The Day I Learned About Resilience : S2 E7

Join Desireé in Episode 7 of Season 2, as she uses her trips around the sun to throw encouragement around like confetti!

In Episode 7, Desireé continues the journey to living your best life by talking about resilience. She tells a story about the day she learned about resilience and how that day has impacted her ever since. She opens up about how to grow in resilience and in the end gives 3 incredible keys to building resilience in your life. This compelling episode will call you into action and get you on the road to success!

Topics include:

• Conversations we all need to have (7:11)
•  What exactly is resilience? (9:27)
• 3 keys to building resilience (11:31)

Follow Desireé on Instagram and Facebook
Support the show and keep this podcast fueled: Buy Her a Coffee
Visit Desireé on her Website

Transcript

Desireé Melfi Bozzo: 0:06

Ciao and welcome to Life out loud. I am your host Desireé Melfi Bozzo. We are going to use this space to share experiences and help you find lasting unshakable unwavering unmessable-with joy and gratitude. We're going to be throwing around encouragement, a little bit like confetti and giving you support to live your very best life. Ciao friends, welcome to episode seven of season two of the Life Out Loud podcast. I am as always your host, Desireé Melfi Bozzo. We are nearing the end of our journey together this season. It truly has flown by. And I also kind of can't believe it. As we get to the end of this roadmap for really great living, I want to talk to you today about three keys to building resilience. So you can get a little closer to living your best life ever. So sometimes full disclosure, okay, here's a little secret about myself. Sometimes when I'm driving alone, without kids, without a husband without anybody in the car, I pause from cranking up the 80s music as loud as the speakers will go. And I actually drive in silence completely alone with my thoughts. Do you ever do this too? Like turn off the ringer. Turn off the notifications on your phone, maybe even like, throw it into airplane mode like that undistracted. Turn down the music and the podcasts and the talk radio, and get really present to your soul and your thoughts. I'm not gonna lie, it can be a little scary being alone with your thoughts. In total silence with only the hum of the road to greet us. We're forced to look at things that sometimes, sometimes the noise of this world can drown out. Recently, during one of these little, I don't know, road meditations, if you will, I started thinking about my creative side. And if any of you creatives are out there, I think this will resonate with you. So there's this thing that happens to me. And it's this pull that occurs in me that if I don't get my thoughts out on paper, like if I don't get my thoughts out in writing, or my creativity on paper or canvas, I feel like I'm gonna die or my soul will implode or I'll like spontaneously combust or something. Maybe weird if you're not a creative, but I have a feeling all the creatives out there kind of get me on this. Like, I started thinking, as I was thinking through all this, where does this need to write and communicate this creativity within us? Where does that come from? And when did it begin? So as I ponder this thought about, like, why I write and why I create this memory actually pops into my head, and this little road meditation, if you will. And as if it were yesterday, I'm so vividly transported back to the moment. I am in the third grade, and we are making a collective art class project. I don't remember why I don't remember the point of it. I just remember making this project as a class as a group. And I still remember where I was sitting. I remember the smells. I remember the sound of the room. I don't recall, like I said the purpose. But I remember I was drawing mountains. And these, like I literally close my eyes, I can picture it these zig and zag and they were like they were big and they were bold. And there were these tall peaks and these low valleys. And it was colorful, it was vibrant. I use bold colors like nine year old me found it beautiful and artistic. And I remember I still remember that moment feeling like maybe for the first time that I was putting like my heart in what I was making like it was this like, moment of pure self expression. And I remember sitting there drawing feeling so proud of my work as I drew and colored my masterpiece of the moment. I remember a teacher she wasn't my teacher she was one of the other teachers was walking by like looking at everyone's work and she came to where I was working and I remember she was standing kind of over me because I was down like we were on the ground and she looked for longer than she did at anyone else's and I still remember my little self saying like, I must have done a really, really good job like this is really good, right? And I could feel like that confidence welling up inside me. And I felt so proud of what I had created. And then this, this lady, this woman's teacher, this human, she opened her mouth. And she said, the most soul crushing thing. I remember the moment she said it, I felt my heart just sank to my toes. She said, it still remember voice. She said,“that is just terrible.” And I remember feeling like that feeling when the blood just rushes out of your face. And I remember my face turning red. And I remember like other students starting to look my way. And my face that could feel was getting redder and redder. And then she continued like it like she should have just stopped there. But she continued, I remember her saying, “you've really ruined this whole piece of class art.” And the weight of her words, they hung in the air and that moment, a couple things happen as I look back on this. So as an adult, looking back on this, number one, A, don't ever, under any circumstances do that to a child or an adult, for that matter. It's, it's gross, and it's rude, and it's disgusting, and it's hurtful. So A. Number one, B number 2. I wish so many times, I wish so deeply that I could go back and take little girl Dez’s face in my hands and look her in the eyes and tell her that that lady's comment had absolutely nothing to do with her and that beautiful art she created. And that lady's comment had everything to do with her own judgment and her own inadequacy than it did about those majestic A F mountains. Now, I want to stop here for a second. And sidenote, a very wise woman, my sister once told me that sometimes, sometimes we do need to have those conversations with our younger selves. And sometimes in those conversations, there's healing. And I just wanted to share that in case anybody has any moments like this when they want to go back and like tell their younger self something, flip the flow on a story, if you will. So I'd like to say, I brushed off that awful moment as a stupid comment. But my nine year old brain didn't brush it off. Instead, I internalized it because that's what we do is nine year olds, right? We think everything is all about us and for us and on us. And I don't think at nine we have the understanding to know that that lady's comments probably weren't about me and my art at all. They were about her own stuff, right. I remember what the moment did to me. The moment hindered part of my unbridled ability to live a life fully self expressed. It made me second guess myself for a really, really, really long time. It made me think twice about me. Somewhere along the way, by the grace of God, I realized that that way of thinking was a lie that I believed right. It was a horrible lie. And it kept me small. As I did the work dismantling the lie, I realized it is more important to live a life that is authentic and truthful than anything else in this includes being creative, right? I think back on what prompted me to remember the story because we all have these stories, like I think if we get quiet enough in our soul will remember these stories, right? If we flip the flow on these stories, if I flipped the flow on this one, maybe that teacher didn't hinder me at all, maybe her thoughtless comment was the fuel to this fire in my soul that makes me need to create. I go back to that question from the beginning. Where does this come from? Right. I think the ability to be resilient, I told you that story to get to the point of resilience, the ability to be resilient is really one of the most important skills that we can learn. Resilience is the ability to get back up after setbacks. It's to rise after we fall. It's not always easy, and it's not always pretty, but it is necessary. Life is going to blindside us, life is going to kick us one more down. The ability to be resilient is going to keep us moving forward. There's a study out that tells us that current college students are the first generation we are seeing where the skill of resilience is on the decline. I want you to sit with that for a minute and try and get present to the implications of this. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine a world where humans don't know how to be resilient. I don't know. I can't think of a world where they don't know how to get back up after setbacks. I can imagine a world my son is gonna grow up. And if we can't collectively change this trend, what is our world going to be in 20 or 30 years when a generation of adults don’t know how to be resilient? When they teach college athletes the skill of resilience, I have them put together a plan for strengthening it - a tangible thing that they can lean into when life happens because life is going to happen. I wish third grade Dez had one of those plans. I would have realized that instead of internalizing the shenanigans that that teacher was throwing around, I could have turned to someone I could have looked at my thoughts with this lady's thoughtless words mean, right, what did I make them mean? I could have learned to push what she said aside and not gotten tripped up by it for so long. All these years later, as I teach the skill of resilience, there are so many great ways to incorporate building the skill in our life. And I want to offer you three that I really believe are keys to success. The first one is to keep good company, Jim Rohn told us that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. So I want to ask you, who's keeping your attention these days? Who are you spending time with? What kind of conversations are you having? Friends, it matters. The people we hang out with, we become the average of. I don't know about you, but I don't the kind of people I want to be the average of one. Of my favorite quotes of all time and you can borrow this“sit with warriors, the conversation is different.” Friends, when I read that, I felt that and I hope that you felt it when I just said it. Keep good company company that pulls you to another level company that has your best interest at heart company that goes to battle on their knees for you, company that sees you the way God sees you. In turn, be that company, reach back and lift up others trying to get The next key to building resilience is to think about where you are. what you're thinking about. So after we pay attention to the company we keep now we need to think about what we're thinking about, we need to pay attention to our thoughts. I know I've said it before on my podcast. But it's really worthy of repeating what you focus on you find. I've spent a lot of years focused on one person's terrible opinion of my art. If I say so myself. It sounds so very silly. But I let her words define my ability to be creative for a long, long time. Friends, that's bananas. To grow and resilience, we must stop believing the lies, we must focus on the truth and what is real. What was real in my situation was that she just didn't like my art and she had really, really terrible way of telling me Poor her. I didn't realize it at the time. But I would move on majoring in art in college, creating art having my art showcase in an exhibition, halfway across the world in Rome, eventually getting jobs where I was literally paid to create art. I wish at the time, I would have had the wisdom to realize that it's okay, I am not for everyone, and neither is my art. What about you? Who out there needs to hear this? What are you thinking about? What lies are you believing because someone offered a terrible unsolicited opinion. We get to change what we think we get to change what we made things mean and we get to design a new narrative for our lives. Friends, I encourage you to think about what you are thinking about. And the last key to building resilience is to proactively move toward your goals. This one isn't as easy to do in real time as it sounds, but I do think that it is the simplest. Proactively be an action. So what we do here is we take the goal and we work backward to get it done little by little by little. When we proactively move toward the goal we're able to gain momentum. When we gain a little momentum, it multiplies more and more as we move forward. The force of our proactive choices keeps us powering forward. When we can proactively move toward our goals we can then push everything else It isn't the goal to the side and not get tripped up by it. Proactiveness it pushes us and it grows us. It gives us self confidence it strengthens resilience. So my friends, there are three keys to building resilience in your life. Keep good company. Think about what you're thinking about. Proactively move toward your goals. How are you going to apply this in your life? And what actions are you going to take? If you want someone to walk alongside you as you build better lives, message me on my website life out loud.me or on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. I am taking on some new clients to walk alongside and teach them tools to live unwavering, unshakable, unmessable-with lives. Friends, I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Come back next time for the last one and let's throw more encouragement around like confetti. But be careful. If you get too close. You just might get some on you. And remember friends there is always always always something to be thankful for. Ciao. Thank you for joining me Desireé Melfi. Bozzo for this episode of Life out loud. I would love to hear from you. Leave me a comment. Tell me what topics you want to talk about and how you take your coffee. If you enjoyed what you heard, text a friend the link share it on social media. Or if you're interested in becoming a supporter, be-bop over to my webpage life out loud.me and sponsor a cup of coffee that keeps this podcast fueled. Until next time sweet listeners!