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Stoicism and Sport (Episode 12)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
How Stoicism can improve our game and sport can make us better Stoics.
Martial artist Michael Tremblay and marathoner Caleb Ontiveros discuss the relationship between sport and Stoicism.
(00:12) Intro
(02:07) Similarities Between Stoicism and Sport
(14:19) Stoicism For Sport
(32:49) Sport for Stoicism
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Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Athletes
00:00:00
Speaker
Now, stoicism encourages us to be humble about our capacity to control external things, but it is very aggressive in our capacity to kind of control, determine, shape our internal lives. And I think if you've come to stoicism as an athlete or you've practiced any other craft where you say, wow, if I put work into this,
00:00:26
Speaker
I actually see results. If I put work into this, that work yields dividends. I can become different. And so sport, and especially exercising, I think is like the clearest example of this.
Exploration of Stoicism in Sports
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. Michael has a lot of experience combining philosophy and sport, both as a teacher and martial arts competitor.
00:01:06
Speaker
So we put together an excellent episode on the similarities between stoicism and sport, how stoicism can be used to improve our athleticism and how we can use sport to be better stoics. Once again, this is a new podcast, whether it's rating or subscribing in your favorite podcast player or reaching out with any feedback comments, we greatly appreciate it. And here is our conversation.
Michael Trombley's Insights on Stoicism and Sports
00:01:34
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about stoicism and sports. Do you want to kick us off, Michael? Yeah. Really happy to talk about this topic. So for those that don't know me personally, which is
00:01:51
Speaker
many of you. I come from a sport background so I grew up as a martial artist. My dad runs a Brazilian jitsu mixed martial arts studio. So I actually grew up in the world of sport and particularly in the world of martial arts before I ever studied philosophy or ever came to philosophy. And so it's always been a topic that's really interested me and then it's kind of colored my reading and my study of the stoics because once you start looking for something you start seeing it.
00:02:16
Speaker
and the Stoics actually, perhaps surprisingly, talked quite a bit about. And there's a lot of similarities the Stoics draw between sport and philosophy, and I want to try to pull out some of those here. So there's three main things I wanted to talk about, Caleb. And the first, I'm going to cover the similarities between sport and Stoicism.
00:02:36
Speaker
So what these two things have in common, which might sound surprising, but I think there's quite a bit. The second thing I'm going to talk about is stoicism for sport. So if you are an athlete or more generally, anybody who puts themselves in kind of high performance contexts, how can stoicism help in those cases? How can stoicism benefit you? And the third thing I'm going to talk about is sport for stoicism. If you're practicing stoics, sport provides an opportunity to practice that stoicism and become a better stoic.
Craftsmanship in Sport and Stoicism
00:03:05
Speaker
So it's not just that you become, you use stoicism to help your athletic performance, but you can actually use your athletic performance to help your stoicism. So that's what I'm going to cover. And again, in terms of my background, I am a Brazilian jitsu black belt. I competed in mixed martial arts, including professionally. I also was a varsity wrestler at university. So I'm coming from a position of a lot of experience competing in an individual sport and kind of a high pressure context in that sense. And.
00:03:32
Speaker
doing those things while I had also was studying stoicism. So kind of combining them both at the same time and coming up with kind of this approach. So to start us off, I want to talk about the similarities between stoicism and sport. And this is just a kind of different way to approach this question. And the first thing that I want to kind of highlight is that both are a craft. So I would say the thing that any athlete
00:03:59
Speaker
And any philosopher has in common is I would say they're both practicing a craft. The ancient Greek word for this was tekne. You know, that's where we get the word for technique from. And this meant kind of a specialized skill set or a specialized knowledge about how to do something.
00:04:15
Speaker
So you might say that a shoemaker has their techne of shoemaking. And Stoics saw philosophy as kind of the techne of living, right? So the good shoemaker makes shoes well, the philosopher lives well, they have an excellent techne of living. And your sport, whatever your sport is, that's the techne of that sport. So if I'm doing Brazilian jitsu, the techne is, you know, how to effectively
00:04:41
Speaker
beat people up Brazilian jutsu, how to control them positionally, how to submit them. If it's soccer, it's how to help your team win at that. But either way, any of these things are crafts. And I think when you want to develop the technique of living well, if you look at that as kind of an abstract thing, it can seem very difficult, very hard to accomplish. But when you make an analogy to any or other sort of technique,
00:05:08
Speaker
then it can seem a lot more simple, right? So you say, well, I want to become a stoic. I want to learn how to live well.
00:05:15
Speaker
Well, what you do is you think, well, what's another craft? What's another skill set that I've developed? And you know, if I've learned how to be a good soccer player, if I've learned how to be a good martial artist, there were certain things that I did to do that, right? I set a goal for myself. I practiced intentionally. I received and was receptive to feedback. I incorporated that feedback into my training. There's these certain kind of certain ways that we know provide good skill development.
00:05:44
Speaker
And I guess that that's kind of my first point is that stoicism and sport have a lot in common because they both kind of exist in that domain of applied skills.
Virtue and Competence in Ancient and Modern Contexts
00:05:54
Speaker
So already they're on kind of the same playing field, just the skill that they're aiming at is a very different one, living versus being an adept basketball player. Did you have any thoughts on that? I think the connection between skill is exactly right.
00:06:11
Speaker
to build on that a little bit. I think that there's a focus in a lot of modern life philosophies, which is around being good or being holy if you're religious or something like this that is distinct from the ancient Stoic
00:06:32
Speaker
sense of good, which is closer to skill, building up techniques, or in particular displaying excellence in your craft. Excellence as a human generally would be what is good. And this shift is a similarity one has with stoicism and sport.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, and we often talk about philosophy or ancient Greek philosophy and stoicism as being kind of a lived philosophy. And I would say that's the distinction, right? Like modern ethics, a lot of those things are not lived philosophies because they're more descriptive. They're like the basketball analyst, right? Where stoicism is about being the good basketball player.
00:07:13
Speaker
So the stoic is judged by their capacity to act well, to be virtuous. The basketball player is judged by their capacity to win games, get the ball in the net, dribble skillfully. Whereas the analyst is judged by their capacity to describe effectively what's going on. And I think a lot of modern ethic is in that analyst position. They're very good at describing and.
00:07:36
Speaker
They don't really care if they're a good person or not. That's not really what they think they're doing. That's not really big. They want, I'm a terrible person, but I'm a great ethicist. And that's almost, that's a, that is a coherent thing to say in modern ethics. And that's a non-craft like view of philosophy.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think to make this, another way to put this would be is that the ancient philosophers made competence a virtue, in a way, competence across a number of different domains, whereas today we might think of competence more as like engineering or something that's not so much related to value or morality. But that's just not so on the ancient picture. Yeah, which I think is good. I prefer the craft view. The second benefit,
00:08:21
Speaker
that I wanted to hit on that I think is a real similarity.
The Role of Hardship in Growth
00:08:24
Speaker
If you come from a sport background or if you've trained in athletics before, which is that both?
00:08:31
Speaker
recognize or reframe hardship as something that is beneficial, as something that is necessary and desired. At the very least, there's opportunities to take value from hardships. There's opportunities to take value from obstacles. This is one thing Epictetus does where he makes an explicit meta-comparison between sport and philosophy because, you know, when something difficult happens to you,
00:08:55
Speaker
Imagine that God is like your wrestling coach. Imagine God is like your trainer and he's giving you a task to overcome such that you can become a better wrestler. He's giving you a difficult training partner such that you can become a more skilled athlete.
00:09:09
Speaker
And so what the athlete does, the athlete, you know, when they go to practice, they say, I want a hard practice. I want to struggle because I understand that makes me better at my craft. I understand that I, I get better from this feedback, from failing, from difficulty. And the stoic, because they're practicing the craft also adopts that perspective. Another thing I love that Epictetus says about athletes and compares them to stoics, he says, we can actually learn from athletes.
00:09:33
Speaker
Because, you know, if you went into the wrestling room and you give a wrestler a weak training partner, you gave them a poor training partner, they would be disappointed. They would say, look, I want somebody to compete me because I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to develop. And he says, you know, you should almost take on that wrestler mentality when you face hardships. It's like, you know, give me something at the very edge of what I can handle such that I can become better. Any thoughts on that?
00:10:00
Speaker
The use of sports metaphors in that context is that you see that a lot in stoicism and it's very useful to return to. So Epictetus talks about it quite a lot. Marcus Aurelius also has the example where you should think of often people as, or people or obstacles you face as a sort of thing that wrestling adversary would throw at you, which is of course the same line that Epictetus takes. And the thought there is that this is something that's part of the game.
00:10:29
Speaker
Right. It's a way to improve. It's expected, not surprising. Yeah, totally. And another Marcus Aurelius line I love about sport paraphrasing a bit here is he says, you know, I'm not like a fencer, but I'm a boxer, right? Because my tool is always part of me and it's this sense of.
00:10:48
Speaker
When we think of this craft, right, this craft analogy, which I'm really going to hammer in here, the craft of a stoic is to be a good person. So you're kind of always doing that craft. Like the same way the boxer always has their fist. They always have their tool. Whereas these other athletes, you know, they're only a basketball player when they're playing basketball. But the stoic is always a stoic. You're always kind of fine tuning that craft. That's another great Marcus Aurelius line on this.
00:11:12
Speaker
The third thing I wanted to talk about in this category was between similarities between sport and stoicism is I think that both make a division between training and competition.
Preparation and Performance in Sports and Stoicism
00:11:25
Speaker
And what I mean by that is, is both kind of have this conception that.
00:11:29
Speaker
you intentionally practice in one context such that you can perform in another. So the idea is that if you didn't practice, which is to say, if you never did things intentionally, whether as an athlete or a stoic, if you never as a stoic, you never intentionally kind of attempted to cultivate your character, did difficult things, tried to be courageous, interrogated your belief system, attempted to be more, you know, empathetic and rational,
00:11:59
Speaker
If you never did that, then when kind of the big moments come, you're going to be unprepared. And it's the same thing with the athlete. So there's always this kind of view of, so if you never practice, you'd be not prepared for competition. But likewise, you don't want to, you don't want to always practice. And this is something that Epictetus criticizes with his students, where, you know,
00:12:23
Speaker
They can brag about how much they can recite Chrysippus or they're able to master these logic puzzles, but you know, they're not going out and demonstrating great character. They're not going out and doing great things or they're reluctant to. And this is kind of the person who is too much in a sense. They don't recognize that the training is for a purpose. The training is to do something else.
00:12:45
Speaker
So that view of this kind of movement between two stages, skill development and then performance, skill development, reflection, refinement, and then performance. The movement between those two is something that both sport and stoicism, I think, share as crafts.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah, in stoicism there's the emphasis on the practice of premeditatio malorum or negative visualization, which Seneca reminded his friend Silius to imagine exile, death of loved ones, so what have you, as a way to practice facing different obstacles.
00:13:27
Speaker
And you can do that on the sort of intense scale that Seneca suggests, or a much smaller scale as well as a way to both, I think, as it does in sport, improve your psychological resilience. So when these things occur, you can be better prepared in the moment, in the psychological sense.
00:13:48
Speaker
But also think about how would you face that if it was actually thrown at you. And that way you can improve your planning as well. So I think both sports in the sort of isolated sense, it's useful to imagine what could go wrong in the sports case and the business case, but also in this broader life sense. And it's a practice that people have found useful, the lyrics in particular for quite some time.
00:14:18
Speaker
So it's, it's always good to see practices like that stand a standard test of time. Yeah, totally. Like I think the, that's the premeditation of evils is a, is a great example of that. And the idea is you have to practice.
00:14:32
Speaker
Right? If you come, hey, if you're not doing the work and something terrible happens, well, it's no wonder it catches you off guard. It's no wonder it's too much to handle because you didn't do your brackets. But likewise, the practice is for a purpose. And if you kind of shut yourself away and you just pre meditate evils, but you don't go out and live, you don't expose yourself to chance. You don't expose yourself.
00:14:54
Speaker
to, you know, caring about people because you're afraid of them dying and you don't expose yourself to trying, you know, professional or personal ventures because you're afraid of them failing. Well, then what was all that practice for wasn't for anything, right? You have to also go out and compete. And that's a.
00:15:12
Speaker
That's another thing that Epictetus reminds us, you know, is that whenever something bad happens, he says, you know, think to yourself, well, this is the Olympic Games. You know, this is what I've been training for. This is what I've been waiting for. And now is the time to show it off. Now is the time to perform. And that kind of mindset shift about difficulties, I think is personally really helpful. I think it's even ironically helpful for athletes. And maybe I'll get into that. I'll talk about stoicism for sports, but I think even just like reminding yourself as an athlete, like,
00:15:42
Speaker
This is what I've been training for. This is why I've been doing all that work. This is my time to shine. Not just great in life, it's great in sport too. So I'll jump into the second category now, unless you had any other thoughts on that. No, second category. Let's do it. Yeah. I could talk forever about it. This is my jam. So I'll just think you gotta, you have to cut me off. Uh, cause I love this stuff. So the second part I want to talk about was stoicism for sport.
00:16:08
Speaker
And if you're listening to this episode, it's probably because you have an interest in sport. But I think this applies generally, as I was saying, to any sort of high performance idea. I've taught a couple lessons. I did over a couple of years, I did a series of workshops with my university's varsity soccer team. So I was helping them with kind of adopt a stoic mindset. And I also teach martial arts. So I teach these stoic values when I'm teaching jitsu.
00:16:36
Speaker
And it's really helpful for athletes. I think the first thing that I try to teach when I'm looking at the benefit of stoicism for sport is to take responsibility for your emotions or to take responsibility for your reaction to external events. So one of the key ideas of stoicism is that, you know, things happen, situations occur.
00:17:04
Speaker
But our reactions to those situations are up to us. Our reactions to those situations are things that we participate in, things that we do. One of the ways, and we talk about this a lot on our channel, but one of the ways this manifests is in the cognitive view of emotions, which is the idea that emotions are value judgments. Emotions are the results of us ascribing value to things going on.
00:17:28
Speaker
So an example of an athlete not taking responsibility for their emotions is an athlete gets all, they get all pissed off and they say, well, the ref screwed me over, you know, the ref made the wrong call. And they're taking this view of, you know, I, this thing happened. So I'm angry. I'm angry because the ref made a bad call. There's nothing I can do because.
00:17:50
Speaker
A ref making a bad call deserves an angry response, or not even deserves, necessitates an angry response. You got screwed over, a bad thing happened. And so one of the first insights of stoicism to athletes in particular, especially if they're not practicing stoics, is that there's this gap, you know,
Emotional Control for Peak Performance
00:18:07
Speaker
as Viktor Frankl talks about, there's this gap between stimulus and response.
00:18:11
Speaker
There's this gap between what happens in the event in the sport and how you react to it and take responsibility for what happens in that gap. It is not the opponent scores. So now you're sad. It is not the ref makes a bad call. So now you're angry. It is those things happen. There's a gap. There's time to reflect.
00:18:32
Speaker
There's time for you to take responsibility and then there's the output. So I think that's step one. That's the first thing that I talk about when I'm talking about a stoic approach to sport. And I think that's helpful for athletes to understand that just like their physical skill, there's a mental craft or a kind of mental skill to being resilient and not resilient in the sense of.
00:18:54
Speaker
how much can you put up with, how much difficulty can you endure, but resilient also in terms of your focus or your ability to remain calm and focus on your technique as situations are fluctuating. Did I explain that okay? What did you think about that? No, I think that sounds great. That sounds great. And I agree with that 100%. Totally persuaded. And so then the next question we have is, okay,
00:19:20
Speaker
Well, another thing that I point out with athletes when I talk about athletes is about actually the harm of passion. Because sometimes athletes have this perspective that, oh, I'm going to get really pumped up. I'm going to get really psyched up. But one thing we know from sports psychology is there's actually this ideal state of arousal. And what this means is that if you do not care about your big competition, you will perform worse. If you care too much,
00:19:49
Speaker
you will, you will also perform worse. So the goal is this middle idea. So the idea is as you care, your performance increases, but after a certain amount of caring, your performance starts to decrease a certain amount of emotion, a certain amount of anxiety, a certain amount of intensity, attention towards the event. So athletic performance is about staying in that middle ground as well. And I know, especially when I was working with soccer players.
00:20:15
Speaker
There was kind of this, almost this pushback to stoicism because there was almost this value of, you know, I want to have this big reaction when we win. It shows that I care. If we get upset when we lose, it shows that I care.
00:20:28
Speaker
And, you know, the fact that I'm getting mad at the referee just shows how invested I am. The fact that I get a red card defending my teammate just shows how much I care about my teammate and all of these things. One of the, one of the insights of stoicism is about the kind of effect that passions or extreme emotions can have on performance. So in systolic case, it's kind of like an ethical performance. Like if I'm angry, I tend to do worse things. I tend to be more of a jerk.
00:20:52
Speaker
But in sport, it's like, I feel like performance. If I'm angry, I'm not thinking about my role in the game. I'm not thinking about my performance. I'm thinking about something else. Likewise, if I'm upset, likewise, if I'm celebrating early and I think, wow, there's five minutes left and I'm winning, we're going to win the game or win the championship. And your mind starts to drift away to these value judgments. So another thing that I, that I still sit and points out is value of caring enough.
00:21:19
Speaker
So in stoicism, it's about, you know, caring about indifference, understanding, navigating externals, but not caring too much, not ascribing an inappropriate amount of focus such that you start getting extreme emotion. That's another thing that I strike on. And the analogy I use when I'm talking about that, or the analogy I'll use now.
00:21:37
Speaker
is you imagine a heart surgeon, right? Do you want that surgeon that's like yawning, says, I don't really care, I have to make it to a golf game after this? Or do you want, no, you don't want that surgeon, that's the person who cares too little. Likewise, do you want a surgeon, if they're doing heart surgery on you, to be like, if I make a mistake, this person will die. Like I am so nervous. I cannot believe that somebody's life is in my hand. This is the most important thing to ever happen. You also don't want that surgeon.
00:22:06
Speaker
And those are kind of the two extremes. You want the person that I care about this, this is important, but I'm able to kind of maintain focus and not drift into that stage of passion, but also not drift into apathy. And so working with athletes or any sort of performance is about figuring out how to maintain that middle ground, which is something that stoicism is very good at and very helpful for. Anything you want to throw in there, because I can keep going.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah, some useful concepts from a fellow named Josh Waitskin, who is a chess master and also a martial artist. He has this idea of hard focus or soft focus or hard zone versus soft zone. And the thought is you have this focus, which everyone thinks is important to be focused when you're doing sport or some other activity.
00:22:56
Speaker
But for any competitor, you know, there's a state of mind where it's what he calls hard in a sense that you're just completely zoomed in. And, but you're, it's sort of brittle in a sense. That's all you see, but particular distractions can snap you right out of it. And I think.
00:23:11
Speaker
I think that's analogous to the state of sort of extreme demotions or passions, where often these sorts of things can be quite useful for really zoning in or narrowing into what you might need to do. But they're not really as flexible or they can't really handle things hopping up. So what you want to be able to do is get into the zone of a softer focus, where you're focused but able to let distractions arise.
00:23:40
Speaker
without having sort of clenching or being so mentally invested in what exactly is going on in front of you. So in a sense, it's almost a paradoxical idea, but it's sort of, I think, what a lot of athletes will talk about when they get into the zone. It's a state of almost relaxed intensity as opposed to just a pure sort of adrenaline infused media.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, I like that idea of relaxed intensity. Josh, the person you were mentioning, he was a chess prodigy and also as a Brazilian jutsu black belt. So he's very famous in the jutsu community and has contributed a lot to kind of jutsu knowledge because he took.
00:24:22
Speaker
the methodology people use to learn chess and applied that to jiu-jitsu. But anyways, that's a different topic. That's a different rabbit hole. I like the idea of soft focus. And again, this kind of craps analogy comes up, right? Because when you're describing that, I'm thinking about ethical performance, right? And the people that we admire the most or people that I look up to as role models are not these people of
00:24:43
Speaker
Not as people was like, I'm very intentionally going to do the right thing right now. And I like, I've kind of, uh, it's consuming me to the point that I've kind of lost the context that got focused on this goal. It's people who are, you know, focused on doing the right thing, focus on acting well, courageously, justly, kindly, but they're able to kind of exist in a relaxed state and that so exists, as you said, kind of a soft, malleable state while also performing well.
00:25:08
Speaker
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00:25:27
Speaker
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00:25:55
Speaker
Well, here's something I'm interested in asking about is in some sports advice, you have this idea that there are almost two selves or two ways of thought. You have the doing self and versus the talking or verbal self. And the thought is the doing self is just sort of
00:26:19
Speaker
What happens almost in a physical or an intuitive sense, whereas the verbal talking self is the self that, if you're playing tennis, watches the way you hit the racket and thinks, oh, my wrist was slightly in the wrong position. The way I moved my elbow, that was wrong. Or that was correct, the way I danced my feet across of the court in that particular move. It's much more evaluative. And in a real sense, it's verbal. You have this running track that's going on as you perform.
00:26:48
Speaker
And what a number of people suggest, in particular this book called The Inner Game of Tennis, is that to the extent you can, to try, allow the doing self to do its thing when you're performing.
00:27:03
Speaker
and in a way either quiet or to accept the talking self without trying to pay too much attention to the judgments that it's making. And then let the talking self, verbal self, do its thing when you are reflecting on how well you performed and deciding maybe what you'll tweak next time or next round.
00:27:25
Speaker
as it were. So I'm curious what you thought about that approach because it is, you know, it's not explicitly stoic, but it is a way to address issues of passions getting too inflamed during sport because often these passions will emerge from the verbal self, making some judgment about what the ref did, what your performance was and so on.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, I really liked that example. I mean, the next thing I was going to talk about, which I think connects with this well is this, is the idea of the dichotomy of control. And because I think very naturally from what you're saying, Caleb, when we say these things, okay, getting this like kind of medium state, right? The question becomes, well, how do you do that? Right? How does that work? Like, yeah, okay. I want to be there. How do I get there? And where I was thinking from your point is you were providing one example of the way you might get there, which is when it's time to do, when it's time to reflect, reflect.
00:28:16
Speaker
Don't try to reflect when you're doing and don't try to do when you're reflecting, keep those spheres separate. And I think of that as kind of an application of the dichotomy of control in the realm of sport. This is something that I advocate, which is that when, if I'm understanding your point correctly, when you're in, and then with kind of the practice and competition division I was making previously as well, where I see practice as the verbal self, practice is reflective, it's iterative, it's critical.
00:28:46
Speaker
It takes in larger contexts. It attempts to change things. And then competition is...
00:28:53
Speaker
I think the people that compete the best are the ones that kind of recognize I'm as good as I'm going to be along almost every sphere. And I'm not going to do any sort of kind of meta improvement or meta criticism, which is to say, you know, if you're at a basketball tournament and you realize you can't perform, I'm not very good at basketball. I just watch a lot. So my examples might be bad, but you know,
00:29:17
Speaker
I'm not good at a certain play. You know, it's kind of too late, right? You develop that play in practice. So your job is to kind of keep your sphere of attention or your sphere of focus on the actual doing, the doing self. That's the way I like to think about it. It's not this kind of division of two selves, but a division of your focus really in oneself.
00:29:38
Speaker
And the way I like to think about it, the metaphor of this attention is kind of what's on stage. You have these things on stage, only one thing can be in the spotlight at a time and trying to have in the spotlight when you're competing.
00:29:52
Speaker
doing what you know you're supposed to do to the best of your current ability. And everything else just becomes information about that. Okay, so my job is to score and the referee made a bad call. So now I've just received new descriptive information. Now I need to score two goals.
00:30:10
Speaker
but I haven't received kind of evaluative or critical information. Like, wow, this is terrible. Wow, this is so unfair. It's just this kind of descriptive information so that I can achieve my goal. I'm trying to kind of stay in that state. I've never thought of this doing thinking, but I think that's the right way, that's the right way to make the division. And the other thing I think is that's a real, I'm not sure if I explained that as clearly as possible, but the basic idea is
00:30:37
Speaker
When you're competing, you're focusing on your task, your rule, and everything else is just information about how to do your rule better in the moment. And you're trying to stay there as much as possible. When you're practicing, then you're taking kind of value judgments. Well, my previous training was not the right way to do it, or my previous performance was poor, or even it was great.
00:31:01
Speaker
But in the moment, you're just kind of staying
Focus and Avoiding Distractions
00:31:03
Speaker
for me in that descriptive zone. That's why I try to encourage my students to do. And the other, the final thing about that is that ability to train your attention is in and of itself. It's a crap.
00:31:16
Speaker
Right. The ability in, as you're saying, the inner game of tennis, to focus on the doing self instead of, you know, the thinking self. That is a craft. That's a skill. And what most people, what most athletes do is they train their bodies, but they don't really train that mental skill of focus, which like anything else is done through iterative practice and then testing through competition. That's my thought on that. What did you think?
00:31:41
Speaker
I think that's right. The division between competition and practice is always useful. Of course, there might be some exceptions if you have an exceptionally long season, but depending on the game and so on, but in general, the competition mode is when you can let a lot of this sort of reflective mind
00:32:01
Speaker
go off and if you've done the work, you should be able to trust yourself to perform well and treat things as information as they arrive. I think that's the main thing that I took away from what you've said and what a lot of Stoics have written is that there's this.
00:32:18
Speaker
shift to thinking about events merely as information instead of adding additional narratives or stories to that. So in the context of a game, if you get scored on, instead of adding some story about how, you know, that reflects poorly on who your team is or something of this sort, you might just see, oh, this happened because, you know, our defense was set up this way. We adjust that and then move on and play the win.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah. And I do that all the time, right? Like I'm not saying, I'm not saying I'm perfect. Like I do that all the time. I'll be in the middle of some jitsu match and it's like four minutes in and I'm exhausted and I don't want to do this anymore. And I'll start adding, like my narrative brain starts going off, right? My narrative brain starts saying, well, you know, you already did pretty well today. People aren't going to be, you know.
00:33:07
Speaker
People aren't going to be disappointed with you. You'll be able to say, oh, you lost to somebody who was pretty good. You start having that narrative brain come in. And it's almost this fight, this fight to stay doing this incredibly difficult, tiring thing, and not just doing it, but doing it to the maximum of your ability. And that's that fight is to push out those intrusive value judgment narrative thoughts. I never thought of that before. I really like the idea of the narrative brain.
00:33:34
Speaker
pushing out the narrative brain because it can also go the other way, right? It can also be, wow, I'm winning. I'm so amazing. I'm so great. I can't wait for this match to be over or this game to be over and meet to get all the accolades that I deserve, you know, and that's also kind of a narrative brain going off.
00:33:52
Speaker
And that's just as bad, right? That, that is not going to serve your performance at the moment because the best way to compete is going to be the same regardless of the narrative. So any attention on narrative is just taking attention away from the best way to compete. But I think that was a really, yeah, an excellent insight Caleb. I'll have to chew on that kind of narrative thoughts. I think that's the right way to put it.
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's the concrete suggesting that, you know, you shouldn't, there's a risk to the positive story, saying that there's a risk that positive story is like Seneca's line that you should never trust prosperity. And I think you can just go on YouTube for clips or.
00:34:33
Speaker
different games where someone started celebrating before the ball had just gone over and then some defender comes out of nowhere and will slide it away or you have the football team who's about to celebrate their amazing comeback and there's a few more seconds left in the game, they kick off and then the other team just runs the ball all the way down the field. This is often rare, but not rare enough that you can tell the positive story and leave it at that.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. There's a whole genre of YouTube of probably people that celebrate too early. Don't be that person either. Anything else you want to dig into that before I moved into sport for stoicism?
Character Building through Sports
00:35:14
Speaker
No, let's do sports for stoicism. Great. So part three. Thanks everyone. So far, so good. And this one I think is the, I think
00:35:24
Speaker
I don't know if there's kind of an elitism, the philosophy. I don't know if that's right, but it's kind of this view of like, well, obviously the athletes could learn something from us because we are the masters of living. So obviously, you know, they could learn something from what we're doing.
00:35:37
Speaker
But I think likewise, we all have a lot to learn from sport, right? I'm just talking about sport because I'm an athlete. That's what I'm excellent at. I think we have a lot to learn from any excellent craft. I think you could have this conversation with a skilled musician, have this conversation with an excellent artist, because coming back to that thing I said at the start, they're all crafts. We all have things to learn from each other. What I want to talk about now is the benefit to practicing sports if you're trying to develop your stoicism. And the first one I want to say, which I think is the real value of sport,
00:36:06
Speaker
Or one of its unique value actually from other crafts is that sport provides situations that are low stakes, but very difficult. I refer to this as kind of artificial difficulty. So I think of like, you know, I've thought professional mixed martial arts, it's like, that's the closest you can get to simulating being in a fight for your life.
00:36:29
Speaker
while also being actually relatively safe in terms of, you know, I can give up whenever I want. If I look like I can't defend myself, if I look like I'm getting too hurt, the ref is going to stop the fight. So I'm simulating, you know, battle. I'm simulating a fight for my life and getting kind of exposure to those, to the benefits of that, you know, learning about myself, learning about how I perform under pressure, learning about
00:36:55
Speaker
just what it's like to do an incredibly difficult thing and face your fears, but I'm also minimizing the downside, minimizing the risks, right? I'm not, I won't actually die if I lose. The person doesn't actually kill me or enslave me or take me as a prisoner of war or things like this, right?
00:37:14
Speaker
For a less extreme example, it's just like, you know, if you're competing in a sport, you're very, very, you're doing something hard, something tired, something people are watching, but it's just putting a ball in the hoop, right? The results of the event, barring you being a professional athlete or, you know, your life being based around that, the results of your competition are incredibly low stakes in the grand scheme of things.
00:37:35
Speaker
But what you do is you pretend like they're high states. You kind of agree. Everybody kind of agrees they're going to take it seriously to get exposure to the upsides, which are these character building these kind of situations. So when we're when we.
00:37:49
Speaker
I said that stoicism was like a craft. Because it's like a craft, you have to practice it to be ready for training. Some of that practice can look like, as we talked about premeditation of evils, but some of that practice can look like doing scary things. It can look like doing difficult things. It can look like motivating yourself.
00:38:08
Speaker
to live consistently. So, you know, if I set a goal for myself, I say I want to be, I want to have a good season, I want to have a good soccer season. It's motivating yourself to eat well, motivating yourself to sleep well, motivating yourself to practice, to develop consistency in the whole of your life and routine. If we can find ways to do those things.
00:38:26
Speaker
which are all difficult things with very little exposure to actual consequences if we fail or if we make mistakes, that's really the sweet spot. And I think sport provides that sweet spot. And for me, I know for many people, that's why there's such an appeal to it as practitioners. That's the first thing I want to advocate for.
00:38:45
Speaker
I think sport can be an excellent gym to practice the stoic virtues, really. In the beginning section, we talked about how to manage emotions, how to make correct judgments, and sport is a good way to
00:39:03
Speaker
Put some, you know, put sort of stress yourself with some situations where everyone's tempted to make incorrect judgments and also situations where it's generally difficult to figure out what's, what's going on or what you want to do, what the optimal play is. So to that extent, I think the sport, like many other activities can be an excellent way to force yourself or maybe not so much force yourself as an excellent activity. If you approach it in the right way to practice stoicism.
00:39:32
Speaker
Yeah, I should say that I don't think athletes are good people. I think athletes are good at their craft. But if you develop that craft.
00:39:42
Speaker
the intention of also becoming a good person, there's lots of kind of double dipping opportunities. Yeah, so you do have to approach with the right mindset. I'm not going to be, especially in martial arts. It's the thing where you think, wow, this person has a black belt, like they must be an excellent person. And it's just not the case, right? There's lots of terrible people who are very good at martial arts. I mean, you end up with the ethics professor example, right? It's just what has been the craft. If the craft is
00:40:04
Speaker
skill of fighting, it doesn't have anything to do with a good person. If the craft is describing ethics well, knowing a lot about ethical systems, that doesn't have anything to do with a good person. But if you try to develop your craft of being a good person, being a good stoic while you do those other things, there's lots of opportunities to do both at the same time. The other thing I really like about sport, which kind of dips on what I was already saying, it kind of connects with what I was saying,
00:40:27
Speaker
But sport provides iterative feedback. Because you are able to do it, because there's low exposure to downside, you are able to do it again and again, right? So if you're preparing yourself for adversity, I hope you only have a couple, a handful of real extreme adversity in your life. I hope you don't have the opportunity to iteratively reflect on your exposure to real tragedy in your life. Like some people might.
00:40:54
Speaker
And I hope they can pull the good things from that. I mean, I think many people do, but you want as little of that as possible, right? You don't want to expose yourself to tragedy intentionally to build your character.
00:41:07
Speaker
But what you do want is lots of opportunities to respond to how to learn and respond to how you deal with those situations. And again, Fort provides that and connects to what I was saying before, but just this, because it's low risk, because it's low commitment, low downside, you get to just continually expose yourself and learn as you grow. And that's great. That's one thing that I really benefited from.
00:41:28
Speaker
And another aspect is that sport really cultivates a growth mindset. So growth mindset is this idea that we're malleable. We have the capability to chain who we are in terms of our character.
00:41:43
Speaker
But also in terms of our physical performance is not set in stone. This is something that maybe there's kind of an extreme spectrum, but we are able to move between that spectrum through effort and work. And a growth mindset, somebody who adopts a growth mindset has a strong conception of their agency. Their capacity to influence who they are, right? And their capacity to navigate the world the way they want to.
00:42:08
Speaker
Now, stoicism encourages us to be humble about our capacity to control external things, but it is very aggressive in our capacity to kind of control, determine, shape our internal lives. And I think if you've come to stoicism as an athlete or you've practiced any other craft where you say, wow, if I put work into this,
00:42:34
Speaker
I actually see results. If I put work into this, that work yields dividends. I can become different. And so sport, and especially exercising, I think is like the clearest example of this, teaches people that, empowers people that. Now, if you take that mindset and you bring it to stoicism, doesn't just become a set of cool ideas, it becomes, well, if I work on this, I could become different. If I work on this, I could transform myself. And if you come with that mindset, you're actually more likely to transform yourself.
00:43:03
Speaker
So I think that empowering that kind of empowerment, that sense of agency, that growth mindset is something that I've taken from sport. And, you know, one thing, one thing that Epictetus talks about is he makes this comparison between muscles and
Transformation and Growth in Stoicism and Sports
00:43:19
Speaker
character. So he talks and he's talking to his students and he says, look,
00:43:24
Speaker
You know, I don't want to look at your weight. It's like, I don't want to see your weight collection, which is the, all their books, they have the kind of exercise they've been doing. He's like, I want to see the muscle. I want to see the transformation that's come from using those weight, the change that has come from doing that. And.
00:43:42
Speaker
That's the growth mindset is this idea of we're not, when we're practicing stoicism, we're not collecting facts. We're not collecting anecdotes. We're not collecting quotes. Whoa, Epictetus said this interesting thing. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius said this interesting thing. We're building our muscles. We're transforming who we are as people. And that is the, that's the fundamental goal. And if you bring that mindset or most athletes, and if you bring that mindset to philosophy, it really, really transforms the way you approach philosophy.
00:44:09
Speaker
Absolutely. I think the most powerful impact sport can have for a Stoic is it can play this self signaling function, which can build your confidence and really be a part of someone's self-transformation. So I know a number of people who have found themselves in a rut in a relatively dark.
00:44:36
Speaker
place and they might have low or self-esteem as a result of something being in that scenario. And there are many things one can do in that situation, but one type of advice that many people offer is to find a craft, to find a sport, if you will, where you can improve
00:44:57
Speaker
see that concrete improvement in real time and in a signal to yourself that transformation is possible. You can be the sort of person who masters a craft and I think if you do that again and again, you will look back with years of improvement, not just ideally in particular crafts, but in your own personal life as well. You know, you're building up
00:45:23
Speaker
and proving to yourself that you are the sort of person who can improve both externally, but also and perhaps more importantly that you made the decisions that you push through whatever doubts or suffering arose to get to that place where you now have a black belt or you now have much faster mile time or whatever it is.
00:45:45
Speaker
So I think that's for me, probably, and personally for me, that's the, one of the best things that, that sports can offer is apart from being quite a lot of fun, you can look back and say, oh, you know, I can push through this spot in my life just as I pushed through and all these other ways. Yeah, it was great. And then, yeah, cause Caleb you're a runner.
00:46:07
Speaker
And I, when I mentioned weightlifting, cause I think weightlifting is a good example. Like lifting weights, exercise is a good example because it's so concrete. Like I could pick up a hundred pounds. Now I can pick up 120 pounds and running is another one of those things. It's very concrete. Like, you know, my, my five kilometer time was this or my five mile time was this. And now it is a minute less. I am a better runner, but character is abstract. And it's like, it's, it can be, that's the first thing you develop. It's very intimidating thing to develop. Right.
00:46:35
Speaker
I think of that like in martial arts, we have belts for that reason because martial arts is abstract. You don't have a number that associates with your skill. So you often end up comparing yourself to other people, but the problem is these other people are also training. They're also getting better. So you can train for years in martial arts and not beat the people that you started with because they are also getting better. So what we use in martial arts is we use belts.
00:46:57
Speaker
So that somebody who's experienced, somebody who's knowledgeable is giving you feedback on your progress and building your confidence, as you said, so that these people feel empowered and more likely to do it. And I guess there's two points there. Just to reiterate, one is this growth mindset. You can do that. You can make progress. You've done it before in sport or in exercise or in running or weightlifting. You can do it with your character. That's one point. And I guess the other point, which I wasn't thinking about before, is like, yeah,
00:47:27
Speaker
It's okay to kind of take, not to be vain, but it's okay to take some degree of enjoyment and progress, some degree of enjoyment and kind of improvement, however incremental. And kind of journaling and reflection can serve that purpose in stoicism. But, you know, being okay with kind of reflecting on, not resting on your laurels, but identifying that you have some laurels and being like, that's great. I didn't have some laurels before and I'm glad I do now. The last thing I'm going to talk about that we can learn from sport is sport.
Learning from Role Models
00:47:57
Speaker
that Stowis could learn from sport, is that sport is really good at role modeling or recognizing the benefits of role models. One thing, every hockey player knows who Wayne Gretzky is, right? And every, I'm showing my Canadian, yes. And every hockey player wants to be like Wayne Gretzky, admires that person and has aspirations towards that person and seeks to emulate them, right? And...
00:48:25
Speaker
Athletes just naturally understand or through trial and error have understood the benefits of role modeling, the benefit of observing others, attempting to practice them and incorporate the beneficial into your own style, into your own game, into your own perspective.
00:48:41
Speaker
And in one sense, it's also agency increasing. Well, if they did it, I can do it, right? If that person could do it, and they came from the same city as me, or they're the same height as me, or the same weight as me, they could make it into the NHL, so can I. It's empowering. But on one aspect, it's also just information. Like, wow, that person is a master of their craft, and I'm learning from a master of their craft by watching them.
00:49:03
Speaker
And I think we as stoics, we talk a lot about contemplation of the sage, but that's really what it is. You're watching the Michael Jordan, you're trying to think of the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky, the Tiger Woods of being courageous, being just, being moderate, being kind, being wise. You're trying to look for those masters of the craft and incorporate that information. Both say, hey, I can do that if they can and learn something about how to do it because I've watched them do it.
00:49:32
Speaker
And I think that's a, if people thought of the contemplation of the sage less as this kind of dramatic or abstract exercise and more as like, just think about somebody who's, you know, really good at this and how they do it and learn from it. That's something that, that still could benefit from.
00:49:47
Speaker
Absolutely. I think at Stoa, we try to incorporate the contemplation of the sage as a regular practice and do things like Seneca advised, you know, picture a panel of people and how they would respond to your actions during the day or choose a model and imagine how they would go through your day if they were to take your place. And I think what you find in
00:50:12
Speaker
people who become exceptionally good performers is that they have very clear pictures of who their models were to the extent that you might even be surprised about how many details they know about their sports hero's life, about specific games, and they use that both in the strategic sense when they're thinking about how to make decisions, but it also, I think it just expresses how much they care about
00:50:40
Speaker
the game and as stoics, if we can, I think we can do the same thing by focusing on people we admire and who we want to emulate. And that's a, I think that's a really good upshot from, from sports, a very clear similarity. Yeah. I like that. I love the way you put that Caleb, but shows how much they care about the game. Right. Like they're just fans of the game. And so the question for the stoic is, well, what's our game?
00:51:06
Speaker
Well, our game is living well, right? So you got to be, if you want to be a good stoic, you got to be a fan of the game, which means you got to care about living well. You got to look for examples of it. You got to look up to those people that do it well and admire them.
00:51:20
Speaker
Even if they're not Stoics, right? Even if they're, you know, whatever example of excellence they are. But yeah, I think that's, for me, if we can conclude on something, that's an excellent idea, which is just be a fan of the game, you know, and both, both in terms of enjoying playing it, loving getting better at it and admiring others that are good at it. I think if Stoics took that, that's really helpful for Stoicism. That's really helpful for any lived philosophy.
00:51:44
Speaker
Absolutely,
Stoicism's Complexity and Importance Beyond Sports
00:51:45
Speaker
absolutely. I would say one difference that from sport and stoicism is of course stoicism has a much larger, it's not even the right word, a much more immense importance, a game of much more immense importance and a much more complex game, this game of life as it were. So if I think we were to pick on one difference between sports and stoicism, it sort of comes out in
00:52:10
Speaker
A story that Plutarch records about a Spartan, which a Spartan loses a wrestling match and someone comes up to him and says, your opponent proved himself the better man. And the Spartan responds, no, a better wrestler. And I think that's always a useful reminder when thinking about sports and incorporating that into living better, but also not of course losing the vision that what we want to do is live better, not merely be a better wrestler.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'll, I love that. I mean, I both think that's quite an inspiring line, but also I'll keep that in my back pocket to preserve my ego to moving forward. Whenever I lose, I'm like, no, let's, we'll try some ping pong and then we'll see one very small part of myself, which doesn't even matter to me that much. No, great. Yeah. But it's always killed. Anything else you want to add? No, this is great.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:53:05
Speaker
It's good. This is a conversation. Good conversation. Excellent. Wow.
00:53:11
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Store Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:53:26
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.