Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

This is how you change. Changing habits is hard. It takes willpower. It means discomfort. It means doing some stuff you don't want to do. It means not doing stuff you want to do. Discipline is not exactly an easy virtue. It's not always a fun virtue. But it's wrong to think that change and discipline is about force, that it's about strictness, that it's all about struggle. When we interview

Dr. Claire Carlisle Tresh about her award-winning book on Habit, one of the things we asked were for

tactics she recommends to people who want to quit a bad habit. And she said there's actually a really

important mindset. She said, the habit is for the moment part of you, and it's essential that you treat it with

kindness and gentleness rather than as an enemy or a monster. Otherwise, you turn your own soul or

psyche or mind into a battleground. The habit needs to be accepted without being indulged. She said,

okay, it's here.

It is the present reality, and I would like to change.

This is actually shockingly similar to some themes we see in Marcus Relius and in meditations.

He says, celebrate behaving like a human.

In another passage, he talks about how to get back to the rhythm after he's been jarred by circumstances.

Philosophy wasn't just a stern taskmaster to this joke, it was also a solace. It was counsel.

It was supposed to, as Seneca said, make you a better friend to yourself.

Change is hard, but it doesn't mean that you have to be relentlessly hard on yourself,

that you have to beat yourself up, that you have to fight yourself.

And this is actually something we talk about in the Daily Stoic Habits for Success,

Habits for Happiness Challenge.

It's six weeks of challenges, yeah, but the challenges are nudging you to be what you're capable of being, pushing yourself to be better, also not beating on you. It's fun. It's enjoyable. You like who you are on the other side of it. And I think you're really going to like it. I'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now at daily stoic.com slash habits. We're going to start it on July 21st, so I'd love to see it in there. We're offering a group discount if you enroll with some of your friends. And it's going to be awesome. I don't want you to think about the year is over. I don't want you to think about the person you want to become as being something out of reach. Just get after it. And you can sign up right now for

the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge and get back on track to being

that person you want to be. That's what it's all about. And you can sign up right now at

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