Bridging The Divide Between Personal and Social Change – with Greyson Peltier
Welcome to anyone coming here from Street Fight Radio. This is the original intro episode to the podcast under its old name: “DIY Tactics, Gnarly Civics, and Reality” where I make fun of Dave Ramsey at some point. It also gives some insight on the thought processes that lead me to where I am today.
Notes:
Another set of episode preview notes.
Higher Level Functions Prevail: We are exquisitely made by God specifically to survive. Our bodies and minds will prioritize addressing crisis and things we need to do in order to survive. All your energy is going to keeping yourself in a job and in your current apartment. You aren’t saving for a down payment on a home because your money is consumed by the current situation and your stress tolerance is exhausted.
Oftentimes the survival instinct is subtle and does weird things. You still go to fast food and spend even though you are low-income and trying to save for a home because your survival instinct wants food and you are depleted of energy. Don’t blame yourself!
Futility Is Apparent: Why work out to get the six pack when you won’t ultimately go on that beach vacation?
Cognitive Dissonance: Why be positive when it’s so negative?
The Solution: Know How To Fail and Make Systemic Moves. Programs often tell you not to fail. You need to know how to, because in your case. Accept the situation and work to change the systemic factors, don’t deny them. Use your voice when you need to. Don’t avoid suing over an injury or unionizing because you are trying to be positive. Be positive about overcoming the system in all ways!
There sometimes can be a benefit to negative emotions and anxiety, and you may not immediately need to suppress them, but only if you know what to do and how to do it right. Athletes, like surfers, often find peace and have their most meaningful experiences when they are most scared. Using your emotions as a resource for energy and action is a necessary and helpful skill. I call this process “manufacturing stoke.”
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So much of self-help is focused on doing a bunch of big things based on goals the authors create, which is to say they promote conformity, and that can conflict with your own innate goals and attitudes, not to mention overwhelming you. My approach to personal development in my own life is focusing on smaller things that can impact mindset across many areas, leveraging my past goals and using them as a compass to point me in the direction of what I want to work on (while making changes), and working with others for accountability. This way you make the progress you want to make in a way that works for you, which is what sticks! I also discuss “leveraging stoke” to do bigger, more difficult things situationally.
This is a preview of episode notes for a future episode and hasn’t been fully edited.
A positive mental attitude believes that you can achieve your goals no matter what is happening around you, just based on your belief in achieving them and not listening to any sort of negativity or talk of bad circumstances from others. It believes in your strength alone.
A revolutionary mental attitude believes you can achieve your goals and help others achieve theirs by believing that changing the circumstances happening around you is possible. It acknowledges that just being positive is necessary, but not sufficient. It is practiced by controlling your emotions, knowing you are strong enough to stand up against oppression, and taking action while organizing with others.
Yes, you should be positive and work on yourself. It is a major failure of activists to say that this is pointless and to stay negative while waiting for the perfect form of policy and systems change to occur.
But you should also acknowledge reality. Yes, there is an entire system designed to keep you down. But you are able to change that. You must believe you can cause change. Believing that it’s possible makes it easier to achieve. It’s reality but you can change reality. Look at the problem and see how you can improve the situation. Whatever it is, it’s good enough for you to make stoke from it. (A key lesson from skating.)
Another skate lesson: You must know how to fall and train yourself for it because if you don’t, falling will be way harder and more detrimental to you. Lying to yourself about how these problems people are facing aren’t real, that anyone can just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and always succeed doesn’t make you positive or successful; it makes you a jerk and leaves you stuck in failure when things go wrong because your mind can’t understand it. Understand and accept systemic problems and put your effort toward both working on yourself and working to create a system that promotes anti-fragility, ergo, being able to fall and get back up.