Episode #9:

Sustainability Part One: Resilience

With the US and the world at large going through a crisis, this is the perfect time to introduce a four-part series on the subject of sustainability and making it through tough times. I don’t want to only focus on the effects of Coronavirus in this episode, but I know that for a lot of people, that’s where your focus is at the moment and it’s bringing up a lot of worry about the future.

The first part of this series will focus on resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficult experiences – something we need as a society at the moment. I want to talk about how we can manage our minds in a way that allows us to be as helpful as possible to the rest of humanity right now, and I’m also sharing how I’ve used thought work to get me through some of the tough times in my life.

Join me on the podcast this week to discover how to strengthen your capacity for resilience, what characteristics resilient people embody the most, and how you can embrace the discomfort of any situation and prevail as a guiding light for yourself and the global community.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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What resilience is and why we need it now more than ever.

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How our resilience capacity actually expands during difficult times.

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The times in my own life that have shown me the importance of resilience.

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What thoughts and characteristics resilient leaders embody.

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How to lean into the discomfort and vulnerability required to develop resilience and face these challenges head on.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Check out more episodes of the podcast here!

TRANSCRIPT

People who have resilience innovate. They become creative during these times. They rise to the occasion and they see the opportunity for growth and connectivity and the chance to move humanity forward.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, where women learn to love their lives. Do you find yourself frustrated by society’s expectations? Looking for practical advice on how to discover your talents and level up your life? You’ve found the right place. Here’s your host, US News top doctor, robotic surgeon, and certified life coach, Dr. Susan Crockett.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast, with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number nine, Sustainability Part One: Resilience. This episode is dedicated to my Cynthia Angel, who has been through it all, most of it with me.

Hello, my virtuosas. Hello, hello. I am your host Dr. Susan Crockett, and as always, you can call me Sue because I’m not being your doctor here. Being your doctor, was that right grammar? I’m sure somebody will tell me. But anyway, you can call me Sue because we’re podcasting and having girl talk here.

And we are in the middle of the US uptick on the Coronavirus pandemic. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about that today. I don’t really want that to be the focus of our talk, but I do think that it sets the stage for where we are today.

So, I am at home. We are not quite on lockdown, but restricted movements for sure. I am sitting here with my doggies with a fire in the fireplace because it is 48 degrees and rainy in Texas after being over 80 degrees this week, and it’s supposed to be spring break, so what the heck, Texas?

The blue bonnets are having a massive year. They’re blooming like crazy. And what’s another fun fact? By the end of the show, I’m going to tell you all something about something that all need more than toilet paper. I know you’re not going to believe that, especially after seeing the shelves and the grocery store racks this week. But believe it or not, there is something that each of us need more than toilet paper at this time.

So, in today’s show, we’re starting a new series. I’m doing a four-part series, and this is part one, if you’re just joining us. I’ve just finished an eight-part series on the transformation tool and what it is to be a virtuosa, which is a woman of excellence and why we want to be here doing this. So, if you missed any of that, feel free to go back and listen to the earlier episodes.

But today, we are going to talk about part one of sustainability, or making it through tough times. And the topic we’re going to talk about today is resilience, which is something, y’all, I know more about than I care to know about.

So, the four parts are going to be resilience, tenacity, diligence, and legacy. Today is resilience. We’re going to have a lesson with an exercise, which is always fun. I’m going to give you some homework and something to do to keep this in mind and help you build your resilience over the next month.

And our giveaway, the Virtuosa wireless earbuds giveaway, it’s happening. Yes, I’m so excited. I got emails and reviews and you all are amazing listeners. And I’m going to give two pairs of our Virtuosa wireless earbuds away at the end of the show today. So, stay tuned and let’s get going.

So, let’s talk about the definition of resilience. Resilience, according to the dictionary, is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness. The other way to think about it is the ability of a substance or an object to spring back into shape; its elasticity. Kind of like rubber bands.

So, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. We are going through some difficult times, y’all. We are going through times like I have never seen in my lifetime. And on this podcast, we are going to talk about how we manage our minds and our thoughts so that we can be the most resilient and most helpful to the rest of humanity.

Because here’s the thing; I believe in the resilience of humanity. I believe that we can do tough things and that we will get through it, and not just get through it, but be better as a human race on the other side of it. I believe in the capacity of us as people, as the humans, I believe in our ability to get knocked down and get up again.

So, I’m going to start with a story that was written in a book by a physician named Ira Byock. And he’s a physician and author on palliative medicine. And here’s the story he tells in his book.

“Someone once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered, a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in an archaeological site 15,000 years old. Why not tools for hunting or religious artifacts or primitive forms of communal self-governance? Mead points out that for a person to survive a broken femur, the individual had to have been cared for long enough for that bone to heal. Others must have provided shelter, protection, food, and drink over an extended period of time for this kind of healing to be possible.

What the great anthropologist Margaret Mead was suggesting here is that the first indication of human civilization is care over time for one who is broken and in need. And she evidenced it first through the fracture of a thigh bone that was healed.”

Y’all, that’s some good stuff. We need that sense of community and taking care of each other and healing each other’s fractures during these times. Not only do we need it if we’re the ones with the broken thigh bone, but we also are the ones that need it if we are the ones doing the healing, if we are the healers or the caregivers.

We all need each other and we all build each other up as humanity through times like this. And we’re going to talk a lot about that today. We’re going to talk about not just resilience, but our capacity for that, our capacity for that as humanity.

So, capacity means how well are we able, how fast are we able, in what sphere are we able to bounce back and to heal from an injury or a bad situation? And what I’d like to suggest today is that through these times of challenge, we actually build our resilience capacity. We grow ourselves as humanity and community through these experiences that we share together.

So, I’ve had a lot of hard times in my own life. A lot of you may not think that – I know sometimes people look at me and they’re like, “Well, she’s a doctor and she’s got a family and amazing kids and cute a cute little doggie who sits behind her while she podcasts and life is always good.”

And the truth is, life isn’t always good and I’ve been through some, Y’all, I’ve been through it. And as I look back on my life and the events that have shaped me, what I’ve seen is that each event that I’ve gone through, I’ve had different abilities to bounce back from.

Some of my hard times I’ve carried as hard times for a very long time and I took a really long time to learn the lessons of resilience. And as I’ve gotten older and recognized it and practiced the thought patterns of healthy resilience and growing that capacity, I can see myself moving through those challenges a little bit easier.

So, each time we go through a test or a bad time, whether it’s Coronavirus or losing a job or a financial crisis or a health issue, no matter what it is, as we go through that test, we flex our muscle and we have an opportunity to either build our resilience capacity or not.

So, examples of challenges where I’ve had to grow resilience or learn resilience in my own life; residency. Oh my gosh, like, the hardest four years I will ever have gone through in my whole life, hopefully. Childbirth, divorce, I’ve had a failed business, I’ve lost patients. The hardest one that I’ve been through so far was actually the unexpected passing of my ex-husband about three years ago, the father of my children, whom I had been married to for about 21 years.

What happened when he passed away of a massive heart attack and was gone in an instant, there was no preparation for it. But I was in the middle of building a business and taking care of kids and life, you know. Life was in the middle of all of this. And I was hit with grief that I just, y’all, I was completely unprepared for this.

We had been divorced for five years, six years, something like that. And we’d been through some hard times and I was totally unprepared for the depth of the grief. And yet, I could not stop life. Life still had to go on.

I became the executor of his estate. I had all this new responsibility and legal stuff and bank accounts and all the things to deal with. And I did not have time to go see a psychiatrist. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go sit in a counselor’s office. I certainly didn’t want to take medication. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking medication when you need it for depression. I’m a total advocate for that. But I knew this was grief. I knew this wasn’t depression. I knew I didn’t want to medicate it away.

And it was about that time that I came across Brooke Castillo’s life coaching. And she has a program called Self-Coaching Scholars, which is amazing. And I enrolled in that. And over the next 10 months, learned how to look at my mind, manage my mind, work through my issues and became so impressed with the methods that we used that I thought, wow, this is something that I want to be able to give back to the world.

So, that’s part of how this podcasting came about, was this is one way that I’m able to give back for the lessons that I’ve learned and I can do it for free. So, the interesting thing about the way her program teaches life coaching is it’s not telling you what to do or accountability or a coach like you would look at a sports coach. It’s teaching people to look at their brain and their thoughts and their mind and giving them tools to manage it. And that’s exactly what resilience is.

So, resilience actually is something that’s more available to people who are curious about their own line of thinking and behaving. This is a quote from Brené Brown in her research about resilience and vulnerability and shame.

So, when I came across that quote, I thought that’s exactly what the skillset is that I’ve learned to go through this last episode of challenge and to grow my resilience capacity. Because now I have a much greater capacity than I did before going through the tragedy.

And so, when I set out for this podcast, I didn’t realize I was going to be teaching on this, this soon. But the purpose, the mission statement for the podcast is for us to learn to manage our brains so that we can have a happier healthier life and live it with intention and on purpose.

With this lesson of resilience, it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about our thought and our brain management. And I was reading out of Brené Brown’s book called Rising Strong. And she lists three characteristics of resilient leaders, so I’m going to share those with you real quick.

So, first, they recognize the central roles that relationships and story play in culture and strategy. They stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. So, part of me talking with you in this way is – and sharing my stories with you and hearing your stories is part of developing that resilience in each other.

And I want to encourage you to stay curious about my emotions and thoughts and behaviors, but mostly about your own as you go through and think about resilience in our lives today.

Second, she says they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And then third – and this one I think is the most important and probably what I’m going to talk about most of all today is they have the ability and willingness to lean into discomfort and vulnerability.

Y’all, how many of y’all are like, “I am out. Do not make me lean into… what are you talking about?” But this is exactly what we need to do and it’s exactly what I’m going to teach you today about being able and willing to lean into the discomfort and the vulnerability, to move through the tragedy or through the suffering and the grief that’s going on to get to the place on the other side of joy and increased capacity and healing and a better humanity.

So, let’s talk a little bit about that. What does that mean, leaning into the discomfort and vulnerability? It means looking forward to the challenges, having courage. And this is what life is made of.

Life is not all just happy and bubbly. And everybody wants to think that a lot of coaching or thought work is about just being happy all the time. And that is not life, my friends. Life is 50-50. It’s half great and half sucky. It takes courage to recognize that and see life and to be aware, as we’re moving through both the good times and the bad, leaning into the challenging times and awakening just to the aliveness or the fullness of it, the moments that we’re living in, the challenges that we have, the people around us, how we’re feeling, how we’re thinking, how we’re moving forward through it.

So, I’m not talking about leaning into or reveling in the suffering itself. I was talking to some of my friends this week, as a matter of fact, that as a physician, I think the hardest thing for me about seeing this tidal wave of viremia coming at us is the anticipation of grief and suffering, and, as an empath, how I take that on and to be able to manage that and grow my capacity to be able to care for people and move forward without that weighing me down.

So, we don’t revel in the suffering itself. But we can lean into the suffering that’s happening as a thing that helps us learn about ourselves, learn endurance, build character, and build our resilience capacity. And that, my friends, that takes courage.

So, each of us has a choice to make when we’re faced with challenges this week. Some of us have challenges because we’re healthcare workers or first responders. Some of us have different kinds of challenges, being homebound with kids trying to homeschool is like, “Oh my goodness I am so glad that my kids are older than that and able to self-manage their schoolwork.” There is a challenge. How do you lean into that kind of suffering?

Some of us are challenged because we are worried about losing our jobs or our finances. And I want to encourage you that we are all going to get through this. We will get through this to the other side. We will figure it out. We will increase our capacity. We will weather this storm together.

And I’m going to encourage you to open your eyes and look at hat we’re going through, not from a position of fear or panic, but from the wonderment of what is happening around us, the curiosity of how your brain is handling it. Because when we are not resilient, when we’re not in a place of building our capacity, what we do is the opposite of that.

We have shame or withdrawal or fear or embarrassment. We have a tendency to disconnect and isolate or dwell in confusion. We may have grief or unforgiveness and staying mad and holding grudges. We may have depression. We may buffer, which is to drink or eat substances or spend time in movies or Facebook or other things that are keeping us away from our relationships and our life in a negative way. We may avoid or altogether quit.

Those are all thought patterns of choices that I’ve made in the past, that when I’ve been faced with hard times, that I know are not building my capacity. And they don’t serve me at all. They keep me stuck. They keep me from being able to move forward. But we need to be aware when we’re choosing that, and we also need to be aware that we have a choice to move forward and through the challenge to the other side.
So, I had a little story about this, this morning. I was on Facebook. I was doing a little buffering myself on Facebook and there was a post by one of my dear old friends. He posted about, like, what was your first hobby? And without really thinking about, I was like, “Music.”

And I posted a little GIF of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon where he’s playing the piano. So, he posted back, he posted, “You’re a totally class act. Never a flaw.”

I looked at it and I thought, I think he meant that really sweet and kind. And then I thought, you know what, no I just don’t always show my flaws. I was taught not to be vulnerable growing up. I was taught to be a perfectionist and I got really good at not showing my flaws. And so, I thought, you know, I did not have very much resilience growing up.

I was a pretty sensitive soul and got my feelings hurt and withdrew and had a lot of difficulty with not being right or having flaws exposed. And I replied back to him and I was like, “No, it’s just that I remember being three and we had this beautiful baby grand piano and my mom wouldn’t let me touch it, so I remember begging her to play it and she finally gave me piano lessons for my fourth birthday, so that’s what I meant by it.”

But being able to tell that story, even though there’s nothing shameful or embarrassing in that story, but being able to relate to people with vulnerability and story is part of what I’ve learned in my older years, in my resilient years, or my more resilient years I should say. And part of what I want to encourage you to – and I don’t mean storytelling like having no filter and bearing everything in your life. But begin able to share yourself with others and communicate openly with humanity, especially as we’re going through challenging times like this is super important.

Okay, so what are the thoughts that people have who are good at building capacity for resilience? They are open and curious and vulnerable. They’re questioning. They can see the good in the midst of the bad. They can see the blue bonnets even though the Coronavirus graphs are all over the place with horrible curves on them.

They can see the good either coming out of the tragedy and the problem that’s happening, the bad situation. Or they can see the good of it in spite of it. People who have resilience innovate. They become creative during these times. They rise to the occasion and they see the opportunity for growth and connectivity and the chance to move humanity forward.

And that is what I’m offering to you today, is the chance to look around your world and instead of just seeing all of this with eyes of fear or badness, quote unquote, which is just a thought, is to consider having different thoughts about what is happening in the world and what your place is in it. Maybe as a healer, maybe as an innovator, maybe as a storyteller or some other form of leader.

So, the other thing that Brené says about resilience in this book is that the concept of spirituality has emerged from the data as a critical component of resilience and overcoming struggle. So, she crafted a definition of spirituality that I’m going to share with you here today.

It’s that it’s recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to one another by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection that power into one another is grounded in love and belonging. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.

Okay, y’all, so let’s step back just a minute from this because we all have our own religious upbringings, whether we were raised Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Atheist, whatever else, Hindu, whatever else your religious upbringing is. That is different from spirituality.

Spirituality is based on your inner core knowledge about your relationship with whatever you call God. So, I’m going to use God because that’s the theology I was raised in. So it resonates with me. You can substitute whatever you want. You can substitute the universe, the creator, whatever makes sense to you.

But it’s this belief, this deep spiritual belief of our interconnectedness and love, which is so important to learning to build resilience, which I think is fascinating. It crosses cultures. It crosses religious doctrines. It is talking about what we had talked about in a podcast earlier about the oneness of humanity, about how we are all one organism, even if we can’t see each other, even if the little toe can’t see the hair on the left side of my head.

So, if we take spirituality in this way, our everyday experiences become spiritual practices. So, taking the time to take care of my staff and make sure that they’re okay is a spiritual practice. Taking care of having food available for my family and enjoying the time that I have together with my kids at home right now is a spiritual practice. Podcasting and being able to talk with you like this is both a privilege and a spiritual experience.

I bet you have other examples of spiritual practices that you can think of. So, rising out of struggle and having resilience demands the foundational beliefs of connection, community, and humanity.

Alright, so that’s our lesson for the day. Now, we’re going to talk about an exercise to help you think about this during the rest of the week. I want you to picture a rubber band wrapped around your thumb and your finger. And I want you to stretch the rubber band and I want you to feel the tension in it, feel how it pulls into your fingers. Feel how it wants to snap back. Feel how it’s got energy in it. Feel how it’s cutting in and uncomfortable.

And then I want you to gently release your fingers. Don’t shoot it across at your coworker or your brother or your whatever. Just gently let it bounce back to its normal self. Feel that release and that relief. How does that physically feel to you? That’s resilience.

So, resilience is going through this period of tension and discomfort and being able to hold it and sustain it, knowing that we’re going to get to the other side and we will bounce back and we’re going to be even better than we were before because we’re building our resilience capacity. Now, a rubber band can’t do that, but we can.

So, I want you to think of a time that you got knocked down, and maybe that’s right now. Maybe you feel knocked down right now. Maybe you’re worried about your job or money or your health or your loved ones or the whole of humanity.

And I want you to think about, during that time that you got knocked down, I want you to think about how you did or did not demonstrate resilience and the thoughts that go along with that and where the opportunities may be to choose different thoughts and develop that resilience.

I bet some of you are in the middle of a knockdown that happened long before this. I see patients, lots of times, that carry the loss of a loved one or the grief of a divorce or the bitterness of a separation, like years beyond when it happened. And they haven’t developed that spring back yet. They haven’t developed the resilience capacity to have moved through that process. They’re still in the middle of that process.

So, if you’re in the middle of one of those processes right now, I want you to consider choosing the thoughts that you could use to move you to build your capacity and your resilience and move onto the best version or the next version of yourself that has a bigger capacity instead of being stuck there.

And then I’m going to challenge you this week to go on Amazon, because none of us can leave the house, and buy a pack of 100 rubber bands, and I want you to start building a resilience ball. I want you to start with the first rubber band in the middle, and every time you catch yourself having a positive resilience thought or a thought about building your capacity or creating or helping humanity or all those good thoughts and ideas that I gave you about the things that characterize resilient leaders, I want you to wrap another rubber bad around your ball and I want you to start seeing your resilience capacity grow.

So, what I’ve shown you today, so today I’ve taught you the first tool of sustainability, which is resilience. This is something that you can use over and over in your life, but is really important for us to learn about and to grow at this moment.

I started to tell you a little bit of my personal story about coaching, how I ended up in it after my ex-husband passed away very suddenly. And I wanted to tell you what happened with the rest of that.

So, I went through and healed and was so impressed by it that I decided to go and become certified as a life coach through The Life Coach School, which I did back in September. And so, six months ago, I started working on building Virtuosa Coaching, which in the outro and intro for the podcast, you’ll hear us mention that. That’s the online site for coaching.

And I added that as – I was building it way before this happened. I was building it because as I see my patients struggling with life, whether it’s weight loss or grief or anxiety or stress or all those things, I realized I didn’t have a great tool in my clinic and I’d come across one.

And so, I started building the coaching practice as something to offer my patients who needed more help or wanted to go deeper with this than just listening to me on the podcast, which is awesome. But if you feel like you need someplace to turn to or talk to or somebody to help you manage your mind through all of this, there is no better gift that I can think of giving you than teaching you these principles here and then providing incredible one on one private coaches for those of you that want more help.

And at the beginning of this podcast, I told you I was going to tell you the secret of what we all need more than toilet paper at this time. And that is a life coach. We all need help managing our brains through this time of trial. I am so excited about continuing to meet more of you and hear back from you through my email. And I’m just really grateful for you listening in.

Speaking of listening, this is what I’m listening to and reading this week. So, I kind of gave you a little foreshadowing earlier in the podcast. The song for this week Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. It’s one of my favorite ones. The lyric goes, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never going to keep me down.” That one. Go listen to that on YouTube or download it, whatever.

And then the book that I chose for this episode is a book called The Choice. It’s from the New York Times Bestseller List a little while back by Dr. Edith Eva Eger. This is what Oprah said about it, “The Choice is a reminder of what courage looks like in the worst of times and that we all have the ability to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to pay attention to what we still have.”

And I thought that was just about perfect for today’s episode on resilience. And speaking of looking at what we have, we get to do an ear pod giveaway. And I’m excited. We’re giving away those little wireless things that aren’t AirPods but they look like them and they say Virtuosa on them.

So, our two lucky winners from the drawing this week are Amy and Mary-Kate. Congratulations. And I’ll be sending you an email to get your mailing address and thanks for connecting and listening.

So, next week, we’re going to continue this series on sustainability with the second topic, part two, which will be on tenacity. And I hope you’ll all join me for that. The podcast comes out every Wednesday. And in this next week, I want you to practice your newness of awareness, of resilience. I want you to practice your thoughts of leaning into the challenges of the coming week, actually looking forward to those challenges.

I want you to have courage and hopefulness. I want you to have those things instead of fear and doubt. And I want you to watch your and our collective humanity resilience capacity grow because love draws a bigger circle, my friends.

Okay my virtuosas, that’s all I’ve got today. To celebrate the launch of the show though, I’m going to be giving away a pair of virtuosa wireless earbuds. Each week for the first four weeks of our podcast, I’m going to be giving away one pair to a lucky listener who subscribes, rates, and reviews the show on Apple Podcasts.

It doesn’t have to have a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides tons of value for you. You can visit virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch. That’s virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch to learn more about the contest and how to enter.

You can also take a peek there of a picture of these beautiful ear pods that will encourage you every time you use them that you are on your way to becoming your own virtuosa. Okay, my virtuosas, have a wonderful week, love always, Sue. And I will see you next week in episode 10.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. If you want to find out more, come check out virtuosacoaching.com. That’s virtuosa - with an A - coaching.com. See you next week.

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