On Becoming Resilient – Ep. 189

In this episode of the Next Level Human Podcast, Dr. Jade talks about the concept of “becoming resilient”. Life throws at us an enormous amount of difficult situations and tough decisions where we have to take action, deal with them, and make our best to get over them. However, it can be very challenging to simply “move on” and we tend to get stuck on this victim mentality, overthinking and suffering for long periods.

Suffering from old traumas and past situations every day can lead to certain behaviors based on anxiety, insecurity, depression, and fear. Not only that, other issues include blaming other people, seeing life as unfair, losing joy in life, and becoming extremely sensitive to normal things – which is the exact opposite of creating a sense of resilience. Tune in to learn more about this topic!

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Connect with Dr. Jade Teta

Website: www.jadeteta.com

Instagram: @jadeteta

TRANSCRIPTION:

Podcast Intro: [00:14] welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast. As a human, you have a job to do. In fact, you have four jobs; to earn and manage money, to attain and maintain health and fitness, to build and sustain personal relationships, to find meaning and make a difference. None of these jobs are taught in school and that is what this podcast is designed to do. To educate us all on living our most fulfilled lives through the mastery of these four jobs. I'm your host, Dr. Jade Teta and I believe we are here living this life for three reasons and three reasons only; to learn, to teach and to love. In this podcast, I will be learning, teaching, and loving right along with you. I'm grateful to have your company; here is to our next level.

Jade  1:18 

And let's get back to the show. All right, what's going on everybody. Welcome to today's show. Today we're gonna do sort of a follow on podcast from the last episode, which was on purpose and pain. And I got a lot of feedback from all of you on that last episode. It is one of these things that all of us humans struggle with something that is always in the back of our mind, and something that I think a lot of people are hungry for. But it's not talked about a lot, which is why this podcast is making it. It's sort of one of its major goals to begin talking about how to handle suffering, and along with suffering, and pain, and turning that into purpose is the idea of resolve and resilience and grit and courage in the face of difficulty. And so this particular talk is a version of the talk, I gave it a forum along with the talk on pain and purpose that you heard last in last week's episode. So these two episodes sort of go hand in hand. So I believe last week was 187. This week is episode 188. So you're gonna want to make sure you look at perhaps that one first if you want 187 was two weeks ago, actually. And then this one is going to be 189. So this is a follow on from Two episodes ago. So 187 episode and 189 sort of go together. If you haven't listened to 187, you may want to listen to that, as well. It doesn't matter which one comes first, but they are designed to kind of go to get so let's get into this topic of resilience. The first thing I want to sort of just draw your attention to some of the things that I want to cover and make you aware of and first of all, the differences between physiological and psychological resilience because obviously in this podcast, we talk an awful lot about metabolism. You know, that's one of my areas of expertise. And certainly we could speak about resilience from the metabolic standpoint, the physiological standpoint. We can also talk about resilience from the psychological standpoint. And today, we're really going to be focusing on psychological resilience and how it differs from physiological resilience. And also, there's a lot of talk about grit, if you're familiar with Angela Duckworth and her very popular TED Talk. Oftentimes, resilience and grit sort of are seen as the same. And they're also seen as sort of synonyms with courage as well. And in this talk, I'm going to try to define these a little bit differently to show you that they're not exactly the same thing. We're going to talk about the elements that may contribute to psychological resilience, and, of course, the role of purpose in overcoming adversity, which is why Episode 187, along with this episode, 189 might be important for you. And then what I want to do at the end of this is I want to give you a simple model of how you can begin to program resilience in yourself are some tools you can use. Now, let's start with the metabolism idea of resilience. This is something that you probably heard before, if you're a longtime listener of this podcast. And I oftentimes talk about this as the model of metabolism is usually defined in two different ways, either as a chemistry set, or a calculator. And it also is defined as either a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism. And one of the things that I have been pushing for a very long time is that we need a different model for metabolism, it's probably best described as a stress barometer and thermostat. And the reason why is it's adaptive, and reactive. Now, that right there that term adaptive, and reactive tells you something about resilience. Because if you're going to be resilient, whether physiologically, or psychologically, you're going to need to adapt, you're going to need to react, you're going to need to be able to respond in an appropriate way. And so when we talk about the metabolism responding physiologically to stress, we really oftentimes can see this from the perspective of the sensing and responding. Nature of metabolism, it senses stress, and it responds to stress. And the ability for to sense stress is a really important aspect of this. And so the way it typically works is the metabolism will pick up signals from the outside world, these are going to be things like temperature, what season it is, you know, food availability, type of food, psychological stress, and this is where this particular episode is going to really come in handy. Because obviously, what we think about the world determines how we might respond to the world. In fact, trauma, especially at an young age, can set up our metabolic machinery in a way to make us more or less responsive to future stress. In other words, what I'm saying is the way we think about the world is determined by some of the adverse events we've had in life, and that that those adverse events and that way of seeing the world whether we see the world as safe or unsafe, whether we see the world as loving or dangerous, can then determine how we internalize all future stresses. And so these things are completely linked. So metabolism physiologically, is certainly linked to metabolism psychologically. And of course, we're going to focus on the psychological aspect today. Now, of course, not only are we responding to outside of minutes in metabolism, but we're also responding to inside the body events, how the mitochondria are respire, meaning how many reactive oxygen species they're creating, how much ATP we're able to generate versus ADP. For those who aren't familiar with the terms I'm using right now. I'll just briefly explain this. In each cell, there's these little energy factories called mitochondria. And when mitochondria do their work to create energy, they can burn that energy very cleanly, and produce a lot of good quality energy or they can burn that energy very dirty. Think of this like a coal plant, versus, you know, a hydroelectric power plant using sort of water. The coal plant is going to be dirty. It has a lot of sort of carbon output smoke, so to speak, that it creates as it's doing its job. Now, when a mitochondria spews out this coal smoke, we call that reactive oxygen species, these things can do damage around the body. And so our antioxidant defenses have to work against that and certainly also the ability to produce more ATP P which is essentially the energy, the electricity that the cell creates the mitochondria create versus lack of electricity, which would be ADP. In other words, the mitochondria inside the body when they're making when it's making its energy are also sending signals that the metabolism in the brain are picking up. And this is going to determine some of its response or its needs. And so we also have toxins, circadian dysregulation, infection, inflammation, injury, all these things that metabolism is responding to, to get itself back to homeostasis. Now, the thing that I'm really trying to draw your attention to here is that there are ways in which we can understand how the metabolism is responding physiologically, how much stress it is under physiologically, I oftentimes talk about this as this acronym you all know me for SHMEC, sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings. When SHMEC sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings are out of check, it's an indication that the metabolism is physiologically under stress, and not being able to be very resilient physiologically, it's not able to bounce back. If it was then sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings, exercise performance, exercise, recovery, all these things would be more balanced. And so the thing that I'm pointing out here for everyone is that if you look at this from a physiological perspective, and to see how resilient the metabolism is, from a physiological perspective, we can look at these biofeedback sensations of sleep, hunger, mood, energy cravings are what I call SHMEC which many of you who listen to this podcast know that SHMEC, sleep, hunger, mood, energy and quit cravings, is also a catch all phrase for all biofeedback sensations in the body. So this would include exercise performance, and exercise, recovery and libido and erections and digestive dysfunction, and joint pain and headaches and signs and symptoms, and you know, all of these sorts of things. And so we want to understand and many of you do understand through your own study and reading, that the metabolism is sending signals all the time, and you've probably learned to speak some of its language. So you know that when you're hungry, or craving or having unpredictable energy, and disrupted sleep, that you might be under too much stress, and you need to do something to balance that out. But what about psychological stress? How do you know if your body is under psychological stress? How do you know if the psychological stress that we are all are, you know, sort of being confronted with in our lives, is keeping you from adapting and reacting and keeping you from being less resilient?

Jade  17:47 

And also how to you know that the stories that you're telling yourself about life, your belief about life, whether it's safe or dangerous, or whether people are mean, or good past traumas, whether you've been abused in some way emotionally, physically betrayed in some way? How do you know that these old traumas haven't created some psychological rigidity and keep on they're keeping you from having resilience? Well, just like their sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings, when it comes to physiological responses and understanding whether you are physiological, physiologically resilient, I'm going to suggest that there is also a way to understand whether you are psychologically resilient or psychologically rigid. And I'm going to give you another acronym. So we have the acronym SHMEC, for metabolic flexibility or resilience. But what about psychological flexibility or resilience? And here is the acronym I want to give you. The acronym is afraid, afraid, which stands for and we're going to go backwards here because I do believe that when we talk about this particular acronym, you want to think about the afraid acronym as a hierarchy. You know, so with the last letter in this acronym, D being depression and being the deepest, most entrenched form of an emotional rigidity. So the D here stands for depression, which in my way of thinking about depression is the inability to find hope. The I in the afraid acronym working backwards is insecurity, which is the inability to believe in self the A is anxiety, inability to make a choice. The R is resistance, inability to act, the F frustration, inability to process what has happened in your life, and the first A anger which is an inability to really move on. And when you think about this afraid acronym, depression, insecurity, anxiety, resistance, frustration and anger working from backwards on that or anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, depression, working the acronym forward to backward. The important thing to understand here is that just like SHMEC, sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings, afraid anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression are a sign or a warning signal. Just like the check pressure gauge in your car for your tires, when you are afraid, feeling anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression and more importantly, living in these emotional states being stuck in these emotional states. It tells you that you have some degree of psychological rigidity, and are not able to be psychologically resilient in the way you might want. Now, right away, this might be challenging some of you what I would ask is simply wait before you react, keep an open mind to try to understand what we are saying here. And I'm going to say it one more time, because this can be complex. What we are saying here is that there is a degree of physiological resilience or rigidity, the way we react physically, metabolically, the biochemistry of our body, and we talk about that as SHMEC, sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings and all other biofeedback signals, when these things are out of check, it is a good indication that you are physically not able to be resilient. Afraid is a new acronym we're presenting today that you've probably never heard me talk about and this afraid acronym, anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression is the psychological equivalent to SHMEC. When you are stuck in afraid any of these emotions, anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, depression, just as SHMEC is an indication that you are not metabolically resilient. This tells you when you are afraid, stuck in any of these emotions, that you may not be able to psychologically be resilient. And so this is a new way to understand some of these emotions. Now, one of the things that I want to talk about with emotions is the following because a lot of people might say, well, Jade, aren't we supposed to feel these emotions? Like isn't anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity and depression? Isn't this useful and necessary? Shouldn't we be in emotional integrity? Shouldn't we feel these things? And the answer to that is, absolutely. However, emotions are meant to be felt not lived. And what I mean by that is that emotions are supposed to be felt, be examined, be used as guideposts to learn, just like we talked about in episode 187, that when you have any emotional reactivity, this is sort of like a bleeding wound, and you have to attend to it. But if you are stuck in an emotion, what this means is that you're not tending to this bleeding wound, you're actually not doing what you need to do to take care of this, and you're having some degree of psychological rigidity. Now, this is a hypothesis. It's one of the things one of the reasons why I am going back and getting my PhD in transpersonal psychology because I want to study this particular hypothesis and see how much water it holds to see if it's actually a viable hypothesis. I certainly have seen this clinical but right now, it's a clinical model, not necessarily an evidence based model, but I'm presenting this hypothesis to you hoping it is useful for you because I do know that it is useful clinically, how much it translates into an actual viable evidence based model remains to be seen, but it hopefully you can see the utility of going is my SHMEC in check, yes or no, that tells me a bit about my physical metabolic resilience, and am I stuck in afraid or not?

Jade  24:30 

And that tells me a little bit about my psychological flexibility and resilience. And once again, afraid is anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression. And you want to look at this acronym as starting from least entrenched most a able to move you out of this stuckness to deepest and trench and least ability to get you out of this stuckness. In other words, anger is a far more useful emotion to move you out of dysfunction and get you into a resilient state than is depression. Depression is very difficult as a very low energy signature. In a sense, we all know what this is like when we feel depressed, it's difficult to find hope to move forward. However, when we feel anger, anger is all oftentimes the catalyst to motivation, and drive and focus. And it's pretty easy to move from anger into taking action to do something beneficial. It's more difficult to move from depression to action. And that's why this afraid acronym goes from most sort of energetic in anger, to least energetic with depression. So hopefully that's making sense. And it's important and I'm harping on this because as we go through today's episode, it's going to be important that you understand what we're talking about here. I'm sorry to break into the show, but I wanted to take a second to cover one of our sponsors and tell you all about Paleo Valley at paleo valley.com These are the grass fed sticks that I tell you all so much about that all of my friends know I have on hand constantly, they are in my car, they are at my house. I keep them at my sister's home in my parents house. I have these things everywhere because they are the simplest, most convenient, Whole Foods protein supplement, you can get almost like carrying around pure protein, low carb protein in your pocket. They also these paleo Valley beef sticks are the only the only 100% grass fed and grass finished beef sticks on the market. They use organic spices they are naturally fermented. Instead of using nitrates and nitrates that can be a problem in some of these cured meats. And they simply taste fantastic. Check out the original or the jalapeno. Those are my favorites, please make sure you go over to paleo valley.com and visit when checking out use the code next level for a 15% discount. Remember, our sponsors keep the show going by you giving them your patronage and spending your money on these high quality products, you actually do a few things. One, you're helping to support the podcast and two, you are helping your health. And three, you are making sure that good quality companies like paleo Valley can be out there doing their business, changing the world making the earth better. One of the things you may not know about this is that grass fed organic and grass finished beef is doing something that is so utterly important for our environment actually helping to repopulate the topsoil. A lot of people don't know this, but our topsoil is being extremely depleted. And raising animals, especially cattle the correct way helps to get that topsoil back. This is one of the reasons why I love paleo Valley. Not to mention it tastes fantastic. But they're one of these companies, like my other sponsors, cured nutrition and Organa phi that are doing the right things by the environment. I really appreciate everything they do. And I hope you will check them out. Thanks so much paleo valley.com use the code next level. And now back to the show. So just one more time physical resilience comes down to metabolic flexibility. And we can use SHMEC as a good determination, a general determination about whether we are metabolically physically metabolically resilient. And we can use a frayed this acronym to see if we are psychological resilience. Now one of the things that is the determinant of not just a little bit but highly determinant of whether or not we are going to have psychological resilience and be stuck in the emotions of afraid or not, is our belief, our belief in self, most importantly, the belief others have in us as well. And most importantly, perhaps the belief that the hard things that happened to us can be used to help us get better and grow. So matter of fact, when I look at the research, which is really difficult kind of all over the place in terms of what we need to think about purpose and resilience and what makes someone have grit or courage or rise up to difficult times in their lives. It really comes down to me three things when you really sort of look at the totality of the research that I I have looked at, and those three things our belief and self-belief others have in you. And the belief that stressful, hard traumas tribulations trials can be used to grow and get better. And in fact that that may be their very purpose. That may be their very purpose. Now, one of the things to understand about resilience and to understand about this afraid acronym, and the propensity for us to get stuck in these emotions, is to think about going on your own hero's journey. And I did a episode on being a hero in the past, and I'm going to just really quickly check here, because this is another thing that you're probably going to want to review here because being a hero, and the idea of being a hero is very important, especially when we contracted with being a victim.

Jade  30:48 

And we're gonna get to this in just a minute because victim mindset is the opposite of hero mindset. And being stuck in victim mindset is going to keep you from being a hero. Now the hero episode is episode 167. So to follow along this episode, you're probably going to want to listen to episode 167, and episode 187. This episode is 189. And this is going to be a really good 123 punch to get what I'm talking about here. But to become resilient, to believe in yourself, to get other people to be on board with what you're doing, and to have the steadfast resolve that your trials and tribulations can be used to make you better, you need to see yourself in my way of seeing it as being on a hero's journey. So let's go through this hero's journey really quickly what happens in a hero's journey. And as we're talking about this, you can think about this from any good movie you've ever seen. One of the things that happens is when you enter into a good story, whether your story, that story of your life, the one you're living right now, or a movie or a book, one of the things that happens is you get this lightning strike moment, this thing that happens where everything changes, there's abuse, maybe there's betrayal, someone dies, something happens, that turn, someone gets fired from their job, someone breaks up with their lover, whatever it is something difficult happens in life, that changes everything. And once this trial, this trauma, this tribulation, this difficulty, this pain, this hurt with suffering happens, it throws the person into this array into a place of uncertainty and discomfort. And the normal response to that is at first a place of resistance. When something happens, that changes everything we want to resist, we want to go back to certainty, even if that place of certainty wasn't necessarily the best place for us, or was doing us the best good. And the reason why is because we humans, we prefer the devil we know versus whatever we don't know. Because we go well, I'm handling this thing just fine, no matter how tough it is, and I can't predict the future, I definitely don't want things to be worse. And we would rather stay in certainty than take the chance. This is what many people will do. And this is what resistance does for us. And resistance is this place where we are unable to accept we deny there's a refusal to change, we have a tendency to blame. We have you know, sort of this victim mindset, it's someone else's fault. Here we have this is where repeated emotions come in familiar patterns, recurrent obstacles come up, and we sort of get stuck in this vortex of her which is a lot of it is self-imposed. And if you want to be resilient psychologically, you need to understand the very normal, but also very destructive tendency of us humans to go into a place of resistance. After we have these traumatic events. We go into a place oftentimes of denial and unable to accept a tendency to blame, to complain, to whimper to whine to deny and to distract. This is what we do. And this is the state of resistance. Now, with this state of resistance, we have to at some point if we're going to escape this and rest assured, many people don't this is why resilience is very difficult and relatively rare. Many people don't but what has to happen to get out of resistance is a change in perception. A change in the way we see the story, and this is where the victimized said and the hero mindset come in very strongly, because we can and we should be victims for a time when things happen that are difficult. It is a propriate. And it is good. And it is something that is valuable to have some level of crying and sitting in the pain and feeling sorry for ourselves and wanting help and feeling the negative aspects of this. Everyone has the right to be a victim for a time. And as good humans, we should also realize that we should allow people to be victims for a time no one would, you know, see someone get hit by a car, run up to them right away and say, Hey, get up and walk it off, no big deal. Instead, we would have empathy, we would tend to them we would understand if they got up and started yelling at the driver, you know, or reacted in some emotional way. However, four months later, after this accident happened, if the person is still complaining about their accident, blaming the driver and acting this way, we may not be as amenable to this mindset, right. And so yes, being a victim for time is important. But everyone at some point must make a choice to cease being the victim. And let's face it, many people don't many people continue to be the victim, many people live victim. And if you're living victim, in my way of looking at this, you're living afraid you're being stuck in one of these emotions, the afraid emotions. Does this make sense? Hopefully, this is making sense. So it's not to say that we shouldn't, you know, take care of victims, and we should we should pretend like people aren't victims, it's simply to say that at some point, the victim has to make a choice to move out of victim to stop living in victim and if they don't, they're only hurting themselves. And they're compounding the injury further. And this is a perceptual shift, it's a real realization. And that starts with an acceptance of what happened. And an awareness of the underlying stories, oftentimes, and this is going to seem a little bit woo-woo, perhaps, but I have a theory that oftentimes, perhaps the entire point of pain and suffering is to force us to look deeply and critically at the stories that we're telling ourselves. For example, one story might be that, you know, my lover, my significant other, my romantic partner, is always going to be there, and I can rely on them, and I can outsource some of my worthiness, some of my self-esteem, and some of my need to take care of myself to them. And this is normal, right, we would all sort of agree with this. However, we also understand that your lover can leave your lover can cheat on you, your lover can betray you, your lover can die. And all of a sudden, that seeds story, that underlying story of that they can they should and they are a part of my life that is going to be there forever blows up in whatever way shape or form as a reminder that as adults, we know full well that in the end, we are ultimately always responsible for self and the degree to which we outsource that responsibility is the degree to which we remain vulnerable. Now, being vulnerable is wonderful. So we certainly need to be vulnerable to let love in and to let people take care of us. However, we also always have to stay in control of who we are and take control of our own lives and not outsource completely our sense of worthiness, self-esteem, and our ability to take care of ourselves. So when you move out of resistance, you get to this place where you go, okay, I need to take care of myself, I need to take ownership, I need to regardless of whose fault it was. I need to be someone who accepts what happens no matter how bad it is. Take ownership of it, and realize that I have to separate myself, from my old self, I have to kill off the old person who believed in these stories that kept me stuck. And I need to begin to write new stories to move in a different direction. And to see this as growth for change so that I can rise from the ashes of who I was to who I am meant to be. This is resilience at its core resilience essentially says you just got your Aspie now, rise up, learn from the lessons and be different. Kill your own old self birth your new self. This is ultimately what it's all about. And in life, if we're doing life correctly, we are constantly killing our old selves, and birthing our new selves. And once we get this realization, what we are confronted with is this idea that, Oh my gosh, I can be something different. And that's exciting. And we also are confronted with this idea of, oh, my gosh, I can be something different.

Jade  40:17 

And that's terrifying. And so we have to begin walking this road, where we began to understand that who we want to be and who we were, are oftentimes at odds, and there's going to be this gap in understanding. And so we're going to need to have new experiences and develop new knowledge and begin to grow in a different way. And this is where wisdom comes in. Right? This is where this idea of wisdom where knowledge plus experience brings us new insights and new information, and a new way of being becomes critical for resilience. And so we traveled this road. And along that road, we develop humility, we began to admit that we don't know we begin facing fears and our failures and realizing that we are dysfunctional human beings, and we start to take responsibility more for our choices and actions. And we began living what refocus, relocate describes as living into the answer. And this is when oftentimes, purpose begins to emerge. And resilience begins to become a dominant feature of our personality. And once this begins to happen, now we can get more into a Purpose Driven Life, a desire to create, we start realizing that life is not about reward, acknowledgement and reciprocation, we start living for the sake of living, we start doing for the sake of doing we start giving for the sake of giving, we start being different. There's an old saying that the person who loves to walk will walk far further than the person who loves the destination. And the point of that sort of quote, is to understand that when you begin to love the journey of life, and you begin to see both compliments and criticisms as fuel for growth, and fear and failure, as well, as fun as being just as useful. And that growth is about good things and bad things, you all of a sudden start to be in a much more resilient state.

Jade  47:17 

let's get back to the show. And so as a reminder, as you become a more resilient person, you have to be able to spot when you are stuck. When you have stuck emotions when you're living in afraid when recurrent obstacles come up when repeated patterns happen again, and again. This is where you begin to understand that I'm not being resilient and I'm holding myself back psychologically, and rest assured where you go psychologically, you go physically in the same way that when you where you go physically, it's oftentimes where you go psychologically. In other words, what I'm trying to say is metabolism is both your psyche, and your physical body. And you tell me which one do you think drives more change, I'm suggesting that it is the psyche, ultimately, that drives more of the change. Now one of the things with resilience, this is important for us to understand, and this is where we have to understand it is difficult, we have to have empathy and compassion for people and give them each their own time in moving from a victim state to a hero state. Everyone's a little bit different. And everyone has different resources, right? Think about someone who was raised with loving parents had resources in terms of food on the table and monetary resources, versus someone who was raised with just a mom, and the mother is not at home, and was food insecure, and was having other environmental factors that were going on in their environment, violence and things like that. Who do you think is going to have more of a leg up in terms of resilience? Well, probably in most cases, the individual who had a loving family and monetary resources and though and a more safe environment. However, what's beautiful about this, and we all know is that it's not a guarantee. In other words, there are plenty of people that come from violent traumatic exposure to stress with insecure homes, who are the most resilient people in the world. There's also people who come from these homes that have everything, they have become, you know, coddled and victim mindsets. And so this is why I make the point that ultimately it does come down to a choice that people make. And this the reason I'm confronting you with this right now is because I want to ask you, it comes down to a choice and I oftentimes think, and I do believe this, that suffering sometimes when you get knocked down to your lowest rung, this is oftentimes the catalyst First, that makes people finally go okay enough and move from resistance to resilience. Right? It really is. And so often times, it's a choice. And that choice is oftentimes forced on us by life. Think about it life as a way of tapping you on the shoulder, then smacking you across the face, and then kicking you in the gut as hard as it can if you're not paying attention and not listening. And what the research actually shows on resilience is there are many, many strengths that we can have here. One of the most important strengths that we can have when it comes to resilience is purpose. And that's why episode 187 It's so critical for you to go back and review when you think about this particular episode and listening to this episode. Now, I want to stop here really quickly and just do some definitions really quickly. What's the difference between courage, resolve, resilience and grit? Well, Courage really is this idea of having strength in the face of pain, or grief or hardship. It's the ability to carry out an action despite being stuck and afraid. Right. And so courage is a big piece of resilience. But it's not entirely the whole idea of resilience. Resolve is sort of the determination to do something, right. And so when you have courage, the strength to face pain and grief and hardship with resolve this determination to do something, now you're getting closer to what resilience is, which is the ability to maintain this healthy physical or psychological functioning despite significant adversity. This is really important. And why would you have this ability in the first place? If you get your ass beat constantly or keep getting kicked? Why would anyone get back up? Why wouldn't anyone just throw in the towel, just be like this is all empty, meaningless. The reason would be to have purpose, purpose is what animates resilience. And so when you think about grit, right, to me, it's really purpose and resilience over the long term. It's resilience plus purpose. That's ultimately what grit is people who have a reason and a passion to be resilient in the first place. And so you really cannot have resilience without having purpose. Now, are you seeing how powerful this is? So let's talk about a brief study here and that this study is titled childhood adversity, midlife generativity, and later, light and later life well-being. And in this study, which is a review study, it basically talks about the idea that resilience is not going to eliminate the negative aspects of aspects of hardship. In other words, resilience does not having resilience doesn't take away the pain, you're not going to be able to get out of this life without pain and suffering. That's just been hurt. That's just the way it is. So being resilient does not eliminate pain. What it does is allows yourself to pick yourself back up and reengage in spite of pain. That's what real resilience does. And in this study, this term generativity, really is synonymous with purpose. It is a trait that begins to put effort and care into the well-being of others. So isn't this interesting, that generativity is a concern for people besides myself and my family, it's a desire to help guide the next generation. And this generativity or purpose is highly correlated to resilience. So what's beautiful about this is not only does hardship, trauma, suffering, confront us with a choice of whether we're going to be resilient, or whether we're going to be in resistance. But it also makes very clear from the research that once you start to be resilient, once you do start picking yourself back up, something transcendent begins to happen. All of a sudden, you begin to have compassion and empathy and purpose, not just for yourself, but for other people. So what I am actually suggesting here is that pain and hardship and difficulty is the generator to being the next level human is something that points you to something transcendent about life, something very different. Something that allows us to have a sense of fulfillment, something that allows us to see our life is more than what we actually think that we are important that we do matter and that our struggles, in fact, are the very thing that make us most precious to the human ecosystem. Because that's what we're in. We're in a human ecosystem, each of us matter and our suffering and our trauma and our hurt and our Difficulty, actually is the thing that will point us to how we matter, and how we can make a difference because rest assured you are living a story. And you're living, in fact, many stories. And the fact is that trauma and suffering and difficulty are going to force you to confront those stories, and to rewrite those stories. And the degree to which you are able to rewrite those stories and become a better human is the degree to which you will make life matter and make a difference and make the world better for other people, not just yourself. And I oftentimes like to say, you know, if you believe life is a war, and that's the story you're telling, you're gonna see battles everywhere, right? That's what you're gonna see. However, if you believe that life is a battle, and you are the healer, right, you are the medical technician, you are the person who you know, shows up and helps people survive, you're gonna see things differently. And if you believe that life is a video game, and it's all about leveling up, you're gonna see life very differently. Those beliefs can make you more psychologically resilient, can they not? Now, the final thing I want to get into here is something that's very important, because if you're listening to this podcast, hopefully very astutely, you should be asking yourself, okay, Jade, I get it. But I'm confronted with things in life that are difficult. And I don't always know what's the best approach I have been burned people have been mean to me, I have been betrayed, I have had hurts, and I am trying to grow from those, but I tend to make choices. And what you're telling me Jade is that I tend to make choices that are more familiar. But how do I know when I'm confronted with something like a new relationship that looks maybe the same? I have a choice between this person A and this person B? And which direction do I go here? Or I have a choice between this career and a in this career B or staying in a career and being an entrepreneur B, like how do I make sense of these choices?

Jade  57:06 

And what I would suggest is that your emotions really often tell you an awful lot about this. So what I would say is anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression, this afraid acronym we talked about, when you feel more of these, it's a good indication from my perspective, that that choice is probably not the best thing for you. However, if you feel more excitement, this comfort, yes, a little bit of fear uncertainty, but it comes along with possibility and hope, this might be a better place for you to go. So if you're left with two choices, and one choice immediately elicits anxiety, anger, frustration, resistance, anxiety, insecurity, and depression. And the other choice is presenting you with excitement, discomfort, fear, uncertainty, possibility and hope, then you may want to move in the direction of excitement, discomfort, fear, uncertainty, possibility and hope. And notice that discomfort, fear and uncertainty, these are not necessarily positive emotions, right? They can seem very similar to insecurity, anxiety, and resistance, right? So how do you know because these two are little bit different. So what happens is once you make the choice, right, so one choice might be more fear based, but be familiar to you, and may have more certainty and more comfort in it. versus the other one may have that same fear, but it's more foreign, uncertain and uncomfortable. What I'm suggesting to you is that you will always go towards more familiarity, more certainty and more comfort. But a resilient person, someone who's trying to, you know, sort of build resilience is probably going to start to recognize that, Okay, this looks more foreign, this looks more uncertain and more uncomfortable. The other thing, they both have fear associated with them. But the other thing is more familiar, it looks like something I've done before it's more comfortable, I would suggest to the degree that which you can, is to be gut began to move in the direction of things that are fearful, foreign, uncertain, and a little bit uncomfortable that come with a bit of hope and excitement, this idea that, Oh my gosh, that is a little bit scary for me, but it's also very different. And I might learn a ton and I could grow from that versus this is a little bit scary, but not as scary and it's more familiar and comfortable. So I think I'll go here and maybe I won't learn as much. So when I like to make decisions and I'm working with people in this regard and teaching resilience. I'm more of the mindset of go where the growth is as scary as that is because it's gonna be scary on both hands. What would you rather do repeat old patterns and deal with the same old difficulty and be stuck in afraid or be a little bit scary grow and get out of those old patterns. Of course, most of us would choose the latter. And that is what determines resilience. Now, how do we do this right to wrap up this particular podcast? How do we do this? Well, many people like to talk about this idea of the law of attraction, you've probably heard about this or read the book or the documentary. And this idea is, you know what, you want something different in life, you're tired of repeating the same patterns, the stuck emotions you don't want to live in afraid anymore. And so the idea is to begin to think about how you do want your life to be and the universe supposedly, quote, tears you and you know, quote, answers your prayers. In other words, the idea of the Law of Attraction is that thoughts become things, right? You've probably heard this idea. The problem with this idea, though, and it's not completely incorrect, I just think it's not complete, is that thoughts alone, don't help you feel different. If you're someone who's never been able to feel differently, then afraid, and you're always stuck and afraid, then what makes you think your thoughts are immediately going to allow you to feel something different, you need to naturally feel something you need your thinking and your feeling in alignment. Now, what is the best way to get your thinking and feeling in alignment? Well, if you act a particular way, that is going to align thinking and feeling in other words, you can think a thing and not act it, you can feel a thing and not necessarily act it. So this idea of fake it until you make it is not the right idea. It's really be it until you see it. So it's not the law of attraction. It's the law of recognition. And the law of recognition basically works like this, let's say you want to the example I always use is buy a red Tesla. And let's say before you're aware of wanting to get a red Tesla, you didn't think about Tesla's you weren't aware of them. But as soon as you decide, I think I'm going to buy a Tesla. And I think I want to read one, all of a sudden, red Tesla starts showing up everywhere, you start seeing Tesla's all the time and an inexplicable amount of those Tesla's turn out to be red. Now, the law of attraction would say something along the lines of You just manifested these, they just popped into reality, the law of recognition would say they were there all along, your brain has now just primed to them. And you started to recognize them now. And we all know what this is like, you read a particular book, you watch a particular movie, you meet a particular person, and it shifts you in a way and things that you didn't know you didn't know, they become an awareness that you now have, and this is how we grow as humans. So what we want to be thinking about is we want to be thinking about this idea of being it until you see it, faking it till you make it means I'll think the thing I'll pretend the thing, and when people are watching me, I'll be the thing, but as soon as they're not watching me, I'm gonna go back to doing what I did before. If you really want to build resilience and growth and become the thing that you want to become and escape the stuck emotions of afraid, you have to be the thing when people are watching and more importantly, you have to be the thing when they're not watching. So you need to be it until you see it. So one of the reasons that I started talking about this idea of be it until you see it is because it is a clear distinction from fake it until you make it you want to act, think and feel in alignment. And that is the definition of being. So how do you do that? Well, you start acting like a method actor, a method actor is someone who doesn't just play a role. They're not faking it, they actually become that role. They act as if they are that thing from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. In fact, they even start dreaming as if they were that perceptual awareness. And this is how you escape resistance. And this is how you begin acting as if and enter what I would call the confidence competence courage loop. If you have courage to act, you will develop some confidence, you will then develop some competence which gives you more courage or we could start with confidence. If you take confidence and succeed and get more competence. You'll develop some courage, or you can start with competence, right? If I can develop some knowledge, some confidence around something that will give me more confidence and courage and they all feedback on each other. And this is how this works. It's not faking until you make it's be it until you see it faking. It doesn't build resilience being it builds resilience. And this means that we have to confront our fears. And again, I want to break down a common acronym that people use for fear false exportations appearing real, I don't think that this idea of fear is useful at all. Fear is not false expectations appearing real, because let's face it, there is real danger in the world, there are really things that you should be afraid of. However, when you think of fear, I think you need to be thinking of it as fine, engage and resolve, you need to stick your toe in the waters of fear. You don't want to jump in the pool, you stick your water in, you have some success, you build some resilience, then you stick your foot in, then you stick your leg in, right, you slowly expose yourself. And this is what we do. When we're doing psychology with people who are building resilience, we use exposure therapy. In fact, there's research on arachnophobia, people who are afraid of spiders, who use exposure therapy in a stepwise fashion of finding engaging and resolving their fear by first learning a little bit about spiders, developing some competence about spiders, second, watching a video about spiders, seeing them on a TV screen, building a little bit of more competence and a little bit more courage and confidence around understanding how spiders move. And then seeing spiders behind a cage protective glass, then being in the same room with a spider with the spiders in a protective container that's covered, and then being in the same room and taking the top off of the container, then being in the same room and touching the spider with a big long stick. And then being in the same room with the spider and actually at the end of the studies holding an actual tarantula. And this is an exposure therapy that has been done inside of two hours, taking people who are terrified of spiders in a two hour session, and actually getting a very high percent of them to actually hold the spider and these extinction of this fear can last up to six months later.

Jade  1:07:00 

This is how powerful developing a resilient mindset can be. So how do you do this I call it a fear PR you pick any fear, any fear, any small fear and you begin to chip away at it. So for example, a fear of sharks. Your first approach in dealing with this fear PR number one might be watching Shark Week watching TV about this fear PR number two might be going and swimming in the ocean. Fear PR number three might be getting certified in scuba and going scuba diving in deeper water. Fear PR number 10 might be swimming with train shark divers, with sharks swimming around you and in between maybe you do some cage diving or whatever. This is how people overcome their fears flying. Right maybe you first watch about flying, learn more about flying fly, you know on a regular plane, then fly in long distance, then fly over the ocean, then do some skydiving, etc. Right? One very simple way of doing this and I always oftentimes like to use this is the fear of being alone. How would you chunk this fear down? Well, you can essentially start by going to see a movie something pretty easy or a little bit anxiety ridden when you first go into the movie theater, but then you know you essentially are sidetracked by the film. And then you have a little bit more anxiety when you leave. That would be fear PR number one of being, you know a fear of you know, sort of being around people fear of you know, sort of agoraphobia or being alone. Right? Doing things alone rather so not agoraphobia. Agoraphobia the fear of crowds we're talking about fear of being alone here. So fear on number two might be go out to eat alone. Fear PR number three might be go out to eat alone without your phone. So you can't be distracted fear PR number four might be you know, go for a hike alone go for a weekend alone. Somewhere fear PR level 10 might be go to Paris where you don't speak the language stay a week by yourself maneuver around the city. Think about how this would build resilience. This is how we begin to make ourselves more resilient. And understand that when we have a deep purpose, we have this engine that drives resilience. Life is about learning, teaching and loving. We oftentimes talk about this. How can we do that if we are stuck in old stories if we are stuck in afraid if we don't develop resilience, and how can we develop resilience if we don't have purpose? And so this to me is how we begin to make change to be resilient. We must confess runt uncertainty and discomfort we must see her hardships, traumas, trials tribulations as fuel for growth. And slowly over time as we expose ourselves to these things, we escaped the victim mindset. Move into the hero mindset develop some confidence and competence and courage that builds on itself. And before we know it, we are a different human being who has resilience, who can grow, who has some self-autonomy, who doesn't completely outsource their sense of worth, and who has a deep purpose and knows that we matter and can make a difference in the world. I hope today's episode was useful for you. Please let me know how you liked the episode. I would love it if you send me a DM on any of the social medias or send an email to support at JT to.com. I'd love to hear your feedback. And as always, please consider giving a review for the podcast your reviews really help get other people interested and finding the podcast. It would be amazing if you'd go over to Apple podcasts and submit a five-star review there or whatever review you like I want your feedback and I really appreciate you enjoying the podcast and showing up here. Thanks so much. And I'll see you all at the next episode.