Why Resilience Means Embracing Life’s Storms, Not Just Surviving Them

[00:00:00] Let's talk about resilience today. I've sort of grown up with, and really woven into my thought pattern, the idea that resilience is being able to take a pounding. You know, when life gets you down, it's resilience that gets you back up when you're going through the grind, it's resilience that allows you to survive that grind.

And while that's true, I want to talk about resilience in a different perspective, today. I wanna talk about resilience, how resilience helps you to embrace the storm that you're going through. Embrace the grind. It helps you to embrace the pounding that's coming. And it is in embracing the storm that resilience can fuel empowerment.

So let's talk about resilience. And first I'm gonna start with a little story of my own. You all have heard the story of Wall Street. You all have heard of the almost two decades that I spent on Wall Street, and [00:01:00] many of you have ideas of what that kind of looks like and feels like. In fact, probably many of you were there with me, and you follow me here on my podcast because of the fact that you were there with me.

I love that. Awesome. Wall Street is absolutely a grind. It's a pounding, and it can get you down. Wall Street is the storm, and when I left Wall Street, I left it because I was moving beyond the storm of Wall Street.

But here's the thing, life isn't just about moving bond a storm life, as we all know, is this combination of the storm, and then, the calm, and then, the storm, and then the calm and the purpose of the storm for you is to allow you to move into a position where through embracing that storm, through stepping into that storm, through becoming the best that you can be in the depth of that storm. [00:02:00]

You can work your way towards the kind of self-empowerment that can only come when that storm builds you every time it hits, instead of tearing you down and requires you to recover. Rather, the storm is itself a piece of the power that you bring to the table from today on.

So here's my story. Again, you've heard pieces of it. I left Wall Street to get away from the storm and I was beaten down. I was broken. I'm not gonna go into that story now. That's not the point. Go back to a previous episode.

I was what I call 5D devastated as opposed to the 70D or 12D awakened that you can get now if you go looking for the right people. I was 5D devastated. And my wife and I, we spent a year and a half sort of rebuilding our bodies, our minds, our spirits, rebuilding our [00:03:00] capacity to just engage with the world.

I mean, we were beaten down. We were not resilient. And again, you've heard from other episodes, and I'll even link some of them in the show notes. Part of the reason why we were so beaten down, part of the reason why we were not resilient was the fact that we were bereft community. We had no one upon whom we could lean.

My parents loved me. They probably would've helped out if we wanted to go up to New York or Northern Vermont, where my parents live, where I was born and raised a beautiful place to, you know, recover from the world. If that was our path, then we could have leaned on them, but that wasn't our path, and we didn't have my parents in New York City.

We didn't have my parents anywhere for us to go run away from the challenges, the hardships of the world that we built for ourselves, right? Here's me taking responsibility. We built that for ourselves. It was the world that we created, and it was the world that we [00:04:00] needed to come back to, or at least a version of it.

It took us years. I launched my consulting company. I landed a couple of clients. The Pokemon Company, you all know has loved me, and I have loved them for now eight years. They helped me step up, but again, not because they wanted to support me, not because they wanted to be there for me, but because it was a valuable transaction.

I was giving them value. They were giving me value in return, and that was enough in the moment. The other clients that I landed, Bird Rides Company, Enormous Electric Scooter Company, shortly after the Pokemon Company picked me up.

Same thing. It was transactional. I was sharing value, I was receiving value, and that was enough. It was enough for me and my wife to be able to sort of stumble ourselves back forward into the world because we didn't have resilience. Now I've learned some things [00:05:00] since then. I've learned that resilience isn't just weathering the storm.

The entire purpose of this episode today is to help you step into embracing that storm and through embracing the storm, stepping into the empowerment, the strength of self that comes from that. I've learned that resilience isn't just weathering the storm. Who was it? Mike Tyson. Amazing quote, Mike Tyson said, "everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth".

I had a plan. I was gonna go to college, get a great job, work for 20 years, retire, find another job. The combination of my retirement income for my first 20 years and the second job together, we're gonna build amazing wealth. And I was 17 years into that plan and I fell apart. [00:06:00] I had a plan. I got punched in the mouth.

Now what? That's when you have an opportunity to start building resilience. It's not resilience that gets you through that punch in the mouth. It's that punch in the mouth that makes it possible for you to start building resilience.

It's not resilience that gets you through that first storm, or the second one, or the third one. It's the storm that makes it possible for you to build the resilience, and you only build it when you embrace the storm. What does that mean? Well, here's what that has meant for me. Coming out of Wall Street, being 5D devastated, picking myself up, dusting myself off, moving forward into the world and trying to do the same thing over and over again.

And each time I've had the same opportunity to get punched in the mouth, and now I look back at it and I see that it's an opportunity. I see that getting punched in the mouth, that getting hit by that storm was [00:07:00] for me because I hadn't learned, I hadn't learned that resilience is embracing the storm, not before, but through opportunity, through the amazingness that that storm can bring.

Here's what's on the other side of the storm. Here's why I've started to really appreciate that storm, and now I'm gonna talk in actual physical storms, not just metaphorically. When a storm passes through in the Northeast, it moves everything out of the way.

There's debris on the ground when you're done. Yes, and somebody needs to go clean that up, or theoretically, if you want to clean yard, somebody's going to, there's debris on the ground, and so everybody sees the debris, but here's what else it does, it takes the debris out of the air and it puts it on the ground. Some of that, because of the strong wind, some of that because of the rain, some of that because of the charge in the atmosphere.

That [00:08:00] hyper focuses all of the things that it touches on that next step. Dust wants to move into raindrops. In fact, that's how raindrops first start getting formed is with that dust. Air wants to move around faster and electrical charges wanna move through it.

Lightning bolts, it's really actually quite amazing. It moves things out of the way. On the other end of a storm, when you're out there surveying the damage, the debris that it's left behind, you also notice that there's nothing quite like the smell after a storm. It's amazing.

Nothing smells fresher than that. It's not your dry dryer. Trust me, the smell after a storm is the most refreshing, amazing smell that I've ever smelled that air is just so clean and so pure and [00:09:00] newly charged to allow for new possibilities, new dust to float up in there, new debris, new raindrops. This is real. I'm, you know, I grew up in the northeast. There are lots of storms there, some of them very big.

I weathered several hurricanes passing through New York City and in fact, I weathered them. I didn't run away from New York City. The storms are amazing, but the first thing that you have to do to be able to enjoy the storm is to embrace it. Embrace the chaos. Embrace the power of the storm. Embrace the purpose, right? What's the purpose of the storm?

Again, really the storm, not just metaphorically. What's the purpose of a storm passing through? It renews everything, it renews the air, it renews the water, it moves nutrients around, it changes the way what it looked like yesterday is going to be tomorrow. Everything, [00:10:00] everything, everything is changed, and it's great. It's renewing, it's empowering, and it's the embracing of the storm that makes it possible for us to find empowerment.

Here's what you can't do. The other thing that I've learned, I learned that you need to embrace that storm in order to move into that self-empowerment. Here's what you can't do. You can't embrace that storm when you're coming into it from insecurity. You can't, how can you embrace the storm if you are not firmly rooted in the ground? You might get blown away.

I mean, really, you might not just metaphorically, you might actually get blown away. How can you embrace the storm if you don't have your family around you to hold you up? Someone upon whom you can lean on, someone upon whom you can be sure from. You'll get whatever you need in order to be able to survive the next day after the storm and the day after that.[00:11:00]

Who cares if my hut gets blown over, I've got family. We can rebuild it.

If you're coming into the storm from a place of insecurity, you can't embrace it and you can't find the empowerment in it and through it. Now, how do we find insecurity? Well, insecurity is the reactive force within you, not the proactive, but the reactive force. So anytime you see yourself being reactive, it could be because you're triggered.

Somebody said something that makes you feel threatened, triggered. It could be because you are worried, you are fearful, you are engaged in some possibility that's not necessarily a great one for you. Being fearful, being worried, being engaged in [00:12:00] these futures that aren't serving you right now, that is effectively a triggered state.

It is an insecure state. You're coming to those fears from insecurity, and in fact, you're accepting the insecurity that those fears bring back into you. Embracing the storm. If you embrace the storm of the insecurity, then you have an opportunity to build some resilience just in that, just embrace the storm.

But that's just some resilience. In fact, the real resilience in life comes from having a community of people that support you. The the community that I've been able to build, only since realizing how powerful that was, only since realizing that every single time, as Mike Tyson would put it, I got punched in the mouth.

It was for me. It was for me. It was happening for me. It was the universe acting through [00:13:00] me and it felt like getting punched in the mouth, but it was acting through me for a better future for me and for everyone that I love, including you.

Think about that. Getting punched in the mouth was for me.

How many times have you been triggered? Now looking back on it, how many times was that trigger for you? How many times was the person who said something that made you feel threatened and insecure, made you feel reactive? And in fact, probably you did react. I've done it. I get it.

How many times was that for you? How many times was that an opportunity for you to recognize something inside of you that's ready to grow? Something inside of you that's ready to become more resilient. [00:14:00] Because ultimately that's what triggers are. It's an opportunity for you to see a place inside of you that's ready for growth.

But when you're insecure, it's hard to see that cause you're just acting in reaction to that trigger, you're just acting in reaction to that insult. You're just acting in reaction to that challenge. I get you, I feel you, I've been there. Some days I feel like I'm there all day. Some days I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and I just am triggered and I don't love it.

And when I wake up the next morning, I'm in a new place. I'm in a new head space, I'm in calm. I'm in my resilience, and I'm in a position where I can really reflect [00:15:00] on the trigger that happened yesterday. I'm in a position where I can really step into to how did that happen for me? How did that happen as an expression of what could be the best me, right?

Looking at my triggers, looking at my reaction and my reactivity, looking at the ways that I stepped maybe differently than I would want to have stepped from a calm, collected, thoughtful place. How did that happen for me? How was that my best self reaching out and lovingly slapping me in the face and saying, Hey, this is a space you can grow in.

Hey, this is a space you need to spend some time paying attention to. Hey, this is an [00:16:00] opportunity for you to level yourself up. And I only see that when I'm moving into that resilient, calm place. I only see that when I'm in a position where I can embrace that storm and they still happen. I still have days that are all storm and no embrace, but the next morning, the next morning, I can smell that sweet air that the storm of yesterday cleared things out and made it possible for me to see things more clearly.

And it's not just me. Because I can't do that alone. I do it because I have people that love me so much, that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, no matter how I say it, tomorrow morning, they're gonna be there for me. They're gonna help me stand back up and they're gonna say, Hey, dude, yesterday was a storm.[00:17:00]

What do you need from me today? How can I help you, Lucas? How can I help you embrace the storm and build more resilience for your own empowerment? And those are the people that are changing my life every single day. Those are the people that are making it possible for me to come to you every single week, week over week, and share with you this amazing experience that we call life, and how community is building that better for me. Embracing the storm.

Now, I think I've built that up a little bit and I'd like to talk about sort of the way that can bring out the best in you. I understand how it brings out the [00:18:00] best in me. The storm clears out. It makes it possible for me to see things, hear things, smell things, taste things, experience things differently.

And I understand the way I get to it. I get to it through my pretty detailed morning routine. I get to it by walking into the calm, the resilience, the serenity of the power that I've built into my mindset, my community, myself, and you hear me.

And the way that you're gonna do that is the same. You're gonna build a morning routine, similar to mine, you're gonna build a morning routine that makes it possible for you to tackle every single day with the kind of start that gives you access to calm serenity throughout the entire day. And you know what, you're still gonna have days just like I do, [00:19:00] that are storm all day.

There are not very many these days. They're few and far between. Part of that is cause I'm older, I've seen more shit because I've seen more shit. I know that I'm gonna get through this cause I did last time. I got through the storm. And you know what, this storm is new and it's different and it's exciting, but also I got through that last storm.

I'm gonna be all right. Part of that is because of the way that I've rebuilt myself, because I've embraced the storm, because I've stepped into the fact that it is the storm that gives me the opportunity to build that resilience. It's the storm that makes it possible for me to really step into the next level of self-empowerment, the next level of my own personal growth, and the next way that I'm gonna be able to share that growth with you.

So here's what I do every single day, morning routine. My morning routine is [00:20:00] about an hour long. It's three parts. Now, I move the three parts around depending on what my goals are, but for all intents and purposes, here's how I would recommend it to most people, most of the time, the three parts are a little bit of exercise, a little bit of meditation.

And a little bit of nonfiction reading. You see a bunch of books behind me. I've got stacks and stacks and stacks of books everywhere around my house. I do nonfiction reading every single day. I do at least a book a week and some weeks many more.

First I get up and I do a little bit of exercise. There's a reason for that. What I want to do is I want to flush the cortisol outta my body. I wanna flush the hormones that are moving me into a stressed state. Now, cortisol isn't a bad thing, especially cortisol in the morning. Your body makes the cortisol to wake you up. It's there for a reason. Also, I want to flush it out cuz there are things that I want to do with my body and my brain and cortisol kind of gets in the way [00:21:00] of that to some degree, to some level.

So I do a little bit of exercise. I get my blood moving. I allow that cortisol to go where it needs to go and the rest of it to get burned up, sent away. I don't do a hard workout cause I don't really want to change my deep thinking brain state, right? Hard workouts are for later in the day when I really want to hit it hard and exhaust my body and maybe even turn off my brain.

Next thing I do is meditate. Here's why, I like the calm that meditation brings, but there's one thing that's much more important than that. As you get good at meditating, you're gonna do three things. The first is, you're gonna get great cataloging the thoughts that are coming into your head. Cataloging, right?

Meditation isn't about having a clear mind. Nobody gets a clear mind. Maybe the monks that have been doing it their entire life and are sitting on top of a mountain wearing robes, I'm not that guy. Nobody else gets clear minds, at least not most of the time.

Occasionally it might come. For the most part, [00:22:00] what happens is your thoughts keep coming in. And that's a good thing. But because of the fact that you're good at meditating, you've built that skill, you've built the resilience by embracing the storm of your thoughts, continuing to come in over and over again. You get good at cataloging them. This is a thought I need to come back to and put it over in this box.

This is a thought I don't need to worry about. I'm gonna throw it away. This is a thought that maybe is gonna turn into a feeling. I should pay some attention to it, I'm gonna put it into this box. As you get really good at that, you embrace the storm of those thoughts and you find that you have resilience.

You build resilience through embracing that storm to be able to step into something kind of like a clear and quiet mind, but it's not quite the same. Trust me, I've had clear and quiet mind. I've had that beautiful flow state that could last for hours and time just flows by and you're not distracted by your thoughts or your feelings or your emotions or that car.

I've had it, it's amazing. And most [00:23:00] mornings when I'm meditating, that's not what's going on. Also, because of the fact that I'm going deep inside my mind and I'm really embracing the storm and I'm moving towards flow state, even though I don't typically get there in every single meditation, you enter into a different kind of brain wave now it's a brain state that's available to you as soon as you wake up.

And through meditation, I'm extending that brain state. It's called the theta brain state. It's one of the brain states that your brain allows you to really dive into. Into information, into something that you're trying to learn into almost anything that you're interested in. It's amazing.

Okay, now I do the exercise first to flush the cortisol. I do my meditation second to get back into that brain state, the theta brain state, the learning brain state, and then I read nonfiction after that, right? Now you can move these around. If you're good at staying awake, you could wake up, meditate. That's just going to deepen the theta brain [00:24:00] state and extend it out even further.

Then you do some reading, maybe then you do some exercise to sort of get yourself into the day and out of that theta brain state. But that's why those three parts are there. Now, everybody that I've ever studied and I've studied a lot of very successful people, have used all three of those parts as part of their morning routine.

Every single one of them, they do different lengths of time. I do about 20 minute, 20 minute, 20 minute. They do different lengths of time. They do them in different orders. My good friend Dr. Chris Lee, he can meditate first. So he wakes up at 4:44 in the morning every single day, and he goes directly into a meditation.

I admire that. There's a reason I don't meditate first. It's cause I have found that if I go directly into a meditation, sometimes I find myself waking up again. And by waking up again, I mean the meditation put me to sleep. It went one step too far. And I'm much more likely to do that if I don't exercise first.

So I wake up, I go to the exercise, then I meditate, then I read. [00:25:00] The meditation, does those three things that I mentioned. It helps me with the theta state. That's why I read next. But, also, it builds resilience by embracing the storm and it catalogs my thoughts, so it helps me to organize my brain, right first thing in the morning.

It helps me to organize my brain for the rest of the day when I miss my morning routines, there is an impact. Is it big? No, I can miss my morning routine every day, and I'm still gonna be pretty high performing. I've trained myself very well, but there is an impact. I strongly recommend building in time into your morning to walk into that exact morning routine.

Adjust the parts, adjust the times, that exact morning routine. The next storm that I embrace is the coming of the day. The power that that day can bring in. It's important and it's a big [00:26:00] storm. The day can hit you hard. As soon as you check your email, I don't know about you, but when I check my email every single morning, I have about 200 emails waiting for me to give me something to do.

Some people want me to buy from them. Some people want me to read their content. Some people want me to sell to them. Those, of course, are ones that I like.

What do you do with your inbox, your social media, your phone, your messages, your email? When you finally decide it's time for you to be open to the rest of the world, that's the next storm of the day. It's a big storm, and having the mental resilience that you've built up over days and days and weeks and years of building your career is a really important part of making sure that you're ready to embrace that storm.

How [00:27:00] do you build resilience throughout the day as that storm continues to pepper you with hailstone? There are some things that I do. First, I never do anything for more than an hour all day long. Nothing. I don't do any deep work sessions to last more than an hour. I take a break. I take a very specific break, in fact.

When I take a break, it's exactly five minutes long. The first minute is a mindset reset, so I'm freeing myself from what I was carrying for the last hour or 55 minutes. The next thing that I do is a biology reset. So I'll go grab some water, I'll go to the bathroom. I'll make sure that my biology, my body knows that I'm taking care of it.

So the mindset reset takes exactly two minutes. The body reset takes two minutes-ish. Then when I'm coming back and I'm getting ready to go back into the work I do [00:28:00] another mindset reset. And in that one, I'm sending myself forward into the power of the day, the next hour, the next half hour of work that I'm gonna do, and letting myself know that I'm gonna be powerful.

At the end of that, I'm embracing the storm of that hour, and I'm still gonna be resilient and empowered through the embracing of that storm. Now you think about that and you're like, you do, 8, 10, 12 hours of work. That's a lot of five minute breaks. Are you sure you wanna be taking all those five minute breaks? Trust me. Yes, you do. Yes, you do.

What it's gonna do for you as the day progresses, it's gonna give you an opportunity, just like your morning meditation, to reorganize your brain and to reset yourself into productivity. And what you're gonna find is that each successive hour, It is not necessarily more productive than the previous hour, but rather it's the same.

And what you've been [00:29:00] doing is each successive hour is a little bit less productive and a little bit less productive and a little bit less productive. And as the day goes on and each successive hour is less productive, it's the difference between where you started and where you were 3, 4, 5, 7 hours into the day.

That difference, you can close by taking that one hour break throughout the day. Building resilience by embracing the storm, by embracing the storm. I know that the next hour is gonna be crazy, and I know that I'm powerful and I know that I'll continue to be powerful hour after hour, day after day by taking these five minutes and doing these things inside these five minutes to set myself up for resilient, consistent success. Embracing the storm.

Now, if it's an option, spend a little time with a coworker. That's even gonna step you up higher. If it's an option, hug a [00:30:00] spouse or a friend. I mean, really a hug, an actual hug. Embracing the storm, building resilience for empowerment.

I'm gonna wrap this up now because really what I wanted to share with you is that you can embrace the storm. You can actually be in empowered through resilience, through embracing that storm every storm all day.

And this is how I do it. I do it by building my community and into my life. I do it by building my routines into my life in a way that ritualistically speaking. I continue to build myself up throughout the day so that I'm at least as productive and sometimes more so, because of the way that I conduct myself.

And my invitation to you is look at the opportunities that the storm has brought to [00:31:00] you. Look at the opportunities that your triggers have brought to you to learn to grow, to reassess who you want to be in the moment and how it is that you arrived there. Arrived there being aware of the reassessment that you wanna make.

Arrived there, being ready to step into the new you and use these tools that I just shared. Ritualized routines, community, resilience through security, resilience through embracing the storm that you know is coming, embracing the learning opportunity and the clarity that it brings. Thank you.