Easy Is Earned – Ep. 208

In this episode of Next Level Human Podcast, Dr. Jade explains the idea of “easy is earned”. For example, when we are learning something new and different like driving, cooking, or swimming we tend to find the thing very difficult. We struggle a little bit, and that’s understandable. However, as we get good at the activity (progress), we start to find it really easy. Why is that? Because easiness only comes with effort; it is earned.

We can also apply this concept when it comes to overcoming fears and traumas. If you are afraid of heights, airplanes, or the sea, for example, and you want to overcome this fear, you have the chance to practice the habit of overcoming it. It’s going to be uncomfortable in the beginning, but it will feel painless eventually. That also means that you “earned” the right not to feel afraid.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Next Level Human

Episode 208- Easy is Earned

Host: Dr. Jade Teta

Solo

Podcast Intro: [00:14] welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast. As a human, you have a job to do. In fact, you have four jobs; to earn and manage money, to attain and maintain health and fitness, to build and sustain personal relationships, to find meaning and make a difference. None of these jobs are taught in school and that is what this podcast is designed to do. To educate us all on living our most fulfilled lives through the mastery of these four jobs. I'm your host, Dr. Jade Teta and I believe we are here living this life for three reasons and three reasons only; to learn, to teach and to love. In this podcast, I will be learning, teaching, and loving right along with you. I'm grateful to have your company; here is to our next level.

Jade 1:18 

Okay, what's going on everyone? Welcome to the show. Let's start today's show out with a question. And this is a question that I get an awful lot of pushback on when I speak about this, especially on social media. And I'll explain why in a minute. And the question on social media isn't usually posed like this. It's simply when I write about what we're going to talk about today, which is a concept or at least a phrase that I've become popular for similar to be it until you see it. A lot of people know me for that phrase. A lot of people also know me for the phrase easy as earned. The question I want to start with is the question of what do you think, is the purpose of suffering? What is the purpose of suffering for us humans? Now, when I say suffering, let's qualify what I mean by that. There's obviously pain, we usually think of pain as physical. So if I stub my toe, or twist my ankle or dislocate my shoulder, I have physical pain associated with that. So typically, we think of pain as something physical. And typically, we think of suffering as something mental, emotional heartbreak loss over a loved one who's passed away.

Jade  2:47 

Difficulty over abuse at the hands of other people, betrayal, financial difficulties, illness, we humans suffer, it's no doubt about that. In the same way, you will never go through life without experiencing some degree of physical pain. I think we would all argue also that you're never going to overcome suffering as a human. And the question I'm posing to you is, what is the purpose of suffering? Now, I want to phrase this this way, because from my perspective, if we really look deeply at this philosophically, we essentially go well, suffering is everywhere, every human suffers. And we have to be very, very careful. In fact, one of the worst things I think we humans do, and you can just try this on, but one of the worst things I think we humans do is use our suffering as another way to be better than others, we do a lot of comparative suffering, my suffering is worse than your suffering, or you're that person suffering is worse than mine. And the truth of the matter is not all of us will experience all forms of suffering. And therefore we can only ever know our own suffering. Not to mention that but suffering is interesting, because some people can suffer one thing, someone else can come along and suffer the exact same thing. And some people will be over it very quickly and have very little ramifications with it, and some people can deal with that suffering forever. Now, as a clinician, you become very familiar with both pain and suffering. So I've become very familiar with both of these in the work that I've done. And I can tell you that just like some people can injure their ankles or their knees and quickly, the back in the game, certain athletes or you know, back to full function. Same thing happens with suffering. I've seen people who have lost loved ones who have been betrayed who have even then what we would consider culturally some of the worst things losing a child being raped, you know, all these kinds of things. I've seen people who have gone through that kind of suffering and bounced back in a way that was shocking to me in a way that I thought how can this person move on so fast and get better. And I've also seen people who have had what we might think culturally are relatively easy. Suffering, you've heard my story and affair betrayal, perpetrated by me and perpetrated on me. And I would consider this a hangnail in terms of the big types of mental emotional suffering that we could suffer as humans. And yet it took me years to get over that. And so we have to be very, very careful to do compare to suffering, because each of us suffer in different ways in some forms of suffering, are may seem difficult for one person, but are easy for another person. Some people can have no problem getting over certain things, and other people can have a difficult time getting over certain other things. And so this idea of what is easy, and what is difficult, really doesn't translate when you're looking at the individual. And I'll tell you a quick story about this. And to be honest with you, I can't remember if this was me personally, who experienced this, or if this was a case study that I had in clinic, I'm pretty sure it was me. But I also it's like funny, I don't know if this happens to you. But nowadays is I'm reaching 50 maybes because of my thyroid difficulties and stuff, which I make fun of because thyroid gives you that sort of foggy brain and you forget certain things. But as I get older, sometimes the stories I tell I'm like, Did that really happen to me? Or was that like a case study I heard about but anyway, the way I remember this is that I was in clinic talking to someone doing, you know, more counseling work. And she said, and then my father passed away. And I wrote down grief, the word grief. And she said, No, it was the best day of my life. And at that point, I had to scratch out grief. Now, I can't remember this happened to me directly if this was a clinical, something that I heard in the clinic. But I can tell you this exact thing has happened to me many, many times. So something very similar to this where someone will tell me something, and I'll assume it's bad, and maybe even write it down as bad. But their perception is such that it's not bad. And so the idea behind this concept of easy as earned, is that the way Hi have answered the question, what is the point of suffering? I have answered that question for myself. As suffering, the entire point of suffering is to learn, to experience and to learn. And you oftentimes hear every time you listen to this podcast, this idea of learn, teach love as sort of my philosophical first principles, what I have come to through my deep thought and the next level human philosophy, that these are the reasons we are here to learn, teach and love. And you've oftentimes heard me say, in my social media channels in my other education that if I was a supreme being, well, if you and I were a supreme being, and we wanted to devise a world that taught lessons and evolved consciousness, we would probably create two elements in that world suffering because it is the best way to learn and force us to learn without suffering, how can we develop empathy? How can we learn the lessons that we need to learn? How can we develop competence and competence, competence and confidence and resilience? How can we do any of that without sufferings? That would probably be the first thing that we would build into this world, if we were supreme beings, we would also probably build in death, or some kind of thing that would force us not to waste our time. And otherwise, we'd have to put a time limit on things otherwise, what's going to force people to get things done. So suffering and death are really useful if we can be objective and take a step back and take this sort of Supreme Being perspective on things rather than our own perspective, we would see that suffering is important. In fact, as you're listening right now, I bet you can look back and let's do this together and think about some of the most difficult times of your life perhaps not the biggest traumas you had in your life. But let's say the most difficult times you've had in your life. And ask yourself, then, what were the biggest lessons you've learned in your life and I guarantee you, you're going to find some direct relationships between the things that were most difficult in your life and the lessons you're most grateful for, that you learned in your life. And so this idea of easy is earned is a really, really important concept because the truth of the matter is, nothing is easy. Nothing you do for the first time is going to be easy. Easy is going to be earned. I mean, let's just take walking and infants and toddlers who learn to walk, it's an incredibly difficult process of first learning to sit up and control the body to some degree to pull yourself up to crawl across the floor, first on your belly, and then on all fours, and then begin trying to stand up and then take steps and fall down. And this takes time. And now we don't even think about it. When we walk around, easy is around now. But at one point, it was incredibly difficult, something as simple as getting up. And walking was incredibly difficult for us at some time. Same thing with driving a car and things like that. The first time we did it, it was nerve racking, we didn't understand we were hyper vigilant. And now many of us can essentially sleep walk our way through driving home. In fact, it's very common for people to be in a completely unconscious state as they're driving and drive from point A to point B, and, you know, not even realize and say, Wow, what was I doing that whole time, it wasn't even conscious of the road or anything like that, yet I got to this place. And that was this is the concept of easy is earned. Now one of the things that happens is, as we get older, I think we forget this concept, we forget the idea that these things take work, we also understand by the way that this stuff, some of these things can be even can be reversed

Jade  11:35 

In other words, think about if you are someone who speaks two languages, and you haven't spoken your native language in 20 years, and/or you developed, you know, let's say you were fluent in Spanish, but your native language was English and you haven't spoken Spanish in 20 years, you will lose some of that. And so this idea of easy as earned is something that in self-development is not talked about enough. And of course, if this is nothing new, just because I'm using this phrasing easy as earned, certainly it might be a new way of saying it. But people have said this over and over again, throughout time. There's nothing new about this concept. But perhaps saying it this way, is more useful for the modern day. But the fact of the matter is, when we think about easy as earn, we have to think about what do we really mean by this now, the six powers of the next level human, which is the complete hero's journey, which I have done podcasts on in the past, it goes by the acronym powers, P for perception over ownership, W for wisdom, W for engagement, R for resolve and S for sharing. And it also has, you know, sort of Latin phrases to go along with this with that I have even tattooed on my body one being meritum Securus, which is the Latin phrase for easy is earned. So as I was developed in developing these next level human concepts, I saw very clearly that easy as earned as a concept that we must master. And that falls into the powers of engagement, and resolve, and goes by primarily the engagement principle of maritime security, which means easy is earned I have this tattooed on my left bicep. And part of the reason is because I'm right handed, it's a reminder that maritime security that if my left hand, things don't come easy to do with my left hand, if I tried to brush my teeth with my left hand, or, you know, I was gonna say brush my hair, which I do not have any any hair. But, you know, anything I tried to do with my left hand is a little bit harder. And so that's why it's there. As a reminder, it's also a reminder for all of us that if we want to master anything, it is something that we must go through this phase of difficulty. You know, one of the things that I do oftentimes now because I've had success as an internet entrepreneur, I talk a lot to friends and colleagues and friends of friends who connect us and say, Hey, Jake, can you give some pointers to my friend on they're trying to start an internet business, etc. And one of the things that I have seen is that people don't succeed, because they expect to succeed. In other words, they expect for things just to be easy. They expect to start you know, open up a social media channel, put up a website, you know, start tweeting, start putting things on Instagram, start talking on Facebook, and they expect for money to just come in and what they usually find is chirps. You know nothing, you know, like either people just it's complete silence or it's a few chirps here and there from friends and family, but it certainly is not what they thought What's gonna happen, in fact, what they find is no one gives a shit. No one really cares, it is essentially complete silence. And most people don't understand this. And this usually causes them to quit, which is, by the way, understandable. But this is where the suffering comes in, there is a degree of suffering that comes along with any new thing you do. So in internet business, what is the degree of suffering, the degree of suffering is understanding that no one cares, and that you're going to have to master a lot of different things communication, psychology of influence, Internet technology, you know, messaging, you know, advertising, budgets, copywriting, you name it, there's a ton of things to master that you would have, you had no idea. And this goes to that point of, you know, we don't know what we don't know. And in order to, to understand and have these things become illuminated to us, we actually have to do the work. There's a popular psychology principle called the Dunning Kruger effect, which essentially says the less a person knows, the more they think they know. Or to put it away. Osho, the philosopher talks about it, the the less a person knows, the more stubbornly they know it. And that's because we need to have a degree of education and understanding about a subject. In fact, we have to understand the subject pretty well. To know that we don't understand that subject. This is have come are the reason why many experts in many fields always use qualifying language. In fact, it's a dead giveaway. When you're talking to an expert, they'll say things like perhaps it might be more research is necessary, et cetera. And that's because the more someone knows, the more humbly they know it and the less someone knows, the more stubbornly they know it. The Dunning Kruger effect, or what I call the dunce effect essentially speaks to this. And there's a well-established psychological principle. Now, how do we know and learn more? Well, we have to suffer through the ignorance and the stupidity of what we don't know. We have to do the work, we have to fail, we have to get our ass beat, we have to engage, we have to make choices and take actions that are wrong, so that we can then take choices and actions that are wrong again, so that we can then learn some lessons and take choices and actions that are wrong again, but perhaps a little bit closer until we finally take choices and take actions that get us to a point where we go oh, I figure that out. And then guess what happens? Then we're at another level, let's say level two, where we don't know what the hell we're talking about. And we have to take choices and take actions that make us fail and make choices and take actions that make us fail and make choices and take actions that teach us some lessons that finally get past that level. And slowly over time, we began to master this and easy is earned.

Jade  20:38 

And now back to the show. Now I want to talk to you about how we can do this in our lives and how this is largely a mindset and how most people as they age, they forget this, because what they tend to do is go you know, I don't want to be uncomfortable, I don't want to deal with the discomfort. So what I am going to do is I'm going to stick to what I know. And I'm not going to challenge myself in any way, shape, or form. In other words, I'm going to do the exercise that I like and not do any other types of workouts. I'm going to read the books that I gravitate to and don't do any other subjects, I'm going to pay attention to just the realm that I understand, which by the way is fine. And most of us will gravitate to that anyway. However, what we don't understand is that by disengaging and only focusing on the things that we are good at, we lose the skill set of maritime security or easy as earned, we learn and to this sort of learned helplessness in a sense, we forget that we must engage to learn, right, we must begin to engage to learn. And so how can we begin to do this in our lives? Well, one way to think about this is simply engagement. We need more experiences, and more engagement. Now what I mean by engagement, I mean more choices and more actions, more definitive choices and more actions. Actually, there's a favorite famous quote, and I'm forgetting who said it right now, I believe it was Rosa Parks, I think, who sat in was one of the one of the first African Americans of black woman who sat at the front of the bus and would refuse to give up her seat and was, you know, essentially arrested for that which is one of the premier moments or Match Point moments in the civil rights movement for African American equality. And one of the things she said, I believe this is her quote, she said, one of the greatest ways to conquer fear is to choose definitively. Basically, she said, making the decision, and essentially deciding decisively, making a decisive choice. And taking a decisive action is one of the best ways to allay fear. And this is why I call this concept the fear, PR, PR meaning personal record. Now, for those who aren't familiar with the idea of a personal record, a personal record is something that in strength and conditioning, we talk about a lot. In fact, those of us who have lived the strength and conditioning, lifestyle, bodybuilding, metabolic conditioning, athletic pursuits, powerlifting, we oftentimes talk about personal records. What that means is, if I'm going to do a back squat, and my back squat is, let's say 405 pounds as a maximum, that's a maximum amount of I can lift at one time, then a PR would be for 10. If I could get for 10, once I would have broken my best personal record. And we talk about this a lot within the athletic community. And this is a key aspect of engagement or maritime security, or the concept of easy is earned. Now the idea here is to create fear PRs, or experience PRs in our lives. For example, one of the things that I just did recently in Costa Rica, I'm just back in Costa Rica for about two or three weeks now. And one of the things that I am afraid of, funnily enough, many of you are gonna laugh at this, but I have been, for whatever reason, there were two fears that have dominated my life. You know, most of my adult life, the fear of flying, which I have overcome, and the fear of the ocean I don't like and as I've gotten older, believe it or not, you might find this funny, I have a little bit of a fear of the ability I used to be an athlete, you know, I'm 50 years old now. I don't do as many athletic pursuits I train and stick with my own workouts but not as athletic or don't challenge my body the way I used to. So surfing was always something that was a little bit something that I thought I would never do because one it happens to be in the ocean. And two, it happens to be something that is not in my wheelhouse. You know, I'm not you know, necessarily The most flexible guy, or at least from my perspective, you know, this is this is something that would seem completely out of my wheelhouse. And I have decided, since the age of 40, over the last 10 years to challenge myself with fear PRs, and experienced prs. And one of the things that was on my list for a long time was conquering the ocean. So I have had several fear PRs that I've challenged myself, the ocean one going out in a boat, you know, off the coast, deep sea fishing, one swimming in the open ocean. You know, 400 meet Unifor under yards off the coast, that I've done both of those snorkeling, that was another one. One thing that I haven't done a scuba diving, and another thing that I haven't done is, you know, surfing. So I actually did surfing. This last time I was in Costa Rica. And of course, one of the pieces, I was terrified of this, funnily enough, my very first try of getting out in the ocean kind of freaking out, I popped up and actually surfed the very first time I tried and even the second time I got up as well. And then I forgot what I was doing, I think I started to overthink it. And I started falling in the water. And by the end of that I was figuring it out a little bit and having some success. And keep in mind this was in the Whitewater, not the green water, not the big waves, but the the, you know, sort of little waves, and we had a great teacher, for any of you who want to go surfing go to, I think it was called the minute Cal surf school and dominical Costa Rica, and had a great time there. Something that I was very afraid of. And by the way, it's something that I'm still kind of afraid of, but I'm far less afraid now. And so this idea of going and swimming in the ocean going out on a boat in the ocean scuba diving in the ocean surfing in the ocean, I would say six, seven years ago, my fear of the ocean on a scale from one to 1010 being high, one being low would have been maybe seven or eight. And now my fear of the ocean is like four or five, maybe even three or four. In fact, my fear has dissipated so much, I think I'm ready to take on my final fear PR, which I've always said over the next 10 years, I thought back in my early 40s I thought I want to scuba dive and swim with sharks, because part of the reason I'm afraid of the ocean is sharks. And so I figured I would attack this, which I knew meant I was going to have to slowly but surely expose myself to the ocean in ways that I had not. And this has completely opened up my mind. And my ability to be more productive, less fearful, more action oriented, take more definitive choices and actions in every single area of my life, not just the ocean. And by the way, I use the same fear PR approach. With my fear of flying, I just began to fly more and more for at first it was short, I started taking you know, lots of trips overseas, which was a big thing for me, that was another fear PR both because I don't like to fly. And I certainly don't like flying over the ocean. Don't ask me I know it's silly. But you know, my whole thing is, well, we crash and then maybe I'm in the ocean, silly fears. But taking on the fear, my fear of flying is completely resolved. Now it's just an inconvenience, I just don't necessarily love it. But I'm not afraid of getting in a plane at all anymore. And it can be actually enjoyable for me. And this has completely changed my perspective about things. And what's beautiful about this easy is earned approach, you can do this with anything, you can begin this fear PR approach, this idea of breaking personal records by chunking these things down and you can do it in things that are relatively easy. For example, I've used this with people in clinic a lot. And the example that I always use because it's very, very prevalent.

Jade  28:58 

It is a fear that actually is you know very much you'll run into in the clinic and that is a gore phobia or fear of crowds. And, you know, fear of crowds is one and another common one is fear of being, you know, fear of being alone. Right? So we have these two things. And I've oftentimes work with people by slowly exposing themselves to large crowds, pretty easy to do, and also slowly exposing themselves to being alone. And this makes dramatic differences in one particular client that you know, well actually this is several clients but one particular that I'm thinking about in my mind, we set the fear PR tasks. In her fear of doing things alone she's a very extroverted person, she realizes that she wasn't really ever spending much time alone didn't like to be alone this was caused some issues in her romantic relationships. And so we took that on so I'm gonna walk through the example of how this would work if you were going to take on this American secure as easy as earned engagement principle that is Part of the next level human philosophy. So what we did with her is we essentially said, let's go with VRP, our level one, what would that be? And we settled on the movie theater. And one of the reasons we settled on a movie theater is because she didn't have to get out and go by herself. But the theory here is that paying for the ticket is a little bit nerve racking, sitting alone, you know, before the movie starts, it's a little bit nerve racking, but once she gets engaged in the film, she's gonna forget that she's alone. And then she has, and then she can leave and she will get through your PR level one. And she did that. She did that successfully. And that changed things in her brain a little bit about being alone. But next thing we did was sent her out to go have dinner by herself. And then that was fear, PR level two, once you did that, the next thing was go have dinner by yourself without your cell phone, because the cell phone provided some distraction. Right. And the next one was go and spend an entire day by yourself in your city, she actually end up getting a hotel room in her city and spent the night in a city that was by herself, you know, away from her husband, and in her own city. And then the next one was actually going away to a different city for a weekend. And the final thing she did, and this occurred over probably the course of two years working together, she went to I can't remember what it was if it was England or Spain. But anyway, she went to Europe, she went for a week, she went by herself now and part of that trip, she you know, ran into some friends and stuff like that, but she was there by herself. And this idea of chunking this fear of being alone. This fear PRC has now gotten largely over that. And it's because of that you can imagine the life changing aspects that this does to your brain to see yourself as somebody who is someone who chooses someone who takes action, someone who is resilient, and someone who can start at a place where they are afraid and think that something is hard or hard and take 1234 Small steps to the point where now they understand maritime security easy is earned, all I need to do is engage.

Jade  37:01 

And let's get back to the show. You can do this with any kind of experiences. And this is usually experiences that are new. recently. My father when we were in Costa Rica, actually, we got to expose him to this principle little principle a little bit one my father is someone who doesn't necessarily love to travel. He's a he's a bit of a homebody. I have a lot of my Father in me, actually. He likes to stay in his comfortable surroundings. And when he does travel, he likes to go to places he's been before. So he'll go to the beach in North Carolina, he likes to go to Hawaii. What's interesting is he used to not want to ever fly to Hawaii. That's a pretty long trip from North Carolina to Hawaii. But last year, I got him and my mother a trip to Hawaii. He went now this year, he wants to go back to Hawaii to the exact same place. And instead I was like, why don't we go to Costa Rica. Now Costa Rica challenged my father in a lot of ways. One, he hadn't been to Costa Rica before. to Costa Rica, when you're flying to San Jose, and you go out to dominical and Uvita. Where I am, is a very long trip. The roads are kind of crazy. It's uncomfortable in a lot of ways. While we were there, we did a lot of different experiences, we went up to the mountains to explore the coffee plantations up there, we went to a cocoa tour, we went on lots of different things that had us weigh in the backwoods jungle in these, you know, if you've ever been to Costa Rica, you know what their roads are like and how when you're traveling places, sometimes it can be a little nerve wracking, especially if you're alone. And my father had to deal with this. What's interesting now, though, is that he reminded himself, of his adventurous younger days, my dad is, you know, just turned 80. He's in really great shape. But you know, as we get older, we can get a little bit fearful and forget this easy as urn principle. And he came back and is far more engaged in life far more wanting to take another trip. And he's already sending me stuff and saying, Hey, why don't we go back to Hawaii, but let's go to a different place this time. Or maybe we should go to Puerto Rico, et cetera. And what I'm saying is cool. But if we go to a place that we've been to before, we need to, you know, have experiences that are sort of out of the box. And so whenever you're thinking about this easy as urn, you can think about this fear PR thing. Or you can simply think about experiences that might be a little bit different or a little bit nerve wracking. And what the point of this is, is that as you begin to take on these experiences, not doing the same things that you're used to, but doing things that you're not used to, and shutting down these fears, by the way, another one of my fears has been historically spiders, so you'll laugh at this as well. But what I started to do is when I see spiders in the house, I used to kill them, which would drive my brother Kayani crazy because he's such an environmentalist and a lover of all animals. Now I have gotten to the point where I will actually put them in a cup and put them outside. And recently I have even last spring. So we'll see this spring, I even let one get on my hand and put it outside. And this was incredibly beneficial sort of for my brain. So the point that I'm making here is that we become fearful in life. Because we don't engage with life anymore. We forget that easy is earned, we forget the things are going to be hard at first. And we also don't realize that these little games that we play with these small little fears, like spiders in the oceans for me, or sharks are flying, or whatever it is, or agoraphobia, or feel a fear of being alone, or whatever these things are fear of talking to people fear of approaching things, whatever these things are, if we begin to address them, we become less fearful. In other things, we become less fearful overall, we also start to reinforce this concept of maritime Securus, we start wanting to do the more difficult thing, we start understanding and having a deep appreciation in our psyche, that the hard things that we do, slowly but surely make these things easy for us. Another example from my world is as an author, I don't really consider myself a writer yet. But I am an author, I do think there is a difference. Obviously, I've written books, I just don't think I'm a fantastic writer. But I am an author and writing, the more books I write, or author, the better I become at writing, the easier that becomes, the more I start to master that. And I think is the same with all of us. And so I want to leave you with this particular episode a challenge with the next level human philosophy. And with us trying to be next level human individuals, we can sit and talk about things all we want, we can talk about these ideas, we can sit in front of the computer, and you know, espouse these ideas and talk about our philosophies, but rarely do we embody them. And in order for you to really take on this easy as earn principle, you must take action, I talk a lot about the idea of being you know, so we talked in two episodes ago, the fake it till you make it versus be it too, you see it idea. The idea being is really interesting, because it's alignment and thinking, feeling and acting. And what's interesting about that, from my perspective, acting, if you do something, you're more likely to also be thinking and feeling in alignment with that doing, it's very difficult to do something and go to sleep, unless you're, you know, essentially driving a car and you're, you know, largely operating from your unconscious. But if you're doing something new especially, you got to be fully engaged and fully engaged means being. So when I say fully engaged, I mean, you're being present. And being means you are completely immersed and align your thinking, feeling and acting self. And so what you want to think about and feel, and act are things that will essentially bring you to this easy is earn concept. And that can be any number of behaviors, it can for a lot of people of you who listen who listened to this podcast, it could essentially be one of the easiest ways to do this, because many of you are strength and conditioning geeks like myself, or health and nutrition people like myself, one of the ways that you can easily use as easy as earn principle is by exposing yourself to different workouts, for example, last year, and this year, I've done probably more yoga than I have weight training. And it's incredibly difficult for me it is not easy. I look like a giant Rhino trying to do yoga. If you've ever seen, you know a rhinoceros, imagine a rhinoceros trying to bend over and touch their toes, it's not going to be that. That easy, however, easy is earned and I have gotten much, much better and my body moves in ways that I didn't actually think were possible. So one of the best ways to do this, and it's why I tend to like CrossFit. CrossFit is one of these workout systems that you never really know what you're gonna get. And it's a great way to expose yourself and understand this easy as earned principle. And this easy as earn principle manifests and propagates itself in any realm. In other words, if I want to be less fearful of flying, I could pick any fear, like the fear of spiders, and if I take that fear on it is going to cross over and make me more or less fearful of other things and more likely to conquer the fear of flying. And what I want to suggest or at least challenge you to do in this podcast is begin to think about these fear PRs, these structured, very particular and planned ways of chunking down fears and attacking them. And in addition Tabasco, that's your first homework, so to speak, if you're going to take on this easy as are in principle, pick a fear and a fear, chunk it into anywhere from five to 10 chunks from easy to hard and began attacking them over the course of a year, two years or even months and began attacking them one by one. And then the second homework assignment is began to expose yourself to experiences that are different. I actually just did a podcast a few episodes ago also on designing experiences to help us grow. So go listen to that podcast as well, and began to make choices and take actions in alignment with this maritime secure as easy as earn principle. And this will help you begin the engagement process.

Jade  45:48 

the final thing I'll say here is you might say, well, Jade, you know, I know you have this system, this six powers perception, ownership, wisdom, engagement, resolve and sharing. Why would you have us just jump into engagement just like this, don't we need to go through perception, ownership wisdom, then engagement, then resolve and sharing. That is one way to do it. But one of the things I have found is that we don't necessarily want to aim and then fire sometimes, and we need to fire and then aim. So in other words, it's not build it and they will come. It's build it as they come. Right. So this is one way, by engagement to immediately get yourself into the perceptual shift that starts this whole journey. Yes, perception is the first principle that we must master. And one of the best ways to change our perceptions as humans is to expose us to something we're not used to something relatively difficult something we have to figure out something that is a little bit uncomfortable, or yes, even fearful. And what happens is it opens up this perceptual space for us to see the world differently. And so in a very real sense, despite the fact that the engagement principle is the fourth principle of the sixth, it actually can if you just jump in, you know, you just leap and weave the net. As you fall, so to speak, you began to get into this situation where you open up a different perception, you see yourself differently, and it teaches you things about yourself and the world that you may not have recognized previously. And so remember, nothing is easy. Suffering is how we learn discomfort is how we learn. It is how we learn the lessons. It is how we develop confidence and competence. Easy is earn this is how this works. And so this idea if you're someone who's trying to get into the internet space, if you're trying or someone's trying to figure out your finances, you're someone who's trying to lose weight. If you're wanting anybody who's trying to master the four jobs that we talk about all the time with next level human you need to understand this principle of engagement maritime secures easy is earned nothing is easy until you earn it. Thanks for hanging out on the podcast today and I will see you at the next episode. You've been listening to the next level human podcast with Dr. Jade Teta. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure you subscribe and consider leaving a review. You make the biggest difference when you pass on your lessons and inspire others. That's why reviews like this are so powerful. Your words may be the only ones that resonate for someone else. Please remember the information in this podcast is for educational purposes only. Always consult your personal Physician or Therapist before making any lifestyle changes. And finally, thank you for where you are in the world. And the difference you make.