Hello and welcome to the Potential Leader Lab podcast. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're going to talk about the one superpower that rules them all. This is the one, I believe the one thing if we can master, if we can make it, the thing that we focus on. It will position us for success far into the future. Now. I want to preface this with a quote, and the quote is by Anais Nin, and the quote says, It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. And by and large. I think that fits us all. And so I'm going to talk about this one superpower. The one superpower that rules them all. And that is. Psychological flexibility. And so I'm going to give you the three components of psychological flexibility. Then we're going to talk about it. And so there are three things that if you're psychologically flexible, you're able to do. One is you're in contact with the present moment. So you're here wherever you are. You're there, right? So easy enough. We're in contact with. Well, let me rephrase. Easier said than done. With all of the stuff people talk about today, about presence and meditation and all of those things. Right. It's it's am I am I here? I had a speaker I saw a couple of weeks ago and she said, be where your feet are. Right. So just be where your feet are.
Am I here? Am I present or am I in contact with the present moment? Second thing, be fully aware of your emotions, sensations and thoughts. And so again, just fully aware. Not letting them, not doing anything with them. Just be aware of them. Your emotions, sensations and thoughts. And then the third component is this. This is probably the harder part. And then the last thing is the hardest. Welcoming all of those emotions, sensations and thoughts, even when they're the ones you don't want, even when they're undesired. And so the second thing, fully aware of your emotions, sensations and thoughts. And the third part is welcoming all of them, welcoming them, even when they're the undesired ones. So things like anxiety and anger and sadness and frustration and whatever those ones are that we don't necessarily seek out, but welcoming those as well. And then the action part of this is so those three things are the steps, right? I mean, contact with the present moment. I'm fully aware of my emotions, sensations and thoughts and I welcome all of them, even when they're the ones that are undesired. I've done those three things now. My action is I'm still moving in a pattern of behavior in the service of my chosen values. And so regardless of all of the stuff that's coming at me, I'm still moving in the pattern. Right. Of behavior that's supported by my values. And so the requirements there. First I have to have it says in service of chosen values.
First thing I have to have clarity on is what are my chosen values? Right. And those are yours and yours alone. But you have to make that decision again. You should have those things. I can tell you. I can tell you what they are for me. Humility, integrity and courage. Humility, integrity and courage. Humility is first. Because it's, for me, the foundation of all of those. And so you have to, for yourself, figure out what are your values, what are your chosen values. It's very interesting. It doesn't say what are your values? So what are your chosen values? What ones did you choose? Which ones did you select, and have you gone through that process for yourself of like thinking through? I mean, I went through I took about a half a day just by myself, and I started out with a really long list, and then I started asking myself a bunch of questions about how these things show up and why did I believe this was better than that and why did I need that? And it's all highly personal. There's no wrong answer to this, but I would challenge you to do it, you know, go through and figure out and I wouldn't my own personal preference is 3 to 5 for me. I love the number three. Like I tried everything I do, I try to do in threes because I can easily remember it, to be honest with you. So that's why I like to do it, because somebody can remember, I can remember humility, integrity, courage.
I can't remember a list of 15 values. I'll never be able to drum those up. And so go through the process, figure out what those are, and then let that influence your behavior over top of the emotion, sensations and thoughts that invade your head on any given time, during any given day. Because you're always faced with challenges during the day and you want to act in alignment with your values. You want to act in a pattern of behavior supported by your values. You always want to. You always want to do that. And that's the core of psychological flexibility is that no matter what you're faced with, you can still act. In a way that supported by your values. You don't let other things dictate your behavior. Simple. Not easy. Right? Not saying it's not saying it's easy at all. But it is. It is simple because we all more or less we strain against the world because. In order for us to achieve any level of happiness and success in life. We have to have a profound relationship with reality. That's my opinion. We have to see the world as it is, not as we would like it. And we have to see ourselves as we are, not as we imagine we are. We just have to have that profound relationship with reality. We have to like it again. Back to the thing. We're sitting with those undesired thoughts like we're okay with them, we're observing them, we're experiencing them. We're not judging them.
But we're taking the world as it is because the world we can't. We can't constantly fight the world. I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with some folks, and there's this there's this ongoing conversation and a lot of different companies about the different generations and and how people today don't do this. And I'm sure you've heard it, you might even be partaking in it. It might be impacting you. I get it. And at some point, it went on for about 5 or 10 minutes and I said, okay, here's the thing. Uh, you can certainly have that opinion. And you could be right. I don't even want to argue right and wrong. The reality is, though, that's what it is. That's the situation we're in. The challenge is, do we want to do something about it? Because all of that discussion around these people don't want to do this and they aren't like this. And they that can all be true. But it is our reality. And so we can either choose to try something different to get a different result, or we can just continue down this path of bemoaning our reality because it's not what we want. Because we're judging people and things and we're saying we want them to be different and that's our solution. I have a bit of news for you that I'm sure you're already hyper aware of. The world does not give a shit what you want. Never has. Never will. You are not in control now. You were never in control.
And you will never be in control of anything except your own behavior. That's it. Again, there are certain facts in the world that we all agree to when we're rational, but then we seem to lose our shit when things don't go our way. But yet, if we sit down and think about it, it's like, yeah, you don't control anybody. Drive in to work tomorrow. You control all the people around you. Do you get frustrated and angry at the way other people are driving? I mean, just think about that at a very base level. Think about the wasted emotion and time. You lose thinking about those types of things when they're going to happen every day. That's the way the world works. We control us. That's it. And that's why if you follow anything in stoic philosophy, events are neutral. No matter what happens, that event is neutral. It's when we react to it or assign value to it, that suffering begins. Because we often judge it as being bad for us or not what we wanted. And when we do that, we put ourselves in a really bad position emotionally, psychologically. We don't make good decisions at that point. Then we lose a sense of self efficacy, right? The self efficacy is hugely important to our lives because it's a belief in our own capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific results for ourselves. Essentially, self efficacy is our belief in our ability to do good. To achieve to impact our environment in a positive manner. To move towards our goals.
It's a fascinating thing. There's something called you can you can look up the studies. I don't particularly like them but they did they figured all this out with dogs actually. And there's a whole study they did. And unfortunately, they you know, they didn't harm the dogs dramatically, but they did shock them. And there was a whole thing about, you know, at one point the dog would there was a small wall, the dog would jump over. They electrified the floor of the cage. And all the dog had to do was jump over the small wall. And some of the dogs did, and some of the dogs didn't based on another experiment they did where the dog learned to turn off the shock, to turn off the hit the button, to stop the shock. And then the other side of the cage, the dog had a button, but it didn't work. So no matter how often they pushed it, the shock still happened and they learned helplessness. And so those dogs, when they transferred them to this other cage, wouldn't even jump over this little wall. Then they remove the wall. It was just a line on the floor and the dog wouldn't move. Just sat there on the floor being shocked.
And they had to drag it across the line to get it. It didn't even go willingly. And they said the dogs then exhibited human behaviors of depression. They lost interest in everything Eating, sex, everything. Because they lost the ability to believe they could impact the environment. They just resolved themselves to it. Now think about that in terms of people that you know. Think about how many people in our world kind of shrugged their shoulders and go, What am I going to do? This is it. This is all I can do. It's not true. It is true to them. You know, we don't believe things because they're true. They're true because we believe them. So I am a huge believer in that, that whatever you believe is true to you. And you. We create our world that way. We most definitely create our world. Because the things that we believe we make come true. And so the funny thing is, if you believe that statement about we don't believe things because they're true, they're true because we believe them, then that also the other side of that is if you choose to believe something different, that can also be true. And my argument on that is just it isn't around physics because there are certain mathematical, physical, scientific things that are absolute truths like gravity. Gravity is a truth. Like you can't imagine away gravity. But most things that we face on a day to day basis are based on our beliefs, especially what we believe about each other.
There's no truth in that. I got news for you. We most of the stuff isn't even fact based. It's just a story that our brain made up about why somebody's behaving a certain way. And nine out of ten times it isn't even factual. It's the story our brain made up to two to. Close the gaps on somebody's behavior. And so what we do is we see somebody act a certain way. They say something to us, they say something a certain way. They look at us a certain way. And without even thinking about it, our brain has made up a story as to why that happened. And that's what we now believe about that person. Well, they. They did this and this and this. And this is why they're probably this is what they. This is what they think now about me. Most of the time, to be quite honest with you, we're all pretty self centered. We spend very little time thinking about other people. Most of the time when that happens, if you really think about the extent that that person would have had to go to actually think those things, they don't have that much time. They actually, I got to be honest with you, they actually don't give a shit about you. They don't care enough about you to think those things. And yet our brain makes those stories up. And that's why I that's why I'm a believer in that statement that we create our world through our beliefs.
When we believe things about ourselves. And that's the most damaging thing, to be quite candid with you. What we believe about ourselves is where it starts. It's where the most damage comes in, because we believe certain things about ourselves that we have been told by other people. And if we can stop and just question that as a starting point and understand that you are not that. That those things were told to you at some point and you believed them, and now they became reality. That's why this psychological flexibility is so, so critical. Because it helps us engage in these difficult activities and still moves us in a forward direction, in alignment with our values. We don't allow the world to change us. That's what we had. That's the strength that we need. That's the power that we have. I, I have this statement. You remember I told you humility, integrity and courage. Right? Those are the things, the values for me. And I have this statement I came up with. And I know it may sound a little weird, but it hits on these things, right? And so the statement is. I am a speck of dust and powerful beyond measure. Because for me, that sums it up. Because that first thing about being a speck of dust is all about humility and understanding our place in the universe. And then powerful beyond measure is courage and integrity. And I have to own both of those.
It's a paradox, right? I'm not either or. I'm both. And that's what we have to make sense of for ourselves. Is our place in the universe. An understanding that things are going to happen that challenge us. But so long as we have that psychological flexibility, that one superpower that rules them all, nothing will come at us that we can't cope with. Now. It ain't easy. It mostly when we are challenged with some really tough stuff. You know, it sucks. I'll be. I'll be honest with you. This is not like something where you're like, Oh, now I can face anything and stuff just bounces. You're not Superman and stuff isn't bouncing off of you, but you do have you can own that. Like you can see your way through it and you can understand your self efficacy to the point where you got this like I can do. You can say to yourself, I can do this. I can work my way through this. I can make different decisions where we always have a decision, even when it's not the one we want. We always have a decision, even when it's not the one we want. We can never give up that power because it's massive amounts of power we have for our lives. And if nothing else, if you understand the self efficacy part of this and you understand that with different choices come different results. That's a win. Because that's what we need. That's what we need people to understand.
We need them to see they're capable. That they're just at every human has value. Every one of us has value. I don't care. I don't care what your orientation is, what your skin tone is. I don't care what sex is. I don't care about any of that. Every we need. All of us. We need to recognize this in ourselves first. We have to give ourselves permission to be that person. Give yourself the permission to be powerful. I don't mean this in some corny way. I mean it in a way that's legitimate, that every day you can make a different decision to move yourself forward in alignment with your goals regardless of what happens to you. That's power. Power is not being moved off of your path by other people. Power is not letting the world change you. Power is staying aligned with your values when you have clarity around what those are. And it's a constant battle and not in a bad way. There's nothing about life that's supposed to be comfortable. This isn't supposed to be easy. We're not trying to find a fucking hack. Right. We're not. We're not doing that. We're not shortcutting anything. We're going to do the heavy lifting because it's awesome. And because we. We get the opportunity to do it. And we can embrace that. And it doesn't have to be negative. It isn't. It isn't bad. It's a huge opportunity for us to have a positive impact on other people.
Which is, you know, when I think about leadership, it ties directly into this because my version, my updated version of leadership is an external manifestation of your internal clarity and commitment to your vision and values. Leadership is the external manifestation of your internal clarity and commitment to your vision and values. I have to have clarity about my vision and values. And then all I'm going to do is, is that the external behavior that I exhibit will tell people what that is. Say, I think it was Saint Francis. I might have gotten this wrong, but I know the quote, but I think it was Saint Francis who said Preach the gospel and sometimes use words. Preach the gospel and sometimes use words. That's what I believe about this. If we believe if we if we partake in the activity of leading. And we and we want to have a positive impact. It's what we do, not what we say. In fact, if we do it in alignment with who we are, nobody should even have to ask us. We talk about this all the time with companies and if I came into your company and I was a fly on the wall and I just watched and listened to what everybody did and said during the course of a day, I should be able to guess your values. They don't need to be painted on the wall. I'm going to see him. I'm going to see him embodied and exemplified.
That's what we have to do as individuals. We have to pick those things and then hold ourselves accountable. For behaving in a way that's aligned with those. Not going to do it every day. We're not perfect. We're looking for progress, not perfection. All we need to do is commit to having them front of mind and being able, at the end of the day before I lay my head down on the pillow to go, Did I? And for me, did I act in a way where people could say, I think what drives that person if I ask them, do you think this person believes in humility, integrity and courage, they would say, Well, yeah, I saw that. Aw, hell, no. I don't know what they're trying. And that's it. And hopefully we have we can do 50%, you know, we can have more than 50% of our days. We do it because sometimes we just can't muster it. We're human. We run out of energy. It's okay. Don't let that bother you. You're going to have a couple steps backwards. That's okay. In fact, expect it. Give yourself some grace. But. But. Strap. Strap the. Pull the bootstraps up. Head out the next day. If their values, they're worth fighting for. There's this great. I forget where I heard it, but it was awesome. And I think it might have been Simon Sinek. Your values don't mean anything. Your values aren't values unless they cost you something. Your values are not values unless they cost you something.
So it is going to be a bumpy road. And that's okay because you got it. You make the choices, you figure out your values, and you act accordingly. That's it. That's all any of us can do. Well, remember, if you want your life to be different, if you want it to be different, you have to do different. And that is entirely 100% within your control to do today, tomorrow, and the next day. You can make different choices and get different results. And that's what we have to do. We have to live at the level of our choices. And. As always, I'm going to close with John Wesley because I don't know how. I don't know anybody who ever said it better because we create a better world by evolving into the best version of ourselves, and that has to be through serving others. And John Wesley said the following. Do all the good you can in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can, in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, as long as ever you can. And I want you to pay attention to two words in all of that, and that is souls and zeal. You don't hear the word zeal enough. So we should all approach it as with as much zeal as we can. Thank you for listening and I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
