Stoic Coffee Break

If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person. – Seneca How would your life be different if you viewed yourself as something you get to create and to become someone you admire? Are you living the life you want to? If you aren’t, how do you create big changes in your life? Today I want to talk about, rather than simply growing and getting better little by little, what if you transformed yourself into...

One of the things we talk about a lot in stoicism is that it’s our perspective on something that causes our distress. So how do we change our perspective on things? Are there tools that we can use to help us view things differently? Today I want to talk about some of the things that get in our way of broadening our perspective, and what tools we can use to help change our perspective. We see what we believe rather than what we see. — Alan Watts It is not the things themselves that disturb...

Trever Yarrish is the owner and founder of Zeal Software and The Hiive co-working space. He is also a good friend and one of my favorite people to chat with about stoicism. He's an avid student of stoicism and brings many of the stoic principles and ideas into his companies as well as his personal life. We sat down and had a chat about life, work, family, and the importance of having a process for managing your mind and emotions.

This year has been an especially rough year for many of us. I can honestly say it has been for me. In this episode, I want to talk about what I have learned over the past year, and ask you about the most important things you have learned. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. — Marcus Aurelius

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. —Marcus Aurelius How do you show up in the world? Are you acting the way that you want to? Are you being the person that you want to? If not, why not? In todays episode, I want to talk about how to live with integrity and be the person you want to be.

Self-confidence is not something that can be given to you. It must be earned, through hard work and determination. — Aristotle Are you confident person? Do you have faith in yourself as person? Are you comfortable with who you are? Today I want to talk about how we often will self sabotage ourselves not because we don’t have the skill or capacity to do something, but because we let self doubt creep in and stop us from sharing our gifts and talents.

Are you a nice person or are you a kind person? Do you know the difference? Today I want to talk about whether it’s better to be nice or kind. Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness. — Seneca I few weeks ago, I stumbled on a discussion on twitter of all place about the difference between being nice and being kind. It was an idea that I had never really thought about, so today I want to look at this idea from a stoic perspective.

A cross post of a chat with Tanner Campbell of the Practical Stoicism podcast. Tanner is warm, smart, and interesting, with a great podcast. If you enjoy my work then you'll probably enjoy his podcast as well.

It may seem difficult at first but everything is difficult at first. — Miyamoto Musashi. Do you want your life to be easy? Do you complain, get stressed out, or upset when challenges come up in your life? Today I want to talk about why we should not only accept adversity in our lives, but learn to embrace it.

Do you feel like the world is in chaos right now? I know that many of us feel like that. Spend a day on social media and easy to find all kinds of things wrong with the world. Is it that the world is truly more chaotic? Are things really falling apart more so than in the past? Today I want to talk about some of the reasons why some many of us feel like the world is in chaos. The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable. —Seneca

How often do you take what other people say and do personally? How often do you feel like you have to “fix” someone else’s mood? Today I want to talk about emotional responsibility, and how it can lead a stronger sense of self and keep you from getting pulled into other peoples emotional mayhem. Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. —Marcus Aurelius

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. —Marcus Aurelius The stoics teach us that we have control over a few things - our thoughts, our choices, and our actions. In short, our will. So is there a way that we can get better with our thinking, and improve our outcomes? Today I want to talk about a model that can help us be more aware of how our thinking impacts us, and with that awareness, improve our lives.

Is it ever okay to hate someone as a stoic? Is there ever a time to have “righteous anger”? Today I want to talk about anger, hate and violence in our ever more divisive world. Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. This is the equation. — Ibn Rushd

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. —Rumi How you ever thought about how often we have judgments in our language? Are you even aware of how often we communicate our our opinions and feelings about others? What if we could remove judgments from our language? Today I want to talk about ways that we can make our language more clear, and increase our ability to communicate non-judgmentally with others.

Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius How often have you been offended by someone? Maybe it was something someone said to you? Maybe they made a comment about your clothes or mocked something that you really liked such as your favorite football team or musician. Maybe it’s one of your siblings who always tries to put you down or get under your skin. Maybe someone on the internet posted a mean comment to a picture you...

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself? —Epictetus How often do you find yourself starting something only to notice a few weeks or months later that you let it fall by the wayside? Today I want to talk about why we have trouble keeping commitments to ourselves, and some ideas about how we can get better about keeping those commitments.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. — Marcus Aurelius Today I want to talk about one of the most interesting things about humans, the fact that we cling so dearly to our belief systems in face of contradiction evidence, often to our own detriment. Why do humans resist changing their minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence? How often have you changed your opinions when presented with new facts? How often have you actually...

How much of our lives do we spend living in way to please other people? How much unhappiness do we feel in our lives because we’re not being ourselves? Today I want to talk about why it can be really hard to live authentically. "The life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety." ― Seneca Link to Neil Gaiman's speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plWexCID-kA

It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it. — Seneca Do you think that life just happens to you? That you are simply a pawn in the game of life? Because there are so many things that we don’t have control over in our lives, it can be easy to fall into this kind of mental trap. The problem is that when adopt this kind of thinking, then we have placed an unhelpful filter through which we view everything that happens in our lives.

When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval. — Epictetus Living on this planet with other people can be very challenging at times. If you’re like me, sometimes you have a strong difference of opinion with someone, and you end up in an argument and spend a lot of time and energy trying to change the other persons mind. Why do we spend so much time trying to change other people or expecting that other people will change for us?