Living the Real

Three ways to protect yourself from life's harms

• Matt Boettger • Episode 25

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This episode is all about when life feels entirely out of control. Previous episodes have focused on learning to live life through the lens of "discovery." The problem is that when life feels upside down, "life as discovery" is meaningless. What first needs to happen is to stop drowning! This episode is all about how to patch the gaping holes of life so we can get our boat afloat again.

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Matt Boettger:

When I was in college, this is about 20 years ago. I had this incredible desire to want to learn jujitsu. Now this was really cool, super cool martial arts, and wanted to do it just because I thought I just wanted to be cool and I was working out if I'd be the next best thing. So I thought I'd Sanford jujitsu. The problem is that it's best not to start with jujitsu. Number one, it's a really intense martial arts. It's better to start with Akido. So I started with Akido. And it bored the heck out of me. And I went to one or two classes at the university of Nebraska Lincoln on a Akido and quit. Now, the reason why a keto is so important is because they believe that you needed to start with a good sense of defense learning, how to defend yourself before you can get into jujitsu, which is more offense. And that just bored me. I didn't really want to do it. So I quit it altogether. Now I know many of us right now have had a difficult past three months, six months, 12 months, 16 months, 24 months. It has been a difficult road for a long while. And you may not be on the order of like depression, but you definitely don't feel fulfilled. And I learned a new word about this in the past week. That really exemplifies sometimes how I've been feeling as well. I bet many of you are feeling the same way and that's a word languishing. You don't feel like you're totally depressed. You don't feel really happy. You feel a little beaten down a little bruised. The world seems a little lost in its color. You may feel Haggard, which I love that word, but you don't necessarily feel depressed. And sometimes the best thing to do at this point in time is stop and get some life Akido lessons. I know more than anything as, you know, if you've listened to my podcasts, all about us, happy into life, or then life happening to us in living with this principle of discovery, learning to discover life as our advocate and not our adversary. But sometimes we need to start a little bit for that and just build a good defense mechanism. And now I don't mean put up defenses around people that might be necessary. I'm talking about a solid defense that gets you back in the driver's seat of life. And this Epic is all about the building blocks to the pursuit of seeing the world again, as our advocate and not our adversary. And so sometimes we need to just take a step back shore up our fences. And then begin to move forward in life. So this episode is all about the three tools that I want to give you to keep you out of harms away. In life. So let's get going. Are you living the most real life possible? I ask myself this question all the time. Most of the time, the answer is I just don't know, but sometimes the answer is definitely not. This is why I have this podcast. I'm Matt and welcome to the show. Two small things. If you get a chance, please leave a review like on Apple podcasts and also check out my website, live in the real.com where I offer lots of resources on how to live the most real life possible now on with the show. Okay. So let's get right into these three life tools. Now, the way I see it as like this, you need to get a life umbrella. Number one. Two, you need to get a life guard, rail, and need to get some life insulation. These are the three tools you need. If you really need the shorter fences, because he feels like life is just like a tsunami army overtaking you right now. My oldest son has been obsessed tsunamis he's right now, coloring, tsunamis, right. And left of him, screaming on an Island while tsunami comes his way. So it's on my mind. And so when life feels like that, it's time to figure out how we actually get the waters to subside from our life a little bit. So we can take stock of where we need to go in our own life. And so it's neat. It's a neat concept to think about us happening to life, or then life happening to us. But when you feel like you're drowning, that's not necessarily the first thing you're thinking about. You just want to get out of the dang water. So I want to give you three tools. Tools are now if you're suffering right now in any way by which you're just like, I am just in a day luge and I need just to get. My head above water, wasn't listen up because this can really, really, really help you these through is, are these things I've been thinking about for, well over two or three years, and it's been on my mind that I wanted to develop them. And I thought, why not? Why not development here in the context of this episode? I know there's a lot here. You might want to take notes if you can't take notes or drive in no big deal, because in the, and boil it down for you to hopefully make this a simple journey for you to really get those waters at Bay. So let's look at these three ideas, these tools you need in your toolbox, you need an umbrella is a guardrail, need some insulation. And if you can have at least the perspective of these three, and if you can at least try to focus on one or two of these at a time to build this arsenal. That helps you be able to keep those harms out of your life. You're going to find yourself feeling lighter and freer. So let's start with this idea of getting a life umbrella. What does this mean? So the purpose of a life umbrella is the way I see it is it protects us from the world, right? Just like an umbrella. You put it over you when the rain comes and it filters out the rain, but yet you can still see the rainbows outside, smell the fresh air. You can still smell the rain. You're not being saturated and getting cold by the rain. So the purpose of the umbrella to protect you from the world, why? Because you deserve to be the protagonist of your own story. It's important to have an umbrella for your life. A particular story in my mind reminds me of back in my day, probably before I was even married. When I would go on long road trips, I would constantly think about, okay, if a car came my way directly, head on how could I divert my car away from a head-on collision without hitting another car. So I'd be constantly looking at ways by which I could ditch out in a safe way. Thankfully, I never had to use this particular skill in my life directly, but I think it came. To be an advantage. One day when I was recently married, we're heading on a long road trip to Notre Dame to see my niece's wedding. And it was about 10 30 at night. And we're going to cross to Nebraska. I've been Nebraska is flat when three deer just came out of nowhere and interstate IAT and instinctively, I was able to Dodge all three and cut right in between them without hitting them whatsoever. I've always wondered was that my 10 or 20 years of constantly surveying my surroundings, that led to this benefit of not hitting a deer and having so much damage or causing harm to my family. Who knows. But I think of that as an umbrella reality by which I was able to protect myself, my family from an external threat. And so this is what an umbrella is and our life symptoms that may be going on in your own life. That made me think, okay, you know what? I do need an umbrella. I need something by which can protect me from life and keep me from the harm yet. Be able to see the good things around me in life symptoms, like feeling like a victim. Increasing suspicion around you, critical of opportunities. Ah, that's not going to work out for me. Lack of control. If you have a sense of this, and maybe you need to equip yourself with a deeper umbrella, because life has beaten and bruised you so badly that you just don't feel like you can have much say in life. So you need to find a way to obtain some umbrellas. So what kind of like types of umbrellas do we have to take on to help us get back in control of our life? Boundaries is one. Sometimes we are because of our lack of boundaries, we really insert, or we allow harm to get into our life. Particularly in relationships, but not seeing how this is not a good idea. I shouldn't date this person. I shouldn't get to be a friend of this person. I shouldn't go out tonight with this person. We let those boundaries go. And then we allow the world to hit us and blindside us, so to speak situational awareness. Setting alarms, another type, if you've been one of those types of people by which you just end up saying, you know what, when this happens, I'm not going to do anything else. So you make some just kind of general statement, but then you end up just doing it. You keep going and I'm just, tonight I'm only gonna have one slice of pizza, right? And then you end up having seven. You never stay true to your commitments. Then you need to maybe insert triggers in your life to keep the world from really infecting you. Decision-making discernment communication, man. Communication can be the bane of our existence when it comes to the outside world. Not speaking clearly to the people around us, which causes problems, not understanding exactly what the person needs before us, which again, causes problems. These are the types of umbrellas we can actually undergo to keep us from allowing life to be our adversary. So let's look at a couple of these actions we can take let's look at life filters, for example. One way, I like to think of this as like life filters, like back in the day. I remember when Gore-Tex, when I was a kid, it was like the coolest thing in the world, which is like this material you could put on as a coat and it was breathable. You could actually have the moisture, leave your body, but the rain never got in. And since then more other kind of technologies have advanced along the way. I think of it like that life filters of like life Gore-Tex by which the good stuff can still permeate come through. We're not putting up walls in our life. Those are boundaries. So we're allowing the good stuff to come out and see the good in the world in others. But of course, putting the filter, keeping that, which is toxic out. And those boundaries are so incredibly important that we never at one of the greatest rules. I think for boundaries, as I learned is that we never compromise our values with someone, but we're always called to compromise our preferences. Even that alone can help tremendously. That filter allows us to keep the bad stuff out. When somebody's asking us to compromise our values and imposing their values upon us, without hearing us that doesn't know what's red flag, that this is the thing in the world that we don't need a toxicity, but of course the preferences are always willing to negotiate. You may value health. You'd be value nutrition. How that's expressed can be negotiated. You may want to eat all organic and the most spent stuff in the world, but maybe that he's been a Goshen, how one lives out a healthy lifestyle while still supporting the value of health and nutrition. I believe in principles, having a set of principles in our life are like good filters that allow the good stuff in your life to come in and keeping the bad crap out. And if we don't live by principles and we allow life to happen to us in such an, a random way that we become beaten down by it and not allowing the bad stuff to stay out. When I think of principles now, ultimately I'm not asking to sit down and just write out every possible principle for your life to help keep the world at Bay. Ultimately, these are life lessons that have from experience, not just from the mind, it's about encountering some dynamic in your life and you realize, Oh man, that didn't work. That didn't work at all. Why? Because this happened and that I didn't like this and then this bad there's something there. I could have learned a life lesson, then you make it a principle and he added to your little diary or journal by what you begin to live from that a few things that come to mind for me when it comes to my umbrella, those life filters that keep the bad stuff out, be radically open-minded as a principal. We closed down and stuff. We don't allow the opportunity for the world to teach us and grow us. Another principle that I love is evidence gives hope, the vote. Why is it so important for me? How many times in my dating life, when I was single, that had this blind hope that this person would really be the one for me, of course, like everything that I was doing with them or a lot of things to do with them. Ah, I just don't like this. I can't really connect with this person, but I kept having hope, but the hope wasn't an evidence. It was just some blind hope. And this principle is really important to keep us in good, healthy relationships that evidence gives hope, the vote, not blind hope, but evidence, which then leads to another vote. That fear gets a voice, but not a vote. We work through our fear and not over our fear. The fear is real talks about this again, in a previous podcast that is important. It opens the door to vulnerability, but it doesn't get the vote. It doesn't tell us what to do, cause that paralyzes us, that doesn't allow us to live life at all, allows the world to impose itself upon us. So I hope you get this idea of the principles that are so important that are not meant for you to craft them all in one sitting, but only to keep an open notebook with a blank piece of paper calling life principles. And there's a life comes your way and you learn something from it, write it down, may it be a filter for you? So the next time it doesn't happen again. And that's what the umbrella is for another type of umbrella I mentioned was setting alarms. Another way of staying is triggers this idea that sometimes we can end up saying we're not going to do something, but then we end up doing it over and over and over and again, and we cause harm for ourselves. But putting in a trigger that is timely. And measurable to help you set the alarms in your life to know that, okay, I've reached beyond the limit. Now it's time for me to make a new decision. Couple examples come to mind. You may want to transition to a new career. I have six months of X, months of living expenses. I need to save. And once I get there, I'll have the green light to move to a new career, then maybe you want to move to Korea, but it's going to be a big salary difference, but you want to set yourself up for success so that you can still happen to life. So you set a trigger for yourself. When I had X amount of money saved after X months, whatever may be, then that's the green light for me to move to this new career because I can do it now with courage and with safety, maybe you're trying something new. You're trying to make a new career, being an entrepreneur. And I'm allowed this much to spend without receiving any income. Once I get to that money spent at nothing come in and I must stop for two weeks and reconsider what I'm doing. I've been down that road, or you just want to spin and spin and spin and keep thinking. I'll tell you, I'll keep investing, investing, investing. They will get better, but it doesn't. Do you see me by triggers pointing things and we'll help you so that life doesn't have to happen to you in this way. Communication, another one. Seeking clarity before engaging, understanding their intentions, their expectations of circumstances, and assuming less how many times that we just assume so much about the other person and that just causes difficulties in life. Decision-making a couple of great books have come up that I've read. That's really helped me as decisive by chip and Dan Heath. The paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz, a powerful things that if you have a tough time making decision, you feel parallel. We'll pick up a good book, learn yourself with good decision skills so that you can allow the good stuff of life in, in filtering the bad stuff out. So that's the umbrella. It's an indispensable part of our arsenal to get our good defense are our life Akido so we can begin happening into life again. So the second tool then is the guard rail, right? So now you have the umbrella, but by which it's you being protected by life, the guard rail is protecting you from you. Why? Because we typically prefer short-term gains and wins, which leads off into long terms, debt, regret, and loss. We need things in our life to nudge us towards shooting for beyond the immediate and what provides us lasting value. We need things in our life to protect us from going down the path that will not provide that ROI, that return on investment on career and relationships. Now, when it comes to putting up guard rails in your life, this is where I shine this. I noticed when I was trying to think of stories of my own life. This is where I have the most stories. I feel like this is my strong suit. The umbrella in the insulation, not so much I need to work on, but this is my strong area. My wife would joke with me all the time that we would clean. I'd always clean in the context of phases. Phase one is done to the toilet. Then I do the mirrors phase two, and then phase three would be the floors. And I've always taken phases. Why? Because it helps me be able to be motivated that I'm making a step forward in something. I'm reaching my goal. I'm keeping a narrow focus and she always laugh about it, but it always kept me motivated. And that is like a guard rail. It's these things that protect you from you to keep you from being distracted or overwhelmed and then want to quit and something that you want to do, right? You can be your greatest adversary or advocate. And for me, cleaning is not that fun. So breaking it down in phases motivates me to accomplish something that needs to be done and makes it exciting for me. Calendaring. I remember when we were newly married, we were having a half time concept being sucked into chores and all these responsibilities during the weekends, which is probably mostly all my fault because I'm the one who's driven to get task management done. My wife likes to enjoy life. And finally we decided, you know what, let's break down every Sunday, the next two to three weeks and plan them out in advance and always start with the most important things. Relationships exercise, date nights and plan all those. So they're there the fun stuff, man. Those were the best months we were having great weekends and they're all full of fun things we'd like to do. And world being responsible who knew this is you protecting you from you by having a plan. So symptoms of needing a guard, rail, unhealthy relationships, one bad career. After another feelings of drifting through life. Shiny object syndrome, moving from one thing to the next and just liking it, but never accomplishing anything, lack of purpose in your life. So if you're feeling this, then maybe it's the guard rail that needs to be brought up an elevated. And how do I get a guard in my life to keep me on those, that path that I want to be on and not fall off the guard rail to something that's just a tangent and doesn't provide me the value I one down the road. So types of really instruments you can use to build a good guardrail would be quite a vision for yourself. What do you want, where do you see yourself five years from now create a concrete plan for yourself that has objectives and goals and striving for habits that resembled that kind of person who accomplishes that kind of end in that kind of vision, create a plan and a schedule for yourself and put those important things as rocks in. In the first round of calendaring, these are the guard rails that keep you focused on what you want to do. Concrete things that you can do with this, create a plan every Sunday, before the Monday begins carve out your week. What do you want to accomplish? Were the three big things that you would love to accomplish? They're like, Oh my gosh. If I got these three things done, there would be huge wins for me. They don't have to big. You could be like, just calling that college that you're thinking about going to, and just seeing about whether it be a good fit for you looking into an online class, just seeing how much it might cost finding a free webinar, looking for class on communication. Just start writing that book. You wanted to write for five minutes, carving out 30 minutes a day to just write to start small. So we have the umbrella. And we have the guardrail and we had the tools to be able to build a good umbrella and the tool to build a good guard rail in your life. The last one then is the insulation or the buffer. I love this one. It's one of my favorite ones, even though I suffer from this one, the purpose of this as the soften, the impact of life, why when we are running thin, we can no longer see life as a moment of opportunity. Connection promotion. But rather we see it as a threat to our life stability. So we shift to preservation mode. And so we approach it with guardedness and increased suspicion. When we're running thin, we cannot be the protagonist of her own story. We can't discover that, which the world desires us to be because we're in survival mode. A story about this goes back to the very beginning of our marriage. When we first got married, we incurred a lot of debt together, mostly all educational debt that we had to combine in our marriage. The first thing we did is attended this place called financial peace university, not a place, but an online class by Dave Ramsey, highly recommended to really get us in the same language. And the same system to deal with our finances, to pay off as much debt as humanly possible with a limited income we had. And it was really important. One of the first steps was to build a thousand dollar emergency fund. It wasn't six months, which we really would love to have, but when you have that much debt, you just put a thousand in for now because Lisa, then you have a little buffer. So if an emergency happens, you got a thousand dollars to deal with it. And just getting to that point was so alleviating for us, knowing that we had this little stock pile of cash and everything bad happened. We could use it without a blink of an eye because it's not for anything else, but for a real emergency. So symptoms we're running so thin in our life. Are you feeling guarded over reactive, critical, negative anxious, overwhelmed out of control. If you're feeling any of these, and man, you need to add some insulation to your life, the areas of insulation to focus on, of course, financial, right? If you're strapped thin going from paycheck to paycheck or can't even meet your bills, there's no way you can deal with life. You've got to fix that, create a buffer, be able to deal with that so that you can deal at least with emergencies. And there's emotional. How Ms feels so intensely that we're constant exhausted, we're afraid or we're scared or anxious. Or angry resentful. And these emotions just tap the abs the energy of us to the point where we can barely function and we become over-reactive or thoughts out of control of rumination. And there's no space for anything else. And we're just tapped then. So we can't connect to anybody else. Or people pleasing because we're just so run down with our own negative thoughts. We're afraid of loss everywhere that we just spend the rest of our moments, other people just trying to keep them right. Instead of just being with them and in the relationship. Another one is time. The third one, we're running from one event to the next one appointment to the next one, mean to the next, with no buffer in between us. And we're exhausted and we're just driving as fast as we can to the appointment just in NYCLA time. And we see some in the side of the road who really needs help. We don't even stop and bother to help them pay is not necessary. And of course we're late for an appointment. We don't have the buffer or the energy I have all the time in the world, maybe, which I don't. But. I have no energy. And so you need the sleep, the nutrition, the exercise. This is where we need to insulate and buffer our life to be able to then weather the storms more easily. When I look at each one of these just quickly, I think of financial, we just talked of setting up an emergency savings at a thousand dollars to build a weather, those storms, when it comes to things in our life, all that clutter, be quick to get rid of things and very slow to adopt them. I'm thinking of Marie Kondo. And I love her approach to the simplicity and getting rid of the clutter of her life because it clutters our mind and our emotions and our thoughts, and be careful because once we possess something, it becomes so much more valuable to us. So be careful the things we take on there's this great study, and I forgot what it was, a punished Sean. So I can find it by wish they were offered a$10 bill and before they received it, they were given the opportunity to negotiate and do something else with a$10 bill. And they were much more free to give it away and do something else. But then once you were given the$10 bill, just holding it, create a whole other ball game of possession by which then those same questions of giving it up and do something else with it. You were like six times more likely to keep it and not give it up just because he possessed it. There's such a psychological connection

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possessing something to be careful about what we possess. So human thinking about this with our thoughts. Be careful in possessing negative thoughts because once you have them, they're so much more difficult to let go emotional thoughts, how to deal with this. Enter into prayer, meditation, journaling, and spinning moments each morning, entering into self-reflection to be able to then not remove those thoughts, not remove the emotions. But to better equip yourself to be a bystander of those emotions, right? Not to get over the fear, but to work through it, allow it to still be a party, but then it doesn't have the vote. It simply remains the voice. And of course that voice gets softer and softer and softer. The less we touch it. Grab a hold of it. Time, add space to your calendar. People don't go from one to the next, with little margin, but add double the space between meetings and appointments that give you time to be able to get there slowly prepare way in advance free. Go to appointment. Don't take a shower 20 minutes before you have to go an hour and a half. Allow yourself to enjoy and be present to life as it happens. Don't rush through it. Enter into deeper leisure. Try the unscheduled method, which I've tried. I love by which you do your best to have a free calendar for the next two or three weeks. Of course you have appointments. You have to keep and work and those kinds of things, but you then fill those things up first with the most important things, I'm going to go out with a friend. I'm going to call a friend on this day. I'm going to go out on a date night. Then I'm going to have self-care every morning, every day, every evening, during this particular point in time. And it's in the calendar, I'm going to do this hobby take on this hobby on this Saturday. And it's in the calendar so that when somebody says, Hey, are you busy Saturday at noon, you look at your calendar and you say, Oh, I'm going to go fishing by myself. You don't say that out loud. Of course you see in your calendar and you say, ah, gosh, I'd love to, but I'm busy. Can we do it next Saturday? So you keep your date with yourself. You keep the priorities. How many times have I said to myself, I'm gonna do this on Saturday. I don't put it in my calendar. And then I forget. Just because life. And then somebody asked me to do something on Saturday. I say yes. And I don't remain committed to the things that

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want to do. Of course you can still relinquish and not do that thing on Saturday that you have the freedom. At least you have the freedom to see what you're committed to and say yes or no to it, all these things help. So you have all of this at your disposal and umbrella and all these tools, guard, rails, and all these tools. And then a buffer and all these tools, and it sounds overwhelming, but don't be overwhelmed just your way there. I love that word. Ooh. To slowly focus on 1% better each day, the goal is to live a more real life, which means less reactionary, more life has discovery, more contemplative life has gift. So that life is our advocate and not our adversary. Realizing that we are a gift and we cannot give what we do not see we have. And if we're busy and we feel like life has happened to us, we don't see the value of who we are. We can't give that gift. And the person, it is indispensable to be able to put these things in place so we can be fully present to the relationships around us. So how are you going to do it? So pick one area that resonates most with you, is it the umbrella? Is it the guardrail? Is it the buffet for me, I'm really good at the guard rail. But I really could use a lot of help and umbrella and buffer. So I think I want to do more with the buffering for the next month. Then pick one sub area that resonated with you umbrella. Was it boundaries that resonate with you? Situational awareness, setting triggers or alarms communication skills. Decision-making discernment. Maybe it wasn't umbrella, but he was guardrails. Was it? I need a vision for my life, man. I need to get a plan for my life. I need to see, to get a schedule going. Or a buffer. I need to get my finances. I need to put something where I have a little bit of buffer. Cause I'm so stressed every night about what bill might come up next, my emotional thoughts, the rumination, I need to send a control the time, the energy, right? Pick one of these sub areas and then pick one thing. One thing to increase in 1% each day. And here's my, before I let you go, the one thing by Gary Keller, a book that really changed and shifted my life. I'll put in the show notes, go get it. I think you'll just absolutely love it. Yeah, because one thing is this, what's the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary. See, that's your goal? All the seems overwhelming, but if you can find one thing that ends up having so much collateral advantage to other things in your life, then you're hitting so many more birds with one stone example for me is the umbrella. For me, it's umbrella and communication. My one thing by focusing on communication for the next three months, it allows a lot of wasted my life by me not communicating effectively my desires or seeking clarity from other people which leads to frustration. What will this happen? This will filter out an enormous amount of toxicity from the world around me. Keeping me on track because miscommunication takes me off the rails in a huge buffer. As it taps my emotional thoughtful energy, it can even lead to less sleep. So for me, by focusing on this one thing, communication, I end up not only buffering something, I get a guardrail and even get my umbrella. For me, this is a big, one thing that I want to focus on for the next three months. So what is your one thing for the next 30 days? What are the next one thing that you can focus on? Read a book to help you on it. Journal about growth, make a task to do one small thing each day to improve upon it. Again, go back to episode nine. If you needed some extra help, right? Talk about making mole Hills out of mountains. Where I tell you how you can improve on something easily by putting a small little system in place to Uber, your way into seeing a world that has your best interests in mind, have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next episode, take care and. Bye-bye thank you for listening to this episode of living the real. If you want to check out more information, go to living the real.com and sign up for my newsletter. If you want to support this podcast, you do that at patrion.com/ltr as well as one time. Payments at Venmo and PayPal in the show notes. See you all next episode. Take care. Bye-bye.