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071 - The Obstacle is the Way - Part 1

Hello there!

Kevin here! With another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. The only English podcast on planet earth that is helping you become more fluent in English, and more fluent in life. Bringing you lessons on books about personal development, entrepreneurship and other life-changing topics to help you become better in all that you do!

Are you facing any obstacles right now in your life? Are there things that are preventing you from getting what you want? Challenges that are taking up a lot of your time and causing frustration, stress; we all have to deal with obstacles in our life. However, the way that we face these obstacles will make a huge difference in our lives. The book, “The obstacles” is the way by Ryne Holiday, will teach you how to take obstacles and use them to achieve our goals. If this sounds confusing, you’re really going to find value from this book. And what I’m going to do is break this book into three separate episodes, so you get a three-part episode series. There are three main components from this book on how to deal with obstacles, it’s kind of a three-step process. So I’m going to make sure that I give you lessons on each one. It should fit nicely into three episodes and you will get a very good idea of the book and what it teaches.

The first lesson: today’s lesson is going to be on perception. The way that we perceive the obstacles that we encounter in our life is huge, we have to make sure that we see them correctly so they don’t stop us and beat us down to the ground and I’ll get right into that lesson. And just to remind you, you can get transcripts to the Feel Good English podcast when you go to the website www.feelgoodenglish.com. There you will find some options, including some free transcripts and these transcripts will help you start not only learning the English more deeply, but also learning valuable life lessons more deeply as well. So after the episode go to

www.feelgoodenglish.com to find all the good stuff. And without further delay, let’s get into “The Obstacle is the Way”, by Ryne Holiday - part 1.

So, the first thing that I should mention is that, this book and a lot of what the author Ryne Holiday talks about is based on a philosophy called Stoicism. Stoicism came from ancient Greece, you might’ve heard of some of the original writers of Stoicism basically a very, very brief summary, Stoicism is based on an idea that through education, through knowledge we learn how to live our lives without getting too connected with the things that happen around us. Struggles and obstacles and things that are out of our control should not disrupt our inner peace and the way that we live. This doesn’t come easy. It’s actually a practice. The practice of Stoicism, learning how to deal with problems and how to live a more virtuous life. Very interesting stuff. So this book is kind of a modern approach to some of the ideas of Stoicism. Which I find quite interesting.

We all have problems that come into our lives. Be it at work, finding a new job, keeping the job we have, finding a better job, getting through school or from any of you becoming a fluent English speaker. Not seeing progress in your English, feeling uncomfortable around native English speakers, feeling uncomfortable with speaking English at work. These are very real obstacles and a lot of you might have encountered these before. So the first part of this book. The first thing that we’re going to talk about is perception. How we perceive obstacles will make a huge difference in how we handle them.

The first thing you should do in the first step is when you encounter an obstacle, when you’re facing a challenge. We had to stop labeling it as bad as something that we want to avoid at all costs something that we want to get out of our lives as soon as possible. We kind of do these by default. If something bad happens or if we’re facing something as frustrating as, we’re going to say. Wow, this is not good! I want this out of my life. Then we get angry and upset. We need to try to stop doing that and try to see it as what it is. It’s just something in life. It’s an event that has happened.

What is something that is happening in our lives? You don’t have to see it as good or bad, it is what it is. One thing you can do here is first of all, is this something out of your control or just something in your control? A lot of things happened to us that are out of control. The way other people behave. Somebody sends you an email, you don’t like it. Somebody talks about you with their friend, you don’t like it. Your boss does something at work that really pissed you off, something happens in your family, or your girlfriend leaves you. All of these things we don’t really have a lot of control over. So, make sure you’re not trying to control things you can’t control. However, there are things we can control like our emotions. Our emotions are reactions to these problems. This is not easy. It takes time, it takes training. I think if you put a lot of time into doing something, you can get better at it and you can be less emotional in that situation. To give you an example, if you get nervous with English and when you’re speaking in front of native speakers or something like that, you’re going to be scared you might be nervous. But, however through training and deliberate practice, you’ll get less nervous the more you do it. So this is deliberate specific training trying to become less nervous around native speakers.

You can control this. This is an obstacle you’re trying to become confident around English speakers, but you can control the emotions you feel around the situation by deliberate practice. Remember getting emotional doesn’t help you come up with creative ways to get out a problem, to solve your problem. Emotions getting pissed off and angry; has that ever really helped you solve a problem? Well, I think it can sometimes. I can definitely think of some situations when I was in Brazil and trying to get something done at a company like cell phone service company or a bank or something like that were literally if I didn’t get upset, if I didn’t fight my way through a problem, they probably wouldn’t have helped me at all. But in general, when you’re really upset, when you’re really frustrated and even in those situations that I was in, that’s not when the problem was resolved.

Normally, after I thought a little bit more about and I calmed my emotions so I could thing a little bit more rationally, the solutions came. So, if you find yourself as somebody who’s very emotional, you get upset very easily; work on that. There’s different ways to do that. I’m not going to go into that today. But meditation, exercise, yoga, martial arts, psychotherapy.

There’s a lot of different ways that you can become less emotionally reactive in situations. So work on that a little bit.

Another great idea here is try to look at the problem from the outside.

Look at the obstacle from an objective position. And I’ve talked about this in other episodes. When something is happening to us, it’s hard to bring yourselves out of that situation sometimes and there are so many things that are attached to our reaction, our motion, our history, what’s happened before, relationships or self-esteem, confidence, all of these things get in the way of us thinking through these things clearly, but try to bring yourself out of this. And one technique that you can use is, pretend you are speaking to your best friend. What would you tell your best friend to do in that situation? Often I’ll find this with myself is very helpful. So I love giving advice. Obviously, like I do in this podcast. Sometimes I need my own advice, and I need to give it to me as an outside person. Somebody looking from outside in, seeing the problem from a whole different view.

So do that, try that out. Another very simple thing you can do when you’re stressed, when you think the world is ending, when you think everything that you’ve worked for is completely destroyed, tell yourself “I am not going to die from this, I am surviving,” that’s pretty powerful statement actually! We get so caught up in what’s going on in our lives day to day.

Sometimes we forget the great miracle that we’ve been given every day when we wake up and we have another day to live. Don’t forget!

One more tip from today’s lesson, this is how to completely change your perspective on obstacles and I’ll talk about that right after this message from our sponsor italki. The last thing you can do here is to completely flip the obstacle on its head. Meaning, you take it and you turn it from something that you think is negative to something completely positive. An example you’re working on a computer program you’re doing some software development and you lose everything is completely erased. You might freak out through the computer at the window and then follow the computer out the window with your body and jump to your death but you could also look at it like this will now I get to start from scratch. I will make a much cleaner version and I will be much more focused this time around.

Maybe your boss is horrible. You only want to get another job, that’s the only thing you want in life. So, use this time to discover all of your bosses’ problem. So you know exactly what not to do in the future and also use this time to look for other jobs. Because you don’t care about the one you have right now; use it to find other jobs. So, as you can see, there are ways that you can completely flip the obstacle on its head. And this is a complete mental flip seeing completely past the negative aspect in putting it into a total positive light. Very clear example, you get nervous when you’re speaking English. You know what? That’s exactly where you need to be to improve. Being nervous around native speakers is what is going to make you a better English speaker, so find those opportunities as much is possible in a few months from now you will feel great. You’ll feel like an American football player on the field running for a touchdown. That’s pretty visual right?

That will do it for part one of the three-part series on “The Obstacle is the Way,” by Ryan Holiday. Now that you’ve learned that you need to see obstacles in a different light from a new perspective, then what? Well, it’s time to take action! Taking right action with a clear unstressed mind. That’s what we’ll get into in the next episode part-2. Hope you enjoyed this.

If you are enjoying the lessons from this book, you can actually download the entire audiobook for free. If you go to my website,

www.feelgoodenglish.com/obstacle, you’ll see all of the information on these lessons. And you will see how you can get two free audiobooks totally free. You can try for 30 days. There is no money needed. Get a couple audiobooks; go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep with these books. It’s a great service. I use it myself go check it out, there is no obstacle there.

Until the next episode, keep learning, keep challenging yourself and keep having fun. See you soon!

Going over some of the expressions from today; first expression I say is, to avoid at all costs. If you avoid something at all cost, that means you do everything in your power to keep something from happening. At all costs; you could do anything in your power to make it happen as well. I’m going to make this happen at all costs. So this means using all of your resources all of your power to do something or to not do something.

Next one phrasal verb, to piss somebody off is with you know this one to piss somebody office to make them very angry. I always piss off is, to make the very angry. I always piss of my boss when I arrive late.

To start from scratch; you’ve heard this before in another episode. Maybe to start from scratch you heard this before. Another episode may be to start from scratch means to start from zero to start from the beginning if you lost your whole weeks’ worth of programming, you would have to start from scratch. Start from zero. Flip something on its head. To flip, is to turn upside down to do a 180° or 360° turn. If you flip something on its head, you put it upside down to the head is actually at the bottom. That means just to completely change something. So you’re flipping an obstacle on its head means, it’s an obstacle in the beginning and you flip it on its head, and it becomes a benefit totally flipping it on its head.

And that’s it for today’s lesson. I will talk to you soon!

Bye-bye!