Why David Goggins is wrong about mid-life motivation.

 Before launching into a critique of David Goggins, let me start by saying - I love this guy. Surely he is one of the toughest most genuine, most resilient forces of nature that has ever graced the earth. The main problem with Goggins however, is that he is too good at his area of focus. When it comes to pushing the physical limits of the human body and mind, without question, he is the elite of the elite.  

He is the only member of the US armed forces to complete Navy SEAL training, the U.S Army Ranger school and Air Force tactical air controller training. He has competed in multiple ultra-marathons, triathlons and ultra-triathlons. He is considered one of the world’s greatest endurance athletes.

Goggins’ approach to motivation is to be aggressively bad-ass towards yourself. Find the things you hate and force yourself to do them again and again until you are numb to the suffering. And then do more. Always do more than the next guy. Get comfortable being very uncomfortable. In fact, embrace the uncomfortable. Suppress and ignore pain until you can’t hear it anymore. Callous your mind. Push hardest when you want to quit the most.

His mission is to help people who are trying to get better, looking for more, waking up tired of being a bitch and tired of being afraid. To them he says – Stay hard.

Jocko Willink, author of Extreme Ownership, has a very similar philosophy. When interviewed on Russel Brand’s podcast he said that the best way to deal with negative self-talk is not to have any self-talk at all. Instead, his simple instruction is to shut it down.

He explains that there is no internal conversation with himself. He does not listen to any voice in his head for fear of entering into a negotiation about the thing he must do. He proudly declares: “I do not negotiate with weakness.”

In any other relational context, that is the pure definition of abuse. One party completely dominates, controls, supresses and shuts out the other. Suggesting this as the very best way to treat yourself is horrific.

It is worth remembering that both Willink and Goggins come from a military background which is based on the necessity of dehumanising individuals to make them into effective soldiers. The differences between good soldiers and good humans are vast.

Just because these crazy guys have found a way to push past the natural limits of human performance doesn’t mean you should. And while this strategy seems to somehow work for them, doesn’t guarantee it will work for you. Nor would you want it to! There is a far better way.

The pain barrier exists for a reason. Although they prove it is possible to ignore it and move beyond it, it is madness to preach this logic as the peak motivation strategy for all people.

The problem with superhumans

For the average person, taking motivational advice from these superhuman freaks would be like going to a running camp with marathon world record holder Eliod Kipchoge, and then expecting to qualify for the next Olympics.  Very few people are physically capable of running one kilometre at his marathon pace let alone 42kms. His results are out of reach to mere mortals, and he has no special ability to teach others to do what he does. His advice is always vague and clichéd – No man is limited…you can achieve whatever you put your mind to.

This is the same with all superhumans. No matter what their field of expertise.

Richard Branson’s best advice to young entrepreneurs on the Tim Ferris show was to stop drinking alcohol. Ok great. I’m sure that’s all there is to growing a global empire.

Imagine getting business lessons from Elon Musk, or Bill Gates. For the average person their advice would be so far removed from the current challenges they are facing, it would be beyond useless.

Th problem is, I’m not convinced these guys fully understand all that has come together to enable their best in field results.  They have had unfair advantages over the general population that have not been taken into consideration. They are outliers and as such their results are abnormal.

It is far better to follow the instructions of average people who’ve got extraordinary results than extraordinary people who do the impossible.

For average people to have found a way to achieve this level of success they must have FULLY understood the mechanics involved. They must have deconstructed the system to its smallest moving parts and created a working model that can be applied in the most normal conditions.

Average people don’t have the luxury of drawing on once in a generation talent, genius level IQ, or super genetics to achieve their result, instead they must be entirely pragmatic. Their only hope of success relies on understanding how the results actually work. They must look rationally, logically and mechanically at the structure of things and then reverse engineer a system that is capable of replicating these results in the real world.  In the process, they discover universal truths, best practice principles, and real-world strategies able to be used by anyone.

Self-discipline

Back to the science of motivation.  As an average man who has found a way to live unhindered by doubt, fear and self-limiting beliefs, here is what I’ve discovered about being at your best where it matters most.

When you get to the mid-life season, self-discipline is massively overrated.

The underpinning logic of self-discipline is that there is an inherently unmotivated, lazy, weak, or bad part of you that will ruin everything if given half a chance. This belief makes it impossible to rest. If you snooze, you lose. If you are not driving things forward, you are being sucked backwards.

The worst part of the self-discipline strategy is that it is energy against yourself. Parts of you are at war. War means one side is winning while the other side is losing with inevitable collateral damage for both parties. Therefore, self-discipline is incredibly inefficient. It is a young person's game because it requires you to have energy to waste.

Self-discipline works when you are young because you do have an abundance of energy. You have more than you need. You can afford to be wasteful. You can steal from Peter to pay Paul and get away with it. But this is no longer a viable option for a healthy human beyond 35 or 40. There is no longer any extra energy to waste. Midlife is all about optimising.

Although self-discipline is culturally celebrated as the most important resource for successful humans, it is also the only tool in the shed for most people. Having a bunch of ultra-masculine, ex-military, hard-arses preaching self-discipline or die, is only making it harder for the average person to genuinely improve their life.

The mid-life season

For those who have not already completely supressed their humanity and shut off all possibility of an integrated relationship with themselves, here’s what happens somewhere in the mid-life season.

The unconscious mind demands a conversation. While it has been prepared to be misunderstood and managed for the last however many years, the maximum tolerance level has been reached and the game changes for good.

This threshold moment shows up as some kind of loss of energy, drop in motivation, procrastination, internal resistance, lack of clarity, brain fog, or self-sabotage. It is as though fuses are being pulled out of the power box and electricity has been cut off to previously high functioning applications.

Another way of conceptualising what is going on, is to imagine your unconscious mind is like the safety officer in charge of workplace health and safety and has stepped on site to demand all work to stop. Clipboard in hand, there are a list of severe safety breeches requiring urgent attention before production can resume. While it may appear that you are being thwarted by your inner ‘bitch’, just take a moment to consider the importance of safety in your life.

Whether you like it or not, every cell in your body is hardwired for self-protection. When in danger (real or perceived) we instinctively activate full defence protocols as part of the nervous systems flight fight response. We only protect that which we value, so self-preservation is evidence of genuine self-love. The safety officer is your friend. They want productivity and success as much as every other part of you, it’s just that your operations must be safe. You can’t just turn off your need for safety.

More courage and less fear is yesterday's game. That logic may work while you are young, but good luck running that strategy now your unconscious has found its voice.

The central dilemma you now face is that whether you like it or not, you do NOT have permission from yourself to succeed. As a result, all progress and production is being actively resisted. The handbrake is firmly on and no matter how hard you try to just stay hard and forge on, you cannot. This is not because there is anything wrong with you, it is simply a loving restriction from your unconscious mind because certain aspects of your current set up are not safe. 

If you were to have permission to fully show up and maximise your energy and focus

without addressing the safety concerns, that would be reckless and lead to certain calamity. Once you address the necessary requirements to make your life safe again, then the handbrake is released, and you are free to power-up! 

Self-permission

If self-discipline is energy against yourself, then self-permission is the complete opposite. It is to work with yourself and have all your thoughts, emotion and energy pointed in the same direction.

Self-discipline is a limited resource dependant on poor self-awareness and a terrible relationship with yourself. Self-permission is a limitless resource based on a repaired and fully functional relationship with yourself.

The most important thing to understand about how self-permission happens is to understand that it is granted from the unconscious, not given by the conscious. This is not just about giving yourself permission to rest, or giving yourself permission to not care what others think about you and move confidently into the thing you want to do with your life. It doesn’t work like that. That is still self-discipline energy aimed at managing yourself to do what does not come naturally.

The term is easily misunderstood, but the essence of self-permission is safety. Your success must be also be safe. Until your internal world is safe, your instinctive need for safety will show up as resistance and a strong NO. You will have to fight against this safety mechanism in order to make any progress. If you are a superhuman, or if you have the energy of youth, you may succeed momentarily, but if you are average and beyond 35, it is pure madness to imagine this is the best plan for a successful life.

The four safety concerns

To solve this problem, there are always four general conditions that will need to be fully satisfied until permission is granted. These conditions represent the biggest safety breaches for every mid-lifer who has not updated their internal operating system.

Here is an explanation of each of the 4 conditions:

1.     Trust rebuilt

The first safety breech is that you do not trust yourself. The obvious evidence of this lack of trust is your tireless and repeated attempts at managing yourself. All self-management can only be seen as evidence that you do not trust your natural ability to achieve your desired results.

How do you expect to survive in the world doing your own thing without implicit trust. If you don’t trust yourself, how is anyone else expected to? You are a danger to yourself and the world and must be restrained. If there is no safe place within yourself to retreat to, the world will eat you alive.

Of course, this is all based on the deep misunderstanding of your core nature first developed in the painful defining moments of your childhood. While your poor behaviour and disappointing mistakes of the past appear to be all the evidence you need to support this thesis, this assumption is a huge misunderstanding without exception. You have not correctly understood your own desires, motivations and strategies. You’ve been too quick to judge and too slow to review the data. 

In a moment of disappointment, hurt or embarrassment, where showing up in your natural state went badly, you decided in your childish wisdom that the problem was you. The real tragedy of this experience was that you decided that you could never just be you ever again. From here on, it would have to be you plus or minus something. In this way you looked at yourself and judged yourself as bad, wrong or inadequate. Then you sided against yourself in an act of deep betrayal that has reverberated through your being ever since.

If you want to gain permission, it starts with restoring trust. To restore trust, you’ll have to go back to the moment trust was broken in the first place. This will require courage to begin and kindness to sustain.

A full 4 stage apology will be necessary to repair the damage done and restore a loving, and safe relationship with yourself where you agree to never betray yourself again.

2.     End the Neediness

The second safety breech is the continuation of your childish strategy of externalising your core needs. The child can only look outside themselves for certainty, variety, significance, love, contribution and growth, but the journey to adulthood is one of learned self-sufficiency.

Wherever there is neediness, you are precariously placed. If those you rely on to fill your cup play their role, then all is well – yet the moment they withhold from you what you need, you are instantly in deficit with no alternate fuel source.

The 6 core needs model from Anthony Robbins is the best framework for understanding that every behaviour is simply an attempt to bring peace and comfort to ourselves, and meet our need for certainty, variety, significance, love, contribution or growth.

The aim of the game is not to stop needing, but to meet our own needs internally. This means becoming your own source and supply.

To gain permission to move forward will require an urgent software update of your central operating system for how you meet needs and protect fears. Version one of the operating system developed while you were a child is incapable of handling the demands of your adult programs. Without updating, the entire system is likely to crash.

The adult upgrade is to develop an internal strategy for meeting all 6 core needs and to eradicate childish fears by examining and deconstructing them.

3.     Improved game play

The third safety concern is that you keep losing the games you are playing.

The constant experience of loss has all but convinced you that you are a loser which is sucking all the life and confidence out of you. As such you are in danger of giving up all together because nothing is working the way you want it to.

This makes the list of urgent areas to review before permission is granted because you cannot afford to keep losing any longer. It is time to get some wins on the board. For this to happen, you will have to review all the games you are playing. Especially the ones that don’t even appear to be games. Marriage, work, family, money, confidence, etc.

Gamification is to apply game principles to non-game domains. The moment you come to terms with the fact that in every area of life, you are actually involved with a high-level game it opens up a world of possibility. Then your work is to understand exactly what games you are inadvertently playing, exit the ones you no longer wish to be playing and create new games for yourself with very clear understanding of rules for how to win. 

If marriage/work/money/success is a game, then how do you win? What is winning? What are the rules? What version of the game are you playing? Is this the version you’d like to be playing?

Once you’ve understood this, there are only 4 options for gameplay:

A)    You are playing the wrong games the wrong way.

You haven’t intentionally chosen the games you find yourself playing. You don’t like these games, don’t have any skill and don’t desire to get better at the game. You’ve found yourself caught up in the games other people are playing even though you’ve always hated their game and have never stood a chance at winning.

Example: As a teenager you find yourself in a gang of Eshays because this is the path your childhood friend group took. You’ve had to get kitted out with the bum bag, Nike hat and air max kicks and you even carry a blade. Problem is you have too much empathy to be a little shit and you always feel bad when you cause trouble for others.  Violence terrifies you and you have dreams of baking cakes for a living.

B)    You are playing the wrong games the right way

You are the leader of the Eshay group. You love being a little shit. Terrorising normal people is your favourite thing to do. As far as Eshays go, you are right in the pocket. The problem is this game can only end in tears. This is not a long-term game.  You are one wrong move away from ending up stabbed or jailed.

C)    You are playing the right games the wrong way

You got out of the Eshay gang, burnt your air max’s and moved interstate so your friends couldn’t find you. That was 10 years ago, and you now have started your own cake business. The problem is that you carry shame and embarrassment from your past that subtly undermines you. You feel like a fraud. Cakes is your thing, but you haven’t worked out how to play the cake game like a pro. You are making no money and are considering selling up and doing something more responsible (which would push you back into the wrong game quadrant)

D)    You are playing the right games the right way

You decide that cakes are your thing after all. It was what you were born to do. It makes no sense and is easily dismissed as meaningless, but you just love everything about the cake baking process. You are most alive when licking batter off the beaters. You know this is where you belong and have gone all in on making this work. You realise that the game you are in is bigger than cakes. You are in the magic moments business. Cakes are for special times.

You understand and embrace all parts of being able to be the go-to cake provider for special moments in your market. You skill up and learn all the rules of the game you are in realising that to simply rely on the quality of your baking is to miss the heart of the game entirely.

To be granted permission will require a proactive and crystal-clear approach to all the games you are desiring to play in the current season of your life. This includes a full understanding of the rules of the game and a willingness to learn the skills required to win the game. Without this gamification upgrade, you will continue to play all the games you are involved in poorly.

4.     A congruent Avatar

The word Avatar comes from the Hindu culture and means the embodiment of a persona or ideal. The reason it is on the safety officer’s clipboard is that your current personas are incongruent with the games you are playing.

You keep showing up to play basketball wearing your netball skirt. How are you supposed to win if no one is taking you seriously, least of all yourself. Show up like you are the person who is most likely to win the game. Take yourself seriously. Embody the persona of a proven winner.

Once you are clear about the games you actively desire to play, then you must develop the persona who is capable of playing these games to win. 

Back to baking cakes…If you want to win the cake game, show up as Julia Child. Embody her. Run everything through the filter of - what would Julia do? Get into character and see the kitchen through her eyes. Find an anchor that connects you to her and be your own version of Julia.

Being always precedes doing.  – This is the way of the winner.

Permission granted

Once all four conditions have been satisfied to the standard of the safety officer, the only possible experience is that permission is granted. You are free to succeed in the games you desire to play because your success is now safe.

All future experiences of internal resistance, self-sabotage, loss of motivation or clarity can only be due to a new breach in one or more of these four areas. This is the best practice for human motivation pure and simple. Sorry David. You’ve got it wrong.