#1788 The Great Disempowering - Harps

does I can do that? There is a propensity at times for me to have a good intention but not always get a good result with that good intention. Feel me, you've probably done a little bit of that yourself. So I'm calling this episode the Great Disempowering. So it's my thinking, ladies and gentlemen, judge and jury, that in an attempt to protect people from dealing with hard stuff life, messy, uncomfortable, uncertain, scary, unfair things, just shit that happens in life. We don't

want it to, but it does. Life's not a Disney movie. In an attempt to protect people from that, and in an attempt to I guess make people feel safe and comfortable and important and special and not offended. We can actually disempower people by trying to nerf the world around them.

We can make them more mentally, emotionally and even physically vulnerable and fragile in a bad way, not in a good way, of course, and then innerfing them mentally emotionally and physically or the world around them prevent them from having normal real life experiences and challenges that would help them build resilience and competence and strength and adaptability and understanding. Of course, there's a line, and of course, you know, there's a time where I think we should step in

and help or protect. And this is tricky because that line is not arbitrary. But you know, my as I said at the start, my good intentions don't always produce good outcomes. And so when we're trying to look after people, protect people, hold their hand, you know, not let them feel bad, and not let them feel unimportant or unseen and to you know, we want our friends and family and kids and loved ones to feel special. And that's a nice intention, but it doesn't always work. It doesn't

always in the short term. It's like I always say to my clients and my friends when they really want advice or help, when they come to me and they say, how do I do this? How do I change that? What do you think you know? And I say, do you really want feedback? Or do you want praise? Do you want endorsement? Do you want validation? Or do you want me to tell you what I see from over

here as objectively as I can. Of course, I'm looking through the Craig lens, but there's a fair chance that I can be more objective about you, because your experience of you is always subjective, and what I'm going to tell you is not necessarily what you want to hear.

So on the one hand, we say things like, yeah, I'm all for feedback, I'm all for personal growth, and you know, tell me the truth, give it to me straight, And more times than not is my experience that when we do give it to somebody straight and it's not what they want to hear, then it's more often than not a bad outcome, not a good hour come, and potentially even going to destroy a relationship. And so, while you know, I want to help and support people, I

want to encourage people. I just started a new mentoring program this Monday night go on. I'm recording this Wednesday, and one of the things I say to them is I'm here to help in sport and encourage and motivate it and hopefully inspire and poke and pride and ultimately my job as a coach or even as a podcaster in this capacity right now, I see my job or my role as helping you to help you, and me telling you you're amazing and bloody special and spectacular twenty

four times a day is not helping you. It's stroking your ego, it's potentially allaying some kind of fear or anxiety. But the truth is, neither you or I are that fucking special. We like to think we're all special, and I'm sure there are moments where we do special things, But the bottom line is where one of eight billion on a planet, you know, hurtling through space and time on a giant, spinning blue rock, you know, that's kind

of who we are and that's what we're doing. And yeah, in some ways we're special and unique, and in some ways we're common. But the bottom line is we're all flawed. And if you didn't realize that, you need to think better. Do better, make better choices, and produce better outcomes. Then you wouldn't be listening to this right now. So you know, now, that's not an insult, that's an awareness, and that's a

courageous awareness. But you and I live in a world where a lot of really well meaning people, like really good, loving kind people, are trying to create comfort and safety and certainty and predictability and fairness for everyone. And while that's fine to a point, and it's nice, but again, it doesn't always produce that good outcome. And you know,

like I'm interested in you over the long term. I'm interested in the kind of results that you're going to produce over the long term more than I am interested in making you feel good for the next two or three minutes by telling you everything's amazing, you're great, it'll all be fine. The other person's wrong, you're right, you're brilliant. This is nice, but it's emotional and psychological fairy floss that eventually gives people emotional and psychological diabetes. It's shit

for us. It's not helpful. It's not helpful at all. And that's not to say there's not a time where genuinely supporting and complementing and validating people isn't appropriate. Of course, there are those times, but it's not all the time, and it's not every day, you know. I think sometimes in our attempts to protect people from discomfort and uncertainty and hardship, we're actually predisposing them to be weaker and more fragile, and more disempowered and less resilient because they

don't have to deal with hard things. And if you don't deal with heart things, how can you build strength? How can you become resilient if you're not navigating uncertainty and problems. And yes, if we're talking about your kid, or your staff, or a family member or a friend, someone you love that you know is a bit vulnerable, sure, you know, hang in the background, and if you need to step in, or you think you need to step in,

do so. But let them fall down a bit, let them get uncomfortable, let them scrape their knees, let them

be a bit scared, let them let them fail. It's okay, Like all of that psychological, emotional and practical mess that mayhem, that discomfort, that uncertainty, that is all consistent with just living a human life, just having the human experience and what we want, what we want to help people with is to prepare them for the inevitability of let's be honest, shit, let's help prepare people for the mess and the mayhem and the unfairness and the uncertainty of relationships and business

and personal development and health and all of the things that just constitute being a human. I'm not talking about throwing people in the deep end without a life raft. I'm talking about the problem of bubble wrapping life so much that we don't allow people, or we deny people. I guess the challenges and the experiences and the interactions and the pitfalls and downfalls and bullshit that would make

them strong. I'm as a coach and mentor, I'm way more interested in helping the people that I work with become strong, adaptable, competent, resilient, able to perform in the middle of chaos than I am in making them comfortable or making them feel good. And it's not that I don't care. In fact, it's that I do care so much.

If I was all about wanting people to like me or being popular with the people that I'm around or talking to, I would constantly reinforce what they want to hear, I would tell them exactly what they want to hear. I would be prioritized and preoccupied with making them feel good and making them like me, so that I am basically a walking endorsement of whatever they already think and want to hear. So let's get into it. Why is discomfort potentially good for us? Why is struggle good? Why

is pain wise? Why are all those things that I bang on good bang on about why they're good? They're good because they help us become the version of us that we need to become, so that we can navigate all of life, the good and bad, the peaks and trosts, the joy and pain. We can navigate that stuff more effectively. This is the thing. When the shit storm cometh, and it comes when it comes, if we've already been through a version of the storm, because we're dealing with hard things,

when the real shit comes, we're ready, we're prepared. But when we've lived in this metaphoric bubble wrap by virtue of the people around us, or our situation, or our circumstance, or our overprotective, doting, well meaning, beautiful but not particularly helpful parents, then when the shit comes, we're fucked. We're fucked because we don't have the capacity, we don't have the physical, mental, emotional capacity or bandwidth to be able to deal with the things that we need to deal with.

There's this really nice concept by I think it's Nassim Taleb, called the anti fragility paradox, and it's the idea that things like muscles and bones and even minds don't just survive stress, they require stress to grow. You've heard me talk about this progressive overload in the gym. How do we build strength? We do something hard in our body adapts, so we don't just survive stress, we actually require it to become the better version of ourselves. So if you

take for example, bones, your skeleton. Put someone in zero gravity like astronauts in space, right, there's no stress, there's no stress, And so what starts happening to those bones is they literally start deteriorating. Bone density drops, they become weak, they become fragile. And why does that happen. Well, that happens because bones need resistance, bones need impact, bones need dress to stay strong. And it's the same with muscles,

and it's the same with minds. But we live in a culture where we are consciously intentionally and actively to our own detriment, removing the stresses that build this mental and emotional resistance that I'm talking about. We're eliminating competition so no one feels bad about losing. We don't want winners and losers. We just want people to have fun.

And that's a beautiful thought. But when we get the kid that doesn't win or lose, but every kid gets a ribbon, and so they don't really understand what is

coming first, what is coming last, what is loss? When loss happens after they get out of the participation ribbon bubble and they get out of that and they step out into the world where participation and ribbons don't fucking happen, and then they get smashed in the face with the reality stick, and that is you are a loser and you don't have any capacity to deal with losing because you've never experienced it. Then we've set our kids up for failure, in my opinion, your honor. We avoid difficult

conversations because we don't want anyone to get uncomfortable. We don't want anyone to get offended, so we won't say things. You know, when I was a kid, I was simultaneously fat and a kid. I was a fat kid. But people hate it when I say that, because it's like I'm saying something that's horrible and nasty, and I'm not. Trust me, I'm the person I'm talking about. These are just two objective bits of data. One, I was a child too. I was morbidly obese. Put them together, obese child.

I'm not judging my character or my worth, or my identity or my personality or my value tell you in that statement, I'm just saying, but you and I live in a time where there are no fat children, there's no obesity, there are no problems or consequences. Everyone's the same. It's all good. It's a Hollywood movie, but it's just not true. The outcomes are not there. All of that thinking and all of that molly coddling and all of that kind of high level avoidance doesn't equate to good outcome.

We're cushioning people from every possible hardship, and we think we're helping, but I truly think we're doing the opposite. And that doesn't mean everybody's got to constantly experience difficulty or hardship or problems. Of course, it doesn't all the time. Of course, of course. And I don't think you or I are the judges of what people should or shouldn't expect that. I'm definitely not, but I have I need

to be careful and sensitive. How I say this, I'm not going to mention anyone, but I've trained lots of wealthy clients over the time, people living in privilege, and good on them. There's no there's no hate here. They lived in privilege, they lived in you know, opulence in some cases. And I would not always, but quite often they would. I'm talking years ago when I was full

time up to my neck in personal training. They would bring me their kids to train, and their kids were spoiled, precious, precocious humans with no resilience, with terrible attitudes that that would crack the shits, that would sook, that would complain constantly at the at the nearest site of anything remotely difficult or uncomfortable. And I had lots of chats with you know, with parents about that. I'm like, I don't know what you're doing, but this kid cannot with anything.

We need a level of hardship, we need resistance to work against because, like every one of you would say, if I asked, I think you would. I could be wrong, But if I said, would you like to be strong and resilient and adaptable and capable of performing under extreme pressure? Would you like that? I think you would all say yes. Then my next question will be, well, what are you doing to develop the skills and competence and capacity to be able to do what I just described. It's like

protecting a tree from the wind. If a tree never experiences the wind, it never grows strong roots or deep roots. Then the first time a real storm comes, it's done. It's dead. Boom, it's gone, it's out of the ground. And I feel like sometimes we're raising generations of metaphorical

trees with shallow roots. And of course, like intentions matter, I know that people trying to create ultra safe environments mean well, and of course there are environments, especially when we talk in you know, home situations and work situations where people really do need help and some kind of intervention and significant support. Of course, that is real, that is real. But sometimes in the middle of trying to create these risk adverse, ultra safe, super comfortable environments, we're

creating more problems and solutions. Because life is not a controlled environment. Outside of the work or outside of the home, or outside of that particular relationship. Away from that, life is not a controlled environment. It is full of all of the stuff that I speak about too much, uncertainty, unfamiliarity, the unknown, all of that stuff. And so in the real world, we're going to experience failure. That's it. You're

going to fail. You're going to get things wrong, You're going to fuck up, You're going to be embarrassed, You're going to be rejected. There'll be rejection, there'll be difficulty, there'll be cruelty, there'll be unfairness, there'll be despite your best endeavors, there will be poor outcomes. And if we've never had to learn to handle discomfort because society or schools, or family or workplaces have shielded us from it, we have very little chance of being the survivor or the

thriver when real adversity shows up. And so instead of bouncing back, we break. Instead of solving the problem, we panic. Instead of adapting, you know, we blame. And instead of instead instead of managing our own life, we get managed by life. And we see this playing out all over the place, the rise in mental fragility and ententitlement and offense taking. It's not just a coincidence. It's not happening for no reason. It's a byproduct of our collective obsession

with making everything safe. But the truth is that strength and competence is built in the uncomfortable and sometimes the unsafe places. So so how do we fix it? All right? So that's the problem or that's the reality, So how do we make sure that or how do we at least try to make sure that we're not part of the great disempowering So there's no three step kind of like with everything, there's no three step plan. But here are some thoughts. So one after he says no three steads, well,

these are not anyway. So let's try and normalize discomfort. Let's try and make that a normal part of our operating system. And to teach kids and students and employees and friends and who you know, athletes or whoever we are leading or mentoring or supporting, let's teach them that it's okay, Like discomfort is okay, failure is okay, vulnerability

is okay, Embarrassment is okay. Mental and emotional and physical discomfort, these struggles are just part of life and so instead of avoiding all of that, we try and normalize it. We try and normalize it. My next idea is that we encourage competence, not just confidence. Confidence is great, but it's kind of empty without competence. So stop telling people they're amazing no matter what if and by the way, when we're constantly telling people be they kids are at

how incredible they are, eventually it has no power. Eventually it doesn't have the emotional psychological impact. And also eventually, once you're not doing it, it's almost like a drug where our receptors kind of adjust. If you're not doing it anymore, then people then people start to demand it for nothing, because we've programmed and conditioned them that all they need to do is fucking get out of bed and we give them a trophy or a round of

applause or some kind of accolade. But let's help them become amazing through building skill and building resilience and having new experiences and leaning into their fear and embracing the tough stuff, and also, within reason, let people struggle. If you rescue your person from every challenge, they ain't gonna

learn to be independent. They ain't gonna learn to deal with things on their own, And sometimes the most empowering thing you can do is not to do anything as much as you want to fix it, save it, solve it. And I get it because I'm like that too. I'm a little bit of a fuck I'll fix this for you. I used to be way way more down. They let me fix it because I want you to like me, and I can fix this, and I'm good at this. But in me fixing, solving it, saving them, I wasn't

actually helping them. I wasn't at Sometimes the best thing for me to do is say something, one or two things, maybe say nothing. But often the best thing for me to do is get out of the road, maybe stick around in case there's a catastrophe and they really need me. But I try very much much not to intervene unless I need to, And I try very much not to give people accolades or compliments that they have not earned. If they earn it one hundred percent, they're getting it

one hundred percent. But like I said before, if people are getting a trophy, a metaphoric trophy, or round of applause for doing something that really is not special, then you're the creator of that problem. In their life because you've set them up for an expectation that is inconsistent with the practical reality of surviving and thriving in life away from the bubble. And maybe let's redefine safe. Of course, safety matters, but safety safety doesn't mean never being uncomfortable.

Safe means having the tools and the resilience and the capacity to handle things that are hard. So here's the big question. Are we protecting people or are we disempowering them? And this is a tricky one because there are very few absolutes with this, and it's slightly different strategies and approaches for different people, you know, and it depends. You know, there's like stuff with my mum and dad now, who in their mid eighties, and I go, how much do

I do? How much do I help my dad? How much do I let my dad struggle with that thing so that he might build a little bit more confidence or confidence with that thing, And so it's like, this is not clearly defined, but I think this is an important conversation to have. It. It's an important thing for us to think about, you know, and maybe for some of us it's time to stop bubble wrapping life and start to even for ourselves, build resilience because like it

or not, wanted on not, life's not easy. Sometimes it is, but life's not typically easy. Just take a look around, take a look at the world, take a look at the people in your own proximity. Once it or not, it is challenging, it is unpredictable, it's often brutal. But those challenges are the things that kind of help train

us for what is to come. That's probably enough. And I know this is a very Craig Harper episode, but you know, I'm I'm all for supporting and encouraging and loving people towards becoming the version of themselves that they want to be. But I actually know that that outcome is not about my words. And yes, I want to encourage and support you, and I hope that you enjoy what I do and say I hope if you don't,

that's totally okay. But more than all of that self gratifying bullshit, for me, what really matters is your capacity and willingness and courage to apply the things that you hear in this show that resonate and are meaningful and might even hurt a little bit, but under the hurt, you know, It's true when you can at the same time go fuck you, Craig, but also you're right, and then do something with it. You're on your way.