Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscarra, and in today's episode we are going to talk about bullying yourself into peace.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

So I recently saw the podcaster Lewis Hous post on Twitter. He says, what do you think it's the biggest problem with the self-help industry that needs to change?

And so I offered my two cents. And I said, I think the biggest problem is framing parts of ourselves as enemies to overcome.

And that my experience is that this just leads to further fracturing an internal war.

Bullying yourself into growth may work to achieve short-term goals, but it doesn't lead to long-term fulfillment.

So curious how that one lands for you. This is something I've gone on about a lot in this podcast.

And if you've attended retreats or courses with me, this is a sentiment I hold as in core to my teachings.

It just hasn't been my experience that you can bully yourself into peace, into enlightenment, into long-term fulfillment.

It certainly is a case that you can bully yourself into short-term achievement of goals. I think there's endless examples of that.

Then what I mean when I say bully yourself, this sort of really belittling the part of you that might be fearful or you feel is holding you back, that sort of what's wrong with you, do better.

Why can't you get this right? The energy of that, which is different than holding yourself to a high standard or encouraging yourself through discomfort,

this not bullying yourself into peace is not to say we just don't hold ourselves to a high standard or encourage ourselves.

Then even a certain degree of pushing ourselves to keep moving forward in context is extremely important. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about where you try to hate yourself into change or shame yourself into change.

The examples of that that can work is like you can be yelling at yourself while you're trying to run a marathon or if you're trying to lose weight, you might just tell yourself how terrible you look.

Any form of shaming or heating or bullying, we all know because we've experienced at some point in our life whether we've been on the delivering side of it or the receiving side of it, most of us have been on both at one point or another.

We know what that's like and I think that's a sentiment that is often carried through in personal growth narratives and modalities.

The one person I'm really looking at with this these days is the author and ultra marathon runner David Goggins, not sure if you're familiar with him.

He wrote a book called Can't Hurt Me and he has an amazing story. He has just been through so much hardship and he's seen the aspects of himself that he would term as weak and fearful and holding him back.

Then he's found his way for overcoming those parts and pushing through and doing absurd physical feats, like a hundred mile marathons in a weekend, eight weekends in a row, which is just ridiculous and holds a record for a number of pull-ups in a 24 hour period or 17 hour period.

...