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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a

meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life.

And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful.

With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

What are you making up about this? That's the question.

If you've ever been to therapy, you've probably been nicely brought around to this idea that there is whatever your husband or wife or father or mother or sister or brother or boss is saying to you and then there's what you're hearing.

In fact, in a lot of couples counseling, the therapist will try to get couples to stop fights from spiraling by asking them to say to each other,

okay, what I am hearing when you say that is or what I make up about this is because it's true. Your mother thought she was just teasing, but what you heard when she did that was, I don't love you and you're not good enough.

You feel like you're just sighing because you're tired, but what your husband is hearing is, I'm upset with you and now he's getting ready to defend himself.

That expression, what I make up about this is, is really illustrative and at its core an idea that touches on the teachings of epictetus.

See what other people do or say is objective. Usually it's pretty straightforward or harmless. In fact, with the people we love most of the time, it's meant well.

That's why we love them in the first place.

But for some reason, we make up stories about it. We add interpretations or project intentions that are totally about us and then we wonder why it descends into a fight or hurt feelings.

It's not things that upset us, epictetus said. It's our judgment about things. It's what we make up about things that upset us. It's what we hear, not what people say that is the problem.

So whatever you think about today, think about that whenever you feel triggered or misunderstood or attacked, is that actually what's happening or are you just making it up?

Is it likely that they were saying anything close to what you heard or is your hearing precisely the source of the conflict? Because it usually is.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

I can't tell exactly when I first heard of today's guest, but let me just say she is very highly recommended and very highly regarded, particularly in military circles.

So I'm almost positive it was that someone recommended her first book to me, Stoic Warriors, which is about the sort of culture of Stoicism, the pros as well as the cons and the sort of ethical ramifications of the sort of the wisdom of Marx,

and Seneca and Epicetus inside the military culture. And I think there is no culture that sort of lionizes those four virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom more than military culture.

And also, you know, some of the ethical quandaries and stressors against those virtues. So her writing is fascinating.

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