The Secret to Building a Resilient Mindset with Mark Black
Episode 151
Are you feeling the weight of the world sitting squarely on your shoulders? Whether it's the unceasing pressure of balancing personal health challenges with professional ambitions, the emotional toll of family dynamics in times of crisis, or the sheer exhaustion from the never-ending pursuit of your goals, we've all been there, and you're not alone.
In this riveting episode, we meet resilience expert Mark Black to tackle these issues head-on.
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to ...
Put your aspirations into action.
Maintain progress despite interruptions from life.
Navigate chaos using the resilience roadmap.
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About the guest
Mark Black the only man in history to have run a marathon with someone else’s heart and lungs. A resilience expert, speaker, coach, and author, Mark helps people “Break Through” their limitations and transform adversity into their competitive advantage.
Born with a life-threatening heart defect, Mark survived two dangerous open-heart surgeries before the age of one. He battled his condition and its limitations until 2002 when he was fortunate to receive a heart and double-lung transplant. Three years later, he ran his first full marathon. Then he did it, three more times. He is also won more than a dozen medals including multiple golds, at the Canadian Transplant Games.
Mark is a Certified Speaking Professional. He has inspired more than 200,000 people in more than 750 presentations and has worked with global brands including ExxonMobil and Mercedes Benz, as well as many national and regional associations.
Connect with Mark Black:
Website
LinkedIn
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Facebook
About the host:
Danielle Cobo is an international female speaker for organizations, associations, and the public sector. She works with audiences to harness the grit and resilience to lead through change.
With over 15 years of corporate experience in the medical sales industry, she knows how to build high-performing teams that increase sales, productivity, and employee retention. Her expertise includes corporate resilience and burnout prevention.
Danielle is the author of “Unstoppable Grit: Breakthrough the 7 Roadblocks Standing Between You and Achieving Your Goals” and hosts the globally top-rated podcast "Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo.”
As a former Fortune 500 Senior Sales Manager, she led her team through downsizing, restructuring, and acquisitions to become the #1 sales team in the nation. As a result, she was awarded Region Manager of the Year. Her resiliency motivated her to earn four consecutive national Sales Excellence Awards in a male-dominated industry.
While her husband, a Blackhawk pilot in the Army, deployed to Iraq for a year, Danielle learned to balance a demanding job while caring for their energetic 1.5-year-old twin boys, who possess more energy than a squirrel after a triple espresso.
Danielle’s resilience led her to start her own business, helping others develop the grit, resilience, and courage to thrive in life and business.
Her tenacious attitude stems from being raised by an ambitious mother and recovering from being taken from her father and cast out at 17 years of age.
She is a two-time 60-mile walker and a monster truck driver in Louboutin’s.
Danielle has a bachelor’s in communication with a minor in psychology from the California State University of Fullerton, Certification in Inclusive and Ethical Leadership from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business, and accreditation in Human Behavior from Personality Insights. Inc., and Leadership from Boston Breakthrough Academy.
She is a member of the National Speakers Association, the Central Florida National Speakers Association Chapter, Innovation Women, and a former member of Working Women of Tampa Bay. Danielle serves on the Military Advisory, Workforce Development, and Women of Influence Committees of the Tampa Chamber of Commerce. She is also a contributing writer for Women's Quarterly Magazine.
Her experience includes serving as a Training Pillar on the Military Spouse Economic Empowerment Zone Committee and Career Transition Advisor for Dallas Professional Women.
Through Danielle's captivating storytelling, content-rich and motivational style, she empowers individuals and organizations to cultivate unwavering resilience, igniting a transformative path towards increased sales, productivity, employee retention, and collaboration.
About the show:
The Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo explores the journeys of people who have overcome adversity and harnessed the grit and resilience to thrive in all areas of their lives, Guests share how they overcame difficult times - the strategies, mindset shifts, lessons they learned along the way, and actions that propelled them forward. From navigating career setbacks to overcoming personal obstacles, each episode is a testament to grit and resilience.
You'll learn how to develop the grit and resilience to lead yourself and others through change.
Join host Danielle Cobo, keynote speaker and author of "Unstoppable Grit: Break Through the 7 Roadblocks Standing Between You and Your Goals." A new episode is released every Wednesday at 4:00 AM EST.
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Welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Grit podcast with Danielle Kobo. Today's guest is a resilience expert focused on helping people break through their limitations and transform adversity into their competitive advantage. Born with a heart defect and underwent two major open heart surgeries before the age of one.
While also receiving a heart and double lung transplant in 2002, our guest is the only person to run a marathon with a transplanted heart and lungs, and since then has completed a total of four marathons. Today's guest we're going to welcome is the author of the resilience roadmap, seven guideposts for charting your course in a chaotic world.
Welcome Mark Black.
Thank you, Danielle. Good to be here.
Well, I'm excited to have you on as a guest, like I shared before we kind of jumped on and hit record. I got an opportunity to check out your website, read your story, and just was absolutely inspired by your journey and the challenges that you have come.
Right from such a young age, just as you're entering into this world, your family finds out that you have a heart defect. Kind of tell us a little bit about your journey and what transpired when, I know you may not have found exactly what happened right then and there at one, but kind of talk, walk us through your life journey since then.
Challenges Early On as a Child
Sure. Yeah. So, all through my mom's pregnancy, everything actually looked really good. Now this is, of course, I'm 45. So the technology that existed then was very different than it is today. but they expected a very normal child. And then I was born and turned blue. So it was very much like, On the spot.
Oh, no, something's terribly wrong. And I was medevaced to the children's hospital three hours away. It was an urgent situation. They couldn't do the surgery there. What ultimately was the problem was a valve in the heart that was not opening the way it was supposed to. So they had to do open heart surgery one day old.
I was obviously very fortunate that that surgery was a success, but doctors warned my parents you've got a long uphill battle ahead of you with this child, and just kind of be prepared. And when I think about that now, obviously, yeah, I have no memory of that, but I'm a parent of three. my wife, I say Your parent, it kind of just blows, like, 'cause you don't appreciate as a kid growing up, this was just my reality, right?
This was my normal, it didn't register until. Again, we had kids and I went, Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine. They were 24 years old. They'd been married for 11 months. and all of a sudden, they're dealing with life and death situation. It's a lot. and so a huge testament to them that they did so many things right from that day onward that are, a main reason why I'm still alive, let alone being able to do what I do today.
Building Resiliency Through a Series of Surgeries
So, fast forward, there was another surgery at a year old congenital heart disease for my entire life, which meant some limitations around how physically active I could be and that sort of thing. And besides that, I lived a pretty normal childhood. I was on medications and things, but otherwise pretty normal.
And then when I was 22, things started to take a turn for the worse. I was at university doing an undergrad, doing my second undergrad, actually, I was going to be a teacher. And every year, my health just deteriorated really quickly to the point that I couldn't, I'd get short of breath climbing up a flight of stairs.
I was losing weight, getting short of breath all the time. Long story short, I went in to see my doctor and he said, we're going to put you in the hospital now and we're going to run some tests and we'll decide what the next plan of action is. It must have been scary. Yeah, it was crazy scary because, you know, I was 20, 23 years old, 22 years old.
Typical college student, living a life where I'm not particularly paying attention to my health. I'm focused on school and friends and work and all the college students Right? Within the college life, not necessarily spending your evenings in the hospital.
No. Right. Exactly.
Right? and planning your future, right? Like, oh, here's what my plan is going to be. And in, you know, a period of a very short time, that all kind of disappears and priorities shift dramatically. And the doctors went into the hospital, which ultimately ended up being for about a month.
As they stabilized me, informed me that the reason I'm short of breath is because I'm in right and left sided heart failure. I've got this major critical health issue going on that I was relatively oblivious to. Long story short, they said, you need a heart and double lung transplant like yesterday.
You go, okay, we knew as a family that transplant was in my future, but it was always something that was kind of like someday off in the distant future. And then all of a sudden it's there like overnight. And so, we began the transplant process, which was a year long process.
So you're being told that you needed a transplant yesterday, and yet it still took a year to get a transplant and not just.
The nature of my heart condition was such that I needed a heart in both lungs because of the way the heart was being affected. Pulmonary artery pressure was high, which didn't get into all the medicine of it, but essentially it meant to replace just the heart was not going to do the job.
So we needed a heart in both lungs and those organs all have to come from the same donor. it just increases the level of difficulty in finding a match and all of that sort of thing. and a lung transplant is also a much more rare and difficult surgery to do than a heart transplant is, which is more common.
It's been done, the history of it goes back a lot longer. The first lung transplant was only done in like 86. So, comparatively speaking, it's a much newer surgery. There were only a few hospitals in Canada that could even do this, heart transplants. There's a lot of centers that can do them, lung transplants, not so much.
So we were told you have a choice of three centers in the country you can go to. The closest one is Toronto. And you're going to need to live within a one hour drive of that hospital because lungs are really fragile and the window of opportunity between a donor and recipient is very short. wherever you go, you're going to have to live.
Close by, and there was not a hospital within 15 hours of where we lived. So, that ultimately meant dad and I packed our bags. We left my mom and my three younger brothers. I have three brothers, who are, at that time were 14 to 6 and we moved to Toronto and left the rest of them at home and started waiting for a transplant that ultimately took almost a year for a donor to be found.
And I imagine that would have, not only an effect on you, but also an effect on your family as well. Your father's, as you said, your parents did everything they possibly could to give you the best life. And that even meant your dad and your mom living in different cities, you, the older brother leaving the family and how that's going to affect the younger siblings.
That's definitely got to kind of, in a way, tear your family a little bit apart in the sense of physically. Is there, a way it brought you guys together in a different way? Yeah, I think in the long run it did, but you're absolutely right. there's pretty solid data that shows that families, parents of kids who go through transplant, have a much higher divorce rate than other people do.
And that wouldn't be just transplant. I'm sure it's all critical medical situations. It's incredibly stressful for the family, as you say, right? And, mom and dad had been married for, I don't know, 24 or 5 years at that point. So, it never spent more than a week, maybe apart from each other.
And during all All that time, and all of a sudden, they're gonna live apart for months. three boys at home who are teenagers, young adults as well. And they're going through their own stuff and watching their brother in a critical health situation and all of the things that that impacts.
And they ultimately made that decision rather than moving the entire family precisely to try and give my brothers as normal a life as they can have. there's also financial aspect of all of this, which is, we were again, fortunate to be, in Canada and the actual procedure itself and the medical care and the hospital stays and all of that was not an issue, but just paying for rent and places to stay and all of that kind of stuff, which ultimately my dad's relatives took us in, which saved us a huge financial cost, but dad had to take time off work.
Anyway, a lot of stress on the family, for sure. Now I can't relate to the health challenges of having a child go through a transplant. I can relate to the fact that my kids were born, they were NICU babies and had some challenges, but also we're a military family. So we spent a year apart. My husband was in Iraq for a year.
My boys and I were in the U. S. for a year. It's a unique challenge when you're being separated, you learn to live a life separated yet while still trying to maintain the connectivity together, and it's hard. It's hard being separated. It's also hard when you come back together to find your rhythm again and to reconnect.
There's definitely a higher divorce rate in military families as well, just because that saying distance makes a heart grow fonder. I don't necessarily know if that's always the case. Maybe the distance is a couple days. But when it gets to weeks, months and years, it's a much different circumstance.
Absolutely. It's a challenge because you're trying to. normalize a life without that part of your family there. And so, like you said, whether if you're really successful at that, then the reintegration becomes a problem. And if you're not successful at that, then that period apart becomes incredibly challenging.
We were very fortunate. not only were we able to kind of keep things together, I would say today we're a closer family than we've ever been.
Sounds like your parents were incredible people. yeah, it's one of the, perhaps cliche, but you don't appreciate things until you lose them or until you get a new perspective on them.
And in my case, becoming a parent, becoming an adult, as we grow up and we get older, we realize if we were fortunate to have good parents, we realized how fortunate we were. And if we weren't, then maybe we learn the lesson and try and be better parents ourselves.
But, I couldn't have asked for two better people be my parents.
I agree with you. Once I became a parent, I had a whole nother level of respect for my mom, even for the challenges that we had in my upbringing, just the level of respect when it comes to just how hard parenting is, and then it's not easy job.
then add on to that, know, when there's, Strenuous type circumstances that are added onto it and the stress of that, it can be very difficult. So, yeah, I agree. When you become a parent, become an adult, you just have another level of appreciation for the opportunities that were provided for us as a child.
Or if it wasn't a great upbringing, then it's the wanting to do better and wanting to do more, but also just being understanding, so, right. Yeah. The empathy. Yeah. . Now you went from a situation where you were having a hard time even walking. Up the stairs you were getting winded.
And then all of a sudden you have this transplant, you get a new heart, you get two new lungs, and now you're running marathons. How did that transpire? Because I have to be honest here, I've done two three day 60 mile walks. So I walked 60 miles in three days. But I hear marathon, and I'm going, absolutely not.
Running is not my forte, not what I love to do. So walk us through, how did you go from getting transplants to now doing four marathons?
Success Post Transplant
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense, admittedly. I think, so right after the transplant, I had this sort of realization. I mean, I remember literally sitting up in bed in the ICU four or five days post surgery and feeling this strong, rhythmic, steady heartbeat.
and I think what's unique about a lung, heart transplant rather versus all the other organ transplants is that you can physically feel it. Feel it, right? All the other organs are there. And if they're working, they're working and you feel bad, you know, you can feel well or not well, but you can physically feel a heart beating, right?
Like you put your hand on your chest and you can feel it. I could feel this strong, rhythmic, steady heartbeat in my heart. that I was born with be irregularly irregular. In other words, whenever the heck it felt like it basically, and that was my normal. And so all of a sudden this rhythmic heartbeat felt very
And it was sort of this wake up call to going, Oh, wow, body has changed now and you are probably capable of doing things that previously were not possible. I don't really know where it came from, but I had this thought that I wonder if one day maybe I could run a marathon it began from there and it began literally with like a walker going from my hospital bed to the bathroom, walking 20 feet by myself to rehab in the hospital three days a week for three months, where eventually I was able to jog on a treadmill for 30 seconds to six months later, running a 5k and then doing a 10k took two and a half years to go from the hospital bed to a marathon.
It was very much slow, incremental progress over time, but accomplishing that at the time was just about accomplishing a goal and showing myself that I could do what I wanted to do. But in the long run it became this great metaphor for me, both personally and professionally when I speak to clients about how goal achievement works in general, which is kind of like setting this objective, mapping out this plan and then making slow incremental progress for a long time.
Making Slow, Incremental Progress to Achieve a Goal
You may not even feel like you're making progress, towards ultimately achieving a goal.
I love what you say about making a plan and then putting steps in place to achieve that goal. Because a lot of times people will say, I have this goal and I want to do it. But if you don't actually put action into, if you don't actually create a plan and put action in place, a goal is just a goal. And that's where a lot of people are. There is a stat out there that says that about 87 percent of people give up on their New Year's resolutions by the second week of February.
Right, right. And I'm just going, that is unfortunate that we have all of these visions of what we're going to achieve for the new year, and then all of a sudden, we don't accomplish it. and it mainly comes down to the fact that we don't have a plan and we don't actually implement the steps to achieve our goal. 100%, right? I mean if you've ever gone to the gym, if you're a gym goer and you go on January 3rd, 4th, 5th, whenever it reopens. There's nowhere to work, it's just packed. But if you keep going, by mid February, all of a sudden, there's lots of space. To your point, people don't have a plan. for what happens when the plan doesn't work. Sometimes people even take the time to even map out. Okay, here's exactly how this is going to go. And guess what? It never goes exactly the way it's supposed to go.
Getting Back On Track
So what happens when I'm too busy that day, or I don't feel like it, or I feel sick or, or, or, or, or, and how am I going to get back on track and how am I going to rejig that plan so that I can ultimately still get to where I want to go? I'm just, I don't know the willpower or this or that, and ultimately it just comes down to, no, you have to exceed the plan and you also have to have the flexibility to say when the plan doesn't go exactly the way I hoped it would, how can I get back on track again?
Now, you talk about resilience in achieving your goals, but you have this particular roadmap that you walk people through on how to build resilience and achieve their goals. Can you walk us through those steps?
Absolutely. And that's why I love your show, because grit is a huge part of this, right?
Resilience, to me, by the way, is about growing through adversity, challenge and change, as opposed to what many of us would define it as, which is some version of bouncing back. I think that's kind of the metaphor that's often used is like, we're going to bounce back from adversity. And, the problem with that mentality and that framing is that it.
Presupposes that there is a back to go to that. Somehow we're going to return to what was except time has passed in between. So the perception most people have, it's like, okay, I'm going along. Bad things happen. I drop down here. I will recover. I come back and we keep going. but you don't go back because time has passed in between.
So we have to figure out this new way of being. I think COVID is a great motive metaphor for this, right? Anybody who is not willing to acknowledge the fact that the world has fundamentally changed from what it was in 2019 to today is fooling themselves. That's not a bad thing, it just is.
The 7 A’s: Roadmap to Resilience
And so one of the key first steps in the resilience roadmap is acknowledgement. It's saying, okay, I acknowledge the reality of the situation, whatever that is, whether that's post COVID, whether that's I lost my job, whether that's my marriage is broken up, whatever the challenges that I'm dealing with, I just face reality.
And that's maybe super basic, but a lot of us don't do that. We deny the problem is happening. We look the other way. We don't weigh ourselves when we know we're gaining weight, we pretend the problem isn't there because it's easier than dealing with it, right? So we acknowledge the problems there.
Second is, agency. And there are seven steps. They all start with A to help us to remember. The second one is agency, which is our personal ability to deal with the things that we face. So unless and until we are willing to. Believe and accept that we can in fact change our personal situation. We're not going to do anything.
That might be obvious to someone who does that regularly, but to the average person, that's not obvious. We tend to think things are outside of our control. We can't fix this. I'm a victim of circumstance. It's my boss's fault. It's the government. It's this. It's that. And so. What was me? I can't do anything about it.
We're living in economically tumultuous times and there's wars and there's all kinds of things and all kinds of potential reasons/excuses for why you can't do this, that or the other thing. And so if you live with that mentality, then being resilient is going to be really challenging.
You have to decide what can I do something about here? The next step is to say, okay, accept. So there are parts of this situation, whatever your situation is, that you can't fix. Maybe you are in a job that you don't love, but you have to stay there because you got to pay the bills for now. Well, let's accept that that's true because until we do that, we can't move forward.
Let's not try and fix what we can't fix, but we do that so that we have more of our time and energy available to then do what we can, which is the next step, which is adaptation. So how do we say, okay, the reality has changed. I'm willing to accept that I can't control everything, but what can I do, how can I behave differently because I'm in a different situation so that I can get different results because we know repeating the same patterns and expecting things to change is not effective.
So how can I be different? How can I think different? How can I behave different so that I get a different result adaptation? We do that. With a clear goal of where we want to go. So what a lot of folks will do is we get in this challenging situation and we're adapting, but we're just kind of treading water because we're just trying to survive.
We're just putting out fires as they come up so that we can kind of just keep moving one day to the next. And that's okay in a very urgent situation to be in that mode for a short period of time. It's normal. But if we operate that in that way, long term, then we're going to burn out. We're going to get tired.
We're going to get frustrated, all of those things. So we need to know where we're going because I have a fundamental belief, Danielle, which is that if people don't lack motivation, people will say all the time, how do I get more motivated? your problem is the motivation. Your problem is. You don't have a clear enough vision of where you want to go and why you want to get there to drive you forward.
When you know what you want and you want it bad enough and it means enough to you, you can move mountains. We can all do incredible things when we know what we want and we believe that where we're going is worth the effort to get there. And so aspiration becomes clearly important and that's, goal setting and vision setting and, establishing values and knowing why we want to go where we want to go.
And then we talked about the next step, which is action. So, okay, what are we going to do? How am I going to behave differently tomorrow than I did today? And then the last step is assessment, which is, is my plan working? So again, one of the traps that we'll fall into is we'll sit there on New Year's Day and we'll create this aspiration and we'll create this action plan and we'll maybe even start to act on it in the first couple of weeks.
But then we don't stop to say, is this working? Am I sticking with this? Am I still executing the plan? Is my plan taking me closer to where I want to go? or is it not effective and I need adapt and change plans? And then I structured the whole roadmap in a circle because it doesn't end. So, the idea that you're going to start at point A, end at point B, Great, done.
I'm resilient now doesn't work, right? Because there's going to be new problems and new challenges. And that's called life. So we go back to the beginning and we do this cycle over and over again. But if we have these tools, I would say the resilient person is not the person who has all of the answers.
The resilient person is the person who believes they have the capacity to find the answers and the capacity to figure out the solutions. And as long as you believe that. And it almost doesn't matter what the problems are going to be, we'll figure it out.
Navigating Resilience Through the 7 A’s
"The 7 A's" offers a valuable roadmap. Each "A" encapsulates a pivotal step in this transformative journey:
Acknowledgement. Start by acknowledging the reality of the situation, facing challenges with clarity and understanding.
Agency. Recognize your agency, empowering yourself to make proactive choices and regain a sense of control.
Accept. Cultivate acceptance, embracing challenges without succumbing to defeat, and focusing on what you can control.
Adaptation. Embrace adaptability as a cornerstone of resilience, learning from experiences and evolving in response to life's unpredictability.
Aspiration. Fuel your resilience by setting positive aspirations, envisioning a better future that motivates and propels you forward.
Action. Resilience is an active pursuit; take intentional actions, no matter how small, contributing to personal growth and overcoming challenges.
Assessment. Regularly assess your progress through self-reflection, refining strategies to continuously enhance your resilience skills.
This framework offers a comprehensive guide for individuals navigating the complexities of life, fostering strength, fortitude, and a positive outlook on the journey to personal growth and well-being.
The Bounce-Back Mentality
There's so much to unpack in what you had just shared, I don't even know where to begin.
But I love what you said about this mentality. That we are not bouncing back because when setbacks when we were faced with challenges, we don't go back to the same person. We were, we learn, we grow, we evolve into a better person. We have new skill sets, new strengths, new mindset approaches.
So that philosophy of I'm going to bounce back. It's not a reality. It's more or less, I've now faced a challenge, I've learned through this, and now I'm better equipped to face that challenge again when it arises.
So that's one of them that I love that you had said. Another one being That when it comes to goals, one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they set a goal and then they say, okay, here's the steps that I'm going to take to get it.
And if they don't achieve it, then they feel like they're a failure. Or if all of a sudden it's maybe not in alignment with what they want, maybe some shift has happened in life. then all of a sudden they're still working towards it, but they're lacking the motivation because it's not in alignment with what they want at this moment in their life.
So there's value in when it comes to setting goals, there's value in pivots, pivots are good. There is no sense in sticking to a goal if it no longer aligns with your long term vision. Sometimes we have a vision of pursuing a particular goal, but then life changes and we get to pivot it a little bit.
Absolutely. I love that. And I love that a person who talks about grit is talking about this because I am in the space that we both work in, and for listeners who listen to podcasts like this, who are probably goal oriented and driven and trying to achieve all of those things are good.
We can get in the false narrative in our own brain of saying, if I don't continue on this path, then I'm quitting and we don't want to be a quitter. None of us want to be a quitter. So. That creates shame and a lot of other negative things going on. And we might even convince ourselves that we need to pursue this thing to the end, just to make sure that we're not a quitter.
You articulated it perfectly. There's no sense in climbing to the top of a ladder that's leaning against the wrong wall. If it's taking you down a road that is no longer serving you, then shifting somewhere else is a good, smart thing to do. certainly we don't want to quit as in lay down and.
I'm going to give up on life. we definitely don't want to do that, but to say, okay, this is no longer the goal that serves me. It doesn't make sense to me anymore. It makes complete sense to say, I'm going to try something else. For example, I've run four marathons. I had a goal to run five before I was 30.
I ran four before I was 29, right on track. And then we had our second child. I remember going for a long run. So we would do her long distance or mirror our endurance runs on Sunday mornings. I'm going to be gone for 3-4 hours. I trained with a group of people. I remember going out for this run, March or something, my wife is holding our six month old, and there's a three month old, our daughter, running around the house.
And I'm waving to my wife going, I'm going to go run for four hours. See you later, dear. And, oh, by the way, I'm going to be useless the rest of the day because by the time I get back from this run, I'll be exhausted. I'm curious to see what her face looked like on this one. Exactly. And as I'm leaving, she didn't stick to her credit.
Like, she's a superhero. and she didn't say anything, but whether it was a look on her face I kind of went, this isn't fair. This is not okay. You're doing this because you have this drive to go run five marathons. Meanwhile, she's doing all the hard work and you're leaving her by herself.
That was the day I realized, okay, you're done long distance running. This doesn't make any sense right now. there may be a period when you're 45 or 50 and kids are older and it makes sense again, but right now this is not the season of life to be doing this anymore. so I haven't run the fifth one yet and I may never, we'll see, but our youngest is seven right now and we're still in that season of Taxi driving kids to activities and it's not practical.
That I understand. I've got six year old twin boys, so my life revolves around driving around to my two little, dictators of what they tell me what to do. I feel like I do whatever they tell me to do. but in all good sense, I love being able to take my kids to places, so I enjoy it.
But I love what you said about seasons in life, because a lot of times we have these goals and these ambitions, and we say, I want to achieve a particular milestone or achievement by a particular time in our life. Life happens. There's different seasons in our lives. So a lot of times I remember I was having a conversation with one person and they said, I thought I would be further along in my career than I am now.
Managing Major Career Shifts
And I said, let's unpack that a little bit because what does further along mean? First off, I knew this person that had a wildly successful career but also they had made some major shifts. They had completely shifted industries, but with good intentions and good purpose. also there were some major life events that had happened too.
So sometimes what we think we want at one particular moment may not be where we want it in that particular season or phase of life that we're in. So it's not so much of a, it hasn't happened yet. It may happen in the future. It may just not be the right time because right now I have different priorities.
Where my season of life is. And that's okay. I'm okay not climbing the corporate ladder and being on, for me, the company that I was working with, if I were to climb even more in the corporate ladder, I would have never been home. I was already on the road all the time. I would have never been home. now it's getting to spend more time with my kids.
Understanding and Embracing the Seasons of Life
I just talked briefly about Seasons of Life. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I can say that will kind of refresh your memory to kick it off.
Talking about Seasons of Life and sometimes it's about how we were talking about climbing the corporate ladder at different phases in life.
We need to give ourselves permission to be a different version of ourselves today than we were yesterday because that's what should happen.
One of the things I talked about in the corporate presentations I do for folks is you are who you are not in spite of but because of. The challenges that you've faced in your life, when we ask people to think about what's in a moment in your life that you're proud of.
What's something that you look back and reflect on and say, this is something that shaped who I am. It's always the challenges, the adversity, the difficult things that we've been through. We are shaped by those things and those things will then shift our priorities, our goals, what matters to us, our values even sometimes change.
It's unrealistic to expect the 40 year old version of you to be in total alignment with the 30 year old version of you. In fact, I would say if you are, then that's probably a problem. Because it means you're not growing very much, So this idea that, we're going to set this career path when we're also at an age, I work a lot with young people as well.
It baffles me. It's all so backwards when I look at it now to think, okay, we're going to talk to these like teenage kids, young adults and say, okay, you need to pick your career now at 17, 18. Because then you've got to go to college and you get the right degree so that you're qualified to do this thing.
And then you're going to go do this thing for 40 years. Like maybe that worked in 1950, but it doesn't work in a world that changes as quickly as ours does. we have to kind of reshape. Our perception of how that all works because I think many of us are operating with a mental operating system that our grandparents had because that's what was handed down to us, but we live in a completely different reality.
I just had this reflection not too long ago. It's interesting. You talk about colleges and choosing our career path because the other day I don't know how I got in the conversation, probably my kids were asking me about school. And I said, I had changed my major five times when I was in college. It's why it took me five years to graduate.
I ended up graduating with a dual major. I remember I was in journalism and then I was in marketing and advertising. Then I was psychology. I think business was one of them. And then I remember. Looking back recently saying, wow, it's interesting that every major that I chose, I end up doing now.
So when I say that I wanted to be a journalism major, I just wrote a book. I write content every single day. I wanted to be in a lot of what I do now, helping people develop their professional brand. And I do a lot of marketing in my own business, the same with advertising, helping a lot of businesses build their business.
The other one was, psychology, which if, you know, in our line of work, when I was in a leadership role, most of the role was actually psychology. And when you're a speaker and you're coaching and you're consulting, a lot of it is based on the foundations of what you learn in psychology.
So it's interesting when I look back at my college experience and yes, you're told to pick one major and go with it. I'm actually glad that I was, I wouldn't say confused because I always knew I wanted to be in medical sales and have some sort of element with something else. But I'm glad I explored different majors because each of those have contributed to where I am today.
I agree. a hundred percent. I got a degree in English Literature and Sociology, so I write like you, write every day, Sociology certainly informed a lot of what I do as well today, and then I was doing a degree in education, I was going to be a teacher, and I joke all the time that I don't teach in a classroom, but I teach, that's basically what I do, that's kind of the approach that I take to all of the work that I do, so in some ways I almost think you can't go Wrong when it comes to pursuing something, as long as you're passionate about it and you have some skill there, you're either going to succeed or you're going to learn.
In either way, that's a good thing.
I absolutely agree with you. That whole, you're either going to fail, I don't believe that we actually fail. We learn, we grow, we get better. We develop new skill sets, we learn different approaches to different challenges, everything that we go through, the challenges of trials or tribulations, all shape us into the person that we are today.
And it's a better version today than we were to tomorrow, and it's helping us prepare for the future. Agreed. And don't you think, The failures actually do more for us in that regard than successes do. I mean, success is fun. Don't get me wrong. We all like to win, but I tend to learn a lot less from the times when everything goes right and I win versus the times when I screw up, as long as I learn from the screw up and don't just ignore it or get angry about it, but actually analyze, okay, what went wrong there? How can I do better next time? Those are growth opportunities in a way that winning success isn't at all. A thousand percent. Because I think back to the two primary programs that people reach out to me for, one of them is leading teams through change and the other one is burnout prevention.
My burnout prevention starts with this moment in my life where I have reached complete burnout after the birth of my twin boys and a category five hurricane coming my way and, Nick you all of this kind of came in together the challenges that I face and what I learned through those challenges and then the other one that a lot of people will reach out to me for is the one on leadership and it's leading through change.
I don't always remember the successes that I had when I was a manager. I do remember some, but more or less the principles that I teach is, Hey, here's the situation of what happened. Here's how I approached it. Here's what I would have done differently. Maybe here's what I would have done the same, but here's what I would have done differently to make it an even better outcome. I believe wholeheartedly that I learn more from my failures because they hurt. No one wants to necessarily fail or no one wants to, to experience a time where we're not achieving the particular goal that we want in the moment in time that we want, but we learn from it. That's the stickiness that we'll always remember.
When we're forced to take action, it's very few of the people who are really good at pushing themselves forward when they don't have to, So when we're succeeding, we're comfortable and things are going smoothly.
The natural instinct is just trying to keep things going the way they're going, because things are working right now. I don't want to fix what isn't broken, when do we get innovative? When do we try new things? it's when we're like, this isn't working. I need a new solution.
I got to try some new stuff. case in point. When COVID hit, my business was 95 percent keynote speaking. In other words, I make my living speaking in front of large groups of people. Guess what isn't going to be happening for the foreseeable future? Like, holy smokes, what am I going to do?
In retrospect, it was a beautiful opportunity to practice every principle that I teach in this book and battle test it. And so now I know, oh, that doesn't just work in my health context. It works. All over the place, because I was able to walk through those steps and go, okay, what, can I control? What can I not control?
How do I adapt to this new reality? Virtual presentations, this is what that looks like. That's going to be really ugly at first. And like most of us, it was a laptop camera halfway up my nose and bad audio and all of the rest of it. and now I'm doing this from my home studio.
This did not exist in 2019 this is the result of seven different iterations of microphones and cameras and setups to make this work. But what was fascinating, Danielle, is I went from the worst year ever in my business in 2020 to 2021, the most successful year I had ever had in my business.
I spoke all over the world and I never left the basement of our house. that was not even on the radar screen of possibilities previous to that. Major challenge called COVID 19. I never would have chosen it, and certainly there were lots of negatives around it, it was a great catalyst for innovation and growth and learning that ultimately has left me a better version of myself and a business, a better version of itself than it was.
Before coming from a background in sales, those challenges that we experience similar to that is where we get creative and innovative, but our ideas, because when in sales, when you've got a quota to hit, you got to figure out a way to make it work. And I remember when I was working for an organization, we experienced challenges where our products were on backorder.
But we still had a quota to hit. We had products that were having faulty pump issues. It had a pump for the product and we weren't able to ship it all sorts of challenges, We still had to hit a quota. So we had to get really creative. I know in the speaking world, one of the blessings that we have as speakers who spend the majority of our time on the road is.
Now companies are a little bit more open to having virtual presentations, which means we still get to create that positive impact. We still get to show up and speak and transform people's lives. And we also get to sleep in our own bed, which is really nice. So there's always beauty that comes sometimes out of the chaos.
If we look at it in a different light and a different perspective. We embrace some of the challenges and again, focus on what we can control and what pivots can we make?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you had shared so much valuable advice on how we could build resilience. And if there's anybody that understands resilience and embodies it, that's absolutely you.
Not only in your personal and professional journey as well. What is one thing you want to leave listeners with today when they're kind of thinking about? Okay. I'm hitting a challenge right now and I need this resilience to help get that motivation back on track.
Moving Away from Just Surviving
If I had to summarize it, what can I learn here?
How can I use this to not just survive, but to be a better version of me in a week, a month, a year? Am I willing? be uncomfortable, maybe even go through some pain in the short term, because I have a belief that it's going to be worth the journey in the long term. I use parenting often for folks as a good metaphor for this, because it's a fairly universal experience for most of us.
There's a lot. about parenting that is really challenging, that in and of themselves, we would probably not choose to do, but for the fact that it's part of this grander picture that we believe is fundamentally valuable and worthwhile. Because of that, where do you get the fire and the drive to get up every day and keep doing it?
It's called your love for that child, if you're not a parent, then you have a relationship in your life that's like that. There's something in your life that means enough to you that you will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, because it matters that much. that's grit,
That's resilience. It's figuring out a way. Because at a fundamental level, it's meaningful to you. And so if you're struggling, then find out what that meaning is. Attach what you're going through to something that means something to you at a deep level. And once you're able to do that, then in the words of Marie Forleo, one of my favorite quotes of hers is, everything is figureoutable.
You find a way because you have to, You've survived 100 percent of the hardest days you have ever lived. There is no reason to believe you will not continue to do that. You just have to have the belief that it's possible.
Questions to ponder:
What goal do you have?
What are you striving for?
How does that align with your vision?
What's in your control? What can you control?
What pivots can you make?
