When Life Gets Hard, Do This! #lifelessons #personaldevelopment #facingadversity #resilience #learn

But let's just get started with, um, first question I have, um, entering a new year. Do you have a headline for the last year of 2023? Do you have a headline? When I think of a headline, um, I go back through the year and I think about, you know, highlights, lowlights, as well as, um, and, and I think I don't know if you know this, but I love to collect quotes, love to collect quotes from myself and other people. And I was at a, I was at a panel on career wellbeing. That's what it was. Yeah. Career wellbeing. And a number of people, you know, were talking about like some of the challenges we face and it's really hard here. As you can imagine. And in my way I frame that, the way I filter that into my brain is complaining and whining is an indicator of victim, a victim mentality. Oh, you know, it's so hard here. And so I was sitting there and also I want to be careful because I also don't want to come across as a baby baby boomer. Where they go like, yeah, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, get over it, you know? And, and so that shuts everybody down really fast too. Mm-hmm. So I sat back and, uh, thought about this. And like I said, I was on this panel and this just came outta my mouth. I, I looked at everybody, it was about 35, 40 people in the crowd and I said, you know, you have to love to learn You have to love, you have to love to learn, to learn, especially when it's hard. And you could hear a pin drop in the room. You have to love to learn, especially when the learning's hard. And, you know, when you say, you know, you had a tough year, I get it. And you are a more complete person because of it. You know, I know that's hard, especially knowing what you went through too. But, but also it's, it's like we learn so much about ourselves when it's hard. And so, and then how I follow it up here, you didn't come to this university because you thought this would be easy. So you came here because it's hard. And so, you know, you have to learn how to lean into that, especially when things are hard. So that, that ended up being my headline for the year, given some of the things I went through for the year as well. I had pneumonia twice and, and it was tough, you know, to get through that. But also, I had to sit in the middle of it and go like, what am I supposed to learn from this right now as I'm gasping for air without, you know, without being a victim to that? That's tough. Yeah. So that was my headline for the year. I hope others other than our two are like, this was an enlightening year. It's like, great. I'm glad you had that.