This is a short Heroic One (+1) podcast by Brian Johnson describing the concept and origin of “Soul Force” as the core superpower of heroes. Johnson links the term to Gandhi’s satyagraha (truth-force/love-force), frames Soul Force as an individual metric in his Heroic App and book, and urges listeners to live with integrity to their highest ideals to change the world.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic One. In our last Plus One, we talked about the fact that you are my all time favorite hero. It's true. We also talked about the fact that although every hero expresses it in different ways, every hero has the same superpower. We named it Soulforce. Today I want to share a quick origin story on where I came up with that phrase. But first, in case you're wondering if you qualify to even aspire to be a hero hero, I have another question for you. Do you happen to know what the word hero actually means? As you may have heard me say before, and I promise I'll say it again, it's an ancient Greek word. Etymologically, the word hero doesn't mean killer of bad guys or tough guy or anything like that. It means protector. A hero has strength for two. And very importantly, a hero is willing to do the hard work to have that strength for two. And do you know what the secret weapon of the ancient hero was? Love. It's love that fuels our commitment to do that hard work to have that strength for two. It's love that gives us the courage to be willing to act in the presence of fear. It's love that gives us the self mastery to do what needs to get done, whether we feel like it or not. And if you haven't noticed, our world needs heroes today more than ever before. We're not just recovering from the effects of COVID 19. We have pandemic levels of anxiety and depression and cancer and diabetes and political polarization and social injustice and environmental degradation. And the only possible way we are going to meet those historically significant challenges and create a more noble and virtuous world for ourselves and for our kids and for their kids. And is if each of us steps up and starts showing up as the best, most heroic versions of ourselves. So back to your Soul Force. It's your superpower. And activating this superpower is the whole point of everything we do together. As in everything. Activating your Soul Force is the final objective. Objective 7 in basic training in our Heroic App. Your heroic Soul Force score is the first thing you see when you open the Heroic App. And it's the individual metric by which we measure our success in helping you show up as the best, most heroic version of yourself. It's by getting your Soul Force to one on one, then helping enough people also activate their Soul Force that we'll have a shot at literally changing the world. Then there's the subtitle to the heroic book I'm working on. Can you guess what that might be? Yeah, it's called a training manual to activate your Soul force. So here's the origin story on Soul Force. It involves one of my favorite heroes, Mahatma Gandhi. By the way, do you know that Mahatma means great soul in Sanskrit? Yep, and Aristotle had a word for that in ancient Greek as well. They called it magnanimous great soul. Now, we're all familiar with Gandhi's paraphrased admonition that if we want to change the world, we each must be the change we want to see. What you may not know is just how fiercely disciplined Gandhi was. He practiced his philosophy with a relentlessness that I find deeply inspiring. He was the living embodiment of arete. Of course, Gandhi liberated India via what we called non violent resistance in the West. But nonviolent resistance is a very weak translation of the Sanskrit word he coined to capture the essence of his movement and practice. The phrase he used was satyagraha. Now, that word comes from two Sanskrit words, sat and graha. Sat means beingness or truth. Graha means polite insistence or force. Now, Gandhi fiercely believed in and fiercely challenged his followers to stand in the power of truth. He knew that Britain's domination of India was morally wrong and that if he and millions of others could stand in that truth without resorting to violence, he could liberate the country without having to go to war. Now, like many ancient and foreign words that are difficult to translate into English, see eudaimonia and arete. Satyagraha can be translated as not just truth force, but also as love force and as soul force. There is an ineffable and extraordinary power that is palpable in an individual who is standing in their truth, living with fierce integrity to their highest ideals. And that is what Gandhi cultivated within himself and was able to help cultivate within enough people to literally change the world. It's also what every hero we've ever admired has embodied. And what I am so fiercely committed to personally embodying and to helping you and enough people embody in your own idiosyncratic way such that we can again literally change the world. How do we do that? By showing up and living in integrity with our highest ideals. Not someday.
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