PNTV - The Tools by Phil Stutz & Barry Michels

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, guys, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. I haven't done one of these in a long time. This is the first one back after a long, long time off doing a bunch of other stuff. The Tools. Phil Stutts, Barry Michaels. Unbelievably good book. Best book I read in 2012. I sent a copy to our team. We actually ran a little book club on it. These five tools can change your life. And in these 10 minutes, we're going to walk through my philosopher's note. We've got maybe, I don't know, 10 big ideas in here. We're going to look at the tools and then a few other favorite big ideas from here. And hopefully you'll get something awesome out of this. So let's jump in the tools. The basic idea behind the tools Stick. Stutts and Michaels are psychotherapists. They have 60 years or something crazy like that of psychotherapy work between the two of them. And what they realized was, it's not enough to change your attitude. You can change your mind about something and get all geeked up, but if you don't change your behaviors, nothing matters, right? Those distinctions don't matter unless they can become an embodied part of your reality. What they came up with is these five tools to deal with the five most common issues that we have in our lives. That's we're going to walk through right now. So let's just jump in. Tool number one. Where's my pen? Here it is. Tool number one, reversal of desire. So idea here is we want to reverse our desire for what? Well, usually when we experience pain, if we're kind of stressed out and we're afraid, what do we do? We want to avoid that pain. And what they teach us with the first tool is you need to reverse that. Rather than look at your pain as some awful thing that's happening to you, you need to actually get excited about it. And they have this really cool little image. As you can see, I'm a fine artist. Maybe not. This little dude likes to live in his comfort zone. But here are his fears. And the challenge is that his infinite potential, infinite potential exists on the other side of his fears, right? So here's his little comfort zone. He likes to kind of go out, oh, wait, fear. I'm going to go back into my comfort zone, right? But in the process, he's missing this extraordinary life. Our infinite potential exists on the other side of our fears. So. So Then what we need to do is we need to learn to reverse our desires. Because these fears are actually the best thing that can happen to us. When we feel pain and we want to kind of curl in to our comfort zone, that's the time we need to expand out. That's the time we need to reverse our desire. And the tool basically is to train yourself. Anytime you feel emotional pain or whatever and you feel that tendency to want to withdraw and avoid stuff, you want to approach it. Therapists, psychotherapists describe it as there's avoidance behavior, then there's approach behavior. We want to approach our challenges. That's a hallmark of a healthy human being. So we want to reverse our desire. And when we feel this fear, we want this little version of ourselves to bust through the fears. And they say, bring it on, bring it on. I love pain. I love fear. Fear sets me free. That's the first tool in a nutshell. We can go on on that for a whole weekend. Obviously, they go off on in the book, but we're going to move to tool number two. So tool number two, again, tool number one is all about reversing our desires, dealing with fears. That's the problem we're dealing with. I should have mentioned that these tools are tied to what they call higher forces, something bigger than ourselves that's at work in the universe. And we want to align with these higher forces. The higher force that corresponds with reversal of desire is forward motion. The universe is constantly moving forward. We want to align with that higher force via using this tool. So the second tool here, active love. So this one you use, whenever you find yourself in a mental maze, when you find yourself being super irritated or annoyed by someone or something, you're in what they call the maze. We've all been in that where we can't break free of our frustration from someone who has done something to us. We perceive they've done something to us. Whatever, we're in the maze. Well, when you're in the maze and you notice that process, you want to engage in the active love tool. And the way you do that basically is when you find yourself being irritated and going in that loop after loop after loop, bring yourself into your heart. Imagine the person who's frustrating you, and rather than continuing to go off on them in your head, beam them. Love. They call it active love. It's a really cool practice. Might sound a little weird, but it's really, really cool. Try it out. The force that you're aligning with here is called outflow. Moving on got less than 10 minutes. Let's see what we can do here. The third tool is inner authority. So the idea here is that oftentimes we have a difficult time expressing ourselves. We can get anxious in front of people. Right. I certainly used to be just petrified. And what they say is you need to basically embrace the disowned parts of yourselves. It's an amazing look at Shadow, which we're not going to have time to go into right now. But basically look at that part of you that you don't want to look at and integrate it. And they have you create this little character version of you. For me, it's a 4 foot, 1188 pound, 14 year old freshman in high school. I was the smallest kid in my school, anxious about everything. And I kind of want to disown that part of me because it's still there. I still get nervous, I still get afraid. But when I can bring that version of me into who I am, there's an inner authority that I have when I'm not ashamed of certain parts of me. So they say take those parts of you that most kind of freak you out, actually create a little character of them and then have that version of you be with you. I get goosebumps as I say that and then, and then present from that perspective. They say, listen up. You in this version of you say listen up. And you have this inner authority. That's a really powerful tool. That's our third tool. The fourth tool is called Grateful Flow. Really cool. So you use this tool anytime you are, well, feeling the exhaust, right? So let's do another little image here. So you've got this little guy and you know he's having a decent day, but then this cloud of ick comes in and rains on him. Oh man, Bummer, right? And they say what you need to do is you need to connect to this higher force, they call it source and reconnect. And how do you do that? Well, the way you bust through Ixos is through gratitude. All the researchers talk about that, but these guys are cool because they teach us. I got to see what my timer is. They teach us that we need to have gratitude on demand. So we've got to be able to elicit what they call Grateful Flow. It's the coolest way I've heard of actually embodying gratitude. You can do gratitude journals, which are awesome, scientifically proven to boost your happiness. But what about Grateful Flow? If you can just turn it on on demand. You're feeling icky and thinking about all the things you don't like in your life. Flip the switch. Think about all the things you're grateful for. Bust through the ick. Connect to source. Feel better? It's awesome. The fifth tool is jeopardy. Now imagine the theme song for Jeopardy. Do do do do. Not the theme song, but like this. The countdown music. Do do do do do do do whatever. I'm also a tone deaf. I'm an artist, and I'm definitely not a single. Jeopardy Is our reminder to use willpower. So that's the higher force we're tapping into with jeopardy. Is willpower. And willpower, they say, is arguably the most important tool because it's the one that brings these ones to life. And we know scientifically, we talk about this in these notes all the time, that willpower is the greatest predictor of our happiness. It out predicts academic performance. Out predicts IQ by a factor of two for academic performance. It's nuts. Willpower is huge. We need to cultivate it. The way they say to cultivate it is to imagine the end of your life. You're at the very end of your life. You have no more moments to live. And that version of you is screaming at the current version of you to step up and to do what you know is best for you. Whether it's using one of these tools or using some other practice that you have. Demonstrate the willpower, the strength of will, the character to do what needs to get done in that moment. That's the tool that brings all these other tools to life. That's a quick look at the tools. We're nine minutes in. What else do we want to talk about? It's pretty good. We'll leave it at that. Hope you enjoyed video number one on the way back. Can't wait to share more with you. Remember to reverse your desire whenever you're feeling freaked out. If you're getting in a maze, mental loop, be nice. Beam someone. Love really works. Inner authority. Embrace the parts of you that you want to disown. Grateful flow. Feeling the exhaust bust through that. Get to source via gratitude. And then jeopardy. Build your willpower. Be as strong as you're capable of being. Moment to moment to moment to moment. It's the tool that brings it all to life. There you go. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See ya. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that philosopher's notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. Me. 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