The Power of Choice: Becoming the Man YOU Want to Be

[00:00:00] You ever heard of Jekyll and Hyde? Or maybe Spider Man and Venom? They're not just characters and stories. They represent something bigger about the world we live in. Think about it. Light and dark, fantasy, good and bad. It's all connected, even down to the cells in our body. You're becoming more or less healthy with every breath and movement that you take.

There's no true stasis. Things in life seem to have a counterpart. Thor and Loki, right? It's not just a coincidence, it's how the world works. Even one of the Indian tribes reports this concept with the myth of the two wolves. Every choice we make big or small adds up. You're ready to dive into the fascinating world of choices with me.

Let's get into it.

Here's the million dollar question. How do men like us reach our full potential growing to the men we dream of being while taking care of our responsibilities, working, being good husbands, [00:01:00] fathers, and still take care of ourselves? Well, that's the big question. In this podcast, we'll help you answer those questions and more.

My name is Brent and welcome to the Fallible Man Podcast.

So my children are at the age where they've discovered the ancient yet pop culture emblem of the yin yang. They actually bought a necklace set for themselves. It's cute, but it's funny at the same time as their dad. It made me remember all the way back to junior high when I came across this concept of duality for the first time.

Honestly, a yin yang was just really easy to draw for someone who has no artistic talents. And it was cool, air quotes, right? Everybody drew the yin yang, everybody had it. It was years before I actually played or actually paid any attention to the concept itself of duality. And it really hasn't processed for my children yet, but it will over time, right?

That comes with age. By the way. Hey, my name is Brent and welcome to the Fallible Man podcast, [00:02:00] your home for all things man. Big shout out to Fallible Nation. That's our regular listeners and a warm welcome to our first time listeners as well. Thanks for checking us out. We know there's a lot competing for your time.

And so we do really appreciate you taking time to check out the episode. I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to reach out to me. I'm at the fallible man on pretty much every social media. Except for Facebook where I screwed that up and I'm at fallible man, but Instagram is my main place to check me out. Shoot me a DM or whatever you do over there because I'm bad at that stuff.

And let me know what you thought of the show. And if you really enjoyed it, share with a friend or leave us review an Apple podcast that helps us out so much. Now, guys, I don't know if the proper term is myth, legend, tale. We've touched on it before in the past on the show, but Whatever it is, the Tale of the Two Wolves is as simple as this, if you haven't heard it.

Just for like, the one person listening to this who hasn't heard this before. Each person has two wolves inside of them. One is light and good, and the other is [00:03:00] darkness. And they're always at war with each other. The one that wins is the one that you feed by your choices. That's Brent's quick breakdown.

There's much more artistic and fun tellings of it, but I really started contemplating this the other day for some reason, like you just, something crept in my head and I decided to analyze this concept. Based on real world application. And while we've touched on it before, I really want to kind of deep dive into what that translates to in our real lives.

We know that this went to an extreme with Jekyll and Hyde, right? Jekyll was obviously a good man. Mr. Hyde was really not. If you read the story, if you don't know the story, yeah, it's pretty cool. Venom, he isn't evil like Mr. Hyde per se. But he is a creature possessed of raw impulse and emotion. Whereas Spider Man is far more noble and humble hero who puts everybody else above himself.

And it's funny because comic [00:04:00] books have a way of revealing some of the real world to us. But let's take it further because we like to stop there, right? That's pretty, that's fun. But how does it actually look in the real world? Because it's usually not as extreme as the comic book telling of it. So let's go down the darker path first, shall we?

Now, if you listen to the show before, you know, that I don't think porn is healthy, we've done a lot of work with child sex trafficking groups and porn counselors here because we feel like it holds men back, but we know factually that porn use leads to more porn use to more extreme porn use, to more really extreme porn use, because.

The same thing that used to get you there just wasn't, doesn't anymore. You have to keep getting more and more extreme. Eventually, statistically, it moves into real world indulgences. With increased use, we see it destroy families and social circles. Just like any addiction person starts to take bigger and bigger [00:05:00] risk, make poor and poorer choices and actually tend to isolate, become more solitary and withdrawn.

We can take that journey with almost any drug we talk about. With alcohol, we see increased use. You have to increase higher and higher volume to get the same effect to where you get, I mean, functional alcoholics who drink enough every day. That would put most people down hard. Because they've built up this tolerance to it while it's destroying their lives internally.

Like it's really just eating your body up. It also destroys your bank account and likelihood of you losing your job goes way up in relation, fellow relationship failures goes way up and many other bad things with increased usage, right? The more you indulge in that screen consumption. Cause you tell me, Hey, Brian, I don't do drugs.

I'm not into porn. I don't do alcohol. What else? Screen consumption. We already spend a large majority of our day on screens in [00:06:00] the modern world. There are more and more jobs where you're spending more and more of your time in front of a computer screen. You don't actively push back on it. You actually spend a ton of your day on screens because.

You have computers at work, but you also have phones for work and leisure and tablets for work and leisure. And then we come home and we have movies and we have TV shows and streaming services and games on. Consoles are on computers. And the more time you spend on those screens, the more you disconnect from the real world.

I hit a point in my life where I realized I was spending way too much time gaming. And I was trying to keep up with like 14 different shows a week. Okay. That's easy math y'all. That's like 14 hours a week. Just keeping up with shows, not watching anything else. If you do the math and the average person spends 40 hours at work, well, you add another [00:07:00] 14 hours of television time.

Right. Cause usually you're coming home from work and you only have four to five hours, depending on where you work before you head to bed, guess how much of my time was lost. So, and that was my personal experience. You may have it under better control than that, but you can see more and more screen consumption actually leads to more and more screen consumption, the more you do it.

Let's go a step farther. How about not being healthy? Eating healthy takes more effort for most people. Why? Because convenient and fast isn't usually healthy. Not always, but. For a lot of people, convenient fast generally is not healthy. Working out is hard to most people. Less than 10 percent of the global population population works out three times a week or more in any way shape or form.

Quite frankly, even if you like to work out, not doing so is still easier. [00:08:00] That's why missing a workout It's tough because once you see the world didn't end and he didn't lose all that hard game muscle overnight, it actually becomes easier to miss another one and then another one. And then it's like, Oh crap, I'm busy today.

I, you know what? I can skip my workout. It's fine. Excuses start coming quicker and easier. And suddenly you're back to, Oh, I don't have time to work out. And it's been months since you did fast food and junk food are way more rewarding the short term immediate dopamine hits. I just got my kid a cookie with M& Ms in it.

Instant dopamine hit, right? Way easier, way immediately more tasty and rewarding in the short term. Whereas actually eating healthy is a long term game and can take a little bit to see the reward. So you see, as we feed those negative things in our life, They actually become easier to [00:09:00] do and they become more common.

They become more a part of our lifestyle. So that was horrible, negative, right? Oh, what about the light in the Goodwill? It does. How does that stack? Actually, surprisingly, it does eating healthy. For example, we already said it takes a little while to see more of a reward. Well, the fact is if you choose a.

good diet that you can follow. It only actually takes about two weeks to start getting rid of that sugar fog that sits in your brain that you don't even realize you have until you start to get rid of it. And the cravings for sugar actually start rescinding after about two weeks. The longer you eat this way in a healthy manner, the less you actually crave the junk food and the fast food and the sugar.

Your body actually starts to naturally reject some of that bad food. Uh, from just the way it processes it, right? You start running to the bathroom more often when you eat junk, because your body's just like, Oh, [00:10:00] from how it even tastes. If you take a break from soda long enough, you start to realize, you know, it kind of tastes nasty.

So eating healthy builds over time and actually becomes more, more easy. That's good English, right? It becomes easier over time to continue to eat that healthier food because you start to feel differently and your body starts, stops craving all the dopamine hits of the instant gratification foods that you used to eat.

Well, what about working out? The longer you do it, the more you're hooked on that feeling. They're really right. Runners talk about runner's high after so many miles. I never experienced that. I'll backtrack that I experienced that once in my life, uh, back when I was in training, I actually hit a point where I actually experienced runner's high and started enjoying running.

That was short lived, but like I've been in a slump recently, right? I, I fell into that trap of, Oh, I'm busy today. Oh, I can miss this one. And, and now I'm [00:11:00] actually been out of the gym for quite a while. And it's really hurting me. I'm not feeling good about it. I used to work out six days a week and it felt wrong.

Not to go, not because I was afraid to lose the muscle I built, but because I loved the way I felt working out like that. I loved how I felt after I worked out. I loved how workouts felt. I'm one of those sick people who just, I loved sitting there and doing heavy squats and feeling like I was going to die and hitting that last two or three reps with time.

You get to where you just enjoy it. And so that builds. Okay, let's try something else then, right? Screen time. I recently changed the screen time rules for our house and how our days end. We started turning off the TV a little bit sooner in the evening and started reading books as a family at night. This isn't the first time we've ever done this.

We've experimented with this before and guess what? It doesn't take long to start to change outlook on that now. We've only been doing it again [00:12:00] for about two weeks now. We can have two weeks. Everybody in the house looks forward to reading together. We enjoy sitting there with the television off and reading and sharing that story together.

Why right now, I think we're on book two of Harry Potter's family. We've gone through several other, I won't say several. We've gone through other series in the past. We went through Jocko's, uh, children's series that the warrior kid, that was awesome series. We all enjoyed that, but we've only been doing it for a while again, because we've done it before in the past and we really enjoying it, right?

It's easier to get away from that screen time because we're enjoying what we're doing. And people are sleeping better. It's better for us all the way around. Well, how about personal development? The more you grow, the more you want to grow in personal development. My own journey started with me trying to grow in one specific area and knowledge area in my life.

One specific piece of knowledge is what I was after. [00:13:00] When I actually achieve my goal of growing my knowledge in that area, I got to that point and went, wow, I could actually learn that on my own. Like I, I taught myself this hard thing that I never thought I could do. And my next response was, if I can teach myself that, what more can I do?

Where, where else can I go? What can I learn? Like, I got excited about what I could learn. Because I gave myself the power of permission to learn. And I haven't stopped on my personal development journey since, because the more you start to grow, the more you enjoy that growth and you start to go, wow, is there really a limit?

Likewise, gratitude, humility, integrity, all these things become easier and more powerful with time and practice. It just becomes part of your life. The more you do it. The easier it is to maintain and the easier it is to [00:14:00] just do it automatically. You read the book atomic habits, you know, that building a habit takes work, but you do it all the time.

It's building the right habits that you want in your life. So the question will ultimately come down to who do you want to be now? Venom seems like he would be a lot of fun to party with. Not going to lie. I don't, I'm, I'm old enough now. I don't party like 20, thank God, but we all had those friends and they were a whole lot of fun.

But they're not people we generally gravitate to when we need support or when it's important. They're not the people we want in our corner. So who will you choose to be? And are you making the choices it takes to get there? Now, the white light wolf and the dark wolf or the good wolf and the bad wolf or whatever that metaphor is, that story.

That's an easy way to frame it, but every choice you make every day is [00:15:00] deciding who that person is, who you're going to be. So as we wrap up, let's think about this. We all have a good and bad within us, just like those two wolves in the old story. What we choose to feed makes a big difference. You've seen how bad habits like spending too much time on screens and eating junk food can really mess things up.

The bright side, choosing healthy habits, eating right, exercising, makes us feel awesome. And it's not just about feeling good. It's about setting ourselves up for success in the wrong long run. So let's make a pact. Let's feed the good wolf inside of us. Let's make healthy choices. Let's make healthy choices.

Let's make better choices in personal growth and how we spend our time and what we do every day to make the choices, become the men we want to be, because you can't feed both and become the person that you want to be. So make your choices. But that choice isn't just a momentary, uh, big [00:16:00] choice. Thing is in every choice in every choice, you have two options.

At least choose the one that makes you the person you want to become. That makes you the person that you look up to. And you'll be well on your way to becoming the man. You've always wanted to be as always be better tomorrow because what you do today, we'll see on the next one. This has been the fellow man podcast, your home for everything, man, husband, and father.

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