The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

By Jon BrooksSociety & Culture Health & Fitness Mental Health Education Self-Improvement Philosophy

The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks episodes

September 04, 2023 How To Make Better Trade-Offs When Time Is Tight
Becoming a parent stripped my time down to almost nothing, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to my focus. This episode is about what I learned from Greg McKeown's "Essentialism": that the constraint was not the problem, it was the teacher.
I get into the MoSCoW method for deciding what actually matters, why waiting for inspiration is the amateur's move and what the professional does instead, and how limits tend to fuel creativity rather than kill it. Underneath it all is one Stoic habit: making conscious trade-offs in a world that pretends you can have everything.
Resources mentioned:
"Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown: on Amazon
"The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield: on Amazon
"Maxims" by Francois La Rochefoucauld: on Amazon
Greg McKeown's videos on Essentialism: on YouTube
The Big Five Personality Test: truity.com
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
11 min
August 27, 2023 Is Your Need for Approval Causing Anxiety? A Talk with Dr. Aziz
A lot of anxiety hides behind being nice. Dr. Aziz Gazipura has a PhD in clinical psychology and spends his time helping people build social confidence, and his work named something I had felt for years but never had words for.
We walk through four ways of explaining where anxiety comes from: avoidance, distorted thinking, biology, and the one that hit hardest for me, the hidden emotion model, where the feelings you swallow to keep everyone happy come back as anxiety. From there we get into trauma healing versus endless self-optimization, shadow work and how to actually practise it, holding assertiveness and compassion at the same time, and Aziz's own path out of crippling shyness. This one rang very true to my own story.
Dr. Aziz Gazipura: socialconfidencecenter.com
Dr. Aziz's books: socialconfidencecenter.com/books
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
46 min
August 13, 2023 Embracing Fate: Nietzsche's Answer to the Victim Mentality
You can be a genuine victim of something terrible and still refuse to live as a victim. That distinction is the whole episode. As I put it in the conversation, "the victim mindset is not just disempowering, it's also foolish, inaccurate, and irrational."
I look at where the victim mentality comes from, often childhood, and the hidden payoff that keeps it in place. Then I bring in the Stoic view of external events and Nietzsche's amor fati, the practice of loving your fate rather than resenting it. There is a detour into Jiu Jitsu and John Danaher's story, plus the "good exercise", radical gratitude, and the inner critic that quietly runs the victim script. Self-ownership without self-blame is the thread holding it together.
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
32 min
August 10, 2023 Stoicism Meets Authenticity: A Conversation with Dan Munro
A friend kept telling me I had to talk to Dan Munro, so I did, and this is the first of what became several conversations. Dan is a confidence coach with an unusual back story: he was a probation officer working with offenders before he started coaching, which gives him a very clear-eyed read on people who do not want to change.
His angle is honesty. As he puts it, calling yourself "a loser" is not humility, it is just inaccurate. We get into honesty as the root of real confidence, how to spot good coaching from bad, dealing with manipulative people, the darker side of the pick-up world, and what "being yourself" actually means once you strip the slogan off it. There is also a nice coincidence: Donald Robertson, who I had just had on the show, was writing the foreword for Dan's book on honesty.
Dan is from Auckland, lives in the Czech Republic, runs the Brojo men's group, and wrote "The Legendary Life" and "Nothing to Lose".
Full write-up: highexistence.com
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
1 hr 50 min
July 31, 2023 How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: Insights with Donald Robertson
Donald Robertson is one of the people who has done most to bring Stoicism into the modern world, partly because he comes at it as a clinical psychologist who sees how closely it tracks cognitive therapy. His book "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" is part biography of Marcus Aurelius, part practical guide, and as he writes, the Stoics can teach you "how to face adversity, how to conquer anger within yourself, moderate your desires" and a good deal more.
This is our second conversation, and we go deep on Marcus: the foundations of his Stoicism, the part compassion played in how he ruled, the long fight between Stoic and Sophistic thinking, the people who shaped him, and his own journaling habit. We also get into the most common ways people get Stoicism wrong, and how it speaks to distinctly modern problems.
Donald on the HighExistence Podcast: highexistence.com
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
1 hr 46 min
July 17, 2023 Build Discipline Through Habits And Community | Eric Brown
Eric Brown is back, and this conversation is about the unglamorous engine room of change: habits. As he puts it, "your daily disciplines cast a vote for the person you want to be and the person you're becoming." Eric is the co-creator of Phoenix Culture and the creator of Warrior 100, both built around discipline and wellbeing.
We get into self-discipline as something you build rather than something you have, why community makes practices like meditation and training far more likely to stick, and the idea of identity-level change, where you stop trying to do the behaviour and start becoming the kind of person who simply does it. Plenty of practical talk about fitting it all into a real life, too.
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
1 hr 32 min
July 05, 2023 How To Put Stoicism Into Practice | Donald Robertson
Donald Robertson describes Stoicism as "a kind of psychological toolbox", full of strategies for handling anxiety, anger and pain, and that framing runs through this whole conversation. We trace the history of the philosophy and pull practical use out of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca rather than treating them as museum pieces.
One note: I originally recorded this a few years ago for the HighExistence podcast and never shared it here, so it is new to the Stoic Handbook feed. We work through some of the key Stoic texts and how to actually apply them in daily life, which is the part that tends to get skipped.
Donald Robertson's courses: learn.donaldrobertson.name
Donald's newsletter: donaldrobertson.substack.com
Donald's books: on Amazon
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
1 hr 20 min
June 29, 2023 Why, What, How: A Calmer Way To Build Discipline
We tend to think of discipline as punishment, something you do to someone, or to yourself, when they get it wrong. This episode argues the opposite: at root, to discipline is to teach. Once you see it that way, both parenting and self-improvement start to look very different.
I share a simple framework I use, the Why, What, How technique: work out why someone (including you) is behaving this way, decide what you actually want to teach, then find the calmest way to deliver it. I get into the difference between wanting to do something and forcing yourself to, and why the way I respond to my son turns out to be a decent model for handling difficult people generally. Calm, curiosity and a bit of distance do most of the work.
The Stoic Scroll newsletter: stoicism.substack.com
"No Drama Discipline" by Daniel Siegel and Tina Bryson: on Amazon
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
10 min
June 23, 2023 Stoic Role Ethics: Stop Trying To Be Everything
Trying to be everything to everyone is a fast route to feeling stretched and resentful. The Stoics had a cleaner idea, role ethics: at any given moment you are playing a specific role, parent, friend, colleague, citizen, and the work is to play that one well rather than all of them at once.
In this episode I unpack how thinking in terms of roles clarifies your duties and quietly lowers your stress, and how the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, give you a standard for playing each role honestly. It also makes it easier to accept the edges of your control, since every role has limits built in.
Related article: stoichandbook.co/life-is-a-movie-just-play-your-role
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
6 min
June 16, 2023 The Paradox of The Dichotomy of Control and the Trap of Feeling Good
Almost everyone who reads a bit of Stoicism gets the dichotomy of control. Far fewer actually feel any relief from it. You can recite "some things are up to us and some are not" and still lie awake at 3am. This episode is about why that gap exists and how to close it.
As Epictetus put it, "the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have." I dig into the paradox in that, and how to apply the dichotomy at three levels rather than one: external events, your emotions, and the judgments underneath them. I also bring in cognitive behavioural therapy as a practical bridge between knowing the idea and living it.
The Notion app: notion.so
"The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy" by Donald Robertson: on Amazon
"Feeling Good" by David Burns: on Amazon
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com
9 min

About The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

From the publisher's feed

You've read the books. You know what Marcus Aurelius would do. But when life gets hard, the philosophy disappears. This podcast is for people who want to close the gap between knowing Stoicism and…