Jordan B. Peterson

an ideal, let's say, this in concordance with the will of your client, right?

It's a voluntary ascent.

Here is the ideal towards which you will organize your behavior in the next week, whatever it might be.

Clean up your room.

The person comes back and says,

Well, I had one client came back and he hadn't cleaned up his room for like 18 years and lived in his mother's house in this high school bedroom.

He just had a child and felt he should get his life together.

And so one of our plans was to see if he could clean up his room.

And he dragged the damn vacuum cleaner into the room, but then it was an upright, but then left it in the doorway

at a 45 degree angle and and then he just walked over it the whole week which was so symbolically perfect and he came back and said that and you know one one response to that would be what the hell's wrong with you so damn useless you can't even vacuum your rug it's like you're 30 years old get it get at it but another approach and this was the approach I took was well

You bit off more than you could chew.

And there was a reason you hadn't cleaned up your room for 12 years.

It's not trivial.

And then when you actually decided to encounter the monster, let's say, and put your life in order, it was too much for you.

You got stopped at the threshold.

So let's shrink the task.

And so one of the things you do if you're a benevolent father, let's say, is you put a requirement, an ethical requirement on your son, and you say, can you strive forward to this point?

And if the answer is, I attempted dutifully but failed, the proper response on the part of the father is to lower the target or to bring it closer.

And you bring it closer, that the rule in some real sense is you bring it close enough so that the person has to improve to hit the target, but that there's a reasonable probability that they'll be able to do it.

And that's judicious relationship, right?