You’re Tougher Than You Think | Jordan Peterson

Rise and shine, it's espresso time! Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in that amazing gift you have inside you that needs to be shared with the world. So let's start the day off right together. Grab your cup of coffee and sip on today's message: toughen up. Over to you, Jordan Peterson.

You're actually tougher than you think. You never knew that, and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because, you know, people play a role in their own demise, so to speak. When you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid, you chose to withdraw because you were afraid. So it's not only that you were overprotected often, it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were overprotected, and run back there whenever you had the opportunity. You know, so maybe you're a kid in the playground, right, and you're having some trouble with other kids, and you know in the back of your mind, "I should deal this with— deal with this myself," but you go and tell your mom, and get her to intervene. And you know that that's not right, you know that you're breaking the social contract, but it's easier, and so that's what you do. You run off to an authority figure, and hide behind the great father, right? Roughly speaking. Well, the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself. So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40. So then you take people out, you say, well, what are you afraid of? Rank it from 1 to 10. So 10 is— make a list of 10 things you're afraid of. The least— the thing you're least afraid of, we'll call number 10. So we'll start with that. Okay, well, I'm afraid of elevators. Okay, well, let's, let's look at a picture of an elevator. Let's have you imagine being in an elevator. Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open, because that's how you're responding to it, symbolically, right? And you're gonna do that at the closest proximity you can manage. You find out, you go do that, it works. You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective, shaking. You go out, you stop, you watch it happen. And you actually calm down. You do that 10 times, and it no longer bothers you. Well, what you've learned— that you didn't die. But more importantly than that, you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death. That's what you've learned. And then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective. It's a tomb, right? It's, it's, it's a place of enclosure and isolation. And you learn, "Hmm, turns out I can withstand that." And then you're much more together, much more confident. And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that. I've seen this multiple times, is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up, they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before.

This is a great line that Will Smith said when somebody asked him what he's afraid of, and he said, fear. He's afraid of fear, the fear of fear. He doesn't like fear. Whenever he recognizes that he's afraid of something, he wants to attack it, to get rid of it, to combat it, to always be pushing through whatever his fears are because his fears prevent him from doing great things. He wants to just run straight into fear, which is such an interesting approach. I don't think many people have that mindset. And just the act of crushing a fear or combating the fear Makes you stronger, makes you grow, makes you more comfortable in doing other crazy things and expands your circle of confidence and competence. The tricky part though is to catch yourself. The tricky part is to actually acknowledge to yourself that you are afraid of something. Because what we'll often do is just come up with a rational reason why we shouldn't do it. Instead of admitting to ourselves that we're afraid, we'll come up with a justification. I'm not going to start my business because, you know, now is not the right time, because, you know, this president's in office, because whatever. You come up with a bunch of reasons. And listen, those reasons may be true, right? A lot of those reasons have some kind of practical value. That's why you pick them, right? You're not going to pick something totally crazy. It's not going to be, you know, Martians might invade planet Earth, so I'm not going to start my business. Somebody told you that, if you told yourself that, you wouldn't believe it because you can't hold on to it. So all these practical reasons that you come up with, they hold a shred of truth, and so that's what makes you feel like that's the reason. But really, you just You're just afraid to do something. Those aren't the reasons. They're there, but they're not the real reasons. You're just afraid. And so catching yourself to understand that this is the reason why I'm not doing something important is super critical, I think. And so when you do catch yourself, then what do you do? Then you start to try to take some kind of action for it. So the example that I've told before, I like to tell, is when I was walking in the street and I had my headphones on, it was some quiet street, and I'm grooving and I'm shaking and I'm dancing and I'm doing a whole bunch of stuff. And then I get close to a busy intersection, and as soon as I see people around me, I tone down. I'm like, "Mm-hmm." I start playing small, start playing it safe, worried about their judgment of me, worried about how they might be thinking about me. Subconsciously, like, it didn't even tick, didn't even register that I was playing small. Right? And this is what we do normally, right? Like, because we're afraid of failing, the fear of judgment, we just play small by default. We just resort down back to it. And then I caught it. I caught it and realized, what just happened? I was groovin' and now I stopped because there's a bunch of people on the street. That's not acceptable. And then I made a conscious effort to dance even bigger on a busy street corner. I'm shaking it up. Now, I'm not going in somebody's face and trying to prove a point. I'm not trying to get in somebody's space and offend them. But maybe what I'm doing inspires them. Maybe what I'm doing gives them a bit of a smile. You know, maybe they think I'm crazy. That's okay. I don't want to be afraid of that. And so whenever I can catch myself playing small, because of a fear, then I try to attack it. The most difficult part is still catching it, and you may catch 1 in 100. I bet you I've already played small 100 times today, didn't catch any of them, just subconsciously. Just, that's how we're wired. You play small daily, hundreds of times, you don't even notice it. When you do notice it though, when you do catch it, you catch your fear, get into the habit of pushing through it. Get into the habit of running towards it. Because the more you do that, the more you'll catch the next one. And you'll catch the next one. And you'll catch the next one. And you've trained yourself that when you're afraid of something, you're going to attack it. Now, it doesn't mean go do something stupid. It doesn't mean like go jump out of an airplane without a parachute on. Okay, like don't go— don't go— you know, there has to be some margin of safety for your life. Okay? But most of the things you're afraid of aren't on that level. You take it to the extreme, extreme example, but most of the things that you're playing small on are not on that level. They're not life-threatening things. It's things like fear of judgment and fear of failure. So the more you can catch yourself and get used to it, the more you build that muscle. And here's the, here's the brain twist. The more you catch yourself playing small and you don't do anything about it, you shrink to that fear. You've realized that you're afraid and you're not going to do anything about it. Then the more you continue to play small. The more you've trained yourself that when I'm afraid of something, I am not going to take action. When I catch myself being afraid, I'm going to do nothing. You perpetuate that habit of playing small every single day. And so the tricky part is catching, but when you do, man, training yourself to fight through it and take the scary action will set you on a course of insane growth, will help unlock your potential, will help you do the thing that you want to do so that you're not constantly thinking that you're less than, constantly thinking that you need other people's approval, constantly thinking that you can't go off and do amazing things. If you train yourself daily to crush through fear and do the things that you're afraid of, guess what happens? Your life starts to change. Dramatically amazing positive way. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is a fear that you have recognized today? Some small action that you are not taking action on, some small thing that you're constantly worried about, but today you're gonna fix. You're gonna own that fear, step into it, and Own up to it and do something. Share it in the comments below. I want to see that. I also want to give a quick shout out to Jeremy. Jeremy, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. Really, really, really means a lot to me, and I hope you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you, and I hope you continue to believe in yourself in whatever your one word is. I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

Be strong and very courageous. Be strong and very courageous. Be strong and be of good courage. Be strong and possess the land, because God knows that for what you're going to do, it is not by outer strength. You understand? You understand? See, help me preach this thing this morning, girl. It's inner strength. So my fourth point is you got to have inner strength for this fight. It's not your outer strength. It's not by might nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord. So you got to have that inner, that inner, that inner, that gut strength, that belly strength, that Devil-defying come hell or high water strength, that roll-me-out-in-front-of-'em-and-I'll-preach-from-a-chair strength, that tenacity to take a licking and keep on ticking, that inner strength that when I can't do as I would, I'm gonna do as I can, but I'm not gonna stop doing. To the best of my ability, I'm gonna Hallelujah! Be strong! Strong, strong, strong, strong. Raise your standard.

Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

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