چگونه واقعا زندگی بهتری داشته باشیم

118 - How to Actually Live a Better Life

Hello there! Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. Here at Feel Good I help English learners become fully confident speakers through lessons on life, personal development, business development, Ted Talks, and today, I’m going to talk about an ancient philosophy called Stoicism. But just a tad. I’m just going to touch on the topic. Because after all, I can’t teach you something so vast in only 15 minutes. But the one lesson I am going to teach you is hugely important.

A question for you. Yes you. I‘m looking right at you. Have you ever been in line at the grocery store, and the line just doesn’t seem to move at all? Doesn’t that really aggravate you? “Why is that idiot in front of me taking so long? What a terrible human being!!”

You know how this frustration can drain your energy and put you in a bad mood. Wouldn’t it just make much more sense if you could stay calm and collected in situations like this?

Today I’m going to teach you a lesson from a book called “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William Braxton Irvine. In this book, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life.

I’m only going to share one lesson from this book, a lesson on how to get through the grocery store checkout line much faster, just kidding, but one very valuable lesson which will show you how the teachings of Stoicism can help us be little more grounded in today’s crazy world.

Before I get into that, if you’re new here, or aren’t that new but still only put Feel Good English in your ears, I also have something for your eyes.

Something to read, as I send out weekly emails that contain short interesting thoughts to thousands of interested English learners. If you want to receive those weekly emails, go to feelgoodenglish.com and look for the bear. The bear will be waiting for you on my website to help you sign up. The bear works for me for free, and the email is free too!

Isn’t that nice?

Now enough bear talk, let’s get into the lesson.

CONTROL

The biggest takeaway I got from reading this book was about control.

And this idea can truly be life-changing.

What we’re going to do here is think about varying, or different degrees of control. How much we control different aspects of our lives. Some things we have no control over, other things we have some control over, and also there are certain things we have total control over. And if we mix these up inside our heads, if we don’t know which one’s which, we’ll waste a lot of time being frustrated, stressed, pissed off, disappointed.

To start, we’ll separate control into two categories; internal and external. And I’m going to use the same example from the book to show you the different categories of control.

So here’s the example. Let’s say you’re a tennis player. You are a serious tennis player, and you have a match coming up tomorrow. I’m sure most players would be a bit nervous, understandably, but what you choose to focus on, if you focus on what you do actually have control over could determine how much you worry. If you have been practicing every day, training hard, putting in your best, then you are doing what you can and should be doing. The activities you choose to spend time on are under your control. This is internal control. You choose to practice tennis every day, or you choose not to.

Now what if the weather forecast called for unusually cold temperatures for your match? It was going to be chilly on the day of your match, and you don’t have control over the temperature, right?

You could get stressed about it because you play better when it’s warm.

You start worrying about the weather, you get a lot more nervous about the match. Well, you are worrying about something external. Whether it’s chilly and pouring rain all day is out of our control, right? We have zero control over the weather. Well, unless you’re God. I doubt God’s listening to this episode though. Are you there, God?

But we do get annoyed by the weather sometimes, don’t we? I sometimes do. Letting the weather get under our skin, though, makes everything feel worse. But according to the stoics we shouldn’t let changes in the weather annoy us; we should embrace them. The weather is external. Outside of our control. So you,, the tennis player can’t do anything about the weather. It’s external. But you could prepare for matches that take place in bad weather. Maybe train longer on cold days, turn the AC way up inside where you practice. Internal control. What’s AC? Air conditioning.

So we can’t control external circumstances, but we can control certain internal things. Focus your time, energy and emotions on what you can control, what’s internal. Start thinking how to decipher the two areas, internal and external, so you don’t find yourself getting caught up in worrying about things that you really have no control over.

Internal and external.

But what we actually have are three categories. Things we can’t control, things we can, and things we can partially control, or something we have some control over.

Whether or not you win a tennis match is partially under your control.

The weather, how good you feel that day, how good the other player feels that day, how competent the judge of the match is; all those factors put the outcome of the match out of your hands. And since winning or losing is not entirely in your hands, according to Stoic philosophy you shouldn’t aim to win the match, which is an external goal beyond your power, because that would mean setting yourself up for potential disappointment. The best course of action would be to internalize your goal. This means redefining your goal as something within your control. Your new, stoic goal in the tennis match would be to simply do your absolute best. Consequently, you won’t be as disappointed if you lose, as long as you achieved your goal of playing at your best.

Is this making sense? Have you thought about how you could apply to certain areas of your life? How it could help you feel a bit more relaxed, less stressed out in the areas that do stress you out? Because after all, if we have no control over something, worrying is senseless.

Some people, however, a lot of people actually will still choose to worry.

It’s what they do. They like worrying for some reason. We have an expression for these people; worry warts. A worry wart! But we must let worry warts worry. We can’t get caught up in their drama. Do you know a worry wart? Are you a worry wart? Do you know what a wart is?

Think of a witch. Gross. Let’s move on.

So what are some areas in your life that would improve, would become less stressful for you if you applied this “trichotomy of control”?

Let me throw some examples out here:

We love someone, and want them to love us. But we can’t control if someone loves us back or not. Your partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, whatever, will love you back only if they want to, or if they just can’t stop loving you. “I just can’t stop loving you.” One of my favorite songs, you know that one? If they do love you, great, but if they don’t, maybe they’ve fallen out of love, there might not be much you can do about it. You can’t say to them, “dammit, you have to love me as much as I love you”. That’d probably have the opposite effect. But what can you control? Well, you can control how you treat them. You can work on all the internal aspects of a relationship, those things that you are responsible for. You can control how much you take care of yourself, how much you love yourself, which usually works pretty well in people loving you too. Start with yourself, make sure you love yourself before trying to get someone else to love you.

Anyway, I digress, you have some control over a relationship. How much you put into it, how honest and open you are, those behaviors can help nurture a relationship. But if you’re partner stops loving you anyway, well, it would be useless to spend too long trying to change that. It’d be best to move on, according to stoic philosophy.

And what about your job. Worried you might get fired? Let’s look at where you should focus your energies. What can you control? Because you can’t control everything about your job. You can control how hard you work. If you follow protocol, that’s under your control. If you’re constantly updating your skillset, staying current and learning the latest trends of your field, that’s something you can control. But if your boss needs to downsize, and you might get laid off because of it, well, as long as you’re doing your best there’s really nothing you can do about it.

Does it mean you can’t speak up for yourself or try to convince your boss otherwise? Certainly you can, and that would probably be part of doing your best. But if the powers that be still decide to let you go, well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

And lastly, with learning English. Let’s talk about what is in your control and what isn’t. So many students worry about things beyond their control. It can be debilitating. So what are those things about speaking English that you can’t control? Things that would be kind of dumb to worry too much about?

How others react to you or how they judge you when they hear you speaking - you can’t control that. What other people will say during a conversation with you - you can’t control that, even though an English textbook might make it seem like you’ll know what they’re going to say.

Those stupid dialogues in textbooks making it seem like people will actually follow that when you’re speaking with them.

“Hello, how are you?”

“I am fine thanks, and you?”

“I am fine as well, thank you. Would you like to buy a pineapple.” “Yes, I would like to buy a pineapple, and a camel.” “Oh great. We have beautiful camels!”

You get the idea. A real conversation is unpredictable, not like a text book. Reactions of others, how conversations will go, just a couple things we can’t control.

But what can we control? We can control how often we practice. We can control what content we choose to learn from. We can control what methods we’ll follow to get better. We can choose our teachers, our books, our schools. We can choose to work on becoming more confident, to overcome our fear of speaking and throw out our desire to not make any mistakes. We can control how we choose to spend that extra 15 minutes we all have every day. Will we use that time for something productive, or just spend that 15 minutes drooling on your phone?

So let me ask you, what comes to mind when I ask you what parts of English learning, or better, worrying, should you throw out? What behaviors or beliefs do you have about learning English that you need to let go of because they are out of your control?

Answer that now…

Now what are the things you can control and will commit to, will take responsibility for? What is under your, and only your control? Tell me… Awesome! I wish you luck. Because we do have control over our goals . What we choose to make priority in our lives is under our control. Don’t pretend it isn’t. Now that doesn’t mean when we have complete control over something we’ll get everything we want. There are a lot of factors that could get in the way of you achieving a goal. No, not everything is possible even though you read that quote on someone’s Instagram profile, sometimes what we want just doesn’t happen. But we always have a choice to want to do something. To set a goal. And there’s nothing wrong with not achieving all of our goals. Let’s not take the achievement of our goals too seriously, and let’s spend more energy on doing the things our goals direct us to do.

Take responsibility for what you can control, and learn how to stop worrying about what you can’t control. Words to definitely live by.

That’ll do it for today’s lesson, using ancient stoicism to figure out how to worry about life less. Taking the teachings from thousands of years ago and applying them to our lives.

Are you a control freak? Well, this lesson might help you relax a bit, might help you allow things flow a tad more. The things that need to flow by themselves.

Or are you someone who thinks you have no control over life, everything happens to you whether you like it or not? Well then let’s start taking more responsibility for our lives, figure out what you do have control over, because you do have control over plenty of things.

If you have any questions or comments, I’m waiting for your email at kevin@feelgoodenglish.com. Don’t be scared.

And if you want to take this podcast to the next level, use it to boost your English speaking skills, go check out a Feel Good Premium Membership. For each episode, I make lessons based on the advanced vocabulary, expressions, and phrasal verbs used here, and teach you all about them and how to use them effectively. Does it work for everyone? Probably not, but I don’t have control over that. I can only control how well I teach what I teach. Ohh, see what I did there? Sneaky, right?

Until next time, be brave, be smart, don’t stare at your phone all day, and keep becoming better day by day so you can be better for those you love.

See ya soon, bye bye!