Not Finished - Finding the Will to Rise Again

What happens when life knocks you down—and returning to who you were is no longer possible?

After a serious illness, I returned to a hill I had run many times before. That day, I made it only 40 yards.

But the real struggle wasn’t physical. It was facing what those 40 yards seemed to say about the person I had become.

In this deeply personal episode, I explore the hidden connection between adversity and identity—and why rising again doesn’t always mean getting back to where we were.

Sometimes it means releasing an earlier version of ourselves, beginning where we are, and discovering the person we might still become.

Because being knocked down is part of life.

Deciding we are not finished is something else entirely.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Execution Insights Podcast, where stories from the leadership journey become lessons for the road ahead. I'm Jim Hewling, and today I want to tell you about the day I made it just 40 yards up a hill I climbed hundreds of times, and why that moment changed the way I think about strength and resilience and what it means to begin again. I'm really glad you're here. 40 yards. That's how far I made it. After seven weeks of pneumonia, I finally felt strong enough to try something really simple. Just walk up the hill that begins at my driveway and winds upward for nearly a mile. Now I've walked that hill hundreds of times, but on that morning, I made it about 40 yards. That's right. 40 yards. And my heart was pounding. You know, my legs felt weak. And for the first time in my life, I saw a version of myself I'd really never met before. You see, I had assumed that once I was well, I'd just pick right up where I left off. But I was really wrong. And just for context, I've never really considered myself an athlete. I mean, there were always people who were stronger and faster and more gifted than I was. But for most of my adult life, being strong had become one of the ways, well, I guess you could say, I understood myself. You know, I spent 12 years in CrossFit and I survived four Murph workouts, and even at one point in my life achieved a 400-pound deadlift. And while I was proud of all those things, I think something else was kind of happening that I really didn't understand at the time. Strength wasn't just something I valued, it was becoming evidence. Evidence that I could endure, that I could push through, that whatever life put in front of me, somehow I could find a way. And I want to say that that mindset served me incredibly well for an entire season of my life. I'd really spent a lifetime accumulating evidence that I was strong. And now, 40 yards up that hill, well, none of that evidence seemed to matter because I couldn't go any farther. And what I remember most about that morning wasn't really the physical exhaustion, it was the confusion. Because somewhere underneath all of it was a question. Well, I guess I just wasn't prepared for. The question was: if I'm not the person who can always keep going, then who am I now? Now, maybe you've had a moment like this, I don't know, but it probably wasn't on a hill. You know, maybe it was an illness, or it was a job change, or it was a relationship that ended, or some other unexpected event in your family. Maybe you reached for something sometimes, something you'd always been able to count on in yourself, and you discovered, like I did, that at least for that moment, it just wasn't there. Now, my experience has been that sooner or later, life has a way of doing just that for all of us. No matter how carefully we prepare, we don't really get to choose the size of the next challenge. And standing there that morning right on that hill, I was beginning to understand something I couldn't possibly have understood the day before. Now, maybe I spent too much of my life trying to become strong in the hope that maybe nothing could actually knock me down. Because eventually, something always will. And in fact, that's not even the real question. The real question is not being knocked down, it's what happens next. Because that morning I stood there far longer than I should have, just looking up that hill and trying to understand well, really, whether I was disappointed or I was deciding. Now, today I think I already knew the answer. I mean, for sure, something in my life had been lost, and I was grieving it. But the question wasn't really whether I could recover what I'd lost. I knew I could do that. The question was harder. I wasn't asking whether I could do it. I was asking myself, is it worth beginning again? And I want to say really honestly that the question surprised me. Because for most of my life, probably like a lot of you, if something mattered to me, I just found a way. I had to work harder or stay with it or figure it out. But standing there that morning, I was tired. I was disappointed. And I was beginning to realize that getting back to where I had been was going to require a lot more than I'd imagined. So I just stood there for an extra moment. And then, a little bit to my own surprise, I started walking. Not very far, just farther. And eventually I made it to the top. Now, right here, I wish I could tell you that there was some great surge of confidence in that moment, that it was a rocky moment on the top of the steps. You know, I didn't get to the top and throw my arms in the air and think, I'm back. Because the truth was, I wasn't back. I wasn't even close to being back. I was just a guy who had made it a little farther than he thought he could on an unexpected day. But something about that moment mattered. I could feel it. And so the next day I went back to the same hill. And then I went back again and again. And some days I felt pretty good. And some days I didn't. There were days when I went farther than I had before, but there were also days when the same distance felt twice as hard. But I kept coming back. And somewhere in that process, I began to understand something about strength that I don't think I had ever really understood, at least in this way before. You see, we put a lot of emphasis on being strong. I certainly did. And we want to be strong enough to handle whatever comes our way, to take the pressure, to carry the responsibility, to withstand whatever life throws at us. And I still to this day think that's a really noble idea. Because honestly, none of us gets to choose what's coming, do we? And you and I know that we can prepare and we can take care of ourselves and we can do everything we know how to do to become stronger, but life can still hand you something bigger than anything you'd prepared for. And these days, I wonder if all along we've been putting too much emphasis on being strong, when maybe the more important thing is learning what to do after it happens. What I learned in this moment of my life is that strength is the ability to withstand a blow. But resilience is the ability to gather yourself, stand back up, and start moving again. And I really love that phrase, gather yourself. Because sometimes I think we make resilience sound too heroic. As if we get knocked down and automatically we just spring back up, like the movies. But that's not how it really works. Sometimes we get knocked down, we just need a minute. Sometimes we need a lot of minutes. We need to sit with what happened. We, in some ways, need to grieve what was lost, and we need to figure out where we are now so that even when we meet a new version of ourselves, we know how to handle what we weren't expecting. I hope you'll hear me when I say that's not weakness. That's preparing to rise again. Because surviving a defeat is actually pretty common. I mean, people do it all the time, right? We've all survived things that we once thought we couldn't. But rising again and moving forward, that's a unique skill. Because resilience actually begins in the moment when you decide. Hey, this may have knocked me down, but it doesn't get to decide where I go from here. And that thought, well, that brings me to something I couldn't have known that morning, standing on that hill. Because at the time I thought the goal was pretty obvious. I just wanted to get back to the strength I had had eight or nine weeks ago, to the workouts I used to be able to do, to feeling, in my words, like myself again. But as the weeks went by, I know something started to change. I started to realize that maybe getting back wasn't actually the point. You see, what I know now is that I had defined myself, at least in part, by what I could do. And probably even more in the course of my life by what I could achieve. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with achieving, and there's nothing wrong with striving for things that really matter. That mindset was really important to me for an entire season of my life. I loved setting goals. I wrote books about setting goals. I loved accomplishing difficult things. And a part of me still does. I'm grateful for all of it. But standing on that hill, none of those accomplishments could do much for me in that moment. I mean, really, think about it. You can't hand your resume to a hill. You can't ask the hill to review your LinkedIn profile. You know, you you just can. You know why? Because the hill doesn't care. And strangely enough, after just a little while, neither did I. The things I'd achieved, I don't want to say they'd become unimportant. That wouldn't be true. But they'd simply become less important. Because I had stopped asking, how do I get back to who I was? And I had started asking, who can I still become? Now that's a very different question. And I have to tell you, for me, it's a much more exciting one. Because really, there's not much energy in spending the rest of your life looking in the rearview mirror to something you used to be able to do, right? You can appreciate where you've been for sure. You can be grateful for it. You can honor that memory, and hopefully you can learn from it, of course. But what you can't do is live there. Because here's what I discovered. I don't want to spend whatever time I have left trying to recreate an earlier version of myself. I'm grateful for the version of me that got me here. Yeah, of course. But I am way more interested in the person I haven't met yet. You know, the person I could still become one day. Just the other day, I heard Matthew McConaughey, the famous actor, tell a story about being asked, who's your hero? And I know, and you may have heard this story, that his answer surprised a lot of people because he said in a very public forum, my hero is me 10 years from now. And I remember thinking, oh, I get that. Because he wasn't trying to become somebody else. He wasn't chasing someone else's life or someone else's definition of success. He was chasing a version of himself that was still out in front of him. And I want to tell you, I just love that. Because there's something about having a vision of who you could still become that pulls you forward. Not back to who you were, forward to who you haven't yet become. And I want you to know that I see versions of this all the time in my coaching work. Now, I work with extraordinarily capable people who've accomplished a lot. But no matter what, something always happens. They don't get the role they thought was theirs, or their business starts to struggle, or sometimes they make a mistake that they can't undo. You know, a career that had always seemed to be moving upward suddenly doesn't. And sometimes the first conclusion is: well, maybe I'm not who I thought I was. And that's where I love the job of coaching. Because in that moment, I tell them about this hill. I tell them about how sometimes becoming requires us to let go of some of the evidence we've been carrying around about who we were. And there's a period in between those two identities when you're no longer quite sure who you were, and you don't yet really know who you're becoming. And if you're in that space, you know that's an uncomfortable place. But because I've been through it, I also know that it can be a sacred place because it's filled with possibility and with hope. Now that morning, I certainly didn't know what was ahead of me, and I couldn't have predicted all of this. But slowly, and I guess you'd say quietly, the uncertainty that had frightened me started to feel different. It began to feel like a possibility. And maybe that's one of the greatest gifts of beginning again. You don't have to know exactly where you're going to end up there. You just need enough determination and you need enough faith to take the next step. And that's pretty much what I did. There wasn't a grand plan. I didn't have a multi-tab spreadsheet with a Gantt chart and lots of roadmaps to guide the way. I didn't even have an elaborate comeback strategy. I mean, honestly, I just walked every day. And if you've ever tried to come back from something, you know how frustrating it can be. I mean, we all want progress to go in a straight line, don't we? I sure do. We want every day to be a little better than yesterday, for sure. But the problem is it doesn't always work that way. I mean, even in my case, I'd have a really good day and I would think, okay, here we go. I'm finally coming back. And then the very next day would be awful, right? Hard, gruesome. And at first, that inconsistency bothered me because, well, I was still measuring progress the old way. You know, how far did I go today? How fast did I go? How strong? What milestone did I reach? Am I all the way back yet? All those kinds of questions. But along the way, I want you to know I stopped doing that. I stopped measuring my progress by how far I'd gone. And I started measuring my progress by how faithfully I came back the next day. Now that shift in measurement, that changed everything about my life. Because showing up was something I could absolutely control. And I think that's one of the things we misunderstand about resilience. When you're actually living it, well, honestly, it doesn't feel very impressive, right? Look at me. I was just getting out of bed and going up the hill, right? So most of the time it feels pretty ordinary. Maybe for you it's making a phone call that you've been holding off on, or it's having a conversation that you're truly avoiding. Maybe it's going back to work or asking someone for help. Or maybe it's as simple as just trying one more time. Now, in my case, I was putting on my shoes, walking back up a hill. And you know there's nothing particularly heroic about that, right? But I'm not sure resilience is supposed to be heroic. You see, today, I think resilience is supposed to be faithful. And slowly, maybe even imperceptibly, everything in my world began to change. Yes, the hill got easier. Yes, I started going farther. Yes. Eventually I started running again. And these days, in fact, this very day, I headed up that same hill, and now I'm either running up it or I'm walking wearing a very heavy-weighted vest. But you know what? Some mornings I still make it easily to the top. And other mornings, it's a grind. But what I know for sure is that I've stopped thinking about the hill. Now I notice something else. Today I showed up. Today I did what I could. Today I gave it all the energy and effort I had within me. And strangely enough, you know what? That's enough. And maybe that's a good place for me to leave this message with you. Because if there's one thing every one of us can count on, it's that somewhere along the way, life is going to knock us down. But when it does, remember, the goal was never to become so strong that nothing could take us down. In fact, it's not even possible. The greater skill is learning how to gather ourselves, stand again, and move forward. So if you're standing at your own 40 yards right now, I mean, if if something has changed or something's been lost, or the or the person you've always counted on doesn't feel quite as familiar as they once did, I won't tell you that it doesn't matter, because it does matter. And I won't tell you that getting back up will be easy. It's usually not. But when that quiet question finally comes, the same question that came to me standing on that hill, is it worth beginning again? I hope you'll remember this. You don't have to know where the next step will lead, and you don't have to get back to who you used to be. Because you know what? There's someone else waiting for you. Like Matthew McConaughey said, there's someone you haven't met yet, and it's you, the you you're going to become. So for today, all I really want you to know is when you come to that moment and you answer that question, it's worth it. Thanks for spending this time with me. I hope something from today's message stays with you, and even more helps you lead and live with greater insight, with greater passion. If you'd like to continue this conversation, well, I'd love to have you join me for the Execution Insights newsletter. You'll find a link to the newsletter in the description below, as well as information if you want to book a coaching session with me. Until then, thanks again for being here. And remember, lead with vision.