God bless you, Dr. Taraban.
5 invaluable life lessons I learned from psychologist Orion Taraban
I was recently laid up after getting a vasectomy and had the good fortune to discover the YouTube channel of clinical psychologist, Dr. Orion Taraban. Orion tactfully naviagates complex and fraught issues with a skill I have never seen before. His content is highly recommended. Here are some of the things I learned, with links, so you can watch the full videos.
1. Learn to leverage THE CROSSROADS
If you learn to recognize certain moments where you have an internal, physiological response, such nervousness or tightening in your chest, for example, as a “crossroads” you can leverage these moments to make lasting change in your behavior and life. If you make a new decision at 10 different crossroads, that can lead to more or less permanent changes in your behavior. You are reconditioning yourself. It’s a way of reframing a trigger or stimulus response, to view it as a call to go against your defaults. For example, that cigarette craving? Now that is a crossroads in your life, an opportunity. That difficult conversation or finally getting the courage to walk out of a bad relationship? Crossroads. The crossroads is a moment where you have significant power to alter the trajectory of your life.
Source: This one came from a long form interview with Orion on another podcast run by the guy behind Charisma on Command (also highly recommended).
2. Emotional pain as TRAINING
Another reframe I got from Dr. Taraban was to notice that you have the option of considering emotional discomfort like training, the same way you do when going to the gym or similar. The main difference is that you don’t get to decide when to go to the emotional gym—the gym comes to you, at unexpected moments in your life. Whenever you feel internal discomfort, you can recognize that as the beginning of a workout, geared at upgrading your capacity and ability emotionally. But going against your impulsive reaction, you are putting in the reps.
Source: I can’t recall exactly which video this was in, possibly also this podcast.
3. Learn to reframe using BLOCK & REPLACE
A lot of the insight on Dr. Taraban’s channel amounts to leveraging different psychological reframes, where you choose to block your knee jerk thoughts and replace them with another, more positive equivalent. Some great examples of this I plan to adopt are:
Reframe 1: Change “What if…?” into “So what.”
Taraban advises that when you are beset by anxiety and fear about an uncertain future or negative reaction you are expecting, instead of allowing yourself to go down a rabbit hole of worry and rumination, you can reframe all of your negative “what-ifs” into a simple “so what”. So what if I lose my job? So what if she doesn’t like me? So what if I wind up broke? You pick yourself up and keep going, man. This one is great, and reminds me of Andy Warhol, who famously said:
“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.” ― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Source: Tips on overcoming anxiety.
Reframe 2: Be afraid of your FEAR
Long ago, when I was getting into mountaineering and taking risks in business, I learned to see fear as I sign post showing me a direction to move instead of a direction to avoid. Fear became a signal that growth is over there, just beyond your fear. Dr. Taraban refines this concept even further, however, admonishing us to be afraid of our fears. To learn to recognize that it is our fears that cause us to falter and not take action that will invariable cause us to lose in love and life.
Source: Fight fire with fire.
Reframe 3: Overcome INACTION, learn to EAT THE FROG and SAY YOUR LINE
Often when faced with a challenging task or decision that scares or stresses us out, we lose momentum and succumb to being stuck in rumination and inaction. To overcome this Orion offers that we can take a note from film or stage actors. When it comes time to perform simply “say your line”. Don’t over think it or anticipate the other’s response. Think of yourself as an actor in a play: and the play must go on. Say your line.
Similarly, he also advises that there are moments in life where we need to do something that we really don’t want to do—in this case, he uses the example of someone giving you something disgusting to eat, like a cockroach or a frog. The longer you stare at it, the more difficult it will become to eat it. The wise move is sometimes to not think, just eat the frog.
Source: Overcome hesitation.
4. Being A MAN
Orion correctly characterizes what it takes to be a man: having a spine to stand up erect and a pair of cojones to give you the courage to be authentically yourself, regardless of the consequences. I relate so much to this, because I used to be loud and proud about who I was and what I thought but suffered a really traumatizing cancellation experience that caused me to essentially go into hiding (this publication is my first step into the public in a number of years.)
Source: Being a man.
5. The things that make life TOLERABLE ARE HOLDING YOU BACK
Drugs, alcohol, entertainment, porn and masturbation, TV, social media, etc. — all these potentially pleasant distractions that each of us uses to make our lives more tolerable are holding us back precisely because they make us more comfortable with our lives as they presently are. If you completely stopped using porn, would you be more likely to get a girlfriend? If you didn’t have weed, booze or whatever else to give you those hits of dopamine, what else might you do? The underlying key point here is another concept I have written about extensively, that sublimitated male sexuality is no small part of the driving engine for all progress.
Source: I cant find the video for this one… it was something like The one thing that holds men back. If you know the link please share.
I hope you check out the rest of Orion Taraban’s content. This is a man we are sure to be seeing a lot more from. He has a rare and much needed intellect for this ridiculous era.
O snail,
climb Mt. Fuji,
but slowly, slowly!
— Kobayashi Issa