In this live recording for a large group of students I share some powerful insights into how anyone can increase the level of resilience in their lives. I explore a key definition of resilience and why it is a topic that is being talked about so frequently. I also share two major theoretical frameworks and a series of practical things you can start doing to increase the level of resilience in your life.

Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/jd-speak-opt-in

Grab a free copy of my book Bridging the Gap here:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/btg-pdf

Find out about coaching with Jonathan here:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/coaching

Jonathan is on Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpCYnW4yVdd93N1OTbsxgyw

Karen’s MasterClass for Women is here:

https://bit.ly/geniusmasterclasskaren

Transcript
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Well, hey there, Jonathan Doyle with you.

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Thanks so much for taking a moment to check out this short presentation on this

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crucial and important topic of resilience.

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You are about to hear a live presentation that I gave to a large group of

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high school students on this really crucial issue that seems to be getting

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more and more coverage these days.

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In this presentation, I'm gonna define what resilience actually.

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. I'm gonna talk about why it's becoming so much more important

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in the last few decades, and then we're gonna do two things.

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They're gonna give you some theoretical frameworks about how you can think

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about resilience, that'll really help you grow in the whole area.

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And then we're gonna do some practical stuff.

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I'm gonna give you some practical things you can do to really grow and improve in.

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Of resilience.

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I don't know about you, but it is a complex, challenging,

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demanding time in human history.

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There is so much coming at us.

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So this presentation is about helping all of us grow in this

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crucial strength of resilience.

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How we can s.

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Bring back into shape when all the challenges of life hit us.

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Now, this presentation, as I said, was given to a large group of high

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school students, but you can apply this anywhere, whether you are eight

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or 80, there are principles here that you can use in family, in your

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personal life, in your business life.

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So make sure you stay to the very end.

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because that's where the real gold is.

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Wanna do the practical steps underneath here, Wherever you're watching,

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there's a whole bunch of links.

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Go and check out the link, uh, to find out how you can book me to speak live.

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I do this presentation live for groups all over the world,

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businesses, schools, students, uh, whatever organization you're with.

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Go and check out the links here.

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Find out how you can book me to come and do this presentation live.

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I think you can really agree with me that, um, there's always something special and

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we're in a live room with real humans.

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All right, that's it for me.

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We're gonna jump into the presentation.

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I'll catch up with you again at the end, but, uh, I really hope that this helps

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you to grow and helps you to flourish.

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My name's Jonathan Doyle.

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I'll see you on the other end.

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I'm here to do a really simple sales job.

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I need to sell you on the concept of resilience in a very short space of time.

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Resilience.

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What is it and why would you want it?

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Is it possible?

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Maybe we don't want it.

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Maybe we want less resilience.

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So what I'm gonna do over the time I have with you is just bring your

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three, three pillars really simply.

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I always like people to know where we're going over the course

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of a short presentation step.

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What is resilience?

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We can't improve something without defining it, right?

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We want to know what it is.

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Then we need to decide if we want it, if it's useful to us, and

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then we need to decide how we go about actually getting more of it.

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Step two is why is it a bigger issue now than it ever has been before?

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For example, when I sat where you sit at your age, I, I could

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tell you I'd never heard of it.

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Like I went through the whole of my secondary schooling.

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I never heard it mentioned.

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. It's a relatively new phenomenon, only something we're talking

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about much more, more recently, and I think that's important.

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So we wanna know why we're talking about it more now because if you

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understand that, that can be helpful.

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Final stage is, um, what can we do to increase it?

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We're gonna define it, we're gonna decide why it's more important, and

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then I'm gonna give you two parameters by which you can increase it, right?

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I'm gonna give you some theoretical things you can think.

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Conceptual frameworks, then I'll give you practical things you can do.

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There is no point in sitting in a room for this long and simply walking away

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thinking, Well, that wasn't too terrible.

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I need to make sure we give you something you can actually put into practice.

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Yeah, something actually changes things.

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Otherwise, we're all amusing ourselves for no good purpose.

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So friends, we begin with this, the concept of what is resilience.

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Resilience does not come to us from psych.

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Many of you would automatically think, given these things, that it

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is a mental thing we gotta make.

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Did it come from psychology?

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Did it come from sociology?

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It actually comes to us from science, and I want you to

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see the scientific definition.

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Once you see that, we'll take it a step further.

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Scientific definition, the capability of a strained body object to recover

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its size and shape after deformation.

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Caused, especially by compressive stress, you're they going,

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How is that relevant to me?

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And why are we here?

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I picked this up in the office just for our left, there's a micro, a microphone

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cover for an SM seven B microphone.

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Now, if you look at this, this is a body, it's a physical object, right?

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If I add compressive stress to it, I'm gonna compress it.

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It's resilience in the scientific.

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Is whether or not it regains its original shape after deformation.

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Let's watch it.

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We're gonna deform it with compressive stress.

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Yeah, we let it go.

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It immediately returns to its original shape.

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That's resilience.

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That's where it comes to us from the ability of an object to experience

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pressure, compressive stress.

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And return to its original shape.

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So this thing, theoretically, we could say scientifically has a

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reasonable amount of resilience here.

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We could do this over and over and over and over again, and we would

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find that it's particularly resilient.

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You with me?

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All right, ju, do me a favor.

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Good man.

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Come up front here for me.

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This is another body, it's physical object.

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This is a box that Olivia and Karen took to Sydney with tea bags.

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Peppermint for Olivia English.

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Breakfast for Karen Jude.

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Um, I'm gonna place that there.

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Would you please provide downward compressive stress to

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that physical object for me?

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All right, grab a seat.

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Thank you.

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Well done.

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You know, you, you know what's gonna happen Jude.

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I'm gonna get home and Karen go, Have you seen that car box of my tea?

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I can't find it anywhere.

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Physical body compressive.

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Stress.

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See its resilience.

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Yeah.

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You with me?

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You getting principle?

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This one.

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This one.

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Different objects, different levels of compressive stress, different results.

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This is not retaining its shape.

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This is not going back to what it was.

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So let's take it to the way that we would understand it.

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It's our ability to recover from stress, suffering, rejection, or

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adversity to recover, to retain our.

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For each one of you in this room to go through difficult, possibly

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traumatic, painful experiences of suffering, rejection, who knows trauma.

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We're not going down that rabbit hole with anybody individually,

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but you live long enough.

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There is not a single one of you in this room.

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They're gonna put their hand up and say that you have not experienced something.

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Right?

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So the question becomes, what do you do with that?

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How do you recover from it?

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Is it simply genetics Does, you know?

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Is it Colleen?

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Do you just recover better than Arabella because of genetics?

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Is it environment?

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Is it all these different factors?

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Is it fair that some of us would just get really good at, Some of us wouldn't.

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So this is what I think resilience means.

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Some people recover.

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Some people don't.

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Let's make it practical.

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Girls, you're in a friendship group.

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Someone says something about you post something about

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you, does something to you.

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It is an experience of this.

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Do you recover shape?

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At what rate?

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At what speed?

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What do you tell yourself about it?

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Men, you have an experience of failure.

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Failure for us is kind of the parallel of rejection for women.

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These are big, broad ideas.

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Not every.

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. But when we experience failure, rejection, suffering, stress or

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adversity, do we regain shape?

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It is highly possible to have low resilience and never get better.

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So this isn't the Happy Seminar where I tell you everything's gonna work

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out for everybody cuz it just doesn't.

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It can't we, We know it doesn't.

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But there are definitely things we can do.

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So let me show you a picture here.

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Down the front there is my.

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And this is my grandfather.

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A man I never met, died 30 years before I was born.

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My father in that photograph's about 13 or 14, and my grandfather

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within about 18 months, died horribly in front of my father.

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My grandfather died at 44, I'm 48.

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They were a very wealthy family living in England and on a Sunday.

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My grandfather had a massive heart attack in his bathroom, and we only figured out

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the details many years later by joining a bunch of dots at my father, who was

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the oldest of five boys, ran outside the house, climbed up a drainpipe,

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got into the bathroom and dragged him away, but then he died in front of him.

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A few weeks later, they sent my father to boarding school where he

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was basically completely traumatized.

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and he never recovered.

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And this is the point of this story.

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He never recovered.

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He spent the rest of his life with huge issues with depression, eating problems.

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He never recovered.

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He's been dead a long time.

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So I don't say that's a bring the vibe down.

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I say it because this is what happens.

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This is what can happen, but it doesn't have to happen.

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So probably a very large part of the rest of my life, most of my professional.

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Has been trying to fix this problem.

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It's weird, right?

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Some people go, I wonder why he does this stuff, be because of that.

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Because I saw what it was like for somebody to go through

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adversity, suffering, setback, and trauma and never recover.

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It doesn't have to be that way.

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It really doesn't.

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So what we're gonna do is spend time on how we make sure it doesn't happen to you.

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Because I don't know you, I'm not gonna get to know you very well, so we could

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probably bring a whole bunch of brilliant psychologists in this room, interview

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all of you for a couple of days at a time, and we would be able to probably

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graph you in this room of who's had the worst and who's had the best life so far.

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But I'm not gonna know that.

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Second pillar.

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Second pillar.

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Why does it seem worse?

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This concept of resilience, why are we talking about it so much more now?

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Why didn't I go to a seminar like this in year 12?

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Here's what I think may be happening.

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We are all of us.

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What unites us in the room is homo sapien sapiens.

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Okay?

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It's what we are.

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We have been in this iteration, Think of it this way, Think

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of the first ever iPhone.

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It was about this big.

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It had a wind up handle on the side.

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We're now at iPhone 14, right?

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Just new versions.

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iPhone coming out.

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We are basically iPhone 14.

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As a species, we have been a species like this.

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Like what?

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The base of your brain is a limbic system.

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It's the fight or flight animal brain right here.

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Behind the bone at the front of your head is your prefrontal cortex where

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you think about complex issues.

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We have been like this for about 350,000 years, give or take.

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We have not changed a great deal in that time.

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How is this relevant to.

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Because for I think about 99.9% of those 350,000 years, everybody here

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lived almost exactly the same way.

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You lived in very small social groupings.

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Very rarely more than 200 people, usually somewhere between 10 to 50.

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Okay?

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You never lived with big groups of people.

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You never traveled more than about 10 kilometers from where you were born, ever.

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What you did for work if you were male, was whatever your father did for work.

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Whatever you did as a woman was just decided by the group

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or tribe that you lived with.

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All right?

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What this means is life had a great deal of predictability.

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Life had a great deal of simplicity.

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Something that I'm calling if you're taking notes and I won't spend too

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much time on it, is what I call neural.

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Neural is to do with neurology, was to do the function of your brain,

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relatively small neural load.

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You woke up each morning and it looked pretty much like it did the

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day before, and you knew that tomorrow was pretty much gonna look like today.

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The same sorts of people, the same sorts of tasks, the same sorts of

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expectations day in and day out.

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So here we are here and that's gone.

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I reckon it's, I, what I say to people is roundabout here, 18.

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1860s, we get the industrial revolution.

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Do not be afraid of, You're sitting there going, Is this a history lesson?

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No, it's almost finished.

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We moved into much bigger groupings.

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There was vastly greater complexity.

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I think that's some of what's happening.

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You have been born at a moment where there is enormous complexity and

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unpredictability in your environment, so your brain is kind of going, I, I'm

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not, We haven't caught up as a species.

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We have not caught.

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To the sheer amount of stuff coming at us.

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I think that's driving a significant part of it.

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The social groups we once lived in have fractured, so a lot of those

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things that held us all together for a long period of time have vanished.

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All right, that's part two.

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Done.

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We're gonna, We're on the home stretch now.

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You're okay.

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Do me a favor, turn the person next to you.

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Look at them.

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Say, I think it's all gonna be okay.

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Do that for me please.

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Okay.

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So what do we got?

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We got a definit.

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Which is what?

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Your ability to bounce back from rejection, adversity, setback problems.

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Why is it more of an issue?

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Because of massive social changes?

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You need to see this.

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So when you're under pressure and you're struggling, you can go.

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It's not because you're a bad person.

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It's not because you're stupid or you're not as good as someone else.

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It's because you got born at this moment and we gotta learn how

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to manage it cuz we are here.

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God doesn't make mistakes.

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He's put us here for a reason.

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What do we do?

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So what do we do?

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What can we do?

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I'm gonna give you two concepts.

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And then I'm gonna give you practical stuff to do.

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These two concepts are really powerful.

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I, I think if you get 'em, they can be really transformative.

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First one.

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This is a guy called Victor e Frankel.

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Anyone heard of Victor Frankel?

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Anybody in the room?

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We've got a couple.

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Good.

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Uh, been dead a very long time.

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Fascinating.

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Start of what we call the third V and e School of Psychotherapy.

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You've heard of people like Sigmund Freud.

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He started the first v and e school of psychotherapy.

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Why?

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Cuz they're all from Vienna v nese school psychotherapy.

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Second guy was Karl Yung.

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This is the third guy.

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This is the guy who's a brilliant psychotherapist.

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, brilliant man, but the backstory is very, very interesting.

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He was living the dream, highly respected, highly influential,

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doing amazing work on psychotherapy.

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Second World War breaks out.

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He has a Jewish background.

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He's arrested by the Nazis with his parents, his sisters, and he's

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taken to the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

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Arguably somewhere between six to 10 million people end up in this system of

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concentration camps, of which this is the.

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Uh, within 24 hours, you are usually gased to death and then put in

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a gas oven and burned till your ashes fall down like snowflakes.

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So Frankel is sent here along with vast numbers of other, It

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wasn't just Jewish people, it was, it was a mix, but predominantly.

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So why would I show you this?

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How is it relevant to you and getting better at resilience?

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So here's the important part of Frankel's.

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He arrives at Auschwitz and you're basically in one of the most horrific

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places in human history, right?

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Everything is stripped from you, usually physically.

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Uh, you have no power, you have no capacity.

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Everything's taken from you.

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You're seeing people die in front of you, are separated from family members.

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Uh, and then of course you realize that large numbers of the people you love and

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care about are probably already dead.

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Both his parents were gas to death and his.

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, but this is the point.

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He manages to survive four years in the extermination camps.

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Comes out the other side.

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10 days later he goes and sits in a little farmhouse and for two weeks

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solid, he writes a very important book.

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Called Man's Search for Meaning.

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I really recommend that every one of you reads it in this lifetime.

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If you go to your grave without having read it, that would be unfortunate.

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Man's search for meaning.

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Here's the point.

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Frankel teaches us that in Auschwitz, he observed two kinds of people, not three,

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not one, two, there were two groups of people who were gonna teach us a lot.

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He said the first group of people could find absolutely no meaning

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or purpose in their suffering.

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They just went, There is no meaning, there is no purpose.

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There's nothing I can do.

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I am completely powerless.

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And he said, those people often died within 24 to 48.

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He said, they just gave up.

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He said people sometimes would sit down in a corner and die.

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Of what?

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Death.

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They were just so psychologically traumatized.

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They would sit there and die at least 50 people a day, ran and

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threw themselves on the electric fences, 50 people a day rather than

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than spend another minute there.

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They're just checking out.

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We're done.

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Two groups of people, but he said there was a second.

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and he said that second group of people were able to do one significant thing,

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and that's the thing I'm gonna teach you.

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He said they developed the ability to find a meaning and a purpose in

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their situation and their suffering.

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Now, all of the, right now, looking at you, somebody going, What does that mean?

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That is abstract, right?

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What is that?

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So here's what he did.

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He said to himself, I am.

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in this place.

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The meaning I am going to tell myself is that I am here in this

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place because I am going to survive.

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And when I survive, I am gonna spend the rest of my life telling the rest of the

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world what happened here and what I have learned, and that single meaning and

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purpose sustained him for four years.

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And also allowed him to go on to do the most phenomenal work.

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Stay with me.

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Same situation.

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You could have Victor and you could have someone else.

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They're in exactly the same circumstance.

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One is finding an empowering meaning.

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One is not, one is living, one is dead.

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So here's what he wrote, one of the quotes that he wrote in his book, and

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I really want you to concentrate now because very important he says, between

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stimulus and response, there is a space.

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in that space is our power to choose our response, and in our response

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lies our growth and our freedom.

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Look here.

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Stimulus and response.

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What's stimulus?

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Anything that happens to you that is a stimulus.

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You are accepted or you are rejected.

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You ace a test or you fail a test, you get cut off in traffic

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or you don't get off, cut off in.

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Everybody likes you or not many people like you.

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That is the stimulus and there is a space between whatever happens to

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you and how you respond, and it's usually about that big, and we're

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gonna talk about that in a minute.

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So this experience of resilience has a great deal to do with what we are telling

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ourselves about what happens to us.

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So you look at my father's.

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He just never had a, he never found a meaning.

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He never found a purpose and he never recovered.

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So girls, let me help you stimulus in response.

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I, I, These are just general examples, right?

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I know you are all different, but this is your peer group

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and you experience rejection.

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Someone says something does.

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post something you can all relate to that.

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Most of the girls in the room, men, I dunno exactly what the same thing

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would be probably for men at this age.

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It's usually around inadequacy, will be criticized and told or

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inadequate or failed in some way.

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Uh, that's just a guess.

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Whatever happens, there's this space and whatever you tell yourself in that

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space determines what happens here.

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Girls, you get something happen to you.

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You're like one answer, one, one.

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Well, it's cuz I'm ugly.

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It's because no one likes me.

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It's because I don't have the clothes she has.

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I don't look like her.

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I don't say what she says.

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I don't just, I just, That's the story you tell yourself.

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Is it true?

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Hell no.

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I don't know.

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You can make it true because you can have the same stimulus and you

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can have a totally different story.

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You can just have this story.

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It has two words.

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Their loss.

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Their loss, which story is right.

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It's up to.

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It's very powerful.

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So this gets into areas which we won't touch on today.

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I'm happy to stay for questions afterwards, but

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people would like to say, Well, does nothing have an objective?

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Meaning?

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Well, yes it does, but Victor Frankel teaches us that we can live

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through the most terrible things, but find a better meaning if we.

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And for what it's worth, if I can help you with this, if you ask yourself

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the wrong question, your brain will serve you up some terrible answers.

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If something happens to you and you say something like, Why

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does this always happen to me?

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If you're not very careful, your brain will say something really unhelpful.

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Cuz one of the things I'm here to preach about just towards the end

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is I think a large amount of our time, our brain is not on our.

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and it took me 30 plus years to figure that part out.

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So you got a stimulus, you got a response, you got a gap, and you

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could say, No, this isn't true.

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Take it up with Victor Frankel because he proves at least

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that one person figured it was.

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Give you one more example, then we can do the practical stuff.

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Are, are you with me?

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Are you, are you Think about your own experiences, think about what hurts.

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. Think about what you tell yourself.

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What's the old saying?

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The mantra.

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There are no more important words that you will ever hear in your life than

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the words you say to yourself about yourself when you are by yourself.

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You heard that before.

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There are no more important words you'll hear in this life than the words you say

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to yourself when you are by yourself about yourself of, because you could get it.

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And it wouldn't be your fault because with all the tech, and I

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mean, look, you know I get on a sec.

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Here we go.

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Second quote, this is a lady called Amanda Ripley.

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She's American author and journalist, came across her quote yesterday, I

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did a podcast on resilience and I just found her a quote and it's great.

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I'm gonna read it to you once.

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There are three sections to it.

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I'll break 'em out really quickly and we'll teach 'em

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and then we're almost done.

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Resilience is a precious skill.

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People who have it tend to also have the underlying advantages of what Here we go.

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One.

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A belief that they can influence life events.

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Two.

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A tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil.

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Three.

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And a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.

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Um, let me give 'em to you one by one.

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Here they are.

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Number one.

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You wanna be.

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, you have to have a belief that you can do something to influence your life.

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If you don't, you are in the realm of

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that is a rat , and I'm not making it up when I tell you I cannot draw a

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better one than that, shall I Of hands?

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Who's heard of the term learned helplessness?

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Learned helplessness.

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1, 2, 3.

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Okay.

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Um, learned helplessness.

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Grab a seat.

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Learned helplessness comes from studies they did on rats years ago.

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They put all these rats in cages, two different groups.

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One group got electric shocks randomly.

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There's nothing they could could do.

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They just get a shock here.

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Shocked there.

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Shocked.

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15 seconds, shocked.

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12 seconds, shocked.

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30 seconds, just randomly shocked.

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The other group of rats were able to press a lever that

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could stop the shocks happening.

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Here's the point, the ones that couldn't do anything.

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They did all these brain scans and tests on all sorts of hormone

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levels in the rats, and the ones that couldn't do anything to change

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their circumstance just died.

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It's called learned helplessness.

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It's when a dog curls up in a ball to protect itself cuz it's being

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attacked and it can't do anything else.

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So you do not want be in learn helpless.

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You always want to be in a place that goes, no matter what

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happens, I can influence this.

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Even if you cannot change the circumstance, you can change the story

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you are telling yourself about the circumstance, and some of you all say,

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but you're just changing the story.

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That's not real.

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Judge it by its outcomes.

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Friends, judge it by whatever you wanna know how to, how to judge it.

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Judge it by whatever helps you to grow, Judge a boy of helps you to become

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more whole and to contribute more and to enjoy the journey of life more.

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Judge it by that second.

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a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil.

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Some of you have been through difficult things.

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Find a meaning.

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If you've been through a difficult life, here's one meaning you

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deserved it, you're gonna repeat it.

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There's nothing you can do to change it.

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Different meaning this means I am stronger than people who

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have not lived through this.

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This means that I will never repeat these things in my own.

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Same situation, different meaning a conviction that you can learn from

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both positive and negative experiences.

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Example, you get a brilliant mark on a test.

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Arabella, that's a positive experience.

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Learn from it.

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Get it again.

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Do better.

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Get 5% more.

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Arabella, you fail a test.

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and it's terrible and you just got a D for the semester.

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You can either go, you failed because you're dumb and you don't do enough work.

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Or you can go, I failed and I'm gonna improve.

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I'm gonna work harder.

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I'm gonna learn the lesson from that.

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So the ability to go through the highs and the lows and take something from both.

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So how do we actually become more resilient?

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What have I just done?

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I've given you two theoretical frameworks, right?

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Man, Search for Leaning and Amanda Ripley.

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I've given you two conceptual things about the stories that you tell yourself.

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What do we do practic?

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All right, here we go.

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How do you become more resilient?

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Uh, question please.

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Caleb, you look trustworthy.

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You ready?

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Yeah.

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How do you become a better runner?

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By running good, man.

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How do you become a better runner?

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Brilliant.

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You run more two and a half thousand years ago in the ancient world, the

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Greeks, which is kind of my post-graduate background, the Greeks were interested

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in a really important question.

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Please let me make this relevant for you.

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It's very important.

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It is not ab.

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. The Greeks wanted to know, were awesome people born that way,

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or did they become that way?

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Now you might think, Well, why is that a big question?

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It was a very big question for them.

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They were very interested in it.

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They wanted to know, were people just genetically born that way?

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Were you just born resilient, more resilient than me?

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Do you become more resilient than me?

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Who knows?

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The Greeks wanted to know.

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So Aristotle, one of the greatest of the Greek philosophers, was

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asked this really important question, which was just this Aris.

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. How does the courageous person become courageous?

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Because they were, They loved courage, they loved virtue.

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They wanted to know are our great courageous histories of Greek tragedy

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and history, Are they just courageous cuz they were born under a courageous star?

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Or did they do something?

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And Aristotle fam hear the question again?

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Aristotle, How to courageous people become courageous?

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And he said something really important that you need to hear.

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Two and a half thousand years later, he.

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They do courageous things.

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Simple life principle.

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Ready?

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Here it is.

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If you're taking notes, I'm gonna save you a whole bunch of time in your life.

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You should say thank you on the way out.

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Here it comes.

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Ready . You will become what you do.

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Madeline.

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Madeline was made.

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I was talking about.

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Yeah, it is you.

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Okay.

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I want you to imagine you have a friend and she lies all the time.

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She just lies all the time, nonstop.

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Every time you discuss anything, you do, anything.

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You experience anything.

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She lies.

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What would you describe her as?

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A liar.

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A liar.

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So Madeline be, you'd introduce her.

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Let's call her.

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Um, gimme a name of girl's.

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Obsess with L.

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Somebody please.

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Lily Lilly.

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Madeline would go.

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This is my friend Lilly.

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Lilly.

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Lie because Lilly lies friends.

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If you want to become more resilient, do resilient things.

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If you want to become holier, do holy things.

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If you want to become more trustworthy, do trustworthy things.

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If you wanna become a faster runner, do more running, and you

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are sitting there going, That's it.

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That's all you got.

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Yes.

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Because no one's getting it these days.

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It's like, do those things, do resilient things?

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Let's talk about the resilient things.

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In seven minutes, in six minutes and 50 seconds, I'm gonna give you a list

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of things that I think will help you.

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Things that I do, things that I do to become more resilient.

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Number one, do hard things.

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I am not your judge, but you got born in a moment in history

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that loves a couple of things.

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Comfort and con.

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Comfort and consumption.

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Uber Eats from Uber Eats to Netflix, friends, the entire system.

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We talked before about, you know, the, the mainstream media running on fear.

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We are in what's called late stage capitalism.

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This system runs on consumption.

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Well, it runs on debt, but the debt drives consumption.

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Now, the you please see it, it's like me.

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You ever seen who's seen the old Wizard of Oz, the original

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movie with the Scary Witch?

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How scary is she?

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You've seen her.

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The green one messed with me.

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Still messes with me.

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Seriously.

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I can't be on my own sometimes.

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Um, the end scene where they pull the curtain back and the wizard's there

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and you see 'em pulling all the.

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That is what we are in is called late stage capitalism,

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which is simply, um, consume.

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We need you to consume, consume, consume, consume, and your comfort is the priority.

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There's a reason the iPhone's called the iPhone.

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It's about comfort and consumption.

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It's not your fault.

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You didn't choose it.

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You just got born at this time.

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Friends, this is not a culture that constantly says to you, deny yourself,

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do difficult things, do hard, possibly painful, challenging, difficult things.

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You don't hear that very.

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So do hard things.

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What does that look like for you?

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I don't know.

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It's gonna be diff few cashier from anyone else.

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It'll be different for you.

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You've got you's not even typed.

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I can't even read that.

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No Miam.

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Is it gonna be different for Miriam?

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Miriam's?

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Hard things will be different than cashiers.

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Be different to Olivia's.

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Different to Tommy's.

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You've gotta start doing hard things because hard things

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will teach you to endure.

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Remember back at the start when things are difficult.

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This is one of my favorite humans on the planet.

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This.

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The guy they call the hardest man alive.

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This is the one and only David Goggins.

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Long story short, brutal background.

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His father was into unspeakable things.

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He got guns pulled on him as a kid, just the worst you could possibly imagine.

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Hated himself.

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Ended up, um, 150 kilos.

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That's what he weighed, massively overweight.

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And his job was a cockroach.

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He got a job spraying cockroaches, restaurants after hours.

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His book, his Life story.

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He just happened to one day watch this video about the Navy and just went,

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He went on to join the US Navy Seals and just had this phenomenal career.

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And if you can find him on YouTube, he's just phenomenal.

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He's just, he's just into hard things, just do tons and tons of hard things.

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So, you know, here's the US Navy Seals training.

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This water is absolutely freezing.

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They do a six weeks course called Buds, and all they're trying to do is just

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weed out the ones here because they know when you watch the documentaries,

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all of these guys are super fit.

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All of these guys are super athletic.

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All of these guys are really great athletes their whole lives, but they

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drop and you watch the documentaries.

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They have to ring this bell when they quit and they're ringing it and they're

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ringing it, and they're ringing it.

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Why?

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It's not fitness.

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It's.

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, the story between the stimulus and the response is here and they give up.

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So you gotta start doing hard things.

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Do you have to join the Navy Seals?

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No.

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Maybe it means you do the dishes more often.

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Maybe it means you do a little bit extra study.

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Maybe it means you help somebody when you don't down.

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Well feel like it.

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Maybe it means that you say no to something you've been

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saying yes to for way too long.

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Maybe it means you get fitter.

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Maybe it means you eat better.

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Maybe it means you work harder.

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Take one thing away from this.

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Do hard things.

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So I run ultra marathons.

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I do about 400 k a week on the bike.

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Um, I'm in the gym every day.

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Let's be honest.

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You can't look this good without working at it.

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Thank you for that weird pause of silence,

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Um, next one, I could, I've got a couple minutes.

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I've gotta finish, catch the internal dialogue over here.

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There is a voice in your head.

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We all have it.

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Most of the time it's not helpful.

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Mine has been particularly toxic over my much of my life, and I've

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had to work incredibly hard at it.

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You wanna be more resilient.

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You have to listen constantly to the eternal dialogue because

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it's mostly not on your side.

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Some of you'll have come from great families and you'll be a

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little bit better than some of the rest of us, but start to listen.

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You will hear it saying things like, It's because you're this, It's because of that.

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Or you will never, Whenever you hear, you will never, You cannot.

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You did it again.

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Whenever you hear accusation, wherever you hear this critical voice in this

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space, start noticing it and criti.

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For the girls, when the voice says, You are not like this.

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You don't look like that, you don't.

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You should be more like this.

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If only you were like that, just go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

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Not helping.

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Push back.

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Get really good at it.

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Just go.

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Yeah.

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Nah.

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All of us have gotta get good at finding this internal dialogue.

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Stopping at no.

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Uh, for what it's worth, I won't spend too long on this cuz you're not gonna like it.

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I think this is true.

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Um, I'm not gonna tell you to stop cuz you wouldn't anyway.

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Look, basically the best I can tell from social media, I had big

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followings about five years ago.

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Deleted every account, everything.

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Thousands and thousands and thousands of followers deleted the lot.

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The only thing now I have is YouTube.

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Um, I, you're not gonna stop, but I'll just say to you, especially for the girls,

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it's like, let's invent something that is just what I call a comparison engine.

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It's just a comparison engine.

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It's like, I'm gonna use this thing so I can constantly remind.

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, why I might feel inadequate.

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That's just my opinion, but I'm a dad now, so , I, I, I'm just really disciplined.

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I, I've taken almost everything off my phone.

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No even email apps anymore.

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I just think that if you want to get more resilient, the studies are pretty

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clear, particularly for girls that you've gotta just ease up on this one.

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Okay?

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I know you can't stop, but just ease up because it can make a

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big difference in resilience.

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Personal favorite, Get around good people.

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You wanna be more resilient.

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Get around resilient.

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How do, what do courageous people do tend to spend a lot of

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time around courageous people.

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What our athletes do, spend a lot of time around athletes.

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What a resilient, mentally healthy people do.

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Try to spend a lot of time around people that, that are doing

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interesting things that are, that are pleasant and kind and generous.

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Please do not accept toxic friends.

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Just don't life short.

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7 billion people on the planet.

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There's plenty more out there.

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Okay?

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If you got people ruining your life, just yeah, just don't be rude.

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Don't be aggressive.

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I talk about time allocation, just allocate less time, just

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begin to allocate less time.

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There's some amazing people on the planet get around them.

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Seven seconds.

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Um, summary resilience means to bounce back from the adversities of

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life, and I don't think it's just about getting back to this shape.

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I think real resilience has gone beyond the shape.

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Real resilience is taking the hits and coming back even stronger, coming back.

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. There's a reason that Jesus, when he comes back from, uh, the resurrection,

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the wounds are still there.

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That's a really important detail.

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It's a resurrected body.

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He's Jesus.

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Why come back with the wounds?

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Because the wounds were glorified.

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The wounds were elevated into something else.

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The wounds still mattered.

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So as you go through the wounds, you'll, you can come back stronger.

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Last thing is to.

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To remind yourself of this, whether you wanna photograph it, you can always

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choose no matter what you lose, no matter how much you get hurt, no matter how

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much loss, betrayal, failure, rejection, you experience, you can always choose.

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And I promise your friends a very small number of people.

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, as much as it's a consumption society, it's a victim society.

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Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, blame.

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And when I teach people, I work with executives and we're talking about blame.

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And it's blame and blame.

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If you ever tell me a story of blame, if we ever have a conversation and

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you tell me about why you feel the way you do because somebody did

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something to you, I'll do two things.

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I will listen to you compassionately.

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I will listen to every detail of what happened to you and why you feel the way

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you do about what somebody did to you.

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And then I'm gonna say three words.

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And now what?

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Because if you're living your life, blaming somebody for the, I'm not

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saying you don't deal with difficult issues of abuse, all that sort of stuff.

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Of course you've gotta address that.

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I, I get that.

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But at some point in life, there comes a time where we have to go.

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And now what?

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You can't hold onto that story forever.

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Eventually we have to move through.

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Uh, last one, I'm never outta the fight comes from that Navy Seals.

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. The Navy Seals have this beautiful saying, I really like it when Karen and

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Olivia went to Sydney over the weekend.

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We're almost done for time.

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Aiden and I were at home on our own.

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We did two things.

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We ate steak for three meals a day and we watched war movies and I was watching

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Lone Survivor with him the other day.

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Four um, four US Navy seals get ambushed.

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There's two left towards the end and one of them famously.

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We're never out of the fight.

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And it's a real mantra for these special forces guys.

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They're like, no matter what happens, no matter how much attack, no

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matter how much, how desperate it looks, we're never out of the fight.

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So I want each one of you today to take away this, photograph it, write it down.

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No matter what happens to you, you can always choose.

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Cuz Frankel chose, you can always choose and you, you'll never out of the fight.

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Hey there, Jonathan, with you again.

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I really do hope you got a lot out of that presentation.

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The gap between stimulus and response, that's the magic, you know, and this,

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this whole idea about how we talk to ourselves, how we explain to ourselves

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what's actually happening in the circumstances that we face in life.

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By the way, please make sure you have subscribed.

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If you're watching this on YouTube or Rumble or somewhere, hit subscribe

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because I'm putting out content like this on a regular basis and I'd love

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to keep sharing it with you or of the, of you're hearing the podcast

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version, hit that link as well.

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Now, if you'd like me to come and do this presentation or similar content

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live, there's a link under here.

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To book me to speak live.

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I want you to go check that link out.

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We can just, uh, have a conversation about how we can start to bring some

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of these principles to your school, to your students, to your business.

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I'd love to come and do this live.

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Nothing makes me happy.

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Have them being honest stage in a room of people who want to change

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and want to grow, cuz that's, Pretty much what I'm still trying to do

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in life, and I know you are too.

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All right, that's it.

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Go check out those links.

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You and I are gonna be in touch again really soon, but I really do appreciate

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the fact that you stayed to the end.

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Um, I just love doing this stuff and I hope it's a blessing to you.

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Hopefully I get to see you live.

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My name's Jonathan Doyle.

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You and I we're gonna talk again real soon.

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Jonathan Doyle
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