How To Get Through Hard Times (2 hour class!)

We're in the here and now. Take grace and connection with the moment for yourself. We've all had pain. We've all had sadness. We can allow the moment now to refresh us. A moment now to have a new feeling, a new emotion, a new sense about ourselves, a new belief about ourselves, a new faith in ourselves, a new faith in the world. Right now, this is a new moment. And with new moments, there's second chances. And with new second chances, there's new abilities to begin anew. But even if we don't begin anew, to allow ourselves the peace and the grace of the moment. Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard. We have an incredible session for you here today. Thanks for joining me this morning for a very important topic as we discuss some of difficult, difficult topics of life. Those topics of loss, of grief, of dealing with tragedy, difficulty, struggle, loneliness, of how do we carry on when bad things happen, how do we find strength and grace and peace in some of the most difficult situations and moments of our lives? That's a big topic today, and I know it will probably be the least participated topic that we usually get. Anytime I say we're going to talk about, you know, something related to something like this, a lot of people I'd rather avoid that session today, Brendan, But I'm here to tell you we can discuss life's most difficult things still with peace and joy. And that's hard, and that is difficult. And arriving to that space is no joke. And so today, tough topics. I know that we'll be taking on some sensitive topics today. So I encourage you today to enter and frame this conversation in your own mind, to develop your own mindset and attitude towards these conversations before we even have them. Because that is one secret, in fact, to dealing with difficulties of life, to set our minds in advance, to set our intentions in advance, to think through and contemplate. How will I cope with that? How will I face that? How will I endure that? That ultimately is one of the great strengths of consciousness, of presence, of intention, of anticipation that allows us to deal with some of the worst issues of life. And so we're going to do that together as a group here, set our intentions of let's have a difficult conversation about the difficulties of life, of loss, of grief. But from a perspective that we're going to step into our strength from a perspective, we're going to set a positive mindset, to have a beautiful conversation, you know, because sometimes when I say, well, I'm going to talk about, you know, many of, you know, I've been on stages around the world, and I always, you know, talk about my car accident or I always talk about the death of my parents or family or friends or clients or the difficulties at hand, the tragedies might be going on in the culture at that very moment that I'm literally speaking on a stage to hundreds or thousands of people. It's always something I know can hook a lot of people and can trigger a lot of people and can set you in a place of, like, uncertainty or fear or just a bad feeling. And so what I've always thought of as a speaker, as a trainer, as a coach, is like, let's set our mindset up front. Let's not wander into this conversation surprised by it, but rather say, what a beautiful conversation we get to have about what's important in life. What a beautiful conversation we get to have about people who we miss. What a beautiful conversation we get to have about people that we will potentially lose in our lives. Or what a beautiful conversation we get to have about the times in life where things don't go right and we lose other things. Because this is not just a conversation about loss and grief in the traditional way that many of us go to. We think of loss and grief of, oh, just losing a person. But. But loss and grief applies to a lot of areas of life. Collectively, a lot of us are experiencing that. A loss of a way of life, loss of the normality of life can bring on grief. Many people around the world are experiencing a collective sense of grief, a loss of way of life, a loss of a certainty because of how we felt before in terms of our health or our safety. And when we lose something, it brings up unpleasant emotions. And the secret to coping and enduring and building a great life is learning to understand, be aware, accept, move through, and navigate unpleasant emotions. You want the secret of life? I'll tell you what the secret to enjoying life. A lot of it has to do with how do you manage and navigate unpleasant emotions. Notice I didn't say get rid of them. So today as we talk, you know, we're talking about some. As I'm. There's no doubt that when I'm talking today, it will bring up emotions. And not just for you. For me, too. For me too. And so I want to bring up this idea with you right off the bat. Let's frame this intention to have a beautiful conversation. Got to get high fives across the board here on this one. So let's have a beautiful conversation, an honoring conversation, a meaningful conversation. Because we can talk about life and death and tragedy and just incredible times of discouragement and shock and sadness, but we can still do it from a place where you are right now, you're in a safe place. We're in a safe environment here. We're in a place where we can have a conversation. And whatever conversations we're going to be talking about, in some ways, whatever situations we're talking about, there's a degree of removal, a degree of detachment that we're not there right now as an example. I lost my father two nights ago, 11 years ago, you know, so this is always a tough week for my family because, you know, we miss him. And there will always be that part of us that, you know, has to deal with the emotions that come up. And I'll talk with you how I approach that, but also talk in general, because some of you have experienced a loss, again from loss of certainty because of you. Maybe you were in a relationship and that relationship ended, or maybe your life used to be like this and then you got laid off, or maybe life used to look like that, and then, you know, you got sick, or you were divorced, or the job got changed, or the project, you know, or the rug got pulled out from underneath you and. And things suddenly and shockingly shifted on you. And it's in those times that we're introduced to unpleasant emotions and incredibly difficult emotions and feelings like grief. And so today I'm not just talking about my dad. I'm not just talking about, you know, the dozens of friends I've lost in my lifetime already or the dozens of emotions that come up every time I think of the dozens of mentors of mine who have passed away, or the times that I've. In my life, I've spent, and a lot of it, in hospice care, helping and serving. I'm familiar with these topics, but also share with you. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm nothing that ends in ist that I'm aware of. I am a person who spends his life in the trenches with people trying to help you improve your lives. I'm not a qualified medical professional or a psychologist in any way. So I'm not going to speak from that perspective. And if you sense that you need that support, you hear me say it so often. If you need therapy, if you need professional assistance, never feel bad about getting it, especially in some of the topics we'll cover today, because I can do so much work with you here in our two hours together. My friends, I can't cover everything right. And healing doesn't usually happen in a two hour segment I'm sure you're all aware of. So let's enter this as a community positive to have a beautiful conversation. Let's do it from a perspective of knowing that we're going to deal with some unpleasant emotions that might come up. And let's face that willingly with trust and faith and gratitude. Because I'll share one thing that's beautiful about loss and grief, and that is you only experience those things and feel those things. If you had something and you were connected to something that you enjoyed, something that you felt was important, something that was beautiful, something that was meaningful to you, and so you had a sense of meaningful connection, something maybe shifted or changed, but that was a beautiful gift. And so today I approach our conversation with reverence. I have great respect for each of you and I know inevitably, with as many participants as we have around the world, you are experiencing or going through a loss. And so right off the bat, I send you my love, my prayers for my family, our condolences and our honor and our respect, knowing that many people are going through incredibly difficult times right now in our community here too, you know, it's inevitable when you do work like this. Lots of people are going through a lot of big struggles. And so let's be respectful and caring and compassionate with one another in our chat. And let's do the work today. Let's do some. Let's do the work. Let's do it. Let's jump in willingly to have a beautiful conversation today. I'll be sharing five principles with you that I've seen over and over and over again in hospice care, over and over and over again in coaching clients who've lost family members, over and over and over again in coaching people who've experienced loss of any kind, literally loss of physical mobility, loss of family members, loss of job, loss of business, loss of their sense of self, and the grief that comes along with change. We're talking about five things that I believe will help if I can. I do want to set the stage a little bit more too, because I probably have a different perspective about this conversation that many of you have heard about. You know, and I know I got a lot of questions in advance. Are you going to talk about the five stages of grief? And no, I'm not. If you've studied Elizabeth Kubler Ross or the work or the ideals behind the five stages of grief, if you haven't heard of that work before, the idea that there's these five stages. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'm more of the mind of which, that of Elizabeth's, who came up with that idea and wrote about that so compellingly towards the end of her life, she mentioned that she wished that it had never been framed as stages, because as she wrote about and spoke about towards the end of her life, as a theorist and a person who had given hospice care, she thought, you know, I wish everyone didn't think there were these stages you're supposed to go through. You know, some of you, you feel like you're supposed to feel great by now. You feel like, well, I should have moved through these stages. I should be okay by now. And some of the greatest moments of grace that you ever allow yourself in life is the grace of time, the grace of allowing, like every single person here, if you look at what we're doing here, every person here will cope with grief differently, right? Everything I'm going to share with you today is just by nature going to be a generic nature. Everyone will cope differently. And if you're still struggling through and you think, jeez, I should be in the stage of acceptance by now, you know, I want to let you know, the person who literally came up with the idea of the five stages of grief wished it wasn't called stages because she thought everyone deals with it differently. It's not sequential. These things become circular in time. And not everybody feels all of these emotions either, Right? The people who I've lost in my life, I've never yet had the sense of anger toward. I didn't have a sense of anger that that thing happened. I didn't have anger towards my father dying. And I know that might sound completely crazy to people, but that wasn't an emotion that I experienced with death, partially because the way that I have faced mortality throughout my life, which we'll talk about. But not everyone goes through all these stages. So I want to set that frame off the bat. Everybody copes differently. There's no right or wrong way to experience loss. There is, however, a healthy way to re engage life. We know from 50 years of psychological study, and you all know it inherently and innately, that there's ways that we cope that are healthy and there's ways that don't make us feel good. There's things that we do that can lead to less ability to continue on with life in a happy way. And so we'll talk about some of those too. Here's the way I believe that we can deal with this well and I'm going to start with a couple different ideas before I'll tell you when I get into the five principles for the day. I'm just framing things up for today. One of the most important and powerful frames I can give you for loss and grief above all else and above everything else is conscious anticipation. Conscious anticipation. Consciousness or awareness in life is so important if we are going to cope well. And what we usually mean when we speak about that, especially with loss and grief, is having the ability to anticipate that it will happen, okay, that it will happen. That if you haven't faced your own mortality and your own death yet, I deeply invite you to do that at some point. It doesn't have to be here during the two hours right now. But I want to encourage you face your mortality, your own personal mortality. Most people have never had a conversation about death, their own mind with themselves, let alone contemplating that maybe they would lose a parent one day or a sibling one day, or a job one day. In other words, in a spiritual practice, we would talk about this as a concept of awareness to impermanence. You've heard that phrase before, awareness to impermanence, that nothing is permanent. That in a lot of spiritual principles you might think of, well, what is permanent maybe is if it's God or if it's universe or it's the dao or the way that there might be something spirit that is permanent. But in the human experience, in our natural world, things are impermanent. Can you face that? Can you face that? Can you anticipate that? Let me switch metaphors for you real quickly. As many of you know, I do this for a living. I talk to groups of people all the time. I'm out on social media all the time. And I talk with so many influencers, so many people who want to be leaders and who are building up their brands and their careers. And they're shocked, shocked when someone judges them on the Internet. They're amazed when someone posts a negative just mean comment. They can't believe it. Can you believe this person post this mean thing on my video? I spent months on, on my life's work, I posted a message that's beautiful about my family. And this person attacked me. Can you believe it? I'm like, yes. Why are you surprised it's called the Internet. Anyone ever been surprised you got a mean attack on the Internet? Well, I tell my peers all the time. I'm like, please don't be surprised. That is something that I guarantee that will happen. If you are commuting, if you are driving to work or you are driving somewhere and you are cut off by somebody in traffic and you go into a rage about it. I'm like, you were surprised. And I know these are simple and simplistic and almost silly metaphors here, but I just want to switch your mind into that anticipatory power that we all have, that when we actually anticipate, oh, this is going to happen, we are way more capable of being centered than when we don't anticipate it. I'm not saying there will not be shock. I am not saying there won't be heartache. I am not saying there won't be incredible like fear or denial or regret or sadness. We'll talk about those things. But what I'm suggesting to you now is find peace with the inevitable. If we can find peace with the inevitable in advance, we are more able to cope. Switching metaphors again. I have so many. We have a lot of people who served in the military before. And as you know, I've been blessed to coach from the highest level groups in the military across all branches. And the way that they deal with what is about to come, when it is just like one of the most difficult missions or projects or tours of their lifetime, is they rehearse it over and over and over and over again in their mind and in practice and in the field. They get comfortable with what is going to be an uncomfortable, unpleasant, potentially terrorizing situation. I don't pretend that's easy. And that's one reason I love the military. Their willingness to do what is incredibly difficult, to protect the freedoms that we all enjoy. But I will share. There's some kind of power in that. And I had that when I was a 19 year old kid and I had my car accident, it forced me to face death. Any fans here of philosophy? Anyone ever read philosophy? Well, if you've never really gotten to the study of philosophy, I hope you will and you'll know. Chapter one in all of philosophy, almost across all philosophers in the history of the world. Chapter one, if we could generalize, says, you're gonna die. Now let's talk about life. That's like the fundamental of philosophy. So I read so much, I got comfortable with the fact that I was going to lose people and there was going to be loss in life anticipation. Now, I know this does not sound really like motivating, but that's not the point here. The point is to say, can we anticipate it? When I received the call from my dad letting me know that he had been Just diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Out of nowhere, he woke up, was lacking some balance as he walked down the hallway. It was Mother's Day of 2009. So he woke up on Mother's Day, didn't feel good. Mom said, what's wrong with you? I don't feel good. He's kind of unbalanced. The weeks before, he's playing golf and racquetball and bowling. He's healthy. All of a sudden, something's wrong, doesn't get better. They go to the hospital. Within a few hours, he's sitting with two doctors who are looking at his blood work and then do some more tests, and they let him know he has seven days to live. And they say, you have aml, acute myeloid leukemia. There's two types of leukemia. AML is the one that usually takes the person quickly. And they said, you have seven days because what happens is your stem cells. I don't want to go to the whole thing about leukemia, but essentially, you're creating blood that's not good. Ultimately, it shuts down your organs. I know I could go deeper into that. But those who know what I'm talking about, leukemia, it strikes fast. And so he had seven days. As soon as he told me that, I said, okay. And I was in shock, and I wanted to deny it, and I had fear. And that comes from shock. You know, when you hear news that you didn't anticipate or something happens you didn't anticipate, you're going to have a shock reaction. And for me, I was shocked about it at first, and those emotions come in. And by the end of the conversation, though, as I felt those emotions come up, I also was releasing them because I'd already contemplated my father's passing years earlier in journaling activities of how I would think of the passing of people. And I know that sounds almost fatalistic, but, you know, have you ever heard that saying, you don't want to leave things unsaid? I was reading a book one time and said, you know what? Contemplate the passing of people who are important in your life so that you. You don't leave things unsaid so that you think of, like, wow, what if this person. What if this is my last moment with this person? If this was my last moment with this person, what would I love to say to them and communicate to them, and don't leave those things unsaid. Now, I know that's difficult because all of us have had situations where someone has passed or know someone who's passed and things were unsaid. And that is incredibly unsettling. It brings up shock and it brings up regrets and it brings up sadness, which we'll talk about those emotions. But also in this moment, in the here and now, listen, none of us can take back whatever's happened in our lives, right? Whatever has happened, has happened. It is as it was, as it is. We are here, we are here now. And all we can do moving forward together as a group is anticipate moving forward. We can't. Like, this is not a thing where I'm going to try to be on a healing journey of the things of the decades past for any of us, because we all heal in our own time, in our own ways. But I'm here to say it's incredibly powerful if we can contemplate mortality and anticipate it and go, wow, what should I say to my kids? What should I say to my loved ones? Let me make sure I take care of people and treat people in ways that I don't regret and that things are said. One reason I was at peace, because my father had already said everything he needed to say to me. I was lucky on that. I had already said everything I needed to say. Now we just had to go through the process with honor and integrity and respect and love of end of life and not deny it. Face it, my dad faced it with a positive attitude. He knew it was coming. They told him, you have seven days. He's a Marine. So he made it 59 days. Good job, dad. And he fought with great, great attitude. I just couldn't believe it. I kept waiting for his attitude to sour. Never didn't believe it. He anticipated the end and he anticipated how he wanted to face it. And it was incredible. And I was lucky to witness that. And I want to let you know I've also witnessed the complete opposite in care before, been with families where it was the opposite and that wasn't right or wrong either. It is. People cope with the end of life is the way that they can. And for those of you who've cared for someone at the end of their lives, I want to let you know that caregiver guilt is something that if you are facing it or you've ever faced it, that's okay, that's entirely normal. And that you need to grant yourself the peace of knowing you did the best you could at the time with what you knew. You know, I've had the blessing of working with a lot of medical professionals, doctors and hospice care workers who talk about this. Gosh, I wish I could. You know, we all wish we could take back time and go change things. We can't. And so today, grant yourself the peace and the gift of knowing you did the best that you could at the time that you knew how to do. They did the best they knew that they could. I wish, you know, that was the first time I've ever cared for somebody personally for months on end with leukemia. I wish I knew more about leukemia. At the time, I didn't know. I didn't know. So some things I would have done differently and dad would have done differently and my family would have done differently. We did the best we could and so did dad. And I want to let you know that no matter what you have dealt with in grief in the past, your family or others loss, losing a job, your divorce, your breakup, your loss of job, listen, you were as conscious as you were at that moment. You did what you could and you need to give yourself grace because please listen to me, my friends. At that time, you were in shock and you were coping. And if you just need a little science from, you know, Brendon right now, let me drop some science on you. A stunning fact that when people are in shock or coping, they don't always perform at their highest level. Best. Oh, my gosh. Did the performance guy just tell us that and say it's okay? Yes. I'm letting you know it's okay that you weren't absolutely phenomenal and perfect and other people around you weren't absolutely and phenomenal and perfect. It's okay if you were getting divorced and the two of you fought, it's okay if you're getting fired and you screamed at your boss, it's okay. Whatever happened, you now must go. I accept it as it was. I'm at peace with what it was. I did the best I knew how at the time. And even if you don't believe you did the best as you could at the time, it doesn't matter. Because yesterday's darkness didn't rise with the sun today. You're in a new moment. You're in a new moment. Your cells are new right now. This spirit, this energy, if you take a deep breath in, that air you're breathing that's fresh. We're in the here and now. Take grace and connection with the moment for yourself. We've all had pain. We've all had sadness. We can allow the moment now to refresh us. A moment now to have a new feeling, a new emotion, a new sense about ourselves, a New belief about ourselves, a new faith in ourselves, a new faith in the world. Right now, this is a new moment. And with new moments, there's second chances. And with new second chances, there's new abilities to begin anew. But even if we don't begin anew, to allow ourselves the peace and the grace of the moment. So important, you know, if you think about anticipation being something that's really powerful, I also want to share. Acceptance is really powerful. To accept ourselves as we are now, no matter what has happened to us. To accept life as it is now, even if it's not perfect. To be in a ready state of acceptance is really powerful. To be accepting when your kids act out and they're freaking out and they're angry. To be accepting when your team doesn't get it right. To be accepting when the project falls apart. To be accepting when the video doesn't get the likes you want just to be allowing and surrendering to the outcomes of life and face them as they are. Identifying what are the controllable variables here, what's not controllable, and asking for the grace of the wisdom to know the difference between the two. There's a lot of things you can't control, Let them go. The things that you can control, you can only control in this moment. So if you didn't control it right in the past, let it go, it's now, uncontrollable now. What are the controllable factors? Living in the now will always be, always be the first sort of gate to enter, to free yourself from pain, to step back into this moment of now, to accept, to realize this is what is. Even if I didn't want it this way, this is what is. And what is is here. Okay, now, how would I like to interpret it? What would I like to do next? These are the power you think of. If you can anticipate things will happen and you can accept as is what the world is, while you also accept your power to shift and shape and control and move things around that you can. That's an uncommon perspective. To come into things with, to anticipate them and to accept those two things are so powerful. The third piece here in framing all this is adaptation. To now adapt to the world as is, to now adapt to what we're dealing with and to adapt to it with real intention. When you are in shock or sadness, there's often not a lot of intention there. It's reaction, it's feeling, it's emotion, which is okay. But there is a stage of adaptation when we start going, oh, okay, I guess life has changed. How do I want to change with it? Not I wish life didn't change, it did now. How would I like to change with it? Who do I want to be in this next stage? How would I like to think and feel and behave and do and become? Life has changed. How would I like to change? How would I like to adapt to this new reality? And we have to find our own way. It's not going to be fast yet. We must have the intention to adapt. I'm okay if it takes you years or two or three or four or five, that's your timing. But let's have the intention to adapt. Let's have the intention to feel better, be better. Let's have the intention to heal. You don't have to heal now, but please have the intention to heal. Can we all raise our hands on that one? Like, you don't have to get it right right now, but have the intention to heal. Have the intention to get better. Have the intention to carry on. Have the intention to build a new life. Have the intention to move forward. Because what is, is now, let's face it, with intention. My dad chose to face the end, the new normal for him. In a hospital bed, he said, I'm going to keep my humor. And he was joking with the nurses and the doctors. When he left the hospital to go home for hospital care, all the nurses and doctors cried because they liked him already. He was funny, he kept a good humor, he respected their work, he went along with the process, didn't want it, but he was there. So he engaged the process and he honored it as something that was happening, didn't deny, did his best. Sometimes we can enter situations with intention and grace, and that makes the situation better. Even though you can't make the situation better, that make sense. Even though you can't change a situation or a circumstance, the way you enter it, with intention and grace, can certainly change how you experience it and often changes how other people experience it. Please adopt that role model mindset. Other people observe your energy. Other people see how you cope and deal and heal. Other people witness your strength. And when they witness your strength or your faith or your goodness or your generosity or your patience, they feel a little inside. That's that neurobiological power of the mirror neurons. They see it in you, they feel it in themselves. And that can be a beautiful thing. That can be a beautiful thing. I don't say it's easy, but it can be a beautiful thing to enter things with Intention. So I've talked about anticipation. I've talked about anticipation. I've talked about acceptance. I've talked about adaptation. For me, that's going to set the frame for what we're going to do today. Okay, that will set the frame for what we're going to do today because I'll come back to some of these topics. I'll come back to these topics. Now let me share what I feel like will be a good framework for us to talk about loss and grief, specifically in terms of emotions. And then I'll share with you the five principles that will help you work through them. Ok. When anything happens in terms of loss, let's talk about that when there is loss. And specifically today I promise to talk about grief as well. But grief is an emotion related to a loss. It is a feeling or a state of being related to something that we have lost, that we cared for. Let me talk about what I feel like are like the four major parts of that that happen for people. And then you might not use the same language as me. And that's okay. Allow me not to be exactly perfect in the descriptions here because we're not trying to do psychological training, but a general sense of what it feels like. Okay. The first, if you want to. If I was going to call it something, a stage, stages or what we all tend to experience, let's talk about what we tend to experience. These are, let's call them commonalities. Commonalities of emotion or experience that happen with loss or grief. Okay. One that's just universal is this feeling of shock. Shock, which is I can't believe that happened or I didn't want that to happen. When there is shock, there's usually three very unpleasant emotions that come up. Right, Three very unpleasant emotions. And those emotions we'll talk about later how to deal with them. I just want to kind of like get your mind on the framework we'll be working through today. And that with shock, often there's an immediate sense of fear and you sense of fear, like, oh my God, that was scary. Or I got, I didn't want that to happen. Or even in the anticipatory mind because like, oh my gosh, what's gonna happen next? But shock is like, there's no way to describe it as accurately. So I'm going to bring up some of the emotions that come up. Often fear, often a sense of regret comes up with shock. Oh my gosh, this has happened. I didn't want that happen. Or these things are unfinished or these things are Undone or wait, I don't want, if that happens, that means all these other things. I didn't want this. I didn't anticipate that. I wish this didn't happen. A big part of it then leads to a thought pattern because emotions tend to lead to feelings and thought patterns. Emotions tend to lead to feelings and thought patterns. I'll talk about the difference later. But if we jump to the end, right at the end of all that thing of shock is often a sense of denial. Shock is going, I can't believe that happened. I didn't want that to happen. And I want to let you know, when you're in that place, and it often is accompanied by fear or denial or regret. When you're in that place of shock, the most important thing is to recognize that, that that's okay and that is normal. And your fundamental number one thing you want to do in that moment is get as soon as you can yourself back into your body. And what I mean by that is it's like you can't believe it happened and you've lost, like your mind goes into fear and goes into rumination, whether towards regret or towards what the future might look like now that things have changed. So sudd you can't believe it. And usually people in shock can't think backwards or forwards. They're just like, they're in stun mode. They're in stun mode. I need you to breathe when you're in stun mode. When you're in stun mode, which is what I'll describe as shock, it's just like you're almost like you can't even. You're not even with yourself anymore. Just so blown out energetically, so surprised. And I just want you to just capture your breath. Capture your breath. When my father tells me he's going to die in seven days, first thing I do is start breathing. First thing I don't think, what do I have to do? Where do I got to go? What's going to happen with the family? What's going to happen? The finances, when I've lost a job in the past, in my life, I didn't start the where's why and who's. And instead of just breathe, just reconnect to breath. Because your breath is also the gateway to the moment of now. Your breath is the gateway to the moment of now. And so just feeling yourself breathe again just kind of puts your. Okay, I'm here. Okay. It activates some of the somatic coping mechanisms that we're going to need right Breathing is a hugely important thing. Through any issue, our lives, any moment of stress that you have, but especially when you're stunned by something, you know, I've been in several major accidents in my life. And as soon as it happens, like car accident or something else, I just, I know I'm in shock. So just take, Take a moment to catch your breath. Just take a moment to catch your breath. Catch your breath. Take a moment to notice what's around, what's going on, okay? And I don't make that, don't pretend that's easy. But today we're specifically talking about loss and grief. We're not talking about trauma per se here. We're talking about loss and grief. And if you get the note, if you find out you've lost something or you're going to lose a relationship or you're going to lose somebody or somebody has passed, take a moment to capture your breath again, to reconnect. It's important. Shock is one piece that we feel. A commonality, if you will. The first commonality, another commonality is sadness. Sadness usually comes after a shock, not always, but sadness is usually there next. And that, that sadness, that, that can feel like a superficial sadness where you're just bummed and you're like, oh, darn. And it can also feel like the depths of real depression, the depths of real depression. And I know most of us here will experience that at some point in our life, and everyone here has experienced sadness. And most people here would say they've experienced depression, but we may or may not classify that as clinical depression. But what's important is to know when you're really, really down and you're really, really depressed in the face of loss and grief, super normal, you know, what you try to do is you try to fight, deny, push through or push down sadness. Almost everyone thinks they shouldn't feel sad, especially in a happy, go lucky, you know, culture and world where we're all supposed to be happy 24 7, and if we're not happy, what's wrong with you? Who's ever been unhappy or sad? And literally someone said to you, what's wrong with you? Has that ever happened? And you're like, what's wrong with me? And now you even feel worse. You're like, at first you defend yourself, right? Because that's the defense mechanism. Someone says, what's wrong with you? Well, what's wrong with you? And you get in a fight. But then later on you're like, is there something wrong with me? Maybe there was something wrong with Me Listen, sadness is a huge part of the human condition. The entire experience of happiness and joy in our life only exists because we have something of juxtaposition. You have the beauties of joy and deep happiness and fulfillment in life because you've had the real life experience of things not being so good, not so exciting, not so happy. So, sadness, I want to let you know, a lot of you are experiencing sadness right now and you can't face it, so you deny it. No, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I always tell people in my seminars, fine is a four letter word. F, I, N, E. Fine. Usually when someone says I'm fine, they are also a liar. Usually when we say we're fine, we're not willing to surface or feel the vulnerabilities of truth. That says, you know, I'm not doing so good and I want to let you know, sadness. It's the first thing I see. Like people can accept that they were shocked by something. Well, that shocked me. I was surprised. But they're very bad at accepting that sadness is part of life and an emotion that they should have or experience. And we have to learn to sit with sadness, feel sadness, recognize sadness, and for what it is as a signal. And I'm going to come back to this topic later on about sadness. Just like shock being a signal, emotions are signals. Emotions are information. And we'll talk about how to interpret that information and feel that information later. So commonalities. It's totally normal to feel shocked. Commonality, Total normal to feel sadness. Commonality. Longing. Longing. Longing means I wish that was still here. And I miss it so. I wish he was still here. I miss him so. I wish they were here. I miss them so. I wish life was like that. I miss it so. We long, we wish for what was. It's more than nostalgia. Nostalgia is. Oh, I think about the past. I connect with the memory. I wish it was that way. Longing is. I feel it. I feel it. I deeply wish and feel that. I wish that person was here. And longing is normal. I still long for the days with my father taking a walk around our neighborhood 11 years later. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I still. The other Yesterday I spent a good 45 minutes crying my eyes out, missing my dad. And I didn't feel bad. I was like, I shouldn't cry. I'm like, this is part of it. Maybe you can all write that down. This is part of it. This is Part of it. The shock, the sadness, the longing. This is part of it. It's okay. It's totally okay. It's so normal for you to long for situations and persons of the past to long for it to be the way it is. And if you try to avoid that, I shouldn't feel this way. That only complicates the issue later. Do you know what, you ever heard that term emotional baggage phrase? Emotional baggage, like you're carrying emotions from the past. What a lot of people realize, don't realize, is a lot of the emotions they're carrying from the past were unfelt emotions. We often think of emotional baggage as, you know, oh, well, she's got emotional baggage. She hasn't let go of these emotions she had. Oh, no. Often it's. She never felt the emotions she had. So they're still here because she didn't allow herself to feel it. It's still here. Emotional baggage is often an additional weight of unfelt things, not just felt things. It's why anyone who does the emotional work that we do in any setting, whether it's, you know, in my professional setting as a coach and a trainer in behavior, or in more of the professional licensing licensed professions where they feel like, oh, their job is to sit with the emotion, to allow the client or the customer or the person they're working with to feel what they feel. And this is the one we often. We're weird about, the longing one. I shouldn't feel that. Totally normal. Totally normal. And so I wanted to bring up these three common experiences, shock and sadness and longing, so that we can anticipate them in the conversation we're about to have about these five principles. And begin with this simple freight statement to you that can be a saving grace. This is part of it. I say that to myself all the time. This is part of it. In every area of my life. I feel extremely sad about something that happened to a friend of mine recently. This is part of it. Unpleasant emotions, difficulty in coping. That's normal. That's part of it. So we must all begin in dealing with loss and grief in a sense in which we don't try to deny that that's part of it. Don't make yourself bad that you're experiencing it because it's part of it. It's part of it. Not just for you. It's the human condition. It is the human biology. It's in other places in nature. Other animals and mammals feel sadness, loss and grief as well. It's not abnormal for you to feel it and if you feel your listen, here's the damage that comes from loss and grief is often that part of us that creates self inflicted wounds when we think we're not normal for feeling entirely normal things. When you label yourself as not normal or not adequate to cope, that is an injury to yourself. Telling yourself you shouldn't feel something and you're so sensitive and oh, I wish I wasn't so sensitive. I wish I wasn't so weak. I wish I was better. And you start now labeling yourself as insufficient. You're only adding insult to injury. We've got to normalize unpleasant emotions. We have to anticipate unpleasant emotions will happen. We have to accept unpleasant emotions as happening, and we have to adapt once we sense them and we understand their signal. So I'm trying to tie those things together for you. Today, our common emotions and feelings and experiences are often shock and sadness and longing. Those feelings that come along with it are sometimes just like regret or fear or depression or loneliness. It's totally normal. Totally normal. But you know what? If I drew out a commonality for you, if I was at my famous flip chart, I would draw out. The way I would draw it is I would draw like a line on a page and on the top I'd write the common things like shock and sadness and longing. And you know what I put on the bottom though? I put this word, honoring. Honoring. To me, the common denominator that helps us cope is to bring honor to the very process of coping, to bring honor to the very moment, reality as it is, and most importantly, to honor your own sense of self and feelings and in those difficult times. Because when you deny them or you label yourself, you create more pain. When you deny the feelings or the emotions and you label yourself now, you create more pain. And please let me do this for you. For those of you who've dealt with loss and grief with others, family members, team members, people you're consoling right now, as I know many of you are coaches here who are helping people, please recognize this is also a social truth, that if you deny other people's feelings and you label other people, you add more pain. It's not just an internal game, it's a social game. When you deny your emotions and you label yourself as inadequate or unable or not doing it right or not normal, you cause pain, greater pain to the situation. When you do that to other people, when you think your brother or your sister should have coped differently and you told them not to be sad, when you told them they're not Doing it normal. And you said, you know, something's wrong with you that caused more pain to them. Telling somebody, telling others that there's something wrong with them is not helpful. We can notice when people are struggling and not label them. You can notice when you're struggling and not label yourself. A lot of the pain you still feel in your life from tons of situations came from the labels you stamped on your forehead about who you are. And a lot of the pain that we experience socially and culturally with others happens because we smack the label on their forehead. It's why you guys, many of you who've been with this community for a long time, I know some of you, it's your first time here and you haven't heard this from me before, but I did a whole session on judge less, feel better. The less you judge, the better you feel. The less you judge others, the better. The less you judge yourself, the better you feel. And a lot of you, this is the day you're going to start allowing more grace into your life, more peace into your life, less judgment into your life. Recognize you're doing the best that you can. And the very fact that you're here working on yourself. Could we all give ourselves a big round of applause for this? Let's go. Let's go. The fact that you, I mean, think about the fact that you are here, I think it's a beautiful thing that you're working on yourself. So few people will do that. So as hard as you've been on yourself, give yourself that spirited acknowledgement that we're talking through some tough things today, give yourself a spirited acknowledgement to say, you know what, okay, some of this might bring up some oceans I might not like, but you know what? Okay, cool, I'm doing the work. God bless you for doing the work. So many people won't even consider these topics. I guarantee the whole year in this HPX community, we can measure every single click in our emails. We can see how many people show up to these things, how many people watch the replay. I guarantee this session will be the least engaged session. I guarantee it. Because people don't want to. It's so much easier not to ever contemplate and deal with these things. Ah, but you're here, you're doing the work. So one more round of applause, everybody. I really genuinely mean that. I genuinely mean that. I think it's a beautiful thing that you're doing it. Such a beautiful thing you're doing. So if we can keep honoring as the baseline, honoring the process, honoring the Struggle. Honoring our emotions, honoring other people as they cope with difficulties too. Oh my gosh, it gets so much easier. There's so much less pain, so much less pain. We stop fighting what is, and we start asking how we can engage it with integrity and kindness and peace in an honoring way. You know, for those of you who've ever been with people who are dying, or those of you I know, we have a lot of, you know, professionals here. We have a lot of doctors and nurses and first, first line caregivers. They would all tell you that a person in the hospital just wants to be honored. They want their feelings to be honored. They want their pain to be heard. They want their experience to be recognized. They want to be seen and heard, just like all of us. All of us want to be seen and heard and validated and recognized and appreciated and respected in life. In other words, honored. When I say I see you, I understand you're going through a hard time and I don't label you. I'm giving honor to you. When you see, hear, recognize, appreciate, love, adore other people, when you show kindness and patience to other people, that's what I mean by honoring. That's what I mean. Everyone wants to be honored, seen, heard, felt, respected, validated, appreciated, loved, adored, recognized. That's a sense of I'm honored as a human being here. That's what we all want. That's what we want. And so let's recognize that in ourselves and other people. And then when we move through this next piece, I'll bring up some of these topics over and over. So our first piece here that we talked about was the idea of anticipation and acceptance and adaptation. We talked about common things, shock and sadness and longing and how all that's okay. And in fact, if we can anticipate that we're going to experience those things, if we can accept that when they do happen and then we adapt from them, then I believe we're bringing honor to the very process of all of human experience. Now let's get into five ideas and principles here for loss and grief based on that framework. Based on that framework. Okay, first idea, first principle for dealing with loss and grief is to understand that there is a difference between emotions and feelings. The difference between emotions and feelings. And when we start to understand that we can now cope better. And so forgive a little bit of like the psychological nitty gritty here, but an emotion in the human body, in the human being, emotion is generally an impulsive, automatic physical response. Impulsive, automatic, physical response. Impulsive, automatic and physical Response. In other words, an emotion just happens. You ever get an emotion, you thought to yourself, hey, I did not order you up here, baby. Like, it shows up like a side salad. You didn't even order. You know what I'm saying? Wait a minute. I didn't ask for this salad, but now you got a whole emotional salad just dumped right on top of your head, and you didn't want it. An emotion just comes up. An emotion can come up from both conscious response and unconscious impulse. You can walk into a store and a song is playing, and an emotion of sadness waves you over. You're like, what just happened to me? Right? That's because emotions are impulsive, automatic, and they're physical, right? They just. They sweep through. They happen. And what those emotions are tend to be signals. They're an adaptive human, biological response to quickly signal us towards something. As an example, the emotion of fear, it says signal. It says, hey, pay attention. Something here is dangerous. I want you to know that this is dangerous. And I want to activate you to do something right? Sadness is also a signal saying, hey, pay attention. There's something here that's important to you. It's meaningful to you, and it's not right. It doesn't feel right. Something's off. That's important. It's a signal. Frustration signal. Pay attention. Hey, this is not the way I want it. I've worked on it too long. It's not going as fast as I want it to be. Can we speed this thing up here? But listen, some signals are just noise. I remember I was doing none of. I'd be shocked if any of you were here with me in 2007 when I did my first major, like, I've arrived in the personal development space. I did an event in Long Beach, California, in a gigantic circus tent. It was unbelievable. We had anyone who's there? Oh, my gosh. It was unbelievable. It was my first big event for personal development specifically. And I brought to life my book, Life's Golden Ticket. Like, we reenacted the book, like, as characters. Like theater, right? Think of theater. Like, I was getting dressed up as characters in that book and helping the audience go through this transformational process that's in the book. Life, School, and Ticket. We had strong men. We had a full circus. I mean, I rented the Mexican National Circus. We set up a huge circus tent on the long. On the long lawn? Yeah, on the lawn at Long Beach, California. Huge circus tent, could hold a thousand plus people. I didn't fill it. I only had, I think, you know, seven six, seven. Six or 700 people. I can't remember. But. But it was like, wow. John Gray, who wrote Mineral, Mars Mineral for Venus, and Marianne Williamson came to speak as an example. It was like, whoa, Brendan has landed on the planet, and he's doing some kind of revival spiritual thing in a circus scent. We don't know, but it's awesome. And, oh, my gosh, it was so cool. Well, listen, so we're out on the lawn, all right? Now I have my headset on. I can hear the team, the production team, because they got to call out music and songs to me, okay? So in one ear, I have my team, and of course, I've got my microphone going out to the audience. Now I'm up there speaking for, you know, eight, nine hours a day, and I'm in it. I'm literally in the center ring of a circus. Center. In the center ring where they have. Where they usually bring in the animals. Well, I'm the animal. I mean, I'm in the middle, okay? So I'm in there and I'm talking, and all of a sudden, you know, my team is giving some direction, and all of a sudden the signal starts. It starts making this weird noise, and another person, who I don't know is speaking in my ear, giving directions, and it. I'm like, right, Imagine you're giving a speech to hundreds of people. It's your dream event, and all of a sudden, someone is talking in your ear. You don't know who that is. Now, it was a signal. Now, sometimes my team was in there, My team. Other times, this stranger. Stranger. Well, it turned out in Long beach, where we're at, on that shoreline there, the Navy ships go by, and their radio signal was interrupting with. With our radio signal. And so patching in, which I didn't know was the captain of a warship going by. And I always thought, what a beautiful metaphor for the difference between a signal and noise. Now, my team, when my team is giving me a signal, it's good. It's good direction. I need to know that. But when someone else is in your ear, that's also a signal. But it might not be relevant information. Sometimes an emotion comes up, and honestly, it came up, you can feel it, you can sense it and go, really? Just not relevant right now. I don't know where you're coming from. You know what? I don't understand it. Is it useful to me right now? Not really useful to me right now. I'm not going to hang on to its every word. In other words, I had to Let that worship pass. Once that worship passed, the noise, the signals went back to normal, and I could carry on with the event. I just had to let it pass. That's what emotions are like. You got to let them pass. Some emotions will come up, and they're a relevant signal to the issue at hand. Some emotions just came up because your body had an impulse or was cued unconsciously or triggered unconsciously. And it comes up and. And you recognize the emotion. You can sense it, feel it, be aware of it, but you don't need to hang on to it. Now we can talk about feelings. A feeling is an ongoing sensation of emotions that come from the interpretation of the emotion. I know that sounds like a lot, so let me explain with another metaphor. An emotion, Remember, Boom. It's instant, it's automatic, it's impulsive. A feeling, though, you have way more control over. A feeling is usually an interpretation of emotions. And a feeling is not always automatic at all. And a feeling is not often cued just by the body. A feeling is usually more interpreted by the mind by the thoughts you give something that you hold on to. So the example I give, I think in high performance Habits or one of my works with high performance teaching. High performance. The difference here, this is really cool. Let's imagine we all go to a. A. Like a. What do you call those? Like a Halloween house. Like a scary house. Some of you, like me, avoid those at all costs. I don't not like them. But let's say you go to the Halloween house and you're going through, and you know, the guy jumps out, dresses as a goblin and scares you, right? Immediate emotion. Fear. Scary. Now, 10 seconds later, what happens? You and your friends are laughing that you got scared, right? It's funny, right? It was. It was a prank. You. You knew. You went into the house knowing there's gonna be scary things, something, and you got scared, but that it's like, okay, and now you kind of laugh about it. Listen, that the emotion came up, but literally 10, 15 seconds later, you can be feeling humor. You'd be feeling like, well, that was silly. You can be feeling safe. You can be feeling not scared at all. How is that possible? Because the difference between emotions and feelings. Let me give you an example. Let's extend that conversation, my friends. Well, now that emotion of fear becomes a maladaptive feeling if it stays too long. So now let's imagine, you know, that night, you're back at your house, and you're still feeling scared based on an emotion that happened earlier in the day that you recognized was not a threat, was not fearful, but you're still feeling unsafe. That feeling is because in your mind you're going, well, what if I'm not safe here? It's your thought pattern now is generating the feeling, right? There's no meaning. Listen, notice there's no stimulus anymore in the physical world. There's no stimulus creating a physical reaction, but you're still feeling something. Well, where is that stimulus coming from? It's not from the external world anymore, is it? It's your mind. Your mind is creating and ruminating and jamming on a situation, and your mind is jamming on that situation and it's creating the feeling now because the actual stimulus in physical reality is gone that created the initial emotion. The feeling endures because our thought pattern about something endures. Now why am I talking about all this? Well, because think about grief and loss. Often after the critical incident that caused us to feel that shock or that sadness years later, if we still feel a lot of real emotion or trauma to it, it's because of what we're replaying it. We're allowing our mind to be on replay, to relive that moment. We're allowing our mind to ruminate. And our mind, our actual thought pattern, is creating the ongoing feeling. And in that difference between stimulus and response and that difference between impulsive physicality of emotion and long term feeling, that's where we find hope. That's where now, oh, well, can I change how much I ruminate on it? Or can I change how I ruminate on it, or can I change where my focus is? And if you think about like the entire, an entire clinical practice of cognitive behavioral therapy, as an example, is helping you realize the power of your very thoughts and where those thoughts are going and the tone of those thoughts, the feelings that are coming from those thoughts. Because emotions, see, people often get this wrong. They say, oh, you can think your way out of emotion. No, that's actually scientifically an emotion is a physical impulse. It's automatic. It, you don't get to control it, right? But a feeling, what you feel like next Monday, next Tuesday, next Thursday, how you feel right now, you can shape that with your own thoughts. What are you thinking about? What are you paying attention to? How are you defining meaning towards things? And so I want to tell you, all of you, my friends, if you've experienced loss and grief years ago and you still feel like you're there in that emotion and you're not in that emotion, you're in a feeling now and therein lies your hope. You have to now direct those thoughts in new ways to feel new things. You want new feelings, new thought patterns, new thought patterns, new feelings, new feelings, new thought patterns. This is how I can say to you, emotions are okay. They're totally normal. They happen. So you don't get to, like, feel guilty about an emotion that you felt at any given part of your life. It just happened. But it also gives us now the accountability and the strength to say, oh, I get to determine my feelings now. And that's the beautiful thing. It doesn't mean when you think about something in the past, an emotion can't be triggered and come up again too. But over the long haul, we know we can take the helm of our feelings with our emotional thought patterns. Now, again, I'm not here to be doing therapy with anybody here. I'm more of a coach. So I'm trying to introduce you to some concepts. And if you feel like you're still struggling with something that happened years and years and years and years ago and you can't break free of those emotions or feelings, that's why you need to go see a therapist and get professional licensed help. Because it will be in discussing and talking through where your thoughts are that you can grab hold of your, in the now moment feelings and your ongoing feelings to have a sense of your life. Again, does it make sense to raise your hand? So far, it's a big distinction. It's a big distinction because now you can allow your emotions, but you can grab hold of your feelings. And when you do that, you get to shape the feelings of your life. It's why so many of you have, I know, very positive morning routines where you're putting positive thoughts into your head. That's shaping your feelings for the day in a better way. Also, though, when you do think about something, you get to choose what to think about. Let me give you an example. If I think on any given day, let me talk about yesterday. There was a moment when I thought about my father and him being in the hospital bed, and it was sad. There was something that happened for him and he was sad and we were sad. It was just sad. And as soon as I thought about it, I felt the emotion instantaneously, spontaneously, 11 years removed of sadness. I didn't fight that emotion. I'm like, oh, that when I think of that, it makes me sad. That's okay. Now I went to that bottom line of honoring and I said, well, what could I think of that makes me grateful? What happened during that time that I Could grab a feeling of goodness from. And now I ruminated. I thought about some of the beautiful moments of my life with my dad. And they weren't all beautiful. I just had to choose the ones that were beautiful because I wanted to feel good. Raise your hand if you follow. And so I consciously ruminated. I chose the scenes to see feel, be in, to get the feeling that would be more healthy for me. That's the power of a feeling versus emotion, is that we can choose the scenes, we can define the meaning. And that's an extraordinary power. So I just want you to think about that next time. If something wells up for you and you feel it, that's an emotion. Okay, listen to the signal. What's it telling you to do? Is it useful? Is it directing your attention to something that you care about that's important that you should pay attention to? If not, okay, well, let's sit and breathe through this emotion. Did you know? Almost all psychologically, when they study it, almost all unpleasant emotions. Almost all unpleasant emotions, their sense at the physical level. When there's a physicality and the feeling like you feel that emotion, if you will, physically, what they can sense and measure, that's usually gone. The physicality of an emotion is usually gone in minutes. In minutes. This is why usually when you experience something, an emotion comes up and you don't, like, breathe through it for a few minutes, allow it to dance and wave through. It'll come in like a wave and out. It'll walk in like a warship and it'll float out. Just listen. You can endure a few minutes. Not to say that feelings don't last longer or that some emotions don't trend longer, but on average, it's much less of a duration than people think. So if you can be uncomfortable for just a few minutes, breathing through, the signal will become clear. As useful or not, it will direct you towards good things. Because biologically, emotions were always built to direct us towards good things. We just get stuck on the negativity. It's calling out the negative scenes. Okay, you like this so far, y'? All? This is just point one. I know, but I'm trying to add a lot of value in these things and help as I speak them, simultaneously coach you through some of these concepts as you feel them or sense them. Second, big idea I want to share with you. Principle. The principle is what we call the interpretation ladder. The interpretation ladder. This has been, you know, so powerful, important for me in my lifetime. I can't share with you how it's changed my ability to take hold of my feelings and my thoughts that tend. Your thoughts and your feelings tend to come from an interpretation ladder. And let me share what that means. What usually happens at the base of the ladder is information comes in. Information comes in. Something happens, Information comes in automatically. Our mind now interprets it, Our mind labels it. Good, bad, safe, not safe. Approach, avoid like immediate interpretation, like a reaction, if you will. Stimulus, response, Right? That's the first two rungs here, right? Information comes in, interpretation happens. Now we have the conscious power to do a better job of noticing good information too. And we have a better job of also pausing that interpretation for a moment or being aware of how our interpretation is. Because once we interpret it, now we move to the next rung of the ladder. Identity. So information comes in, we interpret it. Good, bad, approach, run, safe, sad, fight, flight fee, interpretation, immediate. Then identity says, what does this mean to me? In other words, now we personalize the information that came in. You ever read the four agreements? Agreement number one, don't take things personally. But that's what we do, right? Oh well, this information. Oh well, they're judging me. They're not thinking of me. That means I'm a loser. That means I'm bad. That means I'm discounted. And we personalize the information to the world. Just like listen, when someone puts a hate comment on your post, often you get really triggered or upset about someone's hate or judgment to you because it's a smack against your identity. But you know what? That's also a little bit of a fool's game that when you learn not to take things overly personally or to over individualize or self identify with it. Guess what? It's a lot harder for people to hook you. They can't get you anymore. They can't get you riled up. You can sit there and they can accuse you and scream at you and everything. And you can sit there like the Dalai Lama, just peacefully, right? Just peacefully. It's like the Buddha said, well, what happens when you know what happens when someone is angry towards you? And the Buddha replied, oh well, I just don't accept the gift. Someone's handing you their anger. You don't have to take it. Someone's labeling you something. You don't have to accept the label, something happened at work. You don't have to take it personally because here's the reality of life. You probably weren't even considered other people when they do something bad or other situations that happen. It had nothing to do with you. That was their jam. That was Their situation. That was their bias. That was their problem. You as an individual probably had nothing to do with it. They just had a bad day. They were a jerk. That thing had nothing to do with you. But we personalize. And now as we personalize, oh, it's so much more difficult to deal with. So let's move up. Information, interpretation, identity. Now comes intention. Okay? We filter it through those things, okay, what happened? How do I interpret that? What's it mean to me now? What's my intention next? What? What do I want to do? What should happen here? What's the next right action of integrity for me? We set the intention, what should I do? Or this is my plan, right? We see the future. We estimate the future. We make a plan, set a goal. Initiative. We think through what we're going to do. Intention, intention, intention. Think through what we're going to do. Then, of course, the next rung up is the final piece. Initiative, initiative. We take initiative. In other words, we act. We do something. We execute. We do the thing. We change our behavior. We do something. The interpretation ladder is life, my friends, right? Stimulus. Information comes in. We interpret it. Good, bad, fight, flight, freeze, run, avoid, approach. We identify. What does this mean to me? What does it say about me? How do I feel about this? What about me? Then we say, what do I want to do? Intention. Then go do action, Initiative. And then guess what? It loops. Because when we take action, we get information, feedback and the loop goes again. And so this loop is always running. An interpretation loop is really what we should call it. Yes, it's always going. And obviously these things aren't always simultaneously happening in that order, but they tend to. That's thought, process. Why do I bring this up with loss and grief? Because sometimes you lose something and you do a terrible interpretation ladder on it. You lose a relationship with someone, you get a divorce, or they break up with you. How do you take that? Well, let's talk about how to feel more pain. Let's do a bad interpretation ladder. Okay? This is what happened to young little Brendan when he was 18 and 19 years old. Thought I was going to get married to this girl. Relationship falls apart. And she tells me that she's been unfaithful. And what do I do with that information? Here's someone I love telling me they've been unfaithful. Interpretation. World is unfair, relationships unsafe. You can't trust anybody with your heart. Life is ruined. Identity. I have been. I have been mistreated. Here I feel terrible. Here I must be terrible in relationships. I Must never trust anyone again. I'm going to become a stronger, more independent person. I'm going to protect myself. I've been wronged. And because my relationship was, my identity of who I was was tied up into the relationship and the relationship fell apart. I am broken. Information was our relationship is broken. Identity became. I am broken. Who can understand what I'm talking about here? Move up. Intention. Intention, tell this person what a mean, no gnarly, bad, awful, terrible person. Let me get justice. Let me make sure they recognize how terrible they are. And I come up with all the words to tell them how terrible they are. Because they should know my pain. Watch out for that self righteous intention. What happens next? Initiative, tell the person they're terrible and awful. Intention, Protect thyself. Initiative, don't get in relationships. Intention, never trust someone again. Initiative, don't form any deep, meaningful relationships. You all understand when that ladder goes wrong, the pain builds up. Now when we're young or unconscious, we don't know the ladder, so we let the pain build up. But now you're older, wiser, smarter, mature, doing the work, baby. Now you can say, oh, let me work through this thing consciously. Let me work through this thing consciously. Because two people can experience the same information, same stimulus, have a completely different life experience by how they move up. Interpretation, identity, intention and initiative. Right? Same thing with your grief, trauma, past incidences, challenges that you didn't like. When you look at the past, sometimes it's useful to go, wow, I'm still struggling with that. Let me run this interpretation ladder. How have I been running the interpretation ladder? How might I run it to feel better? I'll give you an example. With the passing of my dad, think about easy. That could have gone bad for me. Dad diagnosed with leukemia. Interpretation, world is unfair. Doesn't matter what we do anyway, doesn't matter how good of a person we are, we're all going to die. Sucks. Life sucks. Do you know how many people have done that on the first rung of their ladder? You decided something to happen and your interpretation was life sucks. And you're wondering why you don't have a full range of positive emotions in your life now. Because too many times on that first rung, you decided life sucks because of it. That's a big meaning. That's a big interpretation, isn't it? I mean, that's a pretty big leap to decide and define. Life itself is bad. And that's why you're feeling the positivity. Even if you have all the caffeine you drank the Whole coffee and you still feel bad. Well, guess what? Coffee is not going to fix an interpretation that life sucks. You can wear an affirmation shirt or put things on the wall, but if so many times in the past, your first interpretation ladder said life sucks. It's unfair. No use trying. Well, no wonder the motivational poster isn't doing it for you. Who knows what I'm talking about here? Interpretation. You got to be careful. Dad passes interpretation. I could say life sucks. It's unfair. No matter what we do, we're going to die. What's the use of trying? Identity. Well, I'm in relationship with this person. He's dying. Piece of me is dying. I'm dead. What's the point? Piece of me is the son. Oh, the son is dead. Now. Piece of me, caregiver. Now that part of me is dead. Meaning I took a stimulus, something that happened and I made part of me dead. No, I have to deal with unpleasant emotions. I have to deal with longing. I have to deal with sadness. But I'm not dead. But some of us allow a part of ourselves to die inside. When your identity didn't need to die, you needed to learn how to navigate difficult emotions that come from the thing. Two different things. So now we're denying a piece of ourselves and blotting out, pretending a part of ourselves is dead. That was beautiful too. I can't, because dad's dead. Now I'm a part of me that's. The sun is dead because there's beautiful there too. Instead, what I need to do is. No, no, no. My identity is not dead. My friends. I just have to learn to deal with difficult emotions. Now. Two different things. Well, what else could have happened? I could have went to intention. Intention. Well, let's say identity. I was not capable of handling my father's death. I wasn't. I don't know anything about leukemia. I'm not a doctor. Now imagine my dad dies and my identity is. I'm not capable. I'm not good because I couldn't save him. Think about that. I'm not good and I'm not capable because I couldn't stop something that was inevitable and out of my control. And many of you have labeled yourself bad for something completely out of your control. Something that happened, someone you lost a job, you lost, a divorce, a breakup in a relationship trauma. And you're labeling yourself identity for something that was totally outside of your control. Your. Your realm of expertise, your capability or your power at the time you took it. Identity level to you when it Wasn't even in your control. And so now you're mean to yourself. You see how this spirals? And now what happens? Intention. Well, I guess my intention is I'm never going to love again. I can't deal with that pain. I guess my intention is, you know, I got to blame the doctors. I gotta be mad at some other people. My intention is, you know, why even try? And then what happens? Initiative. Well, you know what happens? Initiative. You sit around being overly sad because your interpretation was bad, and now it happens. Well, inaction, apathy, stagnancy. Sitting around 74 tubs of Ben and Jerry's a month. You know what I'm talking about out there. People. All of a sudden it falls apart because your interpretation ladder was built on poor thinking. It's hard to accept that. But a lot of our interpretation ladders are built on poor thinking. We zoomed in in the wrong spot. We paid attention to the wrong part of the story. We could have built it up differently because what if. What if I lose my dad? The interpretation is, thank you, Lord, for the time you gave me with this person who I cared about in my life. Thank you for the opportunity to have a deep connection like that, that I would feel so sad and lonely that he's gone. Thank you for the beautiful scenes and moments I did get to have with that person. I now interpret life as so special and so precious. Not life sucks because someone died. Life is precious because someone passed. What a different interpretation. What about identity? What if it could say, oh, you know what? I'm proud of the relationship I had with that person. I'm thankful for it. I, as a human, as a boy, as a man, I'm a better man for having gone through that experience. I can be proud of and respect myself. I can be thankful. I can recognize that I'm better because I had that experience with that person or that thing. I'm stronger. Stronger. Notice the very big difference in the thought pattern. Says I'm stronger versus I'm at fault. Can you dig it? It's a very different thing, ain't it? I'm stronger because of. Not I'm at fault or inadequate because of. Whoa, now, here's the thing. Both persons could be charged as being right, but you know what? Both are also going to have a very different feeling. Experience of life. Let's move through now. What if. Oh, you know what? Life is precious. Life is beautiful. Thank you, God, for these experiences I got to have with this person. Thank you for the depth of the connection there. That was A meaningful person in my life, identity. What did I learn from that person? Who am I? Because of that person, that experience, I'm more, better, I'm stronger because of that intention. You know what my intention. Let me carry on the goodness of that person. Let me carry on the goodness of that person. Let me have reverence for life. Let me live my life so well that maybe people care about me and take care of me at the end. Let me be a good and kind person. Because now I recognize every family goes through trauma. Every family goes through pain. Let me be kinder to other people. Let me have reverence for life. Let me wake up each day with the intention to live it. Let me wake up each day with the intention to tell someone I love them just in case. What a different experience. What about initiative? Well, now you know what? I'm going to make sure I listen to people better. I'll be patient with people, you know, Initiative. I'm going to help people going through the same thing. I'm going to help people. Initiative. Be kind. Initiative. Call mom every Sunday. Geez. At least good things come from it. When you have a different interpretation letter. So what I want to say to you, I'm not here to say your feelings or your emotions are right or wrong. I want to equip you with frameworks to think about them differently. Because can you all raise your hand? Can you see the different feelings that would come from a different interpretation ladder? Life changing. I want you to hear me. Life changing. When you bring in a conscious interpretation here, a very different experience comes from the very same stimuli. I'm not here to say your interpretation is right or wrong. I'm here to say your interpretation is leading to a feeling. And if you don't like the feelings, you have power over the feelings with your interpretation ladder. Is this cool? It means any situation. Think about when your business failed. Think about when your projects failed. A lot of people, their projects fails. Their identity, I'm a failure. Their business fails, I'm a failure. They lose their job, I'm a failure. And what happens with that? Now their intention is less visionary. Their intention, less big goals, less big dreams. Their initiative, less activity, less momentum. And then it loops around again. Less activity, less momentum. Not getting results. Not getting results. The world's unfair. I feel like crap. I'm bad. And it loops and it spirals. And it loops and it spirals. And the whole time. Now that you've heard this from Brendon, you always have to go, how am I feeling? Let me visit my Interpretation ladder. Was this alone worth your time here today, my friends? If you can get this. Once you lock this in, everything shifts. Everything shifts. How am I such an annoyingly positive person? Through brain injuries, through bankruptcies, through loss of multiple family members, through sitting down with people in the hardest times of their entire lives, not once, not twice, for 20 years straight, working with people in the worst parts of their lives. Why am I so positive? Because my interpretation ladder is so positive. Okay, we're only. That was. Number one was emotions versus feelings. Number two, master your interpretation ladder. Number three. To create honoring rituals and commitments. Write this one down, please, my friends. Create honoring rituals and commitments. To create honoring rituals and commitments. What does this mean? Well, let's take on grief of loss. Since we started with that as a topic that you can do something instead of on, you know, being on days, anniversaries, you know, holidays, where you used to have that person, they're not here anymore. Do something to honor them. Create a ritual to honor them, to remember them, to celebrate them. And build that ritual of positivity, of reverence, of remembrance, of gratitude. Build that ritual in versus just reacting to the feeling that shows up that day. And I want to share with you, I did not do a good job with that. My first two years after my father passed, I was still in denial. I wouldn't say I was in denial. I just didn't want to deal with the emotions. So I would just go through the day. I said, no, you know what? From now on, every day, every time that it comes around the anniversary of my dad's birthday or Father's Day or death, I'm going to look through my photos. I'm going to make myself write down my five favorite moments or time that comes to my mind. I'm going to create a post and tell the world about dad and how great he was. I'm going to call my family members. Just create a ritual. Because otherwise you're left to impulsive emotions that are triggered, and you have way more control over the feelings you can create with the ritual. A positive ritual. A positive ritual, an honoring ritual. Create that in place. Create that once or twice a year and over a series of years, your feelings start to go towards the positive. Reverence, gratitude, appreciation. And I know some of you say, I'm scared to do that, Brendan, because I'll miss the person. I'm like, of course you will. That is the longing part we talked about. And longing is normal. I don't want to do that, Brendan, because I will feel lonely. That is ok, but you will also feel positive. You will also remember the good things. You will honor life by recognizing the good things that happened versus just missing what is not here. That is part of honoring life, to celebrate what was here. Because remember, the height of joy in your life is based on the depth of gratitude. The height of joy is based on the depth of gratitude. Go deeper in your gratitude and your reverence. Joy will spring up like a spring. Go deeper in your daily gratitude, go deeper in your ritual gratitude for someone or something you've lost. And joy springs up. It's a magical correlation. The depth of gratitude sets the height of joy. I would say it even sets the possibility of joy. You want more happiness to trickle in, more joy to trickle in. Go deeper on your ritual gratitude. Your rituals of gratitude, whether it's daily or yearly, in some way that honors that which you had lost. As an example, my dad did three tours in Vietnam as a young man fighting for his country as a Marine gunnery sergeant, and he lost a lot of friends. I remember going to the Vietnam Wall, as they call it, the Memorial Wall with dad. It was incredibly difficult day for him, incredibly difficult day. But he did it to give honor to his friends and those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Difficult day, but he did to honor lots of tears, but felt better at the end of the day. In other words, was willing to face the unpleasant emotions to bring honor, to bring respect, to bring positivity, to bring reverence and gratitude. And the more we do that, the more those lingering feelings tend to go away and become under our control because of our interpretation ladder and the ritual of building it in. Notice how I said honoring rituals and commitments. Commitments. What do I mean by that? Well, for me, I said, okay, I'm going to be committed to carrying on these positive traits of my dad. I'm going to be committed to taking care of my family as my dad requested, financially forever. I'm going to find a way. I'm going to be committed to espousing the values. I'm be committed to telling my nephews, his grandchildren about him, even though only one of my little buddies, my nephews, his grandkids, ever met him. I'm committed to carrying on my dad. I want to talk to him. I'm talking to you about him now as an honoring way about my dad this week, you know, so what commitment will you make to carry on something positive, of value or a wish of that person? Or what commitment will you make even if that's not a person? Maybe you lost a job to injustice just like to racism. You lost a job or an opportunity because someone, how they judged you super unfairly. Okay, you're going to feel grief about that, you're going to feel shock about the injustice. You're going to feel sad that that crap happens in the world still. So my question to you is, what's the commitment moving forward? This is where we take personal power into life again. Because listen, unfairness and crappy things happen. So when we feel them, one way to move through is to honor that and go, okay, what am I committed to? How am I committed to treating people, elevating people, educating people, caring for people? What am I committed to? When you're faced with something that is unfair or unjust, what are you committed to? Personally connect with that because that will connect you to your power in a space that doesn't feel like you have it commitments. So for me, it's committing to carrying my father forward in that example of loss. But also some of you had terrible relationship with somebody who lost and left you in shock and sadness, and you're glad they're gone. You're glad you don't have to deal with that person again. Same truth. What commitment do you carry? What's the goodness you're going to carry forward, regardless if they were good, regardless if the situation was perfect or positive? What is your commitment? It's what I always ask. Listen, I. I'm always asking you, this community of this, what is your next right action of integrity? No matter what happens, what's your next right action of integrity? That's personal power. That's personal responsibility. That's inner strength. Your next right action, you do what's right for you in alignment with your values. Next. No matter what just happened, they stole from me, Brendan. Okay, what's your next right action of integrity? They cheated on me, Brennan. Got it. What's your next right action of integrity? I don't pretend that that's easy or that you need to move to initiative phase right off the bat, but do the next, like be committed to the next level of congruence for yourself. What's the next level of commitment and congruence for you now that that thing that you loved, desired or didn't want is gone in this fresh new moment of the now. What's the next right action of integrity? What's your interpretation ladder? What's the initiative look like that brings integrity and honor and respect to you? What is it that gives you those things not from other people? Because listen, you don't get to control whether you get honor and respect and kindness from other people. You all know that if you've ever been in a relationship, sometimes it just don't happen. But you get to bring that to yourself by being a congruent, integrous human. So that's my question to you. Honor whatever's happened in life by doing the next right action of integrity for yourself changes the game. So number one was emotions versus feelings. Number two was the interpretation ladder. Number three is honoring rituals and commitments make beautiful moments. I would tell you that. So powerful. Number four, when we're talking about loss and grief, I really want to encourage you to. It's going to be a weird phrase, but I say this to my clients all the time. I want you to institute listening sessions. Institute listening sessions, implement listening sessions, execute listening sessions, whatever that means for you. What this means is usually when there's loss or grief, you ain't the only one. And what you want is to be heard and seen, respected and validated and honored, and so do others. And what happens in loss and grief, when it becomes very maladaptive, is we close down and close up and we go silent with the world. We want to be alone in our pain and our hurt. And the longer that we are alone and silent in our pain and hurt, the more suffering grows. In silence, there is suffering. When we're talking about loss, grief, longing, sadness, shock, trauma, the longer we are silent, the more we stack on suffering. And so what you have to do, and it's super hard, and by the way, I want to let you know, I super suck at this. But I do it anyway. I'm awful and awkward at it, and I do it anyway. And that is when I'm in pain, when I'm hurt, when I'm sad, I go tell somebody. I say, you know what? Can I talk with you? I don't need you to solve it. Can I just share with you what I'm feeling? No solve needed, no advice needed, no inspiration needed. Need a talking partner right now. Could you listen to a few things? I'll literally say that to people. And then I'll awkwardly bumble through how I'm feeling, and I'll always get the words wrong, and I always feel weird. And I'll still bumble through it and get it out, get it off my chest, out of my heart, and out into the world. Let that breath release the feeling and the emotion a little bit. Because breath is power, and talking releases breath. And you let the ride those words and emotions to ride on top of that breath and exit the body a little bit. And so I'll talk it out, and I'll also create that listening session for others. When a family deals with trauma, especially the trauma of grief and loss, when it's just happened, one of the most important things that I'll do for them or that I'll ask is that they call each other every day and tell them, you don't even have to talk about it. You just need to talk every day. You can talk about the weather, you can talk about Netflix, you can talk about a show. You can talk about what's in the newspaper. You can talk about the president. You can talk about global affairs, you can talk about the environment. You can talk about whales, you can talk about fish, you can talk about cats. I don't care. Well, the cats thing would get annoying, but outside of the cats thing, every day, I just want you to talk every day. Every day. Anything. Doesn't matter. I want you to have that speed dial. Make it happen. Talk to somebody in your family every single day. When you're going through difficulty. Talk to a friend every single day. If you got to. It can't be family, friends or mentors. Just talk every day. When you're going through. When you get fired from your job, talk to somebody every day. Can be other co workers. Just talk, but also allow them to talk. See, you don't need to call. Some of you are like, well, I don't want to call them. I don't have nothing to say. Silly bear. It's not about you having something to say. It's about holding the space that they can say something. What happens is we get locked into our own grief and our own loneliness, and we identify it as ours. And we make the mistake of not reaching out because we don't want to deal with it. It ain't about you. Most grief and loss is social. You need to create the space to honor and give time and appreciation for others. And I know many of you have done that. Someone in your neighborhood lost a father, a parent, a husband, a spouse, a child. And you showed up, you went over, you baked them food, you took their meals on, you washed their car, you cleaned their house out for them, you helped them. You didn't have to be a trauma coach. You didn't have to deal with it. You didn't have to be a grief counselor. You just showed up for them, did stuff. Didn't even have to talk about it. Just did stuff for him. That happens in nature, literally. That's just part of the beauty of the spirit of the animal kingdom. I mean, it happens with monkeys. When a family member of monkeys dies, other unrelated monkeys will come over and help groom their hair while they're sitting there in silence and sadness. It happens with elephants, it happens with whales and dolphins that literally they will nurture and care for another and be around each other even if they're not doing anything. The being aroundness helps with grief. Notice I didn't say solving things, just being around. Notice I didn't say they have to speak their pain, but when they use words, those words carry out on top of that breath and release something. The whole idea behind talk therapy, they don't even have to talk about the thing all the time. It's just sometimes in conversation, there's release because all those words got to ride out on breath, right? So when some think about this, talking is a form of deep breathing. You all know in mindfulness practice, we should all breathe deeper. Talking, sharing is a form of that. So if you're going through hardship right now, I want you all to hear this from me. Please pick up the phone and talk to some people. You don't even have to call and talk about your favorite sports team. Call and talk about something you saw on Instagram. Call and tell them a joke, or just call and listen. But being aroundness, there's healing there. And as I said, that's a hard one for me. I'm like, oh, no. I'll sit here with my little journal, my interpretation ladder, and I'll do it 15, 16 different times, and I'll breathe myself and I'll meditate myself, and I'll get my workout in, listen to my positive podcasts. I'll journal about my goals, I'll look at my battle board, think about the world conquering, and I can still go out there and feel like crap. And then Denise and I will take a walk for 45 minutes and I'll talk about nothing and I'll feel better. But I know many of you don't. And in quarantine, many of you have been alone, even though you had the availability of this most of the time. And so for those who are feeling lonely or are longing for the old way of life, pick up the phone, just talk about it. No reason. I talked to my buddy Kevin yesterday. I think he's probably on the call somewhere on my team. I just called Kevin. We didn't have nothing. I said, hey, you want to catch up today? We called, we wrapped for about an hour, projects here, and then we didn't have an agenda, per se, for the call, it just. I know he's in quarantine at home working on the laptop. I'm at quarantine at home working on laptop. So we just had a jam session, hung up, felt great, got a ton done. The next hour, listening sessions. Listening sessions. That was number four. Number one, emotions versus feelings. Number two, your interpretation ladder. Number three, honoring rituals and commitments. Number four, listening sessions. And number five, living with reverence for life. You want to heal from loss. Experience the gain of living. You want to heal from something that you didn't want to happen. Live. You want to cope with something that you didn't like. Live the way you like. Live reverence for life. Wake up motivated, driven, excited, caring, compassionate. And if you aren't there, use your interpretation ladder five times to get closer to it. If you're not there, ask what's the next right action of integrity. If you're not there, anticipate the difficulties of life a little bit more, accept them a little bit more, adapt a little bit more. But the ultimate secret to healing and moving through things is to live your life, to authentically be. To focus on being again, living again, feeling again. Because notice what happened. You shut down all those emotions because you were scared of them, or you didn't know their signal, or you didn't like the feelings, or you cultivated the wrong feelings. And so what ends up happening over a period of time? You don't feel good anymore. You're not authentically expressing yourself anymore. You're taking your identity level on reaction level versus identity level on. Who do you want to be now? Who are you now? What's your intention now? What positive initiative can you take now? What a beautiful thing to have reverence for life is how you honor the good and the bad of life, to live your life authentically, freely, joyously, outside of their judgments and outside of your own personal judgments against self. But to rather be free, to give yourself the freedom of life and to give yourself the reverence for it. Like, I'm so able to move on through things in life because I love life. I love life. I love experiencing life, breathing life, having life because I've been in a hospital bed thinking I was going to die too many dang times. I love working out because I've been in places where I've been immobilized and broken bones all over my body before. I love talking with people because I've been lonely. I love experiencing the day, even if it's super busy. And I got to do like last night I did contracts, police, legal Stuff all day long. I did four hours of legal stuff last night, like Police. I loved it. Because something was happening. That contract was putting in place. Momentum, something was going to happen. The deal was getting done. I was working through it because I've been in places where I ain't had no deals. So I got some paperwork. At least I got something going on. Okay, let's go. Reverence, joy, engagement, for the life itself. You got to feel that again. Allow yourself to feel life again. That's all anyone really wants. We just never know it. You know what you want more of in life? To feel the day again. That's what you want. I tell you this all the time, hpx. It's about feeling more vibrant and connected in life again. Feeling more fulfilled, satisfied, joyful, peaceful, happy again. You're the only one who gives that to yourself. That's the beauty. No matter what they took from you, no matter what you lost, no matter what yesterday looked like, no matter the dramas and traumas and difficulties we've been through, we now have the choice to live. We can choose to feel life again. Not because suddenly you're a millionaire, not because suddenly somebody who you want back is back, but because you just choose. You say, okay, I want to live life. I'm still here. Let me live it. Let me experience it. Let me give myself that. That means you must release from some of those emotions and feelings that you grabbed onto in the past. Some of you, you're not living today because you don't think you deserve today. You're grabbing onto a guilt that you structured for yourself. See, guilt is a tricky one. Guilty. Guilt is not an emotion per se as much as a structured feeling. Guilt comes from an interpretation ladder. Guilt is an interpretation ladder run over and over and over and over again against oneself. You got to let go of the guilt. You gotta let go of the regret. And you have to step into today. The feeling of today, the freshness of today, the choice of today, the power of today, the beauty of today, the magic of this moment. You got to let all that stuff go if you're going to experience life. And you deserve to, because you're still here. And if you're still here, there's a reason for that beyond your conception. There's if you're a person of faith and if you are awesome, if you aren't awesome. But ultimately you have to say, well, dumb luck or grace, here I am. Might as well enjoy it. Whether you believe, you blink out and go on to another realm, to heaven, to a different place. To soulful spirit, to reincarnation, or to nothing. All of that still cues you to to the value of now. To the value of now. The joy, the hidden possibilities, the magic and the meaning of now. Reverence for life now. All these things we know help people cope. We know it from both the sciences of the work in psychology and sociology and dealing with people in end of life care. But also share my own personal interpretation on this one here. To as many of you know, I am a person of faith. I do believe in God. I was raised that way. I feel that connection. I sense that even if you don't, that's okay. That's just my vibe. So judge less, feel better. And so I am a person who feels a great connection to God. And for me, I just believe that no matter what is happening to me, I believe in that part of the scripture that says and encourages us, that out front things are being set up for us. That the road is being paved in front of us, even if we don't know where it's going, even if we aren't in control of it. That the future holds good things for us, that healing awaits, that victory awaits, that beautiful things await, that magic awaits for us, that we might not even see. But out front, no matter how I feel now, victory is there, healing is there, freedom is there. It's there that's being set up for me. I believe that good things are out there, that good things happen in life even when I don't like them now, because I believe there's a greater plan. I also know that as the road of victory is being paved out in front of me, it's not a perfect road, never was. It's getting built in a hurry because the big guy upstairs has 7 billion roads he's trying to pave right now. So sometimes he's not going to hit every segment of the road. Sometimes there'll be a few potholes and you're going to hit him. So you can anticipate the difficulty and anticipate the victory. I anticipate there's going to be hardship and I anticipate there's going to be victory. I anticipate there'll be difficulty, and I anticipate there will be joy and celebration. Someday soon, things will give you the opportunity, beauty will happen. You will be with your friends, you will get to hang out. Your life will go to a new normal. Not the old way, but something different. And things will be okay. And if you can, give yourself something to look forward to, if you can trust and have faith that victory is coming, that healing is coming. Then you can wake up and have reverence for life because you have a connection to the future, to destiny, to beauty, to good things in the future. All right, my friends, I hope you enjoyed today's session. I'm with you in so much spirit, so much love, and so much gratitude for you doing the work because I know it's a difficult topic, but I think we can approach it with conscious anticipation, with conscious joy, and that when we do that, we really do shift things. Hey, it's Brendan. I just want to thank you for watching my channel. There's so many other teachings and trainings on this channel, so please enjoy. Thanks for being here. Also, for those who want to go to another level, I have an upcoming Certified High Performance Coach Certification Week. This is where I teach you and certify you to become a world class life coach. We call them Certified High Performance Coaches. You can click the link in the description right now to apply and to learn about our upcoming certification week. If you want to go to another level as a life coach and you want me to certify you and help you, make sure you click that link and take advantage of it right now. Enrollment is open today.