Pod Insights Jocko Podcast Jocko Underground: It's Not Real. Getting Others Over Fear. About this episode Getting your child (and others, including yourself) over fear.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jocko Willink? This is the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 170, sitting here with Echo Charles. We are going to present courses of actions available to you based on questions from you about your current situations in business, in family, and in life.
0:16 Speaker 01 Many aspects of life, by the way.
0:18 Jocko Willink? Yes.
0:19 Speaker 01 Okay, first question.
0:20 Jocko Willink? I'd say that the word life encompasses all those aspects.
0:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:23 Jocko Willink? But you can reiterate if you want to.
0:25 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
0:25 Jocko Willink? There's a lot of aspects. Thank you.
0:26 Speaker 01 That's why you said life and I specifically chose to say many aspects of life.
0:32 Jocko Willink? Yeah, yeah.
0:33 Speaker 01 Which is the same, exact same thing.
0:34 Jocko Willink? Yep, you just reiterate it big time.
0:36 Speaker 01 Leadership is hard and challenging and difficult.
0:42 Jocko Willink? There you go.
0:43 Speaker 01 See what I'm saying?
0:45 Speaker 01 All right, first question. My son is five. Last year, he ended up seeing the trailer for the IT movie and it terrified him. It has been a problem ever since. He won't even go to the bathroom without me or my husband going with him. He says he can't get Pennywise out of his head. He wakes up terrified after dreaming about him. It's very sad. I hate it. I don't want him feeling this way. I really don't know how to help him conquer this fear and feel okay to do things on his own again. I thought it would be a phase, but it has been months and months of this on and off. Do you have any advice for helping kids feel brave or just less afraid?
1:24 Jocko Willink? So this goes back to Way of the Warrior kid, exposure therapy, right? Exposure therapy. I did not know that exposure therapy was a thing, but it is a thing. What is it? I, when, when Jordan Peterson came on the podcast the first time and he explained how you get someone to overcome their fear of needles. You put a needle in the room and you tell them, hey, there's a needle in the room. I want you to just go to the, go as, go as close to the door of the room as you can, knowing that there's a needle in there. Don't push them. Don't force them in there. Don't freaking grab the needle and surprise them with it. That'll make it worse. And when they feel, they get to the, to the, the door itself and they can't open the door, but they're like, I can't, I can't do it. Okay, say, fine. Yep, cool. Come back the next day. Hey, go as close as you can again today.
2:10 Jocko Willink? You know, and you continue to expose them to this thing that they're afraid of. And over time, that fear will dissipate. Cause they'll realize there's nothing to be afraid of. In the Warrior Kid, we show that with water, with the kids scared of water. So what do you do? You take him to the river, just wades in the water. And then he goes up to his knees in the water. And then he goes up to his waist in the water. And then he goes up to his chest in the water. And then he puts his head underwater. And they, so you just, and all voluntarily. All voluntarily.
2:42 Jocko Willink? So that's the idea that we're talking about here is exposure therapy. Now, so for the movie It,
2:52 Jocko Willink? you, you know, it's a scary looking clown, right? So I would begin some exposure therapy with, with very happy looking clowns, right? Clowns that cannot be remotely related to it, you know? And, and just pictures or drawings, you know, something that is abstract away from it as you can possibly get with still some connection. You know, so maybe it's a picture, maybe it's a, you know, if you find a funny TV show that there's a clown in or something like that. But again, we don't surprise them. We don't put, make them uncomfortable. That does the opposite. And I would just slowly over time, you know, it's, can you look at this? There's a picture of it, or there's a picture of a clown in the room.
3:37 Jocko Willink? Can you look at the picture? And we escalate from there. Okay. And then maybe eventually say, hey, there's a picture of the clown that's in it in there. I think another huge opportunity that you have here is since it's a movie,
3:53 Jocko Willink? you could do things like show the guy getting his makeup put on, you know, some behind the scenes stuff. It's all fake. Show that guy laughing and joking. Show the kids laughing and joking on the scene, explaining that this is fake. It's all fake. It's not real. It's not real. The whole idea is just someone made it up in his head.
4:10 Jocko Willink? And I think that would be, that would be my approach. You, again, just to reiterate, you have to do this at your kid's speed, right?
4:22 Jocko Willink? You don't make them uncomfortable. Don't force them to do it. The other thing is, as much as you can possibly do this, and this is a huge part of dealing with kids, is don't make things bigger than they are, right? Don't make things bigger than they are. If this becomes the focus, this becomes the focus. If you start saying, you know, I really want you to overcome this fear, you know, if you really make it into a big deal, it's gonna become a big deal. I did a good job for a parent,
4:54 Jocko Willink? kind of, you know, accidentally or just instinctively, of never making something into a big deal that could have become a big deal, or in fact, in some cases, is a big deal in your child's head. Like something will blow up. You know, they get called a name, they get, they get told something, they're afraid of something, something happens, and it's really easy as a parent to make it into a big deal, and then it becomes a bigger deal to them. Whereas as a parent, you're like, oh,
5:22 Jocko Willink? you know, if you, they called me whatever. Kids at school called me, you know, what do they call you?
5:31 Jocko Willink? Plate face. Plate face, that's from where your kid. You know, my kid come home, they called me plate face. You're like, oh, okay. Hey, can you pass the, pass the milk? I'm hungry. I need some protein. You know, like, but if you go, what do you mean? Well, listen, you're not a plate face. It's okay. You go that whole nine yards, you make it into a big deal, a bigger deal than it is. Don't do that. And you know, that applies to everything. It's like, you, in your own personal life, don't make things a bigger deal than they are. In your business, don't make things a bigger deal than they are. And with your kids, don't make things a bigger deal than they are. Just start small. Exposure therapy. Don't make a big deal out of it. Joke about it.
6:15 Jocko Willink? Joking about things doesn't doesn't you gotta be careful. It's not funny because we don't want to get that reaction. But just go slow, take it easy. This isn't a big deal. She's been your your son has been scared for for months. Cool. He's got eighty years left. He's only going to be scared of this clown for another like six months, maybe a year. And then he's not gonna be scared. Regardless, if you don't do anything, you won't be scared of this clown in a year. You could do nothing at all. He's not gonna be scared. So the cool thing is you can teach him about how to overcome his fear. The military does a good job of that. The military makes you climb over the cargo net, which is fifty feet up in the air, whatever, how many fifty feet up in the air?
6:59 Jocko Willink? And then it makes you rappel off of a wall, and then it makes you flash rope out of a helicopter, then it makes you parachute out of a airplane. You just get you've overcome fear, overcome fear, overcome fear, overcome fear. You've learned how to do it. You have an opportunity here to make that happen. Good opportunity to learn.
7:14 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
7:15 Jocko Willink? That's what I got.
7:16 Speaker 01 Interestingly, I went through this exact same scenario with both my kids, and you're right. Both of those things were correct. We did both.
7:24 Jocko Willink? What were they scared of?
7:25 Speaker 01 Uh, well, the most recent one was Megan. You ever watch that? Megan? It's a movie, robot. Yeah, it goes rogue and she's scary. That was my daughter back when the first one came out.
7:36 Jocko Willink? Did you let her watch that?
7:37 Speaker 01 Yes, she will. She wanted to. Okay, I thought it was a freaking kid. It is. It's literally it's more of a teenager's kid toy robot movie, you know? I wasn't thinking like, you ever watch Child's Play?
7:48 Jocko Willink? I'd never watched it, but I remember Chucky.
7:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, Chucky. Like, to me, it came off as way more child movie than Chucky. Chucky was kind of psycho. The first one.
7:58 Jocko Willink? Yeah, I remember Chucky's a horror movie.
8:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, straight up dog. Anyway, um, but the uh, the exposure therapy wasn't with Megan. If I to me, I understood, hey, Megan's a scary robot for kids. So that's not what I want her to get over. I think with age, that kind of you get over freaking Megan, the robot when you're freaking fifteen. Who cares? But this idea of like going places by yourself, and I don't know, maybe Megan's there. Maybe it's another freaking horrible monster, you know? I don't know. I feel I just felt like that was her issue. So with the stuff that she would want me to go with her, like to the bathroom, and we have this bathroom that's kind of down this hall, and it's like, I kind of understand when you're a little kid.
8:41 Speaker 01 Exactly. So what I do is I'd go with her and then slowly I'd be like, hey, like just so you're not scared in the future, you go and just you go in the, I'll go with you, but I'll just cruise outside the bathroom. See what I'm saying? And then after a while, it's like, you know what? I'll just go to here. You go the rest of the time. We'll turn on the lights. All good. It was, but that was the exposure therapy was like doing stuff with her that she required. The Megan part, I was like, bro, let's not watch Megan. And how's this? She wants to watch Megan too. And she just watched that same Megan recently. She's 12 now.
9:09 Jocko Willink? Yeah.
9:10 Speaker 01 But.
9:10 Jocko Willink? She's gonna be scared of it forever.
9:11 Speaker 01 Exactly right. They get over it for that kind.
9:13 Jocko Willink? I, well, I, I would, I would like scaring people. It's kind of fun for me. And, uh, and I scared, have you ever, have you ever played the game Scary Maze?
9:25 Speaker 01 No.
9:26 Jocko Willink? So Scary Maze is a game. It's like a website and you go play Scary Maze. And as you, you, you just have to move this little object down this maze. And it starts real wide and then it gets narrow and narrow. And, and each time you hit a wall, it starts you back at the beginning. And so what it does is it lures you into being more and more closely intent on making this work. And finally you like turn the corner for this last little, little thing. You gotta move the, with your, with your mouse, you gotta move this little object down this very, very skinny kind of hallway. And, and this freaking satanic.
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