and I've seen I've I've sort of seen tangentially. I I'm not uh I'm not a I'm not a deep reader of Naval, but I'm a I'm a I'm a surface level reader. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Yeah. So he has this take on desire. We talk about things that just like kind of just like really resonate with you. And it's like if you are not willing, and I think James Clear talks about it too, to be honest, but if you are not willing to pay the price for your desire, rid yourself of the desire. Because, like you're articulating so many different things that we have this desire and that it, you know, creates this fear, and then that fear creates the inaction. Well, if you're not willing to do it or you're not willing to face that fear or become disciplined or become obsessed or whatever the, you know, or the necessary behavior is, then rid yourself of the desire. Super difficult to do in practice, but simple in theory, right? If have the self-awareness, if I'm not gonna do that, if I'm not willing to put all everything it takes to be that, get rid of the desire. Because if you have too many desires and nothing is resulting in action, that is just a recipe for misery. And, you know, I look at it in my own life because I've instantly, because I'm competitive and, you know, I have an obsessive personality, I'll have these just innate natural desires and I have to walk it back. Like I think about like pickleball or I think about golf. And it's like, I want to be the best golfer or the best pickleball player. It's like, but the reality is I'm probably not willing to do what it takes to become the best pickleball player. If I'm lucky, I can play pickleball once a week. If I'm lucky, I can play golf twice a week. And that is just not the recipe required to be the best in those domains. And so I can walk back those desires and just be like, okay, I want to be a casual golfer. I want to go have fun with my friends and not lose my ball every hole. Okay. I want to be a pickleball player who can just go have fun and not be the worst one there. Right. And then then you can like downstream from ridding yourself of the desire, but you have to have the awareness, I'm not gonna do this. And then have a few dedicated, articulated desires where you're like, I am willing to go on in all in on this. I am willing to face that fear. I am willing to create the behaviors, processes, systems, habits that are required to achieve this. And that's where so much disconnect comes, is because we can't look at ourselves without judgment and say, I'm just not willing to do that. And then you can reduce your desires to your level of behavior or the inverse. I have a desire. Okay, well, I'm gonna flip my behaviors to reach that desire.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

And the the thing that I would want people to understand about this is that is that desire and fear always operate in pairs. I mean, this is this is the physics of the world. Like it's like gravity. And not everybody knows this. So I this is what I love to do. I love to share physics uh of the of the human nature uh element of world. Desire and fear work in pairs. So everything you desire puts a fear into you. If you this is you cannot have a desire that does not also give you fear. That's not physically possible for a human being. Also, the strength of the desire is always matched by the strength of the fear. So the stronger the desire, the stronger the fear. Here you have kids?

SPEAKER_01 37:23

I do, I have three. Three. You have three kids. How old? I have one that's four, one that's two, and one that is four months. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Is not your desire your desires for your kids? I mean, is that not one of the strongest feelings in the world?

SPEAKER_01 37:39

In the world that's the strongest.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

And simultaneously, look at the fear that comes with that.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Yep.

The Emotion Wheel And Naming Fear

SPEAKER_00 37:47

The greatest fears. And we do what we have to do, right? And then that environment, right? The desire typically outweighs the fear. But for a lot of parents, their fear outweighs their desire. A lot of parental behavior and what they do with their kids is because their desire is so strong and so intimate for their kids that the fear is also strong and they have no plan for dealing with the fear. And the fear ends up running the show because that desire-fear pair goes together. Whereas, right, now with my kids, I know the way I think of it is my desire is high. And so then my fear is also matching, but I know what to do with it, and I have a plan for how to do with it. And then you have other parents who are like, yeah, they don't have as much desire around their kids. Not, I don't mean love, I don't mean they care, but like their desire isn't as strong for like wanting to shape and build and do the XYZ. And so then therefore their fears, so they kind of had a little more laissez-faire with their kids and they kind of hang out. But like parenting is a good example of biologically, we're we're naturally connected to desire for our kids, which means we're naturally connected to fear. And a lot of I remember, I remember feeling as a dad for the very first time what it felt like to have a son and like being exposed to all of a sudden, like biologically feelings of fear that I'm like, that's new. I haven't felt that before, right? Like that, that's brand new for me, right? I'm, you know, I had kids that uh, you know, I had kids at like 34, 35, and I'm like, okay, 34, 35 years on this earth, that is a new emotion for me that I'm feeling, right? Because it was a new desire and it was a new fear. But it's the same thing. And I'll and I'll give I'll give an example. When I do a keynote, uh, when I do a keynote, I talk to people about this, and I, you know, the same thing happens here. Is you know, most people are are afraid of public speaking. It's the number one phobia in the world, is public speaking. And then it's the number one, you know, phobia is just a fancy word for fear. It's the number one fear because people are afraid of being rejected, they're afraid of being ridiculed, they're afraid of being embarrassed, they're afraid of being a social outcast, because they're on stage and everybody's looking at them, right? Um, they want the audience's approval. Okay. And so why? Look at what happens. Desire for approval is matched, and by the way, the more intense that desire is, it's matched by fear of rejection. The higher the desire for approval, the greater the fear of rejection. The greater the fear of rejection signals the higher the desire for approval. Like it's again, it's it's physics. What goes up must come down. It operates on those things. So I will talk to people when I deliver keynotes about sort of this dynamic uh in this relationship, and I will express and explain in my case here's how I think of this. When I'm on stage, I remind myself, and this is just my natural way now, at no point in my life did I need the approval of anybody in this audience. So I do not have a fear of your disapproval. But the only reason I don't fear the audience's disapproval is that I don't desire their approval. I I I have I have erased that desire. I don't desire now. Does that mean I don't want the audience to learn something? Of course not. Does that mean I want the audience to not like me? No. Does that mean I have no care at all about whether they like me? No, not at all. But what I've done is I've said, I'm not walking into this with this desire to be accepted by the group in front of me, because what that's going to do is that's going to create fear of what if they don't. So instead, what I go into and I attach my desires to, I want to express what I believe in in the best possible way that I can. I want to share as much value as I possibly can. Now there is nothing standing in my way. My fear doesn't have a whole lot to grab onto because it's like, well, what if I don't do that very well? That's up to me. But if I'm here seeking your approval, Colin, or your audience's approval and I desire it so bad, now all of a sudden, the fear of what if I get rejected, I can't actually do anything about it. Because I can't control what you think of me. I can't control your approval. So now I have a fear that I can't do anything about. Whereas if I attach my desire to right now with us, like say what I want to say, say it articulately, say it clearly, like express it, listen to the idea and like, you know, interact, be valuable, be helpful. My fear is what if I don't do ah, no, I can I can do things about this fear now. So if my desire is attached to something outside of my control, then my fear will be attached to something outside of my control. That's how we put ourselves in a very, very bad situation. But if my desire is attached to something in my control, right, and then I can have like a mission of something I'm trying to accomplish. But if we use this word sort of desire, now all of a sudden we've changed that whole relationship. So the the lesson I want people to grab here is that if you feel a fear, you've got to, you've got to connect that to the desire that's triggering it. And if you don't know what, and if you feel a desire and you're finding yourself hesitating to go after it, you got to recognize that's because the fear that that desire is creating in you is winning out over the desire. So, like the desire to ask the girl on the date gets beat by the fear of her rejecting you. So, what we do is we write off our desires because of the fears that it created. Let's just think about that for a second. The desire I have created a fear that caused me to not chase that desire. And people will live in this loop. They'll live in this loop for 20 years, 50 years, five years, their whole college career.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

You know? It's um it's such an interesting thing because you bring up public speaking, and you know, I I do some like speaking things now, and it shocks people what when I tell them I used to have an absolute just fear of public speaking. I would sweat, I couldn't talk, I would stutter, I couldn't get presentations in school, and then they're like, I I would never. Guess. And to exactly what you're articulating, I had to unpack what was my fear actually. And it was, I was worried about how it would be perceived. And so for me, my process was very similar to you and making it about the message. Because you know, and we talked about this offer, you have a message that is inherently valuable. You know something that has worked, that works, it will help people genuinely. And so for me, I had to put all of my mental energy into that is I know this is valuable. So what can I control? Number one, I'm going to control how I prepare. Because if I prepare and know exactly what I want to say, it may come out a little bit different when I'm on the stage, but I know the ethos of what I'm saying is going to come out. And I know by focusing on that, if the people are paying attention, they are going to get value from it. And then there's the other part of me that I really call it uh, I actually play out the catastrophizing. I'm like, okay, what happens if I botch this? Okay. I may be a joke to these guys or girls for probably the next 15 minutes, maybe an hour. And most of them are probably going to forget about it anyway. And then it's like, okay, would this prevent me from getting another engagement? Probably not. Maybe at this school, maybe with this team? Sure. Maybe not get one with them. Is it going to prevent me from getting something else? No.

unknown 45:18

Right?

SPEAKER_01 45:18

And then it's like, okay, well, guess what? Will my kids still love me?

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Will I still have my? Yeah. All of the stuff that I genuinely, deeply, truly care about. Like, that's that you're saying the same thing like that I say. What's like, what like I look at an audience and I will do this still sometimes just to keep myself sharp. I will look at the audience and I will look at like faces and eyeballs. And I'll look and I'll be like, who whose approval have I needed for me to be okay in my life? And I'll look around. Which person does my sense of self-worth revolve around? And like when I see faces, I look at people and I'm like, none of them. None of them.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

So if that person doesn't like me, it is fundamentally not at all different than yesterday. Yep. And the other piece of it too is in 60 years, or depending on your age, and a hundred years, we're all going to be dead, and none of our opinions mattered anyway. So it's why would I let a singular opinion of someone prevent me from living out my life or doing something that I feel is valuable or care about? Because the reality is they're die, they're gonna die and their opinion's gonna die with them.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

And there's this And they're allowed, and they're allowed to not like us, by the way. Like that's the thing, like they're allowed to not like, it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

And we don't like everybody.

SPEAKER_00 46:30

It's okay. So it's like not it. I go back to my analogy. I tell people all the time, like, my man, like, not every girl in the world likes me. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't like every girl in the world. Like, it's okay. I married, I married, I told a story to the to somebody the other day. I married one woman. She's amazing and she's awesome. Okay. I married one woman. That is not an indictment on every woman in the world. It's just that's the woman that I love, and I picked her and she picked me, right? Like, that's it. It that's the nature of the game. Like, you can't listen to everything everybody, we don't we don't do that with everybody. So it's okay. Go try, go do. People are gonna, people are gonna find their way to these spots, and you know, it works.

You’re Not Afraid Of Failure

SPEAKER_01 47:12

That's a take what that and that's a good, like from a learning perspective, when because you like you said, there is an immense amount of information out there. Take what works for you, disregard the rest, and apply it. Not everything everybody says, including myself, and I'm fully aware of that, not everything I say is going to impact someone in exactly the way that I believe it should. That's perfectly fine. When you are a receiver or recipient of information, of learnings, of whatever, you take it, you apply it. If something I say doesn't resonate, don't take it, don't apply it. Go find something from someone else. That's just the nature. We're all complex human beings, and there's a lot of gray area and nuance to each one of us and how we learn and behave. Not you're not gonna agree with everybody on everything. It's just it's not possible. You and I could never possibly agree on everything in life from parenting to religion to sports to whatever. No chance. That doesn't mean that we don't have things that can be passed on that are viable from one another. And if you just approach everything that my wife and I aren't gonna agree on everything, I can certainly tell you that. So it's like the person we the people we love most, we're not gonna agree with all the time. And there's gonna be times where my wife doesn't like me. There's gonna be time, there's already times where my kids don't like me.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

So it's you know I heard I heard some the other day that said, I heard some the other day that said, I I I married my wife for her looks. I don't mind admitting that, just not the looks she's been giving me recently.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

It's it's it's true though, right? Like it's so it's so funny. And like we can laugh about it, but yet internally there'll be times where I'm like, and we talked about it off air. I'm like, man, I really want this person to like me, or I don't want to upset this person, or this is preventing me from doing that. And even though we know distinctly, nobody, it's impossible for everybody to like you. And so, you know, even when you know it's still hard to act and implement, but the closer you can get to recognizing the awareness, then because actions are downstream from awareness, then you're just putting yourself on the right path. Along these same lines, you say that integrity can mean either raising your behavior to match your beliefs or lowering your stated beliefs to match your actual behavior. How do you acknowledge that gap and determine which way you go?

SPEAKER_00 49:37

So, you know, the the first thing is understanding what what the word integrity means. A lot of people misinterpret integrity as doing the right thing. Uh that's not what integrity means. Um doing good things, uh, that that's not what integrity means. Uh one, because, you know, we were just talking about you and I don't we won't agree on everything. So when we say do the right thing, who gets to decide that? You know, I mean, you got three kids, I have two kids. Well, I don't always how I mean, how often do you and your wife disagree about what the right thing to do with parenting one of your kids in a particular moment is about whether they should make them eat their dinner or not let them eat their dinner. What like what's right? It's like, well, then you end up debating. It's like, so that we can't leave integrity to that. Um, plus, that's not what integrity is. Integrity comes from the Latin word integritas, and it means to be whole. So the word integrity, all it means is to be whole and consistent. That's it. So what whole and consistent means, and we we use the word integrity outside of the human context, the behavior context, um, in engineering. We talk about a building uh that has structural integrity, right? When we when we say it has structural integrity or it lacks structural or integrity, what we're saying is all of the pieces are in the right place and they will stand up under pressure, or it will not stand up under pressure. So if a building lacks structural integrity, what it's saying is it's not whole. It's not complete. There's parts missing. And if if something happens, if there's a disruption, because it's not whole, it's going to fall apart. So in the human world, in the behavior world, what integrity means is to be whole and complete with how you are living your life, specifically between anything on the inside and anything you're doing on the outside. So a lack of integrity, lying is a lack of integrity because you're portraying one thing but doing another. It's not whole, it's not complete. You're not consistent from here to here. Whereas if I say I'm going to lie to you and then I lie, that's integrity. If I say I'm not going to, if I say I'm going to be honest and then I tell the truth, that's integrity. And it's kind of a funny way for people to think about it. They laugh when I say it, but but uh um it's why we say things like honor among thieves. Because, like, you know, it's it's uh mafia code or it's why gangs work, right? Like you would think it's something, but at the end of the day, those environments operate according to human nature as well. There's a code. You follow the code. Like if you don't follow the code, absence of integrity. If you follow the code, presence of integrity. And it has context. So so with desire and discipline, uh, it's an absence of integrity because you're saying I desire this, but then you're not doing anything to go get it, or you say you believe in this principle, but then you want discipline enough to actually live it. What it's saying is it's not saying you're unethical. It's saying you lack integrity, you lack wholeness, you lack completeness. So how do you gain completeness? Well, you gain completeness by either elevating your discipline to match your desires, or lowering your desires to match the discipline that you're willing to do. Bring yourself into whole alignment, completeness. It's fine. Tell me what you believe, tell me how you operate, and I can I can deal with you. I I in my life, I deal with all the time. I would much rather deal with somebody with low standards who communicates it than somebody who says they believe in high standards, but then is all over the place. Low standard people who are consistent are far easier to deal with than high standard, high statement standard people, right? Yeah uh who are selective in their application of it.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

Do you believe that we can ever be fully whole? Can we ever have full integrity?

SPEAKER_00 53:37

I mean Yes. You know, you probably have to go to uh the Buddhist temples. Uh I mean that I mean that's what that is. I mean that's a demon mode. I mean that's what those pursuits are, right? Is is I mean ironically, what what do they call that? I don't know how familiar you are with the whole thing, but what do they call that? They call that actually don't know I don't know what they call that. They call it the it's the oneness. Okay vanna, bliss, to be one. And that's the whole point is it is whole, total, completeness, alignment, the oneness, and it's a lifetime, and you have to simplify because it's so many things going on. You notice in that world they're not doing all the stuff that you and I are doing here, and because why? I mean, shoot. I mean also by the way, you notice like in the one of the uh one of the one of the fundamental things that exists, say, in that particular branch, but it's also in, you know, you see this in in Christianity, and you see this in Judaism, and you see this in, you know, the more uh the more uh the religions and and and and worldviews that you see sort of in more popular here in like the US, you know, more so, but you'll see it over there as well, is you'll see the suppression of desire in every one of them. Right. And part of the suppression of desire is so that you're lowering the suppress you're lowering the fear, right? By suppressing the desire, you suppress the fear, right? But also the suppression of desire is to is to direct the attention into something where you can, in fact, be whole and complete. So like in on the on the Zen or Buddhism or whatever that side is where that oneness is, you notice like the more extreme, that monk type approach, is it's it's very heavy on the elimination and suppression of desire, because then you can actually drill it down to the oneness. But if we're living our life, right, the way that we live life, the modern life of America, I mean, how can you how can you suppress desire when you open Instagram? How can you suppress desire if you watch any amount of television? Any I watch sports. How can you possibly suppress desire if you watch sports? The only thing you're doing is being uh uh uh force-fed funneled advertising. You're not suppressing desire. You're just you're it's it's moving to a subconscious with you. Which I don't again, I don't say it judgmentally. I just like know the environment you're in. The field of action that we live in. You know how many ads the the average person sees in a day?

SPEAKER_01 56:15

I don't know the average, but I would assume it is an insane amount. Watch, I'm gonna do this because it it shifts, right?

Fear Pairs With Desire

SPEAKER_00 56:21

I'm gonna do this right now, okay? I'm gonna do this right now. I'm gonna I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Grok, okay? Because this is how many advertisements because I know what the answer is that I've heard before I'm like we Google it, but let's just see Yeah. How many advertisements do we see a day? If you were to guess, what do you think the number is?

SPEAKER_01 56:41

If I were to guess the number of advertisements we see a day, I would guess it's in the thousands. It has to be a minimum thousand. Yeah. It averages it averages around 10,000 ads a day. 10,000 ads a day. A day, brother. A day. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

That means in that means in that means in one that means in one month you're processing 300,000 advertisements. And I know we I know you're not conscious of all those, neither am I. And I'm not I'm not judging it. All I'm saying is that is the field of action where we live. 300,000 ads a month, and you know, everybody's like, oh, they don't affect me. That's why they spend that much money on them, right? Because they don't work. So the is it possible? Yes, but not practically for the way that we live, because we don't live in those environments, and most of us are not going to go get into a temple and dedicate our lives to being able to do this. So rather than rather than aiming for the elimination of it, I want to aim for having more power over it, which is what discipline is, right? Discipline is having power, power over yourself, and not power over anybody else, just power over me. So you mentioned something earlier about emotions, right? And I I think the best way to think about an emotion is um allow yourself to feel the emotion, but remember that you don't have to do what that emotion is telling you to do. Right. An emotion is a signal to act. It comes from the Latin word emotere, right? And and it it means to move, right? So an emotion is something that's just trying to move you. It's all it's trying to do. It's a signal that says do this, right? A feeling that says, oh, feel this, do that. And uh you're not going to control any more than I am uh uh the presence of the feeling, right? We can adjust it, we can tweak it, we can do all kinds of different things, but but the presence of the feeling, once it's made itself known to us, it's there. You can't undo it. But what we do have power over is what we do with that emotion. So I I teach and remind myself, because it's you know the things I teach are the things that I do, is I remind myself, I'm allowed to feel this, but I'm the one who has to decide what to do with it. I'm the one who has to decide the action. So I can feel the anger, but the action has to be my choice. The moment I feel the anger, and then the anger gets to decide the action, all of a sudden now it's not me. Right? It's not me, it's something else. It's my programming, it's my biology, but it's not Brian Kite. Frankly, I don't know, the influence of, I mean, every influence I've ever had. You know, all kinds of different things. So, um, so yeah, it it it's uh it's a lifelong the integrity question is it's it's a lifelong practice, it's the work, it's the activity. Uh, but give yourself grace because you live in a world that I live in, and that is we're surrounded by all this different stuff. And so that's the importance of self-awareness, is we're perpetually gonna be in gaps. We are.

SPEAKER_01 59:54

With the athletes I work with in in the identity space, it's it's the same concepts. I always say you're never gonna fully become something. You're in a constant state of becoming. So it's directionally, are we acting by design or are we acting in default? Are we lay letting the environment dictate our actions and beliefs, or are we taking some tor some form of self-authorship agency in engineering the identity that we want to become, in choosing and dictating our behaviors, knowing that things are going to change, our beliefs, values will change, we'll be influenced by other things, but at least directionally are we in control of the decisions that we're making? And to your point about the emotion, letting yourself feel the emotion, a lot of times where we get caught up is thinking that the justification of our emotion is okay to let the emotion dictate our action. Just because an emotion is justified, and a lot of times they are, a lot of times you're pissed off for the right reasons. That doesn't give you the okay to do something that is against the type of person you are because your anger is justified or your sadness is justified. Still you have to dysregulate yourself from the emotion in the sense that that emotion will not dictate your behavior. And again, of course, we will make mistakes and we'll we will fail in those elements sometimes. But more often than not, we have to be able to recognize the emotion, feel the emotion, and then choose to act in alignment with the type of person that we want to be. A lot of times it really does not matter if your anger or whatever is justified. You know, you have to be able to cognitively make the decisions that align with what you say your values, beliefs, and standards are and your identity is. It's really hard to do, but the best in the world, do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

There's in leadership, one of my strongest rules is the standards have to apply to the people who set them. Okay. Um and and in life, right, and you know you've experienced coaching as I have. Um there's there's no group that that needs more work on that than coaches. Um not the only one, but and I love coaches, but they they need a lot of coaches need work on on applying the standards that they expect of athletes to themselves. But in life, in life, um the standard you want to apply, wherever you want to apply the standard, you have to apply the standard to the person across from you as well. So what I would what I would tell anybody listening about emotions who's like, ooh, like, yeah, but you know, I gotta be able to express my emotion and I need this space and you know, whatever, whatever the story is, right? If you're a if you're a uh if you're a everybody has their own truth kind of person, okay. If you are a you know, emotions are validated and you gotta validate the emotion, and like you know, the emotion's got to be able to express itself. You can't contain it or trap it, okay. If you are, if any part of you is finding yourself, you know, hearing what you're just talking about, Colin, and being like, I gotta, I gotta, I I I I have to be free to be able to let my um let my emotion guide some of this and drive to the action. Okay. Okay. But if you are free to act according to what your emotions tell you and how you feel, then that means that the people who interact with you are also free to do the same according to how they feel. And you are not allowed to tell them about anything they do that comes from their emotions. If that's the rule we're gonna go by, then we're gonna go by it. But if we're in her, if we're in an interaction, the same thing that you are asking me to do with your emotions, you have to do those from my emotions. I am free to say and do whatever I want if I'm emotionally feeling it towards you. And you are not allowed to tell me otherwise or push back against me, or tell me I'm not allowed to, or tell me that it's wrong because my emotions justify my actions right now. And what I would find, Colin, is that most people don't want to live that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:08

I would say it's a dangerous precedent to set.

Shift Desire To What You Control

SPEAKER_00 1:04:10

We need something other than just what the emotions say. Now, this is why it goes back to the fear conversation of what I would much rather do, let's just sit, let's just say you and I are in a spot. Let's say you emotionally feel one way, I'm emotionally on the other side of the issue in the topic, we both feel really strongly about it, and now we're feeling kind of strongly towards each other about it. We're in some kind of friction or conflict, and it's not explosive, it's just, you know, not adversarial. Let's just say it's just, you know, we're just on other sides of a topic or an issue, right? And we're both vouching for it. Like we could both emotionally go at each other, and you know, I could paint you emotionally into a picture of your being ridiculous, and you could paint me into a picture of your being ridiculous for your side, and the next, you know, we're just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And basically we're just neither of us are paying attention to what the other person is saying. We're both just expressing our emotion. We could both be doing that. We could do it that way. I mean, we both we all know where that ends, okay? That ends with whatever the hell's on first take with whatever Stephen A. Smith talks about every week that, you know, uh, or whatever's on, you know, whatever's on any television show that is optimized around this uh uh stuff, which is which is I I still don't know who watches it, but whatever, it's there. Um, or or how people pay for it, why people pay for it. Um or or we could do it this way. You could tell me, like, hey, like I feel this way. I have this feeling. Like I'm feeling anger, like, and I'm feeling anger because I'm thinking like you think about this structure. I mean, it it emotions don't come from nowhere, they come from somewhere. They come from, like in this case, your emotions don't come from me in this scenario, in this fake scenario. Your emotions don't come from me, your emotions come from what you are thinking about me. Or about what's going on. And I'm willing to listen to that. Like that, that helps me understand. You're saying, BK, I'm feeling angry. I feel these emotions. This is also why the emotion will make sense. Because when you ask people what they're feeling, most of the time they'll tell you what they're thinking. If if we're here and you say, I I feel like you did this, and I feel like you did that. Those are not feelings. And then and then and then I would say, Well, I didn't do that. And you'd say, Don't invalidate my feelings. Well, my thing is, no, no, I didn't invalidate your feelings. You told me you felt like I was mean to you. That is not a feeling. You thought that I was mean to you. You thought something. I can I can critique a thought. I can I can challenge a perspective. I can't challenge the fact that you're angry. You you are angry, indisputable. But you're angry because you're thinking about me in this particular way. And once you start telling me how you're thinking, I can now listen and say, oh, so you're thinking this and you're thinking that and you're thinking this. By the way, anybody who is thinking those things would justifiably feel angry. Those thoughts absolutely justify this anger. The question is, are those thoughts appropriate, valid, full of integrity, accurate, reasonable? That now we can have the conversation. So you can break down in these moments. And again, everybody's like, I don't want to have to do all this different stuff. Well, then go half-ass it and do it sloppy and get lost in the emotion and fight with your wife and argue with your coach and you'll resist your boss and and and back down from fear because you just don't want to actually understand the emotion or do any of the actual work to try to get good at this stuff. But people who are excelling, this is what we do. We look at the emotion, we address the thought that came from it, and we separate between what is factual in that thought, indisputable, like what word that I actually say, and then we identify what thoughts that I add on top of that. So like you know, maybe you say, Hey, I don't like that idea. Okay. And then my thought is you never like my ideas. Okay. And then now, and then now you are angry because I reject you. Okay, well, guess what? If I never accept your ideas, is that justifiable of being angry if Brian Kite never listens to your ideas? Would that would that be justified anger?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

Probably, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:28

Sure. Is it factual that I never listened to your ideas? Is that is that actually true?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:35

Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:36

No, it's not true. Because why? If you said the truth, what would be the truth? BK, you s you sometimes don't listen to an idea that I say. How much anger can come out of that statement? Not as much. Not as much. Because guess what? You know, it's like it's like at home, right? Like at home, if your wife says you never take out the trash, spitting angry, because guess what? That's ridiculous. If you're uh if you never take out the trash and you never watch the kids and you never help around the house, you're a deadbeat.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:09

Okay. But if your wife comes up and says, Colin, you sometimes don't help me when I need it. There's not a whole lot of anger that can come out of that. You know what I'm saying? Like the only way the anger can be at 10 is if you never do it. The second all the second the statement and the thought actually like meets meets the reality of you sometimes don't do it, all of a sudden the anger naturally dissipates. It starts to dissipate because why? I sometimes don't help you. You're right. I sometimes don't. That's true, and I sometimes don't. But now all of a sudden you the other person isn't isn't as angry because the thought is now kind of met, it's kind of bumped up against the rocks of reality of never. So this that the anger comes from the thought, the thought comes from what we observed. Once we start to separate from what we saw happen, and then and then we you know we'll call it a story, but sometimes sometimes with story, people get caught up in like formality. It's not so much, yes, it is story, but it's really just what you're thinking. And and we don't separate between what we're thinking and what's actually happening. And then here's the danger. The danger is we forget that the things we're thinking aren't what actually happened. We were the ones that authored them. Right? We say you never take out the trash and we treat that like it's reality. It's not. So, so this this whole like emotional piece is one where you gotta understand the mechanics of where it comes from. And we can deal with the emotion. That's fine. Like the emotion is always valid. It's what was feeding it. The story might not, the thought might not have been valid, the story might not have been valid, the perspective might not have been valid, but the emotion was because the emotion came from whatever that thought was. You gotta go upsource to find well, what thoughts are creating this? Right? And then, you know, what pre-existing beliefs, right? Like I walk on stage and well, here's a culture speaker. Oh, like you got an audience of a hundred people in a room, a thousand people in a room. If somebody talks about culture, like I talk about discipline. Out of a thousand people in the room, how many people have a really positive, optimistic, like excited lens of discipline in a room? Not a ton. So I know that people are coming in with preloaded thoughts as well and emotions connected to those preloaded thoughts. So I know when I go in that I have I had this as a football player. I'm 5'9, I played at 180 pounds, was my max playing weight. People saw me, thought things about me based on physical appearance, and they had preloaded feelings about what kind of player and competitor I was gonna be. And I use that against people because my physical stature and appearance did not match the way that I actually played the game. And I understood that. And I use that to my advantage. So there's all kinds of ways to be able to do this, but you don't have to get rid of the emotion. You got to remember the emotion is simply following the signals that the external stimulus and then your own internal thoughts are telling it what to create. And you can like you can disrupt that process and interrupt that pattern anytime you want. You just have to build a strength and the skill to do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:16

Do you ever focus on having fun? Like, is fun ever part of like your own process with the work that you do, or is it strictly impact? Because everybody operates in a different space. And I'm curious in your own practice, because clearly we're intellectual, but it's like, how much of this is designed for impact? Obviously a lot, but like how much of this is fun for you? All of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:41

I mean, I don't know, everything other than you know, the expense reports and other that that's not fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:49

Taxes.

Integrity As Wholeness, Not “Right”

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

You know, yeah, you know, booking flights is not the most enjoyable thing, right? Uh the delayed and all that stuff, but no, I mean, look, all of this is fun. To me, all of this is fun. I mean, I mean, everybody sources their fun a little differently. I mean, I'm I'm a and I always have been. I'm a I'm an adrenaline person. I'm like I I I grew up in California surfing, skateboarding, riding motorcycles, um, catching snakes. I got my college of buddies from Ohio. We we were we were all out to dinner one time, we were all drinking beers and things after a round of golf, and and and something happened where I talked about where I grew up in California, a town called Fallbrook Inland, and and it's like the avocado capital of of the world, like his huge avocado fields. And I'm like, you know, we had snakes everywhere, you know. Like it's like the snake capital of the world. I was like joking, right? But just because we have a ton of snakes in in in Fallbrook, it looks kind of like Afghanistan. Like the actual uh terrain looks like Afghanistan. It's like that like high desert, kind of rocky, green, etc. And they're like, oh, snake capital of the world. And and my buddy's like, how many snakes, you know, how how many snakes have you caught? I'm like, I've I've probably caught a lifetime, I've probably caught a hundred snakes. And they were in disput, like they were just like, you know, they started yelling at me. You know, probably had a few beers, right? They started yelling at me, like, you've never, uh and and I was laughing because I'm like, look, I'm sorry you grew up in Cleveland and like we've never seen a snake in your life, and you're terrified of them. But I grew up in a very different place where snakes were everywhere. I would literally walk out of my backyard and I would go catch like horn toads and snakes and rattlesnakes and gardener snakes. That's what I grew up doing as a little kid. I just did, right? Um, so I've always chased so for me, fun is a huge part of life. I I I'm a big, big fun guy. Um, and I'm really big on the discipline to know what it is that you're targeting. When I play with my daughter, who is six, my only goal is fun. I'm very competitive, but I'm not, I turn that part of my competitive off and I turn up the competitive part of just fun competing. But when I'm not with my daughter, I don't compete for fun. My fun in that environment comes out of the strain, the struggle, trying to win. That's where my fun comes from. So part of this is the self-awareness of knowing, my wife's not like that. The self-awareness of knowing yourself in that way. So I know my wife and I are different. Um, the worst possible workout for me is like some type of class. I hate it. I don't want a class. I don't want to be around people, I don't want a class, I don't want to go to a it doesn't even matter if it's workouts that I like. I don't want to deadlift in a class. I don't want to go to Orange Theory or F-45. Keep me away from that stuff. I have no interest. My wife, my wife, she goes to work out and she wants it to be fun. It is the last thought on my mind is what fun is being created in this workout. I'm working out for a functional purpose. But for me, that's because I know I enjoy the feeling of being in a squat rack. It's not fun in the traditional sense of how you know most people would look at it, but I love that feeling. I love being in a squat rack. I love deadlifting. I love feeling on the edge of my ability. That is fun for me. I that was why I liked football. That's why I like it now. Chasing those things is fun for me. Um, and it's a fundamental difference in that piece. So, yes, I do have fun, but I also grew up surfing. And like surfing is fun, but it's also physically very demanding and hard and it's risky, and there's all kinds of stuff. And I feel fun when I feel right on the edge of something. Like I would go swim, like I'm the kind of guy, I would go swim with great white sharks.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:39

In the open ocean.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:40

Like I I would I would open ocean swim with great wide sharks, right? Because to me, to me, that feeling of being on that edge, oh, I love that. I love it. And the higher the risk, the better. Now, I don't want to be stupid and like, you know, there's things that I don't do, like I'm not gonna flip motorcycles, right? But yeah, I like to snowboard in trees aggressively. I do. Am I am I increasing risk? Yes, but I also have some skill. And so I I look for like that match of where does my skill set and my mind meet a challenge where I can just barely fit my skill set into what that challenge requires and be okay. To me, like that's the fun zone.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:27

So I gotta just the shark thing's wild to me. Sharks are some of like talk about like fear eat getting dying due to a shark is like high on my list. Wild to me. That's uh a tip my cap to you. Keep me away from sharks.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:43

True story, by the way. True story, by the way. I I told this, I was telling this yesterday to uh uh Brent who works on my team. He lives in Florida, he's a big scuba diver surfer. Uh seventh grade. He did a we did a uh uh a class trip. I grew again, I grew up in California. There's an island off the coast of California called Catalina. Great, that's like huge shark. There's like kelp beds everywhere, so huge shark territory. There's seals all over the place, so you get lots of sharks and everything there. Um we went out uh seventh grade, it's this big, big trip that you did. Every class did it. We went to Cherry Cove and we camped in Cherry Cove out on Catalina, and we would go snorkeling, and it's in a cove and it's blocked, and so there's you know, no sharks are coming in there, but nonetheless, it's California, it's Catalina. And we did bioluminescent plankton, where you go in at night. You ever heard of bioluminescent plankton? So you go in at night, so you you load up, it's freezing cold, so you're like you're you're head to toe in gear, like everything. And you go in at night in the ocean, and you're going out in your scuba, and you go in, and we go out with our whole class. There's like 30 people. And what bioluminescent plankton are are these plankton um and algae that are in the water. You see them in waves sometimes when when during these certain cycles uh and certain times of year, and we went and you and when you disrupt the water and you activated them, they glow. It's like the closest thing you get to sci-fi in the ocean. It's the coolest thing ever, and it glows like you don't even think it's possible, but it's amazing. It glows like a like a glow stick. It's so cool. Right. So we did that, but but I told this story yesterday, seventh grade, uh, I was scuba diving and we're in this cove, and it's I don't know, 20 or 30 feet down, and we were swimming and chasing lobsters and looking for lobsters. And lobsters swimming in the ocean are pretty cool because they swim backwards and they're super fast. And I was swimming down, looking under rocks to try to find lobsters. And it's so cold, so I have these like big gloves on, like big thick neoprene gloves. So I swim down under this rock to look for a lobster, and I see this lobster, and then it swims away, and I kind of turn around, and like five feet below me, I see this big leopard shark. And a leopard, and I say big, um, you know, it's like the length of my arm. Okay, so it's not a it's not a big shark traditionally, but for leopard sharks, and they're kind of like they they dwell generally speaking on the bottom, and they have a little horn, they could they look like leopards all spotted. They have a little horn coming out the base of the dorsal fin where the dorsal fin on top meets the body. It's super cool. And I see this thing, and it's like five feet away from me, and it's kind of sitting there, and I'm like, man, I'm gonna swim towards that thing until it swims away from me. And I swam towards it and it didn't swim away, and I was like, oh, and I grabbed it and I picked it up, and I was just so in shock that this thing hadn't swam away, and I swam back to the surface with it, and I swam to the surface, and I went to lift it out of the water to show all my friends, and as soon as I lifted it out of the water, you know, it wiggled and like and jumped out of my hands and swam away. So I was the only person who saw it. But the that was the first shark I ever caught. And then number two is I got certified to scuba dive when I was 18 years old in the Bahamas down on Nassau. Got certified, and my very first dive, after I'd been certified the very next day, was in Stewart's Cove and a shark dive. We did a two-tank dive. First tank, we swam around at the continental divide and the continental shelf, not the continental divide, the continental shelf, where basically it's where the shelf of the continent drops off from a hundred feet to thousands of feet, and it's crazy. And we just swam around, and there's like, I don't know, five or six beef sharks. Some of them are four feet, some of them are six, seven feet, and they're just swimming around and they just kind of hang around. Then we go up to the boat, took our tank off, put our second tank on, and uh the second part of the dive was a shark feeding, and they put into these two crates all these fish, and you go down, you put on extra weights, and you sit in this little sandy bottom area, maybe 50 feet down, and everybody gets in a circle, and then the guy comes off the boat. The guide comes off the boat with these two crates full of fish, and he swims down, and then he has this big metal spear with mesh around his arms, and you sit in a circle, and all the sharks come into the area, and then he stabs the spear and then he feeds them, and you sit in a circle while these sharks feed right in front of you. One of the coolest things ever. That was my very first dive that I ever did after I got certified.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:03

I just my body is like like I get chills just up my spine, like just thinking about that. I'm glad there's people like you who enjoy it, my friend. I don't think it was enjoying that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:17

It was my dad, my dad and I did it together, and it was like one of the coolest memories we had. I got certified finally, and I was 18. We did it, and it was it was absolutely one of our core memories was doing this shark dive together. So much so that like I talked to my, I showed my son, I talked to my son, and I'm like, man, I think you and I are gonna go do like this is gonna be what you and I do. Like, we're gonna go repeat this thing, get you certified, we'll go down, we'll do that dive. It was so fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:43

Oh that just sounds terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:46

There was one woman, by the way, in this dive. There was one woman where where at some point her uh we were down on that, her her weight belt fell off uh while we were down on the bottom, her weight belt fell off. And so the way it works in diving is you have a you have what's called a BCD, that's just buoyancy control device, not not my B C D, but buoyancy control device, which controls air, and it f and basically it's designed to to to uh uh make you rise or sink more, and then you put on weight, you wear a belt with these like lead weights around. And so what you do is you do it so that like when you watch people scuba dive, it looks like they're moving through the middle of the water where you have to figure out the right amount of weight to keep you here, and then the right amount of air to put in your BCD to keep you even in the water, so you're not like naturally sinking or rising to the surface. You're trying to kind of equilibrium that. And so for this dive to stay on the bottom for the shark feeding, you wear you you do an excess of weight so that it just holds you on the bottom, and then you just inflate your BCD when the dive is done, and it naturally helps you get to the surface. Well, this woman at some point during the feeding, her belt came off and she started floating to the surface. When I say like there were, without exaggeration, there were a hundred sharks. There's a there were a hundred in a you know, not a large area. I mean, you could not see to the other side of the circle of people. That's how many sharks there were. Her belt fell off and she started floating to the surface. And one of the guides that was there, and of course, she starts panicking, and one of the guides that was there, he quickly like rolled up like a rock that was on the on the floor of the ocean, and he like grabbed her. The other guy pulled her down, and the other person rolled a rock and rolled it into her lap, and she sat for the rest of the dive with a rock on her lap in her vest. So she wouldn't like float up through like the and the risk wasn't significant, but but nonetheless, it was funny looking over and seeing this woman uh uh with a with a huge boulder on her lap so she wouldn't float up into the sharks.

Managing Emotions: Facts vs Stories

SPEAKER_01 1:24:48

Oh man. I uh to circle back to the original question. The reason I ask right the the question uh of fun is a lot of times I feel like that's a a cop-out question or answer, right? Like I think we substitute fun for like enjoyment, but you look in the reality of sport. It's like, how much fun are you actually having? Like when you're training, when you're practicing, even in the game, it's how much fun are you really having? It's usually the the element of fun comes from the adrenaline, the high intensity, the feeling words after of doing something pretty extraordinary, whether it's moving a bunch of weight in the weight room or doing something you didn't think physically possible or going into a game, competing and doing your best, right? The amount of like fun that I think actually takes place in competitive sports is minimal. And that's not to distract from like the premise of fun, it's more to just understand like definitions, words, and what they really are. And so, like, because people like I talk to people and they'll be surprised that outside of like the work I do with athletes or podcasting or other things, like I can be pretty reserved. And I say like I'm not really a fun like person in the sense I'm not gonna go get blitzed at bars, I'm not gonna go to like concerts and be the guy in the front row jumping and screaming, right? But like that's like like the enjoyment element for me is like, I love having these conversations. I love working with athletes. I love the feeling right before I'm about to do something that I either haven't done before or that I know is high stakes. Like that like feeling is like what I chase, like that the adrenaline that's just pumping through your blood. And it's it's not that like I'm always intense and always wired. It's just that I love having meaningful conversations. Those things make me feel, you know, cliche, but like they make me feel live, like they bring the best out of me. And so there's a lot of times where I'm sitting and I'm in a room and I'm just not talking because I either A don't want to have whatever conversation is going on, or B, I don't feel like I can add anything meaningful and I'm just kind of an observer of the road. It's like I think fun is kind of a cop-out because I don't know how well people define what fun is.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:10

They don't, and and you know you've been on a lot of teams, right? You've you've you've been in locker rooms, you've seen it. This is actually something specifically as it relates to teams and athletic teams. There's application for this outside of the environment, but but I'll I'll I'll share what I observe and what I teach around teams. There's there's four kinds of people on every team. Um and these are these are uh they're very much so identities, not fixed because you can you know, people mature and they shift and they change, but I mean the the identities are really obvious once you know what once you see them uh they're they're they're really obvious. So there's four of them. Every team has four kinds of people. You have competitors, players, chasers. And socializers. And the kind of person, the identity, is based on what that person prioritizes at the highest level. We all prioritize stuff. Everybody prioritizes things. Consciously or unconsciously, we all prioritize things. When my wife works out, she prioritizes fun. I don't. We just have a different set of priorities. Like if you were say, if you if someone were asking me how much fun did you have working out, I'd be like, I don't, I don't understand the question. Whereas if I gave my wife a great workout that would that would exactly target what she wants to accomplish with the the the practical goal of the workout, but it was absent fun, she would never do it again. It doesn't mean that either of us are wrong, it just means that we're prioritizing different things. Okay? So here's what these are competitor, player, chaser, socializer. A competitor's highest priority is shockingly competing. A competitor needs it to be competitive. It's not the winning or the losing that the competitor wants. They need the challenge. A competitor, their highest priority is I need something that brings out a challenge I have to overcome to try to get to to try to chase winning. I I want it and I need it. And if it's not enough, I do not enjoy it. If it's not hard enough, if it's not a challenge enough, it's not you know, I mean, obvio you know the obvious, right? Tom Brady was a competitor. Like he needed it to be that. So the second the activity, the drill, the workout starts to become not fun for them, they're out. What happens is competitors and players they get along for some 50% of activity in a team, they do not get along for the other 50%. I don't know what those percentages are, but it could be 80, 20, whatever. But the second it gets into that era, you see this on every team, right? I work with teams all over the country. You see this on lots of college football teams. You have a lot of players and competitors, and next thing you know, it gets to the part of a workout or the part of a practice or the part of a season where the fun has basically disappeared, and you're in the we are doing the competitive thing required to win championships. And what you see is you see a lot of players tap out. And the competitors are like, what? And next thing you know, the friction starts because the competitors are like, this is this is literally where why I came here. I came here to this is this is the experience. What are you talking about? Or you mentioned pickleball. Like when I'm playing pickleball with people, and next thing you know, it's like, hey, let's just have fun. I'm like, no. No, no, we're not just no. What do you mean just have fun? No, what? No, that fun is when we're trying hard. Like you're not trying hard, and you're not trying to win, and you're just kind of taking it casual. That's not enjoyable. How is that in there? Because we're just having fun. I'm like, and I it's like it's like they're speaking a different language to me. Okay. Which is why I don't want to I don't want to be in that environment with this is the thing. As a competitor, I'm a competitor. That's like my identity tied to that. I don't want to be in environments with players when we're in a competing environment. Now, if we're in if we're playing Candyland and we're playing a board game at home, don't be a competitor, be a player. Like if it like if if you and I were hanging out with our wives around a table on a Friday night, I'm not in competitor mode. I'm in player mode. Because why? What's the goal of that night? It's not to chase the victory. It's it's it's trying hard enough to make sure that it's fun. We're just playing board games because then you know the priority is fun tonight. That's the priority. But if we're playing pickleball. Now it's like uh It's funny, you break like the picket. But if I'm playing pickleball with my but if I'm playing pickleball with my six-year-old daughter, now we're back to this spot. And then keep keep that thought. So let me hit you with the so here's the four competitor, player, chaser, socializer. Competitors prioritize competing and the pursuit of winning and trying to not lose. But it has to be an actual competition. So playing against six-year-olds is not, it doesn't do it. Like it has to be something against a worthy opponent or a worthy challenge. Players, they would they just want they want it to be fun. As long as it's fun, I'm in. But the second it stops being non-traditionally fun, their effort goes off a cliff. Chasers, they prioritize the reward. I'll do it as long as I get something out of it. I'll do it if I get something. But I'm not after competing to win. I'm not really after the fun. I want the reward, whatever the reward is. It could be anything. And then the socializer, they just want to have a group to belong to or they want to be with their friends. And that's it. My son is nine. He's not a competitor right now. He's a socializer. He wants to be with his boys. Some of the kids on his team are competitors. They like the socializing part, but they are there to pursue winning in third grade. And that's just difference in wiring and kind of the stages and all that. My son is a socializer right now. That's fine. Totally cool. But when he goes on to the team, I'm a competitor. So I kind of approach him as a competitor. He's a socializer. He's like, I just want to be with my buddies. Next thing you know, my priority for this is up here. His priority for the thing I have is down here, and his priority is up there. And I'm like, I believe in that too. I just don't believe in it at the same priority level as you do. So this is what happens on teams, is every human being is prioritizing something, right? They're prioritizing competing to win or lose, fun, rewards, and the social aspect. And the differences on teams and the differences in life is that based on the order that you put them in, because we all value stuff. We all value things. Like there's nothing wrong with rewards, everything right. But if rewards are above uh competing hard, what happens? You end up with a different set of behavior patterns. They respond to circumstances differently, they pursue goals differently. They still have it. It's all there, but the manner in which we prioritize it, prioritize it changes the identity. So when you're asking about fun and you're hitting this, I'm like, yeah, no, absolutely I have fun, but I don't prioritize fun above competing. Other people, they prioritize fun above competing. So they're like, hey, quiet down this whole competitive thing and the effort and the strain. Like, let's back away from that because we're losing touch with the fun part. And when they say that and I hear it, I'm like, I don't know, I don't believe in that. It's just it's not wrong. It's just I I prioritize differently. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:58

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:59

And can't you see, like, can't you see in your like your can't you see in your in your in your own team experience? You can see, oh, that guy was a chaser. He was always a chaser. Like if it if there was a reward, you got great effort from him. If there was no reward, you did not get great effort from him.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:21

You see a lot of that too. It's very apparent too in in professional sports right now, even in college sports with just the different nature that even was 10, 15 years ago. It's crazy to see how much the sports realm has cycled in terms of the, like you said, the different four core players, four core personalities on a team. A lot of guys happen to be in that player range right now. I think the competitors are able to more so than ever separate themselves from the pack because more, I feel like more than ever there's players as opposed to competitors.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:00

More players, more chasers, more socializers. They've always been there. The distribution has kind of changed, uh, and their their their power, so to speak, or or um the ability to lean into it where and the culture around, right? Players, chasers, socializers are all more accepted than they were in the 80s and in the 90s, right? In the 80s and the 90s, you could do it, but you were not a you you were you were just sort of less core, right? Like it just wasn't as acceptable. Now it's a lot more acceptable, which again, there's elements of that that have helped, uh, there's elements that have that have shifted. But that that fundamental shift between like, you know, between the the hey, we're not having fun, we're not giving great effort, and you know, like my wife and are just I always use my wife as the example of like um I I if I try to apply my priorities to my wife, it doesn't work. She does she doesn't have the same priorities. If she tries to apply the same priorities to me, it it doesn't work. If I'm playing pickleball and I'm playing against a bunch of people who are players and I am a competitor, they don't like me. Because they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, this is this is when it just got fun. Like, this is the fun part.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:10

Yes.

Fun, Risk, And Finding Your Edge

SPEAKER_00 1:37:10

We're we're the fun is like not being angry at each other, but the fun is I'm I'm trying so hard to beat you, and you are trying so hard to beat me, and like this is the fun. So like if you and I are playing pickleball against each other and you're a competitor and I'm a competitor, I was literally talking to my wife about this, like with uh uh somebody that I know. There's like there's like a guy I know uh uh played basketball at Ohio State, and uh we do like these little couples pickleball tournament things once a year. We call it the before, we call it the before of July tournament. It's like on the third of July, so it's before the fourth, so we call it the before. And then we dress up in these cool costumes and we play. And like the for me, the worst the worst couples to play against are the couples that are just there to have fun. Because I'm like, I walk out in the court and I'm like, like we're gonna win 11 to 2, and you're both gonna, and then I'm gonna kind of like I'm gonna be like trying because I don't like I'm not gonna just like casual because you're casual. That's that's not enjoyable. Um, but I love playing against other competitors who are competitors who aren't antagonistic because I'm like, like if we played against each other, like you compete really hard, I compete really hard. We both enjoy, I enjoy the fact that you are trying everything in your power to beat me. And I enjoy using everything in my power to beat you while you are trying everything in your power to not get beat by me. That moment, that feeling, and the being in that environment, to me, that is fun. And other people are like, I just don't get joy out of that. And I'm like, okay, that's fine, but I'm not gonna say there's anything wrong with you. Don't tell there's nothing wrong with me. But if we are on a team, we've got to figure out, or we're in a partnership, we got to figure out what your identity is, what my identity is, and then we have to figure out what is gonna be our team's identity, independent of our own personal preferences. Because this is where a lot of coaches are getting themselves in trouble. Kind of open up a couple threads here, but a lot of coaches getting themselves in trouble because they have designed their teams and their programs and their approaches around players, not around competitors, and they are satisfying for fun. And what happens is you build a program satisfied for fun, or in college football, you build a program satisfied for chasers. Texas AM under Jimbo, they built a program for chasers. What happened was they got a program for chasers.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:31

They filled their program with chasers, and then you get a program that has behavior patterns of chasers, and that doesn't, that does not compete hard enough to win. And then it didn't compete hard enough to win in the Sunbelt conference, let alone the SEC.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:44

I had this conversation with a psychologist, and they disagreed with me, which was okay. And I'm curious to hear your your take. But as a part of athletics and like high-level competitors, and I throw myself in like the competitor landscape, is part of what makes competition so fun is that you have something to lose. And either consciously or subconsciously, you have accepted this may not go my way. And that's what kicks in the adrenaline, kicks in the competition. Because if I just know I'm gonna win every time, it's not that enjoyable. Like me, like just beating on whomever, my like uh, you know, my little brother's not a good pickleball player. Me just beating the crap out of my brother. Pickleball is not that fun. But when I meet a worthy adversary and I'm competing and I'm going hard, like that subconscious level of I have something to lose here is what just makes competition so enjoyable for me. And a lot of the high-level athletes that I work with as well share that like I have something to lose. I have to bring a different level. And while that loss hurts and it stings and it sucks when it happens, it's part of that is like what I love.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:56

Yeah, that that's the that's that your ability meeting a challenge where it's like a puzzle piece, like your ability just enough to overcome that challenge and beat it. If your ability exceeds the challenge too far, there's no stimulation.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:18

There's no there's nothing interesting. Like uh I uh when I I teach this same thing, I use the example of of you know, if if you take a if you take a football team out and you you take a high school football team out, and you could go play you know, the Ohio states of the world could go play um Kent State every game and like that's not interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:45

Nope. It's not fun for either side.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:47

Yeah, like I I could go, uh my son. My son was playing a video game, and he he put himself on level 10 and he put the opponent on level one, and he was doing it because he was trying to like get these rewards or get some stuff, whatever. And I had the conversation with him about, hey, like you're not gonna get better doing that. And like if you want to get better, because he was complaining about some one of his cousins was beating him at the game. I'm like, dude, if you want to get better, like you have to, you can't ha you can't orchestrate these types of environments. Um, but you will have a lot of people who in Madden, like kids, like a Madden, like they they turn themselves up to Hall of Fame level, and then they put the they put the uh uh opponent on rookie level and and they get they get some joy out of that. And then they get in the world and they meet against the real challenge and it's not fun, and what happens? Again, I'm not I'm not I'm not saying the video I'm not trying to draw a linkage between what people do on video games in life, but like just anywhere in the world, like it's not that's not an interesting challenge. And so um uh, you know, what what we want to find is we want to find those, those, we want to find those tests, those games, those, those um opponents, those playing fields that require us to stretch our ability to just barely be capable of achieving achieving that uh and requires all of your skills, that's what's cool, that's what's fun. But if it you know go the other way, right? If if you are if you are Kent State, you do not want to go play Ohio State and then Indiana and then Miami and then Texas AM, and then you know what I'm saying, that's not fun as well, because then it's the other, then it's the opposite, right? The the test and the challenge is too far outside your grasp. And that's not interesting because the the gap is too large, and now all of a sudden that competitive thing is gone uh again. So, yes, some people are wired with you know the David and Goliath attitude and like they just love doing the biggest possible thing that is impossible. Yes, that that's not that that's that's just that's really rare. And you know if you're that kind of person and you've known it for a long time and fine. But for most of us who are in sort of in that zone or kind of wondering about that, it's finding challenges that require you to stretch it. I always say, I always look at like as a measure like five to ten percent beyond your current ability. Like I would love it if like competing with you, I would love it if you were like a five to ten percent better pickleball player than I was. If you are if you were 100% better than I was, the game very quickly gets not fun for me and for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:34

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:34

But if you're five to ten percent better, or I'm five to ten percent better than you, that means I still have to work hard to beat you. Yeah, you have to work really hard to beat me, and then that that dynamic can actually kind of shift where it's like, ooh, I'm a little bit better than Colin, but man, he's playing really well, or he got me. And if I let my guard down, he's gonna smoke me, and then I don't want that. That's a fun challenge, or vice versa. You're like, oh man, like I'm a little better than MK, but I'm not enough better than to to relax. And I'm like, man, Colin's better than me, but like I'm chasing that is like that's the spot where it's like boom, it lights up, right? That's the cool part. And that's for everybody. Like everybody can feel that. It's just it's just uh figuring out how to keep them in. And then last thing on this for you before you go to the next one is there's nothing wrong with there's nothing wrong with the desire or the priority of winning and losing and chasing it. There's nothing wrong with having fun and prioritizing that. There's nothing wrong with rewards and prioritizing that. There's nothing wrong with socializing and prioritizing that. One of the things that you can do is if you have a if you are a if you are a uh uh if you find that you are a player, not a competitor, then what happens is just attach the fun and the gamification to the things that competitors need to do. Just make, just add some fun to it. Now you're not gonna be able to do it with everything, okay? Uh, but you can do it with some. So you can engineer some fun into it to keep those kinds of people engaged. You people are who they are. You can't, if I try to make you a player or a chaser, could I?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:13

No.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:14

Here you go. I couldn't. Now, over time, could you become one of one of them if if your life stimulated you a certain way and you evolved and you kind of did sure, but I can't tell you to prioritize and value something that is not at the top of your list. I can't do that. So if you find that you've got you're married to or working with or leading or coaching or interacting with, or you are player, competitor, chaser, socializer, whatever it is that you are, you've got to recognize that is where that person is. That is what they are. So you either have to figure out how to work with that, work through that, work around that, or you gotta eject. If it's not tenable and it and it does not work, do not say you gotta become a competitor. That'd be like that'd be like saying you gotta stop being a competitor and start being a chaser. You gotta start putting rewards at the top of your list. You're competing too hard. Be somebody who goes after rewards. You're not going to.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:16

You're competing too hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:17

You know what I'm saying? You're not going to. Yeah, someone goes, you're competing too hard. Nobody's ever gone, oh, good call. I'll stop being interested in that. So, so, so, you know, I rather than judging it and telling people what they have to be, you start from the point of humanity of people are what they are right now. So you gotta start with that's where they're gonna be, and you gotta work with it. So, yeah, if you realize that your starting quarterback is a chaser, probably not gonna work. Probably not gonna work. Okay. Um, not saying it can't, but you don't see them winning championships very often, right? Uh, at any level. So, um, or whatever, they can do it as long as they have a huge talent gap. But when that talent gap goes away, so you either got to communicate it and then build something around it so that that doesn't cost, or you gotta find a way to get the right person in that role because you got the wrong person in that role. That's just you're not gonna change people like that. That's just that doesn't at least not on a cycle that not not on a timeline uh that you need it to. People, that change takes a long time for a person to get to, and they get there on their own, not because you commanded it as a leader.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:31

Well, hey, BK, I appreciate you coming on, man. This was a blast of a conversation. You know, I'm I'm happy we we got back on here. If there's anything you're working on or you anything you want to promote, please, how can people reach you? How can they get at you? How can they see what you're doing?

Four Team Identities: Competitor, Player, Chaser, Socializer

SPEAKER_00 1:48:46

Yeah, so so uh dailydiscipline.com is uh I've been we talked about it today, right in the newsletter. Um I've been doing this eight, nine years in, and we've got two things. We've got two things, um, one here now, and then another one here coming soon. We've got the we've got our community, uh, the daily discipline community, which is free to join um and get some extras, right? Reflection questions from the newsletter, some tips and how to bring some things in. If you're a if you're a self-directed, hey, I I I want to kind of go beyond just the ideas, obviously the newsletter. Uh you can read and grab it. Uh, but if you're like, hey, I want to, I wanna, I wanna I wanna do some work on this. Like I'm gonna, and you're a self-starter, join the free community. That's where we've got, I don't know, 1,200 people in there right now. And uh we we add some extra stuff in there that we don't put in the newsletter for people who want to grab it. You can also interact with more people. And then here over the next uh over the next, we're in you know start of February, here over the next week or two, we'll see when the exact launch is is we're launching a uh we're launching a new we're still we're still playing with the name. Um so I'll I'll I'll I'll hold a lead on the name, but it's it's inside it's inside the community. Um is what we've recognized is Is um people need directives for, like I mentioned earlier, putting these principles into action in their lives. Um, we've forgotten more principles than we are even applying, right? You know, you're listening to you know your podcast, you're listening to Huberman, you're listening to all these different places, you're listening to all these different things, um, and our consumption exceeds our our our application. So, and same thing with me, right? 2088 daily disciplines. I know that that the number of people who have implemented even half of what I've written, you know, probably nobody, right? So what we're doing is we're launching, I'm launching, it's a weekly challenge. Um, and every week, and this is, you know, there's a cost associated with this, but you also get to join a group and and come into the community and do this, is every week I'm going to provide a challenge that is essentially think of it like a workout for your behavior skills. Right? Think of it like, you know, why does somebody hire, why does somebody go to why does somebody hire a personal trainer? Why is there a strength coach? Um, you know, why do you go find programming? Well, you know, what do you do to build your workouts? Like you go find out some good programming and then you go into the weight room and you go do that. You do that programming. And some people love to do the programming themselves. Um, I'm one of those people. I like to do the programming, programming myself. But I also pull from a lot of places, a lot of sources, and I construct my programming. Well, what I've recognized is that with behavior skills, we don't really have a way that people don't have a way to work out. And they don't know where they're getting their programming from. So what I've created is a system where we take people on a journey where every week I'm giving challenges for how to develop behavior skills specifically in the field of action, in your actual life. And I give you challenges, things you've got to go do, skills you've got to go develop, actions, activities. Basically, my job is to help you convert principles into practice in your life. And uh, and so if you're somebody who is uh who is saying, Man, I gotta start doing some of this stuff. I gotta, I gotta get into action. Um, you know, this this would be for you. So, you know, come find us in the in the data discipline community. It'll be super easy to find. Um, and there'll be a lot of other people tackling these challenges and learning how to uh apply principles in their life and go, you know, accomplish things, get things done, strengthen their discipline, build better relationships, um, and start building a lot of evidence and uh and skill sets, start putting stacking bricks in their life.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:43

Heck yeah, man. I love that. Uh hopefully some of my listeners get in. I'm gonna have to luck at getting in on this. Um, but I appreciate you, man. Uh, listeners, thank you for tuning in. Tune in next week. Check us out, athleticfortitude.com. Download the pod, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Five stars on the baby. Thank you, BK.