Being The Picture Of Resilience

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. 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, and 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 an another episode of the Conscious Pivot podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell and you have me in the seat today. You have me in the seat today. It's a funny way to begin. I'm alone. I'm going to do a solo cast for just a little while here. I got a couple of things in my mind. I figured why not sit down and share them? In fact, my beautiful beloved wife Randy was just reminding me that some wonderful things that are going on in our lives are definitely things that are probably going on in a lot of people's lives, things that we're working on. And there's never a bad time to just share those things, I think. And this is the perfect moment. So I am grateful as I am more and more just noticing my gratitude, probably because I'm giving myself some space these days to feel gratitude that may not sound so profound. And yet as it, as I'm saying it, I realize just how important that is, that there is actually space made in our daily lives. In the busyness of daily life, we don't always have space just to even feel, to feel ourselves being. And what could we be more grateful for than to be? It's the essence of everything. Without that, we literally do not exist. So I am grateful as I sit here feeling grateful for my body and my health, well being. We talk a lot these days. I speak on stages as a privilege to be able to do around the world. On the topic of resilience, often we speak about how we create resilience and that resilience isn't something we're necessarily born with. Although some people may think that the research bears quite differently on that topic. That we are able to learn resilience as we grow and that our experiences are constantly giving us the opportunity to change that. Our brain is the computer, if you will, it's the hub, it's the tower, you know, the air traffic control tower of our beings and our brains. Unlike what we may have been taught when we were younger, that sort of old dogs can't learn new tricks or old brains can't change. That's just nonsense. All the research is clear on this, that neuroplasticity is the word that describes how our brains actually continue to evolve and change, especially when we're aware of it ourselves, that we are giving our brains time to adapt and be adaptive to new information, to new experiences, that that's part of how we. We remain able to change, that we can train ourselves to be more agile and more flexible and more able to adjust to the changing conditions of life and the experiences in our business, in our personal lives. That these are all opportunities for us to actually continue the evolution of our brain, to train our brains, in other words, to make use of the things that are happening and to be able to then respond to them as opposed to being in a more of a constant state of reactions. Space is wonderful because when we have space between stimulus, between things that are happening in our experience and what we do about them or how we interact with them, that that space becomes very creative. And then we're moving from reaction to response. And why that matters is that in that interval, that space between our, our. What would be our reaction to something and ultimately a more thoughtful approach to it, that that space becomes a way for us to make better decisions. It allows us to be more focused and to show up in a more. In a way that we don't regret. I don't. I don't know how else to put it. I think a lot of times our reactions lead to guilt. They lead to going back and wishing we could redo things, that we could change how things went or how we, how we were involved in, you know, the decisions we made and, and where we could have done better. Universally, we make better decisions when we have more time to think and to create clear plan for how to respond. And that could be a breath. I mean, when I think of what space looks like, space doesn't have to be I need a day, I need a week, or even an hour necessarily. Sometimes it's just the space of a mindful breath, a mindful moment that can be a game changer, literally in whether we've made, you know, written something to somebody or responded verbally or done something else, taken an action in reaction mode, or whether we, in a mindful moment, in a breath or longer, were guided to a different type of response. And that just makes all the difference the world in our results. So I'm fascinated, as you can probably tell, with how the brain is able to change, how it is that we can create new neural pathways and where brain science and brain science research has taken us in understanding the value of mindfulness, practice of meditation, of things that. That have been part of the spiritual world, more particularly Buddhist practices and other metaphysical practices that have been sitting in the arena in the area. In the silo, even of what we call spiritual, and where those things overlap in other areas of our lives that we have segregated or kept siloed as apart from that, like business and being an entrepreneur or performance and innovation. Things, things that are in that realm that you wouldn't think are directly correlated and related to things that we would otherwise think of as spiritual or religious or ritual in nature. So resilience is a topic that's just so important these days because we want to go the distance. And the distance to me, has no end. I love to say I want to live to be 120. I don't. I don't even want to put a cap on it. 120 would be a great number, but 150 be even better. If my brain and my body and all those things were constantly regenerating. Why. Why is. Why wouldn't it be possible? Is it possible? Here's a question for all of us, for the brain to regenerate the cells of our body to the point where we actually stop aging, we even get younger. What's to say that's not possible? The brain is the supercomputer of supercomputers. And. And there's no reason why, based on everything that I'm reading and thinking and feeling, that we. We couldn't. That our brains couldn't, in fact, accomplish that task. First and foremost, if we thought it was possible, and secondly, if we were actually treating our brains in. In ways that allowed that resource, that, that supercomputer to just do what it's capable of doing, we have really no. No outer limit to what the brain might be able to create. And so I put it out there. It's a question. I was inspired to this conversation last night. Randy and I were out with some friends at a incredible, totally amazing, incredible club being corrected in my language right now from words. The conversation in my head is one where my daughter says, why would you say something's incredible now? We use that term all the time. But language talk about being able to pivot in our language. I'm looking at that word and thinking to myself, yeah, why would I say something's not credible. Incredible. Just like something is unbelievable. You know, we routinely will say, oh, that's unbelievable. And yet it's totally believable. It's totally credible. So we were out at a show last night to see a guy that I was first introduced to when I was about 19 years old in college. I was on the swimming team, and my swimming coach had great taste in music. And he mentioned this guy. And I was sort of listening to music back then and thinking, wow, I've never heard anything quite like this. Hadn't been really trained in the blues. Blues music. A lot of music education growing up from my dad. But John Mayall was not somebody that my dad was listening to at the time. And so I had no understanding of his music until my college swim coach introduced the Turning Point. Incredible album. Breathtakingly different and innovative and just like fusing jazz and blues and rock. And, I mean, it was no wonder that John Mayall was also a guy that played with Eric Clapton and in a project called the Blues Breakers. And some people said that the Blues breakers album with Eric Clapton and John Mallow is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, blues album ever created. I don't. I know that I've listened to enough variety of music to be able to make that statement, but I'll just say John Mayall rocks. And he's just, like, tearing it up at age 86. We went out to see him play at the Belly up last night, and this man is 86 and 86 years young. He's standing behind the keyboard. He stood for the entire show with his band behind him, like the most rad group of musicians, eclectic group of musicians behind him, a bassist, drummer, and ridiculously just tearing it up. Lead guitarist. I mean, this woman had a set of pipes, was singing backup and also did a number of songs on her own. And on top of that was just shredding this Gibson and this beautiful old guitar. And he stood for the entire show. He. He played the keyboards. He played his own electric guitar. In taking a few licks and lead and playing the harp. This guy was just in hands on the keyboard, harp in his mouth and the lungs. That at 86, to control that harmonica and the sounds that he was generating and his song as well, just singing and hooping it up and smiling and laughing with his crew. It was just a picture of resilience. That's what Randy said to me last night. Look at him take a picture of that man. That's a picture of resilience. And so I wanted to get on. This podcast is a tribute to the whole concept that we can create resilience ongoingly in our lives at any age. You can model and be A picture of resilience, that our brains are neuroplastic to our intentions, that if we want to get younger, we can get younger. We want to stop that process of aging so that we can continue the projects that we are so passionate about in life. Whether they are personal projects or they are, they're entrepreneurial or they're something other. We just have the capacity, we have the ability to train and retrain and utilize our brains to get after those things at any age. It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever too late. And John Mayall is the testament to that. I can only imagine the life that he has had just through the 70s. I mean, to be standing is one thing, to be alive is one thing, but to be doing what he's doing on stage. And I, by the way, just say this, it was a, it was a packed house. There wasn't any room. This man filling, filling that space and, and he was moving better and singing better and had better energy than a lot of the people that was sitting. You know, like people were just, just sitting, you know, a little bit of an older crowd. It was some younger folks in there too, but folks had to sit in a seat and others were standing and they weren't nearly as spry as this 86 year old blues icon, Mr. John Mayall. Check him out, go on YouTube and find some of his music. And if you can go locate that epic album, the Turning Point or the Blues breakers with Eric Clapton, then you will be transformed and transfixed. So I happy to be in the seat, gonna sign off from here by reminding us all again how blessed we are to be here and to have this moment together and to be alive and breathing as we know it's absolutely true that in this moment, as we're taking this breath, doing whatever it is that we're up to now, that there are people taking their very last breath in this moment as well. And so our hearts are with them and we can acknowledge just how sacred this moment is, how special it is. And that's something to appreciate. And I appreciate all of you, I appreciate you for being loyal to the show that you, you've given us feedback. We love the fact that you're, you're still engaged and getting value out of it. And we'd love to know more of what you think and more of what you'd love to see and hear and experience through this conscious Pivot podcast. And I wish you just the best of days, the best of lives, and I hope you love your life more than anything else. I hope you wake up in the morning and you. You put your feet on the floor and you feel gratitude and you love. You love your life. You love life. And if you're not willing to love your life right this moment, maybe just appreciating your life, being grateful for your life, and appreciating life itself, Life itself. All those things are possible. So I'll say ciao for now, everybody. Have a beautiful rest of the day, the evening, the afternoon, wherever you are. Ciao.

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 this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcasts for more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love love. Join our Pivot community on Facebook at pivotfb.

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