Full Podcast Transcript:

Welcome to the Horsemanship Journey Podcast

Shane Jacob

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking you time to be with me today. Today's episode is brought to us by Cowboy Cuffs. Elevate your style, elevate your life.

The Cowboy Code and Values

So yeah, today, today we want to talk about cowboy values, the cowboy way, the cowboy code. Talk about building grit and courage for ourselves and in our kids. So, you know, my heroes have always been cowboys, like Willie Nelson said, and they still are, it seems. You know, when I was a kid, I just wanted to—when I was a young man, I wanted to be a cowboy and do all the cool things that cowboys do. I've done a lot of those cool things. I've been blessed to be able to spend my working career working with horses, and that's been very fortunate.

The Influence of Western Movies

So let's talk a little bit about this. A lot of this idea around the cowboy way and wanting to be a cowboy and all the romance and the whole idea of being a cowboy, a lot of this was instilled as Western movies came to be popular. Matter of fact, Gene Autry, okay, who starred in movies—think clear back to the'40s, '50s, '60s—he had his own cowboy code, okay? And they say that his code reflected the characters he portrayed, which were men of high moral character who stood for what was good, decent, and fair.

The Center for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership

There's a guy, James Owen, at a place called the Center for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership. He talks about the idea that cowboy values are part of American Western heritage. And he says that cowboy values are values that all Americans can share, no matter what your politics, your religion, or no matter what station you are in life. James says that cowboys are seen as heroic not just because they take on dangerous jobs and ride broncs and rope wild cattle, but because they stand for something. They stand for principles like honor, loyalty, and courage. These things are at the heart of the cowboy way and the cowboy code.

The 10 Cowboy Principles

The Center for Cowboy Ethics has 10 cowboy principles that they use as guidelines. So let's go through the 10 cowboy principles. I'll tell you what they are.

1. Live each day with courage.
2. Take pride in your work.
3. Always finish what you start.
4. Do what has to be done.
5. Be tough but fair.
6. When you make a promise, keep it.
7. Ride for the brand.
8. Talk less and say more.
9. Remember that some things aren't for sale.
10. Know where to draw the line.

The Power of Courage

So today, what I want to do is talk a little bit more and kind of dive into one and six. Number one was live each day with courage.

Courage—you know, I've talked quite a bit about courage. Courage is something that sounds like a pretty positive deal. I mean, courage just sounds like, yeah, that's me. I like courage, and it sounds positive, and it sounds like I kind of like that. I think I'm courageous, and we all want to kind of be courageous. It feels inspiring to think of ourselves as courageous, but the truth of the matter is courage is hard, you know? It's really hard sometimes. It's a lot easier to just avoid those things when they happen than to exercise courage because courage isn't actually doing the thing. It's not simple. It's simple, but it's not easy.

The Natural Brain vs. Courage

Our default brain, or what I call the natural man brain—you know, what do they call it? The emotional triad. Our brain, left unchecked, right? So unintentionally, if we're non-consciously, our brain will guide us to do things that our brain wants us to seek—pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. And so, without intentional, thoughtful, purposeful thought and action, that's kind of the way that we do things. And courage is not those things. Courage is the opposite of that. Courage means facing that fear and going for what's uncomfortable, going through the discomfort and taking the action anyway.

Building Self-Confidence for Courage

Courage requires self-confidence. Self-confidence is the emotion that we can generate that gives us a feeling that we can, right? The willingness to feel any emotion, including the fear, when we exercise our confidence. As a matter of fact, self-confidence can be defined as the willingness to feel any emotion.

When we have confidence—when we're willing to feel the emotion, we can step up, exercise our fear, feel the discomfort, go through the thing—we can feel the thing and do it anyway. That's basically what's courageous, right? So what it looks like in real life is a lack of courage is being afraid of failing and not willing to feel the emotion. We can be afraid of failing, being afraid of rejection, being afraid of humiliation. Courage is just doing it anyway, okay? Because there's so much more to gain than what there is to lose by the discomfort.

Progress Through Courage

Here's the thing about courage. If it's a new thing, they call self-confidence the emotion of progress because, as you develop, the skill of generating your own self-confidence allows you to have courage to go through the discomfort and do the thing anyway. Not be afraid to fail, not be afraid of embarrassment, humiliation, falling down, what other people think, and all of that. Or getting whooped—you know what I'm saying? Failure, failure in whatever it is that could happen if you do the thing. It's being willing to have that happen and have it be okay anyway and go through it and do it.

As we exercise courage, we develop capability, and as we develop capability in the thing that we're doing, eventually, we can look to our past, and because we have all this evidence in our past of what we've done, then we have confidence in a thing, and then it makes it so much easier and it feels better. It feels easier when we can look to our past. But in order to progress, we don't have the past to look to, so we have to rely on our own ability to generate self-confidence and our own courage to go through discomfort to make progress. And that is a key, key, key thing that, if you break it down and understand, can help us make progress—the progress that we want to in life. And so that's part of the cowboy code—exercising courage.

Keeping Your Promises

The second part that I want to talk about in this cowboy values, if you will, was number six. And number six—let me go back to the list—was when you make a promise, keep it. Okay, that was number six. So let's talk a little bit about that. This is kind of important.

And what I'm going to talk about is making a promise to yourself.

The Power of Keeping Promises to Yourself

Stephen Covey talked about this. The first time I heard this was in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And he's like, "Make a promise, keep it. Make a promise, keep it. Make a promise, keep it." And it seems like, okay, that seems like a good idea, but what's the big deal? What does all that mean? Why are you even saying it?

When we make promises to ourselves, basically, we need to trust ourselves, right? We need to trust ourselves that we're going to follow through. That's basically what discipline is.

Discipline and Trust: The Key to Success

Discipline is similar to courage in that discipline is being willing to feel some amount of discomfort in exchange for feeling more discomfort and not getting the reward.

Discipline is being able to feel a lesser amount of discomfort and get the reward, as opposed to feeling more discomfort and not getting the reward.

So let me tell you exactly what that means.

The goal, with building grit and being disciplined, is to be able to trust ourselves—to be able to count on ourselves. To be able to say, "You know what? If I put it in my calendar, it's as good as done because it's going to happen. You know what? I keep my promises. If I say I'm going to do a thing, I do the thing."

Because you don't want to be the other way. You need to be able to depend on yourself for so many reasons.

And as you become more willing to go through the discomfort of this and become more disciplined, your self-confidence skyrockets.

How Broken Promises Impact Your Confidence

When you become that person that you can really trust and count on and depend on, it changes how you interact with other people. It changes your ability to trust, depend on, and trust other people.

So here's how that goes.

Here's an example. Let's just go through this example and break it down exactly what I mean.

Let's say you set a New Year's resolution:

"All right, this is it. I usually wake up at seven. I'm waking up at five in 2020. I wake up at five o’clock now. That’s what I do. And I’m going to use the time to be more productive or exercise or whatever I’m going to do. I wake up at five o’clock. Period."

So you go to bed early—boom—you’re all ready for it. You’re psyched out, you’re ready to roll. You’ve got your alarm set, and that’s going to be a new way of living.

And five o’clock happens. The alarm goes off.

And your brain—remember?—seeks pleasure, avoids pain, and conserves energy.

None of those things involve getting up when you’re not used to it, right? It’s the opposite again. So your brain is going to try to talk you into:

"You know, just push snooze for a little while."
"Maybe try it tomorrow. You didn’t really get to bed early enough to get a full night’s sleep."
"Maybe a little extra sleep before you begin this?"
"I don’t know if you got enough. It’s not even light outside!"

And you push snooze. Or you go back to sleep. And the next thing you know, it’s 7:30.

And you wake up, and you’re not happy.

Rewriting the Narrative: Keeping Your Promise

Now let’s rewind. Say we had a chance to do it again.

January 1st. I set my goal. I’m psyched out. I’m excited. And five o’clock comes, and I’m like, "I’m doing it."

Okay, I’m doing it. I’m doing this thing.

I’m focused on the result, and I get up. And I mope around, trying to wake up, find my clothes. The lights are bright because I don’t have a dimmer.

And I’m thinking, "Who wakes up at five o’clock? This is ridiculous."

And I’m fumbling around, trying to get in the shower.

And you know what?

It takes me max 15 minutes.

Because in 15 minutes, I have come from dead sleep to awake.

And I’m focused.

And guess what? I’m feeling pretty good about me.

"Hey, I did my deal. I woke up at five. I’m on fire. I am going, and I’m doing my thing."

So here’s the thing.

I experienced about 15 minutes max of discomfort.

But guess what I gained?

I gained nearly two hours of productivity.

And I think I’m a rock star.

"You know what? I can depend on me. I say something, I do it. That’s the way I do things. That’s the way I roll. And that’s the kind of person I am. And when you deal with me, that’s the kind of person you’ll deal with."

The Bigger Impact of Keeping Promises

So that is—when we make a promise, keep it.

The other thing I didn’t say about this is that we are more apt to keep promises for other people if we believe that we’re dependable people. So it has this huge result with all the other people. It has a huge consequence.

So you know, when we're not keeping our promises and you know what, here's the deal. It's not going to be a hundred percent, right? This is some, neither is the courage, by the way. These two are ideals of things to work for as far as cowboy values and the cowboy code. Being courageous, you're not going to probably be courageous every time. Okay. It's an ideal to work towards. It's a habit to form of being willing to feel the discomfort.

The Link Between Discipline and Self-Confidence

The same with discipline, because the more that you become disciplined, yourself-confidence skyrockets. When we make the other choice, right? When we listen to our brain, who's telling us not to go through the discomfort, it erodes our trust in ourselves. It leaves the self-doubt. Really, it leaves us stuck in discourage for a long period of time. That's the more discouraged we get.

It an also harm how other people perceive us to be. It just impacts our relationships and our credibility with other people and so on.

So here's the takeaways on that. Okay, here's four steps to keep your promises to yourself.

1. Be realistic about what you commit to. Now, I'm not saying don’t do it unless it’s a no-brainer or don’t do it unless it’s easy. In my example, okay, if somebody told me to charge hell with a water pistol, I’m loading my pistol and I’m off, you know, sometimes without a lot of thought. All I’m saying is, be thoughtful about what you commit to doing yourself. Not just going for the easy stuff, but being intentional.
2. Expect discomfort. Be willing in advance to feel that discomfort and know that it’s going to be a normal part of the process.
3. Focus on the positive outcomes of following through. Your focus is going to help you make the right decision when the moment of discomfort arrives.
4. Face the discomfort and go through it. Keep your promise.

I interviewed Ben Kerr, Olympic wrestler and just an exceptional human being. And one thing that he does to help him in those decision points, when he calls it his decision to be a victim or a victor, in those decision moments, he uses other things to help him make the right decision. One thing that he uses is music.

So to help change his state so that he is focused on the result rather than the immediate discomfort. So for example, when that alarm goes off, in my example, he would have a song as his alarm that motivates him or brings him to a place or helps him envision the future, which helps him make that decision easier to go through the discomfort. Just a little fun extra tip of the day from Ben Care, shout out to Ben Care.

At the heart of these two principles—living with courage and keeping our promises to ourselves—is a willingness to feel discomfort in exchange for progress, and eventually, more joy in your life.

Hey, they never said that living by the cowboy code or living cowboy principles was easy. They only said it was worth it. And I think that’s why our heroes have always been cowboys.

The Bigger Impact of Keeping Promises Final Thoughts: Live by the Cowboy Code

Hey, thank you for taking your time to join us today.

And remember: You cannot fail as long as you Don’t Ever Stop Chasing It.

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