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.

Self-discipline

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 suppressed 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.

B)    You are playing the wrong games the right way

This means you didn’t choose the games you are playing and are not naturally suited to them at all, but despite this, you’ve still found a way to win these games anyway. This dilemma is more problematic than the first one because it is far harder to break free from. Winning the wrong games becomes particularly confusing.

C)    You are playing the right games the wrong way

In this variation, you have already exited the games that other people expected you to play, or the games that didn’t suit you, and you’ve started playing new games that suit you and that you love, but you haven’t found a way to win these games yet. This becomes problematic because losing all the time is confusing you about whether you made the right decision to leave the other game. Again, this means the overall experience is one of repeated loses. This is hard for morale and ultimately you understand how unsustainable it is.

D)    You are playing the right games the right way

The dilemma with all the preceding gameplay variations, and the reason they are on the safety officer’s clipboard in the first place, is because of how dangerous they are to continue. There is no way you will gain any more resources from your unconscious to play the wrong games, or even the right games, if they are being played in the wrong way. Instead, you will continue to experience increasing levels of resistance and sabotage as a loving attempt to get you to change tact.

The only way to have permission granted, and therefore the full cooperation of your unconscious towards your goals is if you are playing the right games in the right way! Surely this is a wonderful relief to know that there is a part of you with such wisdom to demand this of you.

Practically speaking, this means you have deliberately and completely exited all games that are NOT right for you. By the time you’ve reached midlife you have more than enough data to analyse and reach this conclusion.

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. 

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.

Do you have permission to succeed?

Get your hands on the Self-Permission method to upgrade from self-discipline to self-permission for good!