In this episode Dr. Megan McElheran, a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with uniformed service personnel delves into Dr. McElheran’s development of upstream training programs aimed at preparing military and public safety professionals to manage stress before it becomes overwhelming. Marcus and Dr. McElheran explore the concepts of post-traumatic growth, the importance of action-oriented stoic philosophy, and practical steps for emotional regulation. Dr. McElheran shares her journey into psychology, the creation of the Before Operational Stress (BOS) program, and data-backed evidence of its effectiveness.
Episode Highlights:
12:45 The Role of Stoicism in Uniformed Services
24:28 The Importance of De-escalation and Self-Care
25:26 Training Gaps and Operational Stress
26:15 The Duality of Tactical Skills and Trauma
32:43 Facing Fear and Taking Action
Dr. Megan McElheran is a dedicated trauma therapist specializing in helping first responders, active-duty members of the Canadian Forces, and community members navigate the aftermath of traumatic events. With expertise in evidence-based practices such as Prolonged Exposure, EMDR, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy, Megan provides a safe, structured environment for clients to process and heal. Her work emphasizes resilience and the profound capacity for change, as shared in her 2011 TEDx talk, Trauma, Change, and Resilience. Megan’s compassionate approach empowers individuals to rebuild their lives, transforming the impact of trauma into growth and strength.
You can learn more about Dr. McElheran here: wayfound.ca/dr-megan-mcelheran
Episode Transcript:
00:30
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you wanna know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Dr. Megan.
01:00
Mechel Hearn is a clinical psychologist and has worked with uniformed service personnel for over 20 years. She has focused for the last decade on developing upstream training programs for military members and public safety professionals, believing that strong minds train first. Now I’ve had her on the show before. I was actually on her show recently. And Dr. Megan doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. And what I mean by walking is I mean that she’s done the Baton Death March.
01:27
And she’s going to do it again in March of next year. She knows of what she speaks. She is not one of these people that just popped up and try to cash in on stoicism because it is in vogue. She has 23 years in this profession. And if there’s anybody that I’m going to have on the program to push, to actually give them some sort of real functional, practical, pragmatic wisdom that they can apply in their everyday life, this before operational stress program that you have is incredible. And I love the.
01:56
that you have it for veterans, you have it for active military, you also have it curtailed for first responders, you were mentioning tow trucks, things like that. You were also talking about for the legal professions as well because of their specific stress. So tell us a little bit about the origin stories that led you, first of all, you into the profession for you, and then tell us how that evolved into the boss system.
02:22
Well, thank you so much for having me back. I just love talking to you and I was sharing with you before how inspiring our last conversation was and how meaningful on a day-to-day basis. So I’m just, I’m thrilled to be here. So I finished, I did an undergraduate degree in psychology and that’s not necessarily worth the paper that it’s written on. And so started to think about, do I really wanna do this as a career and what could that look like? And I actually ended up.
02:48
My very first job out of school was working in a program for girls who had been involved in the sex trade. So these were adolescent girls and they were trying to get out of that and get back into school and get their lives moving forward. And I’m like this 22 year olds, naive, wide-eyed, whatever. But I just was so compelled in this experience because these girls had obviously had so much trauma in their lives, as you can imagine.
03:16
And yet here they were, like regardless of what they were still dealing with, they were trying to get their lives back on track and they were really motivated towards living well and they were eager to learn. And that was just like a totally pivotal moment in my life where I was like, there’s something indelible about the human spirit. If people can have gone through what these kids have gone through and here they are still trying to find a way to thrive. So, I mean, that was it for me. I was like, I need to learn more about this. I need to understand this. And so I, you know, I,
03:44
decided I was going to go on to graduate school and graduate training, which I did and which I started shortly thereafter and knew that I wanted to learn about trauma. It was like, how could this be? How could there be these seemingly opposite things existing at the same time? And I landed in California. I went to school at a program that was a consortium between Stanford University and the Palo Alto University. And in that system, if you want to learn about trauma, you go to work in the VA.
04:13
And so I started almost from the word go, all of my practical training in the Menlo Park Veterans Affairs System and the National Center for PTSD and didn’t know that I was going to find the intersection of trauma and uniformed service to be as compelling as I did, but I did and never looked back. So that’s kind of where it all, that’s where the work and the starting to understand trauma and service, that’s where it started from. And
04:40
Just like you say, when you start looking into these individuals and seeing, because you have some tremendous stuff on traumatizing foreign leadership, so there is this beautiful, powerful duality if we are willing to look at that. But for many people, when they face trauma, they either completely back away from it and they just allow that to be where they develop and that’s as far as they’re going to go. Or they’re willing to say, I’m going to at least step into this and try to make something out of my life. And…
05:09
that, like you said, that’s where the human spirit comes in. And now it’s like, wow, if I could have just given this person this key or this practice or this exercise at that time, where could they be? And that’s something that they can give to someone else. So that’s kind of where this before operational stress program came from.
05:30
Yes, I mean, that’s like, those are the very, very first seeds that got planted. And what I came to learn about in the early years of training was this idea of post-traumatic growth. And I loved it. So post-traumatic growth, there’s a couple of theorists named Tedeschi and Calhoun. If anyone’s interested, you can go back to the early 90s and read their work. But they really looked at the fact that there are ways that we can grow and develop as humans by virtue of how we work through trauma.
06:00
we can develop parts of ourselves that we couldn’t have developed had we not actually gone through that trauma. Now, how we go through it matters, right? You need to be able to find ways to productively engage with and work your way through. But if you can, people can come to this place where it’s like, I couldn’t have known this about myself, or I couldn’t have had, you know, maybe this degree of wisdom or this sense of my purpose on earth had I not had to go through this devastating thing, right? And…
06:26
I just loved it, especially in the military context and then in the public safety context and beyond because there is so much trauma that people go through. So the idea that this could actually be some of the necessary ingredients to help people truly become who they’re supposed to be, like I just, I think that’s a very inspiring message. How many times do we see people that make mistakes and they beat themselves up and they want to go back and change it, but they have to understand that making these mistakes is part of the human condition.
06:56
So you can either continue making those same mistakes and call those mistakes your life and your destiny, or you can choose to have agency and say, I’m going to take a step forward. I’m going to invest in myself and see what I can do. And that’s what’s so incredible. Lots of times, whenever we feel like we’re about to go down.
07:21
getting a little emotional here. I love the emotion Marcus, and you know, like, there’s so much about your story that I think is so, it’s so imprinted in what we’re talking about, you know? Yeah. When you feel like you’re about to go down, that’s when you had to fight the hardest. Yeah. And it’s crazy because when you actually do fight with everything you have, you don’t go down. No, and that’s one of the things that I’ve loved so much about.
07:52
you know, walking alongside probably thousands of people at this point in time, as they’ve tried to work through these adversities is, um, the suffering, the pain doesn’t have to be like, it’s not like we have to get over that in order to grow and thrive and learn. Like the two can happen at the same time. And I love that idea, right? Like we actually have so much more capacity to hold.
08:18
the things that life is going to bring our way, then I think a lot of people recognize or give themselves credit for, you know? And that’s why we have to, like you said, have that courage to lean into it and say, yes, what does this adversity teach me? And again, it forces us to hit that, those triggers that we wouldn’t normally have. And because we think we’re pushing, we think we’ve hit this threshold, but then something happens and it’s like, now what do I do? I can’t do anymore, but yet we find something. We find a way to get in there.
08:48
I mean, that’s exactly it, right? Like how many times is it like, I just can’t handle this for one more second and then lo and behold, another second passes and then you’re handling it, right? And so I just think there’s something so powerful in helping people to actually tap into that potential that they probably don’t even realize that they have. And I’m not talking about like, when I’ve seen example after example of this example of people who have grown and changed and turned the adversity that they experienced into something.
09:14
so powerful and so profound. I mean, I’m speaking to someone who has a story like that and you didn’t get there, people don’t get there by shying away from or being scared of what they’ve experienced. It is this like leaving it all in the field, going into it, maybe not liking it. You don’t have to like it, but being willing to have it, right? That is, it is so foundational or fundamental to these incredible inspiring experiences that people can then have.
09:42
In fact, you said this to me in our first conversation, and I love it, and I completely agree. Like, you’re never gonna find anybody who is doing something inspiring or motivating or what have you, who hasn’t gotten there because of something difficult. Yeah, there’s usually a direct correlation. And once we’ve been through that ourselves, we can start to see it in other people. So that’s why when we see this person that is not allowing that light or that strength or that ability to take action, when we see a dulled by something, it’s like,
10:12
We want to be the ones that help them crack through that. Now we can’t do the work for them, but as you’re saying, if you can give them that indication, maybe that one statement, that one technique, that’s the thing that gets them going. And it’s their path, they have to walk it. But once they realize that they do have the agency to begin stepping in that direction, that’s sometimes all they need to begin to take this journey. Yeah, and I think maybe…
10:38
like you do or the work that you do, I feel like I’m really here to try to facilitate things. I can’t do anything for anyone, nor can they for me. But the facilitation of this recognition of investing in yourself or having faith in yourself versus being fearful, because fear can paralyze us, will paralyze us, or can shift us into inaction or self-doubt or whatever.
11:05
Whereas if we can have faith that, you know, we take a step and we take another step and we take another step and, you know, even if we stumble along the way, the faith that we will figure our way through it, you know, like, there’s more to learn from that than there is from staying silent or staying put. Yeah. And if saying silent and staying put was going to be the answer, then it would have worked by now. Right. And so that’s why we see so many people that are, it’s like they have to take action.
11:35
completely. So, you know, I spent about 15, 13 years, something like that, in this space. I ultimately left California and I came back to Canada and kept working with uniformed service personnel of different sectors and backgrounds and was working for a really long time in what I now think of as a very downstream sort of space. So treating operational stress injuries and you know.
12:02
both in the US and then in Canada, working with soldiers who were coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and ultimately being medically discharged, and trying to help people recover from psychological trauma that they experienced primarily in combat and then in policing situations, et cetera. And I got to a place about a decade ago, and I kind of like affectionately now think about it as a bit of an existential crisis, honestly.
12:26
Because I was seeing, you know, I was so busy. We didn’t have enough people who understood the work of uniform service. And so, I mean, I was seeing like 30 people a week treating trauma, treating trauma, treating trauma. And I just was like, this can’t be it. Like, this can’t be the whole story. We can’t just be putting Band-Aids on bullet holes kind of thing, right? And this is where I had this, you know, fortunate opportunity to start to learn about stoicism because people were talking to me all the time about.
12:55
you know, how stoic they had to be or this idea that, you know, being stoic in the face of, of, of trauma or tragedy was what was called for da da da. And that took me down this path of really starting to try to understand what was being referred to when people would use the term stoic in that way, and really understood very quickly that what people were referring to was actually pseudo stoicism. And then I dove into the pool.
13:20
what is stoicism actually about? And again, that happened about a decade ago, and I’m happy to talk as much or as little as you’d like about sort of how the before operational stress curriculums started, but it really, it had its kind of forged in the fire in that moment of going, this is not what the stoics meant. This is not what the stoics were encouraging of us. And we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to try to right this ship. And so…
13:47
That’s why I love what you’re doing with the program. And for those of you that are listening to what we’re saying, stay tuned until the end of the episode because Dr. Megan has an opportunity for us to give you a discount on this program that they have, which is incredible. When she came to me with the opportunity, I said, I’d love to be a part of it. And that way we can take whatever. You’re essentially compiling eight hours of, tell us more about that specific. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so.
14:13
I started just kind of off the side of my desk for a while, learning about Stoic philosophy and reading the great Stoics and the early works and really immediately developed this hypothesis of somehow, somewhere along the way, not that long ago, if you understand the history, we really distorted the message that the Stoics had, particularly around emotion.
14:36
And we’ve convinced in modern contemporary times that to be stoic in uniform service is to be unemotional or unaffected or stiff upper lip or that kind of thing. And the hypothesis is that is contributing to these really high rates of psychological injury we’re seeing in the uniform services. And I stand by that. I actually don’t believe it’s a hypothesis. I think we’ve proven that to be true. Because if we are teaching people who are going into these sort of high trauma exposure occupations.
15:02
that how they’re supposed to deal with trauma is by pushing away from it or avoiding it or minimizing it or saying it didn’t affect them or what have you, we are ineffectively training them. You know, we were training them to be less tactically efficient in terms of dealing with the psychological traumas. And we would never do that with teaching physical tactics. So why are we doing that with psychological tactics? Yeah, I absolutely agree. And these different systems that you have are these different…
15:31
ways that you approach it for these different professions. You were saying how that you have them in these sort of bite size abilities. So you said the longest video that you have is say seven minutes. So for anybody that says, listen, I don’t have time for that, or I don’t want to, I guarantee you, you can find seven minutes somewhere in your day. Like get off social media for seven minutes and just lean into whatever this is because they’re going to be functional exercises. They’re going to be things that you can start applying right now. And
16:02
I don’t want to say it in like a macabre kind of way, but we never know when we’re going to need this sort of understanding or these sort of exercises. We may need them, but really the data that we read about them. But yeah, if we don’t start doing them and then we get hit with some sort of trauma or some sort of adversity, we are grossly ill prepared for it. And we know that it’s coming. Like it’s an inevitability. It’s not going to stop. The way the world is right now, there’s a lot of political upheaval.
16:30
no matter what side that you’re on. Having said that, that does not mean that there are not gonna be other things that approach us from different avenues of approach that we can ambush by financial, personal, spiritual, psychological. So having these tools at your disposal is what allows us. And I said this before, but a philosophy is only as good as a person using it. And that’s why I really agree with the way that Dr. Megan’s doing this, because this is not just some like little quote.
17:00
this is actually going deep. There is actually a very much a method to the maddest on what she’s building all this curriculum on. So instead of just trying to buy another copy of this book or look at another, still a quote on social media, which is now rampant and in vogue, I would challenge you to actually apply some of it. And that’s what she’s given you the opportunity to do with this boss system. Yeah. And you know,
17:23
The longest video was seven minutes. Most of them we’ve tried to put into three to five minute chunks. So, you know, in this existential crisis, I sort of was, I sat down on a weekend and I actually dictated to my husband, I was like, just sit down and write. And so I just dictated to him for a day. He was such a good sport. This is what I think it should look like. And, you know, starting with this place of what I propose is that we’ve misinterpreted what the Stoics meant. And so trying to start from that place.
17:51
And then we look at what actually happens to your nervous system, what happens in your brain that this psychological injury of post-traumatic stress takes hold. Because if we can understand the pathway to injury, perhaps we can do some things to intervene and protect against it, right? And then we have three modules that are focused on operationalizing skills, actual practical things people can do multiple times a day, post-incident as a mental hygiene habit like.
18:19
actually putting into concrete principles, these are things you can do to help yourself. And then we talk about how we engage in relationships. And then we finish in the curriculum with a different idea of approaching the work specifically. So, and I’ve got a couple of papers on this if anybody’s nerdy like me and wants to read this. And actually, Dr. Aniston, I wrote one together. So we propose this idea of something called functional disconnection and functional reconnection. That is about, you know, when you have to go out on
18:49
you know, you’re outside the wire, you have to go to a critical institute or whatever, you need to disconnect and we wanna encourage that and we wanna make sure people know how to do that. What we think that has been missing and what our evaluation is showing is we haven’t taught people how to reconnect. And so this model is about disconnect when you need it, but then actually have some practices and some ways that you can reconnect to, you know, work through process, metabolize the thing so you can keep moving forward, right? And…
19:14
There’s lots of stoic exercises we weave into this. And it really is like, I think about this as we are trying to equip people with ways to empower themselves to deal with a world that is full of stress and trauma, and you’re going to get more of it depending on the occupation that you’re in, but it’s actually giving people again, tactical skills that they can train on, they can practice so that we show up differently to these things when they happen. And that’s, that’s so important. As you were saying, if I just get used to
19:44
Detaching, well, it’s really easy for that to become a default setting. And now I don’t attach in a conversation with loved ones, family, all these things that I’m fighting so hard to defend. And then as you’re saying, having these SOPs, these standard operating procedures that we can plug into is like, this just happened step one, step two, step three. Now we don’t sit here in this like rumination wondering what did I’ve done differently, what, what could I have done differently? No, go to this, start applying it.
20:13
just start moving. And as you’re taking those steps, I mean, literally like steps on the baton death march, you just start taking the first step, you follow through it, and now all of a sudden you’re moving. All of a sudden you’re making progress. And if nothing else, you’re moving away from that place of just being in consternation and not moving and being paralyzed. In combat, what do we learn? If you’re on the X, as they say, that’s when you’re a target, you have to move. You have to advance your position or you have to fall back in a way that’s actually tactically intelligent.
20:43
Well, totally. And we have to decouple this idea of like, you know, movement sometimes from a psychological perspective is our behavior, it’s our thoughts, it’s our emotions. There is movement there. And actually movement is a life force. It’s a life source. Right. And so, you know, I go back to the Stoics. The Stoics never said, don’t feel anything, don’t show anything. The Stoics said if there’s emotion to feel, feel it, but then keep moving forward in a productive direction towards virtue. Right. And, and that’s, I think, so much of what we’re trying to operationalize is like,
21:11
you don’t have to not have a thing. Your body doesn’t need to only ever be in a certain place or you only ever have certain kinds of emotions. No, you just have to learn practices to show up and accept and lean into what’s there, trusting, having the faith that when you do that, it will actually pass, but then you get to keep moving forward in a values-based direction. And we train on that in the Before Operational Stress curriculum too. It’s like…
21:36
One of the things we talk about is you have to know your code. You have to know your philosophy. You have to know what it is that you’re like, why are you here? You need to figure that out. You need to go through the, you know, internal exercise of putting your sort of stamp on why am I doing the things that I’m doing, because that’s going to help you keep moving in a productive direction. Yeah, I love that. And I know that there’s a lot of material, but is there a simple example that you could give us to give us sort of an idea of what that looks like?
22:04
because I think that even that example would be enough to give people more of a desire to learn more about those. Yeah, for sure. So a common example that I hear is people will go home at the end of their day in whatever context that they’re in, but let’s say it’s a uniform service context and the feedback will be that they come home and they’re still the Sergeant Major with their wife or their kids or what have you. What we’re proposing is…
22:32
be a sergeant major, be super good at that. Like that’s your job, that’s your occupation. Like refine that, become elite in that role. But then, you know, recognize that there’s gonna be a different set of skills and practices and strategies you need to use when you’re going home to them, be with your wife and kids. And they probably want something different from you than what your soldiers need, right? But you’re not a light switch. And so what we train on is we actually have a five step process that’s about
22:59
really teaching people how to tune in. So can you name what you’re feeling? Can you track it? Can you notice where you’re feeling it? Can you develop rituals, particularly when you’re coming home from work and going back in the home environment? Can you develop some rituals to really support regulation of your nervous system so that when you go in the house, you’re there and you’re ready, right? And we have a number of different sort of strategies that we teach on that, but it really is in the space of
23:27
you want to be able to be available and emotional and flexible in a way when you’re at home with your kids or your spouse or your friends or what have you that you don’t necessarily want or need when you are in operational go mode, right? The two are not necessarily compatible. But if you don’t learn, if you don’t focus on how to actually create some differentiation, the one that was forged in a survival context is going to be the default. And I can’t tell you the number of people.
23:54
Again, thousands of people I have talked to over time, where this is where their marriage has broke down. This is where they get estranged from their kids. This is where they start to feel like they’re a monster. And it’s because they don’t recognize that we’re gonna, we are going to habitually default to a certain way of being if we don’t create some balance. That’s so powerful. And again, before, if you’re in the military or you’re getting ready to hit a house, so to speak, there are PCCs, PCIs, pre-combat checks.
24:23
pre-combat inspections, we know exactly what we’re gonna do. We go over the plan over and over again. Why would you not wanna use a similar intelligent, thought out, premeditated ideal to deescalate, to put yourself back in this position, to show up as the best version of yourself as opposed to the emotionally broken part of you that you had to deal with when you were the Sergeant Major, as it were. Well, and you know, like, and so I’ve talked to lots of soldiers over the years and, you know.
24:50
folks from a lot of different professions. And what, again, what I have heard, which has been really influential over the training that we’re trying to offer is, I got trained really well to be an operator. I got trained really well to do my job and to do my job really well. There’s parts of my humanity that I either had to shelve or maybe dampen or what have you. And I get that, like I’m a trauma therapist. There’s a part of my reactions to things I have to learn how to manage too.
25:18
But I was lucky. I got trained on the importance of treating myself like my instrument. And so I have to learn how to take care of it. And that’s what I hear is the gap in training is there’s too many people who got trained really well to operate, but they didn’t really get trained how to shift out of operational mode. And, you know, we’re thinking that in some parts of, you know, some parts of the US and Canada, North American statistics, you know,
25:43
maybe we’re looking at 25% of a workforce, maybe in some places that’s as high as 50% of a workforce, screening positive for operational stress injuries, mental health conditions. There’s something about the work that is complicit in this. And so again, my working hypothesis for the last decade and our data is sort of showing, these are tactical skills we can train people and it’s essential that we do because otherwise we’re not actually doing something to really tackle this mental health crisis that’s been prevalent for the last.
26:12
Well, for a really long time now. Well, and just like I think I said on my interview with you and Tim, or maybe on our last interview, why would we have all these things in place to make sure that an officer or a soldier is tactically sound and they qualify with their weapon? Why would we not give them a skill set equally on the other side of the duality to say, listen, if you’re going to have to draw your weapon, then.
26:38
On the other side, that coin is going to be this trauma. How do you respond to it? How are you informed from it? And also you were saying, I think it’s a great point, how do you insulate yourself? How do you protect yourself? How are you bringing yourself back to take care of your instrument? I know that physicality is big for that, being able to cope with it, correct? Yeah, totally. I mean, I can sometimes be guilty of preaching and not practicing fully, but actually not.
27:04
tons of the time, like I live in accordance with what we’re talking about, right? So I mean, I really do try to show up to the adversity that comes in my life from the place of what does this have to teach me? You know, I have, I absolutely engage in exercises of voluntary discomfort. You know, I like to set challenges for myself to see if I can do them and not just to see if I can accomplish them, but to see what it’s like for me to go through them and the things that I can cultivate from that. So you know, and then…
27:35
all of the things that we understand help people to develop sort of post-traumatic growth and wisdom and all those things. Like I try to put those things into practice. So you know, like I have an inventory of like mental, cognitive, emotional, you know, social kinds of things that I engage in regularly. And I have a really, really strong understanding of what I believe I’m doing here with the time that I’ve been given. And none of that just happened. Like I’ve had to, I’ve had to go through.
28:01
difficult times and learn that myself through experience and practice. But yeah, there’s nothing that I ever advocate or train on that I don’t believe is important for me to practice as well. And I think that’s another reason why. I don’t think everybody needs to come to the taan, but maybe they do. I think it would be important for them to. And then I think that’s why I resonate with your message so much because I can see that you’re actually living it. You’re actually walking the walk. It’s very easy for people to regurgitate something from someone else or…
28:30
say something that sounds interesting or compelling, and then clearly behind closed doors, they’re not doing it. Or I’ve been in this industry long enough to where I’ve seen some people that you would think would conduct themselves in a certain way. And that’s not always the case. Because they’re human beings and they’re fallible, having said that, we can either use that as an excuse to not try to become what we are capable of, or we can say, you know what, if I can just take one step closer today than what I was yesterday.
29:00
I’m already winning. I’m already making that inroads to where I need to be. Totally. And like we were talking about this idea that suffering and growth can actually exist at the same time. In some ways, they have to exist at the same time because that’s essentially what growing pains are, right? Growing is painful. So I would say that that’s a good thing.
29:22
that duality of faith and fear I’m oftentimes playing with. Like I by no means try to present or suggest that I’ve got this all figured out because they don’t, right? Every single day I engage in a contemplation of, you know, where am I on this thing? Am I being driven by a belief and the stewardship that I believe I have over what I’m doing here on earth? Or am I giving into fear? Is there something that is uncomfortable for me and therefore am I pulling away from something?
29:51
You know what, sometimes I do. Sometimes I do avoid difficult things or delay something. Like I am also human infallible, but I think it’s the recognition that we have to come back. It’s the recognition that we have to remind ourselves that time is short and our opportunities to really show ourselves who we are, like we don’t have infinite amounts of time for that. I think it’s almost like meditation. We try to focus on the breathing or the presence. And then as we drift, we don’t judge ourselves. We don’t beat ourselves up.
30:21
We just come back to it. It’s the same thing in any practice. And like you said, practicing these ethos, these stoic mentalities, actually using the stoic ethos in a way that will help us move in that direction. That’s it, it’s built into it. It’s supposed to be difficult. We’re supposed to fall off the path. If we’re doing it and everything is going smoothly, then there’s a very good chance that we’re under-indexing, that we’re not doing enough. Well, and you know, I don’t know if you ever think about this, but I sometimes, like when I read…
30:46
Marxist-Releases meditations or I read some of his writings, I think about where he was in space and time when he was writing those. He was not living a life of ease. You know what I mean? These were his musings that were coming from tremendously difficult periods of time when he was the emperor and people wanting to assassinate him. I try to remind myself of that because I think Stoicism is so much in popular media nowadays. It’s easy to think that these were…
31:13
musings or contemplations that came from someone sitting back writing and looking at the sky or something. And that’s not the case. He earned it. And I really like that. I don’t know if you are familiar with Brene Brown or not, and I’m going to screw up this quote, but she has this quote that I just love. And it goes something like, if you’re not in the ring pretty routinely getting your ass kicked, then I’m not interested in the feedback that you have to offer me. If you’re out there and you’re actually…
31:43
putting it on the line and trying it and falling and failing and whatever, then you know, then you have a voice in my head, but otherwise, no. No, I, it’s the man in the arena mentality, right? That’s the idea. And it’s also, again, at Aurelius, if we look at it, we can see written in black and white, his thoughts, his beliefs. And even then, it was still hard for him to be able to execute them against the machine of the Roman Empire. He was trying to do the right thing. And then there’s a revolt. And in his mind, he’s like,
32:14
I should just execute this person. I don’t want them to build another army and come back and flank me. But yet he’s like, no, the idea is to do the right thing. And in my mind, this is the right thing. And so again, what happens, this is on a huge scale. Everybody sees it. People are like, you’re an idiot, or now he’s a pushover. And what does that do for some people that actually makes them come after him? But yet in his mind, this is what he was trying to do. This is what he was doing with that mentality. Yeah.
32:43
Totally. And so like again, right? Like that fear-driven decision-making or fear-driven living, right? Where people are like, unless I kind of know how it’s gonna unfold or what’s gonna happen, then I’m not gonna do it, right? And that is just like, again, that’s grows us down, right? Like that stunts us. The ability to go, you know, if I can really check in with myself and I know that I’m trying to do this for perhaps a virtuous or the right reason at least, you know, like if I have reason to believe this could be,
33:12
a good choice for someone or could have a beneficial impact, well then I’m gonna do it. And if it doesn’t go that way, then I will deal with that. But it’s far better to act and figure that out than to hold off and equivocate, right? And then we lose 30 years of our lives having never taken a risk or dared to challenge ourselves. So I mean, I think about this stuff in the context of how do we…
33:37
help people self-actualize, if I think about Abraham Maslow’s terminology, but I also think it’s so relevant to folks who are sacrificing in the context of service. Like yes, there’s a very, very strong likelihood in reality you are going to come across some tremendous adversity or discouraging circumstances or whatever. The same principles apply, right? Go back to the Emperor of Rome having to figure out what the hell am I going to do and who’s this going to piss off? Well, you still take some action. You do the thing.
34:06
and you find out. That’s it. And again, there’s no way for us to possibly know until we begin taking those first steps. And that’s why in our conversation on your show or even this idea of OctaNomber, but that’s it. We really have no fucking clue where we’re gonna go until we’ve taken that first step. Because sometimes that first step changes the orientation and tire lines like, oh, I see that there is this now. And all of a sudden, have we not taken that step and just had it on a whiteboard all of a sudden.
34:34
Yeah, this is fantastic in theory, but application is everything. Well, and you know, and I would be so interested in your thoughts of this too. Like, I think there’s the, there’s like the tangible external things that we have to confront or the consequences of our decisions or whatever. But I actually think the thing that people fear the most is themselves. Right? And like if you’ve ever had the experience of, I don’t know, like being brought to your knees in sobbing and grief or something, you know.
35:01
Like that’s a tremendously painful experience. And yet if we can be brought to our knees and we can find out that even if we, you know, we sob and we mourn and we wail and we whatever, but then actually it crashes and it passes, that’s the stuff I think that we need to learn about ourselves, right? There’s nothing that can happen inside of ourselves that we can’t handle, that we can’t address. And I think that is so much of what people push away from is they don’t know how to handle their own discomfort. Yeah, everybody talks about confidence and resilience, but…
35:30
The only way to do that is to try to do something that to you feels incredible and fail miserably at it and fall down in front of everybody. And then take a breath and realize you’re not made out of porcelain and dust yourself off and look around and realize that a lot of people aren’t even looking. And then just keep walking towards that thing. And all of a sudden you’re closer to what you could become as opposed to just this life of quiet desperation.
36:00
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And, and the having to seek increasingly, you know, larger doses of cheap dopamine, as you put it, which I which I just love, like, I don’t know, I just think that’s, that’s it. What I love so much about folks who are driven towards being of service to others is that this is usually driven by, you know, like care for humanity and care for our civilization and a desire to help and to be better and leave things better than when
36:27
we found it, you know, like usually there’s some part of that narrative I just gave that’s embedded in why people want to serve, right? And that is a fundamental sort of human calling. And as human beings, we are fundamentally feeling creatures. That’s how we learn about our world and what matters to us and what have you. And so the notion that somewhere along the way we should ask people who are doing this tremendously human centric, you know, these acts of service to stop feeling.
36:56
That we’re not actually encouraging that and demonstrating ways in which that should just be, like that should be in some ways what we lead with. Like it’s just bananas to me, right? And again, like that’s so much about what I think, you know, from my perspective, we’re trying to re-infuse into how people approach, you know, taking care of this world and this community and each other. It’s learning that we actually need feelings to be at the forefront.
37:25
and that we don’t have to attach any meaning to them, that in fact, again, we can just have this stoic practice of kind of showing up to them and recognizing that any interpretation we’re gonna make, positive or negative, is something that we’re creating. It’s not actually a thing. Yeah, it’s all things are neutral until we give it some sort of meaning. That’s right, that’s right. And so when sorrowful things happen or when angering things happen, the natural way that we’re designed to feel is sorrowful or angry or whatever.
37:55
but we’re not designed to stay there. We’re designed to experience it, feel it, learn from what it has to tell us, and then move forward. And we’ve lost that. I think we’ve lost that somewhere along the way. Right, I think in today’s culture, emotion seems to be the thing that is at the wheel. And if the emotions are unstable or they’re all over the place, then we can see how a person’s life would be in a similar vein.
38:18
I mean, again, I’m interested in your thoughts on this. I guess I sort of look at what we maybe observe in the last 20 years or so of our, at least Western societies. And we see narratives that have been present for many, many decades of, again, the stiff upper lip or the boys don’t cry or whatever. And we see this increasing sort of mental health instability in our society. And like, do we possibly think there’s a correlation there? Like, do we think that the more we…
38:47
or the less we sort of allowed things to just be and let them be and sort of then pass, like isn’t there some way in which that’s gotten tied up with some of the social ills that we see nowadays? Like, I don’t know, that’s certainly my hypothesis. I just don’t think this is how we were supposed to, you know, be formed or function. I absolutely agree. I, and I think again, seeing that the fact that most people today don’t have an attention span, seeing the fact that most people are not outside at all, other than going from their home to,
39:17
whatever the transportation is to where they work and then vice versa, sitting on their ass, then sitting on their ass to go sit on their ass. And all of a sudden they’re lethargic, which encourages them to continue to sit on their ass and not take any sort of action. Um, everything can be delivered to us via computer or an app that it just shows up automatically. We have no patients, we have no drive, we have no work ethic because everything has become easy for us. But I,
39:45
think that people are starting to understand that the biggest adversity that most people are facing is mediocrity. And themselves, right? I read an article just yesterday, actually, that says that something like 75% of North America would now be characterized as obese. Absolutely, absolutely. Right, and so yeah, all the things like the emotional or the psychological immunity that we have to living in the world gets more and more and more compromised the less knowledgeable or practiced we are at…
40:15
to tackling things from different angles, right? If we are inert, yeah, we’re not really gonna be learning a whole lot or taking new things into the system. Absolutely. So we can learn more about this at befo Yes, you sure can. And so what you’ll find there is, so this is a curriculum that I put into a manualized format. So it’s eight modules. Each module builds on the one that came before.
40:45
principles and ideas of true capital S Stoic philosophy built into the program. And I think importantly for folks to know, if you care about this kind of thing, it was important to me, we are all resource strapped nowadays. And so if people are going to put their time or their focus or their money or whatever towards this kind of training, it was important to me that this be a good use of people’s resources. So we’ve had an independent research institute that’s been studying and evaluating the program since we started. And so.
41:12
We’ve got thousands of people who have now gone through the program. We’ve collected data on thousands of people. And again, we have articles to if people are interested in that kind of thing, you can find them on the website that says this is a good use of time. So generally speaking, we’re seeing people feel more empowered, like they have more knowledge, like they have more agency. We see general improvements in mental health. So, you know, if people have five minutes per day to spare, this is a good use of those five minutes. And if you’re listening to us now, I guarantee you have those five minutes. I guarantee that you can find resources to make this happen.
41:42
Also, even if it’s not you, there’s probably somebody that you know that could benefit from this. If you’re the spouse of somebody that’s in one of these sort of environments, if you’re the child of a spouse in this sort of, whatever the environment is, and if you’re listening to us and you’re probably a fan of stoicism, but you don’t have to be. This is about practical, pragmatic stuff that will work irrespective of what you believe in or don’t believe in. That’s the goal. The goal is to be able to say, listen, this is something that you can apply right now that will help you. And
42:11
As we were saying before, there are a lot of people that have all these books on different aspects of stoicism, but they’re just giving you examples. They’re not living it. They don’t have data to back it up. They’re not showing you how you feel better other than that, again, cheap dopamine head of saying, oh, wow, yeah, whenever I see these things and I have this, it’s essentially a motivational quote that goes away the minute that you actually face any real adversity. The minute that you hit adversity, this is when you need this stuff, and this is where the boss system comes in and actually earns.
42:41
all of its keeps. Got it, Marcus, thank you so much. And that’s just it, you know? And so if anybody wants to join us on the March in Bhutan, we’d be happy for anyone to join us. I’m telling you, like, there’s nothing that I’ve learned more about my ability to get through things than strap in on some heavy weight and go walk in the desert, right? You’re gonna learn some things as you do that. And, you know, maybe that’s not available to everyone, but I mean, we can do those kinds of things anywhere we are, you know? We can actually learn how do we…
43:10
How do we prepare ourselves for the inevitable challenges that we’re going to face? Absolutely. And then we will have a discount code in our show notes to be able to give them an additional discount from, can we say how much the course is? Are you comfortable with that? Yeah. So again, we’ve tried to make this really approachable. So for the eight hours of instruction, it’s $200. We’re going to discount that for listeners of Marcus’ podcast and in support of Marcus and the work, amazing work he’s doing as well. So this is something that would be
43:41
I would say into the tens of thousands of dollars, if people could actually invest that into themselves and you’re given it at a fraction of that cost plus whatever discount that will be applying with that link. So literally you cannot afford not to have this. And she has it for again, all these different professions. We were discussing how veterinarians and dentists have a tremendous amount of stress and trauma. So there is something in there for any person that really needs this.
44:09
And again, even if you’re not in this environment or that’s not what your normal day-to-day work is, I guarantee there’s something that you can learn from this program that will help you in any kind of trauma or any kind of adversity that you face in your day-to-day life. Yeah, I mean, I just actually finished delivering this curriculum a couple of weeks ago to a whole fire department in Northern California. And so many people came up afterwards and had different things to say, but one fellow was just like, these are just tools to live by. And I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly what they are.
44:38
That’s exactly what they are. And again, she’s putting it into play. She’s not just talking about it or hypothesizing it. It’s very easy to regurgitate something from somebody else that’s taken decades to digest it. But she’s speaking from experience. She’s actually doing it. And she has data to back it up. So I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for making me cry on air, but.
45:00
I think that it was a tremendous… Oh my gosh, Marcus, I love it. Thank you for being such an incredible model for people, right? It’s in our heroes, right, that we find out something about how we want to be. So thank you from how you lead, right? It’s inspiring to me. I know it’s inspiring to others. I appreciate you. Thank you for all the work you do and I hope everybody goes out and get as many of these as they possibly can and tell more people about before operational stress. I appreciate that, Marcus. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being on.
45:28
Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
