Coping Flexibility: The Stoic Art of Picking Your Battles Wisely

When do you speak up, and when do you let it go? When do you push, and when do you step back? Donald Robertson and I get into coping flexibility: the skill of matching your response to the situation instead of running the same move every time.

We pull from Stoicism, CBT and martial arts, including Epictetus on how you work out whether you can actually fight the lion in front of you, and why even Marcus Aurelius trained physically. Underneath it all sits self-knowledge: you cannot pick your battles well until you know your own strength.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Cognitive flexibility, which is our ability to kind of view things creatively from different perspectives. That's linked to empathy, like uh it's linked to our ability to kind of snap out of unhealthy patterns of thinking as well. But there's also some something closely related to it called coping flexibility, which is our ability to be able to choose wisely and adaptively between different ways of coping with problems. I mean the m the simplest example of that is sometimes when you're dealing with other people, it's important to be able to speak up and assert yourself. Other times, I hate to break it to you kids, sometimes you'd be better off zipping it like and saying nothing in some situations. But you a a really smart person will be able to pick their battles, like and choose. But if you think I have to confront, confront, like attack, attack, attack, assert myself every time, that generally doesn't work out that well, to be honest, like even though many people believe that that's healthy, and likewise always kind of avoiding things and kind of being resigned and accepting something doesn't work you sometimes. You need to be able to speak up, but you have to pick your your situations. I think Epictetus talks about something very similar to this, but he he recognises that for stoics there's this problem he he's famously he says, How does the bull know that it can kill a lion? Seems like an odd remark to make, right? I didn't know bulls could kill lions, but I did a bit of research on it. Oh boy, they can. Like, so like a bull that's like the in charge of a herd can toss a lion in the air and its horns make mincemeat of it, like but uh the uh calves aren't strong enough to uh to fight off a lion, like only some of the bulls are powerful enough, strong enough to do that. Some of these Epictetes said, How would you know that you could fight a lion? Like, well, the only way that you would really know is through trial and error, like you know, so I think what he has in mind is most ancient philosophers had some experience of martial arts, like they did pancratian or wrestling or boxing, or it's surprising to us now, but even Mark Aurelius, who was a bit of a weedy nerd, were like definitely trained in in wrestling and boxing and alludes to it in the meditations. So did most people like in Greek and Roman society. Um so they're very familiar with the idea of choosing a sparring partner, right? And they this becomes a metaphor for for life on many levels. But part of it is if you choose somebody that's too easy to fight, and you're like really experienced, you're a big strong guy, and you're really fast and you're really skilled, it's gonna be too easy, you're gonna have a sparring partner that's too easy, and you're not gonna learn, they're not gonna be that much of a challenge for you, right? Perhaps. But if you pick somebody who's twice your size and way more experienced, like much stronger and much faster than you, then you're you know, you're just gonna get your you know, like your your butt kicked, right? And maybe you learn something from that, but it's not gonna you'd be better to pick someone who's more generally speaking, who's more evenly matched. You we said earlier you can learn from novices and stuff as well, but for the most part, you want to pick somebody like that's if you're spar you're sparring with, you might want to pick somebody where you think there's kind of a a chance that they might beat you, a chance that you might win. Oh, they're reasonably evenly matched, you know, they're not just gonna beat you within the first two seconds every time or something like, and it's not gonna be you know, there's not gonna be that much opportunity to learn stuff, perhaps, right? So Epictetus says you you can only judge this from experience. Like, you know, you through trial and error you kind of figure out what's too much and what's not enough is a challenge. And in terms of stoicism, like how can you if you can uh use stoicism, for example, psychologically to endure pain, to resist temptation, how do you know?

SPEAKER_00 4:46

For some people being promoted to a position of power, they lose their mind.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Like some famously in politics, if you power corrupts, right? Um and whereas other people are kind of unfazed by that, right? How would you know? Like, but you have to observe yourself very closely in similar situations and think I know that you know this is a weakness for me or it's a strength for me, right? You know, um and so deciding whether it's a good idea to face certain challenges or you'd be better off avoiding them because it's too much, it's gonna overwhelm you, you know, everyone has to decide that for themselves. It's not a standard formula, right? If you no one is like a unless you're the stoic sage, you can't put your throw yourself into every challenging situation because some of them are gonna be too much for you. Like the the it's gonna be depressing, or or you're gonna lose your temper, you're gonna succumb to temptation, like unless you're saint-like, you know, and you've completely mastered all fear and and anger and desire in yourself. And some challenges are gonna be a piece of cake for you, but we have to know ourselves, we have to study our strengths and weaknesses and figure out on the basis of self-knowledge what would be an appropriate coping strategy for us in different situations, right? And that that takes thinking, it takes coping flexibility, you know. It takes, you know, also an a part of it is evaluating what aspects of a situation you have control over and which ones you don't which aspects you don't have control over. Um in some situations the way you cope might depend on uh how much time you have, right? So generally I'm wisdom, would you say? Is that it sounds like it's practical wisdom way you're describing it. Yeah, it definitely it's a form of practical wisdom.