The 3 Hidden Gifts of Your Life's Worst Moments

There is one thing that no one escapes, and that's pain. I remember we lost our little puppy after 16 years, and we were all crying our eyes out. Marnie Pearl was crying her eyes out, and all of us, we were all crying. It was so sad. And of course, I had a plan. I called this guy. He's going to come in as soon as the dog passed, take DNA, and we're going to regrow the same animal. I actually did this, but it didn't work. And it was like, oh my God, will this ever— will we ever have this kind of joy again? And sure enough, we found our current puppy. We also love it. Didn't make anything less. Suffering is a choice, but pain is going to be part of life at times. Everyone is going to experience pain. You think someone who's got it so much better than you, you don't want to trade with them. A friend of mine once said years ago, he goes, you know, if life was a deck of cards, 52 cards, and each one represented a different life, and one was somebody who seemed to have this beautiful life when somebody else was— somebody was blind. Would you really put your card back of this life and pick another one with all the problems, with all the pain, with all the disappointments, with all the hurts? So I've been obsessed with post-traumatic growth, primarily because I've had plenty of trauma in my life early on, and it's just like, I'm not gonna let it stop me. I just can't. I won't. Because I had a sense of a higher purpose. Here's what I need you to understand: everyone is gonna go through enormous stress at some point, extreme stress. We've already probably been through it and you probably will be again. But here's what you need to know. When you don't give up, when you don't let it break you, and the only word language I would play with with my friend, it doesn't break you. It only breaks you if you use that language. It breaks you through if you stay with it. If you can keep going, 3 things are gonna happen. Jot 'em down. One, you're gonna discover how strong you really are. How many have been through shit in your life enough times now, like let's say in your business, that now when shit happens, you've done it so many times, it's like you may not like it, it may seem stressful, but you fucking know you'll find a way. That's the value of living long enough to begin to realize that you are more than anything that could ever happen to you, and nothing will ever fucking break you. You may feel broken, but you are not fucking broken. Your soul, your spirit can never be broken. Body parts can be broken, your heart can feel like it's broken, but not even your heart can be broken. It's an illusion. It's a meaning that we give it. But when you push through those horrible, horrific events, the worst ones of your life that you would never want to go through again, and you never want anyone you love to go through again, you wouldn't even want an enemy to go through those ones. Those are the most powerful things in our lives. How many of you can think of something 10, 20, 30 years ago, something that was so horrible, and at the time you thought it was the worst thing on earth, but 5, 10, 15, 20 years later you look back on and go, man, that made me so much stronger, it made me care so much more. So the pain only remains as long as we have a get a meaning for it. Number 2, when you push through those unbelievably stressful things that all of us are going to experience in our life, no matter how much money you have, no matter how smart you are, no matter how kind you are, no matter how great and connected to God you are, you will experience these stressful events. Extreme stress. What am I talking about? Things that none of us want to think about. Your home being destroyed or burned down, or hurricane coming by, your dog passing away who is the love of your life, your friend passing away, someone stealing from you. The worst memories, the worst things you imagine, we will all experience all of us. No one's gonna escape it, and there's no protection from it. We have to go through it. But when you go through it, not only discover how fucking strong you are, number 2, you discover who your real friends are, who your real chosen family is, because those are the people that'll stand beside you during that time when everybody else is like, you're radioactive, or they don't know what the fuck to say, or they avoid. And you don't need a million friends to be happy. They talked about relationships. If you got 1 or 2 or 3, 1 person that you really trust and respect and love and really trust and respects you, that's there, you have gold. And I, I happen to care about a lot of people, and the more people you care about, the more stress you will probably have. They're all going to go through different situations in life, and they're all going to hit stressful moments. And if you care about them, you're going to feel that too. So what I've had to learn to do is— I was in constant reaction. I care so much that I would either not know what to do, or I'd get so connected to the pain they had I couldn't help. I had to learn how to step out of that and serve them. And if you saw, you know, for example, some of you saw the documentary Tony Robbins' I'm Not Your Guru, and there's a scene in that film where I just did this work with a young girl— I still get emotional thinking about it— who was, you know, raised by her parents and they all thought having sex with children— remember, she's part of that cult— and so it was beautiful, like God came through me, everything worked, these three uncles, all the things, those scenes, it was just fucking beautiful magic. And so I'm feeling what she felt, but I couldn't feel it during the time. But that afterwards, the grace of it all. And then they went backstage and fucking cameraman's banging on the door, Tony said we could follow him the whole time, we want to capture the whole thing. But it was good they did because people could see another side of me. And then I'm sitting back there crying, and I'm crying not just about— I'm crying because I'm letting go of the trauma that I felt for that person as them. And I'm feeling the grace, the grace, the tears of grace, thinking, thank God, God somehow put me through all this shit. I've been through in my life so that I could develop the muscles so I could help anyone. Because I can help them not because I can verbalize, I can help because I've fucking done it again and again and again with me and now tens of millions of people. You want to know that it's worth it because I want to know who really matters to me and I matter too. It's a beautiful thing. Sage and I, we went through some health issues and some things in the media years ago, and I remember there were people here part of our core group here, our core family, wearing these little stickers of it, you know, hashtag I stand with Tony. I was just so touched. I was so ill, I, I burned a hole from this mercury in my body in my esophagus, and I bled out. I lost one-third of my blood supply. I could have died. I survived. And then I had to get on a week later, be on stage at Date with Destiny in the middle of all this shit that was going on. And sure enough, something blew and they rushed me to the hospital. They're like, we gotta drain your kidneys and we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that and you're gonna be here for a few days. I said, I know I'm in the middle of this event. And I got up and I was on a wheelchair because I couldn't fucking walk. And I got up there to serve and then all these people came back. All this love came back my way and it was like, thank you, God. It's like I've always wanted to serve and I was being served. We all are here to serve each other. It's beautiful. And I got to go, here's who my real family is. These are the people that matter. I matter to them, they matter to me. And then the third thing you get when you push through those extreme moments of stress— those extreme can be losing your, your cat or your dog as much as a child, because whoever you love, loss is loss. But when you go through that piece, the other thing that happens when you get to the other side is you discover you develop a level of immunity to the future ones. It's like on the other side of it, there you start after enough of the experiences, you have an immunity, meaning you bounce back so much faster. Nothing takes you down like it did. That's part of growing. So I offer you an alternative choice for you to consider: nothing will fucking break me, ever. It may look like it, it may feel like it, but I am more than anything that can ever be done to me or happen within my life. I am soul, I am spirit. That is eternal. And I just want to say one more thing, and that is this: you will hang on to your pain until you find something you value more than your pain. Please write that down and don't forget it. Someone loses their child, and the ones that get through that experience who will tell you the difference is they found some way to honor that child that is meaningful. Remember the woman that I met whose child was killed by, you know, drunk driver, and it was so meaningless, and this person was the life of their life, and they hated the person who did it. Nothing changed in her life until one day she woke up. She had 3 other children, and they felt like they didn't matter, and she realized, I need to love them. They're right here to do it. And then she decided, I'm going to honor her, and she helped create MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And saved millions of lives. So now there is a higher purpose in what happened. When you find a higher purpose, you will let go of your pain. Pain is not forever. You have to create it. Don't ever let yourself get caught in that belief, because in the midst of your pain, you will think it's forever and it's never ending. It is never ending until you find something you value more. We all have to find what's my global solution, like what's the thing that'll solve it no matter how bad it is. It's different for everyone. You have to find what yours is, and maybe this week you'll discover some of that. But a global solution is, what's something, no matter how bad it gets, that will pull me through? That could be a spiritual belief, a belief in God. It could be a belief that everything does happen for a reason and trusting in your soul that's not true, not just your mind. For me, it was like, I'm not the only one who has this experience, no matter how bad it is, whether it's emotional, psychological, spiritual, financial, family, whatever it is. But I know that if I can figure this out, I can help millions of other people not have to go through this pain. To me, I can convert pain into a signal for solutions that can eliminate pain for everyone, and that's worthy of the pain, and it's worthy of letting go of it so I can move on and solve it. Otherwise, we get addicted to our pain. It is an addiction, and you got to be so careful. So like, what you've gone through, Kent, is It's unimaginable. But at the same time it's unimaginable, it's like it's happened so that there is a transformation available to you. So we either transform or we stay in trauma. Trauma isn't a choice. Also, I don't give a fuck what anybody tells you. There's something greater than trauma. That's your spirit, that is your soul. Everything is a gift, but it's our job to find it. And until we are willing to understand that this is a higher purpose in our life, then we will be trapped like so many people in pain and suffering. You're gonna feel the pain, Kent. We're all gonna feel the pain. The suffering is the choice.