PNTV: Rise Above by Scott Barry Kaufman

The idea here is to overcome a victim mindset, become the hero of our own lives. You have a case of life. We tell ourselves a story that life shouldn't be hard. And again, society is constantly telling us that life should be easy. And then when we have challenges, we can't get everything as quickly as we're told we should get it. Life isn't as fun and easy as we're told it should be and that we're seeing in all these influencers on all the different social channels. But the longer he stayed in, the more frustrated he got. And he realized he didn't really belong there, but he didn't do anything about it and just became more and more frustrated. Then one day— Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, Rise Above by Scott Barry Kaufman, subtitle Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself. and realize your full potential, as we discussed in another recent episode on another one of Scott Barry Kaufman's books called Transcend. Check that out. Scott is one of my favorite people on the planet, one of my favorite teachers. He's a professor at Columbia University, has one of the world's most popular psychology podcasts, and has done extraordinary work helping us understand the science of how to live an optimal life. He's one of the top 1% Most influential social and cognitive psychologist in the world. Good human being. As always, we've got a Philosopher's Note in which I pull out my favorite big ideas. You can check out the note for free in the show notes. We've got 5 ideas in the note and on the chalkboard here. Let's get to work. Rise above. Again, the idea here is to overcome a victim mindset, become the hero. Of our own lives. Scott does a very graceful, tactful job at talking about some of the victimhood that exists in our culture today, bringing in intellectual humility and a scientific basis to help us understand that life is supposed to be challenging, as we will discuss. And our story that it shouldn't be is arguably the greatest obstacle to us overcoming our challenges, etc. But I want to start with Your heroic guide, Scott. His story in and of itself is unbelievably inspiring. As a young boy, he was, as he says, extremely anxious and shy. Side note, so was I. And just a sensitive soul. Side note, so was I. But Scott also had an auditory learning disability. Made it very difficult for him to understand how to follow instructions In real time. And it was such a challenge for him that he was placed into special education. Now he says at the time that increased his anxiety and shame, but it was also somewhat helpful. He needed a little bit more assistance, etc., to understand how to navigate school as a young boy. But the longer he stayed in, the more frustrated he got. And he realized he didn't really belong there, but he didn't do anything about it and just became more and more frustrated. Then one day, The special education teacher wasn't there. A substitute teacher was there. And I got goosebumps as I started to tell this part of the story. And that teacher puts up with Scott, who apparently is acting up a little bit that day. And at the end of that day, she— and he says— peered into his soul and said, I see you. You don't belong here. But you need to do something about it. I get tears in my eyes. That guide for Scott changed his life. He realized she was right. He did something about it. He got out of special education, went on to get his PhD, and again become one of the most influential psychologists on the planet. His story is extraordinary, which gives him a lot of credibility to talk about how we can rise above our perceived limitations and create a life of deep meaning and purpose. In this context, in the note, I talk about We talk a lot about heroes, as you can imagine, within the Heroic app. You don't tattoo your body with Heroic and not talk about that a lot. But in the note, I talk about the fact that you can see yourself as the victim of your story. And most victims don't see themselves as the victim of their story, but it'd be wise to look at the role you're playing. You're playing one of 4 roles, and we all have these different kind of personas within our consciousness, right? But pay attention. Are you being the victim of your story? Are you being the hero of your story, using your challenges as fuel to become the next best version of yourself, which we'll talk more about? Are you being the guide for others in your story? Or, and/or, are you being the villain, persecuting others, victims, etc.? Now again, we all play all of those roles, frankly, every day. We can find ourselves alternating between being the victim, being the hero, being the guide, and being the villain. Mindful. Choose wisely. That's our first idea here. Second big idea, which is really the essence of the book. Scott says, warning, you have a case of life. We tell ourselves a story that life shouldn't be hard. And again, society is constantly telling us that life should be easy. And then when we have challenges, we can't get everything as quickly as we're told we should get it. Life isn't as fun and easy as we're told it should be and that we're seeing in all these influencers on all the different social channels, right? When we see all of that all day, every day, then we experience our challenges, we think something's wrong with us, right? Then we want to put bubble wrap around ourselves and try to avoid all of life's challenges. Scott says unequivocally, warning, you have a case of life. Life is supposed to be challenging. As we talk about in all the work that we do, rule number 1 of a good life, let alone a good heroic life, is it's supposed to be challenging. And your story that you shouldn't be facing whatever challenge you're facing is arguably the greatest obstacle to you conquering that challenge. So again, if we can accept that life is supposed to be challenging, nothing is wrong with us per se that we're facing these challenges, and nothing is wrong with life Per se, then we can do what we need to do to move from victim to the hero of our own lives, and then very importantly become the guide for others who are also facing challenges. Which leads us to the number one skill that Scott talks about. So the number one fact of reality that we need to embrace is life is supposed to be challenging. That's just how it is, period. Quit arguing with reality, which leads us to the number one skill. Scott calls it life acceptance. Life acceptance. He talks a lot about psychological flexibility. He talks a lot about emotional agility. We have a philosopher's note on a book that he references by Susan David, I think, called Emotional Agility. But we've got to accept, as I just said, that life is going to be challenging. I'm going to read from the note a couple different times. This will be the first time. He echoes what we talk about with Phil Stutz all the time. Phil, as you may recall, Says there are 3 unavoidables in life. Check out the documentary on Phil called Stutz with Jonah Hill if you haven't seen that yet. We'll link to it in the show notes. Stutz, Jonah Hill, Phil Stutz. Phil says 3 things are unavoidable in life: pain, uncertainty, and the need for hard work, constant hard work, he says. But all of us want to get to a point where we're exonerated from all of those challenges, and he says never going to happen. Pain, uncertainty, hard work. Here's how Scott describes life acceptance, accepting the reality of life. He says, you aren't alone in your suffering, right? So that's when I struggled the most in my life. I always thought something was wrong with me. I was alone. Kristen Neff 101: self-compassion, common humanity. You aren't alone in your suffering. And then he says, life is sometimes unfair. Let's accept that. Life is sometimes unfair. Life is ultimately unpredictable. We're never going to have absolute certainty. Again, Phil Stutz, uncertainty is one of the fundamental laws of life. Life is ultimately unpredictable. And then he says you can't completely control your life, right? Watch Notre Dame football. I got a little Notre Dame football wristband on. I hung out with Marcus Freeman last week, was in South Bend for a talk I was giving. And hung out with him. You watch him before last week's game, right? It was going to rain during the game, and the reporter was asking him before the game, how are you going to respond to that? He said, we're going to control the controllables. Can't control that, right? But we can control how we show up every single play. And then Scott says, no one is coming to save you. You're going to have to do your own hard work. And finally, you and only you are responsible for your reactions to the world. You know, he doesn't discount, again, the challenges we're going to face, and some of us will have different constraints than others. And he talks about there's toxic agency, thinking you can do anything you want at any time in your life. Toxic agency, the vice of excess sense of control. But then there's toxic passivity. Toxic passivity, where you give up all of your agency and you don't realize, well, you can affect your life in meaningful ways, and you must if you want to have a great life. So the number one skill that you can develop is life acceptance. How do we do that? Well, Scott is a huge fan of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach by Stephen Hayes. I'm gonna do the next episode on Stephen Hayes. I got into Stephen's work even more deeply because of Scott, and he references him all the time. Scott— well, Stephen is the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. ACT, right? One of the most transformative, scientifically proven approaches to changing your life. It's a third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy approach, right? Let's talk about the 6 ways that you can embrace the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy philosophy. Again, acceptance, life acceptance is in the therapeutic approach's name. And then commitment. You accept life and then you commit to taking action. We're going to do another episode on Marsha Linehan and her great book on dialectical behavior therapy. Same thing, opposites. You want to accept life, but then you want to commit to taking action that is in integrity with your values. So if we want to embrace life and then show up powerfully, Scott tells us we got to do 6 things. So this is where I'm going to refer back to my note here. Number 1, you gotta accept life. Experiential acceptance is the scientific phrase. The opposite of experiential acceptance is experiential avoidance, where you want things to go away. Well, Scott says that acceptance is the number 1 most important skill. Stephen Hayes says experiential avoidance is the most toxic thing that you can do. You must accept life's challenges Rather than avoid them. Why? Because when you approach them after you accept them, you can do something about it. The second thing that we need to do when we want to act now in integrity with that philosophy and therapeutic modality is we want to defuse from our thoughts. Most people, when they have thoughts going, they just let the thoughts go and go and go. They become fused with the thoughts. So a big part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is mindfulness. You gotta separate from your thoughts and observe the thoughts. Defuse from them. They've got a lot of different ways you can do that, but that's a huge practice. The 3rd practice is a little long here, but ongoing non-judgmental contact with the present moment. In other words, don't get caught up in your thoughts. Be here right now with this present moment. Engage in what needs to get done right now without judging it, Without getting upset about it. Accept it radically, then do what needs to get done. In sports, they talk about take the next best shot. In my son's chess, it's play the next best move. Don't allow your emotions to overwhelm you. Have a nonjudgmental contact with the present moment. The 4th idea here to embody this is a self without identification. Again, you want to observe yourself rather than live within this smaller, often victim sense of self. The 5th idea is your values, which we're going to talk about in the final idea. What's important to you? What values or virtues do you want to embody? Well, now's the time, number 6, to take committed action in integrity with those values. So you accept reality, you commit to taking action whether you feel like it or not, that is in integrity with your highest values. You have a do-it-anyway attitude is how Scott describes it. In the note, we also talk about healthy selfishness and taking care of yourself and your needs, etc. You can check out the notes for more on that. All of which leads us to the final idea. You want to light— ignite the light within. How do we go about doing that? You go back to your values. So again, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is all about knowing who you are at your best, what values, what virtues as we would say, You want to put into action, and then putting them into action regardless of how you feel. Scott is a cognitive psychologist, but comes from the positive psychology world, and the foundation of that, as you know if you follow my work, is virtue. If you look at how Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Chris Peterson, all the great blanking on James Powelski, all the other great thinkers within this field. They started by studying all the ancient wisdom and faith traditions in order to see what they had to say about how to live a good noble life. What they found was they all talked about virtue, and they distilled those virtues into six kind of core virtues and twenty-four total virtues. In our work, we talk a lot about the four cardinal virtues of ancient wisdom: wisdom, discipline, love, and courage. In the note, I reference a number of other notes we have in which we talk about the science. Of discovering and then embodying your virtues, closing the gap between who you're capable of being, who you're actually being, living with arete, living with virtue, living with excellence. But we want to have more awareness of what our values are so we can put them into action now while we embrace life, accept it completely, recalling the warning: nothing's wrong with you per se. You have a case of life. It's supposed to be hard. Quit telling your story. Quit telling yourself a story that it shouldn't be hard. In this context, I always love to say, look, I just watched The Odyssey not too long ago now, right? Any hero film you're going to go watch, it needs to have a villain. Without a dragon, without challenges, without Odysseus facing all the obstacles he faced, it would be boring. A hero needs to have challenges in order to Cultivate the strength to overcome them. That's what makes life interesting. Easy for me to say when I watch a movie, much harder for me to say when I experience challenges in my life, often because of my own mistakes and my own shortcomings. Perfect. That's life. Nothing's wrong with you. You've received your warning. Let's go. Then remember Scott's story. 2 parts of the story I want you to remember: Scott overcoming his own obstacles and victim mindset to use the subtitle of his book, but also the guide. The guide, that special education substitute teacher who peered into Scott's soul and saw that he was capable of so much more than what he was expressing in that moment. I have goosebumps again talking about that. At the end of the day, that's what I am committed to doing, helping you and being that person for you, looking into your soul, seeing your gifts and saying, you got more you can give to the world. As Walt Whitman said, In the faces of men and women, I see God. Well, I like to say, in the faces of men and women, I see heroes. I see you, hero, right there. You are my all-time favorite hero. It's time for us to step up and be our best, to rise above our victim orientation and other obstacles that we've been using as excuses to not show up as powerfully as we can, such that we can be the hero of our stories and, much more importantly, become the guide To others, showing them what's possible. All of which leads us to the next and most important idea. Plus one, let's go. How can you take this wisdom? Was there an idea? I hope there was at least one idea. When I do my prep for this, I say one person, one idea. I hope one person gets one idea out of this work that I just did and the time we just spent together. But what's one idea that may have jumped out and landed a little bit more than others? for you today? And how can you move from theory to practice on that? How can you apply it to your life a little bit more today? Think about that. Get on that. I look forward to sharing more with you soon. It's an honor to spend time with you. Have a great day.