Transcriber: Christopher Vidler Reviewer: Denise RQ
In 2005, I was subjected to a brutal psychological experiment.
For three and a half months, I was put into solitary confinement.
I had to sleep on a bunk, not very much wider than my body.
I was allowed one short phone call a day,
and for the last 24 days, even that privilege was revoked.
I had no books, no music, and no TV,
nothing to entertain me apart from my own thoughts -
and, obviously, I'm a very entertaining person,
but even I was pretty sick of myself by the end of the first two weeks.
So, how did I allow this to happen?
Was I being paid an enormous amount of money to undertake this experiment?
No - in fact, I paid a lot of money to do it.
In case you haven't guessed already,
I was actually rowing solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
This 23-foot rowboat was my solitary confinement.
But it was brutal, and it was very psychological.
I had to find a way to deal with the stress
of this extremely new and unfamiliar situation.
I'd spent 11 years as a Management Consultant before this,
which had not really equipped me for what turned out to be
the worst year since records began for weather on the Atlantic Ocean.
Something I had to figure out early on was how to suppress that stress,
because when we get stressed, the adrenaline starts pumping,
and you know, those little voices in your head
that can be a problem at the best of times,
especially when you're alone.
We have this tendency to negativity, the negativity bias,
which is kind of an evolutionary thing,
because it pays us much better to pay attention to problems
than to pay attention to all the stuff that's going really well,
which is why, if you're getting feedback,
and you have one negative comment and nine good ones,
it's the one bad one that sticks in your memory.
So, as I'm there on my own in this rowboat,
I feel like there's this mutiny going on in my head,
all those little voices, some of them saying,
"You've got to row fast to get to the other side!"
Other voices going,
"No, you're feeling kind of tired, have a little break."
When stress was added into that mix,
it was like those voices had had six cans of Red Bull.
Suddenly, they're all running around, counteracting each other,
and it made it very difficult to function, and when you're alone on a rowboat,
you really don't get the chance to make second mistakes.
So I had to learn how to control my response to this situation,
because this is the good news: no matter what is going on around you,
no matter what your stress is coming from, whether it's final exams, or a new job,
or an impossibly large challenge, you can always choose your response.
I think of it like this:
We all have a circle of things that we can control.
Outside of that, a circle of influence,
and outside of that, everything else is things that we can't control.
By the way, most people in your world will be outside what you can control,
and any efforts to try and control them will probably backfire.
Early on in the voyage, I'd made some mistakes
in which of these domains I allocated certain things to,
like, for example, the ocean.
Now, the ocean seemed to have a malicious will all of its own,
it somehow knew the worst moment to come along and slop a wave over me.
After my camping stove broke about three weeks into the voyage,
I had to eat my freeze-dried meals cold, which I wouldn't recommend.
You can still rehydrate freeze-dried meals with cold water,
but instead of them rehydrating in 10 minutes,
it takes a good couple of hours for them to rehydrate.
So after two hours of sitting there, watching my meal rehydrating
- not a great spectator sport, but I was really looking forward to this meal -
I'd be sitting there, rowing along,
looking forward to my freeze-dried, whatever it was,
and then I'd have just finished my rowing shift and sat down
to exhale and enjoy my delicious cold chili con carne,
when a wave would just know
to come along and slop itself right into my mug of dinner.
It just seemed to know what to do; and early on I took this very personally.
I was like, "Why is the ocean being so mean to me?"
And it took me a while to figure out the ocean was just doing what oceans do.
It was outside of my control,
and I had to just get on and do what ocean rowers are supposed to do,
which is to keep sticking the oars in the water and stop whinging.
As I see it, there are three different domains within our circle of control:
there's our work, our circumstances, and ourselves.
As an example of my work, to go back to my voyage,
it's really important in the way that you're going to respond to your work,
that you frame your job description in a way that means something to you,
something that's going to be challenging enough
to allow you that acquisition of mastery, but also doable -
it should be at the upper end of your capabilities.
Unfortunately, at the start of my voyage,
I made the mistake of looking at the whole 3,000 miles ahead of me
between the Canaries and Antigua and the Caribbean,
and there is nothing more guaranteed to make you melt down
into a completely demotivated mess than having a massively overwhelming goal.
So I learned the hard way that I had to break it down into manageable chunks,
to take it to the next degree of longitude, or the next day,
or the next hour, or sometimes, just the next ten oar strokes at a time.
My circumstances:
you can choose how you perceive your circumstances by reframing it
if you're not liking the way your circumstances are looking.
So, as an example of that, one day, I'm rowing along, miserably,
I've got tendinitis in my shoulders, I've got saltwater sores on my bottom,
my sleeping bag is damp, everything is just massively uncomfortable.
I can see there's a very good reason that more people don't live on rowboats.
I'm whinging away, "It's all so uncomfortable,"
and suddenly, that word 'uncomfortable' triggered a memory,
and I recalled that in the run-up to the voyage,
whenever a journalist or anybody else asked why I was doing this, I would say,
"I want to get outside my comfort zone, to find out what I can do,"
and unfortunately, I'd forgotten that getting outside your comfort zone
is, by definition, going to be uncomfortable.
And so, when I flipped it around like that,
I realized that the discomfort didn't mean I was failing,
it actually meant I was succeeding in what I'd set out to do,
and from that point on, I was able to be much more cheerfully miserable.
(Laughter)
Finally, in theory, we are able to control ourselves.
Now, frankly, I'm not quite so sure about this.
There are endless psychological studies showing
how we are not as rational and calm as we think we are,
and that the massive elephant of our subconscious
has got this poor little rider of our conscious mind
trying to control it.
But I think there are some ways that we can change our stories.
First of all, so many of the things we worry and stress about don't happen.
As Mark Twain said,
"I've had many worries in my life, and most of them never happened."
I know that certainly on the ocean, I sometimes got a bit carried away
thinking about all the problems that might arise
between where I was and where I was going to end up,
and that way lies madness.
A lot of them are very trivial - there's enough really big problems
going on in the world right now, with environmental destruction,
and social inequality, and human rights violations.
Why are we spending so much time worrying about keeping up with the Joneses,
the acquisition, maintenance, and transportation of stuff;
let's just keep things simple,
let's stop sweating the small stuff, and sweat the really big stuff.
Finally, doing something like rowing across an ocean
is like the opposite of instant gratification.
Captain Webb, the first guy to swim across the Channel, said,
"Nothing great is ever easy."
So, in fact, when you're going through a difficult, stressful situation,
it's possible sometimes to see it as that creative stress -
you're being challenged to try something new.
It means that you're growing, you're pushing your boundaries,
you're getting outside your comfort zone,
and that's the only way that you're going to keep developing as a person.
So there's actually a different kind of stress
that psychologists called 'Eustress' - that's e-u-stress, not y-o-u-stress,
and it means that you're actually in the zone, you're flowing and learning.
So, while you're reframing your situation,
you can actually reframe stress itself.
I think there are a lot of people for whom their circle of control
doesn't even extend as far as the boundary of themselves,
and it's really only through doing this work of looking inside,
of becoming more self-aware of our drivers,
and the tricks that our psychology will try and play on us,
that we actually become wiser in the way that we show up in the world.
Many people seem so much
at the behest of their emotions and irrationalities
that their circle of control is like a tiny little dot inside that,
and it's by doing that inner work
that you can grow your circle of control until you become the master of yourself.
I'd like to finish up
by reciting the last two lines from one of my favorite poems.
In front of my rowing seat, as I was out there on the ocean,
I had a whiteboard, on which I would write up inspirational quotes,
or I would write up the next 100 miles as being my next target,
and I had a number of poems I particularly liked:
Max Ehrmann's Desiderata and Rudyard Kipling's If.
But actually, one of my favorites was 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henley,
and even the name itself means 'unbowed', 'unconquered', 'indomitable'.
The last two lines of that are,
"I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."
My belief is that when you look inside, develop that inner strength,
burnish your soul in the crucible of a really challenging situation,
you will be so much more powerful in the world:
not only does your circle of control grow, but your circle of influence will too,
as people respect you as someone who understands their own motivations.
So, be the master of your fate, be the captain of your soul,
go forth and be powerful in the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)