Personal discovery is about finding commonalities that create a resounding truth. This week on Acta Non Verba Rick Alexander shares how his studies of religions and philosophy led him to find connections in the way we group and divide things in life, as well as the need to see a flow in order to understand those connections better. In this episode Rick and I discuss consumerism as a belief system, how marketing has seeped into our philosophical thought process, and how to experience emotions without reacting to them.
Rick Alexander is an author, speaker, and the CGO (Chief Growth Operator) for The Special Forces Experience. He crafts content and experiences to help lead people through Adversity and into a life of meaning and fulfillment.
Connect with Rick via his website: https://rickalexander.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions and 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. Rick Alexander is an author, speaker, and educator.
01:01
who specializes in helping individuals and organizations understand themselves better so that they can increase performance, find meaning in their work, and build a life that is aligned with their ultimate goals. As a former member of the Navy Special Operations Community as well as an ultra endurance athlete, Rick crafts content to help people lead them through adversity and bring meaning to their life. His new book, Ambitious Heroes and Heartaches will be out in mid-November. And if you enjoyed this conversation, check out his incredible podcast.
01:29
Morning Coffee with Rick Alexander. Rick, sorry to talk so long. I just wanna give people a taste of who you are. Thank you so much for being here. And this is our third conversation. You were nice enough to have me on your podcast. You’re on my previous podcast. And I think that today is going to be, third time’s gonna be the charm. It’s gonna give us all that powerful stuff that we were talking about before we hit record and what we talked about on your podcast and mine as well. So thank you for being here. Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
01:57
I appreciate you saying that I embody that act in non-verbal. I certainly try. I would claim to try. That’s the best we can do. And I think that we live in a culture where we cheapen our experience because we confuse words and actions often. That’s so true. Because we have these desires and these ambitions. And so we’ll say that we want to do it, or we’ll write it down. But those things are empty vessels until they’re actually filled with meaning from purpose and from actual taking action. And
02:25
That’s why I wanted to keep it very simple, you know, decent words. I mean, we were in the military, we hear these kind of Latin phrases thrown around, but that’s sort of like a mantra that can keep you going, whether you be running or whether you’re wanting to compromise on your integrity in some capacity. And by doing that, that kind of just brings us back to that center, back to that source, back to that true priority, and kind of gives us that emotional sobriety to make the right decision. Totally. And I would also submit that in a world where we do confuse actions and words so often,
02:55
your effort is your superpower, right? That is the thing that you get no matter what. It’s like, who are you? You know, we talk a lot about character and I think we have on both of our conversations, but it’s like, why does that matter? It’s like, well, because when the world takes everything, what do you have left, right? It’s who you are. And so I think that understanding that, it keeps the ball in your court. It always gives you the ability to at least act on something, you know, realizing that effort is the thing that you get control over.
03:25
In a world that doesn’t understand that, it becomes a superpower. It’s so true. It’s, it’s almost an unfair advantage. And when there’s, and just like, just like this year we were talking, there’s a lot of things that are out of our control and it’s easy for us to kind of lump everything into that category and just sort of give up and have this glorified victim mentality. But like you said, if it comes down to character, if it comes down to effort, if it comes down to these ethos by which we live, that’s going to be consistent. The Stephen Pressfield says in
03:54
the warrior ethos, he’s like, wars change, but warriors do not. And that’s why it’s so important for us to keep those things in mind and understand again, this is what brings us back to that place that is what truly drives us when everything else has been taken. Totally. It’s so crazy. What’s going on this year is very crazy. And we talked about this before. You’re incredibly well read and I love your content. I’ve said that many times. Is there a philosophy that you
04:22
were initially introduced to that kind of puts you down this path or is there a philosophy that you feel that you embody today that you continue to kind of live your life by? That’s very interesting. That’s an interesting thing to say. So I wrote my book about the hero’s journey. And through that hero’s journey, what I figured out, if you aren’t familiar with this, Joseph Campbell is a psychologist who looked at all of the myth of the world, all the myths, all the like history, real stories, mythology. He started to figure out that this
04:51
pattern, this seems to be primordial pattern emerges and it’s all of these struggles that humans are on. And he called it the hero’s journey and he kind of labels the parts of it. And as I was reading this, I realized, well, this is the psyche’s journey. This is the journey that I’m on mentally as I’m trying to become a writer and trying to stand apart from who I used to be and what I’m trying to do. And I’m in my own underworld battling these demons. This is, we’re not, the dragons we fight aren’t out in the world.
05:20
But that doesn’t mean we don’t fight dragons. We just call them by, they have different names, they have different labels. And so what I began to find was that that as a philosophy, looking at what could be distilled from all of these stories, reading history as if those people are you and asking yourself what it is you can learn about them. I would say that that would be a good way to, that’s certainly what I wrote about. So I’d say that’s a good philosophy to probably start. And from there that.
05:48
got me interested in many more philosophies. Like I’m really into mysticism, which in all religions there’s this sort of area where they all converge. It’s like mystic Christianity, along with Zen Buddhism, along with Sufi Islam. If you guys have heard of Rumi the poet, he was Sufi. Meister Eckhart, he was like the Christian version of this mysticism who came a couple hundred years later, a few hundred years later. And so I’m really interested in that area.
06:16
You know, I’m really interested in that place where all of these religions and philosophies kind of converge and people begin to try to make sense of all the mystery that surrounds us. There’s something about that that I’m innately curious about. So I would say those two things probably sum up my philosophy pretty well. Could you give us an example of some of those commonalities where they dovetail to kind of create this resounding truth that’s undeniable? Yeah. One of the places.
06:42
is in the way, the perceptual lens that you’re using to view the world through. So in Western culture, we have this very dualistic perceptual lens. We look at things as if they are separate. So I look at like mind and body as if it’s separate. And you see that all the time. You see it in personal development or in endurance world. The world I kind of came out of. People are like, oh, you just need to divorce your head from your body, right? And just keep going, keep going.
07:09
And so we have this way of making sense of, and you think about all the labels we use to cut the world up, right? And so we use all of these labels and we cut things up and so that we can understand them better. And in doing that, we end up with this profoundly separate place where everything is separate. I’m separate from you and your, you know, and our jobs are separate from our passions. And one of the things that I found that the mystics are really interested in.
07:33
is trying to look at the world as if it’s all one sort of flow and stream of experience. Now, if you’re coming from Western culture, that doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s very hard to make sense of. In Hindu culture, after people kind of move through the caste system and retire, if they want to understand ultimate reality, what they do is they go out into the woods and they practice for years looking at the world without labels.
07:57
And then what happens when they do that is they begin to see all of the underlying mystery. They start to see all of the things that we can’t see when we’ve already decided what the world is with our labels. And we’ve already kind of cut it apart. And so I would say that that’s one thing that I’m interested in. I think a lot of people in new age religion type movements tend to talk like we’re all one. But, you know, there’s a certain tragedy about talking about the world that you don’t understand. And if you don’t see that, you know.
08:26
If you don’t really experience the world that way, then your words come off really cheap. So you won’t see me saying that, but it’s certainly the goal. I’m certainly striving to find this place where what’s hidden can be revealed. And I think that’s one of those places. That’s a brilliant example of all those things I believe. And like you say, in my experience, martial arts, physicality, philosophy, religion, even, at the highest levels, they all have these powerful overarching truths.
08:56
And so, like you say, when you can take this component, this idea, again, that’s reflected in Buddhism, Daoism as well, where, you know, there’s really no separation if we understand the true underlying thing that we’re created from or the things that pulled us together as opposed to keep us separated. So I think that that’s a beautiful analogy. In today’s society, like you say, for us to be able to process more information, because of, you know, how technology is evolving, it’s easier for us to categorize it and we put a tag on it.
09:25
And we put it in this bucket or we silo it over here. But like you’re saying, we’re giving up quality for quantity. How many people do we know that have read a book or taken a course or gone to hear somebody speak or whatever, and they never apply with their learning consistently, like they’re excited. And they, they hear us speak and they come up and shake your hand and give you a hug and buy your book and you sign it and then they leave and they forget about it Monday morning.
09:53
They don’t do it consistently or whenever the going gets tough, which is when they actually are beginning to do the work, when they have that resistance, that adversity, they kind of give up. And there’s so many people that talk about how many books they read, but yet I would rather you read five books and be able to apply them in every facet of your life as opposed to saying, oh, well, I did this and I read this and I listened to this and oh, yeah, this newest whatever the shiny object is or whatever the high speed training is. It makes more sense. Bruce Lee said it, right?
10:23
knows one technique that he’s done 10,000 times instead of 10,000 techniques that he’s done once because that’s where the mastery comes in. That’s where you truly understand. And like you said, going out to the woods and kind of separating yourself from all this superfluousness to get down to what’s really important. I think we could use more of that for sure. Yeah. And I think we live in a culture that will fool you into or fool themselves into thinking that the guy with 10,000 tactics is the right one. Right. And
10:52
I think right and wrong is a hard thing to make sense of, but actually you should just ask yourself what’s serving you? Is it serving your life to have 10,000 tactics? I realized this in my content game. Something I do is I look around the world for platitudes. Every time someone says something that’s interesting, I try to ask myself, what does that mean? Is that a platitude or is there some substance behind that that I could use to really affect the way I’m looking at the world? If not, it needs to be dispensed with. But we have an aesthetic culture as well.
11:19
Instagram and all these things are really about platitudes. It’s about aesthetics. It’s not about substance. And so, that idea that actually instead of reading an entire book, if you could internalize one concept from that book and actually understand the way that that shows up in your life, that’s what can change your life, right? Like ideas can be a catalyst to experience the world in a completely different way.
11:45
but not if you don’t know what they actually mean. I think what we’re doing is memorizing bits of information. And you’ll see that because you see on Instagram, all of these memes are like recycled. It’s like people are saying, the one I see all the time is if you’re going through hell, keep going, right? Like people love that one. And it’s like, maybe, right? Or maybe stop and look around, ask yourself what got you there so that you don’t hit the roundabout on your way out and end up back in the same hell two years from now. And I think our inability to sit with concepts and understand them.
12:14
especially when we’re in moments of tension or on discomfort. It’s the reason that we’re living out these two, three year patterns of drama. We’ll like kind of date the same people and work the same jobs. And then we, you know, we’ll do that 10 times and then we’ll call it a life. And I think that in the antidote to that is actually understanding the world around you, understanding real concepts. Like if you understood one economic concept, probably wouldn’t have any money problems again, right?
12:44
money works, what is this thing that’s around me that’s dictating my life? But instead, we just memorize all these platitudes and we choose aesthetics over substance. And then we end up in this place, it’s very void of meaning. Actually not to do a shameless plug here, but that’s what my book’s about. It’s about all of these, what’s really going on around me? I know what I hear, I know what you’re saying, but what about the heartache I can’t make sense of? What about love and money and culture and all of the depth in my life that I’ve not been taught to properly deal with?
13:13
I think that learning concepts, to your point, instead of memorizing words, that’s what we’re looking for. That’s the antidote. I love everything you said there. Bruce Lee’s protege is named Guru Dhananath Santo and I’m an instructor under him. And he made this comment one time. He says, if I teach you one technique, you learn one technique. But if I teach you a concept and you actually absorb it, I teach you 10,000 techniques because that overarching principle.
13:40
that truth is there and you’ll see it in everything. So you’re talking about these things that are kind of looping. Everybody talks about the 80-20 principle or the Pareto’s principle, but I don’t think they even understand like you’re saying. You can literally apply that to every part of your life. Easily apply it to your business, easily apply it to your physicality. In a lot of ways, easily apply it to your relationships where you’re like, these are the people that are really important to me. These are the people that suck my energy from me, so I’m going to just shut those people off that are not serving me.
14:10
or I’m not in a place where I can actually either help or learn the lesson from them and just focus on these things. Because everybody tries to make everything a priority instead of having genuine priorities. And like you’re saying as well, whether it be social media or the people we work with or family or whatever, a lot of people, whether they realize it or not, will be pushing those platitudes. They’ll be pushing their interpretation of what is a priority onto you.
14:38
And if you don’t have this philosophical filter, this belief system, these truths that you’ve experienced, or at least these truths that you’ve absorbed from somebody that you do trust and do respect because you seem that they’ve done it, if you don’t have that as a foundation, then you’re going to be philosophically pushed around all the time. And whatever is new and whatever direction the wind blows, you’re just going to kind of meander through into that. And it’s not like you said, it’s not going to serve you.
15:06
And I do see that. I mean, when I was 40 and when I was injured, it made me look back at my life so through a different lens, very much so, and it was about regret. It was about anger. It was about all the things I’d taken for granted. It was about the notion that whatever my strong points were, I just let them be strong points. I didn’t try to improve upon them. And then whatever my weaknesses were, well, I’ve just let those go into it because like, cause that could be uncomfortable, you know? So I think that again,
15:35
taking these ideals and it may be something if you’re listening to us now, it may be one concept that we said earlier and whatever that is, whatever like hits you in the face, like a snow shovel, that’s the thing that you should probably be listening to. And it’s like, just like you were saying, there was maybe a nugget of truth in what these people were saying or the platitude or sometimes even the opposite of what they’re saying is what, like you’re saying what you were really looking at. And that’s why it’s so important to have these understandings. And that’s why I wanted to kind of delve into philosophy with you because
16:05
For some people, they understand the philosophy or maybe a statement that really catches them. Like I said, whether it be Rumi or Francois or Swenzhou, it doesn’t matter. As long as you can find some sort of truth that kind of resonates in you, that’s why reading is so important. That’s why exploring these things, meditating on them, whether it be in a physical component or going for a run and just allowing these ideals to kind of open up like almost like a lotus flower in your mind to be able to create that place to understand better what you are taking in.
16:35
and then be more selective about what you allow through that membrane. Yeah. So it’s something that’s come into my consciousness as of lately is that in our world, you know, it’s hard for us to understand our belief systems, right? Fish can’t see the water. We can’t see the air. We don’t know. We don’t understand the things we’re actually embedded within and our philosophies, our paradigms, the way our thought structures, those are what we’re embedded in, right? And I think one of the things that’s come into my consciousness lately is that the modern person, the modern man.
17:05
man or woman, modern human, is embedded in consumerism as a belief system. We want what we want, and we want it now. That’s what we’ve been taught. We see that in fast food and stuff, but I think it’s deeper than that. I think that is affecting everything. I think it’s affecting the way we read. I think it’s affecting the way we learn because we’re always, what do I need? What can I accomplish? How do I get what I want? How do I make people think I’m valid? How do I make people validate me and think I’m cool?
17:31
Right? And so we have all of these ways that consumerism, the get what you want when you want it thing, in marketing has seeped into our, like, philosophical thought process. One of the things that’s an antidote to this, I’m starting to realize, is there’s a way of reading wisdom texts that came out of medieval Christianity, I believe, and it’s called lectio divina. You heard of this? I’ve heard the term. So the idea is that you, so there’s a bunch of different ways to practice it. But in essence, what’s happening is you don’t read the scripture or the wisdom text.
18:01
and then analyze it for what it can give you. You read it and then you sit back and you let it read you. And you see what part of that thing that you just read did it highlight about you and your life and yourself. It’s showing you some part of the mystery that you’re overlooking. It’s showing you some part of the water that you’re embedded within, right, to use that same metaphor. And then you sit with it. And so the goal is not to read a lot, the goal is to read something.
18:31
and then allow that thing to read you. And then what happens is those seeds that you just planted in the back of your mind, they might mean something now, and that would be great if they did, but they might mean something in a week when you see something else and then you connect the dot, and then that’s when that flowering begins to happen. And so I think as the modern person that just wants to consume and consume and get the badge for having read 60 books this year or whatever it is, actually would be.
18:57
far better off if they read 60 pages and internalized all of them. That’s the thing that can change your life. It’s like the end product of our consumerism is kind of an ugly one because we end up getting a bunch of things. Even if it’s facts of information, we consume all of these things, but they’re not getting us anywhere closer to where we want to be. I think we have to really stop and take a step back and ask ourselves some of these deeper questions.
19:25
these old wisdom texts that we’re also drawn to, especially now in our technologically advanced society, right? You read somebody that didn’t have all of this technology. They were much more intuitive about the world around them. That’s what they have to offer you. And so you let their words read you and that’s what’s gonna change your life. At least that’s what I’m kind of opening myself up to lately. I absolutely agree. I think that in the society, like you’re saying, it’s very easy for us to, technology is there.
19:53
Information is at our fingertips all the time. It’s like this buffet. But if we continually gorge ourselves One we don’t appreciate what we taste even right to nutritionally We can only do so much with that and then three if we over consume if we gorge ourselves on it, we get sick Yeah, right. And we know we never allow ourselves that space like you said to fast from these things and fasting from Technology electronics social media, you know the news obviously
20:22
those are things that we should take into consideration more of because that’s where that space, that’s where that gap is between stimulus and response, right? That’s where that gap is able to be elongated to give us the opportunity. Exactly. And then again, through meditation, through physicality, through this deep rumination, that’s what allows us to have that space because without that, that gap is getting smaller and smaller for people. Now we’re, again, somebody to catch you off in traffic.
20:51
And people today can’t separate that from an actual physical, like this person just punched me in the face and now they’re adrenalized and now everything’s coming towards them and they want to follow this person and it escalates quickly because that emotion is in there and we have to have that ability to detach, to step back. Like I say, emotions assassinate the truth. And if we don’t have the ability to step back and look at it, we will just be again, firefighting will just be reactionary.
21:21
And that’s not how we want to live our lives if we want to make the most of it. And if it’s not even about you, then ask yourself, how will that affect my spouse, my loved ones, my children, my coworkers, my business, the people that I’m claiming to help. So if we can even look at it from that standpoint, that adds a lot more gravitas to the things that we do, whether it be the food that we put in our body or the physicality that we allow ourselves to have or not have. And if we can look at it from that standpoint.
21:49
The stakes are a lot higher and it gives us more urgency in everything we do. There’s a word that our modern culture does not use anymore. And the word is nobility. And like, it’s interesting. That’s not like thought of as a virtue anymore, but I was thinking today, I was like, perhaps it should be what’s interesting. You know, if you remember, if you can remember way back to learning the periodic table of elements, do you remember the noble gases? Noble gases. Right. Well, it’s very defined by being highly unreactive. That’s what they are.
22:18
And so I think that that wordplay, that correlation might be interesting in my life because I thought, man, how would I pursue this noble path and a path of nobility to allow more light into my life? And it’s like, well, the first thing I should do is stop being so damn reactive, right? Allow me, myself to be able to sit within the tension and not having to react to it, not having to run, not having to cope, not having to hide, allow myself to actually just sit with what I’m hearing.
22:46
and then make the best decision for myself, for life, for love, for truth, for whatever it is I serve going forward. And I think that there’s something there. I think that that idea that there’s an element of nobility that’s characterized by not being so damn reactive, right? You think about the person, like you said, cuts you off, and then you beep the horn and flip him off, and it’s like, you’re walking away from nobility. Right? And I think right now, I mean, we’re in a culture where…
23:14
I don’t know when this is going to come out, but after the election goes down, like there’s going to be that agent of chaos is coming for sure. Right. And what the world is going to need and what it needs right now in this time of riots and this time of discontent is people that don’t have to react. You know, people that have the courage to sit in the tension and ask themselves the tough questions. That’s what the world needs right now. And so I think we’ll be getting a masterclass and why being unreactive is important as well coming up here. Yeah. And again,
23:44
So many of us don’t want to experience the emotion that’s there. We can experience the emotion without reacting to it. We can experience it fully, but so many people, they’ll be unhappy or they’ll be anxiety, and then they’ll substitute Netflix or Amazon prime or social media, TikTok, God forbid, to just sort of layer upon that so that it just puts this little bandaid on cancer. And then that just continues to build up. And then all of a sudden, again, I had a client that
24:12
they just had a big loss in their family. And then it took them three weeks and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, they just break down. And it was because it took them that long to feel safe. It took them that long to be in a place where they had that space to actually process this, to actually start to look at this. And I think it’s a great analogy about even if we’re injured in battle, lots of times we can limp through it, but then the real injury becomes apparent.
24:42
when we’re off the battlefield and we can actually look at it and that’s because our body or even if we’re pushing hard and work or whatever and then we have a few days off and people are like, that’s when I got the cold or that’s when I got sick. It’s like, well, yeah, because your body was in this very fight or flight scenario and now that it realizes it’s safe, it’s like, okay, we’re going to actually take the time to try to unpack this, whether it be from a psychological, physiological or philosophical capacity.
25:08
Totally. I love the analogy of putting a bandaid on cancer because that’s how our society operates. We think that treating symptoms is treating the underlying disease. And it’s like, you could use a cancer example. It’s like if I have a cough and I take a cough suppressant, it’ll work for the symptoms. But if I have lung cancer, that’s a problem. It’s not helping. It’s hurting. And so I think that this idea that, you know, our mom kisses our boo-boos when we’re young and like, we think that, okay, so healing means comfort.
25:38
And it’s like, you know, those two things might not be related. Healing might be completely uncomfortable. And a great example of this is if someone cuts you off and you fly off the handle and you get yourself in trouble, what people are going to send you to is anger management, right? Yep. And so that’s the symptom, but why are you so goddamn angry? That’s the question, right? It’s you can deal with the symptom. Great. Learn better techniques for coping. That’s an amazing thing. So it doesn’t screw your life up every time someone pisses you off.
26:08
but what’s going on that’s deeper than this? What aren’t you acknowledging? What part of yourself is anger? Anger is the most easily accessible emotion, especially for men. And so what is the emotion that you’re not feeling that’s causing you to reach into the basket and pull anger out at the drop of a hat? And so it’s like, you need to stop treating symptoms at some point, or this division and this hate and this just constant battle is gonna be, it’s gonna keep happening because we’re not treating the battle, we’re treating the symptoms.
26:36
You know, we’re not treating the root source of the things that are causing us so much pain. That’s a great analogy. When I was in chiropractic school, that’s what they were always saying. It was like, you know, we want to find the cause. So again, if a person has numbness in their hands, you can do things for that. But it’s like, but let’s follow that back to the central nervous system. Let’s follow that back to that nerve root. And again, that follows us back to that idea of the power that created us allows us to heal ourselves, whatever your belief is, and whatever that is. And if we can understand and respect that.
27:05
that’s important, but if we can’t even listen to it or acknowledge it, it’s hard to respect it. It’s hard to be in a place where we can use that. And again, with the emotions, anger is like the hammer of all the emotions because everything becomes a nail with it. But there’s usually fear, shame, trauma that was unresolved. You talk about post-traumatic growth, but there’s a lot of trauma that if it happens too quickly or if we don’t have the ability to create that callous, then we just go raw. And now you and I coach people.
27:35
A lot of the people that are executives, when I initially start coaching them, there’s a triage. It’s like, like you said, I’m just trying to give them these, this is the breathing, this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re doing here to kind of get you out of this place. But now you have to deep dive and, you know, tell me about your relationship, tell me about what’s going on here. And that’s the person that wants to work 80 hours a week and build this incredible business, which again, gets accolades, makes money, success, but yet they can’t talk to their family. They can’t have a…
28:04
conversation with themselves even. It’s very much the self-deprecating push, push, push and burnout is a very real thing, you know, physically and emotionally. Totally. I think that’s a further extension of consumerism as a belief system, right? You have an injury and you think you deserve to be out of pain, right? So I want it and I want it now. And so if I have, let’s go with a terrible one, right? If I have diarrhea and I think, well, of course I need to take Pepto. I need to take an anti-emetic. I need to stop having diarrhea.
28:33
And what I’m not asking myself is what the hell is my body trying to expel right now? Right. And so that I think taking to its logical conclusion and applied to every single inconvenience and discomfort in our lives, we don’t understand our real problems. We don’t know ourselves. We don’t know what our body’s expelling and what it’s keeping. And because we’re just trying to package the whole thing to show up for the world and be who we think we need to be. You know, I wrote about the hero’s journey as a way of approaching your own psyche and your own life.
29:00
you know, anybody that’s not familiar with it, I would just say Google heroes journey and click on images and it’ll show you kind of the phases of it. And you can see like, okay, I see those phases in a movie or whatever. Well, one of the final phases is called the tone men. You might think of that as at one meant or something like that. And what that is, is it’s actually the hero is coming back into reconciliation with their lives. And that only happens after the underworld. And so the deeper idea there is that when you have discomfort, you go into the underworld and you face it.
29:30
You don’t get rid of it. You don’t patch it. You don’t fix it. You sit with it and it will feel like it’s killing you. And it is. And that’s the point because the Phoenix burns. It’s the fire. Nobody likes the fire, right? When people say, um, you know, you only grow outside of your comfort zone. It’s almost always about, they almost always apply that to like, well, you know, I like to run ultras, so that’s the way I like to get uncomfortable. And so it’s like, sure, maybe.
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But what about when it feels like your entire body’s on fire and you’re choosing not to use the coping mechanism that you’ve used your entire life to keep you safe? And so the idea in the Hero’s Journey is if you have the courage to do that and face the things that are in the underworld that you have been avoiding your entire life, the gift that you will get is reconciliation with your life. But you won’t need that anger every single time somebody cuts you off. And so, yeah, I think that’s a deeper idea there, but I think that it’s something that’s definitely worth our consideration.
30:25
It absolutely is. And there’s a reason why we have all these emotions in us. There’s a reason why we have the capacity to have them. But again, I can be angered, but it doesn’t mean that I have to act angry continually and I don’t have to let that ruin my entire day. If somebody comes up and punches me in the face, that gets my attention. There may be some anger initially, but now I have to go through and evaluate. Is this a threat? You know, what was going on here? But without that ability to have that skillset to do something else again, if not, then everything is.
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a nail and it’s just the process of how big of a hammer of anger are you wanting to use to try to stifle this thing that is desperately trying to get your attention? That’s it. And I think anger, when you come up against injustice in the world, anger is what you want. What you don’t want is for the anger to have you because then you don’t get to control it. You don’t get to corral it. You don’t get to use it. And to your earlier point, you know, we have all of these emotions for a reason. This is something that men are.
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notoriously bad for. And one thing that I would say too is in the military, the only accepted emotion to display is anger. Like, I mean, essentially, so that’s your tool, you know, that became my tool. And so the idea is not that you would get rid of what you have, the idea is that you would face everything else that you also have, the sadness and the discomfort and the, you know, overwhelm and all of the things that you feel just because you’re a finite creature navigating a brutal world that could kill you at any second. And so you face all of those things. And if you do, you know, anybody can deny their shab.
31:51
Anybody can deny their darkness. And if you do though, you’re saying, well, that’s not me. And so you don’t get control of it. And so what the integrated person wants to do is actually learn to dance with that shadow. They wanna learn to refine their darkness and they wanna be able to go in there with their eyes open so that they can use it when it matters, when they come up against injustice. But if your anger has you, there ain’t shit you can do with it, right? I mean, at the end of the day, it’s like most people are going around.
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that fly off the handle at people, they think they chose that response. It’s like, no, you didn’t. The anger chose that response. It did, and it’s using you as the vessel for essentially its intention. In martial arts in judo, for example, there are 68 different recognized throws, but most Olympic level judo players are using three to five. Interesting. They’ll use one or two that usually work, and then they’ll create contingencies within that.
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If the hip throw misses, I go for the single. If the reed misses, I go back to this. I go for the trip, which if they step here, now I go back into the initial thing. So, but they will all learn all succeeded these throws because if they don’t know them, they will be victimized by them. So that’s where the shadow is. Even when I read Machiavellian stuff, I don’t do it because I’m brutal and I want to kill people and I want to just have no morals and just win at all costs. But if I am not aware of that, if I don’t know the other people think that way.
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then I will be victimized by it. I will continually get ambushed by it and I will become a victim to that. And again, if I’m trying to get to this goal, this mission, then it will stop me in my tracks. And there’s that part again, where if I’m continually going through that roundabout of hell like you’re saying, that’s what it is. I mean, I was saying how for a lot of people, adversity may not be a big slap in the face. It may just be mediocrity, the life of quiet desperation. Especially today. Especially today, because they’re not in enough pain to change.
33:43
but they’re comfortable enough to kind of stay where they’re at. And because there is no, and like you said earlier about the burning of the fire, adversity hates you, but it hates the weak part of you because it’s trying to get you stronger. But if you avoid it and you try to circumvent it, you’re going to have to face it anyway. Why not just step into it now? It’s going to suck. Again, the military idea. Yeah, you know, embrace the suck, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there’s a place where you don’t have any other option and you have to do that. But again, if that’s the only default that you have.
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and you just want to be angry, then you’re only speaking one language to a world that is multifluent and it leaves you painted in a corner and you’re willfully ill-prepared for all the things you could be doing with it. Yeah, I think that’s the key, willfully and prepared for it. That was part one of my interview with Rick Alexander, author, speaker, and educator, who specializes in helping individuals and organizations understand themselves better so that they can increase performance.
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You can hear part two of our interview on the next episode of Okta Non-Verba, where Rick continues his discussion on acknowledging your darkness and learning to manage it rather than letting it manage you. You can find out more about Rick as well as order your copies of his new book, Ambitious Heroes and Heartache at rickalexander.com. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
