Jocko Underground: Reactance to People, Rules, or Regulations That Threaten or Eliminate Behavior Freedoms.

Psychological reactance. Adverse reaction to People, or Rules, or Regulations That Threaten or Eliminate Behavior Freedoms. Extreme Ownership in the Classroom. K-12. It's bad enough. We need a true leader. Is it too late to join up at 35 years old? Wanting to give back. Charity. Can you set an ideal that's too high? Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Underground Podcast number 49, sitting with here with Echo Charles. Wanted to talk about a little something called psychological reactance. Now, this is something that you know, that I know, that I've known about for a long time, but I haven't heard it. I didn't know this term.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  What this is, is the definition is, quote, unpleasant motivation arousal or reaction to offers, people, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavior freedoms, end quote.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  So what does that mean? What that means is, what that means is that people don't like to feel their freedom of choice is being threatened in any way.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  And what you have heard me say for years, and this is just something I would throw out there as if it was a fact, and it kind of now is, is you hear me say, people don't like have things imposed upon them. You don't want to impose your plan on, you don't want to force things on people. There's a psychological phenomenon that backs up that, quote, feeling that I talk about.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  This happens when you, you know, when someone says, hey, you can't do that, and it makes you want to do it a little bit? We were talking about something earlier today. It was like, oh, someone's telling me to do something, telling us to do something, and that makes us, both of us feel like, oh, we just won't do it just to spite them.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or at the very least, you can't tell me what not to do. Like, you're mad that you can't do it, even though you never wanted to do it.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  Right. That right there, that right there is reactance. That's psychological reactance. When someone says, hey, you can't do that, and makes you want to do it more. And this is because, in my opinion, humans don't like to be controlled. Right? Humans don't like to be controlled. We tend to want to do the opposite of what someone is imposing on us. This is, by the way, where the idea of reverse psychology, which everyone's heard of, plays off. That's, that's the idea that, that it plays on. Like, oh, you, you know, hey, Echo, you're not allowed to sweep up in here. No, oh, watch me, I'm gonna sweep up, you know, like the Tom Sawyer, you know, example of, you know, you guys can't paint defense, you know?

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  No, yes, we can. Okay. Yeah, okay, fine. So, that's what's, that's what, that's what reverse psychology works on. It works on reactance. Uh, there's four elements to reactance. Or four, I should say, four stages, maybe. Perceived freedom, like, this is what I think I'm, I should be allowed to do. Threat to that freedom. Then you get the reactance, which then provides restoration of the freedom.

• 3:00Jocko Willink?

  A couple interesting indicators. The more certain of the freedom, the harder the reactance. So it's something you definitely think you should be able to do, and I told you not to do it, you're gonna have even more reactance to it. The higher importance of the freedom, the more stringent the reactance. And, and here's an interesting point. They tie this to the fact that if I take one freedom away from you, you psychologically think, if you take that one, you probably get to take more. It's almost like a, a psychological slippery slope that we're getting into.

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  So, it's important to understand this. It's important to understand this for me to be able to sorta, to sorta

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  quantify this idea that I've been expressing for years, which is, people don't like being told what to do. People don't like having ideas imposed upon them. People don't like having plans imposed upon them. And, and, and so this is where it comes from. We all as humans have a psychological reactance. We don't want to be told what to do. We don't want to have our freedom of choice controlled in any way. So then the question becomes, how do you overcome this? Right? Well, this is again, something else I talk about all the time, using the indirect approach. Making something someone's idea, right? I don't push the idea down their throat.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  I ask earnest questions to get them to say, oh, well, this, I think we should do this right now. Oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Now it's been your idea. Now you want to go and execute it, which is awesome.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  Saying something like, hey Echo, here's the situation we're in. I think we should go in this direction, but it's your call.

• 4:47Jocko Willink?

  Right? Now I give you that little bit of freedom. You go, you know what? Here's what I want to do. And it allows you a little bit more freedom to think through the issue. Whereas if I say, Echo, you need to do this right now, you're automatically against it. And you might resist it. You might say, I'm not going to do that. Whereas if I say, hey man, here's the situation. It's your call what we do. And it opens up your mind to actually do the right thing.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  And what this reinforces is the fact that, once again, the indirect approach may seem like the harder thing to do. It may seem like the less efficient thing to do. But this is another reason why the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. In fact, that works on a piece of paper in geometry class in sixth grade. But in real world,

• 5:42Jocko Willink?

  the straightest, the closest distance between two points is rarely, if ever, a straight line. And the indirect approach is usually better.

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the indirect, you go around the mountains, kind of like, okay, so I was going up to Big Bear. Coming back. And my son, he's five. He goes, why do these roads have to be so windy? Cause they're windy. And he, and technically it's not a bad question. It's like, yeah, why isn't it? Why is it so windy?

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  Did you say, look at the freaking cliff, bro?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  No, and I for sure didn't say it like that. But I did say, however, I was like, oh, because they gotta go with the contour of the mountains. Otherwise, like, where's the, how are you gonna make the road? Unless you made one huge bridge or something like this, but that would take a long time and all this stuff. I says, but if you pay attention, this makes the most sense because you gotta go look where we're going. We're always next to the mountain. Look. And you see him and for a long time, he's just looking at every curve and it started to make sense to him. It's true. It's kind of the same thing where it's like, yeah, in a vacuum or in sixth grade geometry, whatever. Yeah, it's a straight line, but in real life, it doesn't work like that because there's all these other factors.

• 6:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the, one of the examples I'll use when I'm talking to clients and trying to explain the indirect approach to them. You know, if you've got to get from point A to point B, hey, the easiest way is a straight line, right? Yes, of course. Well, what if there's a river? What if there's a, two ridge lines that you have to pass over? And if you just go a little bit off course, you can go over here into a nice field, which doesn't have the river running through it. And it doesn't have any ridge lines. And instead of you, you know, instead of it taking you, uh, whatever, 10 hours to get across the ridge lines, across the river, you can just,

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  you can just get there in three hours. Because you can go fast. You're not gaining and losing elevation twice to get over ridge lines.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and risking some detrimental stuff, by the way.

• 7:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so very interesting, the indirect approach. I'm still trying to find the best way to explain this to people because it's counterintuitive. And it's counterintuitive because of what we learn in sixth grade geometry, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line and it only works on that piece of paper with, you know, Mrs. Jones, who's telling you what, how to get from point A to point B.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Viola Swamp.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  What is the, okay, psychological Reactance.

• 8:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I don't remember that one.

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a good one because we all have it. You see it from your kids.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Isn't that, okay, you know, the idea of when people's, I don't know if it's the same thing, but that's kind of, kind of what I'm asking. Maybe is this the real fundamental same thing? You know, when they say, um, don't, what is it? Don't think of a elephant. And then you can't help but think of an elephant. I wonder if that has something to do with it.

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  I don't think so. It's a similar thing, but that's more like, once there's an ID in your head, like you can't, you can't process, you can't purposely turn it off.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  Whereas this is a natural reaction. It's like, you know, every action has a natural and equal.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  That is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 9:11Jocko Willink?

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• 9:52Jocko Willink?

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