Transformation Tuesday: Don’t Quit; Find Your Grit.

On this episode of the podcast we have our Transformation Tuesday webinar.

This week, we talked about the definition of grit and why we often quit before we are able to make lasting change. Find out more about Transformation Tuesday at Facebook.com/JohnTesh

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with another transformation Tuesday episode of the show. That's where we take audio from our weekly transformation Tuesday calls and we present it to you in podcast form, lets you put it in your pocket. We have a vibrant community of transformation Tuesday people who want to get from the place they are to the place that they want to be. We take all of the information and the experts that we've had on the radio show over the years, and we bring it to bear to help you make a breakthrough in your life. If you are interested, it is absolutely free. You can find out more about how to sign up for transformation Tuesday at facebook.com/john Tesh. We post some video clips from that every week, and also we have links to join our Facebook group. That is the key to being a part of our weekly transformation Tuesday broadcast, if you're interested in that. Again, facebook.com/john, Tesh. But here is some audio from one of our recent our recent shows. This one is just me. Usually it's me and John Tesh, or it's just John Tesh, but this time, it's just me. So ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, here is me with transformation Tuesday. All right, hello everybody, and welcome to transformation Tuesday. I'm gierard. I'll be flying solo today. John is out of the country at the moment, so he's not going to be on today, but we are going to talk about some of the stuff that we have been touching on. We have some new people. We have opened up, as many of you are aware, we've talked about doing this for a while. We have opened up transformation Tuesday. If you are trying to share with people transformation Tuesday, you can do that now, get them into the Facebook group. That is the starting point. If you are in the Facebook group, Hi Martin, thank you for saying hello. Hi Jeanette, hi April. If you are in the Facebook group or you want to get a friend into the Facebook group, that's fantastic. Make sure when they go to sign up for the Facebook group, that they accept the terms and conditions and that they agree to the rules of the group. We are not letting people in that don't do that. It's one of the few ways that we keep bots out of there. So I'm not going to let people in. Christie's not gonna let people in. Chris is not gonna let people in if you're not handling that. So if there's somebody want to share with, and they're like, I tried and they I didn't get in, that's most likely why they did not get in. Hopefully that makes sense to that end, if you are liking what we're doing here, please get involved in the Facebook group. Post the things that you're working on, post your goals. Let us be a community that supports each other and helps us get from the place we are to the place we want to be. Now. What is our theme for 2026 I've said it a million times for those of you that have been here, we know it is you right now. Is a reflection you are a reflection of your habits from the last six months. So the you that you are right now is a reflection of your habits from last six months. So we want to create habits for the next six months that turn us into the person we want to be. Our whole goal for transformation Tuesday. The reason why we started this is to take intelligence for your life and help you use the information that we have been doing on the radio, that we have been researching on the radio, that we have been presenting on the radio and podcasts and television show and videos for the last 20 some odd years, using that the smartest stuff, to help you get from the place you are to the place you want to be. If you are not subscribed to the John Tesh podcast, I play old transformation Tuesdays in the podcast. So you can, if there's, you know, I try to go back a couple of weeks, maybe even farther back, and every week add a transformation Tuesday. We also take clips from the radio show and put that on there. I want to get some more personal stuff with John on there as well. But for now that we're looking at at some radio clips, as well as intelligence for your health, and then I play some interviews with experts that we've done so that's all available at the John Tesh podcast. If everybody from here were able to subscribe, that'd be great. I'll post about it in the Facebook group, and that will that everything, every little bit helps us. Okay, what are we going to talk about today? We are going to talk about grit. We are going to talk about the reasons why we quit on our goals, both the neurochemical reasons and the emotional reasons. And we're going to talk about how to fix some of those things that make us quit. So why are we quitting? Why are we Why do we feel like again? So many of us signed up for this class. So many of us signed up it's a class, but you know what I mean, so many of us signed up for this because there's something that we feel like is missing, something that we the potential that we have that is untapped, unrealized, unmanifested, whatever that concept is, you signed up because you wanted to feel that. It, maybe it's get healthier, maybe it's make more money, maybe it's improve your relationships. I don't know what it is. These are all areas that we talked about, all areas that we use, but there is something in you. And you look around and you see other people doing the things that you want to do, and you think, you think, why not me? What am I missing? What am I not doing? Is it just chance, or is it something else? So there is an element of chance to everything. But we're going to talk today about grit, and we're going to lean into we're going to a few things from Angela Duckworth, who is fantastic. A big fan of Angela Duckworth, if you haven't read her book, her book is called Grit. We got Andrew Huberman, I know you're shocked. You're shocked that I brought Andrew Huberman into this, but what do I like about Andrew Huberman? For those you guys on the Thursday call on longevity lab, you know, I said this last week, what I like about Andrew Huberman is he is, he's done a lot of this. He does a lot of the research and tests on himself, like Dr Frankenstein, and he takes that and he makes complex scientific ideas more easily digestible and understandable. So that is why I like Dr Huberman. He's not a magic doctor. He hasn't done exceptional research that goes beyond what other people have done, but he does do a really good job of packaging it, and he you can see him do it to himself. So I like that. So we're gonna hear from him, and then we're gonna do something I haven't done before. I have a web clip of a mean, they're all web clips. Obviously. This is 2026 we are, we are living on the internet. I have a clip from an experiment that was done in a classroom in a high school classroom, and I think it will shed some light into why we quit and why we are down on ourselves all the time. But first we're gonna go back in time. I mean, everything's back in time, right? That's the old bitch Hedberg bit. Here's a picture of me when I was younger. Every picture is of you when I when you were younger. Here's a picture of me when I'm older. Oh, let me see that camera. Okay. Here is an old Angela. This is the thing that started Angela Duckworth, sort of entree into the mainstream. This is her TED Talk that catapulted her into sort of the pop science Zeitgeist that she exists in now. And this is her defining, the characteristic of grit, right, which, again, title of her book. Highly recommend. It is very eye opening in terms of getting you to the place that you want to be. So here we go with Angela Duckworth, original TED Talk, talking about the definition of grit, characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Okay, the intense music cue. So grit is the difference. Grit is the thing that is taking the hard classes and doing the hard major in college. Grit is is doing the thing that nobody sees when you are trying to make a sports team. You know? It's doing the stuff that's not just a practice. Everything else in our life is designed to be like a casino. To give you the opposite of grit, which is to hit the dopamine sensors quickly and intensely. I held up my phone because our phone has 1000 apps on it, depending on how many you've downloaded, but the phone itself, even every single app, is designed to hijack that cycle and do the opposite of grit. It's meant to feed you dopamine and all of these neuro chemicals that keep you hooked and give you quick, small moments of gratification. And what does that end up doing, writ large, over time, just like, just like this tiny stream of the Colorado River erodes the Grand Canyon. It erodes your goals. Distraction erodes your goals. This quick fix dopamine erodes your goals. You want to invest in your relationship with your children. You want to invest in your relationship with your spouse or your best friend or what have you. But instead, there is a quick fix, dopamine on your phone that keeps you distracted. You want to look at reels instead of actually engaging with your spouse. You want to look you want to interact and see what how many likes your post got instead of talking to your child that's right in front of you that is eroding our grit. Now, some of you are going to say, well, grit is part of it, but there are people who are just good at things. Maybe I'm just not good enough at X, Y or Z, in order. Be the person that I want to be to do that thing that I've never done before. And we keep saying, What do I keep saying about? We're talking about building our habits for six months to turn into the new person. And when I say new person, you know you know what I mean. You're a different version of yourself with with different choices. But what they maybe, maybe I'm not good enough for that. Maybe I can't do that. So here is the difference between grit and talent, and I think it's very important for you guys to understand this difference is the rate at which you increase in your skill with effort. Some people are going to increase their skills faster than others. And I think it's legitimate to say those are the quick studies, those are the talented people. But in my data, I find two things. One is that more talented individuals don't always keep showing up, right? Woody Allen, famously, once said, 80% of success in life is just showing up. You know, there are many people who could write a great book or who are talented in the sense that when they write, they get better faster, but they never finish what they begin. And so what I find in my data is that talent is no guarantee of actually showing up and finishing the things that you start. The second thing is characteristic of high achievers, really, in any domain, whether it's Google or outside Google is this kind of daily discipline of trying to get better, right? You know, just, you know, in sometimes, you know, microscopic, infinitesimally trivial ways, like all those little details add up to excellence. So that's Angela Duckworth talking to high achievers at Google. But her point applies to all of us, and she makes us it's the art of showing up. Are you showing up every day? We know. We know that one workout, one jog, one day of getting 10,000 steps is not going to shrink our waistline in and of itself. We know that consistency forms the Grand Canyon. We know that, but are we showing up every day in the same way that the Colorado River shows up? Because that wins every time I I know for those of you that are new, you don't know this, but for those of you that have been here for a while, I coach my son's little league baseball team. My kids are heavily involved in youth sports, and it is not because I necessarily believe that they will get college scholarships or play professional that would be great. That is the goal of a lot of people who put their kids into youth sports. But I like it because it teaches you about consistent work. And I'm always nobody cares about you winning a 12 you championship. And I come across a lot of coaches who are who are 12 years 12 and under, who are so focused on winning at the youth level that they I got accused recently of I make my I when I'm coaching pitchers, I'm more focused on their mechanics and their form than I am on how hard they're throwing or, you know, how they're performing in the game. I want them to perform well in the game. That's a part of it. Don't get me wrong, but I'm very focused on mechanics, because winning at the 10 U level or the 11 U level or the 12 U level is fun because it keeps the kids engaged, but it's meaningless. What matters is, did you work on yourself and get better so that when your body grows into itself, those mechanics come with you, and then you're able to throw harder, and then you're able to perform in high school and maybe even in college. So I one of one of the other coaches that I coached with, was like, hey, you know, you're so focused on mechanics, but I feel like they're, they're not pitching as well as they used to, and I'm like, I don't care. I don't care if we win a 10 year championship or a 12 year championship. I care if we are building people into the men that they're going to become two of the greatest pitchers in baseball right now, scoobal and schemes. I don't know why their names sound so similar, but they are two great young pitchers if you follow baseball. Whenever I saw an interview recently between the two of them, I mean, these are the two best scoobel in the American League, schemes in the in the National League. I promise we're not gonna talk about baseball the whole time. But I saw an interview recently between the two of them. They both went and played in college schemes, famously played for the Air Force Academy and then LSU, between the two of them, they had three college scholarship offers. I think schemes had two, and school had one. And these are the two best young pitchers in Major League Baseball. Why do I keep bringing this up? Why? What does this have to do with what we just watched about Angela Duckworth. Well, she talks about talent versus grit. Talent gets you really far. It means that when you put in the work, the work comes back to you more quickly. But what we have seen time and time again in research is that kids that are exceptionally talented or even told. They're talented at a young age, they end up giving up sooner, because when it gets hard and it will get hard, they think that they have lost their talent, which was their magic. But the kids who were not told that they were talented, who were praised for working hard, they are the ones that keep grinding and become the school bulls and the schemes so inarguably, two talented pitchers, but not as talented as their brethren when they were graduating from high school, because between the two of them, they only got three college scholarships. An athlete of that level should expect five offers, 10 offers each. Between these two best, these are the best of the best like this. That doesn't get better in terms of young pitchers in the Major League than these two guys. They had three, means one of them got two and one of them got one. That's a crazy, crazy low number for anybody that follows this stuff. And the point being, they grinded it out. They stuck with the grit. Are you doing that for your dream? Are you telling yourself today that you are not good enough, that you can't have the thing that you are working towards? So you quit? I I'm willing to bet that you have here's Andrew Huberman talking about the neurochemical reason why we quit, and then I'm going to talk about something else, the other side of it. Why do we quit? Like, what is that? And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released. And there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem, and at some point enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control over the motor circuitry, and we quit. That's it. But the thing that can restore those levels, or it can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine. A good example would be, if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable, just think, like the worst family vacation, everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event, and someone cracks a joke, you're almost immediately feel a sense of relief. So it can't be physical energy, it can't be glycogen related, it's not ketone related. It's nothing in the body. In that sense, it's dopamine, ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down so as you accomplish things, as you work on stuff, eventually your brain starts to shut down, and you need a reward system to tamp that down so that you can keep going. This is why we tell you, over and over again, to create those morning habits that benefit you, that morning habit of getting your 10,000 steps when the sun, as the sun's coming up, making your bed. These are the dopamine triggers that help you not only do those habits that are intrinsically good for you, but create the habits that contextualize your neurochemistry to accomplish those bigger goals that you have and to maintain your grit. That is the point. So when I ask you, week in, week out, have you been getting up at the same time every day? Have you been making your bed? Have you been getting 510 15 minutes of prayer, meditation every day? It doesn't have to be that much. Five or 10 minutes is enough? Are you getting your 10,000 steps? Are you exercising? Are you going through the habits? Are you journaling? Right? Don't forget, gratitude journaling is on my list of the top things that you should be doing that will help you accomplish everything. It's not just about those things. It's about creating the context for you to accomplish the things that you want. And what I just described can all be done in an hour. I am 100% sure I can guarantee that I have. I don't want to speak for you, I wasted an hour yesterday that I could have been using for those things. Now, I did most of those things yesterday, but I definitely wasted an hour that could have supported all of those things. So are you leaning into that? Are you doing the things that create dopamine and like, one of the things that we do as baseball coaches is we try to gamify drills. We try to make them fun, because it gets hard, and then the kids check out, and they lose their motor control. And I can see it happening if we do like position plays, meaning all the different places that the kids need to be on different situations in baseball. And baseball is a very mental sport. If we do that for too much, they start to check out. They start to mess with each other. They don't focus again. These are eight, nine and 10 year olds playing a game that requires two hours of intense concentration. It's a fool's errand. I know that I'm a moron. I know, but I enjoy spending time with my son. We have to gamify those drills in order to create the context for them to continue to learn exactly under I didn't know the neurochemistry. I just know eight, nine and 10 year olds in exactly the same way that Andrew Huberman is describing there. So you got to gamify your life. You've got to create those that's why writing a to do list out and physically crossing it out, that's a dopamine rush. We've talked about that that's going to help you stick with your goals. There's another thing that's holding us back, the perception of impossibility, this idea that what we are going to do, what we are trying to do, we are not good enough to do. Hopefully. So far, you've learned that there is no secret amount of talent that so far today, we have established that grit is going to be talent every time that the art of showing up and putting yourself. A position where you could succeed is more important than how good you potentially could be, how talented you potentially could be, How many books have you? Have you written that have gone unpublished? For most of us, even if we want to be a writer, the answer is zero, right? But Stephen King was churning out books and rejections. And he had a board of rejection letters as it was getting ready to quit being a writer, but he had book after book after book that was just getting rejected. Are you putting out book after book after book at whatever your goal is? Here is a cool experiment. It's called learned helplessness, and we're going to, I'm going to explain why I'm presenting this on the other side of it. Ignore the dude at the beginning. This might be one of the best social experiments I've ever seen a teacher do. These are anagrams. Just do the first one. Only go ahead and solve it. An anagram is rearrange the letters to form a word. Just one. Just rearrange those letters to form a word. When you're done, I need to see your hand raised. Keep going. We'll wait. Keep your hands up. Please. Just do number one. Don't go on. Don't go on. If this isn't meant to be difficult. Okay, put your hands down. Let's just go to number two. Don't even worry about number one. Go to number two. Solve that one again. When you're done, I want to see your hands up. Everybody's hands down. We're going to go ahead and do number three. For number three, rearrange the letters, and as soon as you do, go ahead and put your hand up, here's what you need to know. You're both given two different lists. This side of the room was given these three words the left side of the room, here you go. They were given back. What would the word be? The second one they were given lemon, Brian, the word melon. They were easy. The trick here was both of you were given the third word, which was the same. The third word was Cinerama, which was American. Your first two words on this side of my classroom were not solvable. They were impossible tasks. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but here's what we did this for. I was able to induce something called learned helplessness in the left side of the room very easily. Within about five minutes, I want you to think about what happened to you this left side of the room when you saw the right side of the room raising their hands because they already had the task done. What happened to you during that time? Jory, you felt stupid. Okay. I felt rushed. Felt rushed. Joel, I was even more confused. You're even more confused because they all got it and you were still struggling. Chelsea, frustrated. Frustrated. What happened by the time you got to the third word, because I'm here to tell you, this side of the room is not significantly more intelligent than this side of the room. That was a random assignment. So what happened to show the differences? Why did you have more of a difficult time with the third word was the which was the exact same word, Brian, my confidence was shot. What you experienced was a term called learned helplessness. How many have heard of the term before? Let me see your hands. Learned helplessness is often used in the academic literature to mean what Gerard basically, they fail once or can't do something one time, and then they apply that, apply that to everything in the future, right? You fail once, and you learn that you can't do something, and then the task that you absolutely can do, it feels impossible because you have learned that you can't do it. Versus the other half of the room was given essentially the same task, but possible, right? And because they were able to churn out the first two answers quickly and easily, the third answer came to them. But again, the point she's making is that both sets of kids were given the same third word. The one set of kids was given two impossible words to start, the other two easy words to start. And as a result, the kids given the easy words were able to do the third word. The kids who were not given easy words were given impossible words, were told that were basically set up for failure for the first two were were unable to solve that third word. So how does this apply to what we're talking about? Hopefully it's obvious, but if, but I'm gonna explain it anyway. If you have failed at something in the past, is it losing weight? For a lot of us, it is you've decided in your brain. That you can't do it. Perhaps it's because the tools that you had were inefficient. Perhaps it was a life stage that blocked you from being able to, you know, get in the put in the effort that we know works. And what that does is it erodes your grit for the future. It erodes your belief in yourself that motivates you to keep going. So how do we use this to our advantage? It goes back to the dopamine system that Huberman is talking about. It goes back to the idea of showing up anyway, and what Angela Duckworth was talking about when she talked about making those small, infinitesimal improvements every single day. What does that mean? It means, give yourself the task list that you can do, and start checking things off. Make the infinitesimal adjustment if you if you cannot walk 10,000 steps, which is the recommended amount, but you can walk 2000 do the 2000 and then tomorrow, do 2100 and work your way up to the 10,000 but when you tell yourself that it's impossible, when you tell yourself that I can't do these things, so I'm not going to try, it's a self fulfilling prophecy, and you are demonstrating a lack of grit. And sometimes it's straight up, not your fault. Sometimes you have been conditioned to stay in that position. And when I talk about homeostasis, which is, you know, obviously it's the word for equilibrium in the natural environment, but I talk about it in terms of us making changes in ourselves. When you would like to make a change in yourself, your life is going to push back on homeosta and into homeostasis, meaning I'm adding a new habit? Well, I didn't have a new habit yesterday or six months ago. So my life has all of these pressures that are going to push that habit out. Because that's how it works. I've got people in my life that don't want to see me eat healthy, because they are used to having fried food and beers with me every Friday night, and they love it, and it's one of our emotional touch points. So when I cut out fried food, they don't want to, they're going to, they're going to try to convince me to get to get back into it, because they don't want to feel bad about themselves. These are all elements of where your environment will push back on you to keep you where you are right now, and when you fail, you will learn that you fail. So you need to create small, incremental steps that Teach Yourself success. You need tab you need to go from bat to tab right, a very easy anagram to solve, as opposed to whirl, which was again from the video, where you cannot solve that one. There is no other word. How many tabs can you create for yourself to make those incremental changes. Is it intermittent fasting? Is it prayer and meditation in the morning? I don't know what those things are, and those are the those are the habits that we've told you are good for you, but you need, you need to find ways to have microscopic successes that move the needle just a little bit so that in six months, you are that different person, and you have finished that novel, that script that you have, you have gotten yourself into shape for your for your for your reunion, or whatever. The thing is, you have gotten the weekly date night in with your spouse, so that your relationship doesn't feel like two roommates who barely know each other, but actually feels like a relationship, and maybe you don't have enough time to do a dinner every single week, but you have to do something, whatever those things are. We have to make those incremental changes, or we will stay exactly the same. It is unchanging. We will not change if we don't change. And you signed up because there's things that you want to transform about your life. So let's do it. Let's do those small habits. And this is why we keep hitting you with the small habits over and over and over again. Make your bed five to 10 minutes of prayer and meditation, five to 10 minutes of journaling, 10,000 steps. Walk around the block. If you get if you get stuck in your head, go for a walk, you got to do these things consistently, because it opens the door for your brain to do the bigger things. We're going to end with Angela Duckworth, I know some of you are thinking, some of you are making excuses right now for why that change, that thing that you want is not there? Why? It's impossible. Some of you are making excuses in your head. Maybe it's unconscious. Oh, I would, but I, you know, you don't understand. I have this. I have that. Here's Angela Duckworth one last time telling you why you need to get out of your head. There's a word in Finnish called sisu, which very roughly translates to grit, but quite literally translates to your insides, to your guts, and if you're finished, you have the identity of someone when things are really hard and you've given all you can and you still are falling short, you reach down inside and you use your sisu, and you do it anyway. You. I do it anyway. Do it anyway this week. That's my goal. For all of us, is that when we hear that still, small voice in our head that tells us that what we're trying to do is impossible, that we are not in the right position for it. We are too old, we are too young, we are too fat, we are too thin, we are our relationship is already over. When we are told that it is impossible, when our when that voice in our head tells us that we're done, that we do it anyway, and what gives us the power to do it anyway is consistently showing up for ourselves and for the people around us. So what are you going to do anyway? What excuse Are you making in your head right now that when you get off this call, you're gonna be I was, I felt it, but I'm not gonna, you know, there's reasons why I can't do it. No, we're gonna do it anyway. That's your theme for this week. I will see you guys in the Facebook group, and for those of you on longevity lab, I will see you guys on Thursday. If you would like to join longevity lab, you can reach out to Chrissy and she will walk you through the process of getting in that and that, folks, is our show today. This is it for transformation Tuesday. Do it anyway. See you guys next week. That's it for the show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot. When you do that, we also try to respond to every mention the show, every DM about the show. You can tell us what you think about it, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You