PNTV: Many Ways to Say I Love You by Mister Rogers (#426)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we brought the blue shirt back and we've got some blue chalk on the chalkboard. Backed by popular demand, we've also got a great book, Many Ways to say I Love youe by Mr. Rogers. This is our third in the Mr. Rogers series. We started with youh Are Special, then the world according to Mr. Rogers. And it's kind of funny because Mr. Rogers was the last television show in black and white. Literally, I googled it. Well, who's the last black and white TV show? Mr. Rogers. Then he went to color. So we're back. We did a little black and white action. Now we're back to color. Subtitle to this book is Wisdom for Parents and children from Mr. Rogers. The other two is kind of general wisdom. This one's all about wisdom for parents. I read all three of these books in the span of a week after reading that documentary I've recommended a few times called Won't yout Be My Neighbor? Highly recommend it. Phenomenal. Each of these books is a super quick read. Little bits of wisdom from various sources. I love this one. If you're a parent, I think you will also enjoy this. Just soaking your soul in the warmth and presence and wisdom of Mr. Rogers is always a good idea. Watching my kids watch Mr. Rogers just. And I like to watch Mr. Rogers. He's awesome. Learn cool stuff. See a man showing up with presence and compassion and love and encouragement. Super inspiring as always. Six page PDF philosopher's note we've got over 600 of them now on a range of subjects to optimize every aspect of your life. We also have 50 optimal living 101 classes. Check it out. Optimize Me. Optimize Me. Apps for all the apps. Free two week trial, etc. Etc. Oops. I can hold on to that. Mr. Rogers. Many ways to say I love you One of the ways we can say I love you is by modeling how to deal with disappointments. So when I read a book, I often see a word come up again and again and again. In this book and in other books by Mr. Rogers, the word perfection came up a lot in Feelings. Of course, he helped us deal with our feelings. But Mr. Rogers dealt with his own imperfections and those of reality in a profound way. And he talks about the importance of of embracing disappointments. And he says the way we deal with disappointments is largely influenced by how our parents dealt with disappointments. And by extension, the way our kids are going to deal with disappointments is going to be largely driven. Not entirely, but largely driven and influenced by how we deal with disappointments. Which of course begs the question, the accountability mirror from David Goggins. How are you dealing with disappointments? Life's pretty crazy right now. We're in the middle of COVID As I film this, a lot of things have changed, a lot of disappointments. But how are you showing up? Because how you're showing up is going to influence your kids. Are you seeing these challenges as a threat to your well being? Or are you seeing them as a challenge for you to stand up tall in your virtues and give us all you got and model for your kids what dealing with adversity looks like. Super important. And in the note, I talk about Richie Davidson, the guy who studied the Dalai Lama and his monks. First one to study the effects of meditation on your brain. He developed some cutting edge research methodologies in that regard, etc. He talks about the fact that we know from a neuroscientific perspective that how you deal with little challenges, little stresses, is a great predictor of how you deal with big stuff. So if you want to get good with the big disappointments, first of all, realize life comes with disappointments. Then each time we face a little setback, a little obstacle, we make those obstacles make us stronger. Ohms style literally get a little bit better. Use it as training like you're gonna go run a Spartan beast, the world championship. Well, if you want to do that well, you better be preparing on a day in and day out basis to deal with the big things. You got to train with the little things. So those little irritations you feel in your life, see if you can use them as part of your practice. You can deal with the big disappointments. Embrace it. Be a model for your kids. Which brings us to the next idea. The birth of a child. Yes. And of a parent. The moment our children are born, our first child in particular, we. A new version of us is born. In the note, I talk about the hours leading into Alexandra and I becoming parents. Right. So Alexandra had an extended labor. It was like 16 hours, something like that. For our first kid, it was very short, maybe like less than four hours. For the second, Emerson, then Eleanor, both, we had it home with our beautiful midwife, Mary Jackson. Thank you and God bless you. You're an angel, Mary. And Yeah, so we're 10 hours into. I should say we. Alexandra is 10 hours into labor with Emerson, and it's at Night, right? We've been up for like 30 hours. So it's the middle of the night, we're in the shower, we're feeling tired. We're like, oh man, we need a vacation. We laugh at the naivete just hours before we have our first child thinking that was the hard part. That wasn't the hard part. Our lives changed as, you know, parents. You're laughing with me. You can laugh at me. That's fine. That naivete's burned through. You earned some great whiskers in life burning through some naivete. Anyway, the flip was switched. We were reborn. We were born as parents. And to really honor the sacred life that's brought into the world with a child, but also our new identities. And then we have an opportunity to shape our identities. Energy, work and love wise. We're always talking about the big three. Well, who are you? Love wise? It's different pre and post parent. And then we get to shape how we structure the rest of our day such that we can show up as powerfully as possible for our kids. But I just think it's so awesome, the birth of a parent. And then Alexander and I have a joke that there are two kinds of people. Parents will get this joke. Two kinds of people. Those who have kids and those who don't. Those who don't have kids don't know that there are two kinds of people. They think that having two cats or a dog that you got to take care of when you go on vacation is like being a parent. It's not, folks. And again, there's a secret handshake in the parent club. I hereby offer it to all the parents out there. Let's celebrate our birth and then let's celebrate our growth. So again, this is a book of wisdom for parents. And Mr. Rogers talks about the fact that just as our kids grow in spurts, right? And he says you'd be well to realize and remember that growth doesn't go like that. Human growth does not go like that. Now we want to go, we want it to go like that. A lot of self help people will tell us it should go like that. And if it's not, then you just aren't following our protocol well enough. Right? It's not how it works. Goes like this and sometimes it goes like that. How did I get back there? I have no idea. But there I am. And I'm getting back and I'm going up. Oh, there we go. And if we can embrace the disappointments inherent to life and our evolution, we can also embrace the fact that growth occurs little by little by little. Plus one, plus one, plus one. We'll actually check out how Fred puts it, because he puts it beautifully. Let's read you the little passage here. He says, parents don't come full bloom at the birth of their first baby. In fact, parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as our children's growing. And that kind of growing happens little by little. It's tempting to think a little is insignificant and that only a lot matters. But most things that are important in life start very small and change very slowly. And they don't come with fanfare and bright lights. This is why I show up every single day with the plus ones, with the number ones. And now we've got a streak of daily pntvs as I catch up on this. But it's the consistency. It's the little things that when we aggregate and compound a bunch of plus one gains over an extended period of time, we see magic. We got to embrace those tiny little gains, which is why I often end these sessions together and say, what's the one thing you got out of today's discussion? And how can you move from theory to practice to mastery? The little things, ultimately, are everything. Again, my coach, Phil Stutz, my Yoda, calls him microtransactions. How you show up in this moment, he's everything. And again, if you can't deal with the little things, good and bad, well, good luck dealing with the quote, big things. There's no difference. And in fact, the little things are the big things. Let's go hit them with as much presence and power as we possibly can, and let's move on to the next idea. But not before sharing Buddha's wisdom. Buddha says, little by little, a water pot is filled with water. Little by little, one becomes good, just as a water pot is filled with water, drop by drop by drop by drop. Now, most of us want to fill up the water pot as fast as we can. I certainly used to be in that crowd. And that's kind of like taking a fire hydrant to a precious water pot and trying to fill it all at once. You're more likely to spray it around the room and crack it. Slow down, settle down, play the long game, show up, get a little bit better. And know that when you aggregate and compound those tiny little gains, magic truly happens. Then we come to the next idea. Complex versus complicated. Fred, our dear Mr. Rogers beloved neighbor, tells us that parenting is complex. Now, in the note, I talk about Joshua Cooper Ramos, who makes A great distinction between complex and complicated. So he says, look, complicated things can be predicted and figured out, right? So even like a jet engine, a rocket, a heart, artificial heart, those things are complicated, but they can be figured out, right? That's very, very different. Your calculator is complicated, but it can be figured out and then it can be repeated and replicated. Complex systems can't be figured out in the same way. They're too dynamic. So things like a rainforest, that's complex, right? You've got a ton of different variables going on and each one is influencing the other. It's complex. You can't predict it. You can't just pull it out over here and tinker with it and figure it out and put it back in place. It's too dynamic, it's too complex. Well, guess what? Parenting is too complex. It's too dynamic. You've got your own complexity, you've got your dyad. If you're parenting with a partner, you've got your child or children. It's a very complex, dynamic, ever changing environment. We want to embrace that which allows us to deal with that a lot better and, and with our disappointments, a lot better. But if you think you're going to be able to figure it out, then you're going to stress a lot more than you need to. And again, oh, by the way, optimizing is a very complex system. You got to figure it out. Oh, until you don't. It's a moment to moment thing. And when we step back and have enough wisdom to know that, then we can embrace our inevitable imperfections. Which leads us to our fifth idea. I'm sorry. Mr. Rogers talks about the fact that he wasn't a perfect parent. His wife, Joanne Rogers, who proudly described herself as Mrs. Fred Rogers. In our last episode, we talked about her beautiful description of her relationship of over five decades with Fred. How much she admired his courage, his love, his discipline. I asked you, what three virtues are you going to be remembered for? Begin with the end of mind and live those today. That's the ultimate game, right? But even Mr. Fred Rogers was far from perfect. Joanne Rogers says it. She says, I have the feeling that people think it was easy for Mr. Rogers. It wasn't. He and I had to work very, very hard. We're human and there are no perfect humans. And when Mr. Rogers. Can you imagine Mr. Rogers getting upset, losing his cool, saying something he didn't wish he didn't want to say, or not being as considerate as he could be? Think about that and know that He's a human. He had the human being, a father who had the same exact experiences. And I remember a dear friend of mine, Dan Siegel, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, parenting experts, who, you know, describes in one of his books that he too flipped his lid. He talks about the neuroscience of when your prefrontal cortex goes offline, all you got is your limbic system barking at you. And you needed to repair relationships. And so first step here is common humanity. It's not because you're you, it's because you're human that you have a challenging time in the complex system that is parenting. It's a new role for you. You're growing into it. There's inevitable disappointments, but when we do fall short of our standards, we maintain the standards. We have self compassion for ourselves and we repair the relationship. We say I'm sorry. And what I like to do is say I'm sorry, then say, buddy, you know what happened and I needs work it. I say, at this moment, I did this. Now I could have done this. And had I done that, how would you have felt? A little better, huh? Then it's such a beautiful opportunity for me to repair and then model the fact that we're going to be disappointed. We're all growing into new roles. It's a challenging thing to do, but this is how you do it well. This is how you embrace that process. So let's remember to repair, to say I'm sorry. And of course, that starts with ourselves when we fall short of our own standards. Remember, parenting means to bring forth. So we're trying to bring forth the optimized equals, optimist, best version of our kids so they can flourish. We have enough wisdom to help them see the game they're playing, cultivate their self, master their courage, their love. Right? We're bringing forth the best within them, but we're bringing forth the best within ourselves, moment to moment as well. So we need to run the same. I'm sorry, repair algorithms with ourselves when and as necessary. Do that today if you feel so inspired. As you embrace the complex systems grow, embrace the new role you've been born into. Whether it was a year ago or a month ago or a decade ago or two decades ago. I've had so many of our coaches, or a number of our coaches, I should say one woman and grandmother in particular, who comes to mind, who going through our program, we talk about playing your role well, Energy, work and love wise. And we celebrate the role of being a mother and being A father, whether that's a full time role or a part time role, we celebrate that and we say that is so important. And too many people think it's all about your work, your resume, virtues. It's not obviously, but we got to prioritize that. And so she was actually reborn as a grandmother to appreciate she's been a professional mom and grandmother and she has crushed it throughout her life and it gave her a new sense of joy and freedom and celebration, which gives me tears in my eyes. So there you go. Many ways to say I love you. We covered a few of them. I will cover one more right now which is I love you. I appreciate you. Thanks for your support. Let's go. Hit it hard. With joy and love and courage and wisdom and self mastery and gratitude and hope and curiosity and of course zest today. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow. See you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hey guys, this is Bry. Hope you enjoyed that video. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about, so I just wanted to give you a super quick tour of our site, tell you what we do. We do two primary things. We have an Optimize core membership and we have an Optimize Coach certification program for people that want to go from theory to practice to mastery. So the core membership is basically 10 bucks a month depending on whether you do monthly or annual. And you get instant access to over 500 philosopher's notes. 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