Caffeine at 3 a.m. and a big idea: you have more power over your thoughts than you think. In today’s Daily Podcast, Jonathan unpacks Marcus Aurelius’ line, “You have power over your mind, not outside events.” We explore how to interrupt anxious spirals, why ancient Stoics trained for tough realities, a Shark Tank panic-to-poise story, clutch performance under stadium pressure, the golf “overthinking” trap, and a simple daily practice to steer your inner dialogue. Plus: a brief look at mindset in the Christian tradition (“be transformed by the renewal of your mind”).

You’ll learn:

• How to question whether a thought reflects reality—or just a story you’re telling yourself
• A practical self-talk pattern to interrupt anxiety in real time
• Why acceptance of outside chaos + control of inner narrative = strength
• How elite performers manage pressure at the decisive moment

Quote of the day:

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

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Well, hello there, my friend Jonathan Doyle with you.

Welcome aboard to the Daily Podcast.

Today's episode is being brought to you by my greatest long-term supporter, caffeine.

I'd like to thank caffeine for all that it's done for me in

the studio so far this morning.

Uh, for complex reasons.

I've actually been here since about 3:00 AM and uh, but, uh, we're gonna

get some good stuff in this episode.

Something that I really hope will be useful to you, a blessing to you.

I wanna talk a little bit about our thinking.

About whether or not we have much of an ability to control our thoughts.

I guess to summarize, what I wanna share with you is are the thoughts

that run through our minds real?

Are they reality?

Like if we're thinking something, is it an accurate reflection of what's real

in the world, real in our circumstance?

How are we constructing this thinking?

Is it just happening and then we add meaning to it?

Or is it.

Did we create it ourselves?

Look, I don't wanna bog this episode down in what we would call theories of mind,

but I guess this, the central point I want to share with you is how much control we

might be able to have over our thinking.

And to do that, we're gonna start with one of the great philosophers of late

antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor.

Some of you'd be familiar with him.

Uh, he was one of the, uh, the greats of the stoic movement.

I guess the stoics were.

You can't be ruled by your emotions.

You have to accept the vicissitudes, the, uh, unexpected realities of life.

And what you can do is control how you think and how you react.

That, that would be some of the basics of what was going on for stoic philosophy.

So I guess they kinda took the position that I. I mean, that was taken, you

know, almost two centuries later by the philosopher Hume, who famously said

that life is nasty, brutish, and short.

That was, I'm pretty sure it was Hume that, uh, that said that that

life is nasty, brutish, and short.

We can assume he wasn't an optimist, but Hume's idea was, you know, life's just

really difficult and it's really hard.

And I guess until the early 20th century, for most people it was, I

often say that infant mortality at the early start of the 20th century

was still running at about 30%.

So, you know, average life expectancy was still pretty young.

Right.

It's only in the last kind of.

50 years or so, a hundred years that we've really seen some changes.

So for most people throughout history, you got an infection, you died, you

broke a leg, you are in serious trouble.

Uh, you got an unexpected illness.

There wasn't a lot of help.

So the stoics kind of took that as in some sense is their template and

said, okay, how do we adjust to this?

How do we accept this?

And one of the things that Aurelius kind of focused on was that you gotta control.

Your mind, you're thinking.

So the most famous quote from him, which I want you to hear some of you may have

heard it, is he says this, you have power over your mind, not outside events.

Realize this, and you will find strength.

You have power over your mind, not outside events.

Realize this, and you will find.

Strength, like a lot of the great quotes of history, it's very short, but

it's got an enormous amount within it.

You just look at that first clause here, you have power over your

mind, so he's convinced of that.

That's obviously something that he's learned being the emperor

of what was the largest empire in the world history at that point.

He must have learned that with so much coming at him, he had to impose some

kind of control over his thinking.

He says, you don't get to control outside events.

Now, to some extent, I guess we do, right?

Like we can control some things a little bit, but probably far less than we think.

In the keynote that I'm gonna be giving in Phoenix, Arizona in a few weeks, one of

the things I'm gonna be talking about is.

The distracting nature of modern communications based culture so that

we are constantly being presented with, you know, look here, look here, look

at this tragedy, look at this thing.

Look at this as if there's something that we can do about it.

And I'm not saying we should have no idea what happens in the world,

but the truth is for most of us, there's essentially nothing we can do.

Or very little we can do.

What we can do is control or impact our own thinking and

our own close relationships.

And some of us will have the biggest fear of influence than others, but the one

thing we all can have some power over is the thinking that goes through our minds.

So a couple of other examples I'm reading, uh, is it Matt Higgins?

Matt Higgins' book Burn the Boats, which I started reading yesterday.

Uh, you know, he's a very successful entrepreneur and business person.

Came from a really traumatic background and he gives an example of the first

time he appeared on the Shark Tank, uh, business entrepreneurship TV show,

which was huge in the us And he's sitting on this panel with a bunch of

really famous business people and he basically starts to have a panic attack.

Just before, you know, he's sort of said a few things and he's kind of

almost babbling and he describes in the book this moment where everything

could have completely collapsed for him.

Like he could have just had a huge panic attack on air and it's all over,

and that's the end of his career.

But he, he describes kind of suddenly intervening in his own thinking and

speaking to himself differently, saying, Matt, you belong here.

You have something to say and something to offer, and if you don't do this

now, like it was this profound moment of intervening in his own thinking,

intervening over the content of what was happening in his own mind.

So it can be done.

It's not easy to do, and I find it at times incredibly hard to do.

And I'll give you another example, like just, just kind of how this

must work and, and the, the higher up the performance arc you go.

I would say the more important this becomes, so yesterday here in

Australia we had this semi-final of the National Rugby League.

Now I know all of you listening all over the world into different sports.

You probably dunno too much about our national competition.

That's fine.

But there's a moment where one of the teams.

There's about three or four minutes to go and they score to equalize

and this guy's gotta take a kick.

And he hadn't had any kicks so far in the game.

Another guy had taken them and, and missed, so they brought the other guy on.

And this is this moment, right?

And I'm, and I'm sitting there watching it, thinking like

there's 60,000 people there.

Insane fans just going crazy.

And this is.

All coming down to one single moment, like if he misses

this, the season's over, right?

All of the work, all of the efforts, the hopes and aspirations are gone.

Maybe this is one of the great reasons we all tend to love

sport at some level, right?

Because it's just these great big sort of battles and things going on that

are exciting, and I'm watching him go.

What must be going through your head right now?

Like, can you imagine the power of his mind to just ruin him at that

moment or elevate him at that moment?

Now I know that these guys obviously get a lot of training and they get

sports psychologists, they get that.

So he just steps up and just calmly, just slots it straight through the middle.

It was a tough kick and it was amazing to watch.

And he just sort of turns to the crowd and he is got this kinda look and

he kinda salutes and I'm like, wow.

Like I was fascinated like by the ability to absorb pressure, like.

That, but what I'm trying to share with you is it is possible to control

our minds, or at least to have some significant power over them.

You realize this as Marcus Aurelius says, and you'll find strength.

So, you know, this guy yesterday in the, in the game couldn't

control the entire game.

But when there was a particular moment that he had some impact over, he was able

to direct his thinking in important ways.

He could have had a panic attack, he could have just had, you know,

huge, you know, mental talk that was confusing or distracting.

But he, you know, he was obviously pretty well trained.

And there was a huge benefit.

I play a lot of golf and it's huge in golf.

The ability to keep your mind in a place where you need it to be.

You know, often when people take up golf and they're new to it,

they're like, you know, because the swing is such a weird swing, right?

Like it is.

I heard years ago somebody said that.

If you think about it, golf's just about the most unnatural

sporting movement for the body.

If you break it down, there are so many weird angles and

things that are happening.

It's not a normal action that you follow in other parts of the day,

like actions like kicking or throwing.

We do in different areas of life, right?

But we don't tend to do the golf swing.

So what often happens is people are trying to learn it.

It's not grooved into their mind.

So they, they think of all the different parts at the same time.

They're like, now do this and move your foot here and turn your hips like this.

And then your shoulder rotates this way and then your elbow should be here.

And people like have a meltdown and just spray it into a tree.

And I get that.

So you can see how overthinking can be really problematic.

So really what I wanna sort of wrap this up with today is.

This is difficult.

This is one of those things like, you know, things like

goal setting and mindset.

They're not easy either, but they're, they're easier to teach.

What I'm suggesting here is that you and I actually have an ability to direct

and control and choose our thoughts.

Not all the time, not perfectly, but I would suggest we can probably do it.

Much, much better than we might be doing it.

This is gonna sound really controversial, so please don't lose your mind.

But I remember years ago, Tony Robbins saying things about like depression.

He said, you know that you, depression is something you do.

You have to do it.

You have to think your way towards it.

And then you have to move your body in particular ways.

And it drives, drives people crazy because they're like, well, what about grief?

And this happened and this happened and you can't judge this person.

And I just want you to think about it.

I, I think it's an interesting idea that we definitely know that

a depressed person has a different.

Physiology, their breathing patterns, body movement,

posture, and then their thinking.

So I wonder if the ability to literally direct our thinking more deliberately.

Might be something that we think about now.

There's genetic components here.

I actually come from a background with a lot of, yeah, you know, my

mother was pretty, it's pretty high.

It was pretty highly strung.

I could be quite anxious and her mother was, you know, even more so like that.

And I've got that in me so I can be like, I can overthink you.

My brothers used to say.

I always suffered from paralysis by analysis, and so I was high on

analysis and less on intuition.

As I get older, I'm getting better at that, so all of us are gonna have some

kind of genetic predisposition too, right?

I get that.

But I really think that the essence of what I'm trying to share with

you here today is you may have a lot more control than you think, and a

lot of what flows through our mind.

I think we could begin to question it and direct it and choose different thoughts.

Um, Joyce Meyer was a Christian author, still is, and uh, she kind of made her

entire career around this, what she called the battlefield of the mind, that every

time something comes into your mind, you.

Capture it.

You, you recognize it and decide, you filter whether it's a blessing or

not, and whether you wanna roll with it and you choose different things.

Uh, from a Christian perspective, like, you know, it's obviously the,

I guess the Christian perspective in the New Testament is huge on this.

Um, that, that we direct our thinking.

This is just a equia from the book of Romans.

It says, be transformed.

By the renewal of your mind so that we actually change by changing

how we think we are transformed as persons by the renewal, the sort of

supernatural renewal that takes place.

And I think other faith traditions would probably have something relatively

similar that we don't just have to accept.

What's happening often say that we don't have to accept what's on the menu.

We don't like the menu.

We can ask for a different menu or we can ask for the chef to

create something individually.

You know, o often we go to restaurants.

We never do that.

We just think the menu is the menu and what's on there is what you're gonna get

served, and you gotta choose something.

But most of us aren't even doing that.

We're not even choosing what's on the existing menu.

We're just like accepting it.

Like, oh, okay, this is how it is and my thoughts are this, so this must be

true and I'm useless and terrible and I'm overweight, or I'm this or I'm

that, and that's not gonna happen.

And this couldn't the end of the world.

And then politics and economics and, and we just sort of spiral.

Whereas we can go, we can, we could walk up to the chef and say,

Hey, any chance you could do this?

Any chance you could make this for me please?

I'd like something different.

All right, so I'm gonna try and practice that today on very little

sleep and a very busy schedule.

But, uh, I just want you to be encouraged when you think about this.

You can do this just as you go through your day to day.

If you're feeling down, if you're feeling anxious, just go,

whoa, what am I thinking here?

What options have I got?

What different thoughts could I choose?

Okay, so once again, remember Marcus Aurelius.

You have power over your mind, not outside events.

Realize this and you will find strength.

So my prayer for you today is that you'll find some strength from realizing that

there is a battle and it's in your mind.

And you can have some impact upon that, just by aware, becoming aware of your

thoughts and choosing different ones.

I know it's hard, I know it's hard.

Please do not think this is platitudinal or happy, happy, positive thoughts.

It's, it's a little bit of that, but it's more just a, an actual.

Decision to go.

I'm gonna go this way.

All right.

Please make sure you've subscribed, hit that subscribe button for me.

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God bless you, my friend.

This has been the Daily Podcast.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.