Stoicism in 3 Minutes: Master Your Emotions with Erick Cloward

A short clip with Erick Cloward, Stoic author and host of The Stoic Coffee Break Podcast, on the one idea that quietly runs most of our reactions: it is not the event, it is the judgment you make about it. Change the judgment and the emotion changes with it.

Erick puts it plainly: "it is just the way that you are thinking about this, not the thing." Three minutes, one practical handle for staying steadier when something throws you. You can find Erick on The Stoic Coffee Break Podcast and as @stoiccoffee on X.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

The following is a clip from my interview with Eric Claud, a stoicism-focused author and podcaster known for making ancient wisdom accessible and practical. Eric's insights help us approach life's daily challenges with clarity, purpose, and calm. Enjoy. And he writes that supreme intelligence is knowing the real value of things. And I kind of relate that back to the idea that Stoics feel emotions, but they try to feel them in proportion or accurately to what is happening. So they're not going to get super flustered by something that they deem is not worth getting fusted about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I like that thought that that they feel yeah, that you feel your emotions in proportion to the the situation at hand. So yeah. Yeah, I like that. And I think that's part of for me, one of the reasons why stoicism was so attractive is because I used to be angry about a lot of things and I get set off very easy about all kinds of things. And so when I started reading about stoicism and understanding that, oh, really, it's just the way that you're thinking about this, not the thing. Because I always wondered how people could be so calm in some situations where I was getting really riled up about it. I'm like, how do they do that? You know, why is and I was jealous of that because I'm like, here I am, so reactive, and they're so calm and cool and collected, and you know, they they know the right thing to say, they know the right thing to do. They, you know, and for me, I would be like, getting angry about this thing. And I'm like, how do they do that? And then when I started reading about stoicism, it's just like, well, it's your perspective. It's it's that story that you're telling yourself in your head that does that. Then it it still took a long time to really uh integrate that into me as a person in my in my personal thinking and stuff like that. But, you know, and people ask me that like, so how do you get good at implementing these things in your life? And I kind of say, well, I kind of cheated. And they're like, Well, how do you cheat? And I said, Well, I create a podcast on this, and so I think about this almost every day and every week. So it's a constant, ongoing thing, but it's that consistency that does it. And I gave myself something where I had to be consistent about it. And so because of that, that's how I've been able to implement it. And I still struggle and I still fall short on things, and I still have to work my way through these things. But it's always a work in progress, but I'm a lot better than I used to be for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's it's difficult to imagine that you would have been that reactive just from the the energy and the and the vibe. I do think, but just that thought alone that Epictetus and the Stoic stress that it's not the event, but your judgment about the event. Just if you can just e even if you don't embody it, but you just think there's something to that, that thought alone can be life-changing. Because then every time you react, maybe 10 minutes later you can just go, it was probably how I was thinking about it that probably made me feel that way. And then every time you can be 1% better and feel that less intensely or recover more quickly. So yeah, I do think you know, people talk a lot about, you know, I've woken up and I'm not sleepwalking through life anymore. I I do tend to think that for me, that waking up, that being more aware is just recognizing that I am not reacting necessarily to external events at all times. It's my judgment and my opinion that is massively shaping how I'm feeling in any given moment.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, and it allows you to when you when you internalize that and you can truly see that, it allows you e in the moment to not be so reactive to things.