PNTV: I Can If I Want To by Arnold Lazarus and Allen Fay (#233)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, I Can if I Want To I Can if I Want to by Arnold Lazarus and Alan Fay. Subtitle Change youe Thinking, Change youe Behavior, Change youe Life. It's a short 115 page quick reading book. 1975, old school. Albert Ellis, one of the leading psychologists of the 20th century, describes this as one of the best self help books ever written. One of our members recommended it. Thank you very much and I'm glad I read it. It's awesome. Packed with big ideas. Philosopher's Note, bunch of them. Five of my favorite ideas here. So the book is all about helping us deal with what they call the the 20 most common mistakes that can ruin your life. Both of them are psychologists. One is actually a psychologist, the other is a psychiatrist. They came together, looked at these issues that people keep on coming back to even though they have different problems in their lives, they were making these same mistakes. And the whole idea is to do two things, two steps. In the book we go through these 20 mistakes and they identify the faulty thinking and, and the faulty behavior. And if you want to change your life, that's what you need to do. You need to change two things. One, your thoughts, not complicated. Two, your behaviors. And then make the point again and again and again. That's pretty much all it's about. And they talk about the myths of change. It doesn't need to be hard, it doesn't need to take a long time. You can change your life if you identify the thoughts you have and the behaviors you have that are leading to suffering. Which leads us to the second big idea, locus of control. I remember when I first heard this idea, I don't know, like 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, even now. Do the math. It was a while ago, 18 years ago, maybe. Brian Tracy, we used to listen to all of his audio stuff and he talked about the locus of control. There are two places that you can put a locus of control. You can put it inside your head, an internal locus of control. Or you can have an external locus of control where things outside of you, you think are in control. And these guys come back to it again and again and again. The fact that your neighbor's dog barking External locus of control is not the reason why you're frustrated. You're frustrated because of what you're perceiving that experience to be. It's the thoughts you have that are determining your experience of that external event. Now if you go through life blaming everything it's your spouse who upsets you. No, it's not your spouse who upsets you. It's your interpretation of their behavior that's upsetting you. It's your thoughts, right? It's not what's happening out there, it's what's happening in here. So if you have a tendency to blame and to complain and to criticize, that means you almost certainly have an external locus of control most of the time or more often than you'd like. If you want to optimize and actualize, bring control back, know that nothing that happens outside of you can determine unequivocally how you feel. That's up to you. You have an internal locus of control. This is a huge idea. All the great teachers come back to it. But I haven't actually used that phrase in one of these sessions. So I'm excited to unpack that. I remember when I first discovered it, I was like, that's awesome. Internal locus of control. Don't give up your power. Third big idea is a fun one. So these guys are proponents of something called rational emotive behavior therapy. Rational emotive therapy, perhaps. And the idea here is that it's not about analyzing all the reasons why you do the things you do now. So in some therapy, you can go in and you can talk about all your childhood traumas and all the different difficult things that have happened from the day you were born or even before to right this moment, and all the whys, all the reasons you are who you are, right? And spend very little time changing what you do today. These guys say, look, they don't use the phrase archaeological dig, but that's how I like to frame it. If we spend all of our time looking back and trying to understand why, that doesn't necessarily mean we're ever going to figure out how to change our life. And these guys say you don't need to know all the reasons why you do certain things. Even if you figured it out, that wouldn't actually change your life. You need to change what you do. So rather than going on an archaeological digit looking for old bones and fossils, go to the gym, get to work. Identify your thoughts and your behaviors that aren't working and change them, and you will change your life. And they say, life's way too short to spend so much time analyzing all that stuff or reading long tomes, philosophical books and trying to understand the theory. Just get to the work, get to the practice. A lot more efficient. That's our third big idea. Fourth big idea. And again, remember, you can if you want to. If you want to change, you can. You just need to do the work. Fourth big idea they say, is when they say I can if I want to, they don't mean growing wings. It doesn't matter how much you want to grow wings. It doesn't matter how much you want to be 7 1/2ft tall. It doesn't matter. All the silly things they say, whether you want to be in New York and Los Angeles at the same exact time. That's not what they're talking about. What they're talking about is you can, if you want to, identify your thoughts and behaviors that are leading to suffering and change them. We talk a lot about in these episodes and in all of my work, reaching our potential, being willing to dare to dream and to put in the effort, and paying the price to actually actualize our potential. But we also need to realize that and this is part of a mistake on trying to be good at everything is one of the mistakes. Mistake number two or mistake number 13, I forget which number. But trying to be good at everything is like trying to grow wings. It doesn't make any sense. We need to take the time to realize that you're not going to be good at most things. If you're lucky, you're going to be good at one or two or three things, right? And you can identify where you have natural talent, where you actually have an ability to do something, and that area is where you're going to put in the effort. So this is Sir Ken Robinson's element, right? What do you love to do? What do you have natural talent in, and what do you love to do? That's your element. That's what's worth putting a ton of energy into. But we want to be honest, not delude ourselves in thinking that we're going to be extraordinarily good at something that we just don't really have a talent for. We're not going to grow wings. So pay attention to that. Remember, you can if you want to, but let's be honest about where we are. The fifth big idea here is that was the second problem. Now that I think about it, the 13th problem mistake was this idea of avoiding problems. It's a mistake to think that if you avoid your problems, they're just going to go away. They say. In fact, that's actually one of the clearest signs of neurotic behavior. Consistently avoiding things that you deem to be a problem. It's a good way to create a lot of unhappiness. We want to quit avoiding problems, head straight at them and they tend to, well, they're going to get resolved a heck of a lot faster than if we run away from them. So we've talked about this a lot. The idea that we want to reverse our desire is what the tools guys say. And when we feel pain, we feel a problem rather than retreat away from it. Say, bring it on, lean into it, move into our problems, knowing that our potential exists on the other side of the of our comfort zone. So there you go. Change your thoughts about what a problem is. And rather than being something you need to avoid, see it as a growth opportunity. Wow. This is going to give me an opportunity. This problem challenge, much healthier frame of reference is going to give me an opportunity to put into practice all these things I'm so passionate about. Fantastic. Bring it on. Rather than avoid it, I'm going to change my behaviors and I'm going to lean right into it. When you do that, you'll notice that those things tend not to be quite as big as you thought. And you're going to build your muscles so you can more consistently approach those problems with more grace and with more power. But we're not going to try to grow wings. Incremental improvements. We're going to hit the gym rather than go on the long meandering archaeological dig. Life is too short. Identify what works and go get to work on it. Locus of control. We want to take it from outside of us and bring it internal. Everything between here is what determines who we are and how we're showing up. And then the two steps. Thinking, behaving differently. If we want to optimize and actualize. That is a quick look at I can if I want to. It's great stuff. Check out the note and I'm going to do a bunch of micro classes on it as well. And I hope you enjoyed. Hope you have an awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube. So I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 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