(00:00:00) – Intro

full episode

Brent: Good time period, boys and girls. Welcome to the Full Mental Bracket podcast. We’re coming back to you again for another episode. Episode six, if I recall correctly.

Paul: It’s gone by very quickly. Six.

Brent: We have to pull out a finger of another hand so far to even keep track of all the things we were. Anyway. Yes. So and we are continuing our continuing series on story and how to apply story to your life, specifically about looking at your life as an epic story.

Paul: Which I have grown to absolutely love in these six episodes. Like I’m beginning to see my life even more than I already had.

Brent: It is. I’ve been very excited by it, too. It’s a really good tool. If you’ve been with us for this whole journey so far, we discovered this tool. Someone wrote a paper about it. And we’re like, oh, yeah, the smart people say it’s great. And then as we’ve been digging into it week after week, it’s like, it really is great.

Paul: Yes, we got smarter.

Brent: Oh, from Willow. Like, you are great. And Val Kimmerer’s spinning his little sword around. And like, ooh. Val Kimmerer’s telling everyone he’s a great swordsman. And like three quarters of the movie, he finally pulls the sword out. And it’s like, ooh, you are great.

Paul: But you make a good point. Like every movie now, actually, actually everything. I mean, people’s their own stories. I’m just starting to see all the elements.

Brent: Yeah. It’s, and it is. And as you, yeah. As you talk to people, they’re like, well, I could never do that. And it’s like, well, Are you, is that your voice? Whose story are you telling? Who started that story? Uh-huh. And maybe you need some different role models.

Paul: Yes. And maybe you need to be listening to a particular podcast.

Brent: Yes. Yes. So this is the, uh, Schrodinger’s  podcast. If you…

Paul: What?

Brent: Well, cause, cause it’s the Schrodinger’s, it’s a thought experiment. The cat is alive and dead until you open the box. You should be listening. If you don’t have confidence, you should be listening to our podcast. But if you’re not listening to our podcast, you don’t know that you should be listening to our podcast.

Paul: I remember that. Yes. Yes.

Brent: Some quantum physicists will figure out how to make that work. We’ll put them on payroll. That’s like the question of a chair next to Brody.

Paul: When a tree falls in the forest with no one in it, does it actually make a sound?

Brent: Wait, no one’s in the tree? My tree house fell over. I’m definitely making a sound. Like, ahhh! All right. Never mind.

Paul: I think I think a part of this podcast is going to be my Paul‘s reactions to Brent.

Brent: OK, I think that’s I think that’s fair.

Paul: I mean, it might be yours to mine, too.

Brent: Well, you know, I may or may not have a react video from other people for every moment of my life, so I could probably be used to that.

ANNOUNCER: This is the full mental bracket.

Paul: We are leading up to something special. Like the story leads up to something special.

Brent: Well, we are leading up to transformation. That’s today’s theory. Today’s concept is transformation. To recap the elements and chapters for you. The first element or step is that you become a protagonist. You see yourself as driving your own story. You undertake the quest. You get off the couch in the comfort zone and get out there in the arena.

Paul: My favorite one.

Brent: You find the tribe.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: You realize that no one does it alone and that you need support and assistance and advice and and helpers and encouragement.

Paul: Then you are equipped.

Brent: To face the obstacles.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: So when life throws unpleasant events adversarial things at you adversities at you you don’t say my life sucks. Why is this happening to me? You’re like, oh, this is my chance to wrestle with them to embrace them and to grow through them.

Paul: Yeah, that was much more epic than the lemons. I thought you were going to say when live throws you lemons…

Brent: No. I. But which brings us to this week. Once you’ve wrestled with your, through the process, now see that’s easy to say, once you’ve wrestled your obstacles, but the obstacles keep coming. So in the process of wrestling with your obstacles, and it’s sometimes it’s a two step forward, one step back kind of thing. You’re just not like, you take your one step and like, oh, you’ve transformed. Because if you could, I would have signed up for that a long time ago. But no, you kind of, you go forward, you go back a little bit, you know, your arc rises and falls, but it’s generally trending upwards towards growth.

Paul: Love it. I’ve always loved that idea.

Brent: So that’s the thing so if that’s the thing another bonus tip listeners if you’re having a rough day and if you blew your diet, or you missed your workout, or you got in a fight with someone you’re like oh No, I’ve blown it as I guess well that particular data point is down a little bit and tomorrow you get back on the wagon and you get it back up again.

Paul: So all hope is not lost.

Brent: All hope is not lost. It ties into what we’re talking about about an identity being your snapshot day to day from where you are on your journey.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: So on this particular day of your journey, it’s not looking too promising, but yesterday was awesome and tomorrow is probably twice as awesome. So get up and get back out there.

Paul: Speaking of transformation. It looks like we’ve transformed from Starbucks to Seven.

Brent: Yes, so it’s speaking important to note Hint hint that no one is sponsoring our coffee habit. We’re just doing this for free.

Paul: Yeah.

Brent: And today Seven Brews getting our business If Seven Brew wanted to maintain our business, they could just send us free coffee. But you know, that’s that’s I mean, I’ve done I said out loud. I’m sorry. I was thinking out loud. Anyway, carry on.

Paul: So I’m excited about this. So seeing your life as an epic story changes how you see the value and the ends of your struggles.

Brent: Yes.

Paul: Right. And when I when I was thinking about that, I thought not only does it change how you see the values, it actually changes your values.

Brent: Yes. Yes.

Paul: Right.

Brent: Yeah, I mean, because I know we leaned into my personal experience a lot, which I told about once I escaped the adventure of the wartime and military things, I was just happy to be fat and happy on the couch and not leave the comfort zone again. So my value was basically Netflix and chill kind of was like an unofficial life motto. And I’m like, well, how come I’m not accomplishing anything? How come I don’t have a legacy? How come things aren’t happening? And it’s like, what are you doing now? I’m sitting on my butt. It’s like, hmm, there might be a connection.

Paul: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So how can we move? Move someone from this place of comfort to face the obstacles and then finally to what we’re talking about today this transformation?

Brent: Well, I think it’s it’s about You know, it’s through the process of changing how you see the end result of your struggle

Paul: Yeah.

Brent: And the value of your struggle in this is so it sounds simplistic and you’ve heard this before: No pain, no gain and it’s like, you know, Jim Bros will say it or something but, even in development, that’s true in your life. It’s like, what worthwhile thing have you done that you didn’t have to work and struggle and wrestle with it? If you’re going to build something, or if you’re going to raid the lost ark, or if you’re going to do something, do you really think that there’s not going to be any pushback? There’s not going to be any guards? No one’s going to try to stop you from doing that? Or as Pressfield likes to call it, the resistance that comes and pushes back against you. There’s going to be obstacles. There’s going to be enemies, antagonists, trying to stop you. Forces of antagonism.

Paul: Forces of antagonism.

Brent: Those people that are stopping you may not be your enemies, but they are operating as a force that’s antagonistic to what you’re trying to do. Because we have to tie that in again, that we’re all protagonists.

Paul: Yeah, it seems antagonistic.

Brent: Yes, it seems.

Paul: Even though sometimes it’s that … What is it? The adversarial ally.

Brent: Ally, right.

Paul: Yeah. Could be part of that resistance.

Brent: And even if you weren’t an ally, even though our goals are in opposition to each other, that doesn’t make you the villain. It just means that we are tripping over each other as obstacles to try to get to what we want to do. I mean, one’s right or wrong, we just have to figure out how to interweave that.

Paul: Yeah. I stumbled on an interesting topic this week, and it was something separate from what we’re doing. However, embedded within it was this idea of adversity. And it was such an interesting, her last name’s Bergot, and it was this metaphysical kind of idea, spiritual idea, that everyone has to accept that there will be a force, that we we come into our lives having some sense of purpose given to us, whether we accept that or not.

Brent: All right.

Paul: Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? So once we accept it, and I guess the parallel there is becoming the protagonist, she basically said there’s a denying force, some force that will oppose us, and then on the other side of that is a transformation. And I was like, wow. Here’s a completely different area of study, and it has all of these elements.

Brent: It’s a four-meta story.

Paul: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Brent: And even ties into the Pressfield thing, we’re talking about the resistance and stuff. Yeah. I like that.

Paul: I love it.

Brent: I think it’s interesting.

Paul: That gets me excited.

Brent: Yeah. I mean, I’m not really familiar with metaphysics, and I know that’s somehow connected to Plato or whatever. We’ll have to get into that sometime in the future.

Paul: Some other time, yeah.

Brent: That’s great, though. But so even even in fields of philosophy and stuff, they’re still talking in terms that translate into the story form.

Paul: Exactly.

Brent: So it’s all it’s like this is a lens that a bunch of different disciplines dump into.

Paul: Yeah. It’s almost like…

Brent: Including us.

Paul: Yeah. It’s almost like there’s there is some truth. It kind of lines the fabric.

Brent: So if our discipline is dumping into this, does that mean that we have a discipline? Does that mean we’re disciplined or we’ve just been disciplined? We’ve received discipline so many times that I don’t know. I’ve been in time out a lot. I don’t know about you.

Paul: Oh, yeah. Well, we become disciplined, I guess, if we accept the reality of the discipline.

Brent: I guess so.

Paul: And we’re going to talk about that actually.

Brent: I was thinking more about when I was a kid, everyone made the joke that I was going to be an electrician. Like, why do you think that? Because you spent all your time grounded. I was like, yes, that is very witty. Thank you. Go away. So yeah, the struggles themselves have value. It reminds us that what we’re questing for is not just the success of the quest, of the immediate result, but the actual transformation of the process.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: And that’s something that seems to get lost in our society today. I know I lost that plot for like decades.

Paul: And I’ve got a fundamental belief that I think that we can unpack it as we go along in this podcast. But at least today, I’ll just present this idea. I feel like people, they want they want to appear, they want to be transformed without going through the struggle.

Brent: Ah, like a transformation pill. Or the easy button you keep referring to.

Paul: The easy button.

Brent: The easy button. Transform!

Paul: Or the blue pill, right? Or just staying in the matrix.

Brent: So that’s not Voltron, that’s like the Power Rangers. You push the button and you transform. That’s a different. I never liked them as much as Voltron, probably because their transformation was too easy. It wasn’t earned.

Paul: That’s a thing.

Brent: That’s a thing in movies and story writing. It’s like, why was this a bad story?

Paul: Too easy.

Brent: Well, the success wasn’t earned.

Paul: Which is interesting because it’s like it’s almost a paradigm. It’s like people don’t want the work in real life.

Brent: Right.

Paul: But then they’re not pleased when they see someone who doesn’t go through enough work in the story.

Brent: So when it’s another way, the disconnect between when we look story and then we apply it to our lives.

Paul: Make up your minds people.

Brent: We want an easy transformation. But if we watch an easy transformation, we want our money back because that’s not entertaining. It’s not satisfying. It’s not real. I liked it. That’s good.

Paul: Yeah. So one more idea.

Brent: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. Just real quick, real quick. I feel like fundamentally in order to get over this hump that we’re talking about right now, there has to be an acceptance that we are flawed, that we are flawed beings.

Brent: Are you talking about you or me?

Paul: Well, particularly me and…

Brent: I’ve never flawed in my life.

Paul: Practically perfect in every way.

Brent: Yes, I agree, we are flawed beings.

Paul: I don’t know, I just, I think that if you think that you can arrive transformed, you know, without changing your mind, it’s like, you know, what did Albert Einstein say? You can’t get past a problem if you’re using the same thinking.

Brent: They got you there.

Paul: They got you there.

Brent: You have to transform to a different tool of thinking. I like that, that’s good. And that’s something that seems to get lost a lot in our society, as we’ve mentioned. We get really focused, we look at life almost like from a business or industry mindset. We emphasize the end product rather than the process. We emphasize the destination rather than the journey, and we focus all our energy on delivering the goods.

Paul: There’s way more dopamine involved with staring at that picture.

Brent: The gold star on your refrigerator. Yes, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: And that’s, yeah. And I think we kind of mentioned some of that in earlier episodes, kind of the balance between comfort and adventure. I think this is a similar thing. So there is the satisfaction of achievement, which is, but ultimately that’s kind of a temporary pleasure. You feel good for a day or a week and then you’re like, well, now what? It’s like I’ve worked my whole life for this award. And then you have to get out of bed the next day. You’re like, well, what do I do now? So the journey itself provides satisfaction. It’s not as intense dopamine kind of peak like that, but it’s just this long, long lasting satisfaction that keeps you growing and transforming and going on the journey.

Paul: I don’t know if I’m jumping ahead here, but…

Brent: Go ahead.

Paul: Years ago in my supervision, a supervisor said, We were talking about someone who just could not seem to get motivated to achieve this therapy goal in this program. And I remember him saying, we’ve got to give him something small to accomplish. He said, if he doesn’t have any accomplishments under his belt, he doesn’t know what it feels like to be on the other side of the obstacle. And I know we’re going to touch on that later.

Brent: No, I think that’s great. I think that is a little off topic, but at times ties into the idea of shaping behavior. It’s like maybe you didn’t achieve it 100%, but you’re a third of the way there, which is better than you’ve ever been. You need to recognize that and validate that. If you’re like, no, you’re still two thirds short, no one’s going to be motivated to continue. You’re like, all right, you’ve made it. Now take another step. And it’s easy sometimes for me to apply to other people and maybe not so easy to apply to myself. You’re still .23% short. It’s like, that’s pretty darn good, actually.

Paul: Yeah. Well, and I think that sometimes people don’t know that growth is the other side of adversity.

Brent: Oh. Yes. Absolutely.

Paul: They don’t know that there is something.

Brent: Yes.

Paul: There is something exciting on the other side. Worthwhile.

Brent: Yes, absolutely. And that was that was me. And so when I when I talk about people being skeptical of personal development and skeptical of growth and rah rah rah, because that was totally me. Like, well, it’s important to grow. And I’m like, who are you talking to? I’m doing great. So it’s important to face our adversities. Not if I can’t, not if I can help it. Adversity is horrible. And I would hear these words, but they meant nothing to me. They were cheesy. And then it was only as I lived into it some, I’m like, oh, I’m not really seeing the long-lasting satisfaction in my life. I’m not leveling up. I’m not growing, I don’t have these things where I’m satisfied and feel like I’m really giving back to the world like I could because I’m too timid to leave the comfort zone.

Paul: Yeah. And some people don’t even know or believe…they don’t even have a solidified identity to even know that they have a purpose.

Brent: True.

Paul: You know. And so, sometimes they have to know, or they have to actually be coached in understanding why, the why of why am I going through this.

Brent: And you know, it’s so and I think that’s a whole other episode on whether you were like born with a purpose or you find it or you construct your own purpose. But I think a lot of people haven’t done that work and they’re like, well, purpose is for other people. I’m just going to, I’ve made it to the weekend and so I’m going to self-medicate and just drift through the weekend and then try not to just get, keep my head down and do as little as possible and not take too many risks, not taking any chances, not really grow, just kind of just…They’re racing for retirement, like we were talking about, or at least implying a couple episodes ago. It’s like, is that really how you wanna live? You wanna live your whole life holding your breath, racing for retirement, and then you realize, much like the achievement, like, I’m here, what do I do now? I’ve lived my whole life to get here, and now I’m playing shuffleboard or Wii bowling with all the senior citizens.

Paul: It’s not epic.

Brent: It’s not epic. Yeah. I mean, if that’s what you wanna do, we’re not gonna shame you or anything, but you could be epic.

Paul: Yeah. That could be an encouraging word to somebody, by the way.

Brent: You could be epic?

Paul: They could be like, no, I don’t see it. But I think that we should say it.

Brent: I think we should.

Paul: You could be epic.

Brent: You could be epic. And to pull out a thought from a previous episode, often the protagonist is the least likely looking person. We found Frodo Baggins to go all the way to Mordor, right? And it’s like, he had the tiniest legs. He had to take twice as many steps as everybody else. I mean, he was the wrong person. So every time you say, it’s not me, it’s not me. That actually makes for a better story sometimes if you are the least likely. Then you can inspire other people. Not only do you get the satisfaction of doing something that no one believed you could do, especially yourself, but then you also get to be a role model for other people. Like, well, if they did it, I can do it too. And you get to inspire other people.

Paul: Inspiration.

Brent: Being inspiring is awesome.

Paul: Being inspired. Right.

Brent: Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Man, it’s a cycle. It’s a circle. It’s the circle of life.

Brent: I was going to sing it. The circle of inspiration.

ANNOUNCER: This is the Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: As we were mentioning before, it’s like it’s the same balance, or to use a fancy Paul term, it could be the same dialectic, which is you can’t have purpose and adventure without the discomfort.

Paul: That’s right.

Brent: And it’s the same thing. You can’t have the satisfaction of growth without the pain and the struggle of adversity. They’re flip sides of the same coin.

Paul: Accept it.

Brent: Yes.

Paul: Accept it.

Brent: So what do you think this looks like in story? It’s all kind of, it’s all kind of theoretical till now.

Paul: Well, this, this first definition sounds like me explaining a bunch of things that happened to a character, challenges, complications.

Brent: Yes. And that’s it. Some writers talk about you put your character up a tree and then you throw rocks at them. That’s how you develop a plot. Because there’s like decisions made under pressure reveal the character and they also shape the character and all that stuff.

Paul: Oh man.

Brent: So we have two elements. We have the plot and we have the character arc. And sometimes people, even writers, get those two confused. But there are two separate things. The plot, as Paul mentioned, are the events that happen. Good, bad, pushback, the try-fails, all the things we talked about. No one makes the first jump. All the things we’ve talked about. The character arc is how that character responds positively, negatively, running away, growing, leaning in to those events. Which again, it’s entertaining to watch that happen on the screen. It’s a little less entertaining to see that happen in your own life. It’s like, I gotta get out of bed again and face that adversity again? It’s like, well, yesterday you ended on a fail and this is a try. You gotta try, fail. You have to get up and try it again.

Paul: Yes, yes, yes.

Brent: Oh, that doesn’t seem fair.

Paul: No, it doesn’t.

Brent: So, there’s a quote from Christopher Vogler. He defines the character arc as the gradual stages of change in a character, the phases and turning points of growth.

Paul: Turning points.

Brent: Now, Vogler, if you recall, wrote the book on Hero’s Journey as applied to storytelling, to filmmaking. And that’s what he has to say. He’s like, it’s not enough just to have a hero’s journey of plots. You have to develop your character with an arc.

Paul: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I deal with character arcs in real time.

Brent: That’s true.

Paul: Yeah. And I said at the beginning of the podcast, I said, I see, and it’s happened even more so since we’ve been doing this podcast. I see people’s lives through the lens of story. And one thing that I’ve noticed is there is a dialectic. You know, there are things that happen to people. People experience tragedy and they do get stuck. They do get stuck. And they get stuck because of things that have happened to them. And so it’s very hard sometimes for people to wrap their mind around this idea that I have to do something, right? And that’s the struggle. That’s part of that dialectic is like, okay, I understand something happened to you. I understand that you’re stuck, right?

Brent: Right.

Paul: That this pattern of thinking that has developed out of this experience has rendered you frozen in many ways. And what if? What if from this point, not from the point of the tragedy, but this point today, as you look at yourself in a frozen state, if you can see that as the obstacle, not the trauma, but as that frozen state as being the new obstacle. And that has, I would almost say that using story as a tool has helped people frame and I have seen some transformation or a mind shift or a mindset change in people just being like, okay, so you’re telling me that I’ve got to overcome this frozen state; not just, I can’t deny that something bad happened.

Brent: So the frozen state maybe was like a tool or some sort of coping mechanism that they.

Paul: Yeah, I mean.

Brent: Because I’m trying to think of a movie where someone adopts their tool and they won’t let go of it and the tool becomes the obstacle.

Paul: Oh.

Brent: Listeners, I’m sure you can come up with something.

Paul: Please.

Brent: I’m not coming up with anything right now, but we’ll think about that.

Paul: But see, now that you’ve posed the question, my brain will be scanning everything I watch now.

Brent: Everything. It’s like how did I just grab this tool and think it was the solution, but it actually became the problem.

Paul: Yes, yes. And I am probably going to at some point in this podcast use the words adaptive and maladaptive. So what we’re talking about right now, this is really defining that when people are stuck or they’re frozen and they have that tool that you just mentioned that they’re holding on to. might have worked, right?

Brent: Right.

Paul: Like, you know, people that deal with trauma, you know, dissociation actually is very helpful until you’re ready to deal with that frozen state.

Brent: So while you’re in this same crisis, to go away to your happy place can be a good thing.

Paul: It can be.

Brent: If you can’t physically escape, you can mentally escape. Yeah. But once you’ve escaped and you want to heal and pull it back together again, that tool is not so useful anymore.

Paul: Exactly.

Brent: I got you.

Paul: Couldn’t have said it better.

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Brent: Well, I looked up, I was kind of curious. I came up with this word adaptive in a lot of literature. I was kind of curious what it meant. And if I recall correctly, under the definition I came up with is adaptive just means helping is it’s useful to help people achieve their goals, interact with each other. If the tool’s working or not, if it’s adaptive, are you adaptive means contributing to a successful life on a certain on a certain level. Adaptive means contributing to a certain life, successful life. And maladaptive means it’s keeping you from having a successful life. It’s probably more nuanced than that, but that was my layman version.

Paul: Yeah, that’s actually pretty good. I would add to that, it’s the adjustment to changes.

Brent: Oh, right. So you’re static and you’re not really adjusting to the changes as they come.

Paul: Yeah. As a matter of fact, the old school idea of IQ, and I say old school because there are other types of intelligences, is adaptability.

Brent: Right.

Paul: You know, how can you adjust to a change?

Brent: Intelligence is problem solving.

Paul: Yes, exactly. So, you know, that that begged. I mean, I as I was studying some of this at some point a couple of weeks ago, I was like, OK, so how do we help people move through their life, through the struggles of life if they just inherently don’t have as good a problem solving abilities or capabilities as some others.

Brent: So they have different forms of intelligence, but the problem-solving ones are just kind of, through nature or nurtures, become a weakness to them. So how do you find the lever to get out from where you are right now if you don’t actually have the tool currently to get out?

Paul: But what’s so incredible is-

Brent: That’s why you get paid the big bucks. I know people like that, but they’re called executives, and I just-

Paul: Yeah, that’s why I get paid the dozens of dollars.

Brent: Rollin’ in those pennies. I just roll in my spirit change at night. My wealth.

Paul: Yeah: Did I forget that half of my income is non-profit?

Brent: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Brent: Wow.

Paul: It’s okay. Anyway. But this idea, though, is that people when it comes to finding your tribe, it’s just a huge game changer.

Brent: Oh, yeah.

Paul: You know, it’s and it’s it’s again, I talked about this off air. I didn’t know. You know, this is why sometimes it’s a surprise what we’re going to talk about. Right. But we’ll, we’ll introduce this another time, but recently played a role play game where everybody assessed their strengths and weaknesses. And it was such a good way to see it on paper. It’s like, okay, I love to look at a group of people, all their strengths and weaknesses. How are your strengths and weaknesses going to work together to achieve a common goal?

Brent: I like that.

Paul: Yeah. And of course, the classic story, each person had their own story, and then collectively they also had a story.

Brent: So to break that down for more like tabletop gamers, of which I really am not one, they base their own character sheet based on their own selves.

Paul: Yeah.

Brent: Like, this is my strength, this is my weakness. And other people critiqued it. It’s like, actually you need to bump this up and bump this down. Yeah. And then when they formed a party together. Yeah. To go on a quest.

Paul: A quest! Yes.

Brent: Story is applicable in so many different ways. So we’ve got to put a pin on intelligence, because we need to do an episode on intelligence.

Paul: Yes, a pin.

Brent: Yes. Anyway, I had a conversation with my wife just the other day about intelligent people are no less polarized or partisan than other people. They just have better tools for making justifications for their irrational conclusions. It’s like, so intelligence is like a problem-solving tool, but it doesn’t solve all of the problems. Sometimes it makes its own problems.

Paul: Yeah. And you find people that might have Average IQs have higher EQs.

Brent: Yes, yes. Emotional quotients. And we put that, so once again, we’re not talking about this today. Even though listeners, it sounds like we’re talking about this today, we’re not really talking about this today. But in the future, we’ll also talk about the term and study where these high IQ people were no more successful or happy or had any other great results than other people. They were just people.

Paul: It had a lot more to do with, and I don’t know if it’s the same studies, but I’ve read studies that talk about this idea of grit. Yes, that’s being actually a common factor.

Brent: Ultimately far more valuable than IQ in the long term. Yes. This is Paul and I playing Pokemon. We’re slapping studies down on each other. We’re playing Go Fish. I see your Terman and I raise you Dweck. We’ll do that sometime in an episode.

Paul: Yes. And we’ll actually have it sitting in front of us.

Brent: We’ll actually have it. With authors and articles. Paul talked about how people get stuck, and he described it from a therapeutic point of view. We see a similar thing from a story point of view. So a transformation story might have plot points that go like this. A person is faced with an insurmountable problem. A person tries everything that they currently know how to do to solve that problem. Nothing works. Person makes a discovery, learns something new or unlearns something old that seems to point in the right direction. Then they have a lot of try-fail cycles because you don’t actually make the first jump, and then the person is transformed. There’s a change in their identity, their beliefs, and their abilities, and they become the person that they weren’t at the beginning of the story that can actually solve the problem of the story.

Paul: Well said.

Brent: There’s a final test in there to make so that even though it looks like you’re transformed You run into this final test to see if it if it really stuck did the change stick or you just think are you just fooling yourself?

Paul: Yeah, I remember that in the matrix. It was like okay. We’ve seen him. We’ve seen neo stop bullets Okay, right, but can he really finish the job?

Brent: Yeah, we are going to get to that yeah, because You know, and I think we’ve been talking all around it, and we talked about people being stuck and whatnot, but at the end of the day, you know, growth is a choice. We’ve talked about picking your pain. Your pain, your adversity’s gonna come to you and beat you up, but whether you choose to grow from that is a choice. I mean…

Paul: But when I first read that…

Brent: Yeah.

Paul: You know…my dialectical…

Brent: Had a caveat, which is good.

Paul: My alarm went off. So I was like, OK, there’s there is a caveat. Or the new word. There is a nuance.

Brent: A nuance.

Paul: Yes. The nuance is people have to know that something positive is going to happen on the other side of the struggle. And I would term that as hope.

Brent: I got you. So if they don’t believe there’s something on the other side of the struggle, they’re not really going to engage the struggle. So the choice doesn’t really look like a choice.

Paul: It doesn’t look like a choice.

Brent: It’s like, screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t, why am I going to stick my neck out?

Paul: I like the way you said that. It doesn’t look like a choice.

Brent: It still is.

Paul: But it still is.

Brent: I saw something similar in studies of people in poverty, people like Well, you know, if you just had discipline, if you did this, you did this, and it’s like, well, if every time, from your point of view, you get some money, the tax man comes in and swoops it up, or someone breaks their leg, then you’re gonna buy an iPhone as soon as you get that money. You’re not gonna hold onto it for a rainy day, because it never stops raining in your neighborhood. And so well if you were just like like know that that they don’t people don’t think like that their experiences have have shaped the way that they behave and we try to moralize that like with our bad people. It’s like will you live six months in those shoes and come back and tell me what you think yeah? Tell me how different you see the world

Paul: You make a valid point.

Announcer: This is the full mental bracket

Paul: There was an idea here that I think that it fit into what we were talking about, and it’s part of the transformation. And I feel like part of that transformation is, you know, we’re talking about mindset focus, right? I’m sorry, mindset change, which also winds up being focus. And it’s this idea of letting go. And I remember one time you were like, well, what are they letting go of? And for me, I feel like a lot of transformation occurs or when transformation occurs, people have a clear picture of what is not in their control. And so this new mindset says, I’m going to focus on what is on my control. And so, a lot of that transformation is, I can see more clearly what I actually need to be doing.

Brent: Which I think ties into this dialectic we got here, is that you may not have caused all of your problems, but you are responsible for solving them. This radical responsibility, as some people call it. Which was big to me. It’s like, no, you don’t understand. Someone came and beat me with a stick. It’s like, yes, but if you continue to lay in the ditch for the next six months, that’s your choice. No, but you didn’t see how big the stick was like you’re not listening to me.

Paul: Which you might not be right

Brent: And that’s fair.

Paul: They need some validation.

Brent: You’re still suffering if you’re still angry if you’re still traumatized you may not be listening but two years later when you’re still in the ditch and people are tired of hearing about how About how big that stick was it’s like it’s been two years dude. I think you can get up. It’s safe He’s gone. You can get up now.

Paul: They probably need some validation first. Story for another day.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, I think we’ll make a whole episode about that, too.

Paul: Well, I think it’s part of the tribe. Helps.

Brent: Yes. Part of the value of the tribe.

Paul: You got to think about it. The tribe isn’t just there to actually they’re not there to be right. The protagonist for you.

Brent: I’m having this meta moment right after the meta moment that you’ve talked about frozen and letting to go and I refuse to sing because I have discipline like that, but then that another meta moment is that is that we talked about some whim I don’t know if we got on the on the podcast or not But we know part of the tribe is the mentor and the mentor may not be a physical person it could be a code of ethics or some sort of of intellectual things so the The template of story could become a mentor, become part of your, looking at other stories and movies could be kind of a mentor to you in your growth.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: That could be part of your tribe.

Paul: And a part of the transformation.

Brent: Right, but you, okay, listeners, you still have to have actual breathing human beings in your tribe. You can’t collect your favorite video games and movies and call that a tribe. I see some of you trying to do that right now. Stop. Human beings, breathing.

Paul: Oh yeah, there’s a lot of introverts that are like, I heard him.

Brent: He said it. Not bots, human beings.

Paul: And, but see it’s and. Yes. And some other things can be a part of that.

Brent: And this is the beauty of the dialectic. It’s not either or, it’s and, which applies to so many things as we’re learning.

Paul: That’s right.

Brent: Paul is has his brain opened up by some of the story things that I like to think is blowing my mind. It’s like it doesn’t have to be left or right. It can be somewhat in the middle. I don’t have shoes or socks. I can have both. It’s like get out.

Paul: Yeah. And I am also…

Brent: All those days I came in the rain with just the socks. I’ve known this earlier. My life would have been so much better. Fewer colds. It would have been awesome.

Paul: Yeah. I am also resisting the urge right now to tell you why Let It Go was bad philosophy also because that that was just her swing into the other side of the dialect.

Brent: Oh, yeah instead of fighting the middle, right?

Paul: Yeah, it’s not the letting go I was talking about Anyway…

Brent: This happens at my house all the time. I’ll brag to my wife It’s like I’m showing so much discipline because I was gonna make a joke about this so like did you not just? Backhandedly make that same joke it’s like yes, but this time I get points for being disciplined and not actually doing it I sketch it all out, but I didn’t actually say it so it still counts.

Paul: We better move on.

ANNOUNCER: This is the Full Mental Bracket. Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: Growth and transformation is often the most engaging part of a story. It’s the difference between just a run-of-the-mill story and something that really grabs you and sticks with you and you remember from time to time.

Paul: I kind of wrote this down to make sure that I said it. It gives you hope.

Brent: It does. Transformation gives you hope. And as you pointed out, you have to have hope to really engage to get transformation. It’s one of those cycles again.

Paul: Yeah, there you go.

Brent: And so some people are there, so well, if it’s a cycle, is that not a paradox? If you need hope to grow and then you need to grow to get hope, it’s like, well, that’s, and that’s where people like Paul come in and find that lever to get the wheel going. Once the wheel goes, it starts reinforcing itself. If you can get a little bit of hope or a little bit of growth, the growth will support the hope, the hope will support the growth. It’s just trying to get past that initial inertia, like we were talking about earlier. Can you see this? You’re 30% there. Isn’t that amazing? You made a partial step. But that’s more forward direction than you’ve had in three years.

Paul: Oh, man.

Brent: Isn’t that awesome?

Paul: It is awesome. And sometimes I am like in the try fail cycle with them and they like to blame me.

Brent: Well, then you just sing, Let It Go to them and they’ll repent from their sins and they’ll go back to where they were. All right, so tales of transformation are among the most popular and the most powerful stories found in books and movies. A few examples are Groundhog Day, As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson. You make me want to be a better man.

Paul: That’s good.

Brent: You got Shrek. I don’t even go into the onion Shrek thing. The Emperor’s New Groove, a favorite in in our family. It’s a wonderful life, which I broke down to watch in my story writer’s journey that everyone kept quoting it, and so I actually watched it all the way through. And like, this is actually a pretty good movie.

Paul: It’s a very good movie.

Brent: It was actually very sci fi. Let’s go to an alternate dimension where you were never born. And I’m like, well, why didn’t someone tell me this was sci fi? I would have watched this years ago.

Paul: Yeah. Oh, gosh.

Brent: So why what do you think it is that makes transformation stories so appealing to people? Why are they so popular and timeless?

Paul: Mm-hmm. Well, can I just keep saying it? I think it gives people hope.

Brent: Oh, yeah Well, you know and that’s it because you know when when you see people grapple with their problems and succeed, these people become more. They become more capable more balanced more self-aware and more at peace and if you see someone else do that even a fictional person you’re like That that problem looks suspiciously similar to my problem. Maybe I could do that, too.

Paul: I think that that we’re hitting on something that maybe we’re not even fleshing out completely. And that is that people don’t have a reference point because sometimes problems, even though they’ve they may have overcome problems last year or 10 years ago. this new problem is a new context.

Brent: It’s a whole new, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever faced before.

Paul: Yeah, so they don’t have a reference point. And suddenly the story gives them some kind of reference point, right? So they see the protagonist in a story as being more capable and they’re like, ah, I could do that. Yeah.

Brent: And I think we’ve hit it on this in some of our earlier episodes, but the lens of story helps you actually take a more distance vantage point. Instead of being right up in the middle of the drama of your life, getting slapped in the face by your obstacles, you get to look at it from a 30,000-foot viewpoint.

Paul: Yeah, the objectivity.

Brent: It’s like, oh yeah, this is how someone else faces a similar problem, and I’m not feeling the emotions, I’m not feeling the frustration, I’m not feeling the desperation, I’m actually seeing someone else do it. I’m watching their speed run or something like, oh, I could take a few tips from that. And then you get back into the trenches, and you’re like, all right, let’s try not to forget what we learned as the problems go back to slapping me in the face.

Paul: I think the more that I’ve studied a story in these recent months, I’ve grown into a new appreciation of this idea of leveling up. Because it’s like, OK, that puts a language to this idea that, OK, I’m different than I was last year. I have now grown and I’m different. This past version of myself is definitely the person that I was hoping that I wouldn’t be by this time. And lo and behold, I am a better version of myself.

Brent: Yeah, and this whole best version of you, when I first came out, I thought that just sounded weird, and I was kind of skeptical about it. But as we’ve got more into this tool, I’m starting to see that. Like, you were a version of you, and the story served to transform you into the person that could actually solve the problem of that story. You are a now new, better, leveled-up version of you.

Paul: I have to … There is a nuance here, and it has a lot to do with other people being able to see some of these changes, because sometimes the mind …

Brent: They’re not always going to see them.

Paul: No, I don’t think other people are going to see it right away anyway, because you may have a different way of looking at something, and I hate to say it, but the old version of you, you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of the old version’s behavior for a little bit.

Brent: Right. Right. Because you started some, you started some rocks rolling just because you’ve changed. It was the, it was the, Oh brother, where art thou? It’s like, well, the Lord may have saved your soul, but the state of Mississippi and not a forgiving your prison time is perfect. It’s like, yeah…

Paul: It’s perfect. Yes.

Brent: Congratulations! You’ve grown, but the consequences of your previous actions are still rolling and have their own inertia, and you’re going to have to deal with that.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket

Brent: So as we keep talking about, we keep hinting a little bit about growth and identity, and we keep, maybe I’m hammering this point too much, but I read it in, I think it was in James Clear’s book about, or just a quote, he said, to grow requires a loose grip on identity, and that just hit me so hard. It’s like, I’m busy trying to justify who I, well, I’m this guy, I’m this veteran, I do this, I do this, I’m this person who does this, and it’s like, that could keep me from ever growing or changing or anything. If this dysfunction of mine or this thing that’s not helping me right now, it becomes a point of pride, and you can pry it from my cold dead hands, then where am I going to go? How am I going to grow?

Paul: Then you might get that wish.

Brent: You might get that wish. Sooner than you thought. You’re colder and deader than you might imagine. Because you didn’t grow. You have to, it’s adapt or die at a certain level. I mean, hopefully not on a daily level, but ultimately at the basic level, if you don’t adapt, you stagnate and you don’t grow and you alienate your friends and family and you find yourself all alone and grow old and then it’s over. And no one remembers you and no one says, hey, that thing that he or she built to contribute to the world, they’re not talking about that. That’s legacy, next episode. Because you didn’t do it. You got stuck.

Paul: And you’re touching on that negative transformation right now.

Brent: Oh yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. Actually, let’s just talk to that. Let’s skip ahead. We’re gonna, skipping right ahead.

Paul: Alright.

Brent: So we’re talking about all this transformation, and we’re about to talk about some positive transformations, but to begin, we’re gonna go to a negative transformation. Stories can also be cautionary tales. So one tale is the story of The Godfather. So in the story of The Godfather is the story of a good and honorable man who repeatedly tries to solve the problems of his family, but unfortunately for him, his family is a mafia family, making their problems the kind that are hard to solve by good and ethical means. Time after time, he tries to solve his family’s problems while staying a good man, but his problems keep getting bigger and nothing he tries works. Finally…

Paul: Sorry, just sounds like…

Brent: Tell me

Paul: Just sounds like people.

Brent: It sounds like people. Yeah. Yeah, well movies are a Exaggerated version of reality.

Paul: Are they?

Brent: Compressed and exaggerated.

Paul: Oh? Yeah. We should do a podcast on that.

Brent: We should do that So, time and again he tries to solve his family’s problems by staying a good man, but his problems keep getting bigger, and nothing he tries works for long. Finally, he transforms into the person he needs to be to solve the problems of his family. He transforms into a ruthless and vengeful godfather.

Paul: Oops.

Brent: He lets go of his identity as an honest and innocent man, and in so doing, he solves the problem. In a certain to a certain definition of solved.

Paul: Right.

Brent: All his enemies are dead and the family is secure and everyone fears him and no one’s going to try anything good for a new at least 18 months. So he solved all the problems.

Paul: He maladaptively solved them.

Brent: Michael Corleone. He transformed to become what he thought was going to, what the story needed. He became a violent authoritarian figure to lead the family and punish his enemies. But his story became a personal tragedy.

Paul: Gosh, this is kind of how we define an antagonist.

Brent: Yeah, you can, when life hits you as an adversity, that’s a great idea. How you respond determines if you’re the protagonist or an antagonist. Because we talked earlier about we’re all protagonists, but as we mentioned in other episodes, if we’re reaching in to drive other people’s cars, we’re trying to control them, we’re trying to steal their legacy, then we’ve kind of left the protag and kind of entered into the antag territory.

Paul: Yes, yes, yes. So when I was thinking about this, this idea of negative transformation, I went back to the dialectic that we talked about earlier, which is you may not have solved, I mean, you may not have caused all your problems, but it’s your responsibility to solve it. And I realized that that was, what I noticed in the example of the Godfather and some of the real-time stories that I’ve heard, and that is that people, instead of taking responsibility, they choose to blame others. And so that’s, I think that that’s a, you know, we talked about turning points at some earlier, right? That those turning points in the character arc.

Brent: And it’s character arc. Yeah, the character arc are the turning points of growth, right?

Paul: Well, and this is like a turning point in the direction of blaming others and then it’s almost like the life trajectory at that point becomes a pattern just like I was talking about people getting stuck right this pattern of thinking which is I’ve got to take care of this now, which is interesting because they’re not taking responsibility for on the right problem, which goes back to, again, what is in your control and what’s not in your control.

Brent: There’s a lot of assumptions they didn’t question. The assumptions were, we have to stay a crime family, we have to be strong and punish our enemies, we have to fight fire with fire, we can’t quit, we can’t retire, we can’t go into witness protection, we can’t move to another country and just let the other enemy have the, we can’t just roll over and have a peaceful life. Now maybe they couldn’t roll over and stay in that neighborhood and have a peaceful life, but they could have left somewhere else. You know, maybe, I don’t know. So yeah, there was a lot of assumptions they didn’t, they just skipped over and said, all right, these are the rules of the engagement. We have to fight blood with blood.

Paul: Yeah. Also the law of entropy kind of came up, which is something I use every now and then just as an idea that if you don’t, if you don’t address a problem, if you don’t take responsibility for the problem itself, then it tends to just get worse. Much like the law of entropy. It just continues to snowball with all of its consequences. Behaviors get reinforced, so you just continue to do the same thing over and over again.

Brent: We used to sometimes call that going around the mountain. You just go in a circle around a mountain, and you get all the way back to where you started. And like, oh, look, that same obstacle is right where I left it, as if no one solved it when I ran away from it. And it was just there waiting for me. But as you were saying, the obstacle can often get bigger. You lap around the mountain, and like, wow, that rock is even bigger than the last time I saw it. Someone should do something about that.

Paul: So what does that say about that lady?

Brent: Which lady?

Paul: About she’ll be coming around the mountain.

Brent: I should be coming around well Shelby, you know Shelby was coming around I don’t know. All right, so you get to dad’s.

Paul: We are dads.

Brent: You get to dad’s dad jokes That’s just we’ve been doing really good up to this point, so don’t complain. Or we can give you some examples. All right, so protagonists are changing and struggling and growing slowly throughout a good story. But there’s often a final test. A final test that demonstrates how the character has changed since the beginning. It’s like a story version of a before and after photo.

Paul: So we’ve moved into positive transformation.

Brent: Yes, yes. We talked briefly, dipped into, we differently with the scare tactics. If you don’t transform right, you could become the godfather. Now we’re going back into the positive thing. If you transform correctly, either way, good or bad, there is a final test in a story. It’s like, I think he’s grown, I think he’s doing better, and he thinks he’s doing better, or she thinks she’s doing better, but then there has to be this final reckoning. It’s like, are you gonna go back to your old way of thinking, or have you really adopted the change for good? It’s the final, now I wanna sing the final countdown, nevermind.

Both singing: It’s the final countdown.

Brent: Anyway, so let’s look at the matrix. Let’s forget that we just sang Europe and move on. And look at the matrix. Neo struggles to believe and improve. The whole movie long, he’s struggling to believe. He’s the one. He’s struggling to improve and control the matrix. He’s showing a little bit of control here, a little bit of control there. Sci-fi magic, I can kind of do this stuff. I can stretch the rules a little bit. And then we talked about in our previous episodes this whole cycle of victory that he had. He rescued Morpheus, he beat down Agent Smith with his bare hands, something no one had ever done before.

Paul: Again, spontaneous, I’m just noticing that he had the choice all along. but he wasn’t aware yet.

Brent: Right, he had to be brought to this point.

Paul: Of awareness.

Brent: The struggles are about teaching him. He has to try and fail. He has to learn to believe. He believes, but he believes a little bit wrong. He put a lot of faith in the Oracle and he had to figure it all out. but it’s shaping him like sandpaper, and it’s growing him like weights in a gym, and the whole transformation is the thing that…

Paul: Two analogies in one sentence.

Brent: I mixed my metaphors. I’ve been actually doing really good, along with dad jokes, I’ve been really doing good about not mixing my metaphors, but…

Paul: Oh, I enjoy it.

Brent: Here we are.

Paul: Keep going.

Brent: This is the adversity that we provide to our listeners so they can grow.

Paul: That’s very dialectic.

Brent: There’s no extra charge. All right, so he beats Agent Smith down with his bare hands, and then he takes Morpheus and Trinity, and he sees them off, and they’re back to the safety of the ship. And then he’s shot dead, spoiler, by the vindictive Agent Smith. A final test for this person that we’ve built up to be this messianic figure. You know, he’s kind of like a Jesus figure in this movie. Can you save us all from our damnation?

Paul: Oh. Yeah.

Brent: And then he dies. No, he dies sorry guys the movie was cut short, and it was it had a very sad theme at the end. They rolled the credits. Neo we’ll miss you, and they put some teddy bears right where he died and yes, no that’s not true. So only when he accepts Trinity’s love and comes back to life is he fully transformed? Oh, so he was mostly transformed, but he had to pass that last test. There’s like a trial by fire. An initiation kind of thing, a trial by fire. It’s like, okay, you really are, you really have passed over to the other side and you really are a new person now. So, once he’s passed that final test, he’s the master of the matrix. You know, he flexes and the bolts fall and he does this. I really wish I could do that sometimes. I stretch sometimes and I watch to see if the corridors are going to flex with me. And so far, they never have.

Paul: I’ve tried to fly.

Brent: But here’s hoping it could happen.

Paul: Yeah, that doesn’t work out too well either.

Brent: Huh. I can either confirm or deny that if you build cardboard wings and jump off of your house, aerodynamics are not your friend.

Paul: Is there a video of that anywhere?

Brent: Fortunately for me, this is before video was a thing. There was just me and gravity and my pain. I even told my parents and they’re like they didn’t feel sorry for me like that’s what happens to dumb people they learn painful lessons.

Paul: Yes, but you had a mindset shift.

Brent: I did yes. I’m like yeah stories are not necessarily for real like I glad I didn’t write I think I did I tried the cardboard wings and I went back with a trash bag I said, I think I didn’t do it right and we refined my technique.

Paul: Try. Fail.

Brent: That worked 0.2% better than a cardboard wings, but there was still some painful impacts involved. Wow, I’m going down…

Paul: Yes, you should not give up on that by the way.

Brent: Paul’s an enabler. How did Brent fall to his death? Well, Paul, never mind. So, uh. I haven’t gone parachuting, that’s true. I’m not going to blame that on early painful childhood experiences. We’ll just say that those two data points exist in a relationship of some kind. I built a parachute and it failed, and I never tried anyone else’s parachute. So another story we’ve been talking about is the Iron Man story.

Paul: Two of my favorites.

Brent: It’s a great story of transformation. That’s probably why it’s one of the best, or at least my favorite, of the Marvel movies, is because they spent the time building this really solid character arc. Some of the other movies were kind of rushed. I sat there like, why didn’t I like Thor and Captain America as much as I liked Iron Man? Because they really spent the time to rehabilitate a jerk. And you’re like, oh, that feels great.

Brent: Let’s go through that.

Paul: Okay.

Brent: So the entire movie of Iron Man 1 Tony Stark struggles to come to terms with his ego his selfishness and his legacy with the world to the world He starts the story as an egotistical and self-absorbed tech genius who spends his life being praised for his genius and chasing his own pleasures.

Paul: That’s that reinforcement I was talking about earlier.

Brent: You recall at the very beginning, he doesn’t even get his own trophy. He sends his buddy to go pick trophy while he’s gambling and girls are kissing his dice.

Paul: But he gets captured.

Brent: But he gets captured. Yes.

Paul: He escapes, watches his friend die. He discovers his own personal and corporate role in supplying terrorism.

Brent: Bad look.

Paul: Yeah, and slowly starts risking more and more to help others.

Brent: So he starts that, it’s the shaping that forward? Yes, it’s the beginning. Tiny step forward, tiny step forward. Say, hey, that didn’t kill me. Let’s try this again. That’s right. I like it. At the climax of the movie, if you recall, he tells Pepper to blow up the arc reactor, fully expecting to die. He does a suicide move. Kamikaze. That like Neo, he somehow survives the suicide move. He does a suicide move and lives to tell about it. That’s what those two movies have in common.

Paul: But he passes the final test.

Brent: Right, he beats the villain and saves his girlfriend.

Paul: Finding enough selflessness. I mean, it’s a true story.

Brent: Just enough.

Paul: Just enough. to save the day, right? He’s not fully reformed. Still very arrogant.

Brent: Yes. And they point…He’s upgraded his identity, and he starts his life of a new and more satisfying course as a high-tech superhero. But they point out that he’s not fully rehabilitated when they get into the Avengers movie. He and Captain America have this fight. He’s like, you would never lay down on a tripwire to save your buddy. He’s like, well, I’m too smart for that. I would cut the wire or something. But he calls him out. He’s like, you are smart and you’re semi-heroic, but you won’t give everything for others.

Paul: Turning point.

Brent: Right. And then, spoiler to the end of the Avengers movies, after 12, 21 movies or something, he finally gets to that point where he can do that.

Paul: So the story problem is impossible for the old protagonist to solve at the beginning of the story.

Brent: Correct.

Paul: The old version, as we were saying earlier. So only by learning, or I like this, unlearning, changing how they become the type of person who can solve the problem. That’s the transformation.

Brent: And that changes how we see our own adversities. I’m not the right person to solve this problem. This problem’s really hard.” He’s like, this problem is helping you level up.

Paul: Yeah. And again, it’s just I hear it every day.

Brent: I’ve tried.

Paul: I tried that. That’s the most common one.

Brent: I’ve tried that.

Paul: That’s the one I just want to just walk out of the room. I’ve tried that.

Brent: I’ve been thinking. Random aside, I’ve been seeing these React posts, or this whole thing, and they’ll talk about Malcolm Gladwell, or something else, or something else, and I just started thinking about that. It’s like, all right, I saw your thing, and I halfway listened to it, and I tried a poorly plotted out version of what you said, and it didn’t work for me, so I’m launching my own platform to talk about what a fraud you are. And it’s like, you weren’t, you didn’t even, what you call a try was like a 5% try. Give it a full try, and if it still doesn’t work, maybe,

Paul: But then there’s the skill factor that nobody thinks about, you know? It’s like, you know, it’s like I’ve told people, if I draw a line, a straight line on this piece of plywood, and give you a saw, and tell you, you know, I want you to cut a straight line. Now, if this is the first time they’ve ever done this, and it’s crooked, and they go, eh, I tried. It takes several tries to get that thing straight. Maybe dozens.

Brent: One of the stories that I tell myself to give myself courage, actually the story I told myself to give myself courage to actually start working on this was how my oldest daughter nagged me, belovedly encouraged me to build her a built-in bookshelf for her house. And I was like, no, you don’t understand. I am a rough carpenter. I’ll build a doghouse that will survive a nuclear bomb, but nothing I build is pretty. There’s this one time, literally, and this is, I would tell her the story, there was this one time 26 years ago, I tried to build something pretty, and the wood warped, and it was ugly, and I’ve never tried again. And I didn’t even, I wasn’t aware of the words that were coming out of my mouth. With this new filter, I recognize it all right now, but that was the story I told. It’s like, would you just try for me, daddy? It’s like, you’re 32 years old, stop the daddy thing. But it worked, and I tried it, and it was really good. So. A. I just took one step at a time, I googled one step at a time, I prepped the night before, I did it. B. Caulk covers a multitude of sins.

Paul: Amen.

Brent: You know, we didn’t have to stain it, we’re painting it, so we could get away with a lot of stuff. And I got to this point, oh, I’m so mad, this is two millimeters off, and she’s looked at me, two millimeters, that’s your standard of, maybe I’m overreacting. She’s like, just a little. So and it was beautiful and I put that aside and I want you to go build something new Like a whole content system the whole thing like we’re doing here, but oh, I’m so overwhelmed I ever like you built the thing step-by-step before you develop the skills you didn’t have to build a product that you only I basically understood you can do that again and again and again. Oh, that’s so true. Even my own stories can be used as inspiration to get me off the ledge and doing stuff.

Paul: Yes. Which is why I think sometimes people accounting for some accomplishment and maybe helping them see those, that area or that part of their life or that bracket, so to speak. Through the lens of story, it can be inspirational.

Brent: That’s something I would like to do, and maybe we can spend some more energy on that, is just to help people see stories in their own past that can help them move into the present. It’s just a series of questions we can say, hey, what happened in your past? I think you probably have a story in there that will help you.

Paul: You know, I know in the Jewish faith that this is why they do different celebrations because they remind them of accomplishments. They remind them of things that, you know, God helped them through, and it helps them to be inspired for any obstacles they’re dealing with in their personal lives.

Brent: I like that. I like that. We always made fun of the name Ebenezer, but apparently that has a meaning like rock of defense or something. And they piled all these rocks in a pile to remind themselves that they made it across the river. I was like, there’s something powerful in having a physical reminder. You’re like, you’re having a crappy day. You turn your head, you see this big pile of rocks like, hey, it hasn’t always been crappy. It won’t always be crappy. There’s a thing I can look to. I like it.

ANNOUNCER: This is the Full Mental Bracket. Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: I think we’re at the point where we give the takeaways.

Paul: I can’t believe we made it!

Brent: We’ve covered a lot of material. We had some try-fail cycles ourselves. We were discouraged. We may never make it all the way through this episode. But we held on to each other firmly. It’s like, you got this, buddy! I got it, too! And here we are, we made it. So here’s some takeaways. We try to give some questions at the end of each episode that you can kind of think about and apply this information and actually see how you can tool up your own life.

Paul: I like this first one.

Brent: So question number one. Are there areas in your life where you’re focusing on the short-term results rather than on the long-term process?

Paul: Oh, let that sink in. That’s a really good question. But I’ll go to the second question. How could your current struggles actually be working towards your transformation?

Brent: That’s a good question.

Paul: Yeah, that’s really good.

Brent: Are there problems in your life that you are avoiding taking responsibility for? Are you getting hung up on the fact that they were not your fault and not actually embracing them and moving them forward? What are they?

Paul: The reason I like that question is because that’s the question that really helps you frame whether or not your trajectory is moving toward the negative transformation or the positive transformation.

Brent: Are you taking responsibility for your own problems? Are you still getting hung up on whose fault they are? Which, once again, to reiterate, it doesn’t mean that they weren’t someone else’s fault, but that doesn’t change anything. I think of it as somebody left a baby on your doorstep. It wasn’t your fault, but now, what are you going to do?

Paul: What are you gonna do?

Brent: It might not have been a baby, it could have been a steaming pile or something. Somebody left something on your doorstep, but it’s still your problem. What are you going to do with this problem?

Paul: Great analogy.

Brent: I’m going to leave these dog turds on my porch for the next five years and say, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. But it’s still your porch. You have to walk out there. You got to do something with this mess.

Paul: We need to come up with a book of analogies.

Brent: Yes. Let’s do it.

Paul: All right. Next one. Is there a transformation story that inspires you? And can you see yourself having a similar arc of growth?

Brent: And finally, do you see yourself as having a growth mindset? Can you let go and release your identity enough to shift into a better version of yourself?

Paul: That’s a great question.

Brent: So these are great questions that we want to hear from you. We want for you to contact us at contact at full mental bracket dot com. We want to know how you’re doing with your struggles. We want to know if this stuff is helping you. If it’s not helping you, we still want to know that, too. But tell us about how you’re actually applying these questions. Tell us how you’re actually applying this material. We want to hear your stories.

Paul: Genuinely, we want that.

Brent: If you haven’t figured this out yet. We’re all about the story. Tell us a story. We want to know. Thank you for another episode. We will see you next episode where we talk about legacy.

Paul: Yes.

Brent: dun, dun, dun, dun.

ANNOUNCER: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Paul Burkes and Brent Diggs. Executive producer, Brody Scott. Art design, Colby Osborne. Interact with the show at FullMentalBracket.com. This is a Brody Scott production.