Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson on Building Resilience and Communicating Effectively | It's About What You Make of It

Ryan reads today’s meditation and has another conversation with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson about their new book What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, experiencing adversity and developing resilience, why we should look at the last year as a gift that can improve our lives rather than a burden, how to teach kids to find purpose and control in their own lives, and more. Ned Johnson is the president and founder of PrepMatters. A 1993 graduate of Williams College, Mr. Johnson has a BA in Economics and Political Science. Originally from Connecticut, Mr. Johnson now resides with his wife and children in Washington, DC. William R. Stixrud, Ph. D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of The Stixrud Group. He is a member of the teaching faculty at Children’s National Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson: Homepage, Twitter, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's about what you make of it. Lots of interesting things happen to people. They don't all become writers. Lots of interesting things happen to people who are writers, and it doesn't always translate into great writing. And that's because it's rarely about the raw material. It's about what the person turns the raw material into. As Vivian Gornick explains, what happened to the writer is not what matters. What matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. And so it is with life generally. Events happen. Some people ignore them. Some muddle through them. Some turn them into transformative

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  moments. Stockdale took those experiences in the Hanoi Hilton and made them into something that, in his own words, he would not have traded away. Marcus Aurelius made himself into the kind of blazing fire that could turn whatever life threw at him into fuel. He took being made emperor, a job that made so many of his predecessors into monsters, and he used this to become better. And as a writer, he made something great out of what happened as well. And this is what we must do. What happens is what happens. What matters is what we're able to make of what happens. And we have the ability to transform the raw

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  materials of our experience into opportunities, into art, into growth. And this is how we become great. And this is how we live. Amor fati.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, Stoicism is a philosophy that's supposed to be there for actual life. And yes, the Stoics were emperors, or generals, or artists. They had sort of real jobs. And I think part of what, when we say Stoicism is a philosophy for real life, that's what we're talking about. You know, does it stand up to the stresses of, you know, an elite or life or death situation? But also, and I talk about this a little bit in Lives of the Stoics, the Stoics were real people in the sense that they were not like monks,

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  or they made no disavowal of earthly life, earthly pleasures, earthly obligations and responsibilities. Some of the Middle Stoics talked about the importance of marriage, talked about the importance of children. And indeed, most of the Stoics had kids. They looked to how philosophy stood up to the stresses of family life. There's a joke about Socrates, that part of the reason he was such a great and patient philosopher was that he had a difficult marriage. His wife was a difficult lady. Putting the sexism of that aside, the point is that it's not just philosophy for the classroom, and it's not just a philosophy for the public sphere, your occupation, but it's a philosophy for

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  your private life as well. And I gotta say, nothing has, you know, challenged me philosophically quite like having kids, being married, trying to consider success, not just how my books do, or how my business does, or, you know, how my brand does, but success as in, do I have a happy family? Are my kids being prepared for life? Are they going to be good people? Am I setting them up for success? Am I being present and dedicated and loving to them? So, that's something I think a lot about. And in fact, I try to see my sort of civic...

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Professional and personal responsibility is as being in kind of a balance with each other and with one is out of whack at the expense of the other two, that I don't consider that success. It's how do you keep them all working and functioning well together? So, you know, part of this is we have our Daily Dad email and podcast, which hopefully you check out, that's at DailyDad.com. But I'm also just always interested in sort of experts on parenting, family life, marriage, self-improvement, et cetera. And today's guests are two people who have helped me quite a bit. Some of the only people to come

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  on the podcast twice. I'm talking about Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, the author of The Self-Driven Child, one of my favorite parenting books. We sell it at The Painted Porch. It's always very popular. One of the books I recommend to parents all the time, something that's informed my parenting philosophy. And then they have a new book called What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. I think it's very much related to the self-driven child, but it's about communicating effectively with teenagers, with kids of all types. But I also think it's just about communication, period. Just intelligent, effective communication, which is of course

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  the key of leadership, the key of philosophy, the key to life, I think. So, I bring you Dr. Stixrud and Ned Johnson once again in a wonderful conversation. Obviously, I think it's particularly relevant to people who have kids or are thinking about having kids, but I think, I hope this conversation is relevant to just about everyone. I tried to make it not just be about parenting, but about effective communication and dealing with stressful emotions and all the things that get in the way of effective communication. So, check out the new book, What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. And of course, pick up The Self-Driven Child,

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  hopefully at The Painted Porch or anywhere books are sold. Hope you like it and I'll talk to you soon.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  I had such a great time talking with you guys last time. I had some more questions about the first book and then we'll transition to the new book, which I'm also very excited about. I wondered what you thought of this idea. I've seen people write about it. I've heard people talk about it, but this idea that, you know, they're sort of referring to like a lost year, right? Like for kids, this is a lost year. Now it's going on year number two. Certainly, there's obviously been immense consequences to the pandemic and it's tragic that it's happened, you know, that kids had to be affected in any way by the irresponsible decisions of adults and leaders. But I don't know, my initial reaction

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  to hearing it, and I guess we always have to think about where we're privileged and you know, what other people are going through, but it struck me as a very fragile view of our kids, right? Like when I talk to a grandmother or my grandfather who lived through the depression, you know, they don't, they don't talk about it as this like lost year. It's sort of a source of wisdom and experience for them. So I'm just curious how you think, having written so much about kind of the forced and unnecessary fragility and of a sort of a generation of parenting, how do you think about the adversity that you've just seen all these kids go through?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think that Ned and I see that quite differently than the idea that it's a lost year. In fact, Ned wrote a piece in the New York Times pretty early on in the pandemic, suggesting that this could be an opportunity to build stress tolerance and resilience and wisdom in kids. And in our first book, The Self-Driven Child, we talk about the way that people become able to, what we call develop high stress tolerance, that kind of ability to function well and handle the challenges of life. It's by doing so. It's by being in a challenging situation, your prefrontal cortex has to activate to

• 8:51Speaker 01

  figure out what to do. And then, as long as you have time to recover, once you cope, you go into coping mode, then you recover. That's what, that's what builds that confidence that I can handle hard things. And we see many kids who are really thriving, who are gaining confidence, they can handle hard things. They can handle loss, they can handle uncertainty that they weren't sure they could handle before. I'd love to hear Ned's angle on this.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  I agree with all that. I think there's also a question of when do you assess, right? You know, during the middle of the pandemic, right when it ends, a month later, a year later? Because exactly right, you know, that it's the experience of adversity with support, you know, that develops resilience, you know? And I forget if we shared when last time I spoke, I mean, you know, I had a family that had a lot of headwinds. My father's an alcoholic who eventually, you know, drank himself to death. My mother struggled with her mental health. I spent three months of seventh grade in a pediatric hospital, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But at this point in my life, I'm really convinced, you know,

• 10:02Speaker 02

  that I can handle almost anything because when I think about what I've gone through, you know, it gives me the confidence that I can get through other hard stuff. You know, if you're going to be an epic hero in every movie, you don't just get, you know, you know, someone has a sword on your shoulder and hey, you're the hero now. You gotta go out and do stuff and you get.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  You earn it.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  You get beat up, yeah. And because it's really, it's the, you know, resilience, if we remind ourselves that the kind of metallurgical definition of resilience is the ability to return to a previous shape. And I think that same thing applies to us, you know, emotionally, that the only way you develop that is if you get a little bent out shape and then come back. And, you know, before the pandemic, we had, you know, hundreds of articles, whoa, the kids, they got no resilience, they can't do cream puffs, they can't handle nothing, right? Well, now, now we've got our opportunity. And I wouldn't wish challenger difficulty or hurt or all the terrible things. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But it really is how do we deal with that? You know, how do we come together? How do we try to find solutions?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  How do we convey courage to our kids even though things are scary? As opposed to let's everyone go hide in a bunker and just wait for this all to be over? Because in the meantime, life goes on.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  No, and it's out. Everything you're saying also applies to adults, too. There's a great line from Seneca where he's talking about, he's like, "I actually pity the person who's never gone through adversity," he says, "because they don't know what they're capable of. They have no, they've never been bloodied, they, you know, they've never gotten up, so they don't know if they can get up." And so it's, it's sort of strange that our, yeah, as you said, we sort of criticize people for not being resilient. We wonder, you know, "What would I ever do if I had to live through, you know, a moment like this?" Or we think like, "What would I learn from a near-death experience?" And then, then we have it and we, we spend all our time resenting it and pretending that it's, you know, insurmountable. It seems strange.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Ryan, I'll tell you this, you know, four, four, um, four, five, six weeks ago, whatever it was now, I was in the middle of recording the audio for this book, What Do You Say? And I came out from the audio, I got my wife on the phone. My son had been having all these migraines, these weird aura things, and there's some family history of that. We get him on the phone and, um, the three of us, and his language, and he drops a word, and then he drops another word. And then his language starts to fall apart, and I'm like, "What is going on?" Asked my wife to call me on the other line. I thought he was having a stroke. Fast forward, my son's diagnosed with a brain tumor. Now, fortunately, well-mannered kid that he is, he chose the one that seems to be most amenable to chemotherapy. And so he was going through the middle of this. But I swear, a week ago, he said to the two of us, he said,

• 12:42Speaker 02

  "You know, I have had such a, a, an easy life, you know? You know, I, you guys are great parents, you know? You know, we're financially stable, I have friends, I went to school, you know? You know, I'm, I'm, you know, white, I mean, everything that you could make, make life easier to get through life." He has, he's had so many, so many advantages. And he said, "I always wondered, when would something happen to me that would challenge me?" And I thought, "Fascinating." Now, I don't wish a brain tumor on anyone, certainly not on my kid. But I thought, "Holy smokes, what an interesting way that, that's where his brain went." And, and his, I mean, he's a glass half-full kind of guy, anyway. But very, I mean, it's sort of, he's sort of taken a line from, you know, from the Mark, Matt Damon, the Martian, right?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  "Let's work the problem, okay? What are we gonna do?" And, and because what, you know, what else can, can you do? And he's thinking, "I'm gonna be stronger for having gone through this."

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  And what kind of message is it sending your kids that you sort of write them off as being irrevocably harmed by, you know, missing most of fifth grade, or having to do sixth grade, or 11th grade remotely? It does strike me that in the scheme of adversity, you know, that's nothing compared to a brain tumor, or nothing compared to what ancestrally we are all descended from people who endured far worse things.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and there's, we talk about this great, there's a researcher named Sonya Lupin, who used that acronym of NOTS of what stresses people out. And she said that one of the single best ways to combat stress is to have a plan B. Right? And so, you know, and so what we always want to do when we find ourselves stuck, right, or in a hard position, that we think, well, what else can I do? What else can I do? What else can I do? Because, you know, whether you're a family, or whether a corporation, you're constantly saying, that didn't work out as planned, how can we pivot? What's another solution? And so, again, this is a hard time, and I know I've had it easier than than other families have. But I think one of the more helpful things we can do is to keep saying, well, that, yeah,

• 14:46Speaker 02

  that's lousy, that you zoom on school, that's pretty terrible. And?

• 14:50Ryan Holiday?

  And? Right. What are you going to do about it? What's your response?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Right. What else can we make out of this?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We also, in both books, we talk about, we mentioned the work of Byron Katie, who's thinking, I think, is very similar to a lot of the Stoic thinking, about the idea that for all we know, what's happening right now, whatever it is, is what's supposed to be happening, because there's no evidence that something different is supposed to be happening. And one of the people I've learned the most from is meditation teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who used to say that the world is as it should be. And people ask him, well, why are you working so hard to change it? He'd say, that's also as it should be. And I think that we emphasize that the wisdom of teaching kids to not to immediately judge

• 15:42Speaker 01

  the word, this is bad or this is good, but to say that this is the way it is, make peace with it, and then decide, do I want to try to change this? Could this be bad?

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's the Stoic idea of amor fati, that comes from Nietzsche, you know, not just to bear what has happened, but to love it, to go, this was chosen for me. And again, this is easy to say, you know, about Zoom fifth grade. It's harder to say about a brain tumor, or losing a job, or what have you, or even the worst traumas out there. But the idea is, it happened. So having negative thoughts towards it doesn't make it unhappen, and it does make it harder for you to focus on what you do next.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  Have you guys seen the Jaco Willink video, Good? It's like this super viral video, but it struck me as similar to the self-driven child philosophy, which is basically, he's a Navy SEAL commander, and he's relating this conversation where, you know, they're preparing for this mission, or they're on this mission, and one of the men keeps coming to him and going, you know, hey, we're not going to have enough time. And he says, good. And he says, hey, you know, we just lost all the supplies. And he says, good. You know, and he says, and one of the guys is sick. And he says, good. You know, sort of over and over again, this idea of good, because, again, saying that it's bad doesn't do anything, but saying that it's good does inform the attitude to

• 17:13Ryan Holiday?

  which you are going to orient your response around. And that's also what the idea of the obstacle is, the way. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm not sure people were doing this during the depression. They were probably spending a lot of time talking about how bad it was, and how these, you know, fat cats in Washington were all to blame, or whatever. But at the same time, they You do, you do have the choice about whether it's going to be a formative experience for you. And it seems like parents have spent a lot of time blaming, resenting, venting, instead of going, here's how our family was improved by what we went through. Here's

• 17:53Ryan Holiday?

  what we taught our kids, you know, using the world events that were occurring around us as, as they happen.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  I think, I think that's actually right. There's a, there's a success coach from the eighties and nineties named Brian Tracy, who's worked, Bill and I both liked a lot. And he, and he has this, tells a story about some industrialist in either 1910 or whatever, who's summoned from his sleep to come down to, only to find the factory engulfed in flames. And as the thing is burning to the ground, he sits there and watches for about 10 minutes and then declares to his secretaries, whoever ministers who are nearby, said, well, this is fantastic news. I just have to figure out why.

• 18:32Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Well, I, I tell a story in The Obstacle is the Way about Thomas Edison.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:38Ryan Holiday?

  The exact scene, factory is on fire, his son is standing there, shell shocked, and Edison grabs him and he says, go get your mother. They'll never see a fire like this again. He says, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. I think about the parenting lesson of that, like you're essentially witnessing your dad at his worst, right? The worst career moment of your dad. You're watching your inheritance go up in flames, but your, your dad finds some semblance of good in it and he, he rallies the family around. And, and Edison does, you know, he says to a reporter the next day, you know, I've been through things like this before. It's going to prevent me from getting bored. And he rebuilds and he gets to work and you think about what

• 19:21Ryan Holiday?

  a lesson that would be to your children. And then you go, oh yeah, but that's, you know, that's Edison. I haven't experienced things like that. And it strikes me, it's like, you did. That's what the last 18 months have been. And yet we've been sort of looking that gift horse in the mouth because the gift horse never looks like a gift.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  In a self-driven child, we talk about, we have a strong emphasis on parents thinking about themselves. As kids get older, it's more as a consultant to their kid, whose role is to help their kid figure out what kind of life they want and how they want to live it. And part of the reason that we support this kind of idea and want kids to practice making their own decisions is that I don't know whether a kid makes a decision, whether it's going to be a good decision or not. There's no such thing. Well, when do you judge? Is it a year later or five years later? The first time I went to graduate school, I was in a doctoral program in English at the University of California, Berkeley. And I went 20 weeks without turning in an assignment, so I flunked out.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And it felt like my whole life was going up in smoke. And it took about two months for me to realize it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Because I just felt like an imposter as an English student. And when I became a psychologist, these are more my people. But who knows? Who knows when something happens, if it's bad or good? And then the idea of this is a wasted year, it just doesn't make any logical sense. Because you're making what we call the fortune-telling error that I can predict that this is going to have a terrible effect on a kid's life, as opposed to maybe a mixed bag or maybe actually advantageous.

• 21:05Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think there's that Zen proverb about the man who discovers a horse, then his son breaks his leg on the horse, and then he doesn't fight in a war because his leg is broken. It goes on and on. But the father replies each time everyone says, "Oh, you're so lucky," or they say, "Oh, you're so unlucky." He just says, "We'll see." And I do think what you're saying that I think is really helpful. I'm glad you said it. I'm going to try to apply it myself. It's just like a... elongate the the the horizon with which you're looking at this event with your children and and try to get them to do the same thing. It feels terrible that they just got dumped. It feels terrible that they just got cut from the basketball team. It seems like it's a huge disadvantage that they're doing remote ninth grade, but we'll see because we don't

• 21:50Ryan Holiday?

  know. And to think that we know is to be both arrogant and naive.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Right. And this Byron Katie I mentioned, who who wrote a book called Loving What Is, which is the the basic idea. And, you know, the ask simply says, when something happens, ask, is it true? Is it? Is it true that this is a terrible thing? Is it true? Is it? And can I can I really be sure that this is a weight going to be a wasted year? And if we're honest with ourselves, we could almost never really be sure. And then the question is, if we're not if not sure about it, why torture myself like this? Is this going to help me think about this? Is this making more flexible and adaptable? Usually usually usually not so much.

• 22:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, that's the essence of Stoicism. Events are objective. Our opinions about them are not. And it's our opinions that upset us. So that's the other thing is like, you don't have to call it a good year. You don't have to go on the the as far as Jaco. You also don't need to go as far as it's a bad year. It just is, right? Like, you don't need to have any judgment about it whatsoever, because it's simply a fact. And and, you know, if your kid was born with glass, you know, born with that eyesight that they have to get glasses, you don't have to have an opinion about this. It that's just what their eyesight is, right? Like, you would obviously try to address it. You know, you have a kid who's good at sports, and you have another kid who's not good at sports. It's not good or bad. It's just it's just who they are. And your opinion

• 23:14Ryan Holiday?

  is actually what's going to cause the distress because it's going to make one of them feel superior and the other one feel inferior, when in reality, we're all dealt Different strengths and weaknesses and we simply are.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:26Ryan Holiday?

  Nobody gets everything.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just going back to Ned's point about, you know, in both books, we say we want to communicate courage to kids rather than fear. And the last thing we want to do is feel sorry for kids. We don't want to pity kids because we don't want them to feel sorry for themselves. I mean, self pity is never, it's never very attractive.

• 23:48Ryan Holiday?

  There's not a lot of agency in.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. And so the idea that somehow, oh, this is such a waste of year, the poor babies, it's just not a helpful attitude. And it's certainly understandable and God knows so many people that we work with have had a really tough time. And I'm not, and I'm not taking that, I'm not taking it that way. But I am saying, I don't want kids to feel sorry for themselves, so I choose not to feel sorry for them.

• 24:15Ryan Holiday?

  So that was how I was going to transition to talking about the new book because, you know, sort of, we have our tropes as parents, as a society. You know, we say, you know, that we talk about our duty, we talk about our responsibility to other people. We talk about the American ideals, you know, we talk about so much stuff. And then it strikes me that, you know, then, and our kids hear all this. They hear our indoctrination and they hear our myths and they hear what we say is important. And then they look at how people actually behave and then they get a sense of the difference between, you know, action, practice and principle.

• 24:57Ryan Holiday?

  And I think one of the things that makes me the most sad about the last year is just kind of, there's no nice way to say this. But we really showed a generation of young people that is particularly older people showed that to younger people that they're basically full of shit. That they don't care about anyone but themselves, that this idea of sacrifice, this idea of being resilient, this idea of, you know, putting other people first. Of that the right thing is what matters, all this. How generationally can we, can we?

• 25:35Ryan Holiday?

  And possibly communicate as a society, I guess I'm specifically referring to America, but no country seems to have done extremely well. But like, how can we communicate louder than our actions have communicated over the last year? It's, I mean, it's just been sort of abysmal. I think that's sort of the tragedy of, of the boomer generation as they've aged has been sort of those high-minded ideals versus the, sure, but I don't want to, I don't want to have to give up my vacation house, or, you know, I don't want, like, do you know what I'm saying? It seems like we're really struggling between what we claim to believe and then how we

• 26:14Ryan Holiday?

  act when situations are stressful or difficult, or would come at the slightest personal cost to us, talking about whether it's mask-wearing and vaccines, or NIMBY-ism, or climate change. It, it strikes me that we're having, we're in a crisis where we've communicated so loudly our, the disparity between our actions and our ideals.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  And when you frame that up, I mean, part of what I, what I hear and there is, is, when we talk about high-minded ideals, a lot of that is about the, the common good, right? And, and shared values and shared goals and, and shared sacrifice. And then you see a lot of people acting far from that, you know, really selfishly.

• 26:57Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  And it's pretty, it's pretty distressing. And I'm not sure I have a full solution to that. I mean, if I did, we could probably solve, you know, political, political gridlock. You know, I also, I also like, and this may be Pollyannaish, but, you know, the, the William, great psychologist, William James says, you know, our experience consists of that which we choose to attend to, because we can also look around to people who have evinced, you know, heroic ideals and have lived, you know, lived their lives with tremendous grace and, and done more than their fair share. I mean, my twin brother is a paramedic, and so he's, he's about as frontline as frontline people get.

• 27:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And it's been, it's been, it's been a year, and he gets pretty upset with folks. But I also- That I'm watching him and people like him do and go, yeah, I mean, there are, it's not everyone sadly. You know, many hands make light work. But I also, I also try, well, what's it Fred, Fred Rogers says, look for the helpers, right?

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  So I think there can be, while we gnash our teeth about, you know, goings on. I think it's also helpful to look to our, when we're talking to our kids, to help them look to or at people who are, who are living those, those, those ideals, even if it seems like those people are few and far between.

• 28:17Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's something I've, I've tried to, to think about too, you know, it's easy to go, look at the lack of courage in these politicians. Or look at the selfishness, you know, in, in so and so, but ultimately what we control is what's up to us, right? I was thinking about, you know, I was actually just talking, I had a friend over, we were talking outside and, you know, he's a pretty liberal guy and he was just talking about, you know, this, this, this birthday party that Obama threw. What a missed opportunity it was for leadership to, to sort of, instead of criticizing what other people are doing, instead of criticizing the choices or the selfishness of other leaders or other groups,

• 28:55Ryan Holiday?

  which, which may, you know, have the vast majority of impact, you know, maybe disproportionately causing the majority of the harm or the hypocrisy. But you don't control that. What you do control is the choices that your family makes, right? And so, you know, I guess what I'm saying is we'll decry the, the, the lack of courage in some politician or something. And then meanwhile, like, you know, we're afraid, we're, we're sitting at the dinner table, talking about, you know, how we refuse to stand up to our boss, right? Or, or again, we'll talk about this group not doing this or that, and then we throw a big birthday party or, you know, we're, we're, we're violating the COVID protocols ourself in our own small ways, saying essentially,

• 29:38Ryan Holiday?

  we want other people to be sticklers, but when it's my call, then I always have an excuse or a reason. I guess at the end of the day, what you communicate to your kids by example in the things you control is what really matters the most.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  That seems absolutely right, and especially teenagers are so perceptive about inconsistencies and hypocrisy. And there's a chapter in our new book, it's called Talking With Kids About the Pursuit of Happiness. And what we focus on is that young people are growing up with all these nutty ideas about what makes people happy. And we focus on some of the research that focuses on the importance, for example, of meaning, of relationships. The research suggests that you're actually happier if you give stuff away than accumulate it for yourself. You're happier if you do something for somebody

• 30:36Speaker 01

  else than if you do something for yourself. And I think that what we're hoping is that we're also, I was also mentioning that we're, in various places, we talk about the importance of asking kids to really think about their highest ideals. With a family goal of all of us, trying to live lives that are in accord with our highest ideals, because as you're suggesting, we often don't. But it's a practice. It's a practice with the goal of aligning our life with the highest ideals. And we talk in our book about helping kids do that, in part, because it helps, it's one of the keys to being happy. But also, it's just good for everybody.

• 31:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we tell our kids, you know, like, education is important. And then it was like, when was the last time they saw you read a book? Right? Or, you know, we tell them that like, money's not the most important thing. And then we complain about the job we hate that we do for money. Or, you know, we tell ourselves honesty is important. And then they see us, you know, lying to get out of a ticket. And I think that's really been the difficulty with COVID. And I'm not saying that parents have been letting their kids down, but certainly, and a lot of these issues, whether it's COVID, or climate change, or just sort of kicking the political can down the road, we say we love our kids, we say that, you know, they're more important to us than anything. And then, sort of generationally,

• 32:02Ryan Holiday?

  we're not making the difficult Short-term decisions that would have, you know, important long-term consequences. You know what I mean? Like, we're not actually putting them first in the decisions we think about.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. You know, and back to the idea about values, that the more consistently we can write about, you know, journaling, and talk about what are our core values, the easier it is to have short-term behaviors that align with longer-term goals. And that's true. I mean, that's true whether, you know, you're, you know, trying to be an Olympic athlete or you're, you know, a business person or whether you're a political leader. And if our focus is always on the short term, you know, the next dollar, the next election cycle, the whatever, then we're not going to put, we're putting our energy into that short-term thing at the expense of the future.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  And so, you know, for us as leaders in whatever, you know, whether it's business or faith or families, that to spend time really talking about those highest values makes it much easier for our short-term actions to fall in line with what we espouse to be our highest values.

• 33:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. What are you modeling to your kids and to the future generations in the decisions you're making and the actions that you're taking right now?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I just wonder, you know, so much of what we think about and write about and talk with kids about and talk with parents about is this crazy idea of kids growing up thinking the most important outcome of their childhood and adolescence is where they go to college.

• 33:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And you just wonder, what do people who think that, what do they think the purpose of life is? Is the purpose of life to accumulate the most stuff? Or is it to have the most prestige or the most power over people? And I think that if we really think about what, why are we here? Well, what kind of life do we want to create? But what we, in the book, we talk about, talking to kids about, if there's a reason you're here, what is the reason that you're here? What do you have to offer this world? And it's just a very different way of thinking than, you need to get A's so you can get to the top college and make a lot of money.

• 34:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's an essay from Plutarch where he's talking about educating children. And he's talking about how a wealthy parent, they know they're going to pass on like an inheritance to their kids. So they spend a lot of time and a lot of money setting up a trust fund or writing their will so the kids don't fight with each other and the money is managed responsibly and blah, blah, blah. And he goes, wouldn't it be better, and obviously estate planning is important, but he goes, wouldn't it be better just to raise some children who wouldn't fall out with their family over money, or wouldn't, would be able to manage an inheritance

• 35:02Ryan Holiday?

  properly. So it is interesting. Yeah, we sometimes forget that just raising an adaptable, hardworking, decent human being, those people are very rarely unsuccessful in life. Meanwhile, a lot of people go to great schools or get great grades or do amazing on the SAT and they completely fail at life because they don't have those other skills that we're just talking about.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  You know, I was lecturing in Houston, I can't remember if I mentioned this last time, Ryan, but I was lecturing in Houston a couple of years ago about the self-driven child. And I mentioned one of the most elite schools in DC, and I don't remember the context, but I did. And somebody came up to me afterward and said, I'm a therapist here at the Menagerie Clinic in Houston, which is one of the very prestigious mental health places. So we know the school in DC really well because so many of the graduates, they get into these top colleges, but they can't handle them emotionally. They've never had to deal with adversity, they've had their kind of life program for them. And so they take a medical leave and they come here for treatment. And I think that Ned's in my angle is that our goal for

• 36:11Speaker 01

  kids is for them to be able to run their own life before they go off to college or go off to do whatever they're going to do. And so that's our goal for parents is helping kids learn to run their own life and run it in a way that's meaningful to them.

• 36:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and this ties into the new book, which is like one of the most essential skills in running one's own life, in adapting, in dealing with adversity, whatever, is the ability to communicate, to communicate effectively about what you want, to communicate effectively about what you need, what you like, what you dislike. And so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that parents who can't communicate effectively struggle to raise children, who then struggle to effectively communicate.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and it's, you know, and it's, that's, it's very well said. And really the reason we wrote this book, in part because when, you know, when in the self-driven child, we have great concerns about the increasing levels of stress, anxiety, depression in young people. And a close connection between parents and children, it is as close to you get, as close as one gets to silver bullet against the effects of stress. And we're back to that adversity, plus support, will develop resilience. And part of that close connection is how effective are we in communicating with kids, in having them know that we understand them, that we see their point of view, and listening to them, and having them be able

• 37:42Speaker 02

  to listen to us. And so if, as a parent, you have ideas that you want to share, but you're just not effective in how you communicate it, then everybody's upset because your kid feels being nagged, or yelled, or harassed, you feel like your kid isn't listening. And so often, it's the how, not the what. And then no one feels listened to, no one feels connected. And again, the messages, the values that you're trying to share, just, well, those go, you know, those fall on the cutting room floor. And so we really took seriously this, the value of learning to communicate effectively, rather than sort of, you know, shoving things down kids' throats, in part because... These are also the models of communicating effectively, communicating respectfully,

• 38:27Speaker 02

  are the very same tools of communication that our kids will then take out into the world, into the college, in their relationships, in their workplace. And goodness knows, I mean, for me at least, when I watch what seems to me like misbehavior in the political realm, it feels a little bit like whoever can harness the most outrage, whoever can be the most angry is the person who sort of wins the battle. And I have a colleague at work who, she and I are very different ends of the political spectrum, we have very different ideas, but somehow, and it's probably more her graciousness than mine, we can disagree, we can disagree agreeably. I can hear her perspective, I can say, okay, no, tell me why you think that, right? And we work together beautifully.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  We don't agree all the time, but we work together beautifully because we communicate in ways that confer respect, even when we disagree.

• 39:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, showing your kids, I think one of the things that I sort of remember growing up, listening to a lot of talk radio, watching a lot of Fox News, sort of this stuff, and you realize, only when I sort of got out of that bubble a little bit and let's get a proper liberal arts education, nothing to do with liberal or conservative, but just actually learned how to think and how to communicate, did I come to recognize how profoundly manipulative and dishonest and inaccurate the, you sort of, you realize what's happening, right? And so I think a lot of parents struggle with not just what they're communicating,

• 40:03Ryan Holiday?

  but even teaching kids how to recognize like what bullshit is, or what biases are, do you know what I mean? Like, communication isn't just like, how do you say what you want to say, but also making them aware of, like, clearly generationally, we see people who are just much, very susceptible to conspiracy theories, very susceptible to demagoguery, etc. Like, also teaching our kids, by effectively communicating, teaching them how to communicate, you're also doing them the service of teaching them how to recognize bad, or insufficient, or manipulative communication, so they're inoculated against that.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  That's a wonderful point. You know, and I think anybody who's raised teenagers and has had the experience of teenagers in their effort to kind of separate and find their own identity will push back on what the parents believe or to challenge things. And if we can listen respectfully, we can listen in a way and let them know that we're really trying to understand. They're much more likely than to, in some cases, to realize that actually I kind of like the way my parents think, or I disagree with this, but that if we just lecture them, we try to indoctrinate them, it just doesn't work very well.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  And it just, you know, Ned and I just were talking last week about this article that David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times about this shocking percentage of adults who are estranged from at least one of their parents.

• 41:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  You know, and it's just, it's like 27% are estranged from a parent. And it's just so painful to think about that people that you love the most, they don't want anything to do with you. And that's kind of, that's hopefully what we're talking about in our book, this way of staying connected with your kids, treating them in a respectful way, communicating in a way that you're assertive when you have to be, and you're challenging when you have to be, but also that you respect them as people, and the people you want to have a relationship. As Ned pointed out, last few weeks, we're going to have a longer time, hopefully, with our kids as adults than we are with them as kids.

• 42:31Ryan Holiday?

  No, I relate to that very much, and I've written about it a bit, where, and this goes to what we were talking about earlier. I think generationally, you're seeing a lot of young people, especially people my age, struggling with this idea of like, here are the values my parents raised me with. Here are the things they said were important. I didn't agree with all, and then, you know, here were their political beliefs. Here's what they said was important, why they voted the way that they did. And then what do you do when you watch them throw all of that out the window because, you know, this is what their party is endorsing now, or worse, you know, because they read some thing on Facebook or watched some random, you know, video about. I think people are struggling with the like, wait, these people who I admired

• 43:16Ryan Holiday?

  and respected and always thought were operating at a certain sort of mental level are now, you know, making medical decisions based on an email they were forwarded and that they're forwarding me. I think generationally, a lot of people are struggling with, again, that divergence from, you know, sort of the ideal and the reality. And I think that's been really hard.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it has been really hard. I think, you know, and part of it is, you know, if you go back to that, that seeking to understand perspective, we know that the more that we sort of, you know, try to convince someone that they're wrong, the more that they, the more that they, they sort of, they get more entrenched in their beliefs. We take a note from some of the lessons from what's called motivational interviewing, which is first done with alcoholics. And where these people who are trying to get people to stop, you know, their substance use, abusive use of alcohol. And, you know, they tell me like, if you don't quit, you're going to lose your health, your job, your family, blah, blah, blah. And they would just dig in even deeper. Whereas if they, well, so

• 44:25Speaker 02

  tell me about your relationship, you know, with alcohol. And we have a story in a book about a school counselor who was working with a young woman who was smoking a ton of pot. And she first came, she said, look, I'm not going to try to tell you, I'm not going to be the umpteenth adult that tells you why all the problems with pot. And to be completely clear, we're not advocating drug use, particularly for young people. But she took this perspective, she said, I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. But I'm curious, tell me about, what does it do for you? And the girl was sort of, you know, waxed rhapsodic about how it made her feel more relaxed. She felt cool around these kids that she wanted to befriend with, you know, on and on and on. But then at some point she said, but it does cost a lot.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  And so in this motivational interview, and you listen, you don't judge, and you don't try to tell them why, but you look for change talk. And so the counselor said, well, tell me more about that. She says, well, you know, I buy twice a week and it's pretty expensive. She said, okay, well, if you, if you, if you only bought once, like if you had more money, what would you do instead? I don't know, you know, I have this pair of shoes, my friends had, I really liked those, and maybe get my hair done. Okay. And she didn't lean in and say, look, look at all the great things you can have if you stop smoking so much. She didn't do that. And she just listened and reflected back. And a week or two later, the girl came, she saw her walk down the hallway and she had her hair cut. I said, oh, that looks really cute. Well, tell me about that. Well, you know, I realized I could probably buy, buy once a week and smoke a little less. And yeah, I do like the way my hair looks.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  And I sit there when I think about, you know, things like political disagreements where I don't want to yell and fight and try to use, you know, force of logic, even though I'm convinced that I'm right most of the time. Because what I do is I build a, you know, this is the way I'm built. I build a bigger wall and I make it that much harder for a person who maybe the person does realize that they're wrong. I make it, make it, they have to climb all over the wall to come on my, to my side. As opposed to if we keep the wall really low and we don't, we don't pitch a fit, it makes it easy and say, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll tiptoe over that side for a while. This friend of mine who I mentioned at work, who we have very different political beliefs, changed her political party to independent. I won't say which side she started, changed to independent. And I thought, well, okay, we're halfway there.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, this motivational interviewing that Ned mentioned, it's, it's, at its core, is this, this active or reflective listening, which was developed in some way by Carl Rogers, who was one of the really influential psychotherapists in the 1960s and 70s. And Rogers' thing was, was to let people, to try to communicate to your clients that you really, that you understand them. And you do that as they're talking by kind of summarizing or paraphrasing what they're saying. You know, am I getting this right? And I think that I've often wondered, I mean, I personally find debates boring because nobody's listening to each other, just thinking, I'm just thinking, when you're talking, I'm

• 47:23Speaker 01

  thinking, how can I refute what you're saying? And I've always wished that we'd have some kind of Sunday talk shows where people had to, when a conservative listened to a liberal argument, had to summarize the liberal's argument in a respectful way, and then before he responded. And this, which is a really big technique in marriage therapy as well. And if our leaders practiced this kind of respectful listening to each other, and could actually, with being open to learn from each other, we wouldn't see this kind of tremendous kind of gridlock that we see.

• 47:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I would say, part of what I would consider an essential set of lessons for kids would be, you know, an understanding of cognitive biases, an understanding of sort of traps or mistakes, logical fallacies. And then, one thing that I learned relatively late, but it's something I love, is the idea of like, can you steel man, can you argue against a steel man instead of a strong man? So, you know, most of what you watch, as we're talking about with like a Fox News or a conservative radio or something, is a lot of dunking on straw man arguments, right? Disagreeing with things that no, no one essentially believes in, and making it sound like you're some sort of fearless warrior for the truth.

• 48:44Ryan Holiday?

  Steel manning is, well, why does someone believe this? Why do they think, what is the argument for this thing that we disagree with? Or what logic is the other side operating under? And then how can you, how can you then use that to strengthen your own arguments or your own beliefs? Or, you know, in some instances, change your mind, as you're talking about, because you realize, oh, I may have been on the wrong side of this. So, I guess this goes back to modeling, it's like, how often have your kids seen you change your mind? You know, how often have you ever been convinced by their arguments for something? And then conversely, you expect them to just be convinced to do what you say because you said so?

• 49:29Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's, I think, how do we show our kids what good thinking, good clear communication, you know, sort of mental resiliency looks like? That's probably the best way to pass it along to them.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  That's such a great point. And I think that when I was thinking back a couple of conversations, I'm going back to 50 years now, but with my own, more than 50 years, my own father. And we talked about stuff and he said, you know, that's a really interesting point. I never really thought about it that way. And in terms of making me feel confident and encouraged, having my father basically say, I'm willing to see it differently, it was a very empowering thing.

• 50:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I listened to a podcast with Malcolm Gladwell, and he was talking about what he learned from his father was that his father would never pretend that he knew something in the course of a conversation. If someone's like referenced something, he would never have pretended to have heard of that or to have watched that movie. He would go, I don't know about that. What is that? And you can see in someone like Malcolm Gladwell, you know, perhaps where his curiosity and sort of, you know, what makes him Malcolm Gladwell, you can see where that came from.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. And so we talked in this new book about just how, simply how powerful it is to apologize.

• 51:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  To our kids, when we act badly, to simply say, I was wrong, I was tired, I was really stressed, I'm sorry, I took it out on you, you're the most precious thing in the universe to me. And I think that I'm old enough that I don't remember specific incidences, but I remember when I was 40, that I can still remember times when my father had gotten mad at me and came into my bedroom that night and really was, I'm really sorry, you know, I can't say how much I love you and I just, and I really, I was really stressed or whatever it was. And it just, it made me feel so respected.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  And I think that changing, being able to change our minds, being able to say that we were wrong, being able to say that I'm learning, I learned from this, is a really powerful message for kids.

• 52:01Ryan Holiday?

  One thing that I picked up in the book, you were talking about how painful it is for a kid to have something they want to communicate or have a feeling and not be able to, because they don't have the words, they don't have the concepts. And I was just thinking about this with my oldest, who's five, or turning five shortly. You know, he'll do something wrong, you know, knock over his brother, or, you know, throw something, or, you know, he'll do something. And, you know, when he, when you sort of get, get up close to him and you say like, "Hey, I, I, you can't do that. That's not a good idea." Or, you know, "We talked about this." Not, not, not like, sort of, even in the way that I remember as a kid, sort of, being aggressively, kind of, you know, manhandled

• 52:41Ryan Holiday?

  or told what not to do. Even the most sort of polite or, you know, gentle reproach, you can tell that this is, that he's overwhelmed with emotion. And something like, sometimes he'll spit, or he'll pull away, or he'll, he'll say something mean when he's feeling this. And, and thinking about your book and trying to practice some empathy, my wife and I were going, "Well, what's happening is, he's being overwhelmed by the emotion of shame for the behavior that he just committed, for, you know, being communicated now, you know, in even a gentle reproach. But he lacks the ability to say, like, "I wish I hadn't done that." He lacks the ability to say, "Well, here's what I was thinking. You've

• 53:25Ryan Holiday?

  misunderstood me." Or even, even though, like, "I don't like this." Or, or like, "Hey, I'm not a bad person. Why are you making me feel like a bad person?" He's being overwhelmed with an emotion that he can't communicate about. And so he's communicating instead via behavior. Not good behavior, but as they say, behavior is the sort of natural language of children. It strikes me that communicate, providing your child the tools to communicate effectively, and also understanding when they can't communicate and not being too hard on them, is an immense, sort of, release for them, or, or, it's an immense

• 54:07Ryan Holiday?

  relief of discomfort for them that, that they didn't even necessarily understand they were experiencing.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And, and one of the things we talk about is, you're not going, as a parent, you're not going to deliver an effective message when a kid's emotions are that high.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  We do, of course, want to address the behavior and help kids figure out a better way than spitting, or throwing something at your brother, or giving him the elbow, to communicate your frustration, your needs, your wants, or whatever. But we can start with something like, wow, you look like you're pretty upset about what happened there. No, I didn't approve of his behavior. I didn't say it's okay to throw an elbow at your brother, or to throw a toy. But I'm acknowledging, you look like you're pretty upset there. And we start with this empathy, and this acknowledgement, this validation, as a way to calm the hard emotions, and bring the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain, back online. And so we use this acronym of SHURE, where first thing, you stay calm, you don't get

• 55:12Speaker 02

  upset yourself as the parent, because then you become part of the problem. You seek to understand, you look like you're pretty upset there. Can you tell me what's going on there? And not looking for evidence to pounce on them. You then reframe it, you're reflective listening. So what you're telling me is, your brother took something early in the day, and you're still mad about that. Is that about right? And then, you explore options. So let's think about, let's talk about how we can do this better, because you probably don't feel really good about, like you're such a great, like, older brother for throwing something at him. And as your dad, that's just not going to pass muster with me. But I understand why you're frustrated, but this is not behavior, how you're handled this is not the way I want you to handle this in the future.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  And we do this in a gentle, respectful way, by not, by sort of being a non-anxious presence ourself in that, because that will calm the hard emotions, and help our kids be able to then think about more effective ways to handle disagreements, more effective ways to handle their own hard emotions. Rather than just coming down on them, like, that's unacceptable behavior, because arguably, if they already had more effective ways to express and handle those situations, they would have used them. Kids do well when they can. And if they can't, we want to figure out how to help them do it better next time. Yeah.

• 56:31Ryan Holiday?

  That's a beautiful expression, "Kids do well when they can." Tell me about that.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Who's that from, Bill?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Is that Jane Nelson?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  No, that's Ross Green.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Ross Green, who really popularized the idea of collaborative problem solving with kids, as opposed to other forms of discipline. There's a chapter at the very end of our new book, it's called "What About Consequences?" Because in our first book, we talked so much about the power of a sense of autonomy, or control, or agency in kids. People would ask us, when we'd lecture about it, "Well, what about the consequences? Don't kid needs consequences." And what we point out is that the root of the word "discipline" is to teach. Yes, we want kids to learn from their experience, but we love this line from Jane Nelson, who

• 57:29Speaker 01

  wrote a classic book called Positive Discipline, which is, "Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to help kids do better, we have to first make them feel worse, by coming down on them or shaming them like that?" And I think that, I just love that idea, and I think you said it very well, Ned, that there's many ways that we can help kids learn from their experience that don't involve getting mad at them, or coming up with some negative consequence for them, or shaming them. And they're sensitive kids, and anytime they're corrected, they tend to go towards that shame, or resentment, and you've got really sensitive kids, and it takes even more kind of sensitive handling.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  But the idea is simply that what we want is for kids to learn from their experience, so that they become skilled at paying attention to their own experience, and learning from it.

• 58:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm an adult, I don't like being reproached. Like, when somebody does that to me, there's a part of me that wants to pull away, or deny, or lash out, you know? It's sort of like, why would you expect a child to be magically better at something that you haven't even mastered, and you've been on the planet for decades more than them?

• 58:45Speaker 02

  It's a great point, and, you know, because, in part because, these executive functions of putting things in perspective and controlling our emotions, I mean, these are skills that develop, ideally, develop over time, and so you're absolutely right, it's just, it's not, it's not...

• 59:03Speaker 02

  It's not reasonable. You're going to be disappointed if you think that a four or five or twelve year old is going to be able to have the same self-control that we would expect of a twenty-five or thirty-five or forty-five year old. In addition to that, there's also the observation that the kids who get the most punishment tend to learn the least from it, right? And we just want, as Bill said, we want kids to learn from their experience and learn from their mistakes, but how we do it is so darn important. You know, one of the things, when we were writing this book, we talked with dozens and dozens of teenagers and asked them, who do you feel closest to? Right? Because we know this close connection is so important in effective communication and

• 59:47Speaker 02

  is also probably the single, this closest thing to a silver bullet in sort of decreasing the risk of, you know, for anxiety and depression. And we asked the kids, who do you feel closest to? And sometimes it was my mom, my dad, sometimes it was an older brother, sister, aunt, uncle, my grandma, you know, my coach, my teacher, whatever. And then the follow-up question was, well, what made you feel close to them? And the two things were, they listen to me without judging me, and they don't tell me what to do. Now, some parents are going to hear this, like, well, of course I have to tell my kid what to do, you know, that's my job as his parent, which again is true, but there's a how. There's sharing, you know, teaching in ways that maintain the relationship in ways that

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  don't undermine their autonomy, where we're giving them the benefit of our experience and giving them better tools to be effective in their lives, in their communication, without being, you know, with really being authoritative, with our, using our natural authority, without being authoritarian, you know, kind of because I said so type approach.

• 1:00:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, when I think about why I was closer with one of my grandfathers than sort of both my parents, it's almost as if grandparents have freed themselves from this sort of self-inflicted and probably not particularly productive pressure, like you were saying, as soon as a parent hears, well, I have to tell you what to do, you know, do you really? You know, like, you know. You know, grandparents are just like, they're, it's not like grandparents will let you get away with anything. The grandparents have just slightly reduced the pressure, right? Because they've been through this before. They kind of probably understand that it's not as, whatever it is, it's not as important as it feels to the parent.

• 1:01:29Ryan Holiday?

  And just by being slightly more relaxed, they could be saying the exact same thing, even enforcing potentially stricter rules. But it's like the volume's been turned down slightly. And so it gets heard and it's heard in a different way because the receiver is more open to receiving it.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Right. And I think, you know, as a, as a grandparent, I mean, I certainly, I, I, I think that many things that my kids do, that my grandkids do, seem, they don't seem like a big deal to me, but they do more to the parents. And then certainly you, you have a couple of kids, you grew up, you realize that this is not that big a deal to grow out of or whatever. And I think being able to convey that kind of attitude to kids is really beneficial. And I, that's why we talk about this, this, this goal for parents of kind of, of, of working in this direction of being a non-anxious presence, where we kind of are, we can take a long view, as we talked about before, assuming that, and, and we can be respectful

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  of if kids, kids have to go through some hard stuff in order to develop the confidence they can handle their, their lives. That we really, if we take more of that grandfather perspective, you know, that there's, we, we start one of the chapters with a story from, from Fred. What's Fred's last name?

• 1:02:47Ryan Holiday?

  Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Fred Rogers, where he's saying that he was running, he was, he was walking on this wall, this kind of, this kind of stone wall. And his mother and his grandmother said, honey, you're gonna get down, you're gonna fall. And the grandfather says, let him stay up there, he can do it.

• 1:03:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And he said, eventually I was running on the wall. And he said, I, I was like seven years old, I still remember that to this day. My, my grandfather had confidence in me. And, and that, that's what we want. We, we want to communicate to kids that we have confidence that they can handle things, that, that, and that they can figure out their life ultimately.

• 1:03:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think one of the things I would say, there's a great book I've recommended to people called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Is there another type? Sorry.

• 1:03:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, but, but the premise being like at the root of, you know, sort of raising a more self-driven child, communicating effectively, the story with Fred Rogers, which I loved, which is like, dealing with your own shit. Like, how often is it that you're, you know, having struggle, you're struggling to communicate with your kids because you're communicating from a place of anxiety or from a place of insecurity or a place of emotion that if you dealt with in your own life, whether it's going to therapy or reading or, you know, taking better care of yourself or sleeping better, whatever it is, you would more effectively communicate because certain barriers or

• 1:04:21Ryan Holiday?

  headwinds would have been removed. And it strikes me, this sort of a through line of what we're talking about, whether it's the sort of extreme political views that have led to estrangement, or it's the pressures of these parents trying to force their kids to go into some college. It's, it's they're coming at it from a place of being very immature themselves, not dealing with their own issues. And then so you have a 10-year-old talking to a person who's emotionally only like 15 or 16, of course, it's going to be explosive and non-productive. You've got two children arguing with each other instead of a fully-formed adult talking to, empathetically, to a young child.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's a great point. And we have a chapter in the book about the language of a non-anxious presence. And simply the idea that when we, it helps if in any given situation, there's like, there's one adult, right?

• 1:05:16Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  And so when we, as parents, if we can be more non-anxious, if we can be less reactive, if we can take the long view, our energy changes their energy and it makes them much more able to think, you know, with their more developed faculties, with their executive functions and just make better decisions. But when we, as a parent, if we are alarmist and if we are yelling and screaming and everything's a crisis, then, then both our higher faculties and our kids' higher faculties are nowhere to be seen. And, you know, we were acting like children or we're looking like people who are just terrified and no good thinking comes out of fear-based thinking. And so it was a whole chapter on how we can simply be more effective in helping our

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  kids, including giving them really important messages of values and how to live life well. When we work on ourselves to be more non-anxious, to have more of that stoic philosophy, you know, the calm amidst the storm, I mean, the fascinating thing for me in this whole time with my with my son is people just have over and over and over sent to me and to my wife, how are you guys so calm about this? And for me at least, I'll say, you know, I prioritize being well rested and exercising every day and practicing, I practice transcendental meditation, as does my wife now. And I mean, in many ways, can there be anything more alarming than being on the phone with your kid when he's falling apart and you turn

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  out he has a brain tumor and I'm 600 miles away. But still, what I knew in that moment is the best way that I can help my kid is not to panic, because I can always panic later. And because my wife was the one who was, you know, 20 miles away, not 600, if when I was able to help, when I could stay calm, it helped her stay calm. And when she could stay calm, it could help him stay calm. And then then we just trusted that we're getting the best medical help that we can. And it's, you know, and this, you know, this whole COVID thing has been challenging, challenging, challenging. But, you know, so much of the way kids are, the lessons they're going to take out of this past year and a half is their own experience. But also, as they look to us as parents and caregivers saying, how do, how are we looking at this? This is a challenge and we're going to get through

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  it together. Or, oh, my gosh, this is the end of the world, which is kind of a hard message to then get out of bed and pull the head, head out from underneath the covers and say, I'm ready to take on the world.

• 1:07:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and the idea that it

• 1:07:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can't like, we seem to be able to respond well in crises, like truly dangerous situations. Like, I'm always amazed, like, you know, my kid will be doing something and like, it's actually not safe and they need to get inside right now or something, right? You know, in that instance, you can communicate effectively, you know, we, we seem to know what to do in true emergencies, when, when our adrenaline, our body, you know, when something takes over, then we know what to do. The problem is in this sort of middle ground. So it's, I guess what I'd, what I'd say is like, if you've ever responded well in an emergency, what you should take from that is, oh, I do know how to do this. It's really about how to do this more consistently in slightly less severe situations.

• 1:08:30Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you know you're capable of it, so now it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it in, in everyday situations.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  I, I, I can't tell, I can't tell you how many kids have told me over the years that about their, that their parents, their parents screamed at them for yelling at their brother.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Some irony there.

• 1:08:56Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Yeah, it's not what you say, it's what you do. Don't talk about it, be about it.

• 1:09:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, amazing, guys. I love this book. I love the first one. It was an honor to talk again and you've been very helpful to me in my parenting journey. So, so please, please don't stop.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. We love, we love how you think. You, you, you, you, you sound like you have a wonderful family and that's so great for all of you.

• 1:09:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a blast talking with you.

• 1:09:27Ryan Holiday?

  If you can hear that, that is my actual amor fati challenge coin, which I keep in my pocket. It says amor fati in the front. It's got flame, the idea that everything you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. And then on the back, it has the quote from Nietzsche, who coins this phrase, no pun intended, amor fati, not merely to bear what is necessary, but love it, to see what it is, to see what it can become and to make it into that. That's what the idea of amor fati is. And you can check this out at store.dailystoic.com. We have a pendant too, but it's one of the things I try to think about on a daily basis. How do I love what life has chosen for me? And how do I turn it into something that in retrospect I wouldn't have traded for? So, Amor Fati, be well.