Shownotes

Episode Background

How can we control our minds, handle adversity, set goals, manage expectations, access logic, and protect ourselves by creating an inner citadel?
Stoicism, a philosophy that originated in ancient Rome, helps answer the above questions and many more. Stoicism consists of practical principles on how to live a good life. This episode provides a brief introduction of this philosophy.
Concepts discussed include control the controllables, serenity prayer, negative visualisation, voluntary discomfort, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), resilience, mental strength, inner citadel, expectation setting, catastrophizing, happiness.
People discussed include Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Dr Aaron Beck.

Principles of Stoicism discussed in episode

• Control
• Resilience
• Lowering Expectations
• Logic
• Inner Citadel

Resources

Books on Stoicism

• Meditations: Marcus Aurelius
• Letters from a Stoic: Seneca
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: William Ervine
• The Daily Stoic: Ryan Holiday
• How to think like a Roman emperor: Donald Robertson

Insta Accounts

• The Daily Stoic

Episode Transcript

Hi everyone. Happy new year, wishing you a fulfilling, healthy and prosperous 2022. Welcome to how to live a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode six. 

Imagine ancient Rome, 2000 years back. Center of the Western world, a thriving prosperous society, extreme wealth on one side and poverty on the other. Flashiness hedonism co-existing with conflict struggles. No matter who you were daily, life was stressful. Everyone haves and the have-nots were trying to move up the social ladder.  In this backdrop, the philosophy of stoicism was created. The earlier description would be equally valid. If instead of 2000 years back, I refer to today's world. No wonder stoicism is making a comeback. It's more relevant than ever.

In today's episode, we look at this philosophy, which has been described by many as a guideline on how to live a good life. Let's go back even further, 2,500 years ago in Athens. People couldn't explain the world around them. There were floods, droughts, natural disasters, diseases. So they made up stuff. They turned to superstition. Socrates entered this world. He took to the streets and asked simple questions. Made folks think he brought logic to the world. Along with his descendants, Plato and Aristotle laid the foundation for Western philosophy, which was centered on intellectual thought, logic and reason.

There are some who believe that these three wrote everything we know about philosophy. The rest is just footnotes. Athens became the intellectual capital of the world across the sea. Rome was a thriving, prosperous civilization. When this intellectual philosophy reached the Roman shores, it got converted into a logic based practical guideline on how to live one's life in a vibrant city.

The three big leaders who practised and evangelized this were Epictetus, a teacher, a thought-leader Seneca advisor to the king and Marcus or ileus a Roman emperor. Now, before we get into what this philosophy is about one important clarification, the word stoic as it's used in the English language is different from

Stoic normally refers to someone who represses emotions, stiff upper lip behavior. Stoicism does not endorse this. It seeks joy and happiness. In today's episode, we look at five principles of stoicism, which resonated strongly with me. These are not necessarily the top five, but we'll give a good flavor of stories.

The first principle is control. The core premise of stoicism is to be in control of everything we do. The rest of stoicism follows from this key principle. One might think, how can we control everything, a career, family, life, money, or even things like COVID that come out of nowhere. 

Stoics understood we cannot control the external. But we have control over the internals. We can control our minds. We can decide how any experience sits with us. We can choose what meaning to give to it and how to respond to it. 

Taking this concept forward Stoics even set goals they could control. If our business goal is to attract X customers, we can reframe this goal towards how we strategize the effort we put in the process we follow and how we keep learning.

One might say that this sounds good, theoretically, but in the real world, we need to win. We need to succeed. The management concept control the controllables helps understand this well. Focusing on the controllables sets our attention on the right activities, optimizing the process towards success, winning and losing depends on many factors, luck being a major one. By getting the controllables right, we succeed most of the time because luck gets neutralized. We see this regularly in sports. The greatest teams in football, basketball, cricket, or any other sport are known to focus on their plans and execute. Often they might win a game, but will not be satisfied with the performance because it's not in line with their potential.

They evaluate strategy execution on the basis of their internal standards, because when they hit those standards, which are under their control, they succeed most of the time. The spirit of this mindset is like the serenity prayer, having the wisdom to know what we can control and then focus on that to achieve success.

Having control of our minds becomes even more critical during adversity. 

That brings us to the second principle-  Resilience. The Stoics believed that bad events are bound to happen. To prepare for bad times, we need to do the work in good times by strengthening our mind and bodies during this time. 

To get our bodies physically ready, the Stoics practised voluntary discomfort. This could be simple things like sleeping on the floor or fasting, or like Seneca would do. He would go out for annual retreats, stay in poor lodging, wear very little clothes with limited food and would say to himself, this is the worst that can happen to me. And it's not too bad that helped reduce fear. 

For the mind they did mental preparation. They would start with simple experiments, like not having wine for a month and then keep increasing the intensity. The objective was to build the mental muscle. It was like going to the gym, increasing weights slowly to increase willpower and self-control. 

Another powerful tool was negative visualization. They would imagine a future where things would go wrong. Maybe they break their legs and cannot walk. They would spend time immersing themselves in this image, visualizing it, feeling it, building the mental muscle to be able to take the setback after this exercise, not only would they develop mental resilience.But they'd be grateful to have both legs. This tool is really useful and widely applicable. We'll get to it in more detail in the context of consumerism and wanting more in future episodes.

Related to negative visualization, is the next principle - lowering expectation. Marcus in his book, meditations would say to himself, tell yourself every morning today you will meet arrogant, dishonest, jealous meddling folks. When I first read that, I found it a little funny, but it makes so much sense going into our day with this expectation. If you were to meet someone dishonest, we won't be too put-off. we'd expect it. And if you don't, we'll be happy. If one logically thinks about happiness, it's exceeding one's expectations towards life.

There's a study on happiness, comparing a lottery winner to a person who becomes crippled. The lottery winner is off course much happier. However, a year later, the happiness scores reverse. The handicapped person becomes happier because his expectations in life reduce and small things make him. It's the opposite for the lottery winner.

Initially, I thought this way of looking at life is very negative. But on deeper reflection, I realized it pokes into a core belief that many of us have entitlement. We feel entitled to a good life, good food, good family, money, housing, et cetera. Why should this be the case? Why should we be entitled to anything?

Shouldn't we have to earn our way through life. For me, this helps reduce entitlement, increased gratitude, and overall increase happening. 

Now it's one thing to lower expectations, but when adversity hits, we are often taken unawares. This brings us to the fourth principle, logic and reason. 

Stoics acknowledged adversity causes emotional distress. However, one needs to get back to logic and reason to respond. The mind control that has been built over multiple years, that we talked about earlier, helps getting back to a logical frame of mind, but on top of that, they have another useful tool, language. The Stoics believe in keeping language very simple, factual and functional, not layering it with emotions and passion during adversity.

This helps us see facts clearly for what they are and respond. For example, if we’ve been let go from our job, we may say what an insult I've been fired in front of everyone. Word will travel. I won't be able to find another job. I am no good. The Stoics would simply state I've been terminated from my job. Now I need to find a new one. This makes it easier to learn from the episode and more. To do this, however, one needs to be a practising Stoic with strong mental training. 

However, for the rest of us, this principle, when combined with professional help can be useful to everyone. Dr. Aaron Beck, the founder of CBT cognitive behavioral therapy took inspiration from stoicism to create this. CBT is a method of therapy used worldwide to support folks going through depression and. In CBD, the phenomenon of exacerbating events is known as catastrophizing. When therapists work with clients, they get them to state their setbacks in simple language without catastrophizing. And then via logic challenge negative assumptions. So if our assumption is we're no good. We're asked if there's even one task we got, right. We might say something small. Like I safely drop my kids to school. Well, if he got this one task right, then the assumption we are no good is wrong. Slowly through multiple sessions and exercises, the therapist logically helps us realize that we do most things well. We serve people around us and are useful. 

This could be an oversimplified description of CBT, but the overall point is that the Stoic method of making language factual to access logic has inspired a type of therapy that has served many people across the world and continues to do so. 

The principle that puts all this together and my current favorite is the principle of the Inner Citadel.

The Stoics believed that our soul needs to be protected. They would erect an Inner Citadel around this to keep it safe. I believe our inner essence, values, vulnerability, authentic self needs the Citadel for protection. We are constantly facing all types of attacks, especially if you're making changes to ourselves, going against the norm against peer pressure.

Attacks can come in all forms - negative judgement, nasty comments, backhanded compliments, humour hiding insults, pressure from society, family, and friends. People want us to be a certain way, a way that works for them. Some of them feel fearful to venture where we have. some jealous, some resistant to change. Some of this is unconscious, some conscious.

Whatever, be the case we are constantly bombarded. This can create doubts, derail us, demotivate us, sap our energy. However, once we've done extensive work to determine who we are and consciously chosen our path, we need to protect our essence. 

This does not mean that we're not open to change or feedback. There's a difference in energy between the two. We need to build wisdom to tell the difference and see what's allowed in the rest needs to be kept out for all of us working on Self-improvement, trying to be the best version of ourselves. We need the Inner Citadel to protect us. 

I think this is a great place to end. The Stoics had a lot more to say about life. They spoke about self-improvement, managing anger, morality, temperance, and more. We will get to these in later episodes. We will also revisit some principles discussed today in other contexts.

As an action step, you can experiment with any of the exercises mentioned. The self-control exercise to get some control over our minds is a great starting point. You could start with something simple, like having less coffee for a week or no ice cream for a month or anything that is little challenging for you, but doable. And from there on you can keep increasing, Being able to control our minds is such a powerful superpower. It becomes even more useful during adversity. You could also try voluntary discomfort or negative visualization. 

Today's episode was just an introduction to stoicism. If this interests you, I will put up links to books insta accounts and other resources in the shownotes that you can read. The shownotes of this episode and others are in howtolive.life. 

If you liked the show, please do subscribe. This is a little different from the earlier episodes. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me on howtolive.life. Please leave me a voice message by clicking on the mic at the bottom right of the page. 

In the next episode, we talk about arguments we have with our partner. I know this is a very touchy topic, but an important one. When we argue this can be really nasty, but often it's very useful in moving the relationship forward. So how do we get the good part of this evolving our relationship without the nastiness? 

In episode seven, we explore how to fight well with our partner. Hope you join me for this. That's it for today. Hope all of you are having a wonderful start to the year.Until next time. Bye bye. And once again, wish all of you a fulfilling and prosperous year ahead.