O good.
A team, it's a project. That's you, It's Bobby, it's Tiffany, and it's me Craig Anthony. We're going to start with tiff because she's been crooked. Are you on the men? How are you?
I'm feeling much better, but I've got that raspy, ridiculous horse cough that incidentally, How good is laughing when you have that wheezy, weird kind of thing. I just think laughing so much more fun.
You know what?
It makes you sound like a dirty old man? See there it is there, It is dirty old man.
Laugh.
Hell, that's you. Dude, like a flannel shirt and a packet of winning blues in your pocket and you just tag your hand on your crotch while you're doing that laugh. That's you.
I've got a flanny shirt here, actually.
Yeah, put it on listening.
You know who?
You sound like that cartoon character Muttley. Do you remember Mutley? Bobby?
Think?
I'm like, I know there's a cannoon that sounds like this.
Yeah, Muttley Bobby? Did you ever watch.
What Is with You?
I was going to say, when they let you out of the basement, what.
Are you laughing at? Your dirty old man.
Oh fuck, listen to that. That's worse than I thought. Oh that, we'll just call you Ralph.
Somebody take her cigarettes away? Please?
Oh god god, we'll just call you Muttley from from now. Bobby, Hi, how are you?
Ohis wow? I'm doing a lot better than Tiffany's laugh. I'll tell you that.
There you go. I reckon, you should keep that. Yeah, I like it. I like it. I don't know that the listeners are going to like it. But oh, she's muted herself, and the fucking don't we wish she did that more often? That's now half my listeners are gone. Why don't you mute yourself? You can't.
I'm like, all right, that's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, don't you ever mute yourself? And Greg, well you said it. I speak for the audience now.
I concur I get sick of my own voice, and I think I think too. I regularly get you know, can you shut the fuck up a bit? I'm like, okay, but then other people seem to like it, so I'll solder on try and self regulate. Bobby, what's news? Give us one bit of news on planet Capuccio before we dive in today's topic that you don't know what.
Is I'm moving to Wayne Country.
Ah, and you're you're partial to wine, so that that's a nice fit.
Yeah yeah, I mean if I was pursuing like complete sobriety, this would be an interesting move from me. It's kind of like the famous gangster John Dillinger when they said, John, why do you do it? Why do you rib banks? So because that's where the money is, so kind of like the same thing.
Yeah, Oh god, there's Martley just firing up again. Hell, it builds like a fan star, you know, when it just starts and then just kind of hits a fucking crescendo. Oh dear, all right, I want to talk about the idea today of Tiff talks a lot about doing hard in her presentations, and I think we're obviously we talk about it a bit, but the benefit of doing hard things and the subjective experience of hard versus an objective global reality of hard because one person's hard thing will
be someone else's easy thing and so on. But if we look at this conversation through the lens of us the listener, or ask the hosts as what is easy? Well, what is hard? For me that I would like to make part of my routine and hopefully make it easier
over time. I guess the very obvious comparison being we go to the gym, Initially it's very hard, and then it becomes less hard than it becomes somewhat comfortable, and then somewhat easy, and then we have to up the weights or the sets or reps, or the intensity or the level of commitment to find some new hard so
that we keep growing. Do you think that stepping away from the physiological kind of practice of progressive overload in fitness and strength and flexibility and individual specific sport training, can we apply that principle to our emotional system and our mind in terms of choosing to do things that are hard in order to change ourselves so that we're more resilient or capable. And now the hard thing has become easy. Is that a reasonable idea?
I mean, we're sitting here talking about it, so it has to be. I mean what I mean that is throughout most of human history, even going back not even a century ago, hard was a necessity for survival. So yeah, obviously we can do that. I mean, we evolved into the people we are today. Because our ancestors did very, very hard things, and I would imagine most of them failed at it and we're taken out of the gene pool.
Others were successful, and you know nature selected for that perhaps, But I really think that hard has a needs to fire its pr manager. We need to reframe our definition around what hard is, because I mean, if you look at the most rewarding things in our lives and the things that exhilarate us and give us challenge, I think it's around things that are hard, It's around things that are difficult but sometimes meaningful, right, So I mean our
whole dopaminergic pathway are designed around effort and pursued. So I mean, if you're talking about motivation and the reward associated with that, that requires heart. TIF and I had a podcast years ago. I can't remember the exact episode because that would be insane if I did, but we were talking about doctor Victor Frankel in man Search for Meaning, a book we've discussed on this show, and doctor Victor Frankl had a brilliantly insightful quote where he said that
despair is suffering in the absence of meaning. And I've always had the question, what then is suffering in the presence of meaning. So I think like anything that's anything that's worth getting, is worth enduring for I think that's where a lot of rewards come from. And I don't personally believe that we're all that happy when we're not growing and going through the associated growing pains that comes with any situation that puts us in an environment where
we can readily do that. Even if you look at self determination theory, you know, a lot of times you talk about intrinsic motivation and the elements that make up intrinsic motivation, but there's also something called integrated motivation, where I might not love what I'm doing at the moment, like for me going to the gym. I mean recently, I've experienced this because I have injuries. Now that's really
changed my relationship with exercise. But in the past it's not like, oh, I got to motivate myself to go to the gym. There's no place I'd rather be, So I would work out if there was no physical benefit, just for the way it made me feel in the moment. So the payoff is in the process, and that's intrinsic motivation, but in integrated most motivations where I might not really elect to do that if I could do something else, but the meaning that this represents causes me to engage
in it and struggle through the hard anyway. And there's a like think about a parent waking up three, four or five times in the middle of the night because they have a sick kid. Very few parents roll over and ignore the needs of a sick child. It happens so infrequently that there's a special name for them. We usually call them inmates because society frowns upon stuff like that. But why do we do that even though it's painful.
It's the meaning that that child represents. So when we talk about effort, a lot of times there is this I feel like self congratulatory undertone where I put in all the effort because I'm that type of person, but other people I don't believe. I really struggle with that. I think that when there is enough importance and when there's enough confidence, people do engage in the heart and it's extremely rewarding. I feel like sometimes people don't do very well in kind of cross examining hard in one
area of their life versus another. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think you know, because hard. Hard can be physical, financial, emotional, social, practical, psychological, cognitive, academic. Like, there's so many different kinds of hard. What do you think determines whether or not you know? There are some things that I could do that are hard, but they're stupidly hard and I'm just not that Like, it doesn't matter that much to me. Could I do certain things? Like I got asked, do I want to do a postdoctoral study? No? Could I do it? Yep?
What?
I may be enjoyed that maybe, but no. You know, so like what are the variables? That is it just about how much it matters to us? Because we get the opportunity to choose hard every day, multiple hearts. Maybe, how do we know when that's worth stepping into or confronting? Yeah, based on our needs or our wants.
I think there's a lot of complexity and there's two variables that intersect here. Coach Margaret Moore talks about this in her new book and Leader on Leadership. Margaret Moore is probably one of the top executive coaches in the world, and she talks about the intersection of importance and confidence. How important is this to me? And I would add in some cases, enjoyment is a variable. So I might
enjoy something but it's not fundamentally important to me. Like I might really enjoy watching a Netflix show, but it doesn't produce I mean, some shows really produce meaning. But if I miss something, who cares? So they and then other things might not be terribly enjoyable, but they're meaningful. And then there's confidence. So if I feel that no matter how hard I try, I'm never gonna quite get this, and I have that level of low efficacy, I think
that frames how hard something is. Like for me, simple things are extremely difficult because of the way I was raised. And I don't want to I don't want to hash this out too much on the show. We've done it like a lot before. But I learned how to tie
my shoes in a brutal environment. So my stepfather, who I barely knew at the times, like, all right, I'm gonna teach you how to tie your shoes, and he would show me a step and I would do the stet and all right, now do this, and if I got it wrong, he would just haul off and hit
me hard, like very hard. And then if I did that too many times in a row, because Weirdly enough, when you're terrified and being beaten, it doesn't increase cognitive function when you're trying to execute a series of steps. So then it wasn't like getting hit hard for missing a step. It was a full on beating and getting thrown around the room. And then after five minutes, let's try this again. So I could put together a piece of Ikea furniture and have a meltdown missing a couple
of steps because that's my conditioning. Well, then putting together I keya furniture for me would rank as extremely hard, right because it is very very important. Maybe, but it's furniture low sense of self efficacy and that conditioning where my wife might look at it as I'm gonna pull myself a glass of wine and this is a puzzle. If I miss step, I'm just gonna go back and
retrace it. So that level of enjoyment and that sense of self efficacy that if I just take my time with this, I know I can get it, it decreases her perception of hard. So there's the intersection of confidence and importance, and you can kind of tell where somebody is within their stages of change in the trans theoretical model by where those two points intersect, and I also
think it's an eight interests. Victor Frankel also talked about this, where a clue around what you value and what you're meant to do, what you're engineered for, can be found in what is it that's pretty hard for other people to learn? And it's also really hard for them to do, but for you, it is much easier for you to learn, and it's a lot easier for you to do now if you add meaning and enjoyment to that, I think that that's a clue as to what you're uniquely suited for.
And when you're engaging in something that's hard but you're uniquely suited for it, it becomes invigorating, engaging, and rewarding. When you lack those elements, it becomes redundant. It could become quite torturous. That's what yeah.
And I think the ever present reality too is that most of us, because our brain is kind of wired for safety and security and predictability and comfort and instant gratification, is that it's way easier to go yep, I'm going to do that now because that's no risk, there's no adversity in this, this is not uncomfortable, this is not hard. I'm going to do this easy thing because I'm going to get this immediate payoff, and I'll do the hard thing tomorrow. And then that becomes a five year internal
conversation that never ends. And I think that that's stepping off and being fully committed, I guess. But then even with that, I think, like I know lots of people, even clients that I work with over the years where they would stop and start the same process or a version of the same process ten times, and depending on
the attitude or the talk that went into that. Initially, I wouldn't say it, but I would feel they're not going to do it, just because there was something about the energy or the level of commitment or lack of commitment. And then invariably not all the time, but a lot of times, it's like something happened, they had an event and experience and awakening, a light bulb, something would and then they're like, oh, I'm doing it. I'm like, oh,
they're going to do it. They're actually doing it this time, like something has changed where now this is not something they want to do, this is something they are going to do. And I like is a different energy, there's a different attitude. It's like I don't have more resources or different biology or physiology or potential. It's all the same, but something in their thinking, attitude, whatever has shifted, and it's like invariably they go and do it.
Yeah, there's that element of readiness, I think, and it's not around use these words because it produces this action. It's observe your conversation and your dialogue. So if you take a look at motivational interviewing Ronald Nick and Miller, there are different levels of readiness that are represented within linguistic patterns. It's really interesting. And the acronym darn cat represents them well. And darn staves for desire, ability, reasons,
and need. So when you're talking to someone or you're in a conversation and you're the one who's expressing something, you might talk about out something you want to do in terms of desire. I really want to do this or I feel like I'm able to do this because or you know, here's why, here's the reasons why I think I should do this, and then maybe it's like need where oh, well, here's what happens if I don't do this? So that that's representing need in that linguistic pattern,
and a lot of people think, well, that's readiness, right. Oh, when people start talking about I've heard motivational speakers talk about shifting your language from I should to I want to, there's nothing magic there. It's not shifting your language. It's observe your language because all of those the desire, the ability, the reasons, and the need reflect readiness getting ready to
get ready. It doesn't mean that you're going to do something that's represented in the cat acronym where C is comment, and that's when the language changes. When you start shifting from I want to to I will, that's a much deeper level of commitment. And the A is activation. That's when people say like I'm ready, Like you're talking about like, yeah, I will, you know I want to do this. It's like, no,
I'm ready to do this. And then the greatest predictor that someone will take action or you'll take action is the t where you speak about yourself in the frame of an identity of someone who's already engaged in it, which is kind of like when someone's trying to make a dietary change. There's a couple of approaches right where someone can say, well, I'm not going to eat pizza anymore, pizza is bad. Well, first of all, I don't know if an extreme relationship with food like that is sustainable
or it's healthy and food is not bad. You know, I never saw a pizza commit a crime, and I never saw it even be rude to someone on the checkout queue. But it's a lot easier to talk about what you're going to do rather than what you're not going to do. So you could look at it as okay, you know, for a week, I'm going to eat the same foods that I've typically eaten, but I'm going to add a lot more whole foods to it. I'm going
to add a lot more plans to it. I'm going to bring in a lot more nutrients that support a healthy microbiome and do something like that. Because even though that's a very small step, what starts to happen after a week or two, Well, if your diet's really bad, you'll probably start to feel a lot better and you'll be better at emotional regulation, because a lot of emotional regulation depends on our diet. Right, So if you have a healthier if you have a healthier microbiome, You're going
to produce more serotonin. Serotonin helps with emotional regulation, it helps with a feeling of satisfaction. So all of these things start happening in your favor, and so you're more a to engage in greater dietary changes. But what's really important is you start to see yourself as someone who's already doing it. I am already doing this. It's not like someday or next week or my New Year's resolution is or Monday. It's like, no, I'm doing it now.
And that is very critical to pay attention to those things, because the question becomes what brings your desire to an action? Like I really want to do this? Well, what is if I really want to do this, how can I test? What would be one thing that I could do today that would enable me to act on that desire or what would need to happen or what would I need to believe to bridge that gap between an intention and a measurable behavior? If that makes sense.
H I love that I was thinking about. Are there any circumstances where all that kind of thinking and attitude and readiness and self talk and blah blah blah that becomes redundant. And I think there is one situation where it's not about transformation change, doing the hard thing. Is not about how mentally or emotionally ready you are, but
what happens. And so I was thinking about my friend and I think, oh, also Tip's friend Joel Sardi, who spends life in a wheelchair, who was a soldier, went on I think multiple deployments, came back and had an accident while he was on leave and broke his back and became a quadriplegic. And it's like, all of a sudden, hey, Joel, you're going to do life in a wheelchair. By the way, you can't do this, this, this, this, this, this and this, and you can't reject this like this is you now.
So whether or not you feel ready to be a quadriplegic, it doesn't fucking matter. You are. And so people get in situations where life fucks them over and now they just have to be a different version of themselves. Like readiness doesn't come into it. I'm sure in a way it does, But you know what I'm saying, where and I look at him. He's such a great dad, he's such a great husband, he's such a great speaker. He's a fucking amazing human. He's all about solutions, not problems.
He's like, who knows, who knows? How you know able bodied Joel versus current Joel would be in terms of performance and outcomes and happiness. Maybe, Like it's a weird thing to say that maybe his current version is happier or more productive or whatever than the other version might have been. We don't know, but it's like, and then that brings me back to this, Oh, we can change in a fucking instant if we don't have a choice,
Like we can adapt today. We can behave differently today when we don't have the choice of behaving how we did yesterday because something fucking monumental has shifted. And now I'm this is my reality now. Wasn't my reality yesterday, but now it is, so I have And I'm sure people go through massive peaks and troughs dealing with stuff like that. But it's that we spoke. I don't know if Tiff and I or I spoke at least a couple of times recently about this idea. In psychology, they
call a performance capacity gap. You know, so performance what you're currently doing and capacity what you're capable of doing, you know, like what you what is your absolute capacity? Like what could you if you're if you a jol could you survive? Could you thrive? Could you adapt? Could you improve? Learn, grow, evolve? Could you be a better version of you in a chair than out of all that?
All those kind of amazing questions. It's like, imagine if we didn't have to wait to get into the right state, but we just went I'm doing it because I don't have a choice. But nobody wants to get put in that situation.
No, but there are choices though, like most of the time it's not that dire. But you bring up something that's very important in terms of behavior change. And my disclaimer is pain and situations and difficulty. It's all relative, right, Like if your capacity is not where someone else's capacity is,
that that doesn't mean that you're broken. That's okay. I mean we all talk to Charlie Plumb, right, and you know it's like, well, if I haven't spent several years as a prisoner of war the Hanoi Hilton, Well, what right do I have to complain that, you know, my partner broke up with me?
Well?
No, is it the same thing. No, but is it devastating? Yes, and you should sit with that. So I'm not saying do the comparison, but when we have people like a Joe or a Charlie and say, wow, that's an extraordinary circumstance. What are the attributes that this person is displaying that I admire? I mean, Albert ben dur and social cognitive
theory talked about that in terms of vicarious experience. Where Okay, if I were to emulate in a very small way one of those attributes that Joe demonstrates with courage and with joel il, I'm sorry, So what would what would be one small way that I can demonstrate that? Yeah,
and go out and test that. So I think looking at people who you know, we might not have gone through what they went through, right, we might not be where they are in their journey, But being able to utilize them as an example of vicarious experience and model some of their behaviors I think is one a great framework too. It's kind of psychological distancing, you know, it's like, okay, yeah, well this isn't me and I've done that. Okay, well, let's take a look at this person here. If you
were to do this? What made you adapt as a behavior?
I know this is an unanswerable question to feel free to have an opinion as well, But Bobby, to what extent do you think like we need to Like let's say you said to me, Harps, I want to set up a personal training center. Can I do an hour consult with you and you walk me through peaks and troughs and challenges and bullshit you dealt with. And in fact, let's do five sessions. So we do five hours of me coaching you on you know, how to maybe do or not do certain things and build this business that
I built multiple times? Right, and you go, well'll be good to talk to. Great because it was not bad at that. How much can we learn through that? And I guess it varies, but versus just starting with a blank sheet and just trial and error and you doing it yourself experiences through someone else or your own experience or both.
Well, if you're I think both matters. And here's why I'm saying that, because if you're going to do something you've never done before, but somebody else has been very successful, and I think the key point here it's not like, Okay, I started this business and this is what I've started
multiple businesses, and here's a history of successes. I want to learn from that person, Like I want to talk to that person because they obviously understand a lot about what they're doing and what I need to do or the mistakes that I'm very likely to make that I need to look out for. But there's also how I approach things in the world. So in one sense, what works for another person, especially if it's procedural, could probably
work for me. But in terms of what inspires people, what motivates people, you know, how they approach doing anything. You know, there's a lot of space for uniqueness there. And I'm still going to have to go out and do trial and error to want to learn from myself to test what works for me. I'm a big fan of going out and just wandering about a little bit
in life. Not you don't have direction, but it's almost like if you're on a ship and you've got a compass, instead of sailing in a straight line, kind of like letting the current of the waves take it in and out a little bit, because I think you'll find that you'll find out a lot about yourself by putting yourself in different situations, different contacts. I think a lot of that is critical for self discovery. So my answer would be both.
You've done. If you've done both, you've had a fair bit of coaching, but you've also set up two gyms, and you've managed people and led people and had to go through the fucking all the mayhem of money and books and partnerships and development and brand And what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I was thinking, and I find it difficult to answer that question because I think there are a lot of variables in what comes into it being who you are, how you think and learn and function, and how you execute ideas. One of the biggest things I remember banging on about after starting the podcast was the lesson for me that naivety was a gift. If I was not so naive about how podcasts worked, how sponsorship worked, how getting guests worked, I wouldn't have taken action on any
of them. I had sponsors within eight weeks. But I've made it up, and I made and I created a way to offer value and out there in the world of people doing the same thing as me. I would join groups and I would read people asking how to and other people saying don't bother. You can't rah rah. So I think, yeah, it depends who you're looking at, how you think, and how somebody else's coaching or lessons. And this is why I took so long to dive
into a speaking course. How is that going to affect what you're naturally talented at and what you're already doing well based on someone else's opinion?
Were you doing right now until recently? Both? Right, you're in a course being coached on speaking, but you're also separate to that out there speaking like you're doing the job. You're already doing it. You're already on a stage in front of humans, sharing thoughts, insights, messages, building rapport, connection and staining all the shit that you do. And over here you're being trained. So you can do a direct comparison.
Do you get more value from just doing it? And I know this is not global, this is just you, but do you get more valuable, more value and more I don't know, benefit from the courses and all the talking you and I have talked a lot, or from just being on the stage and doing it.
I want to say yes, more from doing it, But I also have an awareness that that's my bias opinion, and that's my experience, Like, what don't I see? So I think maybe it's both, but I do think I do think it's really important to just get out there and get hands dirty.
Yeah, Bobby, we're going to wind up. I was just going to say, so, somebody's got to they're listening to this and they're hard. Could be something completely unrelated to what we've spoken about today, a completely different challenge. And again there's no global answer, individual answer to this very broad question. But how do we know where to start? Like, is there any advice for somebody just going?
Fuck? I?
It all makes sense, but I'm so overwhelmed. It's so big this thing that I do not know where to start.
We'll want to start small and over the past year looking at values that people have. One value that I've observed, and if it's not innatly for you, then it won't work. But one value I've observed in people that's a superpower's curiosity. What am I curious about? It's overwhelming. Yeah, there's probably one hundred steps to it. What is one thing that I'm curious about experimenting with this week and just seeing
what happens? Because I think curiosity in a lot of ways is an antitude to overwhelm unless sure, well then yeah, it's very risky. Don't want to use up any of those nine lives from that. But yeah, because it's like I think when you when you take things and break it down in terms of experiments, they're fun and the whole idea of an experiment is not like, Okay, did I accomplish this thing? Did I fail? Did I succeed? What did I learn? What do I learn from this?
And how does that learning inform my next step? So curiosity takes things from the oh, this is huge, and am I going to succeed at this? Can I do this? Am I going to fail? That doesn't make a difference, doesn't matter what am I going to learn? Because if it's what am I curious about? What's one small step I could take? And what what have I learned from it? There's no waste of time?
Yeah yeah, yeah, And what will I do next time? And what won't I do next time? You know, it's like just taking practical shit away. Thank you both. Tiffany and Cooque has a podcast. She might be interested. It's called Roll the Punches. She's done a thousand episodes as she keeps on fuck and banging on. I've done a thousand episodes. All right, good, well done. Ah, No, she's amazing. It's amazing. Bobby hasn't done a thousand episodes, but he's
probably done ten thousand on other people's shows. The self help Antidote is his amazing podcast, Robert Capuccio dot on the interwebs, and you can find him on LinkedIn and all dodgy bookstores, and Muttley you can find in a bar leaning over a flagon of something wrapped in brown paper with a fucking dodgy, old, stinky, old flannel on, just looking shifty as fuck in the corner. Did I miss anything?
You just listed all of my life's aspirations.
Oh fucking Muttley's going to finish the show, so
Bye,