“To me integrity means acting consistently in accord with your genuine underlying core values. The stoic ideal would be that if you’ve gone through the fire of the Socratic method, the absolute ideal would be to be free from hypocrisy and self-contradiction. That you’ve basically thought through your attitude towards life and ironed out all the contradictions in it, so you have a clearer, more consistent, more coherent world view and set of values driving your actions.” – Donald Robertson   

Donald Robertson:
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Selected Links & People Mentioned in this Episode
REIN Canada
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson
Pierre Hadot
Donald’s publications
Albert Ellis
Ryan Holiday
Aaron T. Beck
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Plato, Euthydemus
Galen
Galen, The Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions
Backbone: Living with Chronic Pain without Turning into One by Karen Duffy

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[02:08] Patrick introduces his newest TEDM guest: Donald Robertson.
[04:23] Donald & Patrick get the party started talking about Donald’s newest book release: “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.” There was so much rich content, Patrick opted to pay Donald twice by both listening to and reading Donald’s book!
[06:13] Donald provides one of his definitions of stoicism.
[07:39] With a deep desire to learn, understand and find a philosophy that resonated with his pursuits, Donald embarked on a broad adventure into self development. Stoicism and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) became his primary focus and led him to author six books on these subjects.
[11:40] Donald explains how one of the pioneers of CBT, psychotherapist Albert Ellis, based the central theoretical premise, the whole foundation of CBT, on a quote and further thoughts from the Roman stoic philosophers. With an avid interest in both, Donald wrote a book to expand on their connection. Oddly, fellow therapists have only recently become interested as their clients are reading about and listening to podcasts on the subject and bringing the concept to their sessions.
[15:18] Donald talks about how he feels academic classicists and philosophers missed out on the rich learnings provided by the stoics and how connected CBT and Stoicism really are.
[16:46] Clearing up and defining two different concepts: cognitive dissonance and cognitive distancing.
[23:30] Using an example of one of the lenses through which a person may view their world, Donald describes one of the techniques within what is now considered a third wave of modern CBT – comprehensive distancing. Cognitive flexibility allows for multiple perspectives to exist at once and seems to be related to emotional resilience.
[28:55] Donald offers one of two perspectives about the current pandemic which is how to avoid non-credible health related information.
[33:06] Referring back to the Antonine Plague through which Marcus Aurelius lived and led from 165-180AD, Donald discusses his second perspective and bigger concern through the view of stoicism: the pandemic of anger within our souls and society. Unless we consider viewing our world through multiple perspectives, divisiveness and anger will prevail indefinitely.
[40:25] Stoicism in the practice of leadership. Donald talks about why he feels the study of stoicism and virtue ethics, the moral philosophy of self-improvement, is a fundamental philosophy to embody as a leader.
[43:19] Core values and virtuous ethics of stoicism. Generally, we can agree on fundamental values as humans,