Season 1 Episode 4

Embrace the Suck-

In this episode, we delve into the crucial elements of navigating challenging situations swiftly: Mindset and Resilience. Discover the profound meanings behind each and learn actionable insights on making mindset shifts and intentional actions. Uncover how these tools empower you to take control and effectively maneuver through even the toughest circumstances.

Episode Highlights & Transcript

Embrace the Suck – Mindset and Resilience

Mindset:

1. Abundance vs. Scarcity Mindset:

• Embrace abundance, believe there’s more space and resources.
• Create opportunities rather than waiting for them.

1. Positive vs. Negative Mindset:

• Focus on solutions, spend more time seeking solutions than finding problems.
• Optimism assumes everything will work out; positivity considers how we respond.

1. Growth vs. Fixed Mindset:

• Cultivate a learning mindset (growth) rather than attributing success solely to inherent ability (fixed).
• Ask different questions, adopt different assumptions, metaphors, and perspectives.

Resilience:

1. Emphasize the Positive:

• Resilience involves a variety of skills and coping mechanisms.
• Zig Ziggler’s reminder: Failure is an event, not a person.

1. Gratitude and Perspective:

• Lower your gratitude bar, appreciate small blessings.
• Develop a positive outlook to put unexpected challenges in proper perspective.

1. Finding Meaning:

• Instead of asking “Why me?” ask “Why not me?”
• Tally gains from challenging experiences, find meaning in suffering.

1. Sense of Humor:

• Even dark humor can play a role in resilience.
• Avoid letting avoidance become your default coping strategy.

1. Taking Small Actions:

• Choose a challenging situation, apply newfound resilience.
• Take small actions, notice their impact, and repeat the process.

Conclusion:

• Life is an experimental journey of actions adding up to change and growth.
• Vince Lombardi’s wisdom: The greatest accomplishment is rising again after falling.

Additional Resources:

• Join the Life Isn’t Always Easy Facebook group for more insights and the Embrace the Suck Four Day Course.
• Visit lifesandwayseasy.com or kimcoastac.com for more resources and a free resilience ebook.

Remember, each small action adds up to significant change and growth. Embrace the challenges and keep moving forward!

Transcript

“So, why embrace the suck? Why would you want to hold on to it? Because in any event, that has the potential to break us, it also holds the same opportunity to build us and shape us. Craptastic situations come with just as much potential for growth as it does to destroy us. In order to transform these opportunities, there are some skills that we must each hold—resilience, flexibility, openness, strength, and a mindset that will provide these skills with the environment to thrive. But before all of those even matter, we need to identify why does this situation even suck to me? Okay, so what makes the situation suck? I know you’re probably thinking that is a stupid question, but have you ever really actually put some deep thought into it and really dissected circumstances and thought about why it sucks?

So think about this. What does the event have that makes it so bad? What makes it seem so unpleasant? Does it interfere with our goals? Does it hurt us financially? Does it interfere with our relationships or does it violate our values? Does it question our skills? Will it take away from time that results in how we schedule our lives? Some things will just hit a little bit harder too, especially if they are compromising your core values. For example, one of my key values is integrity, is something that is coming at me, make me negotiate my integrity. If it does, it will definitely knock me back further than something that isn’t attacking one of my core values.

Something else is how it affects someone that is in my life that I love. If it hurts them, it’s definitely going to suck more for me. Or will it take more time out of my already busy days? Is it short term or long term requiring me to adjust my schedule or my lifestyle? My great grandmother used to say life is nothing but a bunch of problems. Once you get one figured out, another one will come around right behind it. So you can hear that and take one or two things from it. It can seem incredibly depressing or empowering, but you get to decide. You may have also heard the saying that life is 1% of what happens to you and 99% of how you respond to it. It is so true.

If we can combine those two ideas that another problem is on the horizon and how we react to it will matter, then we are able to build a defense around anything that comes our way. Think about it. If you are empowered and know that there is another problem coming around the corner and have a mindset that is needed to respond, you will be more resilient. No, I am not talking about you being happy that you just lost your job or that you found out that you have a chronic illness. That would be ridiculous, but you don’t know the opportunities that await the relationships that you have yet to develop.

And if you let bad news or a crappy job consume you, I promise you there will be many more missed opportunities. I never in a million years thought that I would be grateful my child was diagnosed with a chronic illness or that I have seen the pain of bullying and what it could cause another child to do. But I chose not to live there and to use our experiences to help others. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you need to channel your challenges into helping everyone else. That works for me, but you can use your challenges to remind yourself of what you can overcome. Everything in life we have a choice.

Remember that having awareness of your mindset, understanding your values, and recognizing your current skills are key in navigating through any craptastic situation. Think of the old term phrase is the glass half empty or is it half full? In this episode, I’m wanting to chat with you about two powerhouses that drive our bounce back and can help us recover from anything life throws at you: Mindset and Resilience. Let’s discuss Mindset.

First, there are three main categories for mindset, and I’m going to highly recommend that you pause right here and get your pins out. Or better yet, you can go to lifeisntalwayseasy.com and click on the show notes for the transcript. Okay, here we go. Your mindset is simply a set of attitudes that you hold. There are three categories that we are going to be discussing today. Each of those has two contradictory concepts within them: abundance versus scarcity, positive versus negative, and growth versus fixed.

To adopt an abundance mindset over a scarcity mindset, okay, this just really excites me. Don’t be surprised to see me do a whole episode just on these mindset shifts. Okay, but I digressed. Again, I just get so excited. Okay, so to adopt an abundance mindset over a scarcity mindset, you have to start with the assumption that there is more space and more resources than what you might see at first. You don’t wait for things to happen. You make things happen. You find a way to create more opportunities. You can expand solutions to be inclusive of your ideas as well as others. So rather than fighting turf wars, you create a larger space. Rather than fighting for resources, you just find more.

When you operate from a scarcity mentality, the problem is that you get defensive or offensive and find yourself competing unnecessarily. While you can spend your energy competing, you could also spend it in creating more alternatives and expanding opportunities and finding abundance. Let me give you an example for anybody that doesn’t know. In my former life, I had a high-end photography studio. I got into professional photography at a terrible time because after I jumped in, the digital photography scene blew up and everyone that owned a camera was a photographer. And the photographers, well, let’s just say the industry is ruthless when it comes to helping each other. It was like everyone had a different trade secret and couldn’t be kind to one another because it was all the competition and everybody was fighting over clients.

I took a different approach. I trained moms to take better pictures of their kids and trying to build relationships with every photographer that I had the opportunity to meet. I had the mindset that if we helped each other, then this would raise the industry expectations, even training those that were less skilled than I in both craft and in business. And to be quite honest with you, it worked. The relationships I developed with other photographers gave me some really cool opportunities like photographing the Astros. And when I created a senior photography event for the class of 2020, years after I closed my studio, the photographers came. They all donated time, and above all, they came together in a network. I was successful. I didn’t compete or fight for business at all. I thought outside of the box and created opportunities and my clients dug it. I didn’t care what other photographers were doing because I wasn’t competing.

Okay, next up is adopting a positive mindset over a negative mindset. This does not mean that you don’t find flaws or critical thinking skills about ideas. It just means that you find a way to spend more time seeking solutions than finding problems. With a positive mindset, you keep moving forward and don’t fall into the cycle of getting stuck where you let your own pessimism keep you down. The dictionary definition of optimism is hopefulness and confidence about the future or the success of something, while positivity is the practice of being or tendency to be positive or optimistic in attitude.

Optimism happens inside the head

, and positivity is what you project. Optimism is a personality trait and a more natural instinct and something that you exhibit. While positive thinking is a choice that you make with conscious effort. Optimism makes an assumption about the world. It assumes that everything is going to work out all right in the end. On the other hand, positive thinking makes no exceptions of how the external world will be. Instead, it considers how we will respond to external circumstances.

Optimism can have its fault. Optimists may be accused of being blind to the negative reports or dismissive obstacles. Their assessments of the future or their capabilities may seem naive or even haphazard. Sometimes it may look like they don’t have a really good touch with reality. Although someone who chooses positive thinking is clear-eyed about obstacles and even serious problems. They don’t ignore the challenges, yet they work towards solutions. They do not ignore or minimize the problems, but they move forward with the purposeful belief that a solution can be found.

Oh, all right, we’re going to touch a little bit more on that again, but I just really wanted you to have the good, solid basics. The last subject in mindset that we’re going to cover is fixed and growth mindset. So if you have a fixed mindset, you give credit to ability and not learning. You think people are what they are. They’re either naturally good at what they do or they don’t have it at all. Think of it like a basketball star. They are naturally going to make it into the NBA not because they work their butt off every day to improve their skills, but because they just have a gift.

A growth mindset is a learning mindset. It is a belief that you can improve at whatever you do through the right training, dedication, and grit. And yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. If you are trying to adopt a growth mindset, here are some great tips on how to do so. Ask yourself a different set of Questions. Asking yourself how you can make the most of the situation or how you can thrive instead of survive is a very different set of questions than asking yourself, Why me? What’s the use in trying? You can adopt a different set of assumptions. For example, rather than assuming that there’s not enough, assume that there is more than enough and you just need to find it.

Keep in mind that you should always test your assumptions, but adopting a different set of assumptions can help you reach different conclusions you might not have otherwise explored. Adopt a different set of metaphors. For example, rather than seeing life as a tragedy, you could see life as a drama complete with drama and comedy. And then lastly, wear a different hat. Similar to the metaphor, you can change your mindset by changing your metaphorical hat that you put on. Okay, I loved me some Walt Disney and he summed up abundance, positive, and growth mindsets in one simple quote around here, however, we don’t look backward for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we are curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

This quote I first became familiar with when it popped up at the end of my favorite Disney movie, Meet the Robinsons, which is really a perfect portrayal of all three of these mindsets. Okay, that was a lot to process. Now, moving from mindset to resilience itself, this is the second big nugget that I am going to give you in this episode. Gene Chatsky describes resilience as not a single skill. It is a variety of skills and coping mechanisms to bounce back from bumps in all the roads as well as failures. You should focus on emphasizing the positive. I also feel inclined to tell you that Zig Ziggler couldn’t have been more right when he reminded us that failure is an event and not a person. Let’s keep that at the front of our mind as we realize that we tend to give more weight to our problems rather than solutions.

Okay, let me say a little bit louder to everybody in the back. We tend to give more weight to our problems rather than their solutions. And that negativity can tempt you to throw in the towel and give up on pursuing something that you really want. All of this can lead to unhealthy coping strategies like binging or compulsive behaviors or emotional eating. And really, who needs that? You can become more resilient in many ways, including developing a positive outlook by lowering your gratitude bar. Sure, you might be thinking, Did I just ask you to become ungrateful? No, I just told you to change your standards of gratitude. Sure, big milestones are worthy of celebration, but so are the little things in life.

The smell of a Sunday breakfast, feeling the sun on your face, a playful pet snuggling with your little it is easy to overlook all of life’s little blessings, but making the effort is worth it. Intentional gratitude trains your brain to give less stock in the negative and more power to the positive. A positive outlook puts things in proper perspective when life throws us unexpected curveballs. In order to become resilient, optimism isn’t nearly enough. The late Vice Admiral James Stockdale survived over seven years of imprisonment and torture in the Vietnam War. When he was asked what role optimism played in his survival, he said, the optimists, they did not make it. Wow. Think about that. The optimists did not survive when they were imprisoned. When it comes to resilience, optimism only works in conjunction with a healthy reality check, even if sometimes it’s brutal.

Remember we discussed earlier? Optimism can sometimes be blind to reality. Could dialing down some of your optimism help you see a reality you’re missing? Sometimes it just sucks. It reminds me of the meme that I will post in the show notes so you can see a picture of it, and it’s a dog sitting in a kitchen with the house burning down around him and he is like, Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine. And even though the house is just catching on flames more and more. And it is just a perfect illustration of this concept. So you will need to find meaning. Resilient people find a way to make meaning out of their suffering. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor and author Victor E. Frankl said, we must never forget that we may also find meaning in life, even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.

A Holocaust survivor that well, didn’t expect to survive right and is just surrounded with so much pain and so much death is telling us that we need to find meaning in all situations, no matter how horrific they may seem. Instead of asking, Why me? How about asking, Why not me? Instead of focusing on what you just lost from an ordeal, tally what you may have gained from the experience. I use the same thought process when I am faced with a big whammy. I mean, isn’t it ignorant or arrogant to think that I am somehow exempt or too big for these things to happen to me? What makes me so special that I don’t know. Life can bypass this challenge when I’m concerned.

So hopefully, you are still with me and I haven’t lost you yet or your brain hasn’t exploded. Okay, the last tip that I’m going to give you right now is to develop a sense of humor. After researching Holocaust survivors, former President of the Boston Psychoanalytical

Society and Institute, Maurice Vanderpool concluded that a sense of humor, even a dark sense of humor plays a big role in resilience. Yes, even dark, twisted humor can provide stress relief and perspective to challenging circumstances. Facing adversity is demanding. Sometimes we just want to curl up in a ball and hide. There is nothing wrong with a brief pity party, especially if there’s potential for cake at this party. Seriously, it’s okay to let the feeling of overwhelm overwhelm you.

The trick is not letting avoidance become your default coping strategy. Feel your feelings, but don’t take up residence and live there. Seriously, give yourself a time limit for the visit. Let the next day be a new day. The best example that I really have for this is my son has multiple specialists that he visits, and there are some doctor’s appointments that I know have a potential to come with more life-altering news. I do my best to schedule these appointments at the end of the day. Now, this completely contradicts anything that I would teach a client or exercise myself when it comes to time management. Typically, you would like to schedule a doctor’s appointment the very beginning of the day, the first appointment during the day, or the first appointment after lunch.

Why? Because they are not running late at this time and you don’t have to worry about feeling as caught up or catching up or as rushed. Okay, but the reason why I schedule certain appointments later in the afternoon is because that gives me less time that I am awake before I go to bed to deal with and process this potentially devastating news. I can cry all I want and do all the research that I want that night. And then after I go to bed and I feel refreshed the next day, I move on and it’s go time. So here is your challenge should you choose to accept it. Choose one situation that you were facing in your life right now that is challenging your resilience. Now, make a decision to apply your newfound resilience to the situation. Even a small change can make a big difference.

Then I want you to take one small action. It doesn’t matter how small it is, but pay attention to how it feels. Notice what impact your action, no matter how tiny it seems, has on you in the circumstances that you face. And then I want you to rent and repeat. Seriously, do it again, okay? Because that’s all life really is, one experimental action after another, gradually adding up to change and growth. No matter your age, background, experience, or your line of work, you can learn how to improve your resilience so you are ready for any challenge life puts in front of you. Are you willing to give it a try? If you answered yes, then that’s all you need to get started. A willingness to try. If you’re feeling like you need some more inspiration to get you started, then take a line from the resilient Dolly Parton. She said, I never tried quitting, and I never quit trying.

I know that I have unpacked so much on you today from mindset and to resilience and what it can look like and how optimism or positive attitude plays a role in all of it. I am going to leave you with my favorite quote of all time by the late, great Vince Lombardi. Go pack, go. The greatest accomplishment is not never falling, but in rising again after you fall. If you want to take this subject to the next level, I strongly encourage you to join the Life Isn’t Always Easy Facebook group if you want to take this subject to the next level. I strongly encourage you to join the Life Isn’t Always Easy Facebook group where you will find out how to participate in the Embrace the Suck Four Day Course.

If you are struggling to find it, then just go to lifesandwayseasy.com and click on the show notes for the transcript, okay? Or you can go to KimKosteck.com and I have a free resilience e-book with some of what I shared with you today and so much more. And if you’re feeling really ready to take things to the next level, then shoot me a message and we can set up a time to chat about how you can start reaching your goals, goals, and overcoming challenges faster than ever before with one of my coaching programs. I’m willing to bet that as much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.