Don’t wait for hardships to build resilience

- This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - I want to kick it off by hearing a story from you about a time when you found some resilience and how you found it. - Well, resilience is one of those things you don't find until you realize you need it. And in my case, my journey started with my son, Evan. So, Evan is now 16 years old but when I was pregnant I knew something wasn't right. He would like, kick me so hard I would just fall to the ground. My doctor joked he was going to be a soccer player. He cried all day and all night and when he was 18 months old, my husband left. And so, I was a single mom. I had just started a consulting career. Couldn't not figure out what was wrong and it just... Things continued to escalate and when he was about three years old, I know this is unbelievable but he tried to kill me with a pair of scissors. And he was on his first antipsychotic by the time he was four. By seven was inpatient at his first psychiatric hospitalization in Dallas. By 10, he was hospitalized again and at that point I got diagnosed with a tumor in my salivary gland that resulted in the right side of my face being completely paralyzed, which two days later scratched my cornea and was told by my doctor that my face probably wouldn't recover and I needed to have a gold weight implanted into my upper eyelid and a stitch put into my bottom eyelid. And I needed to do that before I started six weeks of radiation. So the weekend before my eye surgery, my husband and I went to Vegas, he had recovered from a motorcycle accident. And we went to Vegas and I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my foot in four places. And then he fell off a ladder, breaking his arm, ribs and hip. So, it's just kind of been a constant state of needed resilience. - Yes, that is quite a lot. - And my face came back by the way (chuckles). - So, that's a lot, wow. And tell me, how did you find the resilience, the power, the courage, the gratitude, the something to keep on going such that you've been able to get to a good place? - It's fascinating. My background, I have a master's degree in organizational communication and similar to you, I spent 20 years in the organizational development space. So, training in professional development, communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, productivity, lots of soft skill type training. And then after everything that happened, I got contacted by a couple of different TEDx organizations wanting me to speak for them. And the topic of resilience was really what they were curious about. They had heard my videos and seen me on YouTube or read articles. And so they wanted to hear about my story. And I had never told the story before in terms of resilience. I had told it in terms of... I was having opportunities daily to practice what I was teaching because of my situation with my son. And once I started digging into the resilience research in 2014, I realized that there were some things that I was doing naturally to build resilience without even realizing I was doing them. And there are things that I was not doing that were really hindering my ability to build those habits and skills. And so I started pouring over the neuroscience. I've studied the brain since Evan was born, trying to understand how to help him and I have learned a lot along the way. But then I started geeking out on all of the neuroscience resilience, it's incredibly powerful. And it's one of those things that most people think you have to wait until you need it, to develop the skills. And it's exactly the opposite. These are skills and behaviors and habits that you can proactively cultivate so that you have 'em when you need 'em.