Decoding Transformation: Contrary Action Is The Engine of Evolution

0:00I want you to pause for a moment because I want to tell you about my friend RJ. Now, you might know this guy as the founder and CEO of Rivian. He's certainly that, but he's really so much more. He's one of those rare people who actually walks the walk. I've watched him over many years, and I know him to be this incredibly deeply committed person, committed to preserving wild spaces while also inspiring people to explore responsibly. And that's basically Rivian in a nutshell. Their mission, keep the world adventurous forever, comes from this understanding that adventure and a healthy planet, these are not separate things.

0:38They're the same thing. Here's what gets me. Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to run farther, to be changed by the journey. But obviously, that's only possible if we're not destroying those places in the process of getting there. So yeah, Rivian builds electric vehicles. But really, they're building something bigger. Momentum toward a future where exploration does not come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it. It's like, why create the ultimate adventure vehicle if we're not protecting the adventures themselves? And that's why I'm so proud to align forces in partnership with Rivian.

1:19This isn't just about transportation. It's about building a world worth exploring for our kids, for their kids, and for generations to come.

1:39The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another monologue episode of the podcast, my third and what appears to now be an ongoing series in response to your enthusiasm for the previous two. It's coming up in a moment, right after these words from the partners that make this show possible.

2:05We're brought to you today by the wonderful folks at Go Brewing. Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, this guy Joe Chura rings me up out of the blue and he asks if I'll fly out to Illinois and speak at this event that he was hosting called Go, which ended up being this really incredible weekend oriented around taking inspired action. Joe and I hit it off, but that was kind of that. And it wasn't until I ran into him a couple of years ago at Jesse Itzler's Running Man event that I realized that he had taken inspired action himself by creating this new enterprise that was also called Go. Go Brewing, in fact, which from Go has grown into what it is today, one of the most exciting revolutions in craft brewing.

2:47One of the many things that makes Go Brewing extraordinary is that they don't outsource like most companies. They handcraft everything from scratch in small batches. In fact, this commitment to quality has fueled their growth into one of America's fastest growing breweries, now in over 5 ,000 locations across 20 states and available online. The Salty AF Chilada earned the untapped number one non-alcoholic lager in the United States, and they're constantly creating bold new flavors almost every month that push the boundaries of what non-alcoholic beer can be. Double IPAs, mouth-watering sours, all with zero added sugars and none of the junk.

3:26Hear that? Incredible stuff. The non-alcoholic revolution is here, people. I am proud to help champion it alongside Joe. So get on board by getting with Go by going to gobrewing.com, where you're going to use the code RICHROLL for 15 % off your first purchase. Go.

3:52When it comes to health, sleep is a big deal. And there's just so much science out there to back up the role that it plays in every facet of well-being, from heart health to mental health, recovery, cognition, and just being able to show up as your best self. Getting a quality eight hours per night is a personal non-negotiable that I go to great lengths to ensure. It's sort of a commitment not only to myself, but to my career and to those that I love that all begins with what I'm sleeping on. Now, I've tried many mattresses, but the one that's really won my heart is Birch, and there's many reasons for this, all of which boil down to the simple fact that Birch just does things right.

4:32In addition to being incredibly comfortable and cool, helping you regulate temperatures at night, which are essential for quality rest, Birch mattresses are also firm in all the right places, and all their materials are sustainably sourced, including organic fair trade cotton. And also, everything is hypoallergenic and toxin-free, meaning no harmful off-gassing typical of most mattresses. Birch is so confident in their product. They're offering both a 100-night risk-free trial as well as a 25-year warranty. Plus, they provide free delivery right to your door in a conveniently-sized box-up. And so I want to offer all of my listeners the chance to enjoy a deep and restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch.

5:19So right now, you can get 27 % off site-wide plus two free EcoRest pillows with mattress purchase. Just go to birchliving.com slash richroll.

5:35Okay, let's set the scene. It's 1998 and I find myself coming to. I'm nauseous, wildly hungover, confused, trying to ascertain the nature of my strange whereabouts, scrambling to fill in memory gaps. My skin, clammy, stuck to plastic sheets in a bed that I don't quite recognize. My surroundings are entirely unfamiliar, but none of this is abnormal. Like most alcoholics, I had grown accustomed to waking up in strange places, wallowing in that very specific dark and private shame. And then in this moment, it hits me, this dawning realization that the countless bad decisions, the errant behavior, the disconnection from self and my absolute inability and at times downright refusal to change.

6:35Despite so many attempts to stop, I simply could not figure out how to stop drinking, a condition of both body and spirit that had really left me broken, alienated from my friends. It left my family fractured. I was in this state in which I was unemployable, really incapable of being honest, utterly hopeless, entirely alone, desperate in this condition of not understanding how to live and wanting to die. And all of it, all of those emotions, all of those decisions and behaviors and actions had all conspired, I was realizing in this moment, to deliver me to this foreign place we casually call rehab, but let's be honest, it's more aptly described as a mental institution.

7:30And despite degrees from Stanford and Cornell Law School and this idea that I harbored that I was some kind of intelligent person, the truth was pretty inescapable. My best decisions had now led me to a certain form of insanity. I ended up spending a hundred days from spring to fall in that institution, which was a treatment center nestled in the bucolic hills of rural Oregon. And it was an experience that quite frankly saved my life and taught me this really powerful new set of tools for living. It gave me hope. It lifted me out of this permanent midnight to coin a phrase from the great writer, Jerry Stahl and provided me with a foundation upon which I could rebuild this very broken life of mine.

8:18And it ended up birthing an entirely new one. The very beginnings of the extraordinary life I enjoy today started on that first day. And here I am, this husband who's been with my partner for 23 years. I'm a father, I'm a stepfather, athlete, author, podcaster, and an entrepreneur who now shoulders responsibility for the lives of the people I employ. How did this happen? More importantly, reflecting back on that, it was an experience that set in motion this journey that I'd been on towards greater self-actualization that made all of the things I just mentioned possible to begin with a journey that of course I continue to pursue to this day with extreme imperfection, I might add.

9:06And I bring the story up simply to illustrate that change is possible. I don't consider myself gifted or particularly special. In 1998, I can tell you that I was convinced that I could not change. Not that change would be hard, but that change was impossible for me. And yet here I am. But my story is not unique. I've seen it repeated a thousand times over. And because of what I do for a living, I'm on the receiving end of countless emails, letters and messages from people all over the world, regular people sharing openly and with courageous vulnerability, their stories of personal change. Amazing tales of transformation, far more extraordinary than my own.

9:55All of which leads me to one conclusion. No matter how lost, how confused, how alone or how desperate you may be or feel, there is always hope. There is always help if you seek it. What I'm saying is change is possible. Transformation is within your grasp, always. And for so many reasons, I've come to believe that it's your birthright to grow. We were born to evolve. It's something that's imprinted on our DNA. It is our mandate, but there is a caveat and it's a powerful one at that. And it's captured in this saying that's often repeated within 12 step communities. And it goes like this, change isn't for those who need it.

10:46It's for those who want it. Translation, it's all about willingness. Now, one of the first questions I was asked when I found myself in this treatment center after sufficiently drying out was, and this was asked to me by a counselor, Rich, do you wanna change? Now, most people provided they are even slightly sane would respond, of course, of course I do. Look at my life, it's a disaster. Help me change, please. But only a mentally deranged addict like myself would need to take a pause before answering to consider the options. On the one side, we got a lonely, painful, craven life, enslaved to substances that's inevitably gonna lead to incarceration, harming myself, harming others, and probably death.

11:44Or on the other hand, here's this life that you can have, joyous, happy, and free. Huh, I don't know, man. I gotta think about that. Luckily, I ended up opting for door number two, but many don't. Those people die earlier than they should. I've been to a lot of funerals, but for some reason I was blessed with that willingness, a willingness born out of a desire to survive, I suppose, but also pain, this pain that was so severe, it eclipsed the very real fear that I held about change, any kind of change, about letting go, about surrendering, about asking for help and being open to actually receiving help.

12:34I think that pain saved me, but the point I wanna make is that you don't have to be in pain to change. You don't have to hit rock bottom in order to make alterations to your life. Pain makes it easier of course, but the truth is that change is always within your grasp if you can summon the willingness to ask for it. And again, and most importantly, receive it when given. So back to the story, me and that counselor, Rich, do you want to change? Yes, yes, I do. Great, he says, then you only have to change one thing. What's that? I say, he says, everything. Everything, yes, everything. everything.

13:30And all I could think in that moment was everything, what does that even mean? After the break, I'll explain.

13:51Welcome back. Okay, so how do you change one thing when that one thing is everything? Well, after 25 years of attempting to answer this very overwhelming and sort of Zen Cohen-like proposition, I have learned a few things. I've got a few thoughts, which are challenged to articulate without coming across as super reductionist. But with the understanding that this may sound pithy, I'm gonna try. And I'm gonna begin with the idea that you have to do it one breath at a time. You have to do it one thing at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time. And you have to bring to that experience a certain presence and intentionality, a focus placed squarely on just trying to make a better choice every time a decision is presented to you.

14:49Beginning with the smallest, most mundane, low risk decisions that greet you every day and then building from there. Most days are one step forward, one step back. Some are no steps forward, two steps back. But every once in a while you get one step forward and no steps back, a brick laid on the foundation. And tomorrow, another opportunity. This process often means taking something called contrary action. What does that mean, contrary action? Well, it means asking yourself, what have I historically done? What do I typically do or want to do or feel impulse to do in this type of dynamic or situation?

15:38And then what is the typical outcome of that historic behavior? Now, if you're living, thinking, and behaving out of integrity, in other words, out of alignment with your values, with what we can call for purposes of this talk, your higher aspirational self, with what you know deep down to be right and correct for you, then I suspect that outcome is generally not great. An outcome that moves you away from the result you seek, away from the person you aspire to be. An outcome that also often produces drama, conflict, angst, and sometimes even downright chaos. Now ask yourself, what would insert person of integrity you admire do in this situation?

16:32Or perhaps better yet, what would the best version of yourself, the grounded, calm, mindful, sane person, the person you wish yourself to be, the person you would be proud to be do in this situation? Contrary action means doing that instead. That is the essence of contrary action. Now the rub. The funny thing about contrary action is that it will generally feel like the exact wrong thing to do, hence the word contrary. Because your typical reactive suboptimal response is a neural pathway that has been deeply fortified and reinforced from a lifetime of reflexive repetition, By definition, the contrary action will instinctively strike you as completely wrong, contravening every impulse, sometimes every fiber in your being about how you should behave in that moment.

17:31But this moment is your moment of truth. A moment, maybe even a millisecond in which you either do what you've always done or you summon the adequate presence of mind, the awareness to actually do something different, no matter how uncomfortable or counterintuitive it may feel. And sometimes precisely because of how uncomfortable or counterintuitive it does feel until it doesn't, until slowly, bit by bit, invisible to your senses, perhaps even to others, this new neural pathway begins to take root. And from that over time, the emergence of a new habit until one day that new habit is rote, a healthier, more aspirational, new default response to a certain dynamic or externality that may in the micro seem absolutely inconsequential.

18:40Yet in the macro, when repeated over the course of years or decades with extreme consistency and patience, these contrary actions build upon each other. They create a momentum, a compound interest guaranteed and FDIC ensured to alter the trajectory of your life in positive ways you cannot possibly imagine or predict. This process also means, again, and no way around it, asking for help. Despite any overwhelming belief in your ability to manage and solve these issues on your own, or your resistance to bothering others with your baggage, you need to invite others in. You need to bring them in so they can help identify your reflexive, recurring thought and behavior loops that are invisible to you and help you construct healthier responses.

19:39This requires being open, requires being honest and vulnerable with a few people that you trust by outsourcing your decisions to them before making them. And then, and this is the part that really gets often overlooked in the conversation about mentorship or therapy. Not only do you need to hear and consider the consensus feedback, but you actually have to take the action recommended. You can't just hear it and then do what you want. Even when, especially when you may disagree until the contrary action itself becomes reflexive. And then of course, no longer contrary, but instead integral. A very helpful tool when grappling with and learning how to practice this notion of contrary action is to develop the habit of pausing when agitated, to avoid reacting to situations the way you always have and instead indulging a moment to first reflect.

20:45In other words, maybe don't immediately respond to the upsetting email until tomorrow. Walk away from the computer. You know that's what you're supposed to do. sleep on it, talk it through with that trusted friend. It also means another trope, how you do anything is how you do everything. How you make coffee, how you interact with the grocery clerk, how you take feedback from your boss, how you respond when someone cuts you off in traffic or what you choose to notice or pay attention to while walking down the street. It means slowing down, calming down. And this is why consistent meditation and mindfulness practices are essential non-negotiables.

21:33Now, whatever modality you decide to engage with through this process, whether it's therapy or 12-step mentorship or even just friendship, that's less important than the honesty with yourself and others that you bring to it. I cannot overemphasize this enough. Because that honesty is the portal to the clarity required to track a new trajectory. Because you can't set a course forward without first establishing an accurate map of the landscape. Second to this, and because who you are is how you behave and show up in the world, each step forward, every contrary action, these things build a new identity narrative that is being crafted in each moment in real time.

22:24A healthier identity that becomes slowly more and more aligned with your previously dormant self-actualized potential. An identity that with patience and also with toil, let's be clear, will inevitably lead to things you may not currently believe possible. Like forgiveness of self and others and making peace with your past. So that past, as painful as it may currently feel to confront, no longer haunts you, no longer holds power over how you show up in the present. And most importantly, no longer dictates your future. Of course, there's much more I could say about the mechanics of change far too much for the purposes and confines of a brief monologue.

23:12So let me steer away from the three-dimensional for the time being and bring this to a conclusion with a bit of homespun spiritual mysticism. To underscore a point made earlier, I believe that I am here, you are here, we are here to evolve, to grow as both individuals, but also as a collective. And I'm convinced of this. transformation is our birthright. But again, expansion isn't something we do in isolation. Growth is a team sport. It's a muddy road that we journey together at high noon in the heat of summer, because the skins we desire to shed, the pains we harbor and the patterns that keep us stuck, those things thrive in the dark caves of isolation, but they perish in the bright sunlight of community.

24:14So when we summon the courage to illuminate or place a spotlight on our flaws and our fears and our pain in the company of others, we suddenly realize we're no longer alone, that although the facts of our respective lives may differ wildly, there's great unity and commonality and shared humanity in how we experience life. And within that comfort and perhaps most of all, hope. Now, maybe you're bristling at the suggestion, at the wooness of all of this, but let's get honest with ourselves. Deep down, repressed, compartmentalized and perhaps shrouded in a protective coating of fear crafted out of this false sense of self-preservation or an illusory sense that your pain is unique to you and you alone.

25:08I think we all know this to be true. Beyond the ego, beyond the pull of the material world, nests this beating, this pulsing signal, nudging you in the direction of growth. It's like a yearning, a feeling you've always had deep in your soul, this knowing, this strand of code embedded into your core processor that's tugging you towards greater self-actualization, gnawing at you for deeper alignment between your thoughts and your actions. It's not something that's rooted in logic. It's not rooted in rationality. And I'm not sure science can account for what you simply know to be true, which is that you seek to be better.

26:01And you know you can be better. You may not understand it and it may not yet have shape or clarity, but this is a reminder that this feeling that you have is real and it's powerful. It's like this meridian that defines us as human beings that unites us as a collective that represents the future self in gestation and is something that's freely available to all who seek it anytime, all the time. All I'm saying is honor and respect this truth, appreciate its realness. And if you're listening to this and you find yourself adrift in search of a purpose, make this that purpose and take that first step, that first contrary action.

27:00And I'll tell you what, I'll meet you along that muddy road. And when you ask me, so just how long is this road? I'll say to you, don't worry about it, man. Just take the next step. I hope you found this helpful and I'll see you back here again soon.

27:31Thank you.

28:04Thank you.