Radical Responsibility: When Life Chooses You - E213

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick

Dr. JC Doornick discusses navigating a stage 4 cancer diagnosis through the lens of 'radical responsibility.' He introduces the concept of '

Key takeaways

The concept of 'Carency' treats attention, energy, and time as a finite daily allotment that is often wasted on future anxieties.
Radical responsibility is distinct from blame; while blame looks backward at fault, responsibility asks, 'What am I going to do about it?'

Main topics

Radical Responsibility
Carency (Attention Currency)

Notable quotes

You can't take responsibility for something that hasn't happened yet.

Conclusion

The episode provides a framework for reclaiming personal power by shif

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I just want to start off by just coming from a place of gratitude. And this is just a message to my Make Sense family. This project that we have on YouTube, it started this year with only 2,000 subscribers or under 2,000. And looking back, you know, I can't really wrap my head around all that's changed. We're at 20,000. We're over 20,000 subscribers right now. And it's interesting if you're the kind of person that's trying to grow a YouTube channel, there's a right and a wrong way to do it. And there's the right people to work with and the wrong people to work with. I was trying to do it by myself. So I do want to give credit to all of you and my team, but say that the growth that we're experiencing with the podcast and specifically the YouTube channel, it's not mine. It's ours. It's everyone that shows up and watches the videos. And I can't. tell you how much fun it is to see people comment on some of these interviews that we have and the videos that we have. Love talking to you guys on there. All of you that listened and shared this stuff with somebody that you love, you know, I don't take any of that stuff lightly and I never will, but I just want you guys all to know that I wake up every day. It's a big reason that I do these things. I wake up every day grateful for everything, you know, for this community, for this work that I do and for you. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleepwalking mode and label it as Speaker 1 (1:36) life and reality. Yeah. That ends here. Welcome Speaker 2 (1:39) to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock collar and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Speaker 1 (2:03) Make sense. Speaker 2 (2:10) All right. So today I want to talk to you about something that I believe could quite possibly be one of the most empowering and misunderstood ideas in personal development. And that is the idea of taking radical Speaker 1 (2:23) responsibility. Speaker 2 (2:25) And I think it's going to clear a lot of things up with what I've been going through and why I've been. taking it so well. So I want to say great morning world, great morning humans. This is Dr. JC Dornick, otherwise known as the dragon. And I want to welcome you to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. And I want to welcome you to the Speaker 1 (2:44) uprising. of the sleepwalking masses. So Speaker 2 (2:47) strangely enough, this whole conversation that we're about to have started with a thought that I had about what I call care and see. So I'm writing my new book. I've actually written the new book. It's going to launch in the latter part of 2027 because we still have Make Sense and the world still needs to read that book. That's Make Sense, how to rewire your brain or how to rewire your mind and transform your life. But I'm writing this new book and one of the big concepts on there is how care... we are very often with where we place our care. So I came up with this idea of currency, and that is referring to the limit amount of care currency. If you looked at care and our attention and our time and our focus as a currency, it's limited and we have a limited amount, a limited allotment of it every day. So this includes things like our time, energy, focus, and our attention, which everybody's vying for these days. I think a lot of you probably agree with that. So it occurred to me that we seem to be spending an abnormal amount of our currency on things that might happen in the future and not nearly enough of it on what is actually happening. So think that through. Think that through for a second. In our brain, the voice is saying things like, well, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if I lose my job? What if the relationship fails? What if the treatment doesn't work? That one pops up in me. What if my cancer spreads and things get worse? So I started wondering whether living so much of our lives inside an uncertain and unpredictable future is actually creating a rift and a challenge with our ability to live responsibly in the present. So there's an idea I want you to just kind of contemplate right now. Are we spending so much time kind of living our lives in this uncertain future? We all know that that's kind of silly, but we kind of get confused and caught up when we're setting goals and we're creating direction and stuff. And you'll see, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but we spend so much time living in that future and not enough time in our present right now. And this is creating a rift and it's making a lot more challenging. to take responsibility for ourselves right now. And no one's excluded from this. Me as well. So here's the thing. You can't take responsibility for something that hasn't happened yet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. You can worry about it. Yes, you are correct. You can worry about it. You can fear it. You can even rehearse it in your brain. You can catastrophize things in the future. What I'm saying is that you can't take responsibility. for things in the future because it is not here yet. So that's a big distinction today is we're looking at the idea of taking radical responsibility on things that are, not things that might or things that happened in the past. We can't take responsibility. We can take ownership for something that happened in the past, but where does that responsibility take place? Now. So meanwhile, While we're living in the future all the time, the present moment is always standing here. It always is. And it's asking you this question. Hey, dragon, what about me? And we have this really, really good ability to ignore it, to ignore the Speaker 1 (6:18) now, Speaker 2 (6:19) because it's always there. It's always there. And we think that we have unlimited time as well. So it became very, very real for me when the whole cancer thing happened. You know, I remember the moment that I heard the diagnosis, because a big part of the interface response system is not running from our thoughts and feelings. It's acknowledging them. but not necessarily believing that they are the only option that we have, right? So I remember when I first heard my diagnosis, my brain instinctively raced into the future to predict the worst possible scenario. The thoughts in my head was, you know, and it was a defense mechanism, by the way, but I just remember predicting my rapid death. You know, I just remember all of a sudden thinking, and by the way, for those of you that have never experienced something like cancer, you have your own versions of this in your life. It could be associated with bills or something happening with your work or one little thing that triggers you in a relationship. We have this tendency of our knee jerk, you know, reflective response is to just think of the worst. You know, I was thinking about my rapid death and all the people that would be crushed by it. That was the automatic thing, you know. And let's not forget about all the suffering that I was going to go through. This is what was running through my brain. And I kind of remember thinking to myself that all of those thoughts and feelings were offerings. They were opportunities. And that was an interesting moment because there lies step one and step two of the interface response system, where I kind of naturally became curious. And of course I said, hmm, which stands for I haven't made up my mind yet. which is associated with curiosity. When I say, hmm, and I hear about all these predictions of these disastrous future, when I got my diagnosis, I also, for some reason, because I do this work all the time, said, well, what else is there? What else might be true? And I remember thinking, if I choose to live my cancer journey primarily in the future, this is an interesting thought. And think about your version of cancer. You know, what will the next scan show? I could think. What if the treatment doesn't work? What if it spreads? That's a big one. But other things spread other than cancer, don't they? What will happen six months from now? What about if I go into remission and it comes back? That's what it would be like to experience cancer from the future. There is no shortage, my friends, you know, of frightening futures available to all of us if I want to spend my currency there. If I decide to spend my currency, my energy, my focus, my attention in the future only, and forget about that, hey, what about me, present moment? There's no shortage of frightening futures available to us. So here's the distinction, or one of them. None of those things are happening right now. It's important to be able to acknowledge that. Now, you might be projecting an optimistic future. That's not happening now either. So that's how sometimes we can get foolish. Now, I'm not saying, you'll see, I'm not saying to not project a future and set goals. What I'm saying is, to acknowledge that a lot of the things that we're thinking are going to happen or projecting are going to happen or predicting are not happening right now. You got