Episode 2 | This podcast episode, hosted by Dane Sanders and Mitchell Dong, explores the concept of enrolling oneself into seeking personal growth and living a fulfilled life. It references ideas on Stoicism, emphasizing the importance of self-discipline and individual effort in personal development. The discussion delves into the societal craving for comfort and how it leads to weakness. Dane also discusses the concept of 'enrollment,' or committing to personal growth, and contrasts it with being persuaded or enrolled by others. Through various examples, including a powerful personal encounter, the episode conveys the message that true growth and learning come from embracing discomfort and making hard choices. It concludes by encouraging listeners to commit to a small, uncomfortable act for love's sake and share their commitment with someone within ten minutes, emphasizing the importance of taking action towards personal growth.

Key Moments:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:58 Stoicism and Self-Discipline
• 03:17 The Power of Voluntary Discomfort
• 07:43 Self-Enrollment
• 13:10 Self-Negotiation
• 18:35 Commitment, Action, and Growth
• 22:06 Anchor Action: For Love's Sake

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic and Read to Lead program
• Dallas Willard
• Elevated Spaces

Anchor Actions:

After reflecting on the theme of "for love's sake" discussed in the episode, consider individuals in your life whom you love or wish to love more deeply, whether it's yourself or others. From there, think about an action that aligns with the notion of expressing love through your deeds. It could be something as mundane as completing household chores or engaging in a thoughtful gesture towards someone significant to you. The key is to choose a commitment that might initially seem unappealing but holds potential for meaningful impact. Once you've identified your commitment, make it concrete by setting a minimal viable goal and committing to it. Within the next ten minutes, inform someone close to you about your commitment, emphasizing the significance of this decision. Don't procrastinate; set a timer and ensure you follow through promptly. Once you've shared your commitment, allow it to serve as a starting point for further growth and action. Embrace the discomfort that may accompany this commitment, recognizing it as a catalyst for personal development.

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Our Membership Community (MWOD) is where we embrace discomfort as a path to personal development. Remember, it's probably not for you... but if we're wrong about that, or if you want to find out for yourself, visit us at MWOD.io 🦬

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Disclaimer:

The information shared on this podcast and any related materials from Men & Women Of Discomfort (MWOD) or Flying S Incorporated are for general informational purposes only. You should not use this information as a basis for making decisions without consulting your own medical and legal professionals. We aim to provide accurate and up-to-date information, but we make no guarantees about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, or comprehensiveness of the content.

At Men & Women Of Discomfort, we promote agency and encourage you to carefully consider the input we offer. If you find it helpful, we invite you to take advantage of it, but do so with the understanding that you bear the responsibility of due diligence. By using our content, you acknowledge that you are taking opportunities at your own risk. Thank you for understanding.

Copyright 2024 Men & Women Of Discomfort (MWOD.io)

*Transcript Note: The transcript of our podcast is AI-generated and may contain errors. We aim for accuracy but appreciate your understanding and feedback on any discrepancies.

Ryan Holiday had a post just this morning around the Stoics bias towards self-discipline exclusively. If you're going to be rigid, be rigid with you, not with others. The work we're talking about really is about the individual. We do it in community, and community is very helpful, but you don't learn by learning from others. You teach yourself on all knowledge of self knowledge.

As humans, we prefer the path of least resistance. We crave convenience, the pay off without the price. But when our lives revolve around comfort, it doesn't deliver. Living in perpetual comfort leaves us weak and asleep. This podcast is an invitation to flip that script, to choose the unlikely path to get the life you really want through voluntary discomfort.

This is strong and awake. I'm Dane Sanders.

We're used to being enrolled, you know, with marketing. Like we're so used to that you go through the admissions process at a new school, you're enrolled, you're guided.

So let's talk about enrollment for a second.

Let's talk about it.

So I can certainly relate. I love to persuade people. I just think it's so fun. It's why I was probably a I was drawn to marketing as an undergrad. And then at some point I realized, like, how icky it felt to try to manipulate people to do things I didn't necessarily need or want, or to buy things even worse.

And in time, I've shifted from kind of a marketing mindset to more of a philosophical approach to life. And that showed up in grad school, but certainly more in everyday life, certainly at Mod and The Shift. It's subtle, it's a distinction, but the difference between enrolling and other versus enrolling oneself is the point. It's funny, Ryan Holiday had a post just this morning and Daily Stoic around the Stoics bias towards self-discipline exclusively, and not trying to discipline others as an extension of that self discipline or expects that others would.

If you're going to be rigid, be rigid with you, not with others. Be gentle with others who have no idea what they're under and what they're going through. And I, I think that's kind of embedded in that sentiment. Is this understanding that the work we're talking about really is about the individual. We do it in community, and community is very helpful.

And even the conversations in community are incredibly resourceful. Just to kind of sober up together and get in tune with the same kind of frame of ideas. But when it comes to enrollment in particular, I think the assumption of self enrollment is the only enrollment. Just like learning, the only way you learn, you don't. You don't learn by learning from others.

You teach yourself in the presence of others. You read books so that you can train yourself on all knowledge of self knowledge. And that was a Dallas Willard line back in the day. And talk about a pretty sharp philosopher. So when I think about all this as dynamics, and especially as it relates to discomfort, like choosing discomfort in a world where two things are happening one, it's hard.

Life is difficult, like discomforts are choosing us all the time. And it's really uncomfortable. And I get why people would resist that. That totally makes sense to me. It's no fun. But when we raise our hand for discomfort, all of a sudden we gain agency. We gain a sense of strength, not necessarily power over circumstance, but we get to create our own circumstance.

And in that effort to get to that place, it requires facing the involuntary discomfort and saying, I'm going to actually choose you. I'm chasing trouble. I'm not waiting for trouble to find me in the first hand and the second hand to limit that conversation to a conversation with me. So when I come to a group context and I'm looking to enroll people, I'm not looking them to them to enroll them in my thing.

Although, you know, we have a thing and we want people to participate if they think it makes sense to them. But the reason why we have our tagline is probably not for you. It's not just cheeky and a clever reverse psychology effort. It really is. It's probably not for you. We get it. You're under things that we don't know you're under.

Maybe this isn't for you, but as you're in a conversation with yourself, how can you get clear with all the competing voices, all the circumstances, the temptation to be a victim, to be a slave in this world, when all in front of you is a possibility of being a queen or a king of yourself, what do you do?

How do you position in such a way that you would be open to highest and best to serve your future self for who you know your truest self wants to be? Well, that is enrollment. So when I think about your conversation with, you know, leaders at MIT are we are moderators and inviting them in, you know, you're really not inviting them into our thing.

You're inviting them to consider for themselves, like it's a doorway that they could walk through if they choose it. But if they don't, we don't want to persuade them. We don't want that we're anti persuasion even though we're pro enrollment, which is just creating a context where people often they raise their hand. They say, I'd like this, please.

Yes. Can I have another. And or another way to look at it is we don't hold people accountable. You know, we create a context where people account for their life. And it's that kind of a culture that when you when you set that up consistently and live by it and don't ourselves drift into this kind of scarcity bias where we need more members or we need, you know, I'd rather have no members we don't need, we actually have a minimal viable audience of one if nobody shows up and I'm the only guy at the party that's sufficient for this thing to work.

and we're okay with that. And, and as people enroll themselves into what it means to have a life to flourish, to even consider there is a good life that they can engage in, that they can actively participate in going after people who begin to taste that. You don't need to enroll. It's like, get out of the way when they start getting hungry for that kind of a life, they're sprinting.

At first it looks like they're just getting off the ground to kind of get some momentum, but once they get traction, get out of the way. Now, there's no doubt along the way storms do hit involuntary discomforts come your way. And so someone sprinting, if you're tracking with everything we've talked about so far and they're sprinting, they're self enrolled, they're going after it.

And then they just get this rogue wave. They just get sideswiped and they're taken out for a minute. And then it looks like they're knocked out of the game. I think about, you know, my dear friend Tim Krueger, who helped found many women of discomfort when he got stomach cancer. It looked like he got taken out and ultimately he did.

He got he died. My gosh. But that last year of his life, I don't know if I've seen someone who is more enrolled in the good life, despite his body betraying him left and right. He was alive even while his body was dying and and seeing that and seeing that with clarity with what's available to us, especially given that all of us are going to have a terminus, all of us are going to die.

I can't imagine a better and vestment than to wake up every day and decide, today is the day I'm going to enroll myself at whatever stage that is, whether I'm a full on sprint or I'm just getting off the couch. And that's why I think enrollment is such a core conversation early in when people are considering M-word recognize it's not on us to convince you.

It's on you to convince you. And whether you do with us or you do somewhere else, we don't know a better pathway to find agency than to raise your hand and practice doing hard things.

how do we enroll ourselves and how do we kind of step into that? What does that process look like when we're not being enrolled by someone else?

Well you raise a great point. What we're describing is antithetical to the culture that we live in. So going back I see this the point I wanted to raise earlier. So I'm so pleased that you referenced it. You know when Michael Easter talks about the comfort crisis, what he's referencing in that context is we live in a cultural moment where if we are asleep, we can we can buy comforts everywhere we go and actually never get exposed to the challenge that's required in order to become the kind of people who flourish in life.

And it's tragic. It's a it's a crisis of our moment. And you know it because anyone who doubts what I'm describing just watch, turn on your television for 30 minutes at any point and notice every single commercial will be about convenience, ease, comfort, quick, painless, and probably three easy payments. And it's those conversations are continually coming at us.

We start to believe, like what's normal is something out there is going to give me what I need, and then it gets extended to things like you're describing the word enrollment, like you get enrolled at a school. Well, that means I'm paying a bunch of money, taking on a lot of debt, whatever. You're kind of how it is to get into that conversation, and you're creating a context where you have an expectation.

I'm not I'm not now a someone who has agency in my life. I'm a customer and I'm buying a something. There's a transaction that's going on here. And I recognize that. And then what we charge to be a part of our membership. So I get why people are tempted to go, oh, this is a purely transactional thing.

What have you done for me lately? How are you making me and we are explicit. We don't promise any of those things. And I don't think regardless of whether you participate with us as an individual in this world, you want to resist that kind of barter. It's a bad trade. Nothing outside of you is going to give you what you need.

What you need has to come internally. It's intrinsic. So it makes sense to me why people have this perception that enrollment is about something out there. Give me what I need. If I just pay the right amount of money or time or whatever it is, it's going to serve me. And where there's nuance here is there are things outside of you that can serve you, but it's how you use those things.

There's a mechanistic utility in those things that we work in order to get the thing we're looking for. So how do you enroll yourself and let's take someone off the table. Let's just talk it out. If you're you just want to learn how to do hard things anywhere you go, all the time. This is where we come up with our Credo framework.

Because this framework works in every context, you have to be a part of mind to use it. You can use it anywhere you want, but it usually begins with some kind of a vision of I want something I don't have. I'm not the kind of person that I want to be right now. Maybe I've been that person in the past and I'm not right now, so I find some kind of means by which I might become that person.

Maybe I want to become a reader, and I sign up for Ryan Holiday's Read to Lead program, or, you know, something like that. Great. Good for you. You've committed, you signed up, maybe even paid some money. And by putting yourself on the hook with money, now you have skin in the game, maybe you're more likely to show up.

All those things are good in my view. So. But that's just you. You actually haven't done anything yet. Like that's the lie. If you think the transaction is complete because you committed to a read to lead program, you're delusional. You haven't read anything like nothing has happened. So as you begin to look at the the very predictable stages that people go through, usually action precedes understanding.

You get into the thing, you don't really know what you're getting into. It's very uncomfortable and you want to quit. But that second stage of like going from committing where it's all exciting to, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to quit and you stick with it. We call that release releasing in your preferences. Well, then things open up, you relax and you go, well, you don't relax because it's really uncomfortable, but you do the thing.

You do the thing anyways. Even if you're begrudging, even if you're white knuckling it, even if you're just frickin checking the box and moving through the thing, at least you're moving and it's critical step. And then at some point you realize, like, it's actually not that much fun to just check the box. You're second guessing, why did I do this in the first place?

And you have a decision to make to move to stage three, which is to not just do the thing, but embrace the thing, to hug the cactus, to give it everything you've got. And that's actually the only place where growth happens. So committing growth doesn't happen. Releasing growth doesn't really happen. All of those are table setting moments for the embrace of the discomfort.

Because now you're an active participant. You're raising your hand. You're doing the hard thing. Now there are other stages. We talk about a lot of them. We'd like defining who you want to become and owning it with your behavior and trying to get back to that embracing moment. And I would suggest at this stage, don't complicate it.

You're listening to these words. Just know the first three stages. You commit to something, you do it when you don't want to. And in the midst of doing what you don't want to. At some point, you dare yourself to just give yourself to it, to hug it, to create that compression that's required in order to see growth happen.

And when that happens, you taste it for a minute and you go, gosh, this can happen in this context. Where else could that happen in my life? At least smart people do. And they begin to actually look for those areas. And that's a really fun exercise.

Yeah, I love that in the visual. For those that aren't watching this or can't picture that, is that hourglass shape where you're coming back to that embrace on either end of it for that gold. So we're talking about obviously enrollment and enrolling ourselves in something. How does you mentioned intrinsic at the beginning? Yeah. And throughout this and I know this is going to come up in a lot of our conversations.

But how does this at the very beginning stages as you're you've identified you're in that kind of commit stage? I bought the course. I did the thing I'm committing to working out every day or whatever you've decided. Yeah. And you're and you're moving to that kind of release stage. I know that there can be a lot of, like, self negotiating that goes on when you get to when you come up against that wall, when you meet that resistance, what kind of tools or strategies do we have, or is that thinking about it in the wrong way?

Is that overcomplicating it too soon? Like, is it just a matter of just doing the thing? And when does that when does that stop?

I do think there's an idealistic perspective of, oh, I just do the thing. I mean, and in some cases, depending on what you're doing, like for some people, maybe they have a history of working out and they haven't worked out for a long time, and they're out of practice. And but they get in the jam and they have enough muscle memory where they can just kind of they do the thing they get through that first week where everything's sore and uncomfortable.

But what if it's totally foreign? What if it actually could reveal a gap in your character? Or it could have social implications, like you're committed to this thing and your spouse isn't. And they're they're kind of mad that they've lost some time where you could have taken out the trash or, you know, paid attention to the kids or did the dishes or, you know, whatever.

The thing is, I'm not projecting. And any.

Yeah. No, no, I've never been there either.

But in all these ideas, what I'm suggesting is. There it tends to be bumpier than the way we're articulating. We're kind of giving a framework, but in reality we say we've committed to something. But especially if the stakes are low, like we haven't, we haven't really put a lot of money into it or a lot of kind of whole heartedness to the thing what gets revealed is like, oh, we weren't as committed as we thought we were.

It was kind of a provisional commitment or plan at best, but it certainly wasn't a promise to engage wholeheartedly. So as a result, what gets revealed is what you said already, that negotiation I committed, but now I'm it's up for negotiation, which is interesting because I thought I committed because if I had committed, then it's not up for negotiation.

And you hear the elites talk about this and I mean elite in a good way when I say that. So like the late, great Kobe Bryant, you watch any videos of him in comment. He is he is relentless and his conversations about I don't renegotiate with myself full stop. And as a result, he created disproportionate, unfair advantages against his competitors because he as they were renegotiating, he was actually doing the work and he was past that second stage.

He was embracing the work and embracing the work, and he increased in volume. When they were sleeping, he got up at 3 or 4, got his first workout in. They were just waking up. He was going into his second workout. You extrapolate that over a decade and he's getting exponentially more workouts, more reps, more reps means more opportunity to get better.

That compression is created. He's growing at a pace that they can't even catch up to. They have no chance. And that's why he was one of the all time greatest. And you can you know, athletic metaphors are helpful because it translates to a lot of and of course, if I want to read books, if I want to, I'm reading books right now.

So I just took Ryan's class. So that's why it's said something. But I it's not the only one. Right. There's if I want to if I want to learn how to do hard things, like if I'm really unfamiliar with being with buildings like something, I would pay attention to the folks at Elevated Spaces and I would I would notice, like, they're willing to, like, go in the woods and learn how to build a platform, forget a house, forget to like they just do clever ideas.

And they started with, if you don't know these guys, you got to look them up at Elevated spaces on Instagram. But what started with this vision of like, what would it look like to build a platform and have a little bit of knowledge of tools turned into like York City, where they have in the midst of the Santa Cruz Mountains, this like elaborate network of treehouses that it's like it's literally like a city.

And they shower in the spot and you can, you know, look over the look out of the like, can you remember that spot and, and zip lines here? And you know, it's just unbelievable. And it was just a methodical I'm going to do one more hard thing. One more hard thing, one more hard thing. So this translates in every context, but in all context.

Once people committed they didn't renegotiate. And I think you asked earlier like, how do you get to that point? It's nice to say don't renegotiate, maybe put a time cap on it, say, I'm not going to renegotiate for seven days. I'm not going to renegotiate for 30. I'm not going to renegotiate for 14, I'm not going to get shit for one, whatever it is.

And you see this like even in recovery context, like people who are in Alcoholics Anonymous or programs like it, they don't commit to like multiple this one day at a time, one day at a time. And if that's what you can pull off, commit to that and don't renegotiate that one day. I was literally on a plane two days ago, and this guy sitting next to me, it looked like he was in a really bad spot.

And we got into a conversation when, as we were deplaning, we didn't talk much because his entire time his eyes were closed, he was kind of shaking a little bit, and we got off and a off the plane and I turned him and I said, you know, I just felt really this convictions, a sense of like, I need to pray for you.

I've been praying for you on this flight and are you okay, man? And he's like, I can't. What, like he got really it was meaningful for him. And but as we were talking, his wife had just divorced him. He just lost his job. He was moving. He was in his early 50s, and he was moving back in with his parents, and he was just feeling so, like low.

And the stories he was telling himself about the worthlessness of his life. And it was tragic. I mean, just utter tragedy. And he was and he actually said out loud like, yeah, I, I'm pretty sure I'm going to I'm going to kill myself and I don't it's a stranger. I don't know him from Adam. And it's like the, the depth of like, and it was kind of this moment for me where I was like, I'm a stranger.

He doesn't know me. I don't have any kind of stake in the game. I care for him as a human deeply, but I have no kind of ongoing rapport with him. We explain exchanged numbers, the text message, that kind of thing. But that's about it. And, and but I basically just I made a request and I said, would you commit?

And not renegotiate with yourself and not take your life for a year? Could you do that for a year? And he goes, oh, that's too long, I can't do that. And I was like, I respect his honesty. Made sense to me even though the stakes were so significant. At least we're having a real conversation. People think these things all the time.

They don't say it out loud. And this guy's talking about that loud. And then we started talking about, do you have any kids? And he said, he did. And I said, well, how do you think they'd feel if you took your life? And they said, oh, they'd be devastated. But. And then he kept going back to his old stories.

But I'm such a loser and I you know, and I've wasted my life. He just kept rinse and repeat these awful stories. And I just kept saying, like, this is just a story that you're telling yourself over and over again, and you don't. There's other stories available to you if you want. And he kept it. He'd be open to it for a minute.

It kept drifting and who knows what's going to happen with this dude. I haven't heard from him since we ran into each other. But by the end of the conversation, he said, okay, one year, one year. And I said, dude, that's faith. If you can do that for a year, you watch what happens, watch what shows up in your life when you decide you're not going to renegotiate with yourself for this year, I think you're going to be surprised what providence brings.

And we'll see. I hope we'll see. But I think sometimes people are wandering around and they don't quite realize how big the stakes are in their life, like what's really going on, what is the context we're all actually in. When you think about the reality of we have a terminus in this life, the reality of those who count on us reality.

And if we have this window to make the most out of our existence and hopefully this existence will persist beyond this existence. And in the middle of all of that, I think if people understood what was at stake, if they could wake up to the reality of it, they begin to go, yeah, I do need to make a couple more bets on myself, even if they're little bets where I'm willing to do something a little bit more uncomfortable this round.

And, and, and really keep persisting towards the embrace of what Jersey says all the time. You know, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. You make the hard choices early. You get the life.

Thank you so much, Dan. In the spirit of our conversation about enrollment and agency, I don't want to prescribe homework, but I think it would be helpful if we invited our listeners and viewers into maybe an action that they can take, something embodied, something that they can do. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that or suggestions.

I have a....

Well, this is it's kind of off the cuff, but I you know, our mantra at Men and Women of discomfort is to become strong and awake for love sake, for love sake. And I think enrollment is interesting because I think there's real value in being enrolled individually. But sometimes, depending on your personality bias, it's it's especially powerful if you can begin to locate some of your why for the sake of loving now could be loving self.

It could also could be loving others. But it might be an interesting experiment. I suspect, even as I'm saying this word, people who are listening something about pop in mind, whatever that is, notice a pops in mind. But if you think of the phrase for love sake and you think of like who in your world, whether you or others do you love or you want to love more?

And what action could connect the dots for that? It could be dishes and trash and mowing the lawn like we were talking about earlier. But it could be a lot of things. And I would create a minimum viable dose of commitment, like something that you know, you're not going to want to do when you do it, but you're going to be so glad you did when you did.

And I make it as minimal as possible, and I would commit to it. And in that commitment, second part of the assignment is tell somebody, tell a human being in the next ten minutes, get up from where you're at, walk over to wherever they are. Don't wait till later. You'll forget you have tenure. The clock is started ten minutes.

Set a timer. Go within ten minutes. You've told someone that you're gonna commit to something that's probably sufficient. You do that, you can build off of it and. And let us know. Let us know what you come up with.

Absolutely. What we're looking forward to hearing from all of you on that cactus and roll yourself, make that commitment, and then we'll see you on the next one.

Okay. Thanks, man.

Thank you.

Men and Women of Discomfort is our membership community and we are open to everyone. But keep in mind our tagline is it's probably not for you. If we're wrong about that, or if you want to find out for yourself, you can find us at MWOD.io. The information material we're sharing. But for this podcast or anything connected to men or women of discomfort or flying as corporate, it is all for general information purposes only.

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