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Anne Grady Group - Resilience

062: Bouncing Back When You Feel Deflated by Life – Anne Grady

Resilience expert Anne Grady is not your typical motivational speaker. She is a best-selling author, two-time TEDx speaker, trainer, survivor, optimist, inspirer, and truth-bomb dropper. Anne has a master’s degree in organizational communication and has spent the last 20 years working with some of the largest organizations around the globe. She has become known as a leading expert on communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, and resilience, contributing to Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, FOX Business, and many more. Audiences love her raw honesty, edgy humor, authenticity, and insight. Anne shares inspiring personal stories, cutting edge research-based content, and implementation tools to transfer learning into real life to improve relationships, navigate change, and triumph over adversity. And she’ll make you laugh while she does it. In her first book, “52 Strategies for Life, Love, & Work,” Anne provides practical strategies to improve relationships, increase productivity, and reduce stress. In her most recent book, “Strong Enough: Choosing Courage, Resilience, and Triumph,” Anne draws from her personal life experiences that touch the hearts and minds of audiences helping them use adversity as a catalyst to grow “strong enough.”

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

  • The difference between grit and resilience.
  • How to develop resilience through self-care, mindfulness, and gratitude.
  • The reason “why” you’re doing something actually creates resilience.

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Interview Transcript

Well, Anne thanks so much for taking time to hang with us today. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me, it’s a pleasure.

Well, I want to know your take on this word “resilience”. We’ve talked to several women on the podcast about this word because I don’t think it’s trendy, I think it’s just needed. So, what is resilience in your mind? And why is it so important?

You know, it’s a great question. A lot of people think that grit and resilience are synonymous, and they’re not. So, when you talk about grit, I’ll start there. Grit is basically this rugged, passion and perseverance towards a goal that is important to you. It’s something that you’re really doggedly determined to accomplish. Resilience is you’re going to get knocked down in pursuit of that goal or just in life in general, and resilience is your ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down. It’s really your ability to not just survive challenging times and overcome adversity, but to thrive as a result and really grow from it.

Okay, so why is that important? I mean, this may be an obvious question but I just want to hear from your perspective, why is that important in life, in parenting, in relationships, in business?

Well, I think it’s interesting, I spoke to three thousand educators in Dallas the day before yesterday and we were talking about the need for this stuff in schools. Because you learn algebra and you learn history and you learn biology, but what you don’t learn is when life throws things at you and you have some really challenging times, how do you navigate that? And so, you need resilience for anything from getting through traffic in the morning to dealing with the loss of somebody that you love.

In my case, managing a severely mentally ill child and recovering from a tumor in my face. I share my story and people say, “Oh, gosh, well mine is nothing compared to yours,” and it’s like, that’s called comparative suffering, we all struggle at 100%. Whatever we’re going through, it’s relative and it’s real to us. And so, different people need resilience at different times and for different reasons. For some people, sitting in traffic is no big deal. They listen to an audiobook and they chill out. And for others, it’s a source of complete road rage and a full-blown mental breakdown.

So, everybody needs resilience in different areas of their life. What I’ve learned is that these are skills and habits and behaviors that you can build proactively. I think a lot of people think, “Well, I’ve got to wait until something goes hellaciously wrong to be able to build resilience,” and it can’t be further from the truth. These are things that you can do proactively to cultivate these skills so that when you need them, they’re there.

Okay, so I want to get back to that – the cultivating them, but you just glossed over two really challenging things. A child who has some challenges and then a tumor on your face, oh my goodness.

Yeah.

Did these both kind of arise at the same time? Or these different seasons of life?

Yeah, my son, he’s sixteen now. My son, Evan is sixteen and I knew something wasn’t right when I was pregnant. He would literally kick so hard I would drop to the ground. My doctor joked that he’d be a soccer player. When he was born, he cried all day and all night. We went to multiple doctors and nobody could tell us what was wrong. When he was eighteen months old, my husband left, so I was a single mom and I had a baby who was crying eighteen, twenty hours a day and didn’t know what was wrong.

He continued to escalate and when he was three, he tried to kill me with a pair of scissors. By the age of four, he was on his first anti-psychotic. By seven he was hospitalized in his first pediatric psychiatric hospital and I lived at the Ronald McDonald House for two months. When he was ten, he was hospitalized again. In the middle there, I got remarried and we were waiting for the nurse to gather his meds and I got a call from a doctor. I had had a massage at the airport in Austin because I had such a migraine after we had admitted him and the message therapist felt so bad for me, she came to my house and gave me a free ninety minute massage. So, to your audience, if you’re ever in the Austin-Bergstrom airport, go ahead and cry uncontrollably and ask for Becky – amazing.

But Becky found a swollen lymph node, or so she thought. I got it checked out and it turned out to be a tumor in my salivary gland that we thought was the size of a dime, but ultimately was the size of a small avocado. And so, it stretched my facial nerve so much that the right side of my face was completely paralyzed. I drooled, I had a speech impediment, I couldn’t close my eye.

So, a couple of days after the surgery, a speck of dust scratched my cornea, so my doctor did not think that the nerve would recover so he said, “Before you start six weeks of radiation, we’ve got to go ahead and put a gold weight into this upper eyelid and we’ve got to stitch your bottom eyelid. Before we did the surgery, I went to Vegas for the weekend because we had been so lucky and I thought, “Well, let’s go to Vegas.” So, I did and I fell down the stairs and broke my foot in four places.

No way!

Swear to you. So, yeah, lots of people need resilience. And then, there was my husband’s motorcycle accident and a fall off a ladder recently, breaking his arm, ribs and hips. So, I think the average person has five to six traumas in their lifetime, these are really necessary skills. I think I’ve had mine and I’m ready for the back half to be relaxing and easy.

If you were a cat, you would have given up eight lives already. Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, but you land on your feet because you have no other choice. You just do. You don’t know how strong you are until it literally is the only choice you have.

First of all, I just want to give you a hug. And then the second thing is, your face looks great.

Thank you.

You’re not drooling.

When I go to the airport though, because my whole goal was I had to finish radiation before a trip to India for a speaking engagement and told me it wasn’t possible. And so, my passport has my face like that, so now whenever I travel internationally and I go to the guy checking ID’s and he looks at me and I go, “Hold on a second.” He’s like, “Oh, okay. You look way better.”

Oh, Anne, my goodness. You have made it through a lot of things. How long ago was the issue with your face?

I went into surgery February 26th of 2014. I did go to India three weeks after radiation and my face came back while I was going through radiation, which they said was not possible. So, this was all back in 2014 headed into 2015.

Okay, my goodness. Well, you are miracle.

Well, I don’t know about that. Or a glutton for punishment, one of the two.

Well, first of all, thank you for sharing part of that story. I’m sure it’s just a glimpse of obviously all the challenges that you’ve been through, but you said that resilience can be learned. It’s a skill. Maybe even we stay with your story here for a second, you’re teaching resilience and yet you’re having to draw upon resilience. What was your experience like? What were you thinking? “Oh, my gosh. I’m teaching this and now I’ve got to live it.” You know what I mean? Obviously, there’s an irony there, but what are the skills that you had to put in place? What did you personally have to do throughout those experiences that we could learn from?

Well, so it’s interesting because my master’s is in organizational communication. So, I was teaching leadership and emotional intelligence and communication. I wasn’t teaching resilience at all.

You weren’t? Okay.

No, in between Evan and my face, I had been asked to give a TEDx talk on courage. And I was like, “I don’t know anything about courage,” and they said, “Well, we think you do. So, if you could just go ahead and figure it out.” So, I started researching. I was really trying to figure out what courage was and I thought, “I’m the last thing. I’m not courageous. I’m terrified.” And I’ve learned that you means that you are courageous because you do it anyway.

And then, everything happened with my face and I was asked to do a TEDx talk in St. Louis for St. Louis women at the Peabody opera house and they wanted me to speak on resilience. And I was like, “I don’t know anything about resilience,” and they started cracking up and said, “Go ahead and speak on resilience.” I didn’t want to just get up on the stage in front of three thousand people in an opera house and go, “Well, yeah, here’s my story. I’m resilient.” So, I did what the academic in me does and I went and started digging into the research and I found that some of the things that I was doing were building resilience without me realizing it. But there were several things I was doing that was sabotaging my success that I didn’t realize.

And so, since 2014, I have just been stuck in this neuroscience of resilience, really trying to not only cultivate the habits for me because I need them every day with my kids, but also because I think that so many of us, it’s this kind of ubiquitous word and if you know the strategies and have the tools then it doesn’t have to be. It’s really pretty simple in concept, difficult in application.

So, for example, self-care. My mom’s a flight attendant. She was a court reporter for thirty years but when she was fifty-one, she became a flight attendant and she’s seventy and still doing it. I’m not supposed to say which airline, so we’ll just call it Southwest but she makes these great announcements and my favorite is the oxygen mask. She’ll say, “In case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, please place your mask on and then assist your child. And if you’re travelling with more than one child, please pick your favorite or the one with the most potential.” There’s a reason they tell you to put your mask on first and everybody kept telling me with Evan, “You need to just take care of you. You really need to stop.”

And I thought, I was remarried, I have a step-daughter, I have my mentally ill son, I’m running a business, I’m trying to have a social life and maintain friendships and do everything, “I’ll go ahead and take a day off to go to the spa,” it just didn’t sound realistic to me. So, what I learned is a couple of things. One, self-care is not selfish. It is a requirement for resilience. You cannot be resilient if you are not whole. But I also learned, it doesn’t have to be a spa day, it doesn’t have to be a relaxing massage. It could be lighting a candle while you do your taxes. It could be playing music and strategically stopping throughout your day to ask yourself, “Am I controlling my day or is it controlling me?” It could be not eating lunch at your desk because that’s linked to heart disease and anxiety and depression and stress. It could be staying off social media for a week because that has been found to reduce anxiety and depression by 50%.

Also, exercise is something that I don’t typically love. I’m not one of those people who gets a runner’s high and can’t wait to go jog in the morning, but I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was nineteen and so all these people kept saying, “Anne, you’ve got to exercise. You got to exercise. You got to exercise.” My grandmother used to say, “Annie, if enough people tell you you’re tired, it’s time to go lay down.” She also used to say, “If you act like an ass, don’t be surprised if people try to ride you,” but that’s a different conversation for another day. So, I started swimming. I started swimming because it’s the only exercise that I really don’t hate. I probably still have goggle marks on because I went right before this, but it’s not something that I love but I found that it transformed my mood.

So, no judgement if you’re on meds. I’m on everything but roller-skates. I get it, it’s a real thing but exercise and sleep grow back the grey matter in your brain that is damaged by stress. It literally repairs neurons damaged by stress and the grey matter in your brain is the part of the brain that’s responsible for emotional control – emotional regulation and making your attention. And so, in a time when we are tasked more than ever for trying to manage our emotion and our attention, those are two things you can do. Stop me when you want, but another strategy…

No, this is great. Thank you.

Yeah, another strategy is mindfulness and I thought this was the dumbest thing in the world. I’m not going to sit in full lotus and eat tofu and find my Zen. It’s just not me, I’m a type A personality. And I learned that that’s not what it is at all. We spend 47% of our time thinking about something other than what we’re doing right now. So, you’ve thought about something other than what I’ve been saying. I’ve thought about something other than what I’ve been saying. We just have this constant monkey brain, we’re all over the place. And mindfulness is basically a brain training exercise.

So, meditation is one form of it but any time you find yourself wandering and worrying about the past, ruminating about something that happened or anxious about the future, or anything else, if you just bring yourself back and literally focus on your breath or feel yourself sitting in a chair or push against your desk and feel it on your hands, that’s actually called grounding; if you push against a wall and feel it, those are basically activities that are training your brain to focus attention where you want it, rather than where it is likely to go. So, since radiation, I can’t turn my head in the pool. I get really bad headaches and neck tightness, so I’m a total dork, I swim with a snorkel. I look like a total dork.

That is awesome.

But I mediate underwater. I focus on my breath underwater. My mind races and I go back. A lot of people think that meditation is supposed to be this calming, peaceful, Zen-like experience and it’s not. It is hard. It is very hard work and it’s frustrating because your mind is constantly wandering. That’s what our mind is designed to do. I was talking to a friend who worked with a Buddhist monk and he literally calls it your monkey brain. Your brain is like, you’ve got all this stuff in front of you and your monkey brain is trying to grab it all and every time you go back to your breath, you are again training your brain to pay attention where you want it to go. It makes you less likely to hit the panic button when things go wrong. It makes you less emotionally reactive.

I meditate to sleep every single night, around the fortieth breath you get bored and you just fall asleep. But nine minutes a day is the magic number that will change your brain and grow back grey matter. Gratitude is something that I thought was so silly, “Really? In the midst of a broken foot and eye surgery and radiation and a husband who fell of a motorcycle?” Everything was going on and what I learned is that simply looking for things to be grateful for releases serotonin and dopamine, the same neurotransmitters that are in anti-depressants. Just looking for something to be grateful for lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, by 23%. And we have something in our brain called the negativity bias, it’s basically a protection mechanism. We overestimate threats, we underestimate the good stuff, but you can offset that by being very deliberate about what you look for each day. And so, gratitude is one way I’ve found that really helps that.

We’ve actually got a gratitude challenge in our organization right now. You can find us on all kinds of social platforms at Anne Grady Group, but basically the week of Thanksgiving, we’re basically going to draw a name out of this giant gratitude jar that we have and it’s a $250 donation to the charity of your choice or a gift card and all you have to do is send us in things that you’re grateful for. It’s just a way to kind of program your brain to start looking for the good stuff.

Okay, so thank you. So many good things that you shared with us. So, three strategies that you just said. One was self-care, the second one was mindfulness, the third was gratitude.

Yes.

And so, these don’t sound like they have anything to do with resilience because it seems like I get knocked down, I get back up. You know what I mean? I’ve got to power through it. How are you saying that these three build resilience? How is that connected?

Well, resilience is a mindset and a skillset and an ability to reset, right? And so, your mindset part of that is being really deliberate about your habits. Which habits are cultivating purposely and which ones are you just living out of reactively? So, one, resilience is built by cultivating the right habits in the right way on purpose, rather than just living on auto pilot. Gratitude and mindfulness and self-care are all literally changing your brain. So, when you are not down, you have the capacity to be deliberate about the choices that you’re making.

Is it easy? Absolutely not. I struggle with it every day. I had a call yesterday from my son and he had a really, really tough day and I curled up in the fetal position for a little while. Part of resilience is not running from those uncomfortable emotions. Most people don’t like to be uncomfortable, so when we feel sadness or anxiety or depression or frustration or anger, we’re like, “I’ll deal with that later. Let me compartmentalize.” But part of resilience is learning how to process those and just sit with them and not try to run away from them.

So, gratitude is training your brain, mindfulness is training your brain, exercise is changing your brain, humor and social connection change your brain. Being values driven is having this purpose and passion and knowing your “why”. Basically, I liken it to when you’re in an ocean and you try to swim in a straight line, the tide will carry you off. So, you’re taught if you’re an open water swimmer, to aim for an immovable object like a buoy or a lighthouse. And so, I ask people, “What is your lighthouse?” Because your life is like the ocean, some days it’s sunny and beautiful and wonderful and other days you are getting sucked under by these waves that are crashing on top of you and it’s storming outside and it can feel like it’s untenable.

What is your lighthouse? What are you looking toward? What’s important to you? What’s your purpose? What’s your passion? Are you looking forward to a vacation or time with your family? These are all little, subtle things and you don’t have to do all of these, you just pick one or two and practice it. But they literally change your neuro-chemistry and your belief system and your beliefs drive your behavior and your beliefs can be changed.

I love that vision of shooting for that immoveable object as you’re swimming. I live near the ocean and we go to the ocean often and we’re out boogie boarding or something and all of a sudden, “Whoa, we’re not in front of the chairs anymore. We’re way down the beach.” Yeah, we’re way down the beach and so, like you said, the “why” and our values keep us focused on that immoveable object.

So, I will have challenging days. I’ve run my own business for the last eleven years. I’ve made films, I’ve written books, I’ve helped marketing clients, and there are just challenging things that happen but going back to, “Why am I doing this?” That is a very powerful tool that pulls me back out of whatever that funk is. Yeah, that’s good.

And what research tells us is that when we’re doing it just for us, we see the benefit but when we’re doing it for the purpose of making a difference or helping others, there is so much power in the way that restructures your brain. It releases dopamine and serotonin, really this idea of the helper’s high is real. When you do something for somebody, you get what’s called a “dopamine squirt”, and it sounds dirty but it’s not. But any time you do good and feel good, you are releasing this great neuro-chemical.

And so a part of resilience is not what happens to you, it’s your interpretation of it. So, would I have chosen to have a son who is going to have a really hard life? No. Would I have chosen to have a child who physically beat me and hurt me? Of course not. Would I have chosen to have a tumor in my face? No. But a resilience building strategy is once those are there, how do you make meaning of it? What is the unlikely gratitude that you can find in that?

So, I’ve spoken to millions of people and become a mental health advocate. I donate a portion of all my book proceeds to the National Alliance on Mental Illness here in central Texas. I really make a huge effort in all of my speeches, whether it’s for twenty people or twenty thousand, to really reduce the stigma of mental health. One in five people struggle with it and it’s time we talk about it. So, it’s not like I would have chosen these things but now that they’re here, what do you do with them? And that does not mean I don’t have my pity parties. That does not mean I don’t feel sorry for myself and want to have times where I just cry. That is healthy and normal and running from that is tearing down your ability to build that resilience muscle. So, it’s really been a fascinating journey and a lot of lessons.

Yeah, so many of the women that I work with, that story is so powerful. Victim or martyr seem to be the two most common.

Yeah, I always ask, “Are you a victim or a volunteer?”

Okay, yeah.

Because bad things happen but the way you choose to interpret those, dictate the way your neuro-chemistry responds to them. It’s very, very powerful. It’s not just touchy feely fluffy stuff. It’s proven, statistically research has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s something called “experiential dependant neuroplasticity”. And what this means is the more you experience something, the more imbedded in your neural structure that becomes. So, what do most of us do? Well, we ruminate on our day. We think about all the people that have slighted us. We get frustrated at the things that are not fair. At the new deadline. At the competing priorities. At the kid’s activities. And it’s normal, we’re human. But if we stay in that place, then we embed that so deeply into our neural structure. That worry, that anxiety, that becomes a habit, not a purpose of who we are.

And so, on my bathroom mirror I have a sign that says, “What do you want to find today?” And I woke up this morning and I said, “Alright, I want to find out all the reasons why I’m enough.” Because I can go through every day, and owning your own business there are thousands of things that need to be done and on any given day stuff falls from the sky and sometimes it’s overwhelming like I can’t keep up with it all. And so, today I wanted to find all the reasons why I’m enough. And I opened up my inbox and I had an email from someone who saw me speak a couple days ago in Dallas and she said, “You saved my life. I was going to end it and I had no idea that I could turn it around.” And so, that gave me goosebumps. It made me tear up. I wanted to start my day knowing I would find something that made me feel valuable and made me feel like I’m enough, and low and behold what was in my inbox? You find what you look for.

So powerful. As you think back on your childhood or kind of those growing up here, is there somebody that you remember kind of embodying these values of resilience?

I had a really interesting childhood. It wasn’t awful but it certainly wasn’t ideal. And when my mom, like I said, she was a court reporter for thirty years and at the age of fifty-one, she found herself divorced and alone and she not only decided, “I’ve always wanted to be a flight attendant, so I’m going to go for it.” And what I thought, I thought that was the reason but what I found out, I even said that in my TED talk. But what I found out is that she was terrified of flying. She was terrified of travelling alone and she didn’t want that to stop her, so she thought, “What better way than digging in and becoming a flight attendant?”

And so, she had originally intended to do it for just a little time but she loved it and she’s still doing it twenty years later. And to me, that’s grit and strength and resilience at its core. “I’m afraid, so I’m going to jump into what will make me less afraid.” And now she travels all around the world by herself. She goes backpacking in Europe and just trekked through New Zealand. To me, that was a really great model of, “You don’t have to stay stuck in fear. You can make conscious decisions to move past it but you have to be willing to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” and most of us don’t like to be uncomfortable.

Very true. Let’s talk about raising kids for a minute. You’ve talked about your son and your step-daughter, I believe you said. A lot of the women who listen to our podcast have kids that are maybe teenagers and older, so it’s kind of past those younger years. What would you suggest in terms of helping them cultivate resilience?

It is so, so important because our kids are under more stress than they’ve been under in any time in history. I thank God every day I was not raised in a time of social media. They are constantly connected. My daughter’s going to be a senior in high school and the pressure of grades and college and knowing what you want to do with your life. I mean, when she was in the eighth grade they were like, “You have to choose your track for high school.” It’s insane to me. And so, one of the things we do is we have a gratitude jar in our kitchen. And so, every day when she comes home, I’m like, “Alright, write down something you feel grateful for.” And when we started this activity, she thought it was the dumbest thing in the world. She rolled her eyes, she’s like, “Ugh, whatever.” And the next day she came home, she goes, “Okay, I went through my whole day trying to figure out something I was grateful for,” and I was like, “That’s the point,” to start your day looking for the right stuff.

Teaching mindfulness and mediation to your kids, if you can start it at a really young age and kind of make it part of who they are, that’s great. But even kids, like her high school teacher is now starting the class with a minute of deep breathing. It doesn’t have to be crazy. But the other thing is this idea, Carol Dweck is a great researcher, wrote a book called Mindset and it’s how you view failure. So, I think as parents we’re so afraid of failure and we’re afraid our kids will fail that we try to protect them from that and we’re stealing from them. We’re stealing their ability to develop resilience when we say, “Oh, you get a participation trophy.”

I was watching my two kids, they were probably about ten years old and eight years old and they were playing a game of Sorry at the kitchen table. My son said, “Ha-ha, you’re going to lose,” and my daughter was like, “No, everybody’s a winner. We’re all winning.” And I was like, “No, one of you is a loser.” So, it could be embracing failure as learning what not to repeat and, “Hey, I’m so proud of you for taking on this really challenging task even though you didn’t know if you could do it. Even though you failed, you stretched yourself further.” And kids who practice and cultivate this growth mindset, it’s a great book by Carol Dweck called Mindset. And we know that kids who cultivate this and view failure and obstacle as a challenge and not a bad thing, kids who view, “It doesn’t matter how talented I am and what my abilities are, it’s how hard I work,” those kids have great levels of engagement, higher test scores, better college graduation rates, less depression and anxiety, higher income, better social connection and relationships.

So, as parents, it’s like stop protecting our kids from failing and use it as a catalyst to help them get stronger. Practice gratitude. Make sure as a family you’re putting down your screens. The other night, I found – and I teach this for a living, and I found us all sitting around in the living room on the couch watching the TV and we were all on our device. That kind of stuff is really robbing us of connection and so many of our kids have so many virtual friends but they’re not maintaining the social connection and that’s a huge part of it; laughter, humor.

I think we’ve gotten as a society, really great about prioritizing our schedules. I think we have a lot of room to go when it comes to scheduling our priorities. If you were to track your time and your kids time for a week, would it be indicative of what you say is most important to you? Having your kids enrolled in twenty different activities so that they’re well rounded is not helping them if they’re not enjoying those twenty activities. Let them be in one that they love and give them time to play and relax and socialize. I think we’ve gotten into this crazy competitive chaotic world where we just place these expectations on people that are unrealistic and then we leave disappointed rather than being realistic about our expectations and then being pleasantly surprised.

So much good stuff. Alright, so we need more of this. We don’t need less of it, we need more of what you’re dishing out. I know we can go to your website www.annegradygroup.com, and that is primarily really for – you’re a speaker. You’re a professional speaker, you speak to thousands of people. If somebody’s looking for a speaker, obviously they can contact you for their business or non-profit or a keynote at www.annegradygroup.com and then all of your social media is there. But you also offer some resources on a regular basis, how can people get a hold of that?

So, I’m a speaker but I’m also a professional development trainer and facilitator. So, for example, I’ll work with clients like Dell or Starbucks and really help build emotional intelligence and implement personal influence strategies, and so it’s not just to huge groups but really collectively trying to build these skills. But if you text the word “STRENGTH” to 555888, you’ll get a plethora of resources.

I was just dying to use that word “plethora”. You’ll get all kinds of things. You’ll get this resilience self-assessment where you can identify some things that you might be doing to help yourself and some that might be sabotaging you. You can get a self-care sheet, which is basically a goal planning sheet. It’s the top six areas in our life and you can change the categories but it’s every month are focused on setting goals in the things that really matter to you? And you can get a poem that I wrote while in the Philadelphia airport for nine hours with a couple vodka sodas and I’ve got to say, it actually turned out pretty well. And then you can get a monthly resilience newsletter and that’s a routine resilience newsletter with tips, tools, strategies. And of course, you can join us on social because we post videos all the time and articles and interviews and we’ll post this podcast and all kinds of good stuff.

Alright, so all you’ve got to do is – this always confuses me when people say, “Text the word ‘STRENGTH’ to a number,’ because you don’t type in the word first, you type in the number first.

Yes, you text 555888 in your text message app.

Yes.

And then type the word “STRENGTH” in the message.

Yes, if you don’t know how to type the word “strength” or spell it, it’s S-T-R-E-N-G-T-H. There you go, I helped you out. And your life is full of resilience, you are making it. And here’s the deal, more than anything, you’re enough. You are enough. No matter if you saved that women’s life or you save a million people’s lives, you’re enough. Absolutely.

And so is everyone listening. We go through every day feeling inadequate – I think a lot of us do. And just know that you’re enough, you’re strong enough, you’re smart enough, you’re resilient enough and you will get through. The fact that you’re still standing is proof that you have resilience, now it’s just a matter of continuing to build it and cultivate it.

Some people may be laying down listening to this.

Well, the fact that you’re breathing.

There you go.

In everything you’ve survived, you can add to the database of things do not defeat you.

Awesome. Anne, thank you so much, really appreciate it.

Thank you, I really enjoyed speaking with you. 


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