#203: Eileen McDargh: A Learner Of Resilience

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling incredibly blessed in this moment. I suppose I start kind of every day in that way. I don't know that every day ends up feeling that way. I've committed more recently in the last couple of months to greeting the day with love in my heart and actually kind of made a bit of an addition, a plus to an old book by Aug Mendino called The Greatest Salesman in the World, where there's a particular chapter all committed, all sort of devoted to how you greet the day with love in your heart. But now I say I greet the day and I meet the day with love in my heart. And the meeting the day piece is really the key for me because I've kind of— I'll say it, I might get struck by something as my grandmother would say, but I've sort of mastered the idea of getting up and feeling grateful and greeting the day with love in my heart. That part I think I've got down. The more challenging bit is that somewhere in the middle of the day or some other point in the day, it could be 20 minutes in, you know, something happens that requires me to show up with more love. And sometimes I don't do that or I'm not sort of able to immediately pivot, to use that term a bit, and immediately kind of go with my heart. So this idea of meeting the day, of maintaining the day with love in our hearts is a big deal because at least for me personally, it helps me to feel more resilient and my body is more My mind is more resilient. My emotional state's certainly more resilient and it pays an amazing dividend. I feel really blessed about in this moment is that I've got somebody that's going to be with us today. I'm going to introduce her to you in just a second who has a tremendous amount of expertise when it comes to this concept of what resiliency looks like. What does it feel like? What is it in the world before pandemics, during pandemics, and I venture to say after pandemics? So I'll just quickly go through her bio and then we'll jump in as always. Eileen McDarg is the CEO of the Resiliency Group. Since starting her consultancy practice in 1980, Eileen McDarg has become known as a master facilitator and award-winning author and an internationally recognized keynote trainer and executive coach. Clients have ranged from global pharmaceuticals to educational institutions, from hospitals to the US Armed Forces. She's the author of 7 books, including her latest, Your Resiliency GPS: A Guide for Growing Through Life and Work. Her book Gifts from the Mountain won the Ben Franklin Gold Award and was turned into a training program featuring Eileen. Her newest book, which we're going to talk about today as well, is scheduled for release in August, which is just a little while away now. Burnout to Breakthrough: Building Resilience to Refuel, Recharge, and Reclaim What Matters. So great to have you on the show today, Eileen. Thanks for being with us.

Thank you. I'm delighted. It's a great way to start the morning. Grateful.

Well, my question to you is, what's not part of that bio? What's not written in that bio that you would love for people to know about you at the outset?

Oh, that's fascinating. I think what's not in that bio is my why. And when I say my why, I think that's a critical part of resilience. And when you lose your why, you lose your what. And by the way, I also teach what I need to learn. So as I'm speaking out loud to you, I'm speaking out loud to myself.

I'm familiar with that.

And my why. My why is that I believe I'm here on this planet to make a contribution, to help transform the lives of work and the work of our lives through conversations that matter and connections that count. But, you know, that is exactly what life does to us.

What I love about things like that, of interruptions, as she was saying, that things interrupt us in our flow, they interrupt us in life. And what do we do to utilize them? You know, what's the opportunity, the creative opportunity right there to utilize what's happening? So would you want to riff on that?

Sure.

Cool.

I mean, life happens. That's the whole deal, is that it's never a perfectly smooth track. And so when that call came in, first off, it startled me. And I will share something with your listeners, viewers. I wear hearing aids and it goes directly into my ears. That's why I asked you, did you hear that? And it's interesting, there are things that happen in our life that go right to our head and how we respond to what goes right to our head determines what the outcome is. So I almost said to you right then, I went, oh crap, this is terrible. And yet you have to take care of it in the moment. And to do that, I have to stop and breathe. And now let us proceed.

Exactly. How important is the breath to you? Because I saw that you went to your breath right there.

Absolutely. Well, I hope you think in the area of— I hope you can't hear that because it's going into my ears right now. The notion of breath is— think of all the ancient, you know, all the ancient wisdom. And meditation is all about breath.

Hmm.

It's what— when there's— and the notion of HeartMath, which we have the congruence between our head and our heart. When we have that kind of congruence— and by the way, the heart is also called the little brain. Our heart talks to our brain. And so when we can have that kind of congruence and what breathing does, instead of being shallow, which is what we do, You know, it's that centering. It's that coming back. So breath is incredibly important.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out Just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I'd love to just use this as a launching off point into resilience.

Okay.

Because as you said, things are happening all the time. Like the disruption of a cell phone in the middle of a podcast or some other thing is a— on the scale of magnitude, not on the scale of magnitude, right? It's a tiny, tiny, minor little thing compared to things that are going on in the world right now and have been for thousands of years. How is it that you look at things like that and apply your philosophy of resilience to them? Because even though it's a minor thing like a disruption, like the one we just were playing with, people are disrupted all the time. And both my own personal experience of it as well as seeing others is that it could take people out really fast.

Yeah.

Even a tiny little thing that's really not a blip on the screen can throw their day sideways, can take them out of their creative space, can get them into a place of— it can trigger anger or some other emotion. And when it happens several times in a day, it can really sort of move the needle in the wrong direction. And so when we think about resilience and things like minor, minor things, as well as major kind of distractions or changes, what's your philosophy about that?

Well, let me first define resilience for you, Adam.

Beautiful.

Because I totally disagree with the dictionary definition. And if I'm talking to a group and I ask them, you know, tell me what's resilience, inevitably they say, which is the summary of the very first statement in the dictionary, it means to bounce back.

Exactly.

Well, that's great if you're a piece of steel or you're a willow tree. It's not for the human system. There's no such thing, Adam, as going back. That's why it is when I hear people talk about, oh, we want the new normal. Get over it. There is no new normal. Instead of resiliency being go back to where it, quote, was, what I think of as resilience is the ability to grow, to grow through challenge or opportunity. So we end up wiser, smarter, better on the other side. So it's all about growth. And if I think about that, what allows me to move forward, whether it's an interruptive cell phone call or whether it's the fact that everything has closed down and I don't get to go and be with clients I normally, is how do I use this as an opportunity of growth? Ultimately, resilience is also about energy management. Think about it. In fact, that's in the book. Burnout is when the depletion of your mental, physical, emotional hardiness— it's depleted, it's exhausted, and like you said, it can go On a scale from 1 all the way up to 110. So what controls my energy, what either gives it to me or takes it away, is how I create connections. And the connections, first and foremost, are the connections in my head. We talk to ourselves all the time. So what are the connections I'm making here? And is it giving me energy or is it taking it away? And how do I get it back? I have connections with my heart. That's a huge energy base. I have connections when I think about my hands, which is what do I do? It's one thing to think, it's another thing to feel, it's another thing to do. So when I look at those connections, where is it that gives me energy? Where is it that depletes it? And our day goes like that. And the more I can learn to manage that energy, the more I can grow. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense. I mean, to reframe the definition to begin with, I think is really just so useful to people because that's what a lot of folks say. In fact, there was an article that I read about 2 months ago where they were interviewing a bunch of leaders, 15 leaders or something, CEOs, founders, that kind of thing, to ask them their definition of resilience. And what really struck me as a resilience speaker and an author on that topic, as well as yourself, were the diversity of definitions that they all had, the way they all defined it differently. And I thought that's really fascinating. But my own personal experience of people is that they define it the way you defined it at the beginning. If you ask, you know, just any sort of person on the street what resilience means, more often than not they will say it's the ability to bounce back.

Mm-hmm.

And there is something really, I think, worth looking into that this concept of bouncing back— back to what? There's only now and there's only what is in the forward. To go back to something that maybe didn't work, for example, I mean, think about what knocks us down in the first place are usually things that just weren't working well. And to go back to something that wasn't working because it represented safety or it represented the status quo it represented the normal that people were comfortable with, even if that was a painful comfort or a mediocre comfort. It's a really interesting distinction.

Mm-hmm.

But instead, to do as you said, to look at resilience as how it is that we grow. That's not about bouncing back. That's about bouncing forward, I suppose. It's about moving in the forward direction. So yeah, maybe it would be great for our folks to learn a little bit about why the topic even became important to you. As you said at the beginning, You're teaching what you most want to learn or in the process of learning. So maybe take us into a pivot story of your own and where it is that you may have learned resilience for the first time. And I think that'd be kind of interesting.

Okay. It's been like 19 years. I mean, doing— I've been doing this work for a long time, as you said, since 1980, which is amazing because I'm only 22 years old. So how that happened, I have no earthly idea.

Time and space collapse.

I became intrigued with resilience, frankly, here in the States when 9/11 hit.

Hmm.

And when 9/11 hit, and I'm not sure I would have used that word resilience before in my life, if I look back at it, I go, oh yeah, that was it. By the way, resilience is a life skill. It's not an in-time-of-crisis skill. It's a life skill that we build. So I would not have been able to put a name to it. But when 9/11 occurred, I looked at myself, I looked at my neighbors, my fellow citizens, and for us in the US, that was the biggest like, oh my God, everything stopped. All my work stopped. No one would, you know, they said, no, you can't get on a plane and fly. And of course, I'm going crazy. I'm saying, you need me, you need me. I'm not afraid. Take me, take me. I'm yours. We need to talk about this. But as I began to think about what is it that allows us in the face, in this case, in the face of this traumatic event, that will allow us to move through this. And so that's when I began my research, my writing, my thinking about this. And it was only over time that I realized it was also because it's the feedback that people give to me that that it is that transition of energy. And when 9/11 happened, you know, there were little kids on the street that sold lemonade and it was what they could do. They sold lemonade and the money was going to go to New York. The money was going to go to first responders. So they did what they could do in the face of something. And that was really important to me, that even as young as we are, there's something we say, well, how can I make a contribution? What can I do? The other thing that was fascinating to me when 9/11 hit was to read accounts Of people who had big jobs and big titles and to read where suddenly they said, you know what, in the scheme of things, this isn't important to me. And so people began to question this notion of why, what do I want to do if life is going to be what we take it is going to go on forever? And also we realize it's very short. So if it's going to be a short lifespan, whatever that looks like, what is it that I will do that is meaningful to me and meaningful to others? And so you saw people making some career shifts. Because of that. So that's the thing that kind of started me on looking at this journey.

Yeah. Events like that definitely cause reevaluation. And I remember, so before we started the show, I was sharing that my wife and I were on this little island off Cape Cod. And after 9/11 happened, our kids were really young. We have 4 kids and they were really small at the time. We were like so many people just sort of in shock. And it was sort of a month of being in shock going, are we really Is this where the world is and for our children and all that kind of thing? And we came to this little island to just the two of us at the time with our— we had lived next door to my in-laws, so they were happy to watch the kids. I love that. We got away, which is, you know, for folks that are in relationship, intimate relationships, really important to do that. And I recommend you do that now even, that if you can get away somehow. I know it's tough to get away, but even if that's a day, a week, whatever, To be alone with that person, I recommend it. We call this place base camp for us. We came here before we had purchased a house. We just came up and found a spot on the beach and a bottle of wine. And for a good long weekend, we hung out just together thinking about what was going on in the world and what was going on, you know, that would affect us as a couple, as parents and all that. And so rethinking at times, you know, I think it's a part of resilience. We have our own sort of a formula for it, having looked at research and seen the traits of resilient people. And I've got to consider just how important it is that you make time to actually just be still with what's happening. I don't think enough people talk about it. We talk about meditation and all that kind of thing, but more intentional stillness for the purpose of just being with the thing, the event, without hopefully trying to judge it, figure it out, or any of that. Because we didn't have anything to make. We couldn't make anything. That was the thing about 9/11. If you're living in the US and in particular in the tri-state area, we were living in New Jersey, I'm from New York, we had people who lost their lives in the towers. I mean, you just were in total shock. It was just a complete shock event. And I think the pandemic right now, I don't know how you feel about this, Eileen, but I feel like the pandemic is that kind of a shock event. Only unlike 9/11, see, 9/11 came very quickly and it sort of departed fairly quickly. Within 6 months, you know, we already figured out who our common enemy was. Everybody had, you know, sort of, we had rallied the troops. People were behind doing something and all that kind of thing. And then kind of the country got back to a sense of normalcy. I think this is different right now. It came out of nowhere. It caught everybody off guard, or 99.9% off guard. And now people are still in shock that this thing is still continuing and going forward. So I don't expect you to have answers about it, but you've been studying this for a really long time. And what do you tell your clients right now when you're doing a workshop? Like you, I work with corporations and we do these virtual trainings. And, you know, so what are you telling those folks to help them work with their workforce and help people just live a bit of a more grounded life in the midst of this chaos?

Well, there are so many different answers because the context is different for everything. So let me back up first. The difference between where we are now and 9/11 was 9/11 was really about the US. This is global. This is about us as a world. It's about us as a global community, which makes it very big. The second thing that is different is that I think because it's— you got the pandemic over here, but then you have all these tangential things that occurred, the economic downturn, the extreme social unrest, you know, stuff that goes on at some higher levels in governments. You're going, what the heck is going on? So what I think we have here, and it's what I would say to clients, And it's a hallmark of resiliency is being able to take an event and to— you use this word too, Adam— is to reframe it, to look at it differently. And let me give you a metaphor. By the way, I think metaphors are incredible teachers. In 1850, there was this massive storm that swept across England, huge wind and rain. 5 ships went down, all hands were lost. There was an Irish passenger ship that went down. Tremendous devastation and loss of life. 1850, when the storm finally abated, the villagers on the tiny island of Orkney, which is off the coast of Scotland, emerged. And there is a point in the— on that island that now is called Skara Brae. And what they discovered when they walked out was that the ferocity of the wind, the waves, the tides had literally taken off all the topsoil. And the villagers looked down and saw houses, intact houses, no roof, but intact houses. Those houses, come to find later, are older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids. So here's my analogy, which I think is the reframing. What we have right now has ripped away all of this stuff that we've just poured stuff over. Oh, this is the way we do stuff. This is the way we handle medicine. This is the way we talk about people. This is the way we manage our businesses. No, we can rip all that away. And now I say, what is my opportunity here to create the business the way I want it, my world the way I want it? Don't go, what is the opportunity? And I think we're seeing a number of organizations that people say, you know what, what's really important here? What do we do this? And even though I say don't, you know, we don't want to bounce back, there are some things that we forgot that we covered up in the essence of, quote, new. And now what we're discovering, one of the most important things we can do as an organization is talk to each other. Oh my God, what a novel approach. We can actually look in each other's eyes. I don't care even if it's Zoom, because heretofore I didn't see anybody. I just sent email out. You know, they're all in their little offices over here. Somebody's sitting on Massachusetts, they're all gone. No. So here we are. And what's that opportunity? That's how I take it.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid.

And if you're a leader, a business owner, or an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken.

And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

It's so wonderful when we're sort of working in our own little independent patch of land and tilling the soil and proud of things that grow in it. And then we discover that there's someone else in some other part of the world who's tilling a piece of soil and growing things that are very similar. And it's a reminder. I think Socrates said that all learning is remembering, which to me in many ways is just so wonderful Because we're constantly being reminded of things that in many ways is just, you know, there's a humility in it and there's also a great understanding of how just as what you said earlier, that there's so many connections. So connections between us start with the fact that when we're talking about resilience and the traits and the way that you produce it, the first thing we always start with is the reframe. The reframe and not just the reframe but the reframe to see the creative opportunity, which is what you just brought to life.

That's exactly it. I mean, look at some of the things we're seeing that you never would have thought. I just saw something where they were talking Talking about because it's a source of— it is a source of burnout, is the remote workforce, and you feel alone. One of the things this organization is doing is when, quote, the workday is over, they do board games together via whatever format that is. It probably would be Zoom or whatever. And so they're seeing each other. They're having virtual happy hours. There's another company that in the morning when they bring the team together, they have— it's called— it's a brewtiful morning. B-R-E-W. Brew coffee.

Yes.

It's a beautiful morning. So let's start off with saying what's beautiful about this morning and then what is it we need to do today?

Yes.

So there's

just— What a great moment for reimagining things.

It is.

We talk, there's so much talk and sometimes a bit of, I don't call it empty talk, but just, I don't know, lip service to the word innovation in many ways, I think. And what this kind of disruption does is it creates innovation, creates the opportunity for innovation at a level that That is really deep, not just surface-level stuff. So thank you for sharing that. And you're a, among other things, author. I want to talk about the new book in a couple of minutes. Public speaker. So obviously, if you're a public speaker and travel throughout North America or the world— Used to. Used to, right? My question to you is, what do you make of this situation? How are you maintaining your own business resilience? In the midst of what probably you haven't seen since 9/11 in the way of, like you said, hey, don't get on a plane, don't come here because there's nobody to come here to at the moment.

In the area of, and you know this, Adam, in the area of presentations and training and stuff, it's totally shifted. And I think for all of us who are in this kind of industry, it's number one, we first were like the deer in the headlight and this will come back. So it is a different world in which we have to operate. So I'm learning. That's what I'm doing is I'm learning, you know, everything from, okay, like we got on today is, okay, how's the audio sound and how's the lighting and what's it look like? Because, you know, quote, technical things that you never thought about before. The other thing is I'm seeing some people that their idea of virtual training is I can put on— maybe they can go to a studio and look at all the different virtual backgrounds I can have here. And one minute I'm on top of the Rockies and the next minute I'm standing in Barcelona and, you know, just sit. And for me, and this is just what I am choosing to do, is I want to have more and more conversations with the clients. I can do, quote, the seminar, the training, but we have to involve in it a lot of conversation and interaction. So for example, this Tuesday from 6 to 8 at night, because I'm in California, I'm doing a 2-hour program for the International Coaching Federation of The Philippines. So we'll have folks from Manila. That's why the time zone is different. But what we've structured it in this 2-hour, which is based on the book, is yes, there's a lecturette, but there's breakouts, there's conversation. They're going to talk with me. And so that's what I think is different, because in the old world, if I were standing and speaking to X amount of people, there wasn't that dialogue back and forth.

Right.

Now we're going to create that conversation.

Yeah. And what a great opportunity that is to create a meaningful conversation. Whereas in the old paradigm or different sort of a paradigm that we may never see again, it was just more of a talking at people. I'm not sure not everybody kind of that was their style. I'm more of an interactive speaker myself anyway, but it's still less of a conversation when you've got 500 people in a room and you've got 45 minutes to wow them and get them in a different headspace or have them thinking and create a shift. There's not a whole lot of time And space for that conversation to occur. But this way it is different. It's giving us another set of tools for dialogue. So very meaningful. I want to get a sense as well. So the book that you've got coming out, Burnout to Breakthrough, it's going to be out in about a month. Tell us about that book and how long have you been incubating it? Did you start— did you actually change it based on COVID? I know you were late in the editing stages probably at that point.

Well, actually, okay, my book is coming out through Barrett-Kohler Publishers, who actually published Gifts from the Mountain. And the idea for the book came as I was being asked to speak about resilience. I would say in the last 2 to 3 years, in almost all the cases, the context for exploring resilience was about burnout. And in March of last year, I addressed 5,000 pharmacists, the American Pharmaceutical Association Or pharmacists, excuse me, Pharmacists Association. And it was using resilience to overcome burnout. Now I've got pharmacists. They're the ones that when you go to your local drugstore, they're behind there. They're also in hospitals. And when 5,000 pharmacists stand at the end of a presentation, they weren't standing for me, Adam. They were standing because what they got were ideas and hope they could use. Wow. It wasn't about me. It was about— they saw some things for themselves where they could take some personal responsibility back. And right after that, in May, was when the World Health Organization finally declared globally that burnout was an occupational hazard. And I thought, you know what, I need to write this book. This was not the book I intended to write. So if you think about this, now it's May, so we're just a little over a year. I put the proposal out to Barrick Kohler. They accepted it in August of last year. So here it's— we're coming around now. It's going to be a year by the time that book is out. Final manuscript was due in December. I turned it on. Who knew that by the time we got to February and March, the world would look very different? So to answer your question, because this is through a mainstream publisher and I asked, could I write a foreword? Could I do— he said, no, you can't. It's a process. You know, they have this process.

Yes.

And he said, you know, if you do that, it'll date the book. And the hope is that the book will have a long lifespan. I said, okay. So what I find myself now doing is in my writing, which could be blog posts, could be my ezine, in the conversations, we will build in, I will build in what's happening now. What the book does is it provides a process, first off for defining and really looking at what's the global issue, where do you find yourself? Then it looks at what are the triggers, what triggers me personally? That can push me into this place of burnout. Then what is it that happens organizationally? Because the things that organizations unknowingly or knowingly do that push people into this place. And then it goes back to the person and what is it? And it's going to look at those connections. What is it I'm saying up here? How do I reframe what's going on here? What is it? Who are the people I'm connected with that are absolutely taking the energy away from me? Who renews that energy? You've got 4 kids. Sensing that those 4 kids, when you are together, it fills your heart. And you must do okay with your in-laws because you live next door to them. Fills your heart. There are people that drain our energy. It's so— it will look at all— it will look at all of those points and give people a process and a series of questions to explore that. So that's how I'm taking into account what's happened now, the whole thing. But using that, people can use that book as a process. I just had— actually, it was someone who was within the pharmacy industry. They have a book club. Oh, that's great. So, they're going to be using this book for their book club, which means that then they can gather via Zoom, whoever wants, and they're going to talk about what they've uncovered about themselves and what they do as an organization. So, that's kind of it in a nutshell.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy, It's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will help you to be resilient. and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. You're in presale now. So our listeners, they know this well, that the show notes that are included here will have a link to buy the book or to find out where they can buy the book. So the show notes will have all that information as well as information more about Eileen's current work and where you can find out more about that from her. Eileen, I have one more, well, 2 more questions. First, I'm going to ask you the question, but then I want you to dive into the why. So do you love your life?

Do I love my life?

That's the question.

Yes.

Okay. There's no right or wrong answer, but I'm glad to hear you say that. Now, why do you love your life?

I did this for someone else. Well, I woke up this morning, you were on my mind. Now, I have to say, I did think about you, Adam, because we're doing this pretty early for California. But I woke up this morning. I have another day. I've been given a day. I am incredibly blessed. I have the most amazing husband and family in the world. We've been married for 40 years.

Hmm.

He is the love of my life. I have incredible grandchildren. And I have— because I've been given this day, I've been given one more day. That I can learn. I'm always learning so much I don't know. I can write. I can talk to you, Adam, and through this be able to talk to the people who follow you. So yeah, I love my life. And even when it's been hard, I wouldn't trade any of it because each experience, sometimes as difficult as can be, brings me to a different place now.

What a great way to define resilience as well, what you just said. I think that question is a tough one. I was surprised actually by some of the response to my TED Talk a couple of years ago where the premise of it was, what would it be like to love your life no matter what? And that was the question I posed to the audience that day. What if you decided to love your life no matter what? We're in no matter what times. We've always been. But now it's obviously for so many people that kind of a moment where, as you pointed out, being given another day is so vital. I mean, I normally do this at the end and I don't want to— I'm not going to end this way. So this will be a change in the format of the show. But at the moment that we realize that we've woken up for another day, may not be a great day, maybe a day you got to go to court, got divorced, got a bankruptcy, got a— I don't know who. So many things happening in people's life, a funeral. I mean, it could be anything, right? And yet the moment that you take that breath and you realize you've been given another day, it's a blessing. It's a blessing. There are people who are taking their last breath in that very same moment. Yeah. So you can be grateful. And I think that's just the mustard seed, you know, from the Bible. The mustard seed is just such a powerful concept. Something small, tiny, tiny little thing can make us a great person. My grandmother used to say, a little gem, a little thing makes a big difference in the world. And gratitude at the beginning of the day is just the right seed to plant to see something else grow. I wake up, I feel that gratitude for a moment and I put my feet on the floor and I say, I love my life. That's sort of my morning mantra. That's why I say I know how to greet the day with love. What I'm learning more and more is how to meet the day. Can you meet the day with love? Can you love your life when you get a kind of a shitty email or— Or an unexpected bill or a gig that you had has gone sideways. They canceled it or whatever. A million little things in business that can just go as unplanned. So my last question then for you, Eileen, and by the way, before we get to that, just the reminder that I would normally end the show on is for everybody to give that a try for yourself. This kind of transformed my way of being about 12 years ago. I was a lawyer for 18 years. I used to wake up in the morning and more often than not, the feelings I had were anxious. Angst, even anger sometimes that I was doing what I didn't want to be doing and I was doing it primarily for the money. So I felt like a sellout as well. No amount of success, by the way, no amount of money can erase that feeling inside when we feel like we're not who we're supposed to be. We kind of feel like a fraud. So to replace that feeling in the morning started with that mantra, I love my life. It didn't start with my changing my career path. I continued to be a lawyer for many years or several years anyway. After starting that. But as I began to shift that beginning of the day, other things began to shift. And a couple of years later, reinvented my career path as well. And that's what that book Pivot's about. So my recommendation is you try it on for size tomorrow. You think about what Eileen has said here today and what she just said a moment ago when I caught her a little off guard, I would say, with the question. And she got in her heart immediately and just answered, you know, about the things she feels blessed to be A wife and a mom and a grandmother and a leader and an author and all those things. There's a lot to be grateful for. So I recommend that you all give that a shot tomorrow morning and see what comes out of your mouth when you start your day with gratitude. Last question for you, Eileen, is really about rituals. I'm a huge believer in that we have the quality of our lives very much related to the quality of the rituals that we maintain. So what's one ritual that you maintain to produce resilience for yourself?

Well, the first thing that I do besides your regular ablutions when you get up in the morning is I go back. Number one, you don't look at email, you don't look at the news, you don't do any of that stuff. That I meditate for 20 minutes sitting there in bed. And I have— there's a mantra that I use with mala beads, which came from when my husband and I trekked the northwestern quadrant of the Indian Himalayas about 12 years ago. And then there's a book called Celtic Benedictions Being Scott-Irish, and it's just the 7 days a week. And so there's morning prayer, there's evening prayer. I use that and sit and be quiet. So that 20 minutes, it's an important ritual. And I, you know, I just say, let me get out of my own way and just pay attention to what's asked of me. And then I have to throw this out because it's really important, even though I didn't get to do it today. I do go outside. I go outside and I run. But let me tell you one of the things that I run and I say when I run, and you will resonate with this particularly because you just said— it's a poem that Mary Oliver wrote and it's called Why I Wake Up Early. And it's— it'll take a minute if I say it to you. Can I say it to you?

Please.

Okay. So she says, hello sun in my face. Hello you who make the morning and spread it across the fields and into the faces of tulips and nodding morning glories and into the windows of even the miserable and the crotchety. Best preacher that ever was, dear star that just happens to be where you are in the universe, to keep us from ever darkness, to ease us with warming touch, to hold us in the great hands of light. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Watch how I greet the day with happiness, kindness. And this is the word I added to her prayer: gratitude.

Hmm. That's beautiful. I want to— that's the period at the end of this beautiful sentence we created together today. Eileen, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. And folks, if you've got a comment or a question for us, please feel free to go ahead and leave it at adamarkel.com/podcast. And you can, of course, subscribe. Hope you will subscribe and listen to more of these episodes. And I'll say, as my grandmother would say, till we meet again.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.